Oh, I dunno. The planet itself might, with the help of perhaps another ice age to drive the remnants of our cities into so much rubble.
I don't think it would take an ice age. I'd think 50-100 years without humans around for maintain our stuff and all our roads highways and such would be over run with grass. It would take much longer for wind, water, ice, plant erosion to completely destory our roads, but I'd think that under 10,000 most of our roads would be well on their way to being used as bedrock for the planet. I'd think the structures of our cities would take much longer for nature to tear down and level, but time would be on the planet's side.
Oh, yeah those stupid folk to use Nielson ranks to judge the rates for TV ads. I'm sorry, but in todays environment, everygame that has a multi-player on-line component could also have a builtin "Nielson rating". I've always disliked the results of the Nielson ratings. Of course, the Nielson folks really couldn't understand that today instead of using only 10K people as a base line, it is possible to use devices like Tivo, PSP, downloadable ads, and any on-line game to track the viewing/playing habits of millions.
"Classical" music is something to be appreciated. If one cannot appreciate it, oh well, their loss.
Classical music is just a style of music. I don't appreciate just because its older or uses a vast amount of performers. I just don't like most of it.
I'm sure there is music in the background of your video games, perhaps to provide a feel to the game or whatever. But to claim it is merely some ambient garble that really has no meaning is nonsense. It was created. It was composed by a musician--an artist--who has chosen video game music to be his medium.
Um, I don't buy a video game for its music. Good video game music shows up through series. It's not something magical just catchy or just not mindnumbely annoying. Think the mario background music or the classic FF music. I don't buy any video game because of music. It just happens to be there in the background. Honestly, I've wondered how different game sounds could be if instead of game background music they focus on sound effects.
Certainly the former (more specifically "pop music") sports much higher exposure, but had it been the latter, one who is not interested would find it blasé and really have little appreciation for it. Personally I feel that the majority of music that makes it to the radio are awful, simple, anesthetized, pathetic, factory-line created, template garbage that's purpose is sale not creativity (with exceptions, of course). I'll stick to NPR.
You know I'm sick and tired of hearing that music off the radio is weak compared other sources of music. I happen to actually like that mass produced factory music. I don't like cussing language that gets into modern music, but the actual music and the chorus parts I generally really like. I couldn't tell you a single title or artist that I like, but I could tell you which one's upon hearing if I like it or not.
I guess that's part of why "art" and "music" always bugged me through school. Most of it was centered around idenfitication of what was supposedly classical art/music. To be honest you have to go through a music/art program for your opinion to count to music folk otherwise you are just a popular consumer of the worst forms of music in their eyes. I've met one too many musicians with this opinion and its just bugged me. Just because they believe that they or their friends or their selected playlist is better to what I listen to off the radio doesn't mean it actually is true.
Acutally... they did it 20 years or so ago. It was named Final Fantasy 1.:)
Hey, FFI actually has a 2 features that I really liked the most out of the entire FF series. 1 the option of picking the class of each of the 4 characters. 2 I don't think that the hero was a stupid dork that needs sword shoved up his butt. I liked several off the more recent FF games gameplay wise, but plot wise, I've hated their male leads and their whole evil bad guy behind evil empire is trying to cut down the scared mana tree and use the life force of the planet as a non-renewable fuel source. I'm sorry I hated the whole damn social structure of the world of Spira in FFX. (It was a fun game, but I wanted to slaughter the Tidus, Yuna, their church, and most of the supporting cast.) I guess that I'd be happy if they had FF worlds let me pick which FF characters and have 5-7 kingdoms that are always having either border skirmishes or little wars.
I don't need the entire world falling appart to have fun. I just need alittle plot, some conflicts and some tasks to do some optional and some needed to advance the plot.
Nice job on the bias/assumption. I, and a ton of people I know, play the game SOLELY for the cutscenes, storyline, voiceovers, etc. The gameplay is more of a bonus for us. It all comes down to preference. I play through FF games just to experience the story. We play games as a form of interactive movie, if you will. And if this will enhance our experience, good! Just because new technology doesn't enhance YOUR experience, it doesn't mean it doesn't enhance ANYONE'S experience.
I walk away really mixed with cut-scenes. I just don't see the need other than to add glitter and shinies. I've liked FF and KH cutscenes, but you know my favorite part about KH2? Pressing pause and skip to get through it all. I'd really like a similiar feature for FF summons. Once upon a time FF summons were cool to look at or use. Summons have gotten to be too much trouble to bother with. You have to wait through really long squences just for damage effects similiar to your main party members. I don't mind a long summon scene during a boss fight or cut-scene, but waiting through them things through random encounters for effects similiar to using your other characters just gets annoying after the 20th or 30th or 40th time. I'd rather them work on using a much better physics engine and instead of just hitting random monster with sword X and having a small handful of effects to cycle through, having a model of the enemy with arms being cut or burnt off being slightly different each time.
Wii looks to be moving in the direction that I'd like. I'm thinking that it's remote will just detect movements though and not accurately follow that swords path through the exact path through the monster. I can envision playing FF and having variable damage to do how well you perform with your sword or staff rather than just your stats. Its an entire area that we could explore more.
I was hoping that the power of the next-gen consoles would mean developers finally stop using cut-scene movies and do everything in the game engine. Why waste disk space on movie files when doing it with the game engine is smaller and better for immersion?
I can't wait till a FF game does everything with just the game engine rather than having any cut-scene movies. FFX, FFX-2, KH, KH2 are all really good looking, but they all have cut-scenes. I'd love for them to use the game engine and instead of having a cut-scene movie having a playable event.
