Well, if having three or four good "nerdcore" songs makes Weird Al a "nerdcore artist", then he's also a gangsta rapper and a pop musician and swing singer (or whatever you'd call that) and folk singer and apolka singer and a hip-hop artist and a Grunge artist and... you get the point.
I question the utility of labeling him that way. "Parodist" covers it best.
The popular assumption that game theory can't handle an irrational opponent betrays a serious mis-understanding of game theory.
I can't count the number of times that I've seen someone claim that the standard minimax decision tree algorithm can be "beaten" by an irrational player. No, it can't. The minimax algorithm conservatively chooses the best play, assuming the opponent also chooses their best play, but if the opponent plays irrationally and choose something less than their best move, the minimax algorithm will happily take advantage of their errors. Minimax's problem is computational intractability, not a problem with handling irrationality.
In the real world, minimax doesn't come into play, but you are still free to choose to model an irrational opponent. But it's not as if you're going to guaranteed to make better moves, because you might be facing an opponent that is deliberately acting irrational to set you off your guard, only to take advantage of you later. If your "new, improved" game theory doesn't handle that case, you might just find your "new, improved" game theory making grave errors that the Von Neumann approach wouldn't.
The advantage of the Von Neumann approach, as exemplified by minimax, is to maximize your gains while minimizing your exposure surface. Done correctly, an irrational player does not beat the system; in fact they lose badly. You might be able to take advantage of irrationality in advance by making a less-than-optimal move by minimax standards, but if you're wrong you're in trouble.
Upshot is, if you think game theory is so weak against irrational players, try picking up even a simple chess program and "confusing" it by moving around the board randomly. I guarantee you repeated losses.
(In fact when it comes down to it, I completely disagree with the idea that game theory is about trying to see what your opponent thinks you're going to do. Game theory is about making the best move; bamboozling your opponent is only one particular strategy, and it doesn't even always apply, not the core of the whole thing. )
Game theory's big problem in practice is that the easy, clean, simple theory only works with mathematically-defined games that you can see the entire decision tree for. But that easy, clean, simple theory isn't the be-all, end-all of game theory. It's just all you'll be taught in an undergraduate course. Generally speaking, "what you're taught in an undergrad course" is not the sum total of work on a subject.
A routine expedition reveals what is clearly a one-way gateway of some kind (not necessarily a "Gate") to some faraway lost city-spaceship, perhaps not even in our universe proper, that promises vast new technologies, power sources, and weapons. But what really sets this apart from all the other floating tech/power/weapon depots is the promise that maybe, just maybe, this long lost depot will also including an automated schooling system so that we can actually use the fantastical powers within.
Immediately upon the arrival of the expeditionary team, modelled after the UN team but this time once again just American, the leaders of the expedition will find themselves whisked away to meet super-dooper Ascended beings, which the Ascended beings previously only suspected the existence of (not that they bothered to tell us), and make the Ascended beings look like tiny, wimpy children. One look at our gruff military hero with his background of killing and hitting and breaking and just generally, you know, surviving in our rough-and-tumble universe will convince our Super-Dooper Ascended beings that they really ought to consider pruning our entire multiverse due to excessive violence (since they, in their Super-Dooper Ascended state, haven't faced a threat to their existence in seventy-three trillion billion years, so they have totally forgotten what that's like), thus setting off a frantic five-season story arc to convince the Super-Dooper Ascended beings to not destroy us, or, failing all else, could you consider just destroying the Ori?
If we're lucky, our heros will fail. *smirk*
I like Stargate. I'd even say I like it a lot. But it was already a bit implausible that Our Heros could beat the Gua'uld. Not impossible, perhaps, given the Gua'ulds cultural weaknesses and their basic inability to band together meaningfully, but implausible. Taking on Ascended beings is just utterly unbelievable, and also has the problem of that basically being it. There's nothing above Ascended beings, really. Even if there is, it wouldn't really matter to us; how would we really distinguish between Ascended beings and my Super-Dooper Ascended, considering that Ascended beings already seem to possess the ability to throw us into an arbitrary simulation if they so chose? There really is no power above that from the human point of view; Ascended beings do not seem to be what you might call Gods of the Universe but they are basically Gods over individual material beings, able to fully control their minds, senses, etc.
