It's hard to make a game that truly uses the medium to create powerful emotional scenes. Take one example, the death of Aeris in Final Fantasy VII. Most people acknowledge that it was a powerful scene, and with good reason. In some sense, you'd grown to know her character throughout the game, and so seeing her die was an emotional moment. Still, how does that use the nature of the medium? If I'm watching a good movie, I'll have the same reaction. If anything, the Mines of Moria scene in Fellowship of the Ring was more powerful. Might it be possible to use the interactivity of a game to create a branching path, with powerful and resonant consequences, no matter which way you choose?
I'm not saying this because Final Fantasy VII was so heavily FMV-based, either. In fact, it would be possible to create a game which was 95% FMV, but still used the interactivity present in a game to create emotional impact. The difference lies in the fact that FFVII had very little in the way of hard moral decisions. What if it were possible to save Aeris, but it ultimately meant the destruction of hundreds of other, innocent lives? Imagine this:
You're given two options. One, you can use some kind of evil materia you've picked up earlier in the game. It summons the life out of hundreds of others, and uses it to channel some sort of force which turns Sephiroth's blade aside, and drives him away. Cut to a scene of a small child desparately crying for his mother and father, who have died simply so your friend can live. Pull back and see the devastation - hundreds have died so that you could save Aeris, you selfish bastard. She stays with you, but never sees you in the same way. Or, choose option two: Cloud enters and watches Sephiroth kill Aeris, knowing that he (and you) could have done something, but that the end couldn't ever justify the means. Neither one is satisfying, but the choice defines who Cloud is, and what he's willing to do for his cause and his friends.
It's difficult to create a game which can allow you to make weighty moral decisions, but the result of a game which does this well is nothing short of incredible. Consider Planescape: Torment, or, to a lesser extent, the Knights of the Old Republic and Fallout games. They're all truly role-playing games; you can create your own character, with your own moral code. If you're out to save the world, might that justify shaking down peasants when you need the cash to buy that +57 Super Armor? After all, if you die, then they're doomed; better that they be short some cash rather than souls trapped in the Ultimate Doom Machine. On the other hand, aren't you fighting for these people? Heck, maybe you're just power-mad and psychotic, looking to take control of the Ultimate Doom Machine for yourself.
To me, a really emotional game would allow me to step into someone's shoes and make these decisions. In the real world, if I were to be some kind of super-powered hero, I'd have to make hard choices. A game which wants to make a strong emotional impact should force you to make hard choices as well; if the game makes your choices for you, then it can only ever operate on the emotional level of a movie. That's not a bad thing, but as a game, it's possible to use the nature of the medium to go further.
Yeah, try this: $500. Hell, if you set up an automatic monthly debit, you can start one for $100. Fifteen grand my ass.
Credit unions rock. You know how much I've paid in checking fees in my lifetime? Absolutely nothing. Free overdraft protection, too. No minimum balance required, save $5 in a savings account. I seriously reccommend checking out what's available in your area.
At this point, I probably sound like some kind of shameless astroturfer, but you really should check out credit unions. The whole non-profit, member-owned concept means that you get stunningly better deals on pretty much any kind of financial transaction.
If you like Monopoly, you really should give Settlers an honest try. It's a lot of fun to get together a group of ruthless players; extorting resources out of the poor person who set up his only brick-producing settlement next to a 12 and forgot to get a decent port is wonderful. Monopoly offers quite a few ways to screw over your "friends," but Catan is quicker, and with creative gameplay, there are some creative and wonderful ways to bring down the loftiest of players.
You have to use a credit card regularly to build a credit history, don't you?
No, credit history is built with every cent you borrow. It's true that, starting from scratch, it's very difficult to qualify for larger loans. Without a strong credit history, you probably won't be able to get a home loan, or a car loan with any kind of decent interest rate. In fact, pretty much the only large loan available to someone without a good credit history or collateral is a student loan.
Using a credit card, and paying the balance in full each month, is probably the easiest and best way to get a good credit score. However, it's certainly not the only way.
So, this person committed premeditated murder? I'm all for self-defense, but blowing somebody away simply because they're stealing your property is a bit extreme. I'm pretty sure only Texas follows the "castle doctrine" ("a man's home is his castle"), and even there I doubt the cops would look fondly on a plan to kill someone, rather than responding with more reasonable force. Detaining the burglar until the police arrive is one thing; killing someone is taking things far out of hand.
Sure, theft is an asshole thing to do, but you can't kill someone just because they're an asshole. It's people like this who give honest gun owners a bad name. Deadly force should only be used when there is an obvious danger to someone's life, that can't be averted any other way. The burglar might have been an asshole, but the shooter is a murderer.
You can run phone signals (or anything else on RJ-11; I've got a doorbell wired up to use it:) ) down cat 5 easily. It really simplifies wiring to just have one big patch panel, and generic outlets that can be used for network or phone. You have to be careful about plugging them in right, though - you don't want your network card ringing!
Before gmaps, mapping was starting to fall off charts of desktop app and only for gps. with gmaps and the various mash-ups, the application is limitless
Wrong. What, you think that everybody has the money for a nav system? Mapquest is one of the Web's most popular sites, and still, in my opinion, still has a better interface than Google's. (although they should damn well get rid of that top text-entry box, above the address entry)
Before gEarth, satellite imagery was a classified thing given only to the rich and priviliged. with gEarth, satellite integration into mapping became almost required and more people have access to it
Sure. Microsoft's Terraserver never existed years before Google even got its own domain.
Before gSpreadsheet. MS was pretty much the only game in town. OOo was there, but just offers nothing that MS doesn't. There was just no incentive to use it. but since gSpreadsheet allowed for on-line spreadsheet edit on reliable/fast servers. I've started using it to keep lists (DVD collection, anime, game high scores, etc)
That's nice. If I want to use Google Spreadsheet, then I'll need it to have a LOT more features. It's nice for simple things, and access-anywhere and multiuser edit are very useful features, but it's not going to be going toe-to-toe with Excel for a long time.
The standards you posted seem to all deal with data security. While that's a very important part of banking, it's not everything you should look for in a bank.
