I once saw a short film that was pretty much like that. The characters lived in an alternate video game universe in which daily life involved the usual violence of a FPS and dodging death in various forms. The main character was a boy who was playing a video game in which he had to be nice in order to succeed (e.g. helping an old lady across the street instead of shooting her).
I won't give away the ending. I can't remember the title of the film but it was made in England.
"I'll rip off your head and shit down your neck (throat?)" was always my favourite.
That one comes from the Clint Eastwood film "Heartbreak Ridge" (1986). The line is spoken by a new recruit in the marines who thinks he can take Clint. He can't, of course.
Luke Skywalker, too, was powerless and trapped when we first met him. Then he met Obi-Wan, got in touch with the Force, went soaring around the universe to battle evil -- and didn't get the girl, either.
If he had gotten get the girl, it would have made the part where he found she was his sister somewhat less palatable for a family audience.
Seriously though, Luke certainly seems to enjoy his snog with Leia in The Empire Strikes Back, and the Luke/Leia/Solo love triangle subplot is played out right up to the end of The Return of the Jedi ("You love him don't you?", "Yes", "OK I'm off", "No wait, he's my brother", "Phew!" (smooches)) Does anyone else find this slightly strange?
200+ hours to beat Baldurs Gate 2? Are you smoking crack? More like 40 hours if you take your time. I first beat the game in about 2 weeks, in about 3 hours a day (sometimes more, sometimes less).
Turn off the flame thrower! Nobody with a day job and a family can play games 3 hours a day (unless they don't like spending time with their family, or want to lose their job). Puzzle oriented games just don't work when played in bite sized chunks. Even if the time required to play them isn't multiplied up by a factor of 5, it certainly feels like it.
Don't forget "Doctorin' the Tardis" by The Timelords (an early manifestation of those whacky funsters The KLF) which, very unfortunately, went to Number 1 in the UK in 1988. It's a mixture of the Doctor Who theme and a song by fallen glam-rocker Gary Glitter.
Check out the KLF FAQ (link above) which includes lots of interesting trivia, like the fact that Jimmy Cauty of the KLF painted that Lord of the Rings poster from the seventies (for those of you old enough to remember it) and the reason why they burned a million pounds. Strange people.
No, its just a translatlantic difference in language. In the UK (where Ian Stewart is from) not every university teacher is a professor. This term is reserved for the head of department, and is in fact a title.
There are two concepts of freedom. You are thinking of freedom only in its negative sense (freedom from interference) whereas there is also positive freedom (freedom to acheive your goals).
All societies have rules which restrict behaviour. These rules may benefit your freedom in the positive sense. The simplest example I can think of is the law that you must drive on the left hand side of the road. This, and other traffic regulations, keep traffic flowing as smoothly as possible and greatly assist you in your goal of getting from A to B. This is why you never hear people complaining "But I want to be able to do what I want with my car!"
Of course, positive freedom doesn't make any sense without some societal context. I think when people criticise the GPL they miss the social dimension of the free software movement. RMS's idea was to create a community of people who would cooperate with each other. The GPL is just a statement of the rules you must obey in order to be part of that community. And of course, you always have a choice about whether you want to take part or not, unlike the society you were born into.
Re:The economic argument is pure sophistry.
on
Mundie Responds
·
· Score: 1
When you sell software within your own country, you are simply redistributing wealth, not generating any... There is no net economic gain in the transaction.
Oh yes there is! If someone can sell me a product that makes me more productive, then I'll certaintly buy it if I make a net saving. If it makes me a lot more productive, then I'll be prepared to spend a lot of money on it. The aggregate result of increased productivity is economic growth.
There's no doubt that most desktop PC software (with the notable exception of the web browser) makes you more productive. Try preparing a budget without a spreadsheet, or writing any kind of document on a typewriter instead of a word processor.
The real question is whether the price of software should be maintained when it becomes ubiquitous. Once all my competitors have it, there is no real competitive advantage in me having it. I'm just screwed if I don't. Under
these circumstances, I start to feel less happy about paying a lot of money for my software, and it certainly starts feeling like I'm being taxed if the price doesn't come down.
