all 3 patents deal with online advertising and pushing content to players of (mostly) online card / gambling games based on feedback from the players. It gets humorous when one reads the specific claim 92 of the patent cited in the letter and then reads down to claim 95 in the same patent:
95. An apparatus for playing a game on a network, comprising:
a display area for electronically displaying an instance of the game to a first user; an input area for allowing the first user to input a game play; a communications network connection for communicating, on a network, game related information, between: (a) one or more of said display and said input area, and (b) an addressable node on said network accessible by a network address available to said apparatus; wherein a plurality of users communicate with said addressable node for playing instances of the game; and wherein between at least a majority of game plays by the first user, there is a game play related network transmission via said communications connection; and a game speed of play control for allowing the first user to control the pace of the instance of the game.
So, apparently he's patented all online capable gaming machines (and the networks) as well...
the whole point of the box is to get the don't panic button or the piece of pocket lint. Infocom was truly the king of game boxes. There wasn't a lot of wasted space in their packaging, simply because they filled it up with fun, enjoyable, extra stuff that just ruled. (I still have the glowing stone from wishbringer somewhere in a drawer).
These days, most boxes are fairly useless. Big bulky empty cartons that often don't even have much in the way of a manual. Blizzard is still nice and usually includes a pad of paper or other such in their boxes to show appreciation, but other than that I don't really want a box. Physical media, absolutely, but the boxes in most cases are disposable...
Part of the reason the games don't let you look around the scope is balance. Yes, looking around the scope is something a person could realistically do. But give a player a 1 shot 1 kill weapon that enables them to see across a map, and you've given them enough of an advantage.
The limited field of view forces the player to chose: zoomed in, ready to take the shot in a particular area, or zoomed out, looking at other potential target locations (and monitoring your safety). There has to be some disadvantage to sniper rifles, and the inability to see much while zoomed is it.
I think Team Fortress 2/Half-Life Fortress should take that spot, if one really feels the need to slam Valve. Fortress was preselling at the time of HL's release. It then disappeared, sorta re-appeared as the free TF mod, and was re-confirmed with the announcement and subsequent E3 showing of TF2. Then it re-disappeared again, and apparently is gone, now that HL2 is soon to be up to bat?
HL2 had the source code stolen thing, and that's an understandable delay in shipping. TF2 just makes no sense... (particularly given how impressive the technology demonstrations were at E3 however many years ago that was, 4?)
The gamers are going to breeze through all of WoWs content upon its release in a very short amount of time, and become bored rather quickly.
while its true that blizzard has rapid fans (who do strange things like getting lvl 50 characters in D2 within 4 days), I think Blizzard is aware of this.
Sure, people breezed through D2, but did they stop playing? No. That's the beauty of the game. You finish the quests, but your now in pokemon land where you "gotta catch 'em all" when it comes to set items, rare items, crafted items, etc.
I imagine WOW will be the same way. Sure the content designers will probably find that some people have used up all the quest content, but there'll be something else in there to artificially keep the player interested.
I don't want to eat anything that's eaten something harmful to me, as that substance could be present in high enough concentrations to make me sick, or dead.
if all you ate were grass, you'd probably die. (as we really don't have the mechanisms to extract the nutrients out of grass). however, there's probably little wrong with eating a cow.
the glo in glofish is a protein that fluoresces under specific wavelengths. being a protein, it likely is broken down by the higher organism upon consumption, so that the animo acids can be reused to form proteins that the consuming organism needs to survive.
these are zebra fish. their natural habitat is the tropical waters of India. Chances are they are NOT finding local zebra fish to mate with anywhere in the U.S...
a number of organisms exist that glow or luminesce (various bacteria, fireflies, some squid, etc.). their predators do not glow or luminesce. hence, it's fairly obvious that if little timmy eats the glofish, he's not gonna glow.
For a more scientific perspective, I am currently researching the potential for DNA transport in the environment and its potential danger--think dead plants that have been modified in some way, (say pesticide resistance), and bits of their DNA being incorporated by bacteria. While the process can occur, i.e., bacteria can pick up DNA from outside the cell, the frequency with which it occurs is very small (this is called transformation).
