Even if 3GB for 10-12 CDs weren't a ridiculous claim, the article contradicts itself within the same paragraph.
how many people have hard drives with the hundreds of gigabytes of memory required to store more than a few dozen CDs? About 10-12 CDs worth will completely use up the memory of a 3GB hard drive.
Let's do the math. Even with their most conservative estimate:
Sounds like these "hard drives with hundreds of gigabytes of memory" can handle substantially more than "a few dozen CDs." Even my 40GB hard drive should be able to handle 11 dozen of their 300MB CDs.
The most important element of this payment system is not convenience or security, it is anonymity. Every time you use your credit card online, you broadcast all of your personal information to the recipient. With a store-bought number that can't be traced (well, "can't" is probably too strong of a word, let's say "probably won't"), you can make purchases at potentially embarrassing online merchants without giving out all of your personal and financial information. Add a P.O. Box to receive your deliveries and you're home free!
If they could combine this with some sort of age verification (i.e. won't be sold to minors), this would also be a boost for internet porn sites. Imagine subcribing to an online porn site without telling them who you are...tempting, no? Even more so for those among us who aren't worried about the money as much as the potential for embarassment. Plus, most people could afford to lose the twenty dollars or so that is on the card to a dishonest porn site, whereas you wouldn't want them to have your actual credit card info.
The problem is not that the gaming industry uses sex to try to sell their products. Everyone does that. The problem is that they aren't very good at it! The film industry has learned to use sex in a subtle, sometimes subliminal way that arouses without offending. With a few exceptions *cough* Striptease!*cough* Showgirls!*, Hollywood has turned sex into a science that works on a very large and varied audience.
Game developers, on the other hand, try to get the same results by parading hot chicks in bikinis around near their products. This is flawed because
The sex isn't incorporated into their product, so the women are irrelavent to the sale,
When it is incorporated, it is blatant and generally out of context (if woman during the Middle Ages actually wore a leather bustier around, she'd have been stoned), and
It only appeals to men, and especially men without an appreciation for subtlety.
All of these combine to make the gaming industry look like a bunch of hacks to the non-gaming community. Not a good way to bring in investors or new customers.
You are operating under the assumption that you are right and "they" are wrong. This is a perfectly rational assumption, since you would not hold beliefs that you think are untrue. However, it is important to consider whether the Boomers changed their minds because they got old and crotchety, or because with life experience comes greater understanding of life. I may be 20 years old, but I'll be the first to admit that young people know jack about the way the world really works, but they think they know better than their parents. I am embarrassed to belong to a generation with so little respect for their elders.
Who knows, in another 20 years, you might be an "old fogey" too, and proud of it because you are so much wiser than you were when you were a twenty-something cyber-hippie making posts on Slashdot.
Fox must really have it in for Dark Angel, since they plan to move it to Friday night, the time slot where good TV shows go to die.
Anybody remember the show "Brooklyn Bridge?" Didn't think so. It was an excellent show from my youth that lasted 2 seasons on CBS, but midway through the second season it was moved to, you guessed it, Friday night. Whatever made Fox think "The Lone Gunmen" was strong enough to survive the time slot is beyond me. Friday night is when the key demographic, young Americans in high school and college, are out having lives, not sitting at home watching Fox. If you ever see your favorite show move to Friday evening, either make like the trekkies of the sixties and start a massive write-in campaign to save it, or start your funeral preparations. That show is dead meat.
I hear most critics of Battlebots talk about it as though it is a pretender, a copycat of Robot Wars because it came to television several years later. I'd like to point out that Battlebots has been around for years, but it only recently became televised.
I first discovered Battlebots through their website a full year before it came to television. Sometimes during an interview with one of the builders, you can see their trophy cases in the backround. Some of them have half a dozen giant nuts! This competition has paid its dues, and now it's reaping the benefits.
