The ultimate goal of most publishers is likely to be pay-per-read. In other words, royalties for the PUBLISHER. The author might recieve 0.00000001% of this, or something like that, if they are lucky.
The publishers are out of luck if they want to kill an author's percentage.
For most, it's contractually set at a certain rate (whole percantage points of the gross sale), and the publisher making MORE money only means more money for the author.
Last numbers I heard had an author's royalties at somewhere between 1% and 5%. And the big names--those that bring in the massive ammounts of sales that keep publishers in busienss--certainly won't sell their already-done-and-anyone-can-print-it books for less than this.
Something those pagan redskins would never do, or what?
The native americans in upstate NY did indeed work together as one nation. But, AFAIK, it was something that the leaders of the five tribe-nations organized, and not something the "common folk" suggested and implemented. I could be wrong--I've only got at most 1/8th native blood and (sadly) little cultural interaction, and the details are so sparse as to be irrelevant.
Democracy--that is, the concept of people working together for a common good and a common purpose not decreed by "the wise" or "the noble"--is something whose earliest-continous (and most famous) example is the people of the Untied States of America.
The "pagan redskins", to use your slurs, were all "kin" within a tribe and so naturally worked together. The best examples to the historical nature of the orignal parent's noted "discovery" are periods of either high mobility or sudden shift in geographic location. Something that, thanks to the relatively peaceful life (compared to Europe, anyway) of the native americans made a rare event.
The parent post was propably posted in a hurry, but this thing really pisses me off. And yes I'm a european (swedish) and a lawyer and seen this exact argument used against our aborigines (the sápmi) to which we 'brung' law and order. As if they didn't hav any...
Am I missing something, or is Sweden one of those country's who's "civlization_by_conquest" events were so far back in time that they're either prehistorical or, at least, solidly the Romans' fault?
You're reading a statement into my post that I simply isn't there. I never stated anything about any of the native american tribes, nor would I intend to.
Allow me to clarify...
I was listening to a presentation about different pagan holidays, and one component of one of the rituals was to honor / remember your ancestors. What made me remember this was that the presenter said that the ancestors didn't have to be biological, instead could be cultural, intellectual, or spiritual ancestors. Must... resist... urge to... point out... self-intersted religion...
The only people in the world who refer to themselves as "pagans"* are the largely american polytheists, who can also very often be mixed in with the same general religious morass as wiccans or "druids." (Some of my best friends are wiccans, though we disagree on their historical peroggative.)
Now, these "pagans" have a tendency to claim a historical background that, allegedly, predates my own faith (non-denominational Christian). As far as I can see it, those that make the claim essentially take a history of religious rebellions and historical interest in the occult and prop it up as "historical proof." (Which, of course, ignores the fact that even if they DID stretch back to the time of the pre-roman druids, the jewish roots of Christianity would still have a few thousand years on them.)
Given this viewpoint I have, I'm sure that you can see why a discourse on "pagan" holidays that eliminates the definition of "relative", leaving the concept as "anyone you looked up to", could be called "self-interested."
Were I the sort of Christian who runs around damning pagans**, I'd probably damn these polytheists for being too mob-minded to use proper words for themselves and their holidays.
NOTES: *: "Pagan" is derived from a Latin word that does roughly mean "people of the wild", and no doubt got its meaning as a reference to those outside of the Roman city-states who worshipped different gods.
But we're not speaking Latin, we're speaking English--and up until the 60s, "pagan" was an equivalent term to "gentile" and meant "not christian" rather than any specific religion. It strikes me as rather insulting to the finite dieties that they worship to name themselves as "not Christian."
**: The only people who use the word "pagan" properly anymore are overly-zealous ministers of my own religion (see why I'm non-denominational?). I only use it here to emphasisize a joke.
I think this is interesting for the sole fact that a whole lot of people who owe no direct kinship to each other elected to cooperate for a common cause.
What's interesting about that? Americans have been doing that since, oh, 1700 or so. And Europeans were doing it even longer than that.
I was listening to a presentation about different pagan holidays, and one component of one of the rituals was to honor / remember your ancestors. What made me remember this was that the presenter said that the ancestors didn't have to be biological, instead could be cultural, intellectual, or spiritual ancestors.
Must... resist... urge to... point out... self-intersted religion...
In this case, it seems that these 'artificial' families are willing to stick together and cooperate on a common goal, even if they themselves will not directly benefit. I suppose this is just a regular community, with enough people in it that a few would be motivated to assist. Then again, I could just be amazed by my own insight, marvelling at a fact that others have known for ages, and so think that I am smarter than I actually am.:-)
This would work on a small scale. However, there are still problems on the large scale. The AI still has a finite set of needs and plots that it can select. These needs and plots have to be created by a human programmer. Eventually you'd probably see a quest repeated, given that there are thousands upon thousands of players.
That's not a problem, if you make the quests generic enough that they CAN be repeated.
Plus, I think having each quest be as unique as the PCs would work. Sure, the merchant's daughter might keep getting kidnapped, but when she's kidnapped she should be so for EVERYONE until she's returned--and then she should be "unkidnapped."
(Having the possiblity of PCs preventing the kidnapping in the first place is a good idea, too.)
Plus, smart programmers will leave open-ends where new plot ideas can be brought up.
What you need is an AI "DM" that is smart enough to draw from data it knows (perhaps extensive knowledge from fantasy novels, fairy tales, world legends, etc) to create new events worldwide. Perhaps the AI can create an event such as a "war" between two kingdoms. Then the AI must create quests in realtime appropriate for every level range / class of player that are associated with this event. I don't know of any AI that fits this qualification. Essentially the AI must have the creative capacity of a human as well as the capacity to keep track of every single player's actions.