The problem with Paypal is that they skirt the law - they act like a bank when it suits them, but make sure that they aren't subject to normal banking regulations. For example, they can freeze your account indefinitely or withdraw your money at their whim. A real bank would have to abide by many laws and regulations when doing that, and would have to have a damn good reason - or they'd be criminally liable. Even then, if they were to do something drastic such as close your account, they would almost certainly have to cut you a check for the remaining balance. Paypal? Not in a million years! That money's THEIRS; it's by their goodwill alone that you can do anything with it.
Paypal has quite the reputation for terrible customer service, borderline fraudulent practices, and questionable handling of money. While real banks might not be the most wonderful institutions around, at least you get legal protection. The most you can hope for with PayPal is a civil suit, and you can be sure that they have teams of attack lawyers to make sure that getting your $500 back will cost you $10,000 - if you get it at all.
Really, Quicktime is an interesting example of this. Apple gets the consumer part out into the wild for free (the decoder half of the codec), and offers the producer part for a cost (the encoder part), and provides incentives for consumers to upgrade with additional features in the player (although I must say that the restrictions on the free version are... annoyingly chafing, to say the very least). The end result is much more revenue for Apple, since the producers know that their consumers can easily watch their movies (via a download, if they don't already have the software), and the consumers aren't turned off by having to pay to get the player.
It seems to me that creating "community involvement" in the development of a game could potentially be a major mistake for game developers. While it sounds great (you're giving people what they want, after all), there's a serious problem: for the most part, the people who get involved will be the hardcore gamers. These gamers will demand complex features, interfaces which may well be difficult to master (although efficient once mastered), and high levels of difficulty.
While none of these are necessarialy bad things, these features would tend to alienate a much larger market segment, casual gamers. Furthermore, there will always be complaints about certain issues from the hardcore segment. For example, I knew many people who were upset that the weapons, especially the rocket launcher, in Quake II were balanced far better than the original Quake; keep in mind that the rocket launcher in Quake I was by far the most powerful weapon in the game and that deathmatches frequently were rocket launcher races. Of course, these players were unhappy because they were forced to deal with something novel; they wanted the same deathmatch gameplay they had always had. Most of them warmed up to Quake II's multiplayer over the course of a month or so, acknowledging that better weapon balance actually made the game more fun, but if Id had asked them their opinions after a few hours with the game they would have loudly complained about the "worthless" rocket launcher.
The lesson here is not that community involvement is always a bad thing. However, when dealing with the hardcore gaming crowd, there will be a lot of people who want exactly the same thing they had before, with prettier graphics. This would lead to an industry devoid of innovation, alienating its games farther from the casual market with each iteration.
Now, this doesn't mean that games shouldn't be easily moddable. In fact, that's an important way to keep people happy - not satisfied with a certain weapon? With a good mod system, you can change it to the way you and your friends like it. Moreover, there are also some incredible user-created mods, too - Counterstrike got its start as a Half-Life mod. A good mod system makes sense, both in appealing to a community and as a business decision; a good mod can certainly prolong the life of a game. It's important to allow a creative outlet for people to modify your game, but it's not a good idea to base the entire thing on the input of a small crowd of hardcore gamers - the people a "community involvement" system would almost certainly attract.
I've played FF7, and I wasn't particularly affected by this moment. The game was well done, and I did develop some sympathy for the characters, but ultimately, the moment never affected me.
I sometimes wonder at this; for many people, including yourself, this is an obviously emotional moment. I think a large part of it was that I had no real control. After all, in a game, you're used to having some degree of control over the characters. I think it almost certainly would have been more affecting if it were possible for Cloud to attack Sephiroth alone, in a hopeless battle controlled by the player - at the end of the battle, Sephiroth knocks Cloud aside like a rag doll, then proceeds to impale Aeris. After all, a central element in setting up a good tragedy is the feeling that while the fate of the character is preordained, there is still some small hope, eventually crushed.
I don't think I am emotionally "crippled" in any way, although a few people have tried to tell me that when I tell them that scene didn't really affect me much. For example, I tear up when I read the poetry of Neruda or Keats, listen to the fourth movement of Mahler's 5th, or watch the end of Bergman's Seventh Seal; these things affect me in a far more profound way than Aeris's death in FF7. Even the ending of Planescape: Torment makes me incredibly emotional; the way those characters depended on my character, despite being nothing but a set of pixels, was truly moving.
Aeris's death was a poignant scene, to be sure, but it didn't touch any of the depths of the human condition; it's good, but it's overrated in its emotional intensity.
I would never trust an under-the-skin chip. Why? Nothing to do with Revelations.
Why, then? Consider what happens if someone manages to crack or clone your chip. An identity thief can simply wave his or her hand/limb/whatever across the scanner; with some basic prestidigiation, said thief wouldn't even need to have the chip implanted in his or her body. Meanwhile, I'm running like hell to the doctor's office to get my identity chip removed and cancelled - meanwhile, the identity thief is, well, stealing my identity.
This is a big problem with biometrics, too. After all, you can change a password entered into a computer or terminal as many times as you like. Unfortunately, nature has placed limits on how many times you can change your biometric password. Assuming that you're a human who hasn't suffered any permanant injuries involving the lack of body parts, you've got ten fingerprints, two retinas, one facial geometry, and that's pretty much it. If someone can get a hold of your info and fool the appropriate sensor, you've got one hell of an uphill battle getting a new body.
Sure, identification like biometrics and RFID is handy. Unfortunately, if you don't come back to entering passwords and checking ID, thus removing the quick-and-easy aspect, the security risks increase a great deal compared to current methods. Sure, as long as the authentication methods are secure, they'll work. Then again, wasn't the German Engima machine "perfectly secure" against all attack?
As far as I can tell, there's no reference to any sort of interstellar events - just a very strong aurora, which would exhibit certain symmetries according to current research in plasma physics; ancient societies might then be inspired to inscribe this auroral event in petroglyphs. The paper then puts forth support for this idea by showing that the positions of these symmetric ancient drawings are well oriented with a theorized auroral event.