We're not bacteria, and I don't have much knowledge of transformation in higher organisms, but a quick look at a microbiology book says that eukaryotic sells have a different mechanism (transfection), which seems to have an even smaller chance of success.
so, bottom line, it's a nonissue, at least in terms of people eating them. bacteria picking up the genes, however, is a bigger issue though...
Ask anyone what games they played on their Atari 2600 when they were younger, and invariably Combat will be included among the titles listed...
this couldn't be due to the fact that combat was actually included with the 2600, could it? those were the days, when consoles actually came with a game included. and an adequate number of controllers so you could actually play against someone without having to buy anything else...
combat and video olympics, my first 2 atari games. video olypmics ruled. it was pong x 10. tennis? sure looks like pong. soccer? ok, it's like pong, but with a bunch of blocking guys, staggered, that all move in synch. volleyball? 2 blockers at the back moving in synch, otherwise just like pong.
from what I know, Lego owns/developed Bionicle. Sure it might seem fairly lame from a "build anything your imagination can come up with" standpoint, but it's spawned a movie, which apparently made some money, as another is in production. Since Lego owns it, they aren't paying licensing fees, hence costs are cheaper and profit higher. I'd presume they're liscencing out (or profit sharing) bionicle to the animation studio doing the movie, and that's another source of income.
This guy must have shot out of some sort of bizzare-o world. I mean, Nintendo may be having a rough generation, but the rest of the industry seems to be just fine, and the overall numbers are still always better than last year.
not true. according to this random article, "Game sales, meanwhile, shriveled 9 percent to 336.7 billion yen." (when compared to the previous year, i presume). Combined with a 33% decline in console hardware sales for the year, mentioned in the article, the video game industry in Japan is going through hard times. Especially relevant given that no new hardware is planned for release for at least another year or 2... (i.e., hardware sales are only going to get worse.)
It does if all of your bandwidth is tied up by computers downloading the patch.
And at that point isn't it just slightly the duty of the event organizers to step in and call off CS and let the other events proceed? Of course, doing that would actually take leadership, something that apparently wasn't displayed...
So if I dont have Steam on any of my PC's why do I care? 4 friends of mine were in the CoD competition and am sad that they got screwed by Valve's system. That's all.
how exactly did Steam ruin the CoD tournament, seeing as how Call of Duty was developed by Infinity Ward (i.e., not Valve) and does not use Steam?
Ripping on Steam for a failing of the tournament organizers is extremely shortsighted. A power outage can take out a whole event, sure. But certainly not an online service used by only 1 of the many games being played at the event.
regardless of whether steam was or wasn't a problem (or even should have been a problem given the suggestions of other posters in this topic):
How in the world does Steam affect tournaments for all of the other non-steam games (q3, CoD, RtCW, ET, AA). One fubared game should not take down the rest of the event...
From what I've read in the various linked articles, this event was run about as poorly as possible. brackets weren't even established for most of the tournaments and that's somehow to be blamed on steam?
is it anything like breaking the wishbone of a chicken? as i seem to recall from my childhood, whoever used the least force when pulling on it, tended to end up with the bigger piece. hence, neither person would really pull on it and it never breaks...
you can pre-order it from any number of sites. EBgames has it coming out the end of March. However, anyone that pays any attention to these things, knows all the release dates are absolutely meaningless. Most high quality games (i.e., from high quality developers) have the "it's done when it's done" release date. When iD / Valve announces it's gone gold, then you can get it in 2 weeks. That's really the bottom line. This is a non-story.
But if you must pre-order, EBgames does have a cute figurine for Doom 3. (I preordered the harvest moon game for the gba, just to get a stuffed cow that's sitting on top of my computer, along with diablo and arthas...)
of course reading the actual text and finding the following line in the first paragraph: "This prohibition does not apply to a mobile digital terminal installed in a law enforcement vehicle." wouldn't provide any sort of answer to that question now, would it?
somewhere in one of the links on the razor site they mention that the mouse has the 4, 5 buttons (although there isn't a single picture in which they are obviously evident). How accessible are they given that they apparently seem that hidden?
