It merits attention particularly because it IS such a typical example of "journalists" being punished for doing journalism. Treating unprofessional conduct like that as okay simply because it happens so often only ensures it continues, and that people who are supposed to be giving us accurate information about videogames are going to continue to be relegated to being part of the marketing machine.
Granted, if you can only handle getting annoyed at one failure of journalism, it's more important to focus on the travesty that is reporting on political news, but having consistently poor reporting on our hobbies is also bad.
No, it felt like a primarily multiplayer game, which it was. There are a lot of numbers between "one" and "many." It's not a MMO, but it is a multiplayer game. The respawn worked well for that, and was a lot less annoying than the "revert to last save" most single player shooters go with. You only lost money and ammo, which both were handed out like candy on haloween anyway. I think it worked well.
Randomness? I'm not quite sure what you mean there. Random unique weapon drops with tons of different possible features? That was one of the stronger points of the game.
I do agree more scripting and less "read this text, that's the plot" would have been nice, and the opponents didn't have much in the way of character beyond what they looked like. Judging by the DLC for the first one, that's where they're going. Nearly every opponent had more character in each DLC than any in the main game. Plotwise, the original game's plot was serious and completely bland. All the DLC since then have had comedic plots. So they're moving in the right direction, the DLCs were all better than the main game. (Except for mad moxie, that one was a complete waste.)
The problem is there really isn't that much land available, unless you think people should be happy to live in tiny apartments shared with multiple families, or that they should be happy to live in the Sahara Desert.
I don't see any evidence of that happening in the near future. The population density of India and Macau are much higher than the world average. While the population can't grow as it is -forever- I don't see space becoming the issue first, nor do I see an impending timeline on it.
Finally, while there's definitely a lot of improvements that could be made everywhere, these will only result in arithmetic improvements. With the population increasing geometrically, this will quickly outstrip any improvements that can be made.
Evidence please. I see no reason construction can't scale with population, as it has always done. If you have more people in a country, you're going to have more demand for construction, and more construction manpower.
Again, it depends on the timeline. Yes, we might run out of room and be unable to build up anymore in a thousand year time scale, but a 100 year time scale? I see nothing to suggest that.
Franklin's quote still applies, though if you like I could adapt it: "Those who would give up essential privacy online to purchase manners for the internet deserve to be flamed like the trolls they are."
While I don't necessarily agree with Zuckerberg's his point, i do agree with his sentiment. People use anonymity on the internet to be complete pricks. It's easy to talk a pile of trash when you aren't accountable for your blathering. Doing away with anonymity adds at least SOME accountability to your online life.
Not worth it though. Do unto others even when you are anonymous, grow a thicker skin, and there's no problem. I'll take rude people online any day over likely getting more spam/junk mail and having more companies know who I am. It's bad enough as is.
IIRC, we passed the 6 billion milestone about 10 years ago, and we will pass the 7 billion milestone pretty soon now. Which means even if some agency imposes zero population growth on us tomorrow, there will still be a billion kids under 10 years old who are growing up and adding several billion kilos each year to the human biomass, for several more years.
That's a lot of people, and we have a finite amount of land, but that doesn't mean we're at max capacity now, or will be in our lifetimes. Resource consumption will get us before we run out of room to fit people in, and we seem to be doing fine on that. People who are starving are doing so because we're distributing resources in a fairly arbitrary manner. We have more than enough food to feed everyone. The food that gets -thrown out- from grocery stores every day here in the US is probably enough to feed everyone in Somalia, but political instability in the region (putting it nicely) is the limiting factor there. Not malthusian mechanisms.
And that's critical. You can't go telling people they can't reproduce based on a hunch that we can't support more people, especially when it seems like we very much could.
You could potentially design your website to different tiers of intelligence then. Internet explorer detected? Load up the "whack a mole" flash ads and celebrity gossip references. Opera or firefox detected? Hide the the "LIKE THIS ON FACEBOOK!!!" buttons.
He must be an internet explorer user then. An opera user would have merely put up a website where those offended could complain, but then make the site incompatible with IE, and suggest they download opera or firefox. THEN when they do, they'll become smart enough to realize the study was right, and won't complain.