Legal immigration and hispanic birthrates are what contribute to the growth. In some states (ie Utah) Caucasian birthrate is above replacement level, but in most states it is not. Europe has the same problem, Caucasian people are pretty much dying out. African Americans aren't much better, as they are right around replacement rate (2.1), and I suspect in a few years they will fall below it.
My wife and I did our part and have 2 kids. There has always been a part of me that wants a family with 8-10 kids, but do you have any idea how much that would cost? Nope, I can't afford it and we got fixed so we aren't breeding any more.
I predict within 15-20 years by our next major war one of our developed countries will use a bio agent that basically just sterilizes the enemies civilian side with no other affects. With a "weapon" like that, you just smuggle it into your enemies' country spray their population and wait 50-80 years. They could recover, but likely they'll be hit by massive depopulation.
I'm just waiting for us to be honest and bring back the concept of clans and houses as being more important than immediate family or the individual. Any discussion about long term breeding patterns is basically just to insure that my offspring has similiar offspring to find and mate with. Anyone remember in any of the Asimov works where "white" and "black" races have both basically been "mixed" out of the population due to interbreeding? Given enough time I'd think that a version of that would happen. Of course you could get clans that try to get their childern only to breed within the clan or with their social peers.
Music is not a commodity, it is an art. It is not meant to be sold, it is meant to be heard and played. It is meant to be shared and it will be. Try as it may, the corporate music industry cannot stop this movement. I look forward to its rapture.
What century did you walk out of? Music has hardly ever been about art. It's always been about leeching much from sponsors. Usually they were rich nobles, merchants, or priests. You know what. This all really started about copyright over song lyrics and sheet music. Those with the contracts with rich folks wanted a percentage from anyone that tried to use their work. It's amazing that we've actually have all the different types of music today. It isn't because of the musical industry. Musicans have always been about making money and living comfortably off it and teaching tone-deaf rich brats how to play passing music to be considered cultural.
How ever you dislike the concept, music is a commodity. (I'm not sure if commodity is the proper economic term, but it works for me.) The only reason that you think music is an art is because of the centuries hold that they've had over impressing into the minds of the rich that to be cultured that you need to be able to play or identify "classical" music. My culture is different than that. Slashdot and webcomics are part of my culture. Music is part of my culture as being in the background of video games and what's on the radio on the way home. In the 1500-1700s music may have been high end culture, but through the 1950-current music is now universal. Today you don't have sponsor you own musican to write & play a love song for your girl friend/wife/mistress. Today, everyone has access to music. Maybe musicans would be happy if some one did manage to rig a system for personalized love song writing/playing on an affordable scale.
So much of the infrastructure is built around the idea it is very cheap to transport goods over 100s of miles.
I've long thought why haven't come up with some/any means of using all those 1000s of miles of roads to produce energy. If we just ran water with anti-freeze through pipes in our roadways, how much heat energy could be collected from that resource? Roads are outside in light and maintained why can't we give them an additional use and make energy collectors out of them as well? The first company that comes up with a solar panel coating/spray process that you can apply to the tops of our interstates and still drive safely will eliminate most our energy problems.
If you've got fifty million idiots congregated at one place, many of whom are always-horny teenagers, you'd expect more than a handful of predators to try to take advantage of the system.
Um, I'd expect that under 18 pregancies would be on the rise as it would be infinitely easier for all those horny teenagers to find each other and actually have sex.
Actually, not exactly, natural selection just requires that the problem doesn't get so bad that it has a significant impact on the ability of the species as a whole to survive. It's perfectly compatible with natural selection if, say, 2% of the population, despite being totally innocent, meets some horrible unfair death, as long as the other 98% gets along fine. If that's enough to keep the species going, then it's all that natural selection requires.
I think there's a common misconception that evolution is a force which is so powerful that it eliminates all imperfection. That's not necessarily the case. It only eliminates perfections that threaten the ability of the species to do the minimum necessary to survive. All other imperfections are relatively unimportant, at least as far as evolution is concerned.
I read your post and really thought about it for a second. Natural selection doesn't care if there is a yearly flood, hurricane, earth quake, torando, thunderstorm, or plague that kills off 1/4th to 9/10th of the local population. As long as there are "any" survivors that breed natural selection is just fine and happy. Natural selection doesn't care about criminals or crimes at all except 100% death rates. If there was a regular process that killed 98% of life on the planet, as long as that 2% survive and breed natural selection doesn't care about those that died.
Now let's repeat after me, natural selection is not a person like Discworld's Death.
I'm quite glad for this guy; but law enforcement's malaise still cheeses my off a bit. Indeed, writing a Perl script to spider MySpace is not rocket science -- I whipped one up six months ago as part of a graduate school project. Immediately sensing the possibilities of catching people like this, I contacted several people in the CIA and FBI through my school. After several painfully blunt explanations, none of them could grasp how the script could be used in their agencies. Governments and major corporations wonder why China can get into "secure" sites and "kids" write viruses like "ILoveYou" or "Blaster". It's because they're so monolithically slow, stupid, and blind that they can neither see nor react to their environments. Maybe law enforcement will "wise up" and start offering prize money / sponsoring competitions, just like the recent Bio-Tech news here on Slashdot.