What drives the economy is real production of goods: think food, clothing, energy, transportation etc
So you don't think services are an important part of the economy? Services are one reason why you're working in an office now instead of breaking your back in the fields to produce that all important good: food.
And in their uncanny ability to trace a phone call's routing progress graphically on a projected world map via their acoustically-coupled modem?
This is just a metaphor: the best way to communicate visually what the characters are doing without interrupting the plotline (aka "show don't tell"). Movies have their own language, which is most people understand subconsiously. Problems only arise when you have to consciously think about what you are being shown and you think "That's not right." It's a shame because it spoils your enjoyment of the movie, but you can learn to ignore it.
A lot of technology in movies is enhanced in this way to conform to movie logic instead of real world logic. I recently watched the James Bond movie "Goldeneye", in which the characters use some super e-mail/chat program that shows a little cartoon icon of whoever is writing. This struck me as being a bit silly (although not impossible this time), but it is the same idea in action.
Doug Miller:but having too many choices in a commercial platform environment in the end, confuses developers and users.
TrumpetPower:This seems to be the pervailing attitude among those at Microsoft and elsewhere: users are stupid, so stupid that we must make all their decisions for them.
I think your over-reacting here, and putting words in his mouth. A person doesn't have to be sitting motionless and slack-jawed in front of their computer to be `confused.' If I understand him correctly he means that developers are confused because they don't know which environment to support, and they certainly don't want to do both. Indeed why should they? This just increases development and support costs. How many cross-platform GNOME/KDE apps are there? Not many.
Users are confused if vendors pick one environment over the other because then they don't know which one to use. Of course you can run KDE apps under GNOME and vice versa - in the sense that the apps are on the screen at the same time - but this is really limited. Look and feel are completely different and there's no interoperability between apps, so you're loosing all the advantages of the integrated desktop environment.
Bear in mind that he is talking from the point of view of commercial software. If you don't care about commercial software then you don't care, but from this point of view he has put his finger on a real problem.
I am also reminded of a short story by Phillip K Dick in which (I think it was "local author") in which adverts were telepathically beamed into your head. No way to ignore them.
On this subject, the thread in the cartoon strip
Help Desk
about integrating spam into the desktop is very funny. Start
here
to read it.
I don't understand how the French government has any control over a website hosted on US soil.
The French government has nothing to do with this. This is a private court case was brought against Yahoo by two associations - LICRA (the International League Against Racism and Antisemitism) and UEJF (the French Union of Jewish Students).
Remember you don't win unless there is some one out the BUYing the stock from you.
You need to clarify this a little. When you buy stock, you're not just buying a piece of paper, you're buying part of the company. It's normal for that company to increase in value as it generates more wealth, increasing its profits and its assets. So the fact that somebody buys the stock off you for a higher price doesn't automatically make them a loser: they own part of a company that is now more valuable.
The problem with the dot coms (or dot bombs) was that these companies were not making any money and had no assets. Many of them didn't even have a good business model. By normal economic standards they weren't worth anything. The stock price was based on ludicrously optimistic future growth estimates.
I never finished Baldur's Gate. I just got fed up with micromanaging the other PCs all the time. It would have been nice if they had acted in a more intelligent way so I could just get on with playing the game.
My top gripes
1) Pathfinding. The party is exploring a dungeon or wilderness area. One of the characters takes a wrong turn and just wanders off. I have to stop the other characters, go and find the lost sheep and bring him/her back step by step.
2) Suicidal magic users. The party gets into a fight. Everyone has range weapons except the magic user, who has run out of darts. So when I order the party to attack the enemy he charges off on his own to attack them with his dagger and gets slaughtered.
3) Weapon choice. In a fight I have to choose the right weapon for each character. Why can't they work this out for themselves? It really slows down the fights.
This is from the Robert X Cringely column at Infoworld (not to be confused with the other Robert X Cringely). It's a gossip column and should not be treated seriously. Shame on Slashdot for not flagging this.
What do you want? To press a button and get an instant answer?
The only way to get a definitive answer to the question of whether mobile phones are harmful is to study the experience of the general population. This takes time.
An epidemiological study on mobile phone use and cancer is underway in nine countries, coordinated by the International Agency for Research on Cancer. Here is a press release (from September 1998). Results are not expected until 2004.