I heard that figure placed at 5000 years, but that was 10 years ago, so maybe just 4990. I have no idea if that was him or not, but I think it's likely his scenario would happen before that happens.
...right, that's what the article says. Entirely. Good job! You're so smart! Now here's a ball, go off and play with it and let us grownups discuss grownup things!
Its time to get straight, tell the truth, clean up the mess, and make the planet fit for human habitation on all levels.
He didn't give a time for when this would occur, unless I missed something. There's a graph which shows the economy reaching 98% by the end of the century, but he makes it clear that's not a prediction of WHEN it will happen, this was just an example to illustrate the point.
In other words, no one is saying the end is nigh, because it's probably not. Don't sound the alarm that the economy is about to hit the ceiling. There are more down-to-earth reasons to reduce the debt and stop burning the environment like they're making more of it, reasons that won't make us sound insane.
And he's not predicting the end of the world. He's simply saying that our economy depends on the assumption of growth, but growth can't reasonably be expected to continue forever.
The artificial world that must be envisioned to keep economic growth alive in the face of physical limits strikes me as preposterous and untenable. It would be an existence far removed from demonstrated modes of human economic activity
No "the world is going to end." Unless we plow right into it and decide that rather than adjust to a steady state economy, we are just going to nuke everyone else so we'll be able to expand our economy again.
Now, the difference here is that the genes are isolated from the body as a whole, but it seems like we're not too far from being in breach of patent every time we get it on.
No we're not, but the company is already charging thousands of dollars for you to know if YOUR copy of the relevant gene is mutated and if you should be more vigilant about breast or ovarian cancer*, which is of course criminal by any sane standards.
(* to those two women who are reading slashdot, this applies. For everyone else, well, it still raises your health insurance)
I don't know anything about the 1991 law, being unable to access the article at this time, but is it maybe:
-MPAA et al pay lawmakers a lot of money
-Lawmakers make laws that favor the MPAA etc
-Zediva's plan is illegal by those laws
-MPAA continues to give lawmakers money to make laws that keep all the control in the MPAA's hands.
I... I'm not really sure why I said it like it was a BAD thing. I'm e-mailing my congressman right now. No more using the words "up to" in ads, only real averages. Or else they behead you.
I don't think AzTechGuy was suggesting that. It would be pretty stupid to submit an article only to say it wasn't true.
"Read this report. Did you read it? IT'S CRAP! DON'T WASTE YOUR TIME READING IT!"
On the other hand, he -could- have submitted it, knowing full well that slashdotters never read TFA. Maybe he figured if he didn't submit it, we might read it...
Actually, the reason I said it was because the fuel generally used in nuclear reactors (U-238) can't explode, even if you deliberately tried designing it to. It's simply too stable....by "explode" I mean the massive, kiloton-yield, mushroom-cloud forming kind. It certainly could... get out of hand, maybe even make a nice little fireball and vaporize a large section of the surrounding area
Oh. Well darn, I really liked my bit about "the assumption is you're going on a commercial flight and not jumping off a cliff with a pair of cardboard wings taped to your arms." It was a good line. You had to go and bring physics into it and ruin it. Thanks a lot!
TFA points out that he himself didn't expect much of it
He told the newspaper that had he succeeded in building a nuclear reactor, generating any power would probably have proved beyond him.
"To get it to generate electricity you would need a turbine and a generator and that is very difficult to build yourself," he told HD.
He also claims he had been using a geiger counter and had not detected "a problem" with the radiation.
Pretty sure that goes for, er, modern, professionally designed reactors. A thousand dollar homemade reactor in a closet -might- not have the same safety level.
It's kinda like how they say flying is safer than driving: the assumption is you're going on a commercial flight and not jumping off a cliff with a pair of cardboard wings taped to your arms.
Slashdot Mirror
It merits attention particularly because it IS such a typical example of "journalists" being punished for doing journalism. Treating unprofessional conduct like that as okay simply because it happens so often only ensures it continues, and that people who are supposed to be giving us accurate information about videogames are going to continue to be relegated to being part of the marketing machine.