I'm not sure Stargate needs a full re-boot in the comic book or the "Enterprise" sense, but they need to sit down and rethink what they want to be about: Do they want to be another Star Trek, which is where they are headed in many ways? Do they really need to have a Single Overarching Threat, especially given that they've basically maxed out that story line? Do they really want to become Yet Another Time Travel Show, which they've so far mostly managed to avoid but are in immanent danger of being sucked into that black hole? There's still a lot of interesting stories to be told, but only if they change some of their story arc templates.
And what is it about space exploration shows that inevitably turns them into space warfare shows?
"Do you remember when we used to be explorers?" - Captain Picard, Star Trek Insurrection
But we also consider those goals to be part of Vulcan logic, as axioms. So a Vulcan might say "logic dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few". This isn't an expression of truth or falisty, but an expression of Vulcan values. Similarly Vulcans value family.
Personally, I find it amusing that you can use logic-mathematics to prove that Vulcan logic-popular-perception is fatally flawed, and that it is absolutely impossible to reason from simple first principles up to "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few." And thus, for better or worse, "Logic" just happens to be the name of the Vulcan religion. This neither validates nor invalidates it, but it does make them insufferable pricks about it; "[Vulcan] Logic dictates that..." should be read as one step away from "God says that..."... not quite identical, but close.
Personally, I think you've put way more thought into it than the collective of the writers, and while I can't guarantee that perhaps one of the writers has thought it through to the extent you have, I've never seen any evidence of this. (To be fair, I have only seen about the first third of Enterprise. If I'd found out they were actually grappling with the philosophical problems of the putative Vulcan philosophy, instead of continuing to carry on the false image of cold, sterile logic perpetuated since ancient times, I'd have been more interested; I'd love to see some evidence of a Vulcan that at least wonders about this.)
Mathematicians abandoned the idea of a single, all-encompassing sterile logic from cold, hard mathematical principles at the beginning of the 20th century. Maybe by the middle of the 21st that'll manage to propagate out to the general culture.
The first one should totally be "We told you we'd see you on another channel" or something snappier to that effect. (See the last tagline they did for why.)
The evidence I'd want to see for that are statements from publishers and developers to the effect that they don't want a single console to dominate. And while I can't link them up, I'm pretty sure Square is playing the field for this very reason and that they've said some stuff to that effect, and Ubisoft seems to want diversity enough to put some money behind it.
Good argument.
And the best part is, now no matter what happens, we've got it covered! Ain't prognostication fun?
The forces that shape the console industry are unstable, and I mean that in the physics sense. Success breeds success, failure breeds failure.
At this phase it's anybody's game. Maybe at this point in the previous cycles the winner was obvious (though I'd question that), but the structure of the competition means that three years from now there will almost certainly be an obvious winner. One of these consoles is going to rise up as the go-to console for the biggest, most popular games, and it's going to be the console that sells the most games, which will proceed to sell even more games because it has more of the exclusives.
The probably of a 33%-33%-33% outcome within some tolarance is non-zero, but unlikely. Somewhat more likely is something like a (Sony-Microsoft-Nintendo) 35-35-10 or 15-15-70 split, with the XBox360 and PS3 splitting the top market by being so easy to cross-port that effectively everything gets released on both consoles, eliminating their effective differences, and turning it into a Wii/non-Wii fight, but I'd still bet in this situation that one or the other of the XBox360/PS3 ends up dominating by offering a better bang-for-the-buck.
The big story is that Sony is not going into this generation with the unstoppable advantage they did in the previous. This doesn't mean they are going to lose, just that they didn't start with the advantage so many people have been assuming they would for the past three or four years.
(I'm not emotionally committed to any of these outcomes, so I'll pass on the flames. I find studying the structure of systems interesting.)
I just did a backup of my laptop. It took 6 single-layer DVDs, which were nearly full. At 20KB/s upstream, which is about what I get (and yes that's kilobytes not bits), that's a minimum of 17 days of continuous uploading, and that's assuming Comcast doesn't shut me down first.
Consumer bandwidth is the problem for those services, really.
I doubt it will. I like Family Guy, but Futurama's got much better fundamentals. Better characters, better actual stories (as opposed to joke hooks), and Family Guy has never actually affected me emotionally like several of the last season Futurama episodes. I think they'll be fine.
Apparently, the symbol of the human race in the real world is the rectangle, with arches sprinkled in for interest.