I see some knee-jerk reactions here from people who don't know the background to this story. This is explained in the BBC link but obviously people aren't clicking through, finding it easier to make cheap anti-French remarks.
Jose Bove (Zho-zay Bo-vay) is a sheep farmer who was caught in the middle of a trade war between Europe and the US. Since the EU refused to accept imports of American beef containing hormones, the US retaliated by putting a punitive 100% tax on certain "luxury" goods from Europe, include Roquefort cheese, which is made from sheeps milk, and is the main product of Jose Bove's region.
McDonalds was chosen as a symbolic target of a protest demonstration. In his book "The world is not for sale" Jose Bove claims that the McDonalds construction site was not attacked so much as dismantled, and the extent of the material damage has been greatly exaggerated. Both McDonalds and the local authorities were informed of the demonstration in advance. Only afterwards were arrest warrants put out for the demonstration leaders (members of the Confederation Paysanne), and he had to return from holiday to turn himself in.
What really projected M Bove into the news was the fact that he refused to pay his bail which was set at an excessive amount, and was therefore remanded in custody. This created a groundswell of public sympathy which resulted in his release. Since then he has gone from strength to strength.
Jose Bove is incredibly articulate, and a man of conviction. It is a shame that most Slashdot readers, who don't speak French, won't hear what he has to say.
Smarter, faster, stronger animals eat the smaller, weaker and dumb ones
Apart from the stronger animals (elephants for example) that don't eat any other animals. Or the faster ones (lions) that eat the smarter ones (humans) or the slow dumb ones that don't get eaten because they are poisonous or have some other strategy to avoid being eaten (porcupines), or the really slow dumb ones that parasitize a stronger smarter faster host (tapeworm)...
It's certainly an erosion of civil rights. But it's just the latest example in a long line. There was an article in yesterday's Guardian by Madsen Pirie, president of the Adam Smith institute, on how successive governments have eroded civil rights in Britain by passing laws aimed at particular groups of offenders. Depressing stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
I once saw a short film that was pretty much like that. The characters lived in an alternate video game universe in which daily life involved the usual violence of a FPS and dodging death in various forms. The main character was a boy who was playing a video game in which he had to be nice in order to succeed (e.g. helping an old lady across the street instead of shooting her).
I won't give away the ending. I can't remember the title of the film but it was made in England.
"I'll rip off your head and shit down your neck (throat?)" was always my favourite.
That one comes from the Clint Eastwood film "Heartbreak Ridge" (1986). The line is spoken by a new recruit in the marines who thinks he can take Clint. He can't, of course.
Luke Skywalker, too, was powerless and trapped when we first met him. Then he met Obi-Wan, got in touch with the Force, went soaring around the universe to battle evil -- and didn't get the girl, either.
If he had gotten get the girl, it would have made the part where he found she was his sister somewhat less palatable for a family audience.
Seriously though, Luke certainly seems to enjoy his snog with Leia in The Empire Strikes Back, and the Luke/Leia/Solo love triangle subplot is played out right up to the end of The Return of the Jedi ("You love him don't you?", "Yes", "OK I'm off", "No wait, he's my brother", "Phew!" (smooches)) Does anyone else find this slightly strange?
200+ hours to beat Baldurs Gate 2? Are you smoking crack? More like 40 hours if you take your time. I first beat the game in about 2 weeks, in about 3 hours a day (sometimes more, sometimes less).
Turn off the flame thrower! Nobody with a day job and a family can play games 3 hours a day (unless they don't like spending time with their family, or want to lose their job). Puzzle oriented games just don't work when played in bite sized chunks. Even if the time required to play them isn't multiplied up by a factor of 5, it certainly feels like it.
Don't forget "Doctorin' the Tardis" by The Timelords (an early manifestation of those whacky funsters The KLF) which, very unfortunately, went to Number 1 in the UK in 1988. It's a mixture of the Doctor Who theme and a song by fallen glam-rocker Gary Glitter.
Check out the KLF FAQ (link above) which includes lots of interesting trivia, like the fact that Jimmy Cauty of the KLF painted that Lord of the Rings poster from the seventies (for those of you old enough to remember it) and the reason why they burned a million pounds. Strange people.