What's really bad, is that your examples are for national level organizations. Did you try your local police department? They'd take almost what ever they can get. The problem is do your means gather enough evidence and can be legally put forth in court? Your local pd has their hands tied with respect to alot of neat police IT tech because its near useless to them becaue its either expensive ($20-$30K per unit) or the results can't be used as court evidence for one reason or another. Find your local police department and ask for detective assigned to sex offender registration and show them your fancy tools. They'll run them privately, but there are very strict limits about what they are able to legally do as well. Remember this though, your same sexoffender id script could be used to scan for any list of names/addresses that you have.
And then there is the whole issue about not talking to stangers in the first place; apparently his parents have completely missed the boat in that area. Scary.
You know the whole don't talk to strangers thing has always bugged me. I'm antisocial by nature hearing don't talk to strangers just reinforced it though. Life isn't safe. Kids need to learn to socalize with strangers and what is and isn't proper to talk about and in what forums it is and isn't proper. Briefly I played with the thought of creating a personal webpage or maybe even a blog, but the entire concept revolves around publishing your private life to strangers! I find it funny that slashdot loves to complain about lack of privacy when the internet/blogs/webpages have made it socially accepted to lay out your entire life for everyone to read. I don't think that its a good idea, but what I think doesn't matter. When the thousands of myspace teens get to be my age and have always had a myspace page, they'll think that's normal.
I still keep up my original yahoo email account mainly to sign up for random forums that require a registered username, password and e-mail before you can post. I wonder that these folks will think about their own myspace pages in 10-15 years time.
It is patently obvious that the Rizon admins are FULLY aware that they have dozens, if not hundreds, of illegal filesharing groups that are using botnets to set up fserves, attack other systems for more bots, etc. They're doing jack shit about it (and in fact, they're making it easier- they now support SSL connections) and I think it's time someone sued them to hell and back. It's time IRC operators were taught that you can't knowingly support criminal activity, and that if users report hackings- they need to look into said reports and act on them. I also think it's time IRC traffic was considered "highly suspicous" and monitored by ISPs for fserve commands and such; fserves have no real legitimate purpose today, except illegal filesharing.
Um, it seems that you are willing to throw out the baby with the bathwater. The problem is that if you had evidence that you were hacked then you should have gone to the police and had the police shut down/monitor all of Rizon. It isn't your job to be the police. The sad thing is that most police don't have a clue about this level of crime. Really this is something that the FBI needs to have a special unit to handle. You could be hacked from anywhere and really your local police department won't have the manpower/equipment/knowledge to go after this set of criminals. You know if you really had it in for Rizon, you should just aleart the MPAA and RIAA that Rizon is a haven for pirates and let them do the legal work of takening down the company.
This crap is criminal. Crimes like this are sheltered by discussions about philosophy, politics, jurisdiction, and technology. If people would stop discussing and arguing, and start working together on the problem, it could be eliminated in under 24 months.
But convincing people to work together is impossible, so we might as well get used to it.
There are few things that make me mad enough that I wish that our government had a hit squad out against some folks. Bot-nets, spammers, virus writers, and spy-ware creators all fall into the file. I wouldn't care if the US government went and disappeared each one of them that they find. Heck, disappearing them and just keeping them in a jail ceil without trail for the rest of their lives is much, much kinder than the emotions and penalites that I'd like these guys to go through. I'd rather them get really tortured, but I can live with them never ever allowed near any computer system. Oh, here is an idea. Wrist bands with explosives in there that if they detect anything electronic no more arms or hands. Nah, to indiscriminate and there are far too many electronic sources for them to avoid to make that a useful approach.
So you are basically saying that every major home appliance that I could think off off the top of my head is already at its pick except for HVAC and refrigerators due to hitting limits in our current tech base? I'll buy that. Looking at the list, I forgot one little one water heaters as well. Actually, there are improvements and better performing water heaters now. They just aren't required for use in new buildings though. I've liked the idea of those tankless water heaters that only heat water right when you use it. That device is supposed to save alot in water heating costs over a year. (Before I had come across that, the cheapest water heating option was using a solar pre heater, but that was for only part of the year, but that part of the year you'd have near free hot water.)
You know refrigators could most likely be improved if they were designed to interface with HVAC and dump their waste heat outside the building instead of within the dwealing. (As I understand the basic concept of the refrigator is to move the heat from within the box into the surrounding air of the kitchen. We never really think about it but just having an indoor refrigator is like having a small heater going 24/7. I'd have to look at the numbers of new modern refrigators to see if this is that big of an issue. You know, the same basic concept could be applied to ovens and venting all that waste heat either outdoors or better into some thermal storage medium for winter usage.
I keep 2 ceiling fans constantly going. You imply that they are as good as they are going to get. I'll buy that except that's why we need the government to come and say to manufactures hey we'd like you to improve by 1-2% or 2-5% per year. Let's face it if we actually came out with a complete range of household products that used only 1 watt each, we'd still have to wait about a generation for all the existing hardware to start failing before people will replace it with the new super efficient models. That's more of a cost issue though. I couldn't afford to replace the major appliances in my house without some major multiyear pre planning.
Maybe I'm getting old, but the idea of playing any video game nonstop for two hours (or more!) strikes me as ridiculously uncomfortable.
It's all the chair. With the right chair, working 8 hours at work is a breeze. With the the right futon chair, playing 5-6 hours of FF is a breeze. It sounds like the excerise part will be optional and that you don't have to excerise that much if you don't want to. Well, 4-5 hours of light excerise is still excerise. If I'm going to be doing medium or heavy exercise for 4-5 hours, I might loose alot of weight.