I pity the rest of the races of our galaxy, whose architects are crippled by the fact that they can't use rectangles and arches because unbeknownst to them, twenty thousand light years away, humans already claimed them.
Pity the poor, primitive Kr'zilt'k of Tomporon, as they attempt to build their first primitive mud huts completely out of isosceles triangles.
Pity the poor, advanced RRRRRzzzzzzRrrz of ZZZZrrZzRz, as they try to build skyscrapers that look like clumps of mud stuck together, but fail due to the simple laws of materials science, and are thus stuck with cities built out of the equivalent of five-story buildings.
Curse humanity! Curse them and their claiming of the precious "simple, unadorned rectangle"!
That reminds me of one of the exceptions, too: Tuvix. Well, he's sort of an exception, in that while Tuvix came to grips with his existence fairly well, he was forced to undergo a very literal sort of racial cleansing by the local embodiment of the Star Trek ethos, Captain Janeway. So as exceptions go I guess he's not such a good example.
Most of the conflict is about who they belong to, and comes from the characters themselves.
The racism is not in the fact that the characters feel conflict; it is from the underlying casual assumption that they must "belong" to either one or the other.
My "heritage" is Scotch, Dutch, and German. I would find the idea that I must choose between wearing kilts or wooden shoes or lederhosen racist. In fact I do none of those things and it doesn't seem to cause me any particular distress. Moreover, I find myself interested in many cultures that I have no particular blood ties to, including but not limited to English, French, and Japanese. I don't think that makes me a traitor to my race(s).
(I actually would accept the premise if the species in Star Trek were better differentiated and the aspects they were having trouble with were somewhat more fundamental; for instance, suppose you had to grapple with having to choose between preying on sentients and not? That conflict is fundamental, and it has also been done in other places. But as aliens really are just humans in face paint in Star Trek, as evidenced by the fact they can so easily cross-breed and are all basically the same, and the resulting conflicts are pretty pathetic and well into the class of race issues.)
By the way, I am aware you can find a lot of dialog that contradicts this, and the rare isolated counterexample, but the general trend is clearly in this direction. For every isolated counterexample of somebody happily living with people who aren't their species or forging their own cross-cultural identity, you have entire major characters where "conflicts" between their species was their major story line for years at a time: Worf and Spock bigtime, Troi (didn't come up as often but it certainly was an issue), and Odo, complete with racial epitaphs for the "solids".
(Star Trek dialog and Star Trek on-screen fact contradict each other pretty often, anyhow.)
Vulcans, who were negotiating reunification with the Romulans, pulled out of the Federation.
Well, at least they're getting the racist aspects of Star Trek correct. This has been predictable ever since it was revealed that Romulans and Vulcans were the same race.
Star Trek is dedicated to the idea that every species has one culture, one religion, one government, and they all belong together on the same planet (or at least the same star system). Anybody who dares to marry outside of their race, err, species, will have children that are horribly torn between their two distinct and apparently utterly immiscible heritages. "Oh, woe is me, shall I be Vulcan or Human because it isn't possible for me to forge my own distinct identity, I must only belong to one race, err, species!"
What other reasons would the Vulcans have for re-uniting with the Romulans? The Vulcans may be the same species but in almost every other way they are night and day; their culture, their philosophies, their approaches to problems, everything except maybe general arrogance. They're geographically separated so far apart that there was enough time before they re-discovered each other that they forgot they were related. They share few to no strategic interests.
But blood will out, apparently.
I bet Vulcan or Romulus ends up destroyed at some point (probably Vulcan) and all of the Vulcan refugees go live on Romulus, cause the post-TNG Star Trek mythos can't tolerate races living in two places.
I fully expect Captain Alexander Chase's ship to be a time ship. It will start with some sort of limitations that seemingly prevents it from being used to solve all problems, but the limititations will be routine flouted by the other writers once the series gets going.
Seriously, I'd like to see a reboot of Star Trek where they declare in one form or another that there is no longer any such thing as time travel, and while I won't ask them to completely discard the idea of multiple universes or "dimensions", to commit to the idea that there are basically a limited number of them, not an infinite number of dimensions in which everything that can happen, does.
To the extent that invalidates earlier continuity.... good! That's kind my point.