No, its just a translatlantic difference in language. In the UK (where Ian Stewart is from) not every university teacher is a professor. This term is reserved for the head of department, and is in fact a title.
That would be professor Stewart, or just Ian Stewart if you don't like titles.
There are two concepts of freedom. You are thinking of freedom only in its negative sense (freedom from interference) whereas there is also positive freedom (freedom to acheive your goals).
All societies have rules which restrict behaviour. These rules may benefit your freedom in the positive sense. The simplest example I can think of is the law that you must drive on the left hand side of the road. This, and other traffic regulations, keep traffic flowing as smoothly as possible and greatly assist you in your goal of getting from A to B. This is why you never hear people complaining "But I want to be able to do what I want with my car!"
Of course, positive freedom doesn't make any sense without some societal context. I think when people criticise the GPL they miss the social dimension of the free software movement. RMS's idea was to create a community of people who would cooperate with each other. The GPL is just a statement of the rules you must obey in order to be part of that community. And of course, you always have a choice about whether you want to take part or not, unlike the society you were born into.
When you sell software within your own country, you are simply redistributing wealth, not generating any ... There is no net economic gain in the transaction.
Oh yes there is! If someone can sell me a product that makes me more productive, then I'll certaintly buy it if I make a net saving. If it makes me a lot more productive, then I'll be prepared to spend a lot of money on it. The aggregate result of increased productivity is economic growth.
There's no doubt that most desktop PC software (with the notable exception of the web browser) makes you more productive. Try preparing a budget without a spreadsheet, or writing any kind of document on a typewriter instead of a word processor.
The real question is whether the price of software should be maintained when it becomes ubiquitous. Once all my competitors have it, there is no real competitive advantage in me having it. I'm just screwed if I don't. Under
these circumstances, I start to feel less happy about paying a lot of money for my software, and it certainly starts feeling like I'm being taxed if the price doesn't come down.
What drives the economy is real production of goods: think food, clothing, energy, transportation etc
So you don't think services are an important part of the economy? Services are one reason why you're working in an office now instead of breaking your back in the fields to produce that all important good: food.
And in their uncanny ability to trace a phone call's routing progress graphically on a projected world map via their acoustically-coupled modem?
This is just a metaphor: the best way to communicate visually what the characters are doing without interrupting the plotline (aka "show don't tell"). Movies have their own language, which is most people understand subconsiously. Problems only arise when you have to consciously think about what you are being shown and you think "That's not right." It's a shame because it spoils your enjoyment of the movie, but you can learn to ignore it.
A lot of technology in movies is enhanced in this way to conform to movie logic instead of real world logic. I recently watched the James Bond movie "Goldeneye", in which the characters use some super e-mail/chat program that shows a little cartoon icon of whoever is writing. This struck me as being a bit silly (although not impossible this time), but it is the same idea in action.
Doug Miller:but having too many choices in a commercial platform environment in the end, confuses developers and users.
TrumpetPower:This seems to be the pervailing attitude among those at Microsoft and elsewhere: users are stupid, so stupid that we must make all their decisions for them.
I think your over-reacting here, and putting words in his mouth. A person doesn't have to be sitting motionless and slack-jawed in front of their computer to be `confused.' If I understand him correctly he means that developers are confused because they don't know which environment to support, and they certainly don't want to do both. Indeed why should they? This just increases development and support costs. How many cross-platform GNOME/KDE apps are there? Not many.
Users are confused if vendors pick one environment over the other because then they don't know which one to use. Of course you can run KDE apps under GNOME and vice versa - in the sense that the apps are on the screen at the same time - but this is really limited. Look and feel are completely different and there's no interoperability between apps, so you're loosing all the advantages of the integrated desktop environment.
Bear in mind that he is talking from the point of view of commercial software. If you don't care about commercial software then you don't care, but from this point of view he has put his finger on a real problem.
KW Jeter has written two sequels to "Blade Runner" called The Edge of Human and Replicant night.
On this subject, the thread in the cartoon strip Help Desk about integrating spam into the desktop is very funny. Start here to read it.
I don't understand how the French government has any control over a website hosted on US soil.
The French government has nothing to do with this. This is a private court case was brought against Yahoo by two associations - LICRA (the International League Against Racism and Antisemitism) and UEJF (the French Union of Jewish Students).