Granted, if you can only handle getting annoyed at one failure of journalism, it's more important to focus on the travesty that is reporting on political news, but having consistently poor reporting on our hobbies is also bad.
No, it felt like a primarily multiplayer game, which it was. There are a lot of numbers between "one" and "many." It's not a MMO, but it is a multiplayer game. The respawn worked well for that, and was a lot less annoying than the "revert to last save" most single player shooters go with. You only lost money and ammo, which both were handed out like candy on haloween anyway. I think it worked well.
Randomness? I'm not quite sure what you mean there. Random unique weapon drops with tons of different possible features? That was one of the stronger points of the game.
I do agree more scripting and less "read this text, that's the plot" would have been nice, and the opponents didn't have much in the way of character beyond what they looked like. Judging by the DLC for the first one, that's where they're going. Nearly every opponent had more character in each DLC than any in the main game. Plotwise, the original game's plot was serious and completely bland. All the DLC since then have had comedic plots. So they're moving in the right direction, the DLCs were all better than the main game. (Except for mad moxie, that one was a complete waste.)
In development at a different company. Possibly in the "To do" list right after left 4 dead 3 through 7.
The problem is there really isn't that much land available, unless you think people should be happy to live in tiny apartments shared with multiple families, or that they should be happy to live in the Sahara Desert.
I don't see any evidence of that happening in the near future. The population density of India and Macau are much higher than the world average. While the population can't grow as it is -forever- I don't see space becoming the issue first, nor do I see an impending timeline on it.
Finally, while there's definitely a lot of improvements that could be made everywhere, these will only result in arithmetic improvements. With the population increasing geometrically, this will quickly outstrip any improvements that can be made.
Evidence please. I see no reason construction can't scale with population, as it has always done. If you have more people in a country, you're going to have more demand for construction, and more construction manpower.
Again, it depends on the timeline. Yes, we might run out of room and be unable to build up anymore in a thousand year time scale, but a 100 year time scale? I see nothing to suggest that.
While I don't necessarily agree with Zuckerberg's his point, i do agree with his sentiment. People use anonymity on the internet to be complete pricks. It's easy to talk a pile of trash when you aren't accountable for your blathering. Doing away with anonymity adds at least SOME accountability to your online life.
Not worth it though. Do unto others even when you are anonymous, grow a thicker skin, and there's no problem. I'll take rude people online any day over likely getting more spam/junk mail and having more companies know who I am. It's bad enough as is.
IIRC, we passed the 6 billion milestone about 10 years ago, and we will pass the 7 billion milestone pretty soon now. Which means even if some agency imposes zero population growth on us tomorrow, there will still be a billion kids under 10 years old who are growing up and adding several billion kilos each year to the human biomass, for several more years.
That's a lot of people, and we have a finite amount of land, but that doesn't mean we're at max capacity now, or will be in our lifetimes. Resource consumption will get us before we run out of room to fit people in, and we seem to be doing fine on that. People who are starving are doing so because we're distributing resources in a fairly arbitrary manner. We have more than enough food to feed everyone. The food that gets -thrown out- from grocery stores every day here in the US is probably enough to feed everyone in Somalia, but political instability in the region (putting it nicely) is the limiting factor there. Not malthusian mechanisms.
And that's critical. You can't go telling people they can't reproduce based on a hunch that we can't support more people, especially when it seems like we very much could.
You could potentially design your website to different tiers of intelligence then. Internet explorer detected? Load up the "whack a mole" flash ads and celebrity gossip references. Opera or firefox detected? Hide the the "LIKE THIS ON FACEBOOK!!!" buttons.
He must be an internet explorer user then. An opera user would have merely put up a website where those offended could complain, but then make the site incompatible with IE, and suggest they download opera or firefox. THEN when they do, they'll become smart enough to realize the study was right, and won't complain.
Statistics are like a bikini: they should be taken off as soon as possible.
I don't really think I had a point there, but nonetheless... BOOBIES!
I heard that figure placed at 5000 years, but that was 10 years ago, so maybe just 4990. I have no idea if that was him or not, but I think it's likely his scenario would happen before that happens.
...right, that's what the article says. Entirely. Good job! You're so smart! Now here's a ball, go off and play with it and let us grownups discuss grownup things!