My current MS optical (i presume it's the most recent version) has what I consider a fairly good 4,5 placement. They protrude nicely (little bumps), on the left side below the 1 button, just slightly north of where the thumb rests so there's no accidental pushing. Previous MS optical mice had horrible 4,5 buttons (flush with the side so you weren't sure if you had depressed it and of course exactly where your thumb rests; one version even had the 5 button on the right side).
Guess this is more about ergonomics than dpi, but that's probably just as important than how fast you can move thing.
a relative of mine is a semi-famous engineer in the field of fluid dynamics, in particular with how wind interacts with structures (he's on the committee for one of the building codes or standards). Several years back he had a client who had developed a better wind mill for this exact purpose (minimizing the bird chopper effect).
While I never saw the actual design, from what I understand the basics of it were a flat disc upon which the blades were radially fixed. Wind blows on the disc and is directed radially through channels formed by the blades. I guess the channels were angled such that the flow through them caused the disc to spin.
I can't imagine quite how it works, but said relative had tested it in a wind tunnel and said it worked and wasn't entirely screwball (he seemed somewhat impressed by it). The flat disc is far more visible to birds than a spinning blade. I have no idea though if it is used in practice today or if it even made it to market.
The question I have, though, is how many birds die yearly from colliding with tall buildings. Quite regularly, I'll find small birds (sparrows, finches ?) dead on the sidewalk next to a tall (15-20 storey) quite reflective building. Multiply this by the number of tall reflective buildings in the U.S, and I imagine more birds die from this than from wind turbines...
"Except for the fact that the guy purposely used the topic of WMDs just to gain publicity."
Of course he did. There's a reason there were 3 Amy Fisher movies a soon after the whole fiasco: current events sell. Why create a "find pirate pete's buried treasure" game that will get no attention, when you can create a "find the WMD" game that will get people intrigued.
Plus there's the whole aspect that this guy has crafted a puzzle that fits seamlessly inside of a current event. The game book comes with a bunch of clues, which prompt you to go searching through the reams of publicly available documents (that he provides) to try to track down the WMD, based on his clues. (because clearly if the government knew where they were, they would have found them by now). The author has decided where the WMD are and wants you to track them down using his clues and whatever information the government has declassified. This is kinda like the game associated with the A.I. movie (on a sorta dissimilar level).
As for your contention that the author is "is basicly tapping into the anti-U.S. government setiment thats going around right now to make a quick buck", I find that somewhat laughable. Bush currently is enjoying a major surge in popularity, with op-ed writers across the country predicting how badly this will hurt Dean. (I.E., any anti-government or anti-Bush sentiment that does exist is probably felt by a minority or at best half of the population.)
it's basically "I like puzzle / riddle games. A major current event involves finding weapons of mass destruction. So why not combine the two into a game I can sell to make money for law school."
people that buy sports video games are going to be too busy playing them to go out and watch/play an actual sport. just like the people who bought the Return of the King game will be too busy to go to the movies today. that logic makes a whole hell of a lot of sense.
and then we can flip the tables pointing out how the tomb raider game killed the movie. so perhaps the next really bad football game from EA (or whoever makes bad sports games) will ruin the NFL...
on G4 (the all video game network). I rarely watch the show, but basically they get 2 teams of 4 players and pit them against each other in best of 3 matches. Games I've seen them play include Counterstrike, perhaps an Unreal and a Mechwarrior-type game. Plus live commentary (if I'm not mistaken Wil Wheaton was a commentator for a while, but last time I watched I don't recall him being on).
These teams clearly aren't pro and often don't even really use teamwork (occasionally they split screen between the game and the players, and I've never seen them communicating.)
It's a rather interesting show to watch if one gets tired of competitive freediving on the Outdoor Life Network.
regarding Bubbles: When chimps get older they get aggressive and really can't be handled by people anymore (unless you're Steve Irwin or any other of those nuts on Animal Planet). Jackson gave up Bubbles a while back, and the chimp is currently living at a facility in the north end of the San Fernando Valley, along with Geoffrey the giraffe (of Toys R Us commercial fame).