I'm no plasma physicist, but I would be very suprised if even the extreme forces of a supernova, located many thousands of light-years away, would be able to do a fraction of what the solar wind of a star eight light-minutes away could achieve. If the conclusions of this paper are correct, and there was some sort of massive auroral event in antiquity, I would expect a better explanation to lie in variations the Earth's own magnetic field or in high solar activity; after all, that's what well-confirmed theory tells us produces the aurora.
Can we get a pro to elaborate on the BS?
on
Supernova 1987A Decoded
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· Score: 2, Interesting
First, it's pretty obvious this is absolute screaming bulls--t, if for no other reason than the priceless quote that "Stars are an electrical, not a thermonuclear, phenomenon," a gem at the beginning of the 18th paragraph.
Some ludicrously misapplied scientific terms come to the front when Googled, too. Take "Birkeland current," one of the ideas put forth as some sort of power transmission line throughout the galaxy; a brief bit of research indicates that the phenomenon is referred to solely in a terrestrial context (at least, on non-out there sites)
Another one? The paper referenced towards the end, entitled "Characteristics for the occurrence of a high-current, Z-pinch aurora as recorded in antiquity," and published in IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science, relates solely to a large terrestrial aurora discharge.
Still, it would be great if we could get a pro in here to thoroughly debunk this. Any astronomers want to step up to the challenge?
Although not the OP, I can concede that it would have been better for the population of New Orleans to have secured transit out of the city before the hurricane, rather than remain inside a city which was likely to be destroyed.
However, I seriously doubt that someone with only a few dollars in their pocket, who probably only heard about the hurricane in an impending-doom sense hours after the evacuation order was issued (remember, the poor tend to not have access to the same information you do) could actually get to another city. After all, what are your options?
You could hitch a ride - unfortunately, the people going out of town are almost all running like hell with family and everything they can fit jammed into their cars. There's no room for some "hitchiking bum." Furthermore, even if there was a willing group of people to provide free or low-cost transport out of the city, there wouldn't be nearly enough vehicles leaving to evacuate the entire city in a day.
Well, there's still walking or biking, right? Probably not. After all, walking or biking out of the city will take you out of New Orleans, a city which was expected to be damaged but not cast into anarchy, into either the suburbs, an alien area which will likely turn its back on a poor, probably black, person, or rural Lousiana, which is basically a massive swamp (meaning minimal food and potable water), during hurricane-force winds? Sure, it might be possible to get out and to higher ground by walking or biking, but that's a massive gamble against moderately long odds. Looking back now, it might be the smart thing to do. But after all, once the die is cast, the right bet to make is also obvious.
Finally, your parting comment is rather offensive. Sure, there are dumb poor people. But there are plenty of dumb rich people, too (see morons like Paris Hilton). The problem is that smart poor people can often see the right thing to do, but can't do the right thing. For example, it's almost a complete financial given that you should save about 10% of your paycheck at the very least, giving you a "rainy-day fund" or the capital necessary for improvements to yourself (an education, nice clothes for a job interview, etc.). However, a truly poor person often can't afford to put 10% into a savings account - they have to spend every penny they earn on necessities of life like food, rent and clothing. Even if there are benefits available from the government, there are almost no efforts to educate the impovershed about them - and these people can't for the most part afford to spend hours a day checking out what the government has to offer. There are certainly bums who try to take advantage of the system, but there are also hard-working people who are living paycheck to paycheck and have no real path out of poverty.
To me, this is one of the saddest realities of America today - in a true capitalist society, the cream would rise to the top, no matter where it started. In a socalist society, the poor would have basic needs provided, and might have some opportunity to excel. However, America's poor are trapped in the hideous hybrid system that manages to combine the bureaucratic excesses of socalism with a pseudocapitalist system which allows even intelligent, driven people from poor backgrounds few ways to excel.
If I ruled the game-development world, I would quite simply place the world's game scriptwriters in front of the RPG Planescape: Torment. If you've played it, you probably know why.
If you haven't, here's a brief synopsis of what made it so very, very good (and thus, unfortunately, unusual):
The game had an engrossing story, which was revealed in steps. In the beginning, you simply wake up in a mortuary, with that somewhat hackneyed device of amnesia. However, instead of hearing your character's entire background five minutes into the game, or never understanding why the character would forget himself at all, the game instead uses an admittedly overused device to slowly reveal the nature of the character and allow you to define that character.
It allowed you to define the character. First, as a Dungeons and Dragons based game, it had a built-in alignment system. However, unlike most D&D games, it allowed you to choose your alignment naturally. You started out completely neutral, and your alignment shifted according to your actions. Furthermore, the game, which in large part centered around the question, "What can change the nature of a man?" actually allowed you to play the character such that almost any answer to that question was viable.
Finally, it allowed for great freedom. While the main plotline was mostly linear, the ways to accomplish the various tasks allowed the gamer to play almost any character. Have a character with high wisdom? Talk your way out of a fight by showing the uselessness of fighting. High charisma? Convince people that you're incredibly powerful and will mow right through them. Have high strength? Just bash your way through obstacles.
While the game was certainly not without its flaws (lots of text-based exposition, which was read in a small dialog box and some of which might have been done better if movies were worked in, a mediocre interface, and somewhat dated technology) it still stands as a shining example of what storytelling in a game should be.
Interesting idea, but it probably wouldn't work - first of all, most of the commodity USB keychain drives have ROM firmware. Try flashing that! Second, even among devices with flashable firmware (mostly flash MP3 players), every device's firmware is different. Considering the massive number of flash MP3 players on the market, and the fact that it would be a large effort to set up even 10 or 15 "infectious" firmwares, it's unlikely we'll see worms spreading this way, just like we don't see worms flashing themselves into a motherboard BIOS.
That said, this is still a large security hole. After all, even the most locked down public (and private) computers usually have USB ports open; flash drives have almost completely replaced floppies for most users. Either you are forced to severely restrict functionality, or you are opening yourself to attack. This puts sysadmins in a very sticky situation, unless their users are already used to draconian security measures.