The game AI doesn't need to be that complex. It just needs to determine the semirandom actions of the NPCs individually--a lot of processes, but nothing that a central serverfarm that's allready handling the location of all the PCs shouldn't be able to do.
You could even design the system to handle new events--a must if you want PCs to be able to start a war. Have a short "current events" list which causes reactions when certain events come in for the NPCs...
And in any case, if the real "DMs" want a war, they can override the actions for NPC_king or just edit the NPC and control the bugger personally.
For unique personages such as kings, it might even be a good idea to employ folks to play them fulltime.
Such a MMORPG might exist in the future, but I don't think it is a realistic expectation for at least 10 years. I might be wrong, however.
Despite how simple this seems to me, you're probably right. The status quo is rather large, and it'll take something like a new evolution of Everquest to get an idea like this off the ground.
Almost 10 years sounds about right for the next full revision of the major MMORPGs, which is time when real innovations and decentralized structure could be written in.
I would like to see recorded music costless and many more real artists making an honest living from live performances.
That'd be nice... but most artists work on the exact opposite schema. Their concerts are only worthwhile so far as they promote the record.
I'd like to see recorded music for sale via micropayments (microauctions?), and have a costless central information exchange for tracking down the bands & seeing them when they come to town.
If the system is microauction, the fans in each market can list a price they're willing to pay for a concert & alter it any time before purchase. If the numbers work out (after a "uncollectable" discount), the band comes to the area. If not, well, shucks.
I would like culture to be a participation event, not a simple manufactured mass-marketed commodity for those whose mentality is particularly ovine.
Most of the great parts about our culture are done by competetive artistic competition. If it's not for record sales, it's for private sales of whole works--and if not that, it's jockying for patronage.
I'd like to see RIAA (and the industry it protects) reworked into an "agent and CD press" outfit, where the money from a CD is split along three persons (press, agent, and artist) and artists aren't forced to pay for the press or the agent's money. (A cash-based system where no party can spend money that they don't have might be good too...)
Do you want to wait that long for animals to do that? While hunting and eating animals is not an unreasonable request, I really don't see a practicle reason to waste time programming animal breeding cycles into a game, when it serves no practical purpose unless you become an animal breeder, or something.
Just have a set population of each type of monster, that grows at a certain rate given its population.
A small database with a simple rule and boom, you've got realism.
On the other hand, in an MMORPG type setting, you have to repeat basic quests like this. There is NO WAY that you can avoid repeating quests for a game with thousands of players on a server.
Sure there is. Have NPCs run as AI processes with random needs and plots, in response to player action or the plots of other NPCs.
If the thieves randomly kidnap someone--especially if it's a quest given to thief_players--, the kidnappee's associated guild should then have a "rescue" quest, that can become a "vengence" quest if the woman dies.
To be properly done, a MMORPG needs to let players take over any and every role in the game. A few thousand real folks in a city can hatch far cleverer plots than AIs and computer desingers ever could. There is _no reason_ why logging new quests can't take advantage of this.
No, sorry, I disagree. I don't want a computer / console RPG to become so realistic in what I have to do that it becomes a job for me. The amounts of time you have to throw into games like EQ and DAOC are crazy enough.
The tedious--and non-lethal--parts of my PC should be automated. And since the PC is an "adventuerer", the tedious parts should be very, very small indeed.
If you want a multiplayer RPG to be the way you want it, you should consider grabbing a group of friends and a Dungeons and Dragons book (or other REAL RPG of your persuasion).
While I'm very much a fan of real RPGs (try out the new D&D for a great RPG--or if you're a classless snob, try d20-modern), MMORPGs do something that classic RPGs can't do very well as of yet--track the world.
I'd LOVE to have a computer program that tracked my NPCs & came up with random monsters & stored a thousand plots and quests for my campaign setting. And if those NPCs all randomly worked against each other, all the better.
Hmm... I wonder who's arm I have to bend to get work on that started...
And second, it pisses me off that a company's board can legally screw the company and pay itself a bonus out of the remaining cash just before they fsck it to death.
It's a corporation. The board--that being, the governing body elected by and composed of stockholders--acts as the "owner" of a corporation. Everyone else works for them, and the whole point of the corporation is to make them--the stockholders--a profit.
If a company isn't making money, the owners are able to do anything legal to cut their losses and get what they can from it.
Don't like the system? Think it's not fair? Figure out something better.
Dude, Alaska's not suburban. Suburbs are places where your house takes up almost as much of your property as your yard.
Alaska's RURAL--just like my hometown of Westmoreland, NY., where it as far (6+ miles) from home to the high school than it is from the high school into the heart of Utica.
Exactly what is non-standard in my way of browsing the web? If you mean unusual I could agree, but non-standard is wrong.
You're confusing technical uses of the word with colloquial ones. Web standards have _never_ been the normal case; there has always been some tweak or extension that makes the web useable in ways that a significant proportion of the decision-makers seem to like.
Your adherence to Standards is a non-standard act (an act against the norm, unusual, et al), and as such it is an unforseen action on your part and not an action on the part of the website owner & their developers to exclude you.
My point wasn't about standards, it was about whose action caused you to be unable to use the non-standard commerical websites. Since non-standard design is the norm for the industry, it's a case of the website failing to take extraordinary action (making their sites standards-compliant) to keep you as a visitor, and not them taking action to deny you as a visitor.