Its time to get straight, tell the truth, clean up the mess, and make the planet fit for human habitation on all levels.
He didn't give a time for when this would occur, unless I missed something. There's a graph which shows the economy reaching 98% by the end of the century, but he makes it clear that's not a prediction of WHEN it will happen, this was just an example to illustrate the point.
In other words, no one is saying the end is nigh, because it's probably not. Don't sound the alarm that the economy is about to hit the ceiling. There are more down-to-earth reasons to reduce the debt and stop burning the environment like they're making more of it, reasons that won't make us sound insane.
The artificial world that must be envisioned to keep economic growth alive in the face of physical limits strikes me as preposterous and untenable. It would be an existence far removed from demonstrated modes of human economic activity
No "the world is going to end." Unless we plow right into it and decide that rather than adjust to a steady state economy, we are just going to nuke everyone else so we'll be able to expand our economy again.
You're right, and it's worth noting that Brca 1 and 2 mutations do increase the risk for that too. I suppose the offhand comment wasn't worth making.
Now, the difference here is that the genes are isolated from the body as a whole, but it seems like we're not too far from being in breach of patent every time we get it on.
No we're not, but the company is already charging thousands of dollars for you to know if YOUR copy of the relevant gene is mutated and if you should be more vigilant about breast or ovarian cancer*, which is of course criminal by any sane standards.
(* to those two women who are reading slashdot, this applies. For everyone else, well, it still raises your health insurance)
I don't know anything about the 1991 law, being unable to access the article at this time, but is it maybe:
-MPAA et al pay lawmakers a lot of money
-Lawmakers make laws that favor the MPAA etc
-Zediva's plan is illegal by those laws
-MPAA continues to give lawmakers money to make laws that keep all the control in the MPAA's hands.
Seems very relevant to me.
Seems to me if you work in banking, the only reason to stop exploiting loopholes is when you're tired of having too much money. That and morals.
No, the content owners are evil independent of whether or not another company is skirting the laws (the ones the content owners have bent themselves.)
If you even giggled at that, let alone "roffle"d, you have a really odd sense of humor.
And most advertising agencies would be in a world of trouble if there were legal consequences for using "Up to" in deceptive contexts like that. "geShitty car insurance-co could save you 15% or more on car insurance" and whatnot.
I... I'm not really sure why I said it like it was a BAD thing. I'm e-mailing my congressman right now. No more using the words "up to" in ads, only real averages. Or else they behead you.
I don't think AzTechGuy was suggesting that. It would be pretty stupid to submit an article only to say it wasn't true.
"Read this report. Did you read it? IT'S CRAP! DON'T WASTE YOUR TIME READING IT!"
On the other hand, he -could- have submitted it, knowing full well that slashdotters never read TFA. Maybe he figured if he didn't submit it, we might read it...
Actually, the reason I said it was because the fuel generally used in nuclear reactors (U-238) can't explode, even if you deliberately tried designing it to. It's simply too stable....by "explode" I mean the massive, kiloton-yield, mushroom-cloud forming kind. It certainly could... get out of hand, maybe even make a nice little fireball and vaporize a large section of the surrounding area
Oh. Well darn, I really liked my bit about "the assumption is you're going on a commercial flight and not jumping off a cliff with a pair of cardboard wings taped to your arms." It was a good line. You had to go and bring physics into it and ruin it. Thanks a lot!
The fact is that it's a gazebo pavilion temple which is on top of a large pyramid. And of course in the pyramid is a stargate.
He told the newspaper that had he succeeded in building a nuclear reactor, generating any power would probably have proved beyond him. "To get it to generate electricity you would need a turbine and a generator and that is very difficult to build yourself," he told HD.
He also claims he had been using a geiger counter and had not detected "a problem" with the radiation.
I know nuclear reactors generally can't explode.
Pretty sure that goes for, er, modern, professionally designed reactors. A thousand dollar homemade reactor in a closet -might- not have the same safety level.
It's kinda like how they say flying is safer than driving: the assumption is you're going on a commercial flight and not jumping off a cliff with a pair of cardboard wings taped to your arms.