And how! Four annoying ads at the bottom of the page, a Google Ad sidebar, those green underline ad links, and three more pages left to click through. Someone's getting paid for *this* Slashdotting....
It's odd that I have posts within a few lines of each other in the Slashdot scroll that are getting opposite objections.
The original post's tone made it very clear that its author had an axe to grind. He said that funding that all funding that research would accomplish would make scientists richer. It probably would, if you pay them for doing work.
And they might not succeed at it, a point I made in the other thread. They *might* succeed, and that would be really great. But there is no guarentee, at this point in time, from what I know, that nuclear fusion, as a method of producing power, will ever be practical, unnecessary comma.
Absolute nonsense. Ever see that glowing thing in the sky? Ever hear of hydrogen bombs?
Power-producing fusion is a proven fact, and using it for electricity production is a technological challenge that most experts in fusion think we can surpass in a timely fashion with proper funding and research effort.
No, I object to your objection, it is not nonsense. My statement is not intended to be one about the nature of the universe (despite my admittedly unfortunate phrasing), but the nature of advancing technology. When an obstacle relies on the acme of human cleverness to overcome it, it is not easy to predict when, or if, it will be overcome. (One could argue against that, citing Moore's Law perhaps. I'll try to respond to that if someone decides to do so.)
But even so, just because most experts decide something doesn't necessarily mean it's possible. My point, merely, is that throwing money and effort at a problem is not always enough, and I didn't say that useful fusion *was* impossible, but that it *might* be.
You know, I'm really sure, if you have THAT many images of the same parts and activities over and over, that you can invent a much better compression algorithm for it than MPEG....
My wife's building a 4 petabyte array (starting with 600 terabyte by the end of this year) for real-time multiple-access high-speed video streaming on GPFS.
My solution to terrorism? Take the amount of money we've spent in Iraq and direct it towards fusion power research. Once fusion power is achieved, we don't need to prop up those regimes in the middle east any more. At last, we will be able to leave and flip them off on the way out. Then when the middle east is still a hellhole they can't blame us.
Well, the two problems I can see with that are:
1. We use oil for more things than power. Of course, without using it as a fuel source, it'd severely cut into the demand. But it'd still be in demand.
2. More seriously, there is no guarentee that fusion power will ever be workable. It may not be feasible in our universe to ever get more power out of a fusion reaction than you put in.
Which is not to say we shouldn't try. Just that we shouldn't put all our eggs in that basket. We're agreed that none of 'em should be in the Iraq basket....
1. If we stick $300 billion dollars into fusion research; all we'll get is a lot of physicists who are $300 billion dollars richer.
So, you're on Slashdot and you distrust physicists? Your days, my friend, are numbered.
So, why do you think making physicists richer is a bad thing? Do you have some reason you hate them? One route a particle accelerated through your house one? Someone give a subatomic particle a name that pokes fun at your wife?
2. We could do the same thing already by building more nuclear power plants. The reason we don't is because of liberal evironmentalist whacknuts.
Ah, I think the reason we don't build more nuclear plants is safety concerns, sport. In fact, there are new, safer ideas in nuclear plants going forward, like pebblebed reactors which cannot melt down. I'm sure the original poster would not object to them. I'm sure he'd object to your inflammatory rhetoric.
3. Who says that liberal environmentalist whacknuts won't get all prissy about fusion power too?
Maybe they will, if it proves to be dangerous! But we have every reason to believe that it'd be inherently safer than fission. Jerk.
Yeah? How the hell are we supposed to prove it? So many of the damn details are under wraps! Asking someone to prove something that they're prevented from proving because of the very thing they're claiming is intellectually dishonest.
It is completely natural to be suspecious of something done in secret, and the more power being wielded behind that curtain, the more natural it is. In fact, it is healthy to be suspecious of this.
And even if all the spooks involved have been perfect saints, the fact of the matter is, powers such as these get abused, sooner or later. It's only a matter of time.
One of the cool things (though not the coolest) about Serious Sam is that his personality is NOT that of Duke Nukem, which is the same as Mr. J. Random Badass. Of course, Sam doesn't actually talk a whole lot in the game I played (the first one) -- I can only name two other jokes he makes in the whole game, and one is during the ending.
For the record, the only other in-game joke I can remember Sam making has him walking down a corridor, and as he approaches the hallway at the end, a bunch of enemies run across his field of vision, away from him. Sam says, in an exasperated tone: "Hey! I'm over *here!* (Bunch of headless freaks!)"