At best, they're ignorant and you're suffering from the consequences of your choice. At worst, they're gulity of not wanting to expend the effort to accomodate you--but that only happens if they have the ability & opportunity to meet your needs. (i.e., only to those websites that you contact with a request for a toned-down main or alternate version of their web page that you can visit.)
I much prefer my Tivo, but the cable box/PVR is nice too (mostly because it's the cable box as well, and can record two things at once. And it has an 80GB drive, larger than the 20GB my Tivo came with (it has 60GB now.))
Currently, the most advanced thing I've got is a DVD player. Time Warner's rolling out the S.A. Explorer 8000, and I'm considering picking one up.
Do you think it's worth it? Does the "DVR" give out a macrovision-esque signal that would keep me from archiving the shows I want to keep a tape of?
So I guess I am not very informative about my habits - which I think is my freedom to do. And if a site doesn't work that way, the site owners clearly indicate that they are not willing to accept me a s a visitor - which is their freedom.
Your logic is wrong.
The owners of a website, especially if they are not aware of your habits, are not rejecting ('not accepting') you as a visitor / customer.
At the worst, they're not taking efforts to accomodate your nonstandard way of browsing the web. YOU were the one who chose to apply filters--hence, the active part in the exchange is you, not the website owner.
Good science classes shouldn't say that "science" is an irrefutable, infalible body of facts. "Science" is a process of successive approximation whereby we gradually, haltingly proceed towards more reliable and general understandings of the law.
You've never been to an American high school science class, I take it.
The whole system is built on and depends on the students not questioning the teachers. When there is something that can still be realistically debated or is unsure ("Where did we come from" or "can socialism ever work" are two big ones in my book. I'm sure "computers use windows" is another one.)
I can't see any prima facie reason why it can't be tested. The origin of life is just an event that occurred at some time in the past. As with any past even we can try to understand it by trying to find and interpret evidence of the events, or by trying to reproduce a similar situation, or indeed just by eliminating impossibilities, amongst other methods.
The best we can get there is to find a plausible way that life COULD have began. We might even manage to make new life. But we can't prove how life _really did_ happen.
Personally, I think if science classes left the religious bias at the door and used the supposition as a teaching tool it'd stick better in the kids' minds. (Instead of "we all evolved randomly", a thought of "what would it take for intelligent design".)
A similar argument could have been made a few years ago about thunder being caused by electrons vs angry gods, or about the geocentric universe. What makes your case any different?
Thunder is an extant phenomina. You can go out and hear thunder just about every week on Earth if you go to the right place. We can reproduce thunder. Oh, and there isn't a significant body of people who thinks that _thunder_ is caused by angry gods. (The common belief that He Who Controls Random Events can use lightning to express anger is different; it's like causing a landslide to bury someone's house--you don't change the mechanism just by having someone conciously start it.)
Oh, and as the Universe has no real center, we can place the center wherever it's most convenient for us. We use the sun when it makes all of the orbits in our system easy, and the Earth when it makes local navigation easy.
In case you haven't got it: "my case" is different because we're not aruging HOW life could have began, we're discussing how it DID. The rocks roll down the hill because of gravity as opposed to the will of angry-godling, but that doesn't mean that angry-godling could not have started them rolling.
My guess is that the work pattern is different on a Win32 desktop, and that you normally start an app, use it, then close it before you start another. Is it due to the lack of virtual desktops, or some other UI-related issue? I would not think it's resources, as Windows should swap out unused apps just like other OS:s.
It's a workflow thing. When people aren't using a program, they close it.
There IS a finite ammount of room to hold apps, and AFAIK even a wholly-in-the-swap-file app will cause a (very) slight slowdown the system at large, even if it's just in the "task switcher" equivalent app that needs to keep track of yet-another program.
Outlook sucks, everyone admits this as fact except for microsoft. and unfortunately the only other "corperate alternative" is lotus notes and it's horribly overpriced.
Actually, Outlook's gotten a bit better than pervious versions. The massive security holes are more legacy software or a consequence of the monopoly than anything else. (Consequence of the monopoly: if everyone ran PINE instead of outlook, and someone found a hole in PINE, it'd be a huge hole just based on the installation size.)
Oh, and there IS a different alternative. Go novell, and use groupwise. (yes, it's a program I dislike almost as much as I dislike outlook, but it does everything that a "corporate" e-mail system needs to.)
It might be good now, but at the time that there was competition, it was definitely inferior to offerings from other companies. Now, Lotus and All-the-various-owners-of-Wordperfect did some pretty stupid things, so it's not all Microsoft's fault, but I don't believe for a minute that MS Office won out on *merit*. They won through bundling, and they won through marketing.
Back in the day, MS Office had to be "better" in the combination of cost, usability, and ease-of-transition compared to its competition. AFAIK, MS did this by building Wordperfect-specific and Lotus-specific help into Word and Excel--and bundling them together.
Now, since then, MS has had to compete agianst itself. Each version of Office since, oh, 4.0 at least, has had a marked improvement over the previous edition. Maybe not a clear-cut across-the-board improvement, but always at least something "better."
A business that supports thousands of people should have more access to a politician than you. A politician does not have infinite time. So... A company (or entity with money) that represents you can speak for you and the thousands below it.
Every one of the thousands of people that Microsoft Supports is a citizen--a rather well-paid citizen, to boot--and is fully capable of conributing their own money towards a contribution.
Money simply should not have an impact on politics. It slants it towards the filthy rich, and makes the lazy bastards who live off their grandparent's efforts mroe valuable than the hardworking people who keep this company going--and who, since they're actually working, and more prone to notice issues that need government involvement.