I have a couple of channels on my analog cable that are inferior, and I've seen some funky signals. Once I figured out that somewhere in Comcast's system, over-the-air channel 2 was being broadcast right through the cable system, right on top of what they were trying to broadcast as channel 2. That really screwed with the sync. (I still don't know the details, but I did find out when I moved to a new apartment and hooked into the cable system, which wasn't being fed any Comcast cable, that I could actually tune in to over-the-air channel 2 and it was crystal clear without the Comcast cable channel 2 interfering with it. Something was clearly wrong.)
But by and large, especially with the higher channels, my analog channels clearly beat DirectTV.
I am certain that some people have worse feeds, though. I've had cable from many sources and this is the best signal I've ever gotten, as measured by my cable modem.
(If you're on a cable modem, try accessing 192.168.100.1, that's a common address. You can usually find a signal strength measurement somewhere in there; use Google to look up the terms and find good ranges. I have found that reporting to the cable company that your cable modem is measuring poor signal quality tends to skip you past a lot of pointless fiddling with your computer. This is especially helpful when you run Linux and don't really want to deal with either being told that Linux is the problem or trying to "fake" clicking through windows dialogs, which works right up until they ask what's on your screen...:) )
The point is that there's no reason that any analog signal should beat the digital signals. Part of the whole digital marketing is superior quality, when they are really only offering superior quantity and what you might call reliable quality, in the scientific sense of 'reliable'. That is not a bad thing, really, but it's not what they are claiming in the marketing.
Because of the fact that the harder you compress the channels, the more you can push down the wire, the cable companies have every incentive to push the compression to the limit, and then push a bit more. You have to be a videophile/audiophile to realize what is being done, but subjectively, everybody I've asked about this correctly does say that DirectTV does seem to lack a bit of the pop or crispness of the analog signal. And then there are the pathological cases where it's obvious that it sucks.
Unfortunately, despite the fact that digital should be wildly superior to analog, this drive to squeeze the life out of every channel means I am totally not looking forward to our all-digital future. I'd pretty much rather have sharp, full-bandwidth analog than digitally-washed-out HDTV.
(Early in the adoption curve you tend to see more bits thrown at HDTV. I'd bet HDTV looks a lot better right now. As more content goes to HDTV, expect to see the HDTV channels get degraded, too.)
Contrast this to DVDs and disc technology in general, where once you've committed to printing a disc of a certain kind (i.e., number of layers), you might as well fill the disc up completely. There is no incentive to skimp on the bits.
As a computer programmer by trade, I tend to "see through" the graphics to the underlying engine.
So far, while my PS3 sampling is anything but thorough, I am yet to see any engines that are any more advanced than anything on the PS2. Graphics? Nice, and I can't argue with the sharpness. (On TV equipment I don't own, but that topic's been done to death.)
I'm sure some Grand Theft Auto 4 sort of thing will eventually knock my socks off (Grand Theft Auto 3 was the first PS2 game that I saw that I really felt like the Dreamcast couldn't have handled), but we're not there yet.
Nintendo gets the nod here, because the controller means that even though there may well never be a Wii game with an engine that the PS2 couldn't technically have handled competently, the PS2 (and the rest of the current generation) wouldn't be able to let you interact with the engine. So maybe they won't be richer or more powerful but at least they'll be different.
Game engines: The underappreciated component of gaming fun.
I just finished this game three days ago on the Playstation 2.
I'd put it this way: If you have ever complained about the lack of originality in gaming, you are morally obligated to pick this up. New copies through Steam, other copies through the usual channels.
And play it slow. Poke around in corners, soak up the details usually missing in games. This was very well done.
Particularly pick this up if: You like stories that partially take place inside of characters heads, innovative platforming (you have got to see the level where you go inside the head of a paranoid schizophrenic, I have never seen a level like that, and man, did it ever fit...!), the humor of any of Tim Schafer's works (awesome games, each and every one).
We don't get original games because when they actually come out, we punish the authors and publishers by not buying them. Guess why we get endless sports "sequels"...?
Many of us consider the missing "img" tag a feature, not a bug. Posting a link is fine for many reasons, including not uglying up the discussion with animated gifs, and the fact that inlining an image in a freakin' Slashdot discussion would be pretty hostile to the host. Better to let only interested parties see it.