The problem with the warnings provided by a bank are useless when a user is in "panic mode," which most phishing attacks attempt to induce. For example, one phishing attempt I recently recieved told me that "FRAUD ALERT - A charge on your credit card in the amount of $5,000 has been made by the First Bank of the Cayman Islands [or some such, it was a name which screamed "sleazy offshore bank"]. To stop payment on this transaction, please go to [phisher's site]."
Of course, many users will start to panic when confronted with something like this - "Oh my God, how did the First Bank of the Cayman Islands get my information? What am I going to do now?" rather than do the rational thing - calling the bank and confirming. In a panic, the user may immediately enter their personal information. While they may realize later that they've been phished, it may be too late; additionally, many users may simply be glad that "their bank's fraud protection," worked.
The upshot of all this, of course, is that anything that causes the user to stop and think "that's funny," rather than panic, will help to stop phishing and fraud.
The special covering? Inside sources* tell me it's a special technology known as a "plain brown bag," which has been used to cover printed material for more than half a century.
First time it's ever been used on anything intended for children, though.
I find it interesting that the authors of this "Mundane Manifesto" think that strictly following the rules of modern science creates "better" fiction. While I grant that following established science is often a good thing (and Treknobabble is undoubtedly a terrible thing), great fiction is ultimately a contrafactual reality - one which never existed, and probably never will exist - which is designed by the author to shed light on some aspect of the human condition.
With this in mind, bending the rules of science slightly (to allow for faster-than-light travel, for example) can help an author illuminate his or her point more clearly. An example might be in Joe Haldeman's The Forever War, in which the main character, a soldier, travels faster than light to fight an interstellar war, only to find that he can never go home: time-dialation effects have made him a living anachronism. His only option is to fight. Haldeman, in this novel, was using exaggeration to shed light on a problem faced by himself and other Vietnam veterans; they left to fight, and came back to find themselves in a culture completely different from the one they had left. Without the faster-than-light travel in the book (which makes an interstellar war possible), it would have been far more difficult for Haldeman to create a novel which expressed his disorientation as he came back to a nation which he had fought for, and which was in some sense no longer his.
Now, I'm not saying that authors should break the rules of science in a cavalier fashion; this leads ultimately to a bad Star Trek episode, in which characters back themselves into a corner, but can get out by recalibrating the deflector phase array to 114.2 pulses per second - an unsatisfying way to end a conflict. However, carefully breaking the rules can make possible works which would not be allowed under the "Mundane Manifesto." The authors should consider carefully what they might throw away before they pledge to avoid writing about anything including aliens, interstellar conflict, colonization of other star systems, or any of the other fascinating, if unlikely, possibilities for the future.
Unfortunately, Theo is known for making inflammatory public comments. Most of the undeadly posters are simply saying that "Theo was taken out of context, isn't it obvious?" without any real support for their statements.
While Theo is undoubtedly an incredibly talented developer, his temper is simply legendary, his ego is gargantuan, and he isn't at all afraid to call things as he sees them: the end result is that if he feels Linux is insecure and poorly developed, he's excatly the sort of person who would make statements in an interview like, "Linux is for losers."
While it's certainly possible that he was taken out of context, and he certainly isn't as flame-happy as he was during his NetBSD days, it's not exactly out of character for him to speak his mind, even if it's offensive to others.
Well, they (or more likely, their parents) will want to pay for your product when it's the uninstaller for the adware that shows 4 popups every 2 seconds advertising "YOU MAY HAVE SPYWARE ON YOUR SYSTEM! CLICK HERE TO BUY A SPYWARE REMOVAL PROGRAM!!!"
Most of the spyware I've seen recently (and I see a fair amount among just friends and family) is either CoolWebSearch (a dark spawn of Hell of which I will not speak again) or a thinly veiled extortion tactic which charges money to buy the uninstaller - or rather, the "SPYWARE REMOVER!!!! GUARANTEED 100% ACCURATE!!!!! GET RID OF SPYWARE NOW!!!!!" Were I to meet the "humans" who install this crap via drive-by downloads and IE exploits, causing both my friends and I to lose hours upon hours of valuable time, I would do things to them which would make the Lovecraftian elder gods not only blanch but run away screaming.
In the long run, there would very little difference.
Long answer:
Sure, the Blizzard name almost certainly helped the initial takeoff. However, the fact remains that the WoW developers really have distilled the essence of what many people want in an MMORPG. It provides easy access for casual gamers (including a biggie, decent graphics without a $300 video card), good content, and enough high-level content that hardcore gamers stay happy.
In short, WoW probably would have had many subscribers buy the game and leave after a few months had it been a poor game with the Blizzard name; conversely, if it had been released by someone other than Blizzard, it probably would have taken some time to "build up steam." However, if name recognition was truly a major factor in MMORPG success, Everquest 2 would have creamed WoW; after all, when WoW was released, the only MMORPG many casual gamers were familiar with was Everquest (at least in the US). Instead, WoW was able to spread to the casual-gamer market and has not only eclipsed Everquest but is reaching subscriber numbers that approach Lineage, the 900-pound gorilla of MMORPGs.
Although the Blizzard and Warcraft associations certainly helped sell WoW, it never would have reached its current numbers without being recognized by both casual and serious gamers as an excellent game worthy of a large time investment. While the Blizzard name undoubtedly helped, there is simply no way it could have pushed a basically mediocre game to WoW's current subscriber numbers. Similarly, the reason for WoW's success lies mainly in its broad appeal, a factor that isn't affected by the name of the developer. After all, only a small subset of the gamer population even cares who developed their game - they only want to have fun. These are the people who have propelled WoW to 2 million, not the Blizzard fanboys.
First, there was a good deal of copyright infringement going on in the computer world then. An example would be the source code to UNIX; it was technically available only to a few institutions, but it was not at all hard to find a copy. Ultimately, until fairly recently, the valuable part of a computer was the hardware; while the software represented a good deal of work and person-hours, it wasn't treated as a separate entity. A good deal of this was probably due to the customized nature of most software in that era; if you needed a piece of software to accomplish some task, you would probably write it yourself or find someone to write it for you. Sharing it would not represent a large revenue loss to the person who wrote it - since it was designed for someone's specific needs, it would not likely fit well with others' peculiarities.