As for the sports commentator crap, it's a small price to pay for the exposure that the tournament has received. After only one season, the battlebox has improved significantly and the scoring system has been completely overhauled. These improvements are certainly the result of televised competition, and if the show stuck to the technical details without the "sportscaster crap," it would still be in PBS exile.
You think you're joking, but you've actually hit the nail pretty close to the head. The same reason that superheroes wear skintight outfits (their anatomy is easier to draw without clothing draped over it) applies to video games to an even greater extent. The Quake guy isn't exactly skimpily dressed, but all of his clothes are literally painted on. The same applies to Laura Croft. The less clothes, or the tighter those clothes, on a CG character, the more realistic it will appear until you have a reliable and affordable cloth simulator that produces real-time rendered effects.
What have we sunk to when a posting like this gets moderated UP to a 3 and labelling insightful? It seems like a typical rant, pure flamebait if not troll material, and yet here is is on my screen, where I have the minimum score displayed set to 3. There is nothing new or insightful here. I've heard it all before, millions of times. "You're all a bunch of prudes." "Stop telling me what to do." "There is not absolute right or wrong." They are all variations on the same age-old and unoriginal theme, so where do you guys get off?
I don't think that this type of software presents a censorship issue. If this software was mandatory on all computers and gave no option to override the warnings, that would be censorship. What the software does do is assist people who DON'T want to see porn, however they might define it. If someone sends me an uninvited attachment of people involved in sexual acts, I would appreciate the opportunity to be warned in advance before accepting the download. If, on the other hand, I recognize the sender of the e-mail as someone who was going to send me a fine-art nude, I would accept the download and go on about my business. Controlling what people see is censorship. Helping people to have greater control over what they see is not.
The way I see it, when the only candidates likely to win are both reprehensible, whoever votes for the winner will eventually have to answer for their vote. This is a potentially embarrassing situation. The solution is to vote for someone that you can be sure is not going to win. That way, when Gore gets us into a depression or Bush gets us into a war, you can always say, "Don't blame me. I voted for Nader." If you don't vote at all, you forfeit this right, since you are indirectly responsible for allowing the election of the winner.
Perhaps this is obvious to everybody, but I wanted to make sure it was mentioned publicly. Any attempts to alter MP3s, including imbedding advertising, is bound to fail as long as services like Napster and Scour exist. Why? Napster users are usually not downloading MP3s that were posted by the record companies or even by the artists. As long as Joe Winamp can rip all of the tracks on his Smashing Pumpkins CD and post them to Napster, nobody will want to download these newfangled Ad-ridden tracks. In order to get internet users to download an MP3 with advertising, the label must offer something that makes the tracks more appealing to users than a ripped track. Since people hate advertising, it would have to be a really spectacular improvement in sound quality or some other area that no free service offers. The music industry constantly underestimates the number of options open to people determined to download free music. Napster doesn't just keep a big database of songs and make everyone download from that. As long as there is free exchange of music between internet users, nobody is going to go searching for the "official" MP3 of a song, especially if it has an ad in it.
In addition to France's history of being, shall we say, overly interested in other nations' economic secrets, a report on BBC radio yesterday shed some additional light on the issue. According to Nigel West, an espionage expert interviewed on the program, once the nature of France's complaints is fully revealed, they won't have a leg to stand on. Apparently, the information acquired by the U.S. government concerning French business dealings revealed that several deals made by the French were the results of bribing foreign businessmen (a practice which is encouraged by the French government). When the U.S. blew the whistle on these bribes, the deals were blown and the French cried foul. Whether the French are justified in their complaints or not remains to be seen. However, getting only part of the story can result in unfair assumptions. Specifically, most readers of the short BBC article assume that the U.S. used Echelon to intercept business-related transmissions from France and pass them along to interested U.S. business's. What probably has happened is Echelon uncovered some shady dealings, and now the French are whining because our spies brought them into the open.
