It's interesting in that some expressions are universal due to a biological basis, but some are cultural.
Quite true.
Smiling with teeth for humans is a universal expression of happiness. Or at least near universal. But for most other mammals, showing teeth is a sign of aggression and anger.
I wasn't talking about religion. Belief in God is not the same as being part of a religion, and it is important to recognize that.
The parental figure in mammals is a very important one. It is the giver, protector, teacher, and (more importantly) the creator. And we mammals use these figures to explain what we don't know.
Go back 2000 years and there is even more that we didn't know, even with our parental figures. So people resorted to God to try and explain it. Nowadays we relatively know a hell of a lot more than back then. And, lo and behold, people don't resort to God to try and explain things. And even more exemplary, educated societies today generally don't come up with new Gods on a whim.
Despite the power and effect of organised religion on societies, I'm talking about belief in God.
Anyone remember Jet Moto for the PSX? They had Mountain Dew and Butterfinger ads plastered on billboards through all of the races. Even the teams of racers were sponsored by different products. But hey, back then I thought it was pretty cool.
What is more interesting to slashdot users: someone dies at Internet addiction camp, or people dying from starvation in third world countries? Just saying, the context is slashdot, and in this context it is news.
In any case, we are not robots programmed by the structure and chemistry of our brains.
How do you explain instincts then? They are pre-programmed knowledge not learned through the environment.
Everyone still has the ability to choose their actions, and for everyone with a disorder that "forces" them to commit a crime, I'm sure you can find someone with the same feature who lives a normal life. Brains are not computers, you cannot expect to hack them for a quick fix to interpersonal problems.
But freedom is nothing other than the ability to evaluate the past and present and decide on a potential future. The term freedom is ironic in itself since we are only free to choose the things that we think of at the time of choice. The things we think when making the decisions are based on pre-programming in our brains, and experience in our environment in our past and present. We are not really "free" but we are free within the bounds of our thoughts.
I can think of no better way to kill the sports MMO genre than to start it off with baseball.
One of the things about the baseball game in particular that's so great is that there is a leveling component, not just to the team, but also to players.
OK, but that's only because people have been focused on stats in baseball games since, well, forever. Can't this be applied to any sport?
So, there are things where if you win a game, that's how you gain experience points. If you win against a higher level opponent, you get more experience points; if you bottom feed and you take advantage of lower-level players, you don't get as much, and so on. There are a lot of MMO-type concepts in the game.
Again, couldn't this be applied to any sport?
I could see a sports component in an MMO, but not an MMO completely based on sports.
Printing seems to be the issue he is focused on. But you can't just assume that you'll never need to print out your documents. If your documents are written in a non-WYSIWYG format (like HTML) then you'd have a horrendous time trying to figure out what page everything ends up on.
I imagine that this sort of debate will become more of an issue when we get things like good quality E-paper. Should be interesting then. Right now he's just a tempest in a teapot.
It wouldn't be an end to patents. Only large companies would be able to get patents because of the huge research costs to see if it has been patented or not. They would also be the only ones able to withstand the fines in the case that an idea was already patented. Everyone else would be driven six feet under.
If being the first to develop something doesn't give you the edge in the market, then no patent will change that.
Often being the first to develop something won't give you an edge though. This is exactly why patents exist. If I am the little guy and spend time and money developing an idea and product, I don't want some huge company to come along, steal the idea and all the work I put into it, and steamroll over me because they have a larger budget. This is exactly what would happen if patents didn't exist, and even though they do, it still does happen.
I don't know if Blizzard has anything to do with the movie other than as a content source. But they already have experience in this area. The Diablo I and II cinematics and plot were well done. Same with the Warcraft 3 cinematics. Warcraft 2's movies were pretty gimmicky though.
The problem is that the screenings mostly give one of the probabilities to the public: the amount of people who test positive. But people rarely hear about the number of false positives, the important probability. Of course people aren't going to understand that the test could be wrong if you don't tell them about the false positives.
If possible lose the mouse. Programming is always faster when time lost moving your hand between the mouse and keyboard is eliminated. Try using Vim or Emacs and learn the hotkeys. You'll be quick in no time and learn some great text-wrangling.
If you read my comment you'd see that it is extremely difficult to get evidence in this type of case. This is precisely why the making available argument has been brought up.
The law is highly adaptable. If it allows people to break the law without being caught (as with your logic of requiring evidence where it is near impossible if not illegal to obtain said evidence) then the laws will be changed to prevent this behavior.
It's like this: There's a huge online piracy operation where a certain someone is making media available for free. It's obvious that the songs are being distributed. We could download them ourselves just to prove this. But the only way to track how many songs were distributed would be to rig up everyone's computer to send us the info. Too difficult, right? Right. So we should just drop it and let her keep distributing the files.
A hundred thousand times the retail value of the file may seem like a lot. But how many copies of each song did she distribute? If it was a hundred thousand copies of each MP3, the verdict seems reasonable. Even at fifty thousand copies the verdict seems reasonable.