Which, of course, is beside the point that Microsoft is a corporation and not a PAC. They are not a political party, nor a club, nor anything more than a money-making machine. If they want to organize one, then great, more power to them--but it should not ever be assumed that a company is working for the political interests of those who work for it or who happen to hold a small portion of stock.
(The way to sort out a politician's time, btw, should probably be through representation of citizens, measured in citizens and not dollars. MS's lobbyist with twenty million dollars and five thousand citizens should be behind the EMT rep with twenty dollars and a million citizens, and before the billionare who's just there for himself.)
There's as much reason to believe this was performed by an other-worldly force as there is to believe there is a magical place "where socks go". Sorry, but I prefer to wait for proof that there is something awry than to jump to conclusions.
Who said anything about other-worldly? Assuming that we don't have a few dozen millionare-engineer-pranksters running around, the likeliest explination is an as-of-yet undetermined wholly-natural phenomina.
There is ONLY one scientific idea of how life got here. There are a bunch of unsupported fantasies, but they have no place in science class. If you want to teach I.D., then we might as well teach the idea that the Earth is flat too, for they both have the same scientific footing.
once again...
The backwards extrapolation of evolution to explain the origin of our species and all species is not proven science. If religion didn't have anything to say about it, it wouldn't be an issue--but religion does, and the origin of life is one of those few parts where science cannot be tested against religion.
If scientific belief went over to say that the natural state of human beings was to be polygamist murderers, that wouldn't be taught in schools either.
And I don't necessarilly want the schools to teach I.D. They shouldn't teach any idea of where life came from, at least not in a "science" class where the textbook is taken and taught as if it were irrefutable truth. Evolution-from-lesser things, Creation, I.D. et al should be taught in either "social studies" or a "religions of the world" class.
It's a religious question, and so it should be treated as such, and the schools should stay neutral.
Ok, tell me how to falsify historical evolution--specifically, the "we evolved from something else" part.
While you're at it, find a good record of predictions that evolution's made.
I wonder if the problem is that you are confusing evolution with abiogenesis. Evolution doesn't care how life got started, it takes over from there.
As I said before, evolution is a great and wonderful biological principle that no one in their right mind can disagree with.
Historical evolution--which is simply taking the percieved principles of breeding and stretching them backwards--is not. Especially when it contradicts things like Intelligent Design.
A thorough school class on the history of life (taught in high school as "biology") should logically get into each of the current ideas that explain where life came from and how it got here, instead of ridiculing "the old belief that life sprang full-bore from mud" and ignoring current religion entirely.
It is more reasonable to believe that there are hundreds of groups of crop circle makers in the world out to get some attention and have a laugh at the public's expense than it is to believe that supernatural forces are involved.
If it was just flattening crops, sure, but that isn't the only relevant phenomina.
Electomagnetic funnyness, odd light displays, melted iron bits in a regular pattern... there's SOMETHING going on beyond just a couple of hoaxers.
It's not necessarilly a "magical" unexplained phenomina, but it's something worth looking into seriously--oh, and look, there are people looking into it seriously!;)
And I mean really watched it, sat down and watched the two-hour roughly-in-order shots on FX at 7:00 EST?
It's quite possibly the best-written low-budget hot chick show ever. Every inconsistency is either explained away or simply believable, given a simple modicum of suspension_of_disbelief.
Contrast this with, oh, Star Trek or Andromeda or Farscape, or the other common "sci fi" series setups, and you'll see the "internal realism" he was talking about.
Discovery channel has aired film of the hoaxsters creating circles. It's been on television dozens of times.
I saw that last night. They had some MIT kids try and fake the crop circle.
The two (apparantly stoned) grad students surveyed it via helocopter, and oddly enough suffered a power outage while over the darn thing. (the 'chopper auto-rotated and got a jump-start while doing so--and as the grad students were rather blase about the whole thing, hence the supposition of their stonage...)
Crop circles seem to be a genuine real phenomina, most likely caused by an as-yet undetermined natural event. Sure, there are folks who go out and create crop circles at random--but they don't account for all of the crop circles.
Then again, my source is Discovery Channel, so who the hell knows.
True. Fortunately, the various theories of evolution are a lot more detailed than that.
But, when projected backwards and used as history, they're still neither falsifiable nor a good source for predictions. Get a time machine, and then we'll talk.
(note: I believe in the natural prinicple of evolution, and that it shapes every living organism when given enough time. I have no religious belief on if God created the world 6000 real-years ago or 6000 God-years; the allmighty's on a differnet time scale, and I suspect he might have just fast-forwarded through the boring parts inbetween adjusting the flow of evolution...)
Who cares about common language? We are talking about science here.
On slashdot? No, this is a common, colloquial discussion forum open to (and frequented by) laymen with little to no real scientific knowledge. Theory (and other technical terms), unless used in expressly scientific terminology, should be assmed to be used in a colloquial sense. Especially when comparing two things, neither of which is a scientific Theory.
No scientist debates whether or not the universe extends as observed with no sentient guiding hands beyond our own in all four dimensions. It's simply not possible to factor in such a variable to science, so it's easy enough for science to ignore it until when, if ever, said sentient guidng hands decide to make themselves known, at which time science will return to figuring exactly how many angels can fit on the head of a pin...
Again, it seems irrefuatble that, if the Sentient Guiding Hand does exist, He wants us to act in a pracital matter as if He doesn't, and not put real-world plans in motion that hinge on His action or proving His existance or disexistance. (Like a wiccan friend of mine said--He's the world's Biggest Geek, who sat around some day borded so He decided to make Himself some friends.)