Furthermore, software is certainly not the only thing that is covered under copyright. In fact, almost anything anyone creates is copyrighted - every post on Slashdot, every email you send to your friends, every picture you take, almost everything you personally produce that could possibly be copied is copyrighted by default under the Berne Convention. Although said convention was only ratified in the US in 1989, it represented a global shift throughout the 20th century in attitudes toward copyright. This is important because it's not just software that is copyrighted - in the 1970s, nobody would have thought anything of photocopying large portions of a copyrighted book, even for small distribution (like, say, a professor to students). While the advent of widespread digital distribution - which, of course, allows nth generation copies to be exactly the same as the original - has changed the landscape to some extent, there really has been a large shift in general attitudes towards copyright. Ultimately, it comes down to the fact that companies have realized that there's revenue in them thar hills, and they won't give it up without a protracted battle.
A good thing to remember about backups (and one that no one in this thread has yet brought up) is that most of your data isn't that important. Sure, you've got a 200 gigabyte hard drive that's full to bursting, but how much of that is MP3s and how much is your really important, totally irreplacable data? You know, your finances, your emails, even your vacation pictures?
A quick check of my own hard drive gives me about a gig for my/home directory on the Linux side and about 3.5 gigs for the My Documents and Application Data directories on the Windows side; meanwhile, my Media directory has about 110 gigs in it - all ripped from other media, and thus replacable. Even the 4.5 gig figure could probably be pared down considerably, if I wanted to put the effort into it - especially in Windows, applications tend to leave temporary files everywhere. Although I wouldn't be surprised to hear that many people here have far more data than I, I would also be very surprised to hear many non-business users say that the majority of the information on their hard drives is totally irreplacable - that is, there are more than a few non-professionals who have more space devoted to their own work than they do programs, ripped media, and the like.
Why is this important? It makes it a lot easier to back up your data if you can isolate the important bits. Instead of a fairly expensive solution involving removable hard drives, it's probably possible to fit everything on a much cheaper archival-grade DVD or two - or store everything on a remote backup server for a lot less money. In fact, with only a few gigs of mostly static data to consider, an FTP or SSH-based reciprocal backup arrangement with a friend could work well.
The point here is that, while backing up every single bit on your hard disk is an excellent idea, and will certainly get you back up and running quickly, it can be much more feasable to simply back up the small subset of truly irreplacable data. While it's not as good as a full system backup, it's certainly better than the full system backup you never implemented or used because it was such a hassle. While this kind of system might be unacceptably lax in the buisiness world, it is certainly better than what many home users, including many Slashdotters, are using right now.
Slashdot Mirror
It's hard to make a game that truly uses the medium to create powerful emotional scenes. Take one example, the death of Aeris in Final Fantasy VII. Most people acknowledge that it was a powerful scene, and with good reason. In some sense, you'd grown to know her character throughout the game, and so seeing her die was an emotional moment. Still, how does that use the nature of the medium? If I'm watching a good movie, I'll have the same reaction. If anything, the Mines of Moria scene in Fellowship of the Ring was more powerful. Might it be possible to use the interactivity of a game to create a branching path, with powerful and resonant consequences, no matter which way you choose?
I'm not saying this because Final Fantasy VII was so heavily FMV-based, either. In fact, it would be possible to create a game which was 95% FMV, but still used the interactivity present in a game to create emotional impact. The difference lies in the fact that FFVII had very little in the way of hard moral decisions. What if it were possible to save Aeris, but it ultimately meant the destruction of hundreds of other, innocent lives? Imagine this:
You're given two options. One, you can use some kind of evil materia you've picked up earlier in the game. It summons the life out of hundreds of others, and uses it to channel some sort of force which turns Sephiroth's blade aside, and drives him away. Cut to a scene of a small child desparately crying for his mother and father, who have died simply so your friend can live. Pull back and see the devastation - hundreds have died so that you could save Aeris, you selfish bastard. She stays with you, but never sees you in the same way. Or, choose option two: Cloud enters and watches Sephiroth kill Aeris, knowing that he (and you) could have done something, but that the end couldn't ever justify the means. Neither one is satisfying, but the choice defines who Cloud is, and what he's willing to do for his cause and his friends.
It's difficult to create a game which can allow you to make weighty moral decisions, but the result of a game which does this well is nothing short of incredible. Consider Planescape: Torment, or, to a lesser extent, the Knights of the Old Republic and Fallout games. They're all truly role-playing games; you can create your own character, with your own moral code. If you're out to save the world, might that justify shaking down peasants when you need the cash to buy that +57 Super Armor? After all, if you die, then they're doomed; better that they be short some cash rather than souls trapped in the Ultimate Doom Machine. On the other hand, aren't you fighting for these people? Heck, maybe you're just power-mad and psychotic, looking to take control of the Ultimate Doom Machine for yourself.
To me, a really emotional game would allow me to step into someone's shoes and make these decisions. In the real world, if I were to be some kind of super-powered hero, I'd have to make hard choices. A game which wants to make a strong emotional impact should force you to make hard choices as well; if the game makes your choices for you, then it can only ever operate on the emotional level of a movie. That's not a bad thing, but as a game, it's possible to use the nature of the medium to go further.
Yeah, try this: $500. Hell, if you set up an automatic monthly debit, you can start one for $100. Fifteen grand my ass.
Credit unions rock. You know how much I've paid in checking fees in my lifetime? Absolutely nothing. Free overdraft protection, too. No minimum balance required, save $5 in a savings account. I seriously reccommend checking out what's available in your area.
At this point, I probably sound like some kind of shameless astroturfer, but you really should check out credit unions. The whole non-profit, member-owned concept means that you get stunningly better deals on pretty much any kind of financial transaction.
If you like Monopoly, you really should give Settlers an honest try. It's a lot of fun to get together a group of ruthless players; extorting resources out of the poor person who set up his only brick-producing settlement next to a 12 and forgot to get a decent port is wonderful. Monopoly offers quite a few ways to screw over your "friends," but Catan is quicker, and with creative gameplay, there are some creative and wonderful ways to bring down the loftiest of players.