Also, the fact that you take advantage of the only alternate typeface leads me to wonder if you also want to <font size="+2" face="Comic Sans" color="red"><blink> too. Many of us also consider not having that much control over your HTML a feature, too, sort of like Douglas Adam's point about presidential offices; anyone who actually wants to do that to their font is also the last person should on no account actually be allowed to do so.
Who the heck said you should connect the unpatched machine to the 'net to grab this stuff?
Actually, that is a good question. Who did say that?
Could it be... you?
(Clearly the point is that you use a patched machine to make the CD, then feed the CD to an unpatched machine, resulting in 0 unpatched machines on the raw internet.)
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if having three or four good "nerdcore" songs makes Weird Al a "nerdcore artist", then he's also a gangsta rapper and a pop musician and swing singer (or whatever you'd call that) and folk singer and apolka singer and a hip-hop artist and a Grunge artist and... you get the point.
I question the utility of labeling him that way. "Parodist" covers it best.
The popular assumption that game theory can't handle an irrational opponent betrays a serious mis-understanding of game theory.
I can't count the number of times that I've seen someone claim that the standard minimax decision tree algorithm can be "beaten" by an irrational player. No, it can't. The minimax algorithm conservatively chooses the best play, assuming the opponent also chooses their best play, but if the opponent plays irrationally and choose something less than their best move, the minimax algorithm will happily take advantage of their errors. Minimax's problem is computational intractability, not a problem with handling irrationality.
In the real world, minimax doesn't come into play, but you are still free to choose to model an irrational opponent. But it's not as if you're going to guaranteed to make better moves, because you might be facing an opponent that is deliberately acting irrational to set you off your guard, only to take advantage of you later. If your "new, improved" game theory doesn't handle that case, you might just find your "new, improved" game theory making grave errors that the Von Neumann approach wouldn't.
The advantage of the Von Neumann approach, as exemplified by minimax, is to maximize your gains while minimizing your exposure surface. Done correctly, an irrational player does not beat the system; in fact they lose badly. You might be able to take advantage of irrationality in advance by making a less-than-optimal move by minimax standards, but if you're wrong you're in trouble.
Upshot is, if you think game theory is so weak against irrational players, try picking up even a simple chess program and "confusing" it by moving around the board randomly. I guarantee you repeated losses.
(In fact when it comes down to it, I completely disagree with the idea that game theory is about trying to see what your opponent thinks you're going to do. Game theory is about making the best move; bamboozling your opponent is only one particular strategy, and it doesn't even always apply, not the core of the whole thing. )
Game theory's big problem in practice is that the easy, clean, simple theory only works with mathematically-defined games that you can see the entire decision tree for. But that easy, clean, simple theory isn't the be-all, end-all of game theory. It's just all you'll be taught in an undergraduate course. Generally speaking, "what you're taught in an undergrad course" is not the sum total of work on a subject.
Immediately upon the arrival of the expeditionary team, modelled after the UN team but this time once again just American, the leaders of the expedition will find themselves whisked away to meet super-dooper Ascended beings, which the Ascended beings previously only suspected the existence of (not that they bothered to tell us), and make the Ascended beings look like tiny, wimpy children. One look at our gruff military hero with his background of killing and hitting and breaking and just generally, you know, surviving in our rough-and-tumble universe will convince our Super-Dooper Ascended beings that they really ought to consider pruning our entire multiverse due to excessive violence (since they, in their Super-Dooper Ascended state, haven't faced a threat to their existence in seventy-three trillion billion years, so they have totally forgotten what that's like), thus setting off a frantic five-season story arc to convince the Super-Dooper Ascended beings to not destroy us, or, failing all else, could you consider just destroying the Ori?
If we're lucky, our heros will fail. *smirk*
I like Stargate. I'd even say I like it a lot. But it was already a bit implausible that Our Heros could beat the Gua'uld. Not impossible, perhaps, given the Gua'ulds cultural weaknesses and their basic inability to band together meaningfully, but implausible. Taking on Ascended beings is just utterly unbelievable, and also has the problem of that basically being it. There's nothing above Ascended beings, really. Even if there is, it wouldn't really matter to us; how would we really distinguish between Ascended beings and my Super-Dooper Ascended, considering that Ascended beings already seem to possess the ability to throw us into an arbitrary simulation if they so chose? There really is no power above that from the human point of view; Ascended beings do not seem to be what you might call Gods of the Universe but they are basically Gods over individual material beings, able to fully control their minds, senses, etc.