I had the quite unique experience of visiting this place last year, seeing where all the famous animal actors live. Bubbles was quite threatening, but the giraffe was loads of fun...
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So, apparently he's patented all online capable gaming machines (and the networks) as well...
given that NASA uses real player for their briefings, they're probably just stuck waiting for the "buffering..." message to finish.
the whole point of the box is to get the don't panic button or the piece of pocket lint. Infocom was truly the king of game boxes. There wasn't a lot of wasted space in their packaging, simply because they filled it up with fun, enjoyable, extra stuff that just ruled. (I still have the glowing stone from wishbringer somewhere in a drawer).
These days, most boxes are fairly useless. Big bulky empty cartons that often don't even have much in the way of a manual. Blizzard is still nice and usually includes a pad of paper or other such in their boxes to show appreciation, but other than that I don't really want a box. Physical media, absolutely, but the boxes in most cases are disposable...
Part of the reason the games don't let you look around the scope is balance. Yes, looking around the scope is something a person could realistically do. But give a player a 1 shot 1 kill weapon that enables them to see across a map, and you've given them enough of an advantage.
The limited field of view forces the player to chose: zoomed in, ready to take the shot in a particular area, or zoomed out, looking at other potential target locations (and monitoring your safety). There has to be some disadvantage to sniper rifles, and the inability to see much while zoomed is it.
I think Team Fortress 2/Half-Life Fortress should take that spot, if one really feels the need to slam Valve. Fortress was preselling at the time of HL's release. It then disappeared, sorta re-appeared as the free TF mod, and was re-confirmed with the announcement and subsequent E3 showing of TF2. Then it re-disappeared again, and apparently is gone, now that HL2 is soon to be up to bat?
HL2 had the source code stolen thing, and that's an understandable delay in shipping. TF2 just makes no sense... (particularly given how impressive the technology demonstrations were at E3 however many years ago that was, 4?)
The gamers are going to breeze through all of WoWs content upon its release in a very short amount of time, and become bored rather quickly.
while its true that blizzard has rapid fans (who do strange things like getting lvl 50 characters in D2 within 4 days), I think Blizzard is aware of this.
Sure, people breezed through D2, but did they stop playing? No. That's the beauty of the game. You finish the quests, but your now in pokemon land where you "gotta catch 'em all" when it comes to set items, rare items, crafted items, etc.
I imagine WOW will be the same way. Sure the content designers will probably find that some people have used up all the quest content, but there'll be something else in there to artificially keep the player interested.
I don't want to eat anything that's eaten something harmful to me, as that substance could be present in high enough concentrations to make me sick, or dead.
if all you ate were grass, you'd probably die. (as we really don't have the mechanisms to extract the nutrients out of grass). however, there's probably little wrong with eating a cow.
the glo in glofish is a protein that fluoresces under specific wavelengths. being a protein, it likely is broken down by the higher organism upon consumption, so that the animo acids can be reused to form proteins that the consuming organism needs to survive.
these are zebra fish. their natural habitat is the tropical waters of India. Chances are they are NOT finding local zebra fish to mate with anywhere in the U.S...
a number of organisms exist that glow or luminesce (various bacteria, fireflies, some squid, etc.). their predators do not glow or luminesce. hence, it's fairly obvious that if little timmy eats the glofish, he's not gonna glow.
For a more scientific perspective, I am currently researching the potential for DNA transport in the environment and its potential danger--think dead plants that have been modified in some way, (say pesticide resistance), and bits of their DNA being incorporated by bacteria. While the process can occur, i.e., bacteria can pick up DNA from outside the cell, the frequency with which it occurs is very small (this is called transformation).
We're not bacteria, and I don't have much knowledge of transformation in higher organisms, but a quick look at a microbiology book says that eukaryotic sells have a different mechanism (transfection), which seems to have an even smaller chance of success.
so, bottom line, it's a nonissue, at least in terms of people eating them. bacteria picking up the genes, however, is a bigger issue though...
