Errr... I think that's with random number generators, not necessarily with people or other real world entities.
Looked at from a certain way, everything is a random number generator (admittedly, some are better than others), but that's beside the point. Over an infinite period of time, *ALL* possible things happen. Random number generators are just one of the easier ways to explain this, but it applies to all things with a non-zero probability, and practically nothing that isn't forbidden by an actual law of physics has zero probability. Any non-zero number times infinity is infinity, so, anything that can happen will, granted an infinite time-frame.
That logic is quite flawed. I could live forever and vow never to visit China, for instance. One can conceive of a world where I go on living but never visit China. So long as nothing forces me to go there, I could quite easily make the choice not to ad infinitum.
False. This shows a misunderstanding of the nature of infinity. Eventually, something will happen to cause you to go to China. If it doesn't happen after the first fifty billion years, then maybe it'll happen after the next fifty billion. If not then, then the fifty billion after that. There will never be an end to the number of fifty billion year periods.
Further, since we're talking about infinity here, you will go to China an infinite number of times. Hope you like kung pao!
Honestly, I'm a Christian, and I've never met another Christian who spouted crap like "God put them there to test our faith"....
I have.... That's just flaming stupid.
I agree.
The problem with Intelligent Design is that it's a transparent attempt to make the doubt of evolution seem scientific, much more than a credible theory. Instead of being built from the ground up as science first, it seems custom-built to get into classrooms by any means necessary. That's not just bad, it's evil. Evil, callous, cynical, manipulative, and dangerous.
I'm going to have to disagree with you on this one. "Most"? 90% of the Christians I personally know tell me that the Bible is the literal word of God, and evolution is one of Satan's attempts to derail good Christians and keep them from the kingdom of Heaven.
I know a lot of Christians.
Aren't Catholics Christians too? There's a hell of a lot of Catholics, and it's not a religion that takes a literal view on everything in the Bible, in my understanding. (On the other hand, there's that whole communion issue, which seems rather odd -- "Funny, it doesn't taste like Christ-blood.")
Anyway, the point I'm making is that just because you may be surrounded by a lot of Christians, it doesn't mean that they're all the same. Most Christians, numerically-speaking, aren't living in the United States.
Intelligent Design or millions upon millions of years of evolution and adaptation - either way, the design of life is far from flawless or without "bugs."
Cancer: The problem there is, evolution doesn't optimize for the effeciency of individuals, but of the species as a whole. It's very possible that the flaw that allows for cancer (which seems to be present throughout most mammalian life) has other benefits.
Aids: Unfortunately, this is an example of evolution's success -- it's an epidemic that's been spead to a large number of people, is it no From the point of view of the Aids virus, it's a success.
Of course it could also be argued that, by killing the host, Aids denies