(The coolest thing about Serious Sam? The action! Nothing like mowing down dozens of ravenous monsters trying to kill you - and coming at you at once, and with frequent replacements - and surviving. If more FPSes were like that, then hell, maybe I'd *like* the genre.)
How long before we get some kind of lame-ass movie story about someone who receives donor brain cells from an unborn embryo and rapidly become EvIl InCaRnAtE?
One of the scariest moments I had myself was with the game "Blood"
Scaryscary...
(a zombie themed first person shooter),...scaryscaryscary...
where kamikaze zombies would run at you...scaryscaryscaryscarySCARY...
(SeriousSam-like)...
sca-...!
Wow, you just destroyed the entire effect of your post, man! Mention those Serious Sam guys and I always have to stifle a chuckle, especially when I remember that point early in the game where you blast one of those guys running at you, screaming, from over a hill, and Sam says in that Sam-like manner, "Waaaaugh yerself!!"
Then like a hundred of them come over the hill, and Sam says: "Uh-oh." Great moment, yes, scary, no. Heh.
Thank you very much! I'll play around with it a bit. Rest assured you just helped a college student ensure he'll be absolutely useless when he has to go in tomorrow morning, heh.
At the McDonalds around there, there's no password or username or code needed to connect. I've always paid to use it (and paid for that paying; ugh).
There's a web-connected Burger King here as well. They have computer stations but I don't know if they have wireless. You need a password to connect there, however; it's printed on the receipt.
Actually, there's a local McDonalds here that already has free Wifi, I've used it my laptop with it twice now.
Twice, because that's the number of times I've been able to stand McDonald's lousy food. And my laptop always feels a couple of pounds heavier afterwards....
So when super real graphics become the standard, the focus will shift away from them. It's simply inevitable.
You took the previous argument and showed the greater pattern that underlies it and makes it moot. Allow me to do the same with your argument.
This process you describe, this process by which the monied and capital-laden get to make the cool stuff by the virtue of their obscene wealth is, of course, accurate to a point. They're a level or two ahead of ordinary people in capability and production values by virtue of their economic resources.
But they won't always be thus. The breaking point, in a field, is when human imagination and ingenuity fails to come up with a succeeding-level of technology fast enough. Then the model falls apart, businessmen weep and gnash their teeth, legal efforts are undertaken to try to controll it, and if they fail, democratization occurs. The floodgates of creativity are unleashed!
Which in practice will probably mean a ratio of one worthwhile work to every thousand pieces of Naked Sailor Moon Fanfiction. But that one-in-a-thousand piece... it's swell.
Of course, by that time the moneymen have found something else cool to make people drool over, and the masses have moved onto something else to obsess over that is ruthlessly controlled by virtue of the expense of working with it.
And thus the process continues until one of these things happens:
1. The Singularity that people keep fussing about, which would be the point at which this metaprocess has turned in on itself, or 2. Massive cultural breakdown, where our society runs out of that upon which it has fueled itself (which is partly the result of these processes), or 3. Forever. But my money's not on this one.
As a 15 year old virgin boy (back then) I found it really awesome and they were the kind of dreams were I didnt want to wake up....gasp! Someone call Jack Thompson! We need to abolish this heretofore-unacknowledged, obviously widespread source of pornography before it's too late! Think of all the children sleeping each night, experiencing all kinds of lewd, obscene, depraved sexual acts! We need to install develop and install federally-mandated dream-supression technology in all kids beds today!
One possible solution is to move the criminality of kiddie porn from its distribution to its production. Then the crime is the protographing of naked children for sexual intent (or the import of such photographs), rather than a free speech issue.
Not trying to make any sophisticated point here. It's just fun to think about the mechanics of law, heh.
Concrete details of their Wifi plans!
on
DS WiFi On The Way
·
· Score: 1
At long last, we have something solid. We have pictures of the Wifi adaptor. We have confirmed they're making a mass market USB device. We have solid information on how players will meet up.
Maybe now we can stop speculating and get down to the actual drooling.
All these are Bubble Bobble action/puzzle games, which provide some of the best play ever seen in arcades. Quick, simple to pick up, but with hundreds of possible bonus items and astounding hidden depths. Also home to one of the first actual codes found in an arcade game, devilishly hidden secret rooms (get as far as you can without dying!), and the "Bubble Alphabet," a code to decipher if you DO find one of those rooms.