Um, it would be nice if they could encourage 1 Watt as a usage goal while the device is on as well. I can understand things like irons, dishwashers, dryers, refrigators, ovens, garabe disposals, vacuum cleaners, and heating/air conditioning taking up a big amount of energy while in use. I have no clue how much it costs to run my dishwasher each cycle or say over a month's time.
I'd love for the government to work toward's most devices using 1 watt or less. Those walkaround phones, TVs, ceiling fans are a few things that I would like it if they used 1 watt or less during operation. Heck, how much electricity do each of the new next gen. game systems use during play and during standby?
Um, I'm not sure that was a fair test for the Wii. I mean how many games do you only play for 2 hours? If they really wanted to fairly test it, then they should have had 4-5 hour testing times every weekday and then two 15-18 hour weekend sessions. Come on who only plays for 2 hours at a time? During school, I'd play video games from 4:00-9:00 thats about 5 hours with about 30 min for dinner somewhere in there and homework during the hour of 9:00-10:00 during Star Trek.
As an adult, I don't play nearly as much. I get home around 5:30-6:00 and it takes 30 min to an 1 hour to fix dinner and eat. So say 6:00-10:00 or 6:00-11:00 is left for video game time. That's 4-5 hours. I've been drooling over the Wii, but will I kill over after getting it and Zelda or Mario?
On a side note, if I don't die from over excerise, I might get fit.
I think the stupid stigma has long vanish for anyone who's ever played Dance Dance Revolution or Guitar Hero... best prime those friends who still have fears.
But, but, it's better to watch those with those fears than those without such fears.
Will it ever be possible to have a rational discussion about energy production?
Um no. I'm still waiting for hydrogen blimps to make a comeback. Hydrogen blimps actually had an entire industry going, which one PR negative shut down. It would be like the Titanic sinking ending all cruiselines. It's a stupid concept, but apparently we'll do it over a few select topics. Chernobly and Three Mile Island have poped up in every single discussion of nuclear tech that I've ever read/been invovled with.
Think of how many thousands die in auto accidents a year. Well, if we carried this anology over, the first early auto manufactures should have had a huge anti-auto lobby and killed the industry. Today we have safety standards and drives can survive through accidents. We should have taken that mental framset to the problems of hydrogen blimps and nuclear energy, but it's not going to happen.
If oh-so-wonderful France can run 70% of its energy off nuclear power, then why can't the US? In the US we have a lot of lunatics who would rather have coal plants than nuclear plants. I'm assuming Russia, which has always been much more creative in nuclear technology than the US, that the only obstacle to nuclear power is coming up with the money to fund it.
The US can be just as creative with nuclear tech as the Russians. What's the difference? Our government and public has to listen or tune out the anti-nuke lobby/crowd. The old USSR could just have them shot or disappeared. From what I've heard lately Russia is much, much better, but it's a popular belief that the Russian mob controls most of the Russian government and several key industries/businesses. I don't know if this is just a US opinion or if it actually thought so in Russia. Now, if you lived it a country where you believed that your mob was running things, would you be as ready to protest as those in the EU or US would be?
You could say similiar things about China. You know what's really scary? I'd generally say that the EU protestors are more successful on average than those in the US, but our anti-nuclear lobby has nearlly frozen most of our civilian nuclear tech. It sounds like the nuclear subs and aircraft carriers could be our more civilian adaptable military techs, but I don't see the US having any nuclear powered cruise lines so maybe not.
If I sell something, it then belongs to you: you are responsible for its maintenance, use, and disposal, unless otherwise specified in a contract.
When the law starts saying I'm responsible for anything happens to an object I've sold in the future, where does it end? How about people being responsible for their own property?
I think of this more along the lines of like HP toner cartridges. Every single HP toner cartiridge that we buy has a UPS sticker for return of the old cartiridge in the box of the new one. When we change toner, we just stick the old one in the box stick the label on it and let UPS pick it up when they drop by again. This works great for toner. For anything above $500 we have fixed assest tags and paperwork to fill out. I guess if I could ship off an old Dell in the box of a new Dell after I'm done with the paper work that it could work. We mainly put them into storage until we have about 20-30 really outdated computers and then we auction them off in alot so we have more storage space. I think that it could work for a variety of consumables/easily recycables by the manufacters, but some things like canned food we need to just throw in the the trash. Recycling and personal trash sorting is a religion for some people. We should do recycling and trash sorting on an industrial scale not just a personal one though. Some things like cans and paper it makes abit of sense to do some basic sorting, but do we really want to sort through our kitchen wastes on a personal level? We really should re-think the whole landfill idea. We should have companies that attempt to recycling everything that hits a landfill. It's been mentioned that cars are used for scrap metal and most metal is recycled somewhat. I'd think that over the past 15 years that we've made big improvements in glass, plastic and paper recycling. That's really just a start though. I and others don't want to have to personally sort through most our household wastes. I'd rather some else get the task of removing/reducing landfill wastes to zero. Ideally we should think of a landfill as temp. 1-3 month holding area for trash to be sorted and set off/recycling/used as raw materials for other companies. I'm slightly green minded, but I think when companies like Walmart start to see the economic benefits of near zero waste we would drastically improve our waste handling abilities. Right now it isn't profitable to recycle/sort through our landfills. Maybe that's a good thing in the long term. Maybe in 50-100 years when US labor is as cheap as current Chinese labor it will be profitable for the Chinese to hire US labor to properly sort/recycle all the "wastes" that have pilled up in our current landfills.
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Oh, I dunno. The planet itself might, with the help of perhaps another ice age to drive the remnants of our cities into so much rubble.