No, credit history is built with every cent you borrow. It's true that, starting from scratch, it's very difficult to qualify for larger loans. Without a strong credit history, you probably won't be able to get a home loan, or a car loan with any kind of decent interest rate. In fact, pretty much the only large loan available to someone without a good credit history or collateral is a student loan.
Using a credit card, and paying the balance in full each month, is probably the easiest and best way to get a good credit score. However, it's certainly not the only way.
So, this person committed premeditated murder? I'm all for self-defense, but blowing somebody away simply because they're stealing your property is a bit extreme. I'm pretty sure only Texas follows the "castle doctrine" ("a man's home is his castle"), and even there I doubt the cops would look fondly on a plan to kill someone, rather than responding with more reasonable force. Detaining the burglar until the police arrive is one thing; killing someone is taking things far out of hand.
Sure, theft is an asshole thing to do, but you can't kill someone just because they're an asshole. It's people like this who give honest gun owners a bad name. Deadly force should only be used when there is an obvious danger to someone's life, that can't be averted any other way. The burglar might have been an asshole, but the shooter is a murderer.
You can run phone signals (or anything else on RJ-11; I've got a doorbell wired up to use it :) ) down cat 5 easily. It really simplifies wiring to just have one big patch panel, and generic outlets that can be used for network or phone. You have to be careful about plugging them in right, though - you don't want your network card ringing!
Wrong. What, you think that everybody has the money for a nav system? Mapquest is one of the Web's most popular sites, and still, in my opinion, still has a better interface than Google's. (although they should damn well get rid of that top text-entry box, above the address entry)
Sure. Microsoft's Terraserver never existed years before Google even got its own domain.
That's nice. If I want to use Google Spreadsheet, then I'll need it to have a LOT more features. It's nice for simple things, and access-anywhere and multiuser edit are very useful features, but it's not going to be going toe-to-toe with Excel for a long time.
The standards you posted seem to all deal with data security. While that's a very important part of banking, it's not everything you should look for in a bank.
The problem with Paypal is that they skirt the law - they act like a bank when it suits them, but make sure that they aren't subject to normal banking regulations. For example, they can freeze your account indefinitely or withdraw your money at their whim. A real bank would have to abide by many laws and regulations when doing that, and would have to have a damn good reason - or they'd be criminally liable. Even then, if they were to do something drastic such as close your account, they would almost certainly have to cut you a check for the remaining balance. Paypal? Not in a million years! That money's THEIRS; it's by their goodwill alone that you can do anything with it.
Paypal has quite the reputation for terrible customer service, borderline fraudulent practices, and questionable handling of money. While real banks might not be the most wonderful institutions around, at least you get legal protection. The most you can hope for with PayPal is a civil suit, and you can be sure that they have teams of attack lawyers to make sure that getting your $500 back will cost you $10,000 - if you get it at all.
Really, Quicktime is an interesting example of this. Apple gets the consumer part out into the wild for free (the decoder half of the codec), and offers the producer part for a cost (the encoder part), and provides incentives for consumers to upgrade with additional features in the player (although I must say that the restrictions on the free version are... annoyingly chafing, to say the very least). The end result is much more revenue for Apple, since the producers know that their consumers can easily watch their movies (via a download, if they don't already have the software), and the consumers aren't turned off by having to pay to get the player.
While none of these are necessarialy bad things, these features would tend to alienate a much larger market segment, casual gamers. Furthermore, there will always be complaints about certain issues from the hardcore segment. For example, I knew many people who were upset that the weapons, especially the rocket launcher, in Quake II were balanced far better than the original Quake; keep in mind that the rocket launcher in Quake I was by far the most powerful weapon in the game and that deathmatches frequently were rocket launcher races. Of course, these players were unhappy because they were forced to deal with something novel; they wanted the same deathmatch gameplay they had always had. Most of them warmed up to Quake II's multiplayer over the course of a month or so, acknowledging that better weapon balance actually made the game more fun, but if Id had asked them their opinions after a few hours with the game they would have loudly complained about the "worthless" rocket launcher.
The lesson here is not that community involvement is always a bad thing. However, when dealing with the hardcore gaming crowd, there will be a lot of people who want exactly the same thing they had before, with prettier graphics. This would lead to an industry devoid of innovation, alienating its games farther from the casual market with each iteration.
Now, this doesn't mean that games shouldn't be easily moddable. In fact, that's an important way to keep people happy - not satisfied with a certain weapon? With a good mod system, you can change it to the way you and your friends like it. Moreover, there are also some incredible user-created mods, too - Counterstrike got its start as a Half-Life mod. A good mod system makes sense, both in appealing to a community and as a business decision; a good mod can certainly prolong the life of a game. It's important to allow a creative outlet for people to modify your game, but it's not a good idea to base the entire thing on the input of a small crowd of hardcore gamers - the people a "community involvement" system would almost certainly attract.
I sometimes wonder at this; for many people, including yourself, this is an obviously emotional moment. I think a large part of it was that I had no real control. After all, in a game, you're used to having some degree of control over the characters. I think it almost certainly would have been more affecting if it were possible for Cloud to attack Sephiroth alone, in a hopeless battle controlled by the player - at the end of the battle, Sephiroth knocks Cloud aside like a rag doll, then proceeds to impale Aeris. After all, a central element in setting up a good tragedy is the feeling that while the fate of the character is preordained, there is still some small hope, eventually crushed.
I don't think I am emotionally "crippled" in any way, although a few people have tried to tell me that when I tell them that scene didn't really affect me much. For example, I tear up when I read the poetry of Neruda or Keats, listen to the fourth movement of Mahler's 5th, or watch the end of Bergman's Seventh Seal; these things affect me in a far more profound way than Aeris's death in FF7. Even the ending of Planescape: Torment makes me incredibly emotional; the way those characters depended on my character, despite being nothing but a set of pixels, was truly moving.
Aeris's death was a poignant scene, to be sure, but it didn't touch any of the depths of the human condition; it's good, but it's overrated in its emotional intensity.