Ask anyone what games they played on their Atari 2600 when they were younger, and invariably Combat will be included among the titles listed...
this couldn't be due to the fact that combat was actually included with the 2600, could it? those were the days, when consoles actually came with a game included. and an adequate number of controllers so you could actually play against someone without having to buy anything else...
combat and video olympics, my first 2 atari games. video olypmics ruled. it was pong x 10. tennis? sure looks like pong. soccer? ok, it's like pong, but with a bunch of blocking guys, staggered, that all move in synch. volleyball? 2 blockers at the back moving in synch, otherwise just like pong.
from what I know, Lego owns/developed Bionicle. Sure it might seem fairly lame from a "build anything your imagination can come up with" standpoint, but it's spawned a movie, which apparently made some money, as another is in production. Since Lego owns it, they aren't paying licensing fees, hence costs are cheaper and profit higher. I'd presume they're liscencing out (or profit sharing) bionicle to the animation studio doing the movie, and that's another source of income.
This guy must have shot out of some sort of bizzare-o world. I mean, Nintendo may be having a rough generation, but the rest of the industry seems to be just fine, and the overall numbers are still always better than last year.
not true. according to this random article, "Game sales, meanwhile, shriveled 9 percent to 336.7 billion yen." (when compared to the previous year, i presume). Combined with a 33% decline in console hardware sales for the year, mentioned in the article, the video game industry in Japan is going through hard times. Especially relevant given that no new hardware is planned for release for at least another year or 2... (i.e., hardware sales are only going to get worse.)
It does if all of your bandwidth is tied up by computers downloading the patch.
And at that point isn't it just slightly the duty of the event organizers to step in and call off CS and let the other events proceed? Of course, doing that would actually take leadership, something that apparently wasn't displayed...
So if I dont have Steam on any of my PC's why do I care? 4 friends of mine were in the CoD competition and am sad that they got screwed by Valve's system. That's all.
how exactly did Steam ruin the CoD tournament, seeing as how Call of Duty was developed by Infinity Ward (i.e., not Valve) and does not use Steam?
Ripping on Steam for a failing of the tournament organizers is extremely shortsighted. A power outage can take out a whole event, sure. But certainly not an online service used by only 1 of the many games being played at the event.
regardless of whether steam was or wasn't a problem (or even should have been a problem given the suggestions of other posters in this topic):
How in the world does Steam affect tournaments for all of the other non-steam games (q3, CoD, RtCW, ET, AA). One fubared game should not take down the rest of the event...
From what I've read in the various linked articles, this event was run about as poorly as possible. brackets weren't even established for most of the tournaments and that's somehow to be blamed on steam?
is it anything like breaking the wishbone of a chicken? as i seem to recall from my childhood, whoever used the least force when pulling on it, tended to end up with the bigger piece. hence, neither person would really pull on it and it never breaks...
you can pre-order it from any number of sites. EBgames has it coming out the end of March. However, anyone that pays any attention to these things, knows all the release dates are absolutely meaningless. Most high quality games (i.e., from high quality developers) have the "it's done when it's done" release date. When iD / Valve announces it's gone gold, then you can get it in 2 weeks. That's really the bottom line. This is a non-story.
But if you must pre-order, EBgames does have a cute figurine for Doom 3. (I preordered the harvest moon game for the gba, just to get a stuffed cow that's sitting on top of my computer, along with diablo and arthas...)
of course reading the actual text and finding the following line in the first paragraph: "This prohibition does not apply to a mobile digital terminal installed in a law enforcement vehicle." wouldn't provide any sort of answer to that question now, would it?
maybe slightly offtopic, but...
somewhere in one of the links on the razor site they mention that the mouse has the 4, 5 buttons (although there isn't a single picture in which they are obviously evident). How accessible are they given that they apparently seem that hidden?
My current MS optical (i presume it's the most recent version) has what I consider a fairly good 4,5 placement. They protrude nicely (little bumps), on the left side below the 1 button, just slightly north of where the thumb rests so there's no accidental pushing. Previous MS optical mice had horrible 4,5 buttons (flush with the side so you weren't sure if you had depressed it and of course exactly where your thumb rests; one version even had the 5 button on the right side).