Thing is that with the technology available then (and probably now) you can't expect the RIAA to know how many copies were distributed. There is no way to tell other than rigging up everyone's computer who used P2P at the time to send their traffic data to you.
What is there to do then? Charge her for one times the damages? No that doesn't seem reasonable. One hundred times? Well she probably distributed way more than a hundred copies of each MP3. As bad as one hundred thousand times the damages sounds, when you actually sort through the facts of what Jamie Thomas was doing (easily on the scale of a huge piracy operation) the damages awarded makes complete sense.
I like the movie analogy but there's a problem. All of the changes you mentioned about movies were actually taken by everyone or nearly everyone to be an improvement -- no question about it.
Once upon a time, all movies were silent, and then someone invented the talkie.
Same thing with black and white. Someone invents color film, and people thing WOW, great more options!
Same thing with 2D sprite-based games. 3D comes along, and people at first thing Great!
Yes, everyone wanted sound and colours in their movies. Yes, everyone wanted 3D games. They made the experience wholly better. The only nay-sayers were due to the experimental state of the technologies when they were first introduced. But these problems were gradually fixed.
Then motion control comes along and we don't have the same reaction that we did to the other technologies. Not everyone likes it. Right now it's sluggish, inaccurate, and often difficult to learn to play and develop for. So at this point it's not a improvement over button games.
Even if motion control is perfected, it still has drawbacks compared to button controls. It requires more effort than button mashers, and is slower to execute actions than with buttons.
So I think they will continue to coexist with one another for quite a long time.
Personally I like the mouse, just not the keyboard. To me the keyboard is so unnatural to play games on. I'd rather have a controller I could hold in my left hand and a mouse in the right, or vice versa.
I usually end up playing PC games with an Xbox 360 controller. It's pretty sweet for the games that support it.
There is room in the gaming market for both casual and hardcore players right now. It's probably not going to change anytime soon. The casual market is still being saturated, so there's plenty of room for growth. But that doesn't mean hardcore button gamers will be out of the loop. The game makers know that hardcore players simply buy more games on average than causal players. I would cite that but I can't remember the link I read it from.
Slashdot Mirror
It's interesting in that some expressions are universal due to a biological basis, but some are cultural.
Quite true.
Smiling with teeth for humans is a universal expression of happiness. Or at least near universal. But for most other mammals, showing teeth is a sign of aggression and anger.
I wasn't talking about religion. Belief in God is not the same as being part of a religion, and it is important to recognize that.
The parental figure in mammals is a very important one. It is the giver, protector, teacher, and (more importantly) the creator. And we mammals use these figures to explain what we don't know.
Go back 2000 years and there is even more that we didn't know, even with our parental figures. So people resorted to God to try and explain it. Nowadays we relatively know a hell of a lot more than back then. And, lo and behold, people don't resort to God to try and explain things. And even more exemplary, educated societies today generally don't come up with new Gods on a whim.
Despite the power and effect of organised religion on societies, I'm talking about belief in God.
True. Reminds me of waiting for the advertisements on RottenTomatoes.com to load before the actual content appears.
Anyone remember Jet Moto for the PSX? They had Mountain Dew and Butterfinger ads plastered on billboards through all of the races. Even the teams of racers were sponsored by different products. But hey, back then I thought it was pretty cool.
What is more interesting to slashdot users: someone dies at Internet addiction camp, or people dying from starvation in third world countries? Just saying, the context is slashdot, and in this context it is news.
In any case, we are not robots programmed by the structure and chemistry of our brains.
How do you explain instincts then? They are pre-programmed knowledge not learned through the environment.
Everyone still has the ability to choose their actions, and for everyone with a disorder that "forces" them to commit a crime, I'm sure you can find someone with the same feature who lives a normal life. Brains are not computers, you cannot expect to hack them for a quick fix to interpersonal problems.
But freedom is nothing other than the ability to evaluate the past and present and decide on a potential future. The term freedom is ironic in itself since we are only free to choose the things that we think of at the time of choice. The things we think when making the decisions are based on pre-programming in our brains, and experience in our environment in our past and present. We are not really "free" but we are free within the bounds of our thoughts.
Meh, belief in God is just the need for an ultimate parental figure in mammals. It's embedded.
If he had said this about Linux he'd be modded a troll here on /., but instead he's modded insightful.
I can think of no better way to kill the sports MMO genre than to start it off with baseball.
One of the things about the baseball game in particular that's so great is that there is a leveling component, not just to the team, but also to players.
OK, but that's only because people have been focused on stats in baseball games since, well, forever. Can't this be applied to any sport?
So, there are things where if you win a game, that's how you gain experience points. If you win against a higher level opponent, you get more experience points; if you bottom feed and you take advantage of lower-level players, you don't get as much, and so on. There are a lot of MMO-type concepts in the game.
Again, couldn't this be applied to any sport?
I could see a sports component in an MMO, but not an MMO completely based on sports.
The ribbon kills the previous interface. Unless you love clicking through 50 cascaded menus over and over.