Slashdot Mirror
The ultimate goal of most publishers is likely to be pay-per-read. In other words, royalties for the PUBLISHER. The author might recieve 0.00000001% of this, or something like that, if they are lucky.
The publishers are out of luck if they want to kill an author's percentage.
For most, it's contractually set at a certain rate (whole percantage points of the gross sale), and the publisher making MORE money only means more money for the author.
Last numbers I heard had an author's royalties at somewhere between 1% and 5%. And the big names--those that bring in the massive ammounts of sales that keep publishers in busienss--certainly won't sell their already-done-and-anyone-can-print-it books for less than this.
The native americans in upstate NY did indeed work together as one nation. But, AFAIK, it was something that the leaders of the five tribe-nations organized, and not something the "common folk" suggested and implemented. I could be wrong--I've only got at most 1/8th native blood and (sadly) little cultural interaction, and the details are so sparse as to be irrelevant.
Democracy--that is, the concept of people working together for a common good and a common purpose not decreed by "the wise" or "the noble"--is something whose earliest-continous (and most famous) example is the people of the Untied States of America.
The "pagan redskins", to use your slurs, were all "kin" within a tribe and so naturally worked together. The best examples to the historical nature of the orignal parent's noted "discovery" are periods of either high mobility or sudden shift in geographic location. Something that, thanks to the relatively peaceful life (compared to Europe, anyway) of the native americans made a rare event.
Am I missing something, or is Sweden one of those country's who's "civlization_by_conquest" events were so far back in time that they're either prehistorical or, at least, solidly the Romans' fault?
You're reading a statement into my post that I simply isn't there. I never stated anything about any of the native american tribes, nor would I intend to.
Allow me to clarify...
The only people in the world who refer to themselves as "pagans"* are the largely american polytheists, who can also very often be mixed in with the same general religious morass as wiccans or "druids." (Some of my best friends are wiccans, though we disagree on their historical peroggative.)
Now, these "pagans" have a tendency to claim a historical background that, allegedly, predates my own faith (non-denominational Christian). As far as I can see it, those that make the claim essentially take a history of religious rebellions and historical interest in the occult and prop it up as "historical proof." (Which, of course, ignores the fact that even if they DID stretch back to the time of the pre-roman druids, the jewish roots of Christianity would still have a few thousand years on them.)
Given this viewpoint I have, I'm sure that you can see why a discourse on "pagan" holidays that eliminates the definition of "relative", leaving the concept as "anyone you looked up to", could be called "self-interested."
Were I the sort of Christian who runs around damning pagans**, I'd probably damn these polytheists for being too mob-minded to use proper words for themselves and their holidays.
NOTES:
*: "Pagan" is derived from a Latin word that does roughly mean "people of the wild", and no doubt got its meaning as a reference to those outside of the Roman city-states who worshipped different gods.
But we're not speaking Latin, we're speaking English--and up until the 60s, "pagan" was an equivalent term to "gentile" and meant "not christian" rather than any specific religion. It strikes me as rather insulting to the finite dieties that they worship to name themselves as "not Christian."
**: The only people who use the word "pagan" properly anymore are overly-zealous ministers of my own religion (see why I'm non-denominational?). I only use it here to emphasisize a joke.
I think this is interesting for the sole fact that a whole lot of people who owe no direct kinship to each other elected to cooperate for a common cause.
:-)
:)
What's interesting about that? Americans have been doing that since, oh, 1700 or so. And Europeans were doing it even longer than that.
I was listening to a presentation about different pagan holidays, and one component of one of the rituals was to honor / remember your ancestors. What made me remember this was that the presenter said that the ancestors didn't have to be biological, instead could be cultural, intellectual, or spiritual ancestors.
Must... resist... urge to... point out... self-intersted religion...
In this case, it seems that these 'artificial' families are willing to stick together and cooperate on a common goal, even if they themselves will not directly benefit. I suppose this is just a regular community, with enough people in it that a few would be motivated to assist. Then again, I could just be amazed by my own insight, marvelling at a fact that others have known for ages, and so think that I am smarter than I actually am.
Yep, that's it.
This would work on a small scale. However, there are still problems on the large scale. The AI still has a finite set of needs and plots that it can select. These needs and plots have to be created by a human programmer. Eventually you'd probably see a quest repeated, given that there are thousands upon thousands of players.
That's not a problem, if you make the quests generic enough that they CAN be repeated.
Plus, I think having each quest be as unique as the PCs would work. Sure, the merchant's daughter might keep getting kidnapped, but when she's kidnapped she should be so for EVERYONE until she's returned--and then she should be "unkidnapped."
(Having the possiblity of PCs preventing the kidnapping in the first place is a good idea, too.)
Plus, smart programmers will leave open-ends where new plot ideas can be brought up.
What you need is an AI "DM" that is smart enough to draw from data it knows (perhaps extensive knowledge from fantasy novels, fairy tales, world legends, etc) to create new events worldwide. Perhaps the AI can create an event such as a "war" between two kingdoms. Then the AI must create quests in realtime appropriate for every level range / class of player that are associated with this event. I don't know of any AI that fits this qualification. Essentially the AI must have the creative capacity of a human as well as the capacity to keep track of every single player's actions.
The game AI doesn't need to be that complex. It just needs to determine the semirandom actions of the NPCs individually--a lot of processes, but nothing that a central serverfarm that's allready handling the location of all the PCs shouldn't be able to do.
You could even design the system to handle new events--a must if you want PCs to be able to start a war. Have a short "current events" list which causes reactions when certain events come in for the NPCs...