Why, then? Consider what happens if someone manages to crack or clone your chip. An identity thief can simply wave his or her hand/limb/whatever across the scanner; with some basic prestidigiation, said thief wouldn't even need to have the chip implanted in his or her body. Meanwhile, I'm running like hell to the doctor's office to get my identity chip removed and cancelled - meanwhile, the identity thief is, well, stealing my identity.
This is a big problem with biometrics, too. After all, you can change a password entered into a computer or terminal as many times as you like. Unfortunately, nature has placed limits on how many times you can change your biometric password. Assuming that you're a human who hasn't suffered any permanant injuries involving the lack of body parts, you've got ten fingerprints, two retinas, one facial geometry, and that's pretty much it. If someone can get a hold of your info and fool the appropriate sensor, you've got one hell of an uphill battle getting a new body.
Sure, identification like biometrics and RFID is handy. Unfortunately, if you don't come back to entering passwords and checking ID, thus removing the quick-and-easy aspect, the security risks increase a great deal compared to current methods. Sure, as long as the authentication methods are secure, they'll work. Then again, wasn't the German Engima machine "perfectly secure" against all attack?
Here's what looks like the abstract of their precious journal article (it's a PDF):http://public.lanl.gov/alp/plasma/downloadsCo smo/peratt2004ICPS.pdf
As far as I can tell, there's no reference to any sort of interstellar events - just a very strong aurora, which would exhibit certain symmetries according to current research in plasma physics; ancient societies might then be inspired to inscribe this auroral event in petroglyphs. The paper then puts forth support for this idea by showing that the positions of these symmetric ancient drawings are well oriented with a theorized auroral event.
I'm no plasma physicist, but I would be very suprised if even the extreme forces of a supernova, located many thousands of light-years away, would be able to do a fraction of what the solar wind of a star eight light-minutes away could achieve. If the conclusions of this paper are correct, and there was some sort of massive auroral event in antiquity, I would expect a better explanation to lie in variations the Earth's own magnetic field or in high solar activity; after all, that's what well-confirmed theory tells us produces the aurora.
Some ludicrously misapplied scientific terms come to the front when Googled, too. Take "Birkeland current," one of the ideas put forth as some sort of power transmission line throughout the galaxy; a brief bit of research indicates that the phenomenon is referred to solely in a terrestrial context (at least, on non-out there sites)
Another one? The paper referenced towards the end, entitled "Characteristics for the occurrence of a high-current, Z-pinch aurora as recorded in antiquity," and published in IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science, relates solely to a large terrestrial aurora discharge.
Still, it would be great if we could get a pro in here to thoroughly debunk this. Any astronomers want to step up to the challenge?
However, I seriously doubt that someone with only a few dollars in their pocket, who probably only heard about the hurricane in an impending-doom sense hours after the evacuation order was issued (remember, the poor tend to not have access to the same information you do) could actually get to another city. After all, what are your options?
You could hitch a ride - unfortunately, the people going out of town are almost all running like hell with family and everything they can fit jammed into their cars. There's no room for some "hitchiking bum." Furthermore, even if there was a willing group of people to provide free or low-cost transport out of the city, there wouldn't be nearly enough vehicles leaving to evacuate the entire city in a day.
Well, there's still walking or biking, right? Probably not. After all, walking or biking out of the city will take you out of New Orleans, a city which was expected to be damaged but not cast into anarchy, into either the suburbs, an alien area which will likely turn its back on a poor, probably black, person, or rural Lousiana, which is basically a massive swamp (meaning minimal food and potable water), during hurricane-force winds? Sure, it might be possible to get out and to higher ground by walking or biking, but that's a massive gamble against moderately long odds. Looking back now, it might be the smart thing to do. But after all, once the die is cast, the right bet to make is also obvious.
Finally, your parting comment is rather offensive. Sure, there are dumb poor people. But there are plenty of dumb rich people, too (see morons like Paris Hilton). The problem is that smart poor people can often see the right thing to do, but can't do the right thing. For example, it's almost a complete financial given that you should save about 10% of your paycheck at the very least, giving you a "rainy-day fund" or the capital necessary for improvements to yourself (an education, nice clothes for a job interview, etc.). However, a truly poor person often can't afford to put 10% into a savings account - they have to spend every penny they earn on necessities of life like food, rent and clothing. Even if there are benefits available from the government, there are almost no efforts to educate the impovershed about them - and these people can't for the most part afford to spend hours a day checking out what the government has to offer. There are certainly bums who try to take advantage of the system, but there are also hard-working people who are living paycheck to paycheck and have no real path out of poverty.
To me, this is one of the saddest realities of America today - in a true capitalist society, the cream would rise to the top, no matter where it started. In a socalist society, the poor would have basic needs provided, and might have some opportunity to excel. However, America's poor are trapped in the hideous hybrid system that manages to combine the bureaucratic excesses of socalism with a pseudocapitalist system which allows even intelligent, driven people from poor backgrounds few ways to excel.
If you haven't, here's a brief synopsis of what made it so very, very good (and thus, unfortunately, unusual):
- The game had an engrossing story, which was revealed in steps. In the beginning, you simply wake up in a mortuary, with that somewhat hackneyed device of amnesia. However, instead of hearing your character's entire background five minutes into the game, or never understanding why the character would forget himself at all, the game instead uses an admittedly overused device to slowly reveal the nature of the character and allow you to define that character.
- It allowed you to define the character. First, as a Dungeons and Dragons based game, it had a built-in alignment system. However, unlike most D&D games, it allowed you to choose your alignment naturally. You started out completely neutral, and your alignment shifted according to your actions. Furthermore, the game, which in large part centered around the question, "What can change the nature of a man?" actually allowed you to play the character such that almost any answer to that question was viable.
- Finally, it allowed for great freedom. While the main plotline was mostly linear, the ways to accomplish the various tasks allowed the gamer to play almost any character. Have a character with high wisdom? Talk your way out of a fight by showing the uselessness of fighting. High charisma? Convince people that you're incredibly powerful and will mow right through them. Have high strength? Just bash your way through obstacles.
