I definitely agree. When I play a game, I want something exciting and interesting, where I'm in control. I don't want to recreate the experience of watching a soap opera.
Really, I feel the same way about tabletop RPGs. If your GM has a story he really wants to tell, you'll probably be railroaded and it very well may suck. If, on the other hand, the GM gives you the freedom to take it where you want to go, ahh, now that's more fun.
Also, I want to be able to turn on a game and enjoy it immediately. I don't want to have to turn on a game and say, "that's right, I'm still looking for the Princess's MacGuffin!" or have to try to remember exactly where I was. But maybe I just don't have the right gamer mindset needed to appreciate long linear plots in video games.
Hmmm. So they say they could house 3.4 Tb on a unit the size of a credit card? Hmmm. Well, since they say it will have an access rate of 100 Mb/sec, I take it it would take 9 hours to read everything from a unit of that size? Hrm... Hot-syncing might take a little longer then, huh?
Uhm...geepers. Have you read the first amendment? Has anyone here?
Last I recall it didn't say that a company couldn't talk to other companies about its former employees because of things they've said. In fact, if we were to prevent one company to talking to another about an employee, wouldn't we be violating the company's freedom of speech?
(Long ago the Supreme Court ruled that corporations have the same rights as humans. Not that I don't think that's a bit suspect, but they did.)
Aim high, think big. Right now is a particularly good time for ambitious game programming, because so much more is possible now than ever before, thanks to CPU performance and 3D accelerators.
You know -- that's as opposed to five years ago when CPU performance was at its lowest in over ten years.
I mean, you know, I dig the point and all, but won't it always be a good time for ambitious game programming?
Now if the DoJ told the appeals court that the judge who ruled in their favor was biased, now that would have been news.
Or, for that matter, if the appeals court had ruled that Penfield Jackson was or wasn't biased...well, that would have been more newsworthy. But just the fact that the DoJ made an argument...uhm...I was kinda figuring they were going to do that here sometime...
I was with him until he started giving examples...
on
Information Poisoning
·
· Score: 2
We need to prevent corporations from gaining too much power over the population. We need to make sure our children learn critical thinking skills. I agree with Carr on these points.
What I don't agree with is that notion that somehow registering users for porn sites and giving the government the abilitiy to punish gossip-mongers is somehow going to accomplish this goal.
Carr starts out with a sensible goal in mind, but I really don't see how the things he talks about are going to help. If sites have to carefully label all claims they make so that someone isn't unwittingly duped by a false rumor, wouldn't that just further degrade people's critical thinking skills? (No need to question that news item -- it's a proven fact that's been certified by the government.)
Also, as near as I can tell, fraud isn't legal just because it happens on the internet...
In a similar vein, if part of what makes a game "influential" is the number of people that play it, then I bet solitare is one of the most influential games ever.
Really, it's a revolutionary idea. It helps to teach people the incredible utility of a PC when they realize they can finally get rid of their playing cards.
Non-virtual schools haven't been able to keep corporations out, with crap like Channel One and the like. You just know that a virtual school would have plenty of targeted advertising forced on the kiddies.
I just recently saw the snazzied-up version of Episode IV for the first time. With great additions to the film like that lame looking how-could-you-possibly-miss-so-far-from-so-close blaster shot from Greedo, and the equally lame shot of Han carelessly stomping on the gigantic tail of the gangster he owes thousands of credits to, I have say: it's about time Lucas started stressing.
Other than the recipe for electric jello, there was a good point buried in there. The notion of virtual communities does still have a long way to go. I think when enough people get enough bandwidth, virtual communities might start to seem a lot more community-like.
Someday in the future we may get to the point where when we think of the term "virtual community" (not that I ever actually use that term) we'll think of a site where we can video conference with hundreds of different people at a time instead of a modern message board or chat room.
When we get to that point, it will be possible to to form something online you would really consider a community.
Restoring personal backups to a different physical drive - a common enough occurrence when a disk has failed - will require authentication with a central server.
Ten thousand brownie points to the first script kiddie to crash that server.
The first amendment to the U.S. Constitution says, in part, that the government can't obstruct free speech. As near as I can tell, this has no application whatsoever to Napster.
Now, if Napster were run by the U.S. government, then you'd be on to something...
That would be the big reason, IMO, for these findings.
Writing this as I am from a 8x10 cube right now, I can tell you that if I was in the same room with other people that worked on this code and could just shout out questions to them I would be a lot more productive.
Instead, I might spend a substantially longer time thrashing through the problem myself. Or when I do resort to tracking someone down, it's a lot harder to find them in this maze of cubicles. Sometimes I can spend half a day on and off just trying to find one guy.
Who says the list is all about personal greed and making yourself happy? Maybe I want to read the list for ideas on what to buy my geek friends and geek relatives.
And besides, even if you disagree with the materialistic undercurrent of this article, a lot of what/. is about is technology (i.e., material goods) and it is a relevant article. The day/. puts up the article "how to tell your friends and relatives you love them" will be a strange day indeed!