And in any case, if the real "DMs" want a war, they can override the actions for NPC_king or just edit the NPC and control the bugger personally.
For unique personages such as kings, it might even be a good idea to employ folks to play them fulltime.
Such a MMORPG might exist in the future, but I don't think it is a realistic expectation for at least 10 years. I might be wrong, however.
Despite how simple this seems to me, you're probably right. The status quo is rather large, and it'll take something like a new evolution of Everquest to get an idea like this off the ground.
Almost 10 years sounds about right for the next full revision of the major MMORPGs, which is time when real innovations and decentralized structure could be written in.
I would like to see recorded music costless and many more real artists making an honest living from live performances.
That'd be nice... but most artists work on the exact opposite schema. Their concerts are only worthwhile so far as they promote the record.
I'd like to see recorded music for sale via micropayments (microauctions?), and have a costless central information exchange for tracking down the bands & seeing them when they come to town.
If the system is microauction, the fans in each market can list a price they're willing to pay for a concert & alter it any time before purchase. If the numbers work out (after a "uncollectable" discount), the band comes to the area. If not, well, shucks.
I would like culture to be a participation event, not a simple manufactured mass-marketed commodity for those whose mentality is particularly ovine.
Most of the great parts about our culture are done by competetive artistic competition. If it's not for record sales, it's for private sales of whole works--and if not that, it's jockying for patronage.
I'd like to see RIAA (and the industry it protects) reworked into an "agent and CD press" outfit, where the money from a CD is split along three persons (press, agent, and artist) and artists aren't forced to pay for the press or the agent's money. (A cash-based system where no party can spend money that they don't have might be good too...)
Do you want to wait that long for animals to do that? While hunting and eating animals is not an unreasonable request, I really don't see a practicle reason to waste time programming animal breeding cycles into a game, when it serves no practical purpose unless you become an animal breeder, or something.
Just have a set population of each type of monster, that grows at a certain rate given its population.
A small database with a simple rule and boom, you've got realism.
On the other hand, in an MMORPG type setting, you have to repeat basic quests like this. There is NO WAY that you can avoid repeating quests for a game with thousands of players on a server.
Sure there is. Have NPCs run as AI processes with random needs and plots, in response to player action or the plots of other NPCs.
If the thieves randomly kidnap someone--especially if it's a quest given to thief_players--, the kidnappee's associated guild should then have a "rescue" quest, that can become a "vengence" quest if the woman dies.
To be properly done, a MMORPG needs to let players take over any and every role in the game. A few thousand real folks in a city can hatch far cleverer plots than AIs and computer desingers ever could. There is _no reason_ why logging new quests can't take advantage of this.
No, sorry, I disagree. I don't want a computer / console RPG to become so realistic in what I have to do that it becomes a job for me. The amounts of time you have to throw into games like EQ and DAOC are crazy enough.
The tedious--and non-lethal--parts of my PC should be automated. And since the PC is an "adventuerer", the tedious parts should be very, very small indeed.
If you want a multiplayer RPG to be the way you want it, you should consider grabbing a group of friends and a Dungeons and Dragons book (or other REAL RPG of your persuasion).
While I'm very much a fan of real RPGs (try out the new D&D for a great RPG--or if you're a classless snob, try d20-modern), MMORPGs do something that classic RPGs can't do very well as of yet--track the world.
I'd LOVE to have a computer program that tracked my NPCs & came up with random monsters & stored a thousand plots and quests for my campaign setting. And if those NPCs all randomly worked against each other, all the better.
Hmm... I wonder who's arm I have to bend to get work on that started...
And second, it pisses me off that a company's board can legally screw the company and pay itself a bonus out of the remaining cash just before they fsck it to death.
It's a corporation. The board--that being, the governing body elected by and composed of stockholders--acts as the "owner" of a corporation. Everyone else works for them, and the whole point of the corporation is to make them--the stockholders--a profit.
If a company isn't making money, the owners are able to do anything legal to cut their losses and get what they can from it.
Don't like the system? Think it's not fair? Figure out something better.
some VERY suburban place like Alaska.
Dude, Alaska's not suburban. Suburbs are places where your house takes up almost as much of your property as your yard.
Alaska's RURAL--just like my hometown of Westmoreland, NY., where it as far (6+ miles) from home to the high school than it is from the high school into the heart of Utica.
Exactly what is non-standard in my way of browsing the web? If you mean unusual I could agree, but non-standard is wrong.
You're confusing technical uses of the word with colloquial ones. Web standards have _never_ been the normal case; there has always been some tweak or extension that makes the web useable in ways that a significant proportion of the decision-makers seem to like.
Your adherence to Standards is a non-standard act (an act against the norm, unusual, et al), and as such it is an unforseen action on your part and not an action on the part of the website owner & their developers to exclude you.
My point wasn't about standards, it was about whose action caused you to be unable to use the non-standard commerical websites. Since non-standard design is the norm for the industry, it's a case of the website failing to take extraordinary action (making their sites standards-compliant) to keep you as a visitor, and not them taking action to deny you as a visitor.
At best, they're ignorant and you're suffering from the consequences of your choice. At worst, they're gulity of not wanting to expend the effort to accomodate you--but that only happens if they have the ability & opportunity to meet your needs. (i.e., only to those websites that you contact with a request for a toned-down main or alternate version of their web page that you can visit.)
I much prefer my Tivo, but the cable box/PVR is nice too (mostly because it's the cable box as well, and can record two things at once. And it has an 80GB drive, larger than the 20GB my Tivo came with (it has 60GB now.))