I'm not sure Stargate needs a full re-boot in the comic book or the "Enterprise" sense, but they need to sit down and rethink what they want to be about: Do they want to be another Star Trek, which is where they are headed in many ways? Do they really need to have a Single Overarching Threat, especially given that they've basically maxed out that story line? Do they really want to become Yet Another Time Travel Show, which they've so far mostly managed to avoid but are in immanent danger of being sucked into that black hole? There's still a lot of interesting stories to be told, but only if they change some of their story arc templates.
And what is it about space exploration shows that inevitably turns them into space warfare shows?
Personally, I think you've put way more thought into it than the collective of the writers, and while I can't guarantee that perhaps one of the writers has thought it through to the extent you have, I've never seen any evidence of this. (To be fair, I have only seen about the first third of Enterprise. If I'd found out they were actually grappling with the philosophical problems of the putative Vulcan philosophy, instead of continuing to carry on the false image of cold, sterile logic perpetuated since ancient times, I'd have been more interested; I'd love to see some evidence of a Vulcan that at least wonders about this.)
Mathematicians abandoned the idea of a single, all-encompassing sterile logic from cold, hard mathematical principles at the beginning of the 20th century. Maybe by the middle of the 21st that'll manage to propagate out to the general culture.
The first one should totally be "We told you we'd see you on another channel" or something snappier to that effect. (See the last tagline they did for why.)
Are you kidding? Gaming will matter more than ever! And the stakes will be... your life!
"Two men enter, one man leaves!"
Personally, I'm betting on Master Blaster, Inc. at 100% market share at that point.
Interesting logic.
The evidence I'd want to see for that are statements from publishers and developers to the effect that they don't want a single console to dominate. And while I can't link them up, I'm pretty sure Square is playing the field for this very reason and that they've said some stuff to that effect, and Ubisoft seems to want diversity enough to put some money behind it.
Good argument.
And the best part is, now no matter what happens, we've got it covered! Ain't prognostication fun?
I disagree.
The forces that shape the console industry are unstable, and I mean that in the physics sense. Success breeds success, failure breeds failure.
At this phase it's anybody's game. Maybe at this point in the previous cycles the winner was obvious (though I'd question that), but the structure of the competition means that three years from now there will almost certainly be an obvious winner. One of these consoles is going to rise up as the go-to console for the biggest, most popular games, and it's going to be the console that sells the most games, which will proceed to sell even more games because it has more of the exclusives.
The probably of a 33%-33%-33% outcome within some tolarance is non-zero, but unlikely. Somewhat more likely is something like a (Sony-Microsoft-Nintendo) 35-35-10 or 15-15-70 split, with the XBox360 and PS3 splitting the top market by being so easy to cross-port that effectively everything gets released on both consoles, eliminating their effective differences, and turning it into a Wii/non-Wii fight, but I'd still bet in this situation that one or the other of the XBox360/PS3 ends up dominating by offering a better bang-for-the-buck.
The big story is that Sony is not going into this generation with the unstoppable advantage they did in the previous. This doesn't mean they are going to lose, just that they didn't start with the advantage so many people have been assuming they would for the past three or four years.
(I'm not emotionally committed to any of these outcomes, so I'll pass on the flames. I find studying the structure of systems interesting.)
Moan. Nice.
Now I gotta yank out my Futurama DVDs...
I just did a backup of my laptop. It took 6 single-layer DVDs, which were nearly full. At 20KB/s upstream, which is about what I get (and yes that's kilobytes not bits), that's a minimum of 17 days of continuous uploading, and that's assuming Comcast doesn't shut me down first.
Consumer bandwidth is the problem for those services, really.
I doubt it will. I like Family Guy, but Futurama's got much better fundamentals. Better characters, better actual stories (as opposed to joke hooks), and Family Guy has never actually affected me emotionally like several of the last season Futurama episodes. I think they'll be fine.
Apparently, the symbol of the human race in the real world is the rectangle, with arches sprinkled in for interest.
I pity the rest of the races of our galaxy, whose architects are crippled by the fact that they can't use rectangles and arches because unbeknownst to them, twenty thousand light years away, humans already claimed them.
Pity the poor, primitive Kr'zilt'k of Tomporon, as they attempt to build their first primitive mud huts completely out of isosceles triangles.