Elevator Action: A nifty game, looks really simple, but the challenge ramps up fast.
Space Invaders, Space Invades Part II, Return of the Invaders: Space Invaders is mostly interesting for historical purposes, but the sequels tend to update the series mighty nice, almost (but not quite) to the point where they start looking more like Galaga than Space Invaders.
Zoo Keeper: Not the recent Flash and DS game! No, Zoo Keeper was an ultra-classic, somewhat rare arcade game that ran on Qix hardware. One of the coolest arcade games I've ever seen, with very unique, wall-in-the-animals gameplay. Also contains oddly Joust-esque platformer levels that are practically a Mario overdose. Probably worth buying the collection for, if it's only $20.
On the other hand, with practice, in both KD1 and 2, with practice you don't need the Eternal levels. It's very possible, in both games, to almost empty the world of matter within time, and once you know the layout it's not even hard.
Both these situations are especially evident in each game's "big" level, Make the Moon in the original and the Bird+Elephant level in KD2 (aka We Love Katamari). Both seem a bit difficult and barely completeable in time on first play, but now.... I can easily clean out the entire ocean in Make the Moon with over five minutes left on the clock (the katamari will always be around 877-879 meters at this point), and I just had a Bird+Elephant play in which I had only tiny islands left to scoop up with three or so minutes left (final size: a smidge over 3,600 meters).
It is nice to be able to tool around the Eternal levels, especially for introducing people to the game. But on the other hand, you have to get really good scores to unlock them in the original game. You effectively have to be able to clean out the map of junk within a limited time in order to be able to do it with all the time in the world.
In summary... Eternal levels are really good for introducing new players to Katamari Damacy, but by the time you yourself can reach them even in the original game (where they existed at all), you don't need them anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
And how! Four annoying ads at the bottom of the page, a Google Ad sidebar, those green underline ad links, and three more pages left to click through. Someone's getting paid for *this* Slashdotting....
It's odd that I have posts within a few lines of each other in the Slashdot scroll that are getting opposite objections.
The original post's tone made it very clear that its author had an axe to grind. He said that funding that all funding that research would accomplish would make scientists richer. It probably would, if you pay them for doing work.
And they might not succeed at it, a point I made in the other thread. They *might* succeed, and that would be really great. But there is no guarentee, at this point in time, from what I know, that nuclear fusion, as a method of producing power, will ever be practical, unnecessary comma.
Absolute nonsense. Ever see that glowing thing in the sky? Ever hear of hydrogen bombs?
Power-producing fusion is a proven fact, and using it for electricity production is a technological challenge that most experts in fusion think we can surpass in a timely fashion with proper funding and research effort.
No, I object to your objection, it is not nonsense. My statement is not intended to be one about the nature of the universe (despite my admittedly unfortunate phrasing), but the nature of advancing technology. When an obstacle relies on the acme of human cleverness to overcome it, it is not easy to predict when, or if, it will be overcome. (One could argue against that, citing Moore's Law perhaps. I'll try to respond to that if someone decides to do so.)
But even so, just because most experts decide something doesn't necessarily mean it's possible. My point, merely, is that throwing money and effort at a problem is not always enough, and I didn't say that useful fusion *was* impossible, but that it *might* be.
So, nyaah.
Gah....
You know, I'm really sure, if you have THAT many images of the same parts and activities over and over, that you can invent a much better compression algorithm for it than MPEG....
My wife's building a 4 petabyte array (starting with 600 terabyte by the end of this year) for real-time multiple-access high-speed video streaming on GPFS.
Wow! WHERE did you FIND HER??
My solution to terrorism? Take the amount of money we've spent in Iraq and direct it towards fusion power research. Once fusion power is achieved, we don't need to prop up those regimes in the middle east any more. At last, we will be able to leave and flip them off on the way out. Then when the middle east is still a hellhole they can't blame us.
Well, the two problems I can see with that are:
1. We use oil for more things than power. Of course, without using it as a fuel source, it'd severely cut into the demand. But it'd still be in demand.
2. More seriously, there is no guarentee that fusion power will ever be workable. It may not be feasible in our universe to ever get more power out of a fusion reaction than you put in.
Which is not to say we shouldn't try. Just that we shouldn't put all our eggs in that basket. We're agreed that none of 'em should be in the Iraq basket....
1. If we stick $300 billion dollars into fusion research; all we'll get is a lot of physicists who are $300 billion dollars richer.