The concept that intelligence will follow physical development is supported by current anthropological theories concerning the origin of man. For generations the scientific community assumed that the "missing link" in the evolutionary chain between ourselves and our ape ancestors would be a chimpanzee-like ape with a larger brain. Much to the surprise of many, the discovery of "Lucy" the australopithecine revealed a hominid that walked erect but had no sign of human intelligence. Similarly, fossil evidence suggests that early hominids were using tools before they developed large brains. Perhaps the best way to go about developing artificial intelligence is to follow the pattern that resulted in real intelligence.
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how many people have hard drives with the hundreds of gigabytes of memory required to store more than a few dozen CDs? About 10-12 CDs worth will completely use up the memory of a 3GB hard drive.
Let's do the math. Even with their most conservative estimate:
10CDs/3GB * 100GB = 333 CDs
333CDs * 1 dozen CDs/12CDs = 28 dozen CDs!
Sounds like these "hard drives with hundreds of gigabytes of memory" can handle substantially more than "a few dozen CDs." Even my 40GB hard drive should be able to handle 11 dozen of their 300MB CDs.
If they could combine this with some sort of age verification (i.e. won't be sold to minors), this would also be a boost for internet porn sites. Imagine subcribing to an online porn site without telling them who you are...tempting, no? Even more so for those among us who aren't worried about the money as much as the potential for embarassment. Plus, most people could afford to lose the twenty dollars or so that is on the card to a dishonest porn site, whereas you wouldn't want them to have your actual credit card info.
Game developers, on the other hand, try to get the same results by parading hot chicks in bikinis around near their products. This is flawed because
- The sex isn't incorporated into their product, so the women are irrelavent to the sale,
- When it is incorporated, it is blatant and generally out of context (if woman during the Middle Ages actually wore a leather bustier around, she'd have been stoned), and
- It only appeals to men, and especially men without an appreciation for subtlety.
All of these combine to make the gaming industry look like a bunch of hacks to the non-gaming community. Not a good way to bring in investors or new customers."I'm not above.net the law, I AM the law!"
You are operating under the assumption that you are right and "they" are wrong. This is a perfectly rational assumption, since you would not hold beliefs that you think are untrue. However, it is important to consider whether the Boomers changed their minds because they got old and crotchety, or because with life experience comes greater understanding of life. I may be 20 years old, but I'll be the first to admit that young people know jack about the way the world really works, but they think they know better than their parents. I am embarrassed to belong to a generation with so little respect for their elders.
Who knows, in another 20 years, you might be an "old fogey" too, and proud of it because you are so much wiser than you were when you were a twenty-something cyber-hippie making posts on Slashdot.
Anybody remember the show "Brooklyn Bridge?" Didn't think so. It was an excellent show from my youth that lasted 2 seasons on CBS, but midway through the second season it was moved to, you guessed it, Friday night. Whatever made Fox think "The Lone Gunmen" was strong enough to survive the time slot is beyond me. Friday night is when the key demographic, young Americans in high school and college, are out having lives, not sitting at home watching Fox. If you ever see your favorite show move to Friday evening, either make like the trekkies of the sixties and start a massive write-in campaign to save it, or start your funeral preparations. That show is dead meat.
I first discovered Battlebots through their website a full year before it came to television. Sometimes during an interview with one of the builders, you can see their trophy cases in the backround. Some of them have half a dozen giant nuts! This competition has paid its dues, and now it's reaping the benefits.
As for the sports commentator crap, it's a small price to pay for the exposure that the tournament has received. After only one season, the battlebox has improved significantly and the scoring system has been completely overhauled. These improvements are certainly the result of televised competition, and if the show stuck to the technical details without the "sportscaster crap," it would still be in PBS exile.
You think you're joking, but you've actually hit the nail pretty close to the head. The same reason that superheroes wear skintight outfits (their anatomy is easier to draw without clothing draped over it) applies to video games to an even greater extent. The Quake guy isn't exactly skimpily dressed, but all of his clothes are literally painted on. The same applies to Laura Croft. The less clothes, or the tighter those clothes, on a CG character, the more realistic it will appear until you have a reliable and affordable cloth simulator that produces real-time rendered effects.