While the game was certainly not without its flaws (lots of text-based exposition, which was read in a small dialog box and some of which might have been done better if movies were worked in, a mediocre interface, and somewhat dated technology) it still stands as a shining example of what storytelling in a game should be.That said, this is still a large security hole. After all, even the most locked down public (and private) computers usually have USB ports open; flash drives have almost completely replaced floppies for most users. Either you are forced to severely restrict functionality, or you are opening yourself to attack. This puts sysadmins in a very sticky situation, unless their users are already used to draconian security measures.
Of course, many users will start to panic when confronted with something like this - "Oh my God, how did the First Bank of the Cayman Islands get my information? What am I going to do now?" rather than do the rational thing - calling the bank and confirming. In a panic, the user may immediately enter their personal information. While they may realize later that they've been phished, it may be too late; additionally, many users may simply be glad that "their bank's fraud protection," worked.
The upshot of all this, of course, is that anything that causes the user to stop and think "that's funny," rather than panic, will help to stop phishing and fraud.
First time it's ever been used on anything intended for children, though.
* Not really.
With this in mind, bending the rules of science slightly (to allow for faster-than-light travel, for example) can help an author illuminate his or her point more clearly. An example might be in Joe Haldeman's The Forever War, in which the main character, a soldier, travels faster than light to fight an interstellar war, only to find that he can never go home: time-dialation effects have made him a living anachronism. His only option is to fight. Haldeman, in this novel, was using exaggeration to shed light on a problem faced by himself and other Vietnam veterans; they left to fight, and came back to find themselves in a culture completely different from the one they had left. Without the faster-than-light travel in the book (which makes an interstellar war possible), it would have been far more difficult for Haldeman to create a novel which expressed his disorientation as he came back to a nation which he had fought for, and which was in some sense no longer his.
Now, I'm not saying that authors should break the rules of science in a cavalier fashion; this leads ultimately to a bad Star Trek episode, in which characters back themselves into a corner, but can get out by recalibrating the deflector phase array to 114.2 pulses per second - an unsatisfying way to end a conflict. However, carefully breaking the rules can make possible works which would not be allowed under the "Mundane Manifesto." The authors should consider carefully what they might throw away before they pledge to avoid writing about anything including aliens, interstellar conflict, colonization of other star systems, or any of the other fascinating, if unlikely, possibilities for the future.
While Theo is undoubtedly an incredibly talented developer, his temper is simply legendary, his ego is gargantuan, and he isn't at all afraid to call things as he sees them: the end result is that if he feels Linux is insecure and poorly developed, he's excatly the sort of person who would make statements in an interview like, "Linux is for losers."
While it's certainly possible that he was taken out of context, and he certainly isn't as flame-happy as he was during his NetBSD days, it's not exactly out of character for him to speak his mind, even if it's offensive to others.
Most of the spyware I've seen recently (and I see a fair amount among just friends and family) is either CoolWebSearch (a dark spawn of Hell of which I will not speak again) or a thinly veiled extortion tactic which charges money to buy the uninstaller - or rather, the "SPYWARE REMOVER!!!! GUARANTEED 100% ACCURATE!!!!! GET RID OF SPYWARE NOW!!!!!" Were I to meet the "humans" who install this crap via drive-by downloads and IE exploits, causing both my friends and I to lose hours upon hours of valuable time, I would do things to them which would make the Lovecraftian elder gods not only blanch but run away screaming.
In the long run, there would very little difference.
Long answer:
Sure, the Blizzard name almost certainly helped the initial takeoff. However, the fact remains that the WoW developers really have distilled the essence of what many people want in an MMORPG. It provides easy access for casual gamers (including a biggie, decent graphics without a $300 video card), good content, and enough high-level content that hardcore gamers stay happy.
In short, WoW probably would have had many subscribers buy the game and leave after a few months had it been a poor game with the Blizzard name; conversely, if it had been released by someone other than Blizzard, it probably would have taken some time to "build up steam." However, if name recognition was truly a major factor in MMORPG success, Everquest 2 would have creamed WoW; after all, when WoW was released, the only MMORPG many casual gamers were familiar with was Everquest (at least in the US). Instead, WoW was able to spread to the casual-gamer market and has not only eclipsed Everquest but is reaching subscriber numbers that approach Lineage, the 900-pound gorilla of MMORPGs.
Although the Blizzard and Warcraft associations certainly helped sell WoW, it never would have reached its current numbers without being recognized by both casual and serious gamers as an excellent game worthy of a large time investment. While the Blizzard name undoubtedly helped, there is simply no way it could have pushed a basically mediocre game to WoW's current subscriber numbers. Similarly, the reason for WoW's success lies mainly in its broad appeal, a factor that isn't affected by the name of the developer. After all, only a small subset of the gamer population even cares who developed their game - they only want to have fun. These are the people who have propelled WoW to 2 million, not the Blizzard fanboys.
A quick check of my own hard drive gives me about a gig for my /home directory on the Linux side and about 3.5 gigs for the My Documents and Application Data directories on the Windows side; meanwhile, my Media directory has about 110 gigs in it - all ripped from other media, and thus replacable. Even the 4.5 gig figure could probably be pared down considerably, if I wanted to put the effort into it - especially in Windows, applications tend to leave temporary files everywhere. Although I wouldn't be surprised to hear that many people here have far more data than I, I would also be very surprised to hear many non-business users say that the majority of the information on their hard drives is totally irreplacable - that is, there are more than a few non-professionals who have more space devoted to their own work than they do programs, ripped media, and the like.
Why is this important? It makes it a lot easier to back up your data if you can isolate the important bits. Instead of a fairly expensive solution involving removable hard drives, it's probably possible to fit everything on a much cheaper archival-grade DVD or two - or store everything on a remote backup server for a lot less money. In fact, with only a few gigs of mostly static data to consider, an FTP or SSH-based reciprocal backup arrangement with a friend could work well.
The point here is that, while backing up every single bit on your hard disk is an excellent idea, and will certainly get you back up and running quickly, it can be much more feasable to simply back up the small subset of truly irreplacable data. While it's not as good as a full system backup, it's certainly better than the full system backup you never implemented or used because it was such a hassle. While this kind of system might be unacceptably lax in the buisiness world, it is certainly better than what many home users, including many Slashdotters, are using right now.