Guess this is more about ergonomics than dpi, but that's probably just as important than how fast you can move thing.
a relative of mine is a semi-famous engineer in the field of fluid dynamics, in particular with how wind interacts with structures (he's on the committee for one of the building codes or standards). Several years back he had a client who had developed a better wind mill for this exact purpose (minimizing the bird chopper effect).
While I never saw the actual design, from what I understand the basics of it were a flat disc upon which the blades were radially fixed. Wind blows on the disc and is directed radially through channels formed by the blades. I guess the channels were angled such that the flow through them caused the disc to spin.
I can't imagine quite how it works, but said relative had tested it in a wind tunnel and said it worked and wasn't entirely screwball (he seemed somewhat impressed by it). The flat disc is far more visible to birds than a spinning blade. I have no idea though if it is used in practice today or if it even made it to market.
The question I have, though, is how many birds die yearly from colliding with tall buildings. Quite regularly, I'll find small birds (sparrows, finches ?) dead on the sidewalk next to a tall (15-20 storey) quite reflective building. Multiply this by the number of tall reflective buildings in the U.S, and I imagine more birds die from this than from wind turbines...
"Except for the fact that the guy purposely used the topic of WMDs just to gain publicity."
Of course he did. There's a reason there were 3 Amy Fisher movies a soon after the whole fiasco: current events sell. Why create a "find pirate pete's buried treasure" game that will get no attention, when you can create a "find the WMD" game that will get people intrigued.
Plus there's the whole aspect that this guy has crafted a puzzle that fits seamlessly inside of a current event. The game book comes with a bunch of clues, which prompt you to go searching through the reams of publicly available documents (that he provides) to try to track down the WMD, based on his clues. (because clearly if the government knew where they were, they would have found them by now). The author has decided where the WMD are and wants you to track them down using his clues and whatever information the government has declassified. This is kinda like the game associated with the A.I. movie (on a sorta dissimilar level).
As for your contention that the author is "is basicly tapping into the anti-U.S. government setiment thats going around right now to make a quick buck", I find that somewhat laughable. Bush currently is enjoying a major surge in popularity, with op-ed writers across the country predicting how badly this will hurt Dean. (I.E., any anti-government or anti-Bush sentiment that does exist is probably felt by a minority or at best half of the population.)
it's basically "I like puzzle / riddle games. A major current event involves finding weapons of mass destruction. So why not combine the two into a game I can sell to make money for law school."
anything else is reading far too much into it.
people that buy sports video games are going to be too busy playing them to go out and watch/play an actual sport. just like the people who bought the Return of the King game will be too busy to go to the movies today. that logic makes a whole hell of a lot of sense.
and then we can flip the tables pointing out how the tomb raider game killed the movie. so perhaps the next really bad football game from EA (or whoever makes bad sports games) will ruin the NFL...
on G4 (the all video game network). I rarely watch the show, but basically they get 2 teams of 4 players and pit them against each other in best of 3 matches. Games I've seen them play include Counterstrike, perhaps an Unreal and a Mechwarrior-type game. Plus live commentary (if I'm not mistaken Wil Wheaton was a commentator for a while, but last time I watched I don't recall him being on).
These teams clearly aren't pro and often don't even really use teamwork (occasionally they split screen between the game and the players, and I've never seen them communicating.)
It's a rather interesting show to watch if one gets tired of competitive freediving on the Outdoor Life Network.
totally offtopic, but...
regarding Bubbles: When chimps get older they get aggressive and really can't be handled by people anymore (unless you're Steve Irwin or any other of those nuts on Animal Planet). Jackson gave up Bubbles a while back, and the chimp is currently living at a facility in the north end of the San Fernando Valley, along with Geoffrey the giraffe (of Toys R Us commercial fame).
I had the quite unique experience of visiting this place last year, seeing where all the famous animal actors live. Bubbles was quite threatening, but the giraffe was loads of fun...