I don't think it would take an ice age. I'd think 50-100 years without humans around for maintain our stuff and all our roads highways and such would be over run with grass. It would take much longer for wind, water, ice, plant erosion to completely destory our roads, but I'd think that under 10,000 most of our roads would be well on their way to being used as bedrock for the planet. I'd think the structures of our cities would take much longer for nature to tear down and level, but time would be on the planet's side.
Oh, yeah those stupid folk to use Nielson ranks to judge the rates for TV ads. I'm sorry, but in todays environment, everygame that has a multi-player on-line component could also have a builtin "Nielson rating". I've always disliked the results of the Nielson ratings. Of course, the Nielson folks really couldn't understand that today instead of using only 10K people as a base line, it is possible to use devices like Tivo, PSP, downloadable ads, and any on-line game to track the viewing/playing habits of millions.
"Classical" music is something to be appreciated. If one cannot appreciate it, oh well, their loss.
Classical music is just a style of music. I don't appreciate just because its older or uses a vast amount of performers. I just don't like most of it.
I'm sure there is music in the background of your video games, perhaps to provide a feel to the game or whatever. But to claim it is merely some ambient garble that really has no meaning is nonsense. It was created. It was composed by a musician--an artist--who has chosen video game music to be his medium.
Um, I don't buy a video game for its music. Good video game music shows up through series. It's not something magical just catchy or just not mindnumbely annoying. Think the mario background music or the classic FF music. I don't buy any video game because of music. It just happens to be there in the background. Honestly, I've wondered how different game sounds could be if instead of game background music they focus on sound effects.
Certainly the former (more specifically "pop music") sports much higher exposure, but had it been the latter, one who is not interested would find it blasé and really have little appreciation for it. Personally I feel that the majority of music that makes it to the radio are awful, simple, anesthetized, pathetic, factory-line created, template garbage that's purpose is sale not creativity (with exceptions, of course). I'll stick to NPR.
You know I'm sick and tired of hearing that music off the radio is weak compared other sources of music. I happen to actually like that mass produced factory music. I don't like cussing language that gets into modern music, but the actual music and the chorus parts I generally really like. I couldn't tell you a single title or artist that I like, but I could tell you which one's upon hearing if I like it or not.
I guess that's part of why "art" and "music" always bugged me through school. Most of it was centered around idenfitication of what was supposedly classical art/music. To be honest you have to go through a music/art program for your opinion to count to music folk otherwise you are just a popular consumer of the worst forms of music in their eyes. I've met one too many musicians with this opinion and its just bugged me. Just because they believe that they or their friends or their selected playlist is better to what I listen to off the radio doesn't mean it actually is true.
Acutally... they did it 20 years or so ago. It was named Final Fantasy 1. :)
Hey, FFI actually has a 2 features that I really liked the most out of the entire FF series. 1 the option of picking the class of each of the 4 characters. 2 I don't think that the hero was a stupid dork that needs sword shoved up his butt. I liked several off the more recent FF games gameplay wise, but plot wise, I've hated their male leads and their whole evil bad guy behind evil empire is trying to cut down the scared mana tree and use the life force of the planet as a non-renewable fuel source. I'm sorry I hated the whole damn social structure of the world of Spira in FFX. (It was a fun game, but I wanted to slaughter the Tidus, Yuna, their church, and most of the supporting cast.) I guess that I'd be happy if they had FF worlds let me pick which FF characters and have 5-7 kingdoms that are always having either border skirmishes or little wars.
I don't need the entire world falling appart to have fun. I just need alittle plot, some conflicts and some tasks to do some optional and some needed to advance the plot.
Nice job on the bias/assumption. I, and a ton of people I know, play the game SOLELY for the cutscenes, storyline, voiceovers, etc. The gameplay is more of a bonus for us. It all comes down to preference. I play through FF games just to experience the story. We play games as a form of interactive movie, if you will. And if this will enhance our experience, good! Just because new technology doesn't enhance YOUR experience, it doesn't mean it doesn't enhance ANYONE'S experience.
I walk away really mixed with cut-scenes. I just don't see the need other than to add glitter and shinies. I've liked FF and KH cutscenes, but you know my favorite part about KH2? Pressing pause and skip to get through it all. I'd really like a similiar feature for FF summons. Once upon a time FF summons were cool to look at or use. Summons have gotten to be too much trouble to bother with. You have to wait through really long squences just for damage effects similiar to your main party members. I don't mind a long summon scene during a boss fight or cut-scene, but waiting through them things through random encounters for effects similiar to using your other characters just gets annoying after the 20th or 30th or 40th time. I'd rather them work on using a much better physics engine and instead of just hitting random monster with sword X and having a small handful of effects to cycle through, having a model of the enemy with arms being cut or burnt off being slightly different each time.
Wii looks to be moving in the direction that I'd like. I'm thinking that it's remote will just detect movements though and not accurately follow that swords path through the exact path through the monster. I can envision playing FF and having variable damage to do how well you perform with your sword or staff rather than just your stats. Its an entire area that we could explore more.
I was hoping that the power of the next-gen consoles would mean developers finally stop using cut-scene movies and do everything in the game engine. Why waste disk space on movie files when doing it with the game engine is smaller and better for immersion?
I can't wait till a FF game does everything with just the game engine rather than having any cut-scene movies. FFX, FFX-2, KH, KH2 are all really good looking, but they all have cut-scenes. I'd love for them to use the game engine and instead of having a cut-scene movie having a playable event.