Now, obviously, if someone got hit and killed (uhm...yeah, you wouldn't think it would just disfigure them, would you?) then there would be legal liability. But, other than that, does anyone know if they could have been legally prevented from doing a mass "de-orbiting"? Could a country prevent them from doing it just because it could potentially endanger their citizens?
1-in-249 means it's unlikely, but not vastly improbable, and it seems a bit disturbing that a company could do something that would ("only") have a 0.4% chance of killing someone.
So, you're saying that these issues aren't being dealt with enough outside of Hollywood?
If you don't hear everyone talking about the morality of cloning, there's a reason: there is no real morality problem to be discussing. Just lots of imagined ones.
So, let's say we can make a genetically identical copy of an organism. So what? A lot of people think that there will be some sort of dillema about who will be the real person: the original or the clone. Funny though, isn't it, that we don't seem to ever have these problems with identical twins?
An organic realtime multiplayer game is a piece of software that people claim to be better for the environment even when it's not and the farmers get to charge more for it.
From: xxxxxxxx@microsoft.com
To: "dR.fuZZo"
Subject: FW: New Microsoft Policy
------------Forwarded Message------------
From: "William Gates"
To: all@microsoft.com
Subject: New Microsoft Policy
Good day, comrades! This is just a note to let you know that from now on, Microsoft will be making all of our products available absolutely free to members of the Communist party.
The purpose of this offer is solely for capitalistic purposes -- repressing the proletariat, living off of the working class, etc. This in no way signals that I myself am no longer the money-mongering tyrant that I've always been. I simply feel that this policy is in the long term best interest of Microsoft.
Please ignore any further emails you may see from me in the future on this topic -- particularly if they retract this offer. Long live the revolution!
I'm truly disturbed to see that a large portion of the Slashdotters that responded to this poll were so apathetic as to not be American citizens. Most distressing!
This is a patent on an enhancement to a Rectangular GUI Element such as a Box, Dialog, Alert, or Window. The enhancement is a string of alphanumeric characters -- usually assembled into meaningful clusters known as words -- which resides at a vertically maximal location of the Rectangular GUI Element. Horizontally, the Descriptor may be left-aligned, right-aligned, centered, or sporadically scattered.
Examples of possible strings include:
"Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters"
"Microsoft Word"
"Fatal Memory Exception"
The Rectangular GUI Element Descriptor's primary purpose is to describe or summarize the contents or function of the Rectangular GUI Element to which it is attached, but it may also serve to insult or confuse the user, or be entirely without purpose.
If bans on distributing lecture notes were around in ancient Greek times, we probably wouldn't have any of the works that we refer to as being "by Aristotle". Well...ok, I don't know that those were commercially distributed...
Look at it this way: what if I wrote up an article about a speech made by a politician at a closed setting? Would that be infringing on copyright? What's the difference?
When I saw this my first inclination was to post a link to a previous/. story. But then I actually went and read the CNet story. RedHat didn't claim to start the open-source movement. They only claimed to start the open-source revolution.
Not that their claim is justified, but there is a difference there.
Slashdot Mirror
I definitely agree. When I play a game, I want something exciting and interesting, where I'm in control. I don't want to recreate the experience of watching a soap opera.
Really, I feel the same way about tabletop RPGs. If your GM has a story he really wants to tell, you'll probably be railroaded and it very well may suck. If, on the other hand, the GM gives you the freedom to take it where you want to go, ahh, now that's more fun.
Also, I want to be able to turn on a game and enjoy it immediately. I don't want to have to turn on a game and say, "that's right, I'm still looking for the Princess's MacGuffin!" or have to try to remember exactly where I was. But maybe I just don't have the right gamer mindset needed to appreciate long linear plots in video games.
Hmmm. So they say they could house 3.4 Tb on a unit the size of a credit card? Hmmm. Well, since they say it will have an access rate of 100 Mb/sec, I take it it would take 9 hours to read everything from a unit of that size? Hrm... Hot-syncing might take a little longer then, huh?
Uhm...geepers. Have you read the first amendment? Has anyone here?
Last I recall it didn't say that a company couldn't talk to other companies about its former employees because of things they've said. In fact, if we were to prevent one company to talking to another about an employee, wouldn't we be violating the company's freedom of speech?
(Long ago the Supreme Court ruled that corporations have the same rights as humans. Not that I don't think that's a bit suspect, but they did.)
This paragraph made me smile.
Aim high, think big. Right now is a particularly good time for ambitious game programming, because so much more is possible now than ever before, thanks to CPU performance and 3D accelerators.
You know -- that's as opposed to five years ago when CPU performance was at its lowest in over ten years.
I mean, you know, I dig the point and all, but won't it always be a good time for ambitious game programming?
Now if the DoJ told the appeals court that the judge who ruled in their favor was biased, now that would have been news.
Or, for that matter, if the appeals court had ruled that Penfield Jackson was or wasn't biased...well, that would have been more newsworthy. But just the fact that the DoJ made an argument...uhm...I was kinda figuring they were going to do that here sometime...
We need to prevent corporations from gaining too much power over the population. We need to make sure our children learn critical thinking skills. I agree with Carr on these points.