Currently, the most advanced thing I've got is a DVD player. Time Warner's rolling out the S.A. Explorer 8000, and I'm considering picking one up.
Do you think it's worth it? Does the "DVR" give out a macrovision-esque signal that would keep me from archiving the shows I want to keep a tape of?
So I guess I am not very informative about my habits - which I think is my freedom to do. And if a site doesn't work that way, the site owners clearly indicate that they are not willing to accept me a s a visitor - which is their freedom.
Your logic is wrong.
The owners of a website, especially if they are not aware of your habits, are not rejecting ('not accepting') you as a visitor / customer.
At the worst, they're not taking efforts to accomodate your nonstandard way of browsing the web. YOU were the one who chose to apply filters--hence, the active part in the exchange is you, not the website owner.
Good science classes shouldn't say that "science" is an irrefutable, infalible body of facts. "Science" is a process of successive approximation whereby we gradually, haltingly proceed towards more reliable and general understandings of the law.
You've never been to an American high school science class, I take it.
The whole system is built on and depends on the students not questioning the teachers. When there is something that can still be realistically debated or is unsure ("Where did we come from" or "can socialism ever work" are two big ones in my book. I'm sure "computers use windows" is another one.)
I can't see any prima facie reason why it can't be tested. The origin of life is just an event that occurred at some time in the past. As with any past even we can try to understand it by trying to find and interpret evidence of the events, or by trying to reproduce a similar situation, or indeed just by eliminating impossibilities, amongst other methods.
The best we can get there is to find a plausible way that life COULD have began. We might even manage to make new life. But we can't prove how life _really did_ happen.
Personally, I think if science classes left the religious bias at the door and used the supposition as a teaching tool it'd stick better in the kids' minds. (Instead of "we all evolved randomly", a thought of "what would it take for intelligent design".)
A similar argument could have been made a few years ago about thunder being caused by electrons vs angry gods, or about the geocentric universe. What makes your case any different?
Thunder is an extant phenomina. You can go out and hear thunder just about every week on Earth if you go to the right place. We can reproduce thunder. Oh, and there isn't a significant body of people who thinks that _thunder_ is caused by angry gods. (The common belief that He Who Controls Random Events can use lightning to express anger is different; it's like causing a landslide to bury someone's house--you don't change the mechanism just by having someone conciously start it.)
Oh, and as the Universe has no real center, we can place the center wherever it's most convenient for us. We use the sun when it makes all of the orbits in our system easy, and the Earth when it makes local navigation easy.
In case you haven't got it: "my case" is different because we're not aruging HOW life could have began, we're discussing how it DID. The rocks roll down the hill because of gravity as opposed to the will of angry-godling, but that doesn't mean that angry-godling could not have started them rolling.
My guess is that the work pattern is different on a Win32 desktop, and that you normally start an app, use it, then close it before you start another. Is it due to the lack of virtual desktops, or some other UI-related issue? I would not think it's resources, as Windows should swap out unused apps just like other OS:s.
It's a workflow thing. When people aren't using a program, they close it.
There IS a finite ammount of room to hold apps, and AFAIK even a wholly-in-the-swap-file app will cause a (very) slight slowdown the system at large, even if it's just in the "task switcher" equivalent app that needs to keep track of yet-another program.
Outlook sucks, everyone admits this as fact except for microsoft. and unfortunately the only other "corperate alternative" is lotus notes and it's horribly overpriced.
Actually, Outlook's gotten a bit better than pervious versions. The massive security holes are more legacy software or a consequence of the monopoly than anything else. (Consequence of the monopoly: if everyone ran PINE instead of outlook, and someone found a hole in PINE, it'd be a huge hole just based on the installation size.)
Oh, and there IS a different alternative. Go novell, and use groupwise. (yes, it's a program I dislike almost as much as I dislike outlook, but it does everything that a "corporate" e-mail system needs to.)
It might be good now, but at the time that there was competition, it was definitely inferior to offerings from other companies. Now, Lotus and All-the-various-owners-of-Wordperfect did some pretty stupid things, so it's not all Microsoft's fault, but I don't believe for a minute that MS Office won out on *merit*. They won through bundling, and they won through marketing.
Back in the day, MS Office had to be "better" in the combination of cost, usability, and ease-of-transition compared to its competition. AFAIK, MS did this by building Wordperfect-specific and Lotus-specific help into Word and Excel--and bundling them together.
Now, since then, MS has had to compete agianst itself. Each version of Office since, oh, 4.0 at least, has had a marked improvement over the previous edition. Maybe not a clear-cut across-the-board improvement, but always at least something "better."
A business that supports thousands of people should have more access to a politician than you. A politician does not have infinite time. So... A company (or entity with money) that represents you can speak for you and the thousands below it.
Every one of the thousands of people that Microsoft Supports is a citizen--a rather well-paid citizen, to boot--and is fully capable of conributing their own money towards a contribution.
Money simply should not have an impact on politics. It slants it towards the filthy rich, and makes the lazy bastards who live off their grandparent's efforts mroe valuable than the hardworking people who keep this company going--and who, since they're actually working, and more prone to notice issues that need government involvement.
Which, of course, is beside the point that Microsoft is a corporation and not a PAC. They are not a political party, nor a club, nor anything more than a money-making machine. If they want to organize one, then great, more power to them--but it should not ever be assumed that a company is working for the political interests of those who work for it or who happen to hold a small portion of stock.
(The way to sort out a politician's time, btw, should probably be through representation of citizens, measured in citizens and not dollars. MS's lobbyist with twenty million dollars and five thousand citizens should be behind the EMT rep with twenty dollars and a million citizens, and before the billionare who's just there for himself.)