Legal immigration and hispanic birthrates are what contribute to the growth. In some states (ie Utah) Caucasian birthrate is above replacement level, but in most states it is not. Europe has the same problem, Caucasian people are pretty much dying out. African Americans aren't much better, as they are right around replacement rate (2.1), and I suspect in a few years they will fall below it.
My wife and I did our part and have 2 kids. There has always been a part of me that wants a family with 8-10 kids, but do you have any idea how much that would cost? Nope, I can't afford it and we got fixed so we aren't breeding any more.
I predict within 15-20 years by our next major war one of our developed countries will use a bio agent that basically just sterilizes the enemies civilian side with no other affects. With a "weapon" like that, you just smuggle it into your enemies' country spray their population and wait 50-80 years. They could recover, but likely they'll be hit by massive depopulation.
I'm just waiting for us to be honest and bring back the concept of clans and houses as being more important than immediate family or the individual. Any discussion about long term breeding patterns is basically just to insure that my offspring has similiar offspring to find and mate with. Anyone remember in any of the Asimov works where "white" and "black" races have both basically been "mixed" out of the population due to interbreeding? Given enough time I'd think that a version of that would happen. Of course you could get clans that try to get their childern only to breed within the clan or with their social peers.
Music is not a commodity, it is an art. It is not meant to be sold, it is meant to be heard and played. It is meant to be shared and it will be. Try as it may, the corporate music industry cannot stop this movement. I look forward to its rapture.
What century did you walk out of? Music has hardly ever been about art. It's always been about leeching much from sponsors. Usually they were rich nobles, merchants, or priests. You know what. This all really started about copyright over song lyrics and sheet music. Those with the contracts with rich folks wanted a percentage from anyone that tried to use their work. It's amazing that we've actually have all the different types of music today. It isn't because of the musical industry. Musicans have always been about making money and living comfortably off it and teaching tone-deaf rich brats how to play passing music to be considered cultural.
How ever you dislike the concept, music is a commodity. (I'm not sure if commodity is the proper economic term, but it works for me.) The only reason that you think music is an art is because of the centuries hold that they've had over impressing into the minds of the rich that to be cultured that you need to be able to play or identify "classical" music. My culture is different than that. Slashdot and webcomics are part of my culture. Music is part of my culture as being in the background of video games and what's on the radio on the way home. In the 1500-1700s music may have been high end culture, but through the 1950-current music is now universal. Today you don't have sponsor you own musican to write & play a love song for your girl friend/wife/mistress. Today, everyone has access to music. Maybe musicans would be happy if some one did manage to rig a system for personalized love song writing/playing on an affordable scale.
So much of the infrastructure is built around the idea it is very cheap to transport goods over 100s of miles.
I've long thought why haven't come up with some/any means of using all those 1000s of miles of roads to produce energy. If we just ran water with anti-freeze through pipes in our roadways, how much heat energy could be collected from that resource? Roads are outside in light and maintained why can't we give them an additional use and make energy collectors out of them as well? The first company that comes up with a solar panel coating/spray process that you can apply to the tops of our interstates and still drive safely will eliminate most our energy problems.
What's the list price for Adobe? MS could just buy the company and reorganize or downsize selected managers.
If you've got fifty million idiots congregated at one place, many of whom are always-horny teenagers, you'd expect more than a handful of predators to try to take advantage of the system.
Um, I'd expect that under 18 pregancies would be on the rise as it would be infinitely easier for all those horny teenagers to find each other and actually have sex.
Actually, not exactly, natural selection just requires that the problem doesn't get so bad that it has a significant impact on the ability of the species as a whole to survive. It's perfectly compatible with natural selection if, say, 2% of the population, despite being totally innocent, meets some horrible unfair death, as long as the other 98% gets along fine. If that's enough to keep the species going, then it's all that natural selection requires.
I think there's a common misconception that evolution is a force which is so powerful that it eliminates all imperfection. That's not necessarily the case. It only eliminates perfections that threaten the ability of the species to do the minimum necessary to survive. All other imperfections are relatively unimportant, at least as far as evolution is concerned.
I read your post and really thought about it for a second. Natural selection doesn't care if there is a yearly flood, hurricane, earth quake, torando, thunderstorm, or plague that kills off 1/4th to 9/10th of the local population. As long as there are "any" survivors that breed natural selection is just fine and happy. Natural selection doesn't care about criminals or crimes at all except 100% death rates. If there was a regular process that killed 98% of life on the planet, as long as that 2% survive and breed natural selection doesn't care about those that died.
Now let's repeat after me, natural selection is not a person like Discworld's Death.
I'm quite glad for this guy; but law enforcement's malaise still cheeses my off a bit. Indeed, writing a Perl script to spider MySpace is not rocket science -- I whipped one up six months ago as part of a graduate school project. Immediately sensing the possibilities of catching people like this, I contacted several people in the CIA and FBI through my school. After several painfully blunt explanations, none of them could grasp how the script could be used in their agencies. Governments and major corporations wonder why China can get into "secure" sites and "kids" write viruses like "ILoveYou" or "Blaster". It's because they're so monolithically slow, stupid, and blind that they can neither see nor react to their environments. Maybe law enforcement will "wise up" and start offering prize money / sponsoring competitions, just like the recent Bio-Tech news here on Slashdot.