What I don't agree with is that notion that somehow registering users for porn sites and giving the government the abilitiy to punish gossip-mongers is somehow going to accomplish this goal.
Carr starts out with a sensible goal in mind, but I really don't see how the things he talks about are going to help. If sites have to carefully label all claims they make so that someone isn't unwittingly duped by a false rumor, wouldn't that just further degrade people's critical thinking skills? (No need to question that news item -- it's a proven fact that's been certified by the government.)
Also, as near as I can tell, fraud isn't legal just because it happens on the internet...
In a similar vein, if part of what makes a game "influential" is the number of people that play it, then I bet solitare is one of the most influential games ever.
Really, it's a revolutionary idea. It helps to teach people the incredible utility of a PC when they realize they can finally get rid of their playing cards.
Non-virtual schools haven't been able to keep corporations out, with crap like Channel One and the like. You just know that a virtual school would have plenty of targeted advertising forced on the kiddies.
I just recently saw the snazzied-up version of Episode IV for the first time. With great additions to the film like that lame looking how-could-you-possibly-miss-so-far-from-so-close blaster shot from Greedo, and the equally lame shot of Han carelessly stomping on the gigantic tail of the gangster he owes thousands of credits to, I have say: it's about time Lucas started stressing.
Other than the recipe for electric jello, there was a good point buried in there. The notion of virtual communities does still have a long way to go. I think when enough people get enough bandwidth, virtual communities might start to seem a lot more community-like.
Someday in the future we may get to the point where when we think of the term "virtual community" (not that I ever actually use that term) we'll think of a site where we can video conference with hundreds of different people at a time instead of a modern message board or chat room.
When we get to that point, it will be possible to to form something online you would really consider a community.
Can someone give me one copy protection scheme that actually has worked?
It's called book burning.
Restoring personal backups to a different physical drive - a common enough occurrence when a disk has failed - will require authentication with a central server.
Ten thousand brownie points to the first script kiddie to crash that server.
The first amendment to the U.S. Constitution says, in part, that the government can't obstruct free speech. As near as I can tell, this has no application whatsoever to Napster.
Now, if Napster were run by the U.S. government, then you'd be on to something...
That would be the big reason, IMO, for these findings.
Writing this as I am from a 8x10 cube right now, I can tell you that if I was in the same room with other people that worked on this code and could just shout out questions to them I would be a lot more productive.
Instead, I might spend a substantially longer time thrashing through the problem myself. Or when I do resort to tracking someone down, it's a lot harder to find them in this maze of cubicles. Sometimes I can spend half a day on and off just trying to find one guy.
Who says the list is all about personal greed and making yourself happy? Maybe I want to read the list for ideas on what to buy my geek friends and geek relatives.
/. is about is technology (i.e., material goods) and it is a relevant article. The day /. puts up the article "how to tell your friends and relatives you love them" will be a strange day indeed!
And besides, even if you disagree with the materialistic undercurrent of this article, a lot of what
Now, obviously, if someone got hit and killed (uhm...yeah, you wouldn't think it would just disfigure them, would you?) then there would be legal liability. But, other than that, does anyone know if they could have been legally prevented from doing a mass "de-orbiting"? Could a country prevent them from doing it just because it could potentially endanger their citizens?
1-in-249 means it's unlikely, but not vastly improbable, and it seems a bit disturbing that a company could do something that would ("only") have a 0.4% chance of killing someone.
So, you're saying that these issues aren't being dealt with enough outside of Hollywood?
If you don't hear everyone talking about the morality of cloning, there's a reason: there is no real morality problem to be discussing. Just lots of imagined ones.
So, let's say we can make a genetically identical copy of an organism. So what? A lot of people think that there will be some sort of dillema about who will be the real person: the original or the clone. Funny though, isn't it, that we don't seem to ever have these problems with identical twins?
And here I haven't even gotten acquainted with 5.0 yet...
"...using to produce the sfx in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy."
Uhm...there's a person's name that goes in front of that title, but I don't think it's "Peter Jackson".
An organic realtime multiplayer game is a piece of software that people claim to be better for the environment even when it's not and the farmers get to charge more for it.
I'm truly disturbed to see that a large portion of the Slashdotters that responded to this poll were so apathetic as to not be American citizens. Most distressing!
Examples of possible strings include:
The Rectangular GUI Element Descriptor's primary purpose is to describe or summarize the contents or function of the Rectangular GUI Element to which it is attached, but it may also serve to insult or confuse the user, or be entirely without purpose.
If bans on distributing lecture notes were around in ancient Greek times, we probably wouldn't have any of the works that we refer to as being "by Aristotle". Well...ok, I don't know that those were commercially distributed...
Look at it this way: what if I wrote up an article about a speech made by a politician at a closed setting? Would that be infringing on copyright? What's the difference?
When I saw this my first inclination was to post a link to a previous /. story. But then I actually went and read the CNet story. RedHat didn't claim to start the open-source movement. They only claimed to start the open-source revolution.
Not that their claim is justified, but there is a difference there.