There's as much reason to believe this was performed by an other-worldly force as there is to believe there is a magical place "where socks go". Sorry, but I prefer to wait for proof that there is something awry than to jump to conclusions.
Who said anything about other-worldly? Assuming that we don't have a few dozen millionare-engineer-pranksters running around, the likeliest explination is an as-of-yet undetermined wholly-natural phenomina.
There is ONLY one scientific idea of how life got here. There are a bunch of unsupported fantasies, but they have no place in science class. If you want to teach I.D., then we might as well teach the idea that the Earth is flat too, for they both have the same scientific footing.
once again...
The backwards extrapolation of evolution to explain the origin of our species and all species is not proven science. If religion didn't have anything to say about it, it wouldn't be an issue--but religion does, and the origin of life is one of those few parts where science cannot be tested against religion.
If scientific belief went over to say that the natural state of human beings was to be polygamist murderers, that wouldn't be taught in schools either.
And I don't necessarilly want the schools to teach I.D. They shouldn't teach any idea of where life came from, at least not in a "science" class where the textbook is taken and taught as if it were irrefutable truth. Evolution-from-lesser things, Creation, I.D. et al should be taught in either "social studies" or a "religions of the world" class.
It's a religious question, and so it should be treated as such, and the schools should stay neutral.
Um, sure they are. Why wouldn't they be?
Ok, tell me how to falsify historical evolution--specifically, the "we evolved from something else" part.
While you're at it, find a good record of predictions that evolution's made.
I wonder if the problem is that you are confusing evolution with abiogenesis. Evolution doesn't care how life got started, it takes over from there.
As I said before, evolution is a great and wonderful biological principle that no one in their right mind can disagree with.
Historical evolution--which is simply taking the percieved principles of breeding and stretching them backwards--is not. Especially when it contradicts things like Intelligent Design.
A thorough school class on the history of life (taught in high school as "biology") should logically get into each of the current ideas that explain where life came from and how it got here, instead of ridiculing "the old belief that life sprang full-bore from mud" and ignoring current religion entirely.
It is more reasonable to believe that there are hundreds of groups of crop circle makers in the world out to get some attention and have a laugh at the public's expense than it is to believe that supernatural forces are involved.
;)
If it was just flattening crops, sure, but that isn't the only relevant phenomina.
Electomagnetic funnyness, odd light displays, melted iron bits in a regular pattern... there's SOMETHING going on beyond just a couple of hoaxers.
It's not necessarilly a "magical" unexplained phenomina, but it's something worth looking into seriously--oh, and look, there are people looking into it seriously!
Y'know, "christian" doesn't imply "moron." (Although "slashdotter" might... )
Have you ever watched it?
And I mean really watched it, sat down and watched the two-hour roughly-in-order shots on FX at 7:00 EST?
It's quite possibly the best-written low-budget hot chick show ever. Every inconsistency is either explained away or simply believable, given a simple modicum of suspension_of_disbelief.
Contrast this with, oh, Star Trek or Andromeda or Farscape, or the other common "sci fi" series setups, and you'll see the "internal realism" he was talking about.
apparantly, they do happen sometime.
again, @#%!ing discovery channel. AFAIK it's a bum report, but that's what I heard.
nice webpage, btw....
Discovery channel has aired film of the hoaxsters creating circles. It's been on television dozens of times.
I saw that last night. They had some MIT kids try and fake the crop circle.
The two (apparantly stoned) grad students surveyed it via helocopter, and oddly enough suffered a power outage while over the darn thing. (the 'chopper auto-rotated and got a jump-start while doing so--and as the grad students were rather blase about the whole thing, hence the supposition of their stonage...)
Crop circles seem to be a genuine real phenomina, most likely caused by an as-yet undetermined natural event. Sure, there are folks who go out and create crop circles at random--but they don't account for all of the crop circles.
Then again, my source is Discovery Channel, so who the hell knows.
actually, vampires can have kids with humands. Angel did it in his TV series, causing quite a plot element.
Of course, it might be that vamps require a soul to be fertile...
True. Fortunately, the various theories of evolution are a lot more detailed than that.
But, when projected backwards and used as history, they're still neither falsifiable nor a good source for predictions. Get a time machine, and then we'll talk.
(note: I believe in the natural prinicple of evolution, and that it shapes every living organism when given enough time. I have no religious belief on if God created the world 6000 real-years ago or 6000 God-years; the allmighty's on a differnet time scale, and I suspect he might have just fast-forwarded through the boring parts inbetween adjusting the flow of evolution...)
Who cares about common language? We are talking about science here.
On slashdot? No, this is a common, colloquial discussion forum open to (and frequented by) laymen with little to no real scientific knowledge. Theory (and other technical terms), unless used in expressly scientific terminology, should be assmed to be used in a colloquial sense. Especially when comparing two things, neither of which is a scientific Theory.
No scientist debates whether or not the universe extends as observed with no sentient guiding hands beyond our own in all four dimensions. It's simply not possible to factor in such a variable to science, so it's easy enough for science to ignore it until when, if ever, said sentient guidng hands decide to make themselves known, at which time science will return to figuring exactly how many angels can fit on the head of a pin...
Again, it seems irrefuatble that, if the Sentient Guiding Hand does exist, He wants us to act in a pracital matter as if He doesn't, and not put real-world plans in motion that hinge on His action or proving His existance or disexistance. (Like a wiccan friend of mine said--He's the world's Biggest Geek, who sat around some day borded so He decided to make Himself some friends.)