Printing seems to be the issue he is focused on. But you can't just assume that you'll never need to print out your documents. If your documents are written in a non-WYSIWYG format (like HTML) then you'd have a horrendous time trying to figure out what page everything ends up on.
I imagine that this sort of debate will become more of an issue when we get things like good quality E-paper. Should be interesting then. Right now he's just a tempest in a teapot.
It wouldn't be an end to patents. Only large companies would be able to get patents because of the huge research costs to see if it has been patented or not. They would also be the only ones able to withstand the fines in the case that an idea was already patented. Everyone else would be driven six feet under.
If being the first to develop something doesn't give you the edge in the market, then no patent will change that.
Often being the first to develop something won't give you an edge though. This is exactly why patents exist. If I am the little guy and spend time and money developing an idea and product, I don't want some huge company to come along, steal the idea and all the work I put into it, and steamroll over me because they have a larger budget. This is exactly what would happen if patents didn't exist, and even though they do, it still does happen.
Loved the ending of Diablo II!
I don't know if Blizzard has anything to do with the movie other than as a content source. But they already have experience in this area. The Diablo I and II cinematics and plot were well done. Same with the Warcraft 3 cinematics. Warcraft 2's movies were pretty gimmicky though.
I have hope, it could actually go well.
The problem is that the screenings mostly give one of the probabilities to the public: the amount of people who test positive. But people rarely hear about the number of false positives, the important probability. Of course people aren't going to understand that the test could be wrong if you don't tell them about the false positives.
Yes, yes, you have some good debunkers there. But despite all of the arguing there is one point:
If Microsoft did the same thing and had a PMP that was as popular as Apple's, there would be an antitrust complaint in no time.
Dreamcatcher imminent?
... tracking some 90 million articles and blog posts which appeared from August through October 2008 on 1.6 million mainstream media sites and blogs.
It took them 8 months to come up with the results?
If possible lose the mouse. Programming is always faster when time lost moving your hand between the mouse and keyboard is eliminated. Try using Vim or Emacs and learn the hotkeys. You'll be quick in no time and learn some great text-wrangling.
If you read my comment you'd see that it is extremely difficult to get evidence in this type of case. This is precisely why the making available argument has been brought up.
The law is highly adaptable. If it allows people to break the law without being caught (as with your logic of requiring evidence where it is near impossible if not illegal to obtain said evidence) then the laws will be changed to prevent this behavior.
It's like this: There's a huge online piracy operation where a certain someone is making media available for free. It's obvious that the songs are being distributed. We could download them ourselves just to prove this. But the only way to track how many songs were distributed would be to rig up everyone's computer to send us the info. Too difficult, right? Right. So we should just drop it and let her keep distributing the files.
A hundred thousand times the retail value of the file may seem like a lot. But how many copies of each song did she distribute? If it was a hundred thousand copies of each MP3, the verdict seems reasonable. Even at fifty thousand copies the verdict seems reasonable.
Thing is that with the technology available then (and probably now) you can't expect the RIAA to know how many copies were distributed. There is no way to tell other than rigging up everyone's computer who used P2P at the time to send their traffic data to you.
What is there to do then? Charge her for one times the damages? No that doesn't seem reasonable. One hundred times? Well she probably distributed way more than a hundred copies of each MP3. As bad as one hundred thousand times the damages sounds, when you actually sort through the facts of what Jamie Thomas was doing (easily on the scale of a huge piracy operation) the damages awarded makes complete sense.
I like the movie analogy but there's a problem. All of the changes you mentioned about movies were actually taken by everyone or nearly everyone to be an improvement -- no question about it.
Once upon a time, all movies were silent, and then someone invented the talkie.
Same thing with black and white. Someone invents color film, and people thing WOW, great more options!
Same thing with 2D sprite-based games. 3D comes along, and people at first thing Great!
Yes, everyone wanted sound and colours in their movies. Yes, everyone wanted 3D games. They made the experience wholly better. The only nay-sayers were due to the experimental state of the technologies when they were first introduced. But these problems were gradually fixed.
Then motion control comes along and we don't have the same reaction that we did to the other technologies. Not everyone likes it. Right now it's sluggish, inaccurate, and often difficult to learn to play and develop for. So at this point it's not a improvement over button games.
Even if motion control is perfected, it still has drawbacks compared to button controls. It requires more effort than button mashers, and is slower to execute actions than with buttons.
So I think they will continue to coexist with one another for quite a long time.
Personally I like the mouse, just not the keyboard. To me the keyboard is so unnatural to play games on. I'd rather have a controller I could hold in my left hand and a mouse in the right, or vice versa.
I usually end up playing PC games with an Xbox 360 controller. It's pretty sweet for the games that support it.
There is room in the gaming market for both casual and hardcore players right now. It's probably not going to change anytime soon. The casual market is still being saturated, so there's plenty of room for growth. But that doesn't mean hardcore button gamers will be out of the loop. The game makers know that hardcore players simply buy more games on average than causal players. I would cite that but I can't remember the link I read it from.