Remember you don't win unless there is some one out the BUYing the stock from you.
You need to clarify this a little. When you buy stock, you're not just buying a piece of paper, you're buying part of the company. It's normal for that company to increase in value as it generates more wealth, increasing its profits and its assets. So the fact that somebody buys the stock off you for a higher price doesn't automatically make them a loser: they own part of a company that is now more valuable.
The problem with the dot coms (or dot bombs) was that these companies were not making any money and had no assets. Many of them didn't even have a good business model. By normal economic standards they weren't worth anything. The stock price was based on ludicrously optimistic future growth estimates.
There is an interesting essay by Dr Norman Matloff of the University of California at Davis called Debunking the myth of a desparate software labor shortage.
I never finished Baldur's Gate. I just got fed up with micromanaging the other PCs all the time. It would have been nice if they had acted in a more intelligent way so I could just get on with playing the game.
My top gripes
1) Pathfinding. The party is exploring a dungeon or wilderness area. One of the characters takes a wrong turn and just wanders off. I have to stop the other characters, go and find the lost sheep and bring him/her back step by step.
2) Suicidal magic users. The party gets into a fight. Everyone has range weapons except the magic user, who has run out of darts. So when I order the party to attack the enemy he charges off on his own to attack them with his dagger and gets slaughtered.
3) Weapon choice. In a fight I have to choose the right weapon for each character. Why can't they work this out for themselves? It really slows down the fights.
I didn't say you should take him seriously. I said you shouldn't confuse them. Tsk.
This is from the Robert X Cringely column at Infoworld (not to be confused with the other Robert X Cringely). It's a gossip column and should not be treated seriously. Shame on Slashdot for not flagging this.
What do you want? To press a button and get an instant answer?
The only way to get a definitive answer to the question of whether mobile phones are harmful is to study the experience of the general population. This takes time.
An epidemiological study on mobile phone use and cancer is underway in nine countries, coordinated by the International Agency for Research on Cancer. Here is a press release (from September 1998). Results are not expected until 2004.
Where does this blind faith in "The Market" come from? Free markets have to be free to work properly. As Baptist Death Ray has explained quite clearly
I see some knee-jerk reactions here from people who don't know the background to this story. This is explained in the BBC link but obviously people aren't clicking through, finding it easier to make cheap anti-French remarks.
Jose Bove (Zho-zay Bo-vay) is a sheep farmer who was caught in the middle of a trade war between Europe and the US. Since the EU refused to accept imports of American beef containing hormones, the US retaliated by putting a punitive 100% tax on certain "luxury" goods from Europe, include Roquefort cheese, which is made from sheeps milk, and is the main product of Jose Bove's region.
McDonalds was chosen as a symbolic target of a protest demonstration. In his book "The world is not for sale" Jose Bove claims that the McDonalds construction site was not attacked so much as dismantled, and the extent of the material damage has been greatly exaggerated. Both McDonalds and the local authorities were informed of the demonstration in advance. Only afterwards were arrest warrants put out for the demonstration leaders (members of the Confederation Paysanne), and he had to return from holiday to turn himself in.
What really projected M Bove into the news was the fact that he refused to pay his bail which was set at an excessive amount, and was therefore remanded in custody. This created a groundswell of public sympathy which resulted in his release. Since then he has gone from strength to strength.
Jose Bove is incredibly articulate, and a man of conviction. It is a shame that most Slashdot readers, who don't speak French, won't hear what he has to say.
Smarter, faster, stronger animals eat the smaller, weaker and dumb ones
...
Apart from the stronger animals (elephants for example) that don't eat any other animals. Or the faster ones (lions) that eat the smarter ones (humans) or the slow dumb ones that don't get eaten because they are poisonous or have some other strategy to avoid being eaten (porcupines), or the really slow dumb ones that parasitize a stronger smarter faster host (tapeworm)
It's certainly an erosion of civil rights. But it's just the latest example in a long line. There was an article in yesterday's Guardian by Madsen Pirie, president of the Adam Smith institute, on how successive governments have eroded civil rights in Britain by passing laws aimed at particular groups of offenders. Depressing stuff.