Pity the poor, advanced RRRRRzzzzzzRrrz of ZZZZrrZzRz, as they try to build skyscrapers that look like clumps of mud stuck together, but fail due to the simple laws of materials science, and are thus stuck with cities built out of the equivalent of five-story buildings.
Curse humanity! Curse them and their claiming of the precious "simple, unadorned rectangle"!
Oh, point.
That reminds me of one of the exceptions, too: Tuvix. Well, he's sort of an exception, in that while Tuvix came to grips with his existence fairly well, he was forced to undergo a very literal sort of racial cleansing by the local embodiment of the Star Trek ethos, Captain Janeway. So as exceptions go I guess he's not such a good example.
I wonder what sort of strange attractor is at play here? I wonder what the Ultimate Sci-Fi Series looks like?
(Sci-fi as opposed to Science Fiction here.)
My "heritage" is Scotch, Dutch, and German. I would find the idea that I must choose between wearing kilts or wooden shoes or lederhosen racist. In fact I do none of those things and it doesn't seem to cause me any particular distress. Moreover, I find myself interested in many cultures that I have no particular blood ties to, including but not limited to English, French, and Japanese. I don't think that makes me a traitor to my race(s).
(I actually would accept the premise if the species in Star Trek were better differentiated and the aspects they were having trouble with were somewhat more fundamental; for instance, suppose you had to grapple with having to choose between preying on sentients and not? That conflict is fundamental, and it has also been done in other places. But as aliens really are just humans in face paint in Star Trek, as evidenced by the fact they can so easily cross-breed and are all basically the same, and the resulting conflicts are pretty pathetic and well into the class of race issues.)
By the way, I am aware you can find a lot of dialog that contradicts this, and the rare isolated counterexample, but the general trend is clearly in this direction. For every isolated counterexample of somebody happily living with people who aren't their species or forging their own cross-cultural identity, you have entire major characters where "conflicts" between their species was their major story line for years at a time: Worf and Spock bigtime, Troi (didn't come up as often but it certainly was an issue), and Odo, complete with racial epitaphs for the "solids".
(Star Trek dialog and Star Trek on-screen fact contradict each other pretty often, anyhow.)
Star Trek is dedicated to the idea that every species has one culture, one religion, one government, and they all belong together on the same planet (or at least the same star system). Anybody who dares to marry outside of their race, err, species, will have children that are horribly torn between their two distinct and apparently utterly immiscible heritages. "Oh, woe is me, shall I be Vulcan or Human because it isn't possible for me to forge my own distinct identity, I must only belong to one race, err, species!"
What other reasons would the Vulcans have for re-uniting with the Romulans? The Vulcans may be the same species but in almost every other way they are night and day; their culture, their philosophies, their approaches to problems, everything except maybe general arrogance. They're geographically separated so far apart that there was enough time before they re-discovered each other that they forgot they were related. They share few to no strategic interests.
But blood will out, apparently.
I bet Vulcan or Romulus ends up destroyed at some point (probably Vulcan) and all of the Vulcan refugees go live on Romulus, cause the post-TNG Star Trek mythos can't tolerate races living in two places.
I fully expect Captain Alexander Chase's ship to be a time ship. It will start with some sort of limitations that seemingly prevents it from being used to solve all problems, but the limititations will be routine flouted by the other writers once the series gets going.
Seriously, I'd like to see a reboot of Star Trek where they declare in one form or another that there is no longer any such thing as time travel, and while I won't ask them to completely discard the idea of multiple universes or "dimensions", to commit to the idea that there are basically a limited number of them, not an infinite number of dimensions in which everything that can happen, does.
To the extent that invalidates earlier continuity.... good! That's kind my point.
Analog's problem is that it varies a lot.
:) )
I have a couple of channels on my analog cable that are inferior, and I've seen some funky signals. Once I figured out that somewhere in Comcast's system, over-the-air channel 2 was being broadcast right through the cable system, right on top of what they were trying to broadcast as channel 2. That really screwed with the sync. (I still don't know the details, but I did find out when I moved to a new apartment and hooked into the cable system, which wasn't being fed any Comcast cable, that I could actually tune in to over-the-air channel 2 and it was crystal clear without the Comcast cable channel 2 interfering with it. Something was clearly wrong.)
But by and large, especially with the higher channels, my analog channels clearly beat DirectTV.