What's really bad, is that your examples are for national level organizations. Did you try your local police department? They'd take almost what ever they can get. The problem is do your means gather enough evidence and can be legally put forth in court? Your local pd has their hands tied with respect to alot of neat police IT tech because its near useless to them becaue its either expensive ($20-$30K per unit) or the results can't be used as court evidence for one reason or another. Find your local police department and ask for detective assigned to sex offender registration and show them your fancy tools. They'll run them privately, but there are very strict limits about what they are able to legally do as well. Remember this though, your same sexoffender id script could be used to scan for any list of names/addresses that you have.
And then there is the whole issue about not talking to stangers in the first place; apparently his parents have completely missed the boat in that area. Scary.
You know the whole don't talk to strangers thing has always bugged me. I'm antisocial by nature hearing don't talk to strangers just reinforced it though. Life isn't safe. Kids need to learn to socalize with strangers and what is and isn't proper to talk about and in what forums it is and isn't proper. Briefly I played with the thought of creating a personal webpage or maybe even a blog, but the entire concept revolves around publishing your private life to strangers! I find it funny that slashdot loves to complain about lack of privacy when the internet/blogs/webpages have made it socially accepted to lay out your entire life for everyone to read. I don't think that its a good idea, but what I think doesn't matter. When the thousands of myspace teens get to be my age and have always had a myspace page, they'll think that's normal.
I still keep up my original yahoo email account mainly to sign up for random forums that require a registered username, password and e-mail before you can post. I wonder that these folks will think about their own myspace pages in 10-15 years time.
Yeah but wait til Google becomes too powerful, the only option we'll have to shut the computers down will be to black out the sky :-/
That's what paint ball was made for.
It is patently obvious that the Rizon admins are FULLY aware that they have dozens, if not hundreds, of illegal filesharing groups that are using botnets to set up fserves, attack other systems for more bots, etc. They're doing jack shit about it (and in fact, they're making it easier- they now support SSL connections) and I think it's time someone sued them to hell and back. It's time IRC operators were taught that you can't knowingly support criminal activity, and that if users report hackings- they need to look into said reports and act on them. I also think it's time IRC traffic was considered "highly suspicous" and monitored by ISPs for fserve commands and such; fserves have no real legitimate purpose today, except illegal filesharing.
Um, it seems that you are willing to throw out the baby with the bathwater. The problem is that if you had evidence that you were hacked then you should have gone to the police and had the police shut down/monitor all of Rizon. It isn't your job to be the police. The sad thing is that most police don't have a clue about this level of crime. Really this is something that the FBI needs to have a special unit to handle. You could be hacked from anywhere and really your local police department won't have the manpower/equipment/knowledge to go after this set of criminals. You know if you really had it in for Rizon, you should just aleart the MPAA and RIAA that Rizon is a haven for pirates and let them do the legal work of takening down the company.
This crap is criminal. Crimes like this are sheltered by discussions about philosophy, politics, jurisdiction, and technology. If people would stop discussing and arguing, and start working together on the problem, it could be eliminated in under 24 months.
But convincing people to work together is impossible, so we might as well get used to it.
There are few things that make me mad enough that I wish that our government had a hit squad out against some folks. Bot-nets, spammers, virus writers, and spy-ware creators all fall into the file. I wouldn't care if the US government went and disappeared each one of them that they find. Heck, disappearing them and just keeping them in a jail ceil without trail for the rest of their lives is much, much kinder than the emotions and penalites that I'd like these guys to go through. I'd rather them get really tortured, but I can live with them never ever allowed near any computer system. Oh, here is an idea. Wrist bands with explosives in there that if they detect anything electronic no more arms or hands. Nah, to indiscriminate and there are far too many electronic sources for them to avoid to make that a useful approach.
So you are basically saying that every major home appliance that I could think off off the top of my head is already at its pick except for HVAC and refrigerators due to hitting limits in our current tech base? I'll buy that. Looking at the list, I forgot one little one water heaters as well. Actually, there are improvements and better performing water heaters now. They just aren't required for use in new buildings though. I've liked the idea of those tankless water heaters that only heat water right when you use it. That device is supposed to save alot in water heating costs over a year. (Before I had come across that, the cheapest water heating option was using a solar pre heater, but that was for only part of the year, but that part of the year you'd have near free hot water.)
You know refrigators could most likely be improved if they were designed to interface with HVAC and dump their waste heat outside the building instead of within the dwealing. (As I understand the basic concept of the refrigator is to move the heat from within the box into the surrounding air of the kitchen. We never really think about it but just having an indoor refrigator is like having a small heater going 24/7. I'd have to look at the numbers of new modern refrigators to see if this is that big of an issue. You know, the same basic concept could be applied to ovens and venting all that waste heat either outdoors or better into some thermal storage medium for winter usage.
I keep 2 ceiling fans constantly going. You imply that they are as good as they are going to get. I'll buy that except that's why we need the government to come and say to manufactures hey we'd like you to improve by 1-2% or 2-5% per year. Let's face it if we actually came out with a complete range of household products that used only 1 watt each, we'd still have to wait about a generation for all the existing hardware to start failing before people will replace it with the new super efficient models. That's more of a cost issue though. I couldn't afford to replace the major appliances in my house without some major multiyear pre planning.
Maybe I'm getting old, but the idea of playing any video game nonstop for two hours (or more!) strikes me as ridiculously uncomfortable.
It's all the chair. With the right chair, working 8 hours at work is a breeze. With the the right futon chair, playing 5-6 hours of FF is a breeze. It sounds like the excerise part will be optional and that you don't have to excerise that much if you don't want to. Well, 4-5 hours of light excerise is still excerise. If I'm going to be doing medium or heavy exercise for 4-5 hours, I might loose alot of weight.