What have we sunk to when a posting like this gets moderated UP to a 3 and labelling insightful? It seems like a typical rant, pure flamebait if not troll material, and yet here is is on my screen, where I have the minimum score displayed set to 3. There is nothing new or insightful here. I've heard it all before, millions of times. "You're all a bunch of prudes." "Stop telling me what to do." "There is not absolute right or wrong." They are all variations on the same age-old and unoriginal theme, so where do you guys get off?
I don't think that this type of software presents a censorship issue. If this software was mandatory on all computers and gave no option to override the warnings, that would be censorship. What the software does do is assist people who DON'T want to see porn, however they might define it. If someone sends me an uninvited attachment of people involved in sexual acts, I would appreciate the opportunity to be warned in advance before accepting the download. If, on the other hand, I recognize the sender of the e-mail as someone who was going to send me a fine-art nude, I would accept the download and go on about my business. Controlling what people see is censorship. Helping people to have greater control over what they see is not.
The way I see it, when the only candidates likely to win are both reprehensible, whoever votes for the winner will eventually have to answer for their vote. This is a potentially embarrassing situation. The solution is to vote for someone that you can be sure is not going to win. That way, when Gore gets us into a depression or Bush gets us into a war, you can always say, "Don't blame me. I voted for Nader." If you don't vote at all, you forfeit this right, since you are indirectly responsible for allowing the election of the winner.
Perhaps this is obvious to everybody, but I wanted to make sure it was mentioned publicly. Any attempts to alter MP3s, including imbedding advertising, is bound to fail as long as services like Napster and Scour exist. Why? Napster users are usually not downloading MP3s that were posted by the record companies or even by the artists. As long as Joe Winamp can rip all of the tracks on his Smashing Pumpkins CD and post them to Napster, nobody will want to download these newfangled Ad-ridden tracks. In order to get internet users to download an MP3 with advertising, the label must offer something that makes the tracks more appealing to users than a ripped track. Since people hate advertising, it would have to be a really spectacular improvement in sound quality or some other area that no free service offers. The music industry constantly underestimates the number of options open to people determined to download free music. Napster doesn't just keep a big database of songs and make everyone download from that. As long as there is free exchange of music between internet users, nobody is going to go searching for the "official" MP3 of a song, especially if it has an ad in it.
In addition to France's history of being, shall we say, overly interested in other nations' economic secrets, a report on BBC radio yesterday shed some additional light on the issue. According to Nigel West, an espionage expert interviewed on the program, once the nature of France's complaints is fully revealed, they won't have a leg to stand on. Apparently, the information acquired by the U.S. government concerning French business dealings revealed that several deals made by the French were the results of bribing foreign businessmen (a practice which is encouraged by the French government). When the U.S. blew the whistle on these bribes, the deals were blown and the French cried foul. Whether the French are justified in their complaints or not remains to be seen. However, getting only part of the story can result in unfair assumptions. Specifically, most readers of the short BBC article assume that the U.S. used Echelon to intercept business-related transmissions from France and pass them along to interested U.S. business's. What probably has happened is Echelon uncovered some shady dealings, and now the French are whining because our spies brought them into the open.
The concept that intelligence will follow physical development is supported by current anthropological theories concerning the origin of man. For generations the scientific community assumed that the "missing link" in the evolutionary chain between ourselves and our ape ancestors would be a chimpanzee-like ape with a larger brain. Much to the surprise of many, the discovery of "Lucy" the australopithecine revealed a hominid that walked erect but had no sign of human intelligence. Similarly, fossil evidence suggests that early hominids were using tools before they developed large brains. Perhaps the best way to go about developing artificial intelligence is to follow the pattern that resulted in real intelligence.