I am certain that some people have worse feeds, though. I've had cable from many sources and this is the best signal I've ever gotten, as measured by my cable modem.
(If you're on a cable modem, try accessing 192.168.100.1, that's a common address. You can usually find a signal strength measurement somewhere in there; use Google to look up the terms and find good ranges. I have found that reporting to the cable company that your cable modem is measuring poor signal quality tends to skip you past a lot of pointless fiddling with your computer. This is especially helpful when you run Linux and don't really want to deal with either being told that Linux is the problem or trying to "fake" clicking through windows dialogs, which works right up until they ask what's on your screen...
The point is that there's no reason that any analog signal should beat the digital signals. Part of the whole digital marketing is superior quality, when they are really only offering superior quantity and what you might call reliable quality, in the scientific sense of 'reliable'. That is not a bad thing, really, but it's not what they are claiming in the marketing.
Because of the fact that the harder you compress the channels, the more you can push down the wire, the cable companies have every incentive to push the compression to the limit, and then push a bit more. You have to be a videophile/audiophile to realize what is being done, but subjectively, everybody I've asked about this correctly does say that DirectTV does seem to lack a bit of the pop or crispness of the analog signal. And then there are the pathological cases where it's obvious that it sucks.
Unfortunately, despite the fact that digital should be wildly superior to analog, this drive to squeeze the life out of every channel means I am totally not looking forward to our all-digital future. I'd pretty much rather have sharp, full-bandwidth analog than digitally-washed-out HDTV.
(Early in the adoption curve you tend to see more bits thrown at HDTV. I'd bet HDTV looks a lot better right now. As more content goes to HDTV, expect to see the HDTV channels get degraded, too.)
Contrast this to DVDs and disc technology in general, where once you've committed to printing a disc of a certain kind (i.e., number of layers), you might as well fill the disc up completely. There is no incentive to skimp on the bits.
As a computer programmer by trade, I tend to "see through" the graphics to the underlying engine.
So far, while my PS3 sampling is anything but thorough, I am yet to see any engines that are any more advanced than anything on the PS2. Graphics? Nice, and I can't argue with the sharpness. (On TV equipment I don't own, but that topic's been done to death.)
I'm sure some Grand Theft Auto 4 sort of thing will eventually knock my socks off (Grand Theft Auto 3 was the first PS2 game that I saw that I really felt like the Dreamcast couldn't have handled), but we're not there yet.
Nintendo gets the nod here, because the controller means that even though there may well never be a Wii game with an engine that the PS2 couldn't technically have handled competently, the PS2 (and the rest of the current generation) wouldn't be able to let you interact with the engine. So maybe they won't be richer or more powerful but at least they'll be different.
Game engines: The underappreciated component of gaming fun.
I just finished this game three days ago on the Playstation 2.
I'd put it this way: If you have ever complained about the lack of originality in gaming, you are morally obligated to pick this up. New copies through Steam, other copies through the usual channels.
And play it slow. Poke around in corners, soak up the details usually missing in games. This was very well done.
Particularly pick this up if: You like stories that partially take place inside of characters heads, innovative platforming (you have got to see the level where you go inside the head of a paranoid schizophrenic, I have never seen a level like that, and man, did it ever fit...!), the humor of any of Tim Schafer's works (awesome games, each and every one).
We don't get original games because when they actually come out, we punish the authors and publishers by not buying them. Guess why we get endless sports "sequels"...?
Wha? That's seriously broken. Order matters in option boxes.
My apologies for the wild accusation, then.
Also, Ghostzilla is pretty amusing.
Many of us consider the missing "img" tag a feature, not a bug. Posting a link is fine for many reasons, including not uglying up the discussion with animated gifs, and the fact that inlining an image in a freakin' Slashdot discussion would be pretty hostile to the host. Better to let only interested parties see it.
Also, the fact that you take advantage of the only alternate typeface leads me to wonder if you also want to <font size="+2" face="Comic Sans" color="red"><blink> too. Many of us also consider not having that much control over your HTML a feature, too, sort of like Douglas Adam's point about presidential offices; anyone who actually wants to do that to their font is also the last person should on no account actually be allowed to do so.
Could it be... you?
(Clearly the point is that you use a patched machine to make the CD, then feed the CD to an unpatched machine, resulting in 0 unpatched machines on the raw internet.)