Um, it would be nice if they could encourage 1 Watt as a usage goal while the device is on as well. I can understand things like irons, dishwashers, dryers, refrigators, ovens, garabe disposals, vacuum cleaners, and heating/air conditioning taking up a big amount of energy while in use. I have no clue how much it costs to run my dishwasher each cycle or say over a month's time.
I'd love for the government to work toward's most devices using 1 watt or less. Those walkaround phones, TVs, ceiling fans are a few things that I would like it if they used 1 watt or less during operation. Heck, how much electricity do each of the new next gen. game systems use during play and during standby?
Um, I'm not sure that was a fair test for the Wii. I mean how many games do you only play for 2 hours? If they really wanted to fairly test it, then they should have had 4-5 hour testing times every weekday and then two 15-18 hour weekend sessions. Come on who only plays for 2 hours at a time? During school, I'd play video games from 4:00-9:00 thats about 5 hours with about 30 min for dinner somewhere in there and homework during the hour of 9:00-10:00 during Star Trek.
As an adult, I don't play nearly as much. I get home around 5:30-6:00 and it takes 30 min to an 1 hour to fix dinner and eat. So say 6:00-10:00 or 6:00-11:00 is left for video game time. That's 4-5 hours. I've been drooling over the Wii, but will I kill over after getting it and Zelda or Mario?
On a side note, if I don't die from over excerise, I might get fit.
I think the stupid stigma has long vanish for anyone who's ever played Dance Dance Revolution or Guitar Hero... best prime those friends who still have fears.
But, but, it's better to watch those with those fears than those without such fears.
Will it ever be possible to have a rational discussion about energy production?
Um no. I'm still waiting for hydrogen blimps to make a comeback. Hydrogen blimps actually had an entire industry going, which one PR negative shut down. It would be like the Titanic sinking ending all cruiselines. It's a stupid concept, but apparently we'll do it over a few select topics. Chernobly and Three Mile Island have poped up in every single discussion of nuclear tech that I've ever read/been invovled with.
Think of how many thousands die in auto accidents a year. Well, if we carried this anology over, the first early auto manufactures should have had a huge anti-auto lobby and killed the industry. Today we have safety standards and drives can survive through accidents. We should have taken that mental framset to the problems of hydrogen blimps and nuclear energy, but it's not going to happen.
If oh-so-wonderful France can run 70% of its energy off nuclear power, then why can't the US? In the US we have a lot of lunatics who would rather have coal plants than nuclear plants. I'm assuming Russia, which has always been much more creative in nuclear technology than the US, that the only obstacle to nuclear power is coming up with the money to fund it.
The US can be just as creative with nuclear tech as the Russians. What's the difference? Our government and public has to listen or tune out the anti-nuke lobby/crowd. The old USSR could just have them shot or disappeared. From what I've heard lately Russia is much, much better, but it's a popular belief that the Russian mob controls most of the Russian government and several key industries/businesses. I don't know if this is just a US opinion or if it actually thought so in Russia. Now, if you lived it a country where you believed that your mob was running things, would you be as ready to protest as those in the EU or US would be?
You could say similiar things about China. You know what's really scary? I'd generally say that the EU protestors are more successful on average than those in the US, but our anti-nuclear lobby has nearlly frozen most of our civilian nuclear tech. It sounds like the nuclear subs and aircraft carriers could be our more civilian adaptable military techs, but I don't see the US having any nuclear powered cruise lines so maybe not.
If I sell something, it then belongs to you: you are responsible for its maintenance, use, and disposal, unless otherwise specified in a contract.
When the law starts saying I'm responsible for anything happens to an object I've sold in the future, where does it end? How about people being responsible for their own property?
I think of this more along the lines of like HP toner cartridges. Every single HP toner cartiridge that we buy has a UPS sticker for return of the old cartiridge in the box of the new one. When we change toner, we just stick the old one in the box stick the label on it and let UPS pick it up when they drop by again. This works great for toner. For anything above $500 we have fixed assest tags and paperwork to fill out. I guess if I could ship off an old Dell in the box of a new Dell after I'm done with the paper work that it could work. We mainly put them into storage until we have about 20-30 really outdated computers and then we auction them off in alot so we have more storage space. I think that it could work for a variety of consumables/easily recycables by the manufacters, but some things like canned food we need to just throw in the the trash. Recycling and personal trash sorting is a religion for some people. We should do recycling and trash sorting on an industrial scale not just a personal one though. Some things like cans and paper it makes abit of sense to do some basic sorting, but do we really want to sort through our kitchen wastes on a personal level? We really should re-think the whole landfill idea. We should have companies that attempt to recycling everything that hits a landfill. It's been mentioned that cars are used for scrap metal and most metal is recycled somewhat. I'd think that over the past 15 years that we've made big improvements in glass, plastic and paper recycling. That's really just a start though. I and others don't want to have to personally sort through most our household wastes. I'd rather some else get the task of removing/reducing landfill wastes to zero. Ideally we should think of a landfill as temp. 1-3 month holding area for trash to be sorted and set off/recycling/used as raw materials for other companies. I'm slightly green minded, but I think when companies like Walmart start to see the economic benefits of near zero waste we would drastically improve our waste handling abilities. Right now it isn't profitable to recycle/sort through our landfills. Maybe that's a good thing in the long term. Maybe in 50-100 years when US labor is as cheap as current Chinese labor it will be profitable for the Chinese to hire US labor to properly sort/recycle all the "wastes" that have pilled up in our current landfills.