So, you're on Slashdot and you distrust physicists? Your days, my friend, are numbered.
So, why do you think making physicists richer is a bad thing? Do you have some reason you hate them? One route a particle accelerated through your house one? Someone give a subatomic particle a name that pokes fun at your wife?
2. We could do the same thing already by building more nuclear power plants. The reason we don't is because of liberal evironmentalist whacknuts.
Ah, I think the reason we don't build more nuclear plants is safety concerns, sport. In fact, there are new, safer ideas in nuclear plants going forward, like pebblebed reactors which cannot melt down. I'm sure the original poster would not object to them. I'm sure he'd object to your inflammatory rhetoric.
3. Who says that liberal environmentalist whacknuts won't get all prissy about fusion power too?
Maybe they will, if it proves to be dangerous! But we have every reason to believe that it'd be inherently safer than fission. Jerk.
Yeah? How the hell are we supposed to prove it? So many of the damn details are under wraps! Asking someone to prove something that they're prevented from proving because of the very thing they're claiming is intellectually dishonest.
It is completely natural to be suspecious of something done in secret, and the more power being wielded behind that curtain, the more natural it is. In fact, it is healthy to be suspecious of this.
And even if all the spooks involved have been perfect saints, the fact of the matter is, powers such as these get abused, sooner or later. It's only a matter of time.
That quote... wow, every word glows with evil. It's almost like a Bush press conference, and how I wish that weren't true.
I think King Kong should win an award for "Demo That Sneaks StarForce Driver-Based Copy Protection Onto The Most Computers."
Alternatively, they could just win "Most Evil."
Actually...
One of the cool things (though not the coolest) about Serious Sam is that his personality is NOT that of Duke Nukem, which is the same as Mr. J. Random Badass. Of course, Sam doesn't actually talk a whole lot in the game I played (the first one) -- I can only name two other jokes he makes in the whole game, and one is during the ending.
For the record, the only other in-game joke I can remember Sam making has him walking down a corridor, and as he approaches the hallway at the end, a bunch of enemies run across his field of vision, away from him. Sam says, in an exasperated tone: "Hey! I'm over *here!* (Bunch of headless freaks!)"
(The coolest thing about Serious Sam? The action! Nothing like mowing down dozens of ravenous monsters trying to kill you - and coming at you at once, and with frequent replacements - and surviving. If more FPSes were like that, then hell, maybe I'd *like* the genre.)
How long before we get some kind of lame-ass movie story about someone who receives donor brain cells from an unborn embryo and rapidly become EvIl InCaRnAtE?
One of the scariest moments I had myself was with the game "Blood"
...scaryscaryscary...
...scaryscaryscaryscarySCARY...
Scaryscary...
(a zombie themed first person shooter),
where kamikaze zombies would run at you
(SeriousSam-like)...
sca-...!
Wow, you just destroyed the entire effect of your post, man! Mention those Serious Sam guys and I always have to stifle a chuckle, especially when I remember that point early in the game where you blast one of those guys running at you, screaming, from over a hill, and Sam says in that Sam-like manner, "Waaaaugh yerself!!"
Then like a hundred of them come over the hill, and Sam says: "Uh-oh." Great moment, yes, scary, no. Heh.
Thank you very much! I'll play around with it a bit. Rest assured you just helped a college student ensure he'll be absolutely useless when he has to go in tomorrow morning, heh.
I don't suppose you'd upload a blank QEMU VMware image somewhere so those of us forced to run Windows could play around with this?
Pretty please?
(Hopefully, ZIP'd it wouldn't be very large.)
At the McDonalds around there, there's no password or username or code needed to connect. I've always paid to use it (and paid for that paying; ugh).
There's a web-connected Burger King here as well. They have computer stations but I don't know if they have wireless. You need a password to connect there, however; it's printed on the receipt.
Actually, there's a local McDonalds here that already has free Wifi, I've used it my laptop with it twice now.
Twice, because that's the number of times I've been able to stand McDonald's lousy food. And my laptop always feels a couple of pounds heavier afterwards....
I've spoken like that, not in real life, but while playing in-character in a MMORPG. I've also spoken like that in real life, but in an ironic manner.
Did the kid have a snarky expression on his face, or was he in World Of Warcraft at the time?
So when super real graphics become the standard, the focus will shift away from them. It's simply inevitable.
You took the previous argument and showed the greater pattern that underlies it and makes it moot. Allow me to do the same with your argument.
This process you describe, this process by which the monied and capital-laden get to make the cool stuff by the virtue of their obscene wealth is, of course, accurate to a point. They're a level or two ahead of ordinary people in capability and production values by virtue of their economic resources.
But they won't always be thus. The breaking point, in a field, is when human imagination and ingenuity fails to come up with a succeeding-level of technology fast enough. Then the model falls apart, businessmen weep and gnash their teeth, legal efforts are undertaken to try to controll it, and if they fail, democratization occurs. The floodgates of creativity are unleashed!
Which in practice will probably mean a ratio of one worthwhile work to every thousand pieces of Naked Sailor Moon Fanfiction. But that one-in-a-thousand piece... it's swell.
Of course, by that time the moneymen have found something else cool to make people drool over, and the masses have moved onto something else to obsess over that is ruthlessly controlled by virtue of the expense of working with it.
And thus the process continues until one of these things happens:
1. The Singularity that people keep fussing about, which would be the point at which this metaprocess has turned in on itself, or
2. Massive cultural breakdown, where our society runs out of that upon which it has fueled itself (which is partly the result of these processes), or
3. Forever. But my money's not on this one.
As a 15 year old virgin boy (back then) I found it really awesome and they were the kind of dreams were I didnt want to wake up. ...gasp! Someone call Jack Thompson! We need to abolish this heretofore-unacknowledged, obviously widespread source of pornography before it's too late! Think of all the children sleeping each night, experiencing all kinds of lewd, obscene, depraved sexual acts! We need to install develop and install federally-mandated dream-supression technology in all kids beds today!
(I really think they'd do it if they could.)
Honestly, I think you're kidding yourself if you think it would have.
Who knows? I think you're kidding yourself if you think this argument is a slam dunk!
This is a very good point.
One possible solution is to move the criminality of kiddie porn from its distribution to its production. Then the crime is the protographing of naked children for sexual intent (or the import of such photographs), rather than a free speech issue.
Not trying to make any sophisticated point here. It's just fun to think about the mechanics of law, heh.
At long last, we have something solid. We have pictures of the Wifi adaptor. We have confirmed they're making a mass market USB device. We have solid information on how players will meet up.
Maybe now we can stop speculating and get down to the actual drooling.
Bubble Bobble, Bubble Symphony, Rainbow Islands:
All these are Bubble Bobble action/puzzle games, which provide some of the best play ever seen in arcades. Quick, simple to pick up, but with hundreds of possible bonus items and astounding hidden depths. Also home to one of the first actual codes found in an arcade game, devilishly hidden secret rooms (get as far as you can without dying!), and the "Bubble Alphabet," a code to decipher if you DO find one of those rooms.
Elevator Action:
A nifty game, looks really simple, but the challenge ramps up fast.
Space Invaders, Space Invades Part II, Return of the Invaders:
Space Invaders is mostly interesting for historical purposes, but the sequels tend to update the series mighty nice, almost (but not quite) to the point where they start looking more like Galaga than Space Invaders.
Zoo Keeper:
Not the recent Flash and DS game! No, Zoo Keeper was an ultra-classic, somewhat rare arcade game that ran on Qix hardware. One of the coolest arcade games I've ever seen, with very unique, wall-in-the-animals gameplay. Also contains oddly Joust-esque platformer levels that are practically a Mario overdose. Probably worth buying the collection for, if it's only $20.
On the other hand, with practice, in both KD1 and 2, with practice you don't need the Eternal levels. It's very possible, in both games, to almost empty the world of matter within time, and once you know the layout it's not even hard.
Both these situations are especially evident in each game's "big" level, Make the Moon in the original and the Bird+Elephant level in KD2 (aka We Love Katamari). Both seem a bit difficult and barely completeable in time on first play, but now.... I can easily clean out the entire ocean in Make the Moon with over five minutes left on the clock (the katamari will always be around 877-879 meters at this point), and I just had a Bird+Elephant play in which I had only tiny islands left to scoop up with three or so minutes left (final size: a smidge over 3,600 meters).
It is nice to be able to tool around the Eternal levels, especially for introducing people to the game. But on the other hand, you have to get really good scores to unlock them in the original game. You effectively have to be able to clean out the map of junk within a limited time in order to be able to do it with all the time in the world.
In summary... Eternal levels are really good for introducing new players to Katamari Damacy, but by the time you yourself can reach them even in the original game (where they existed at all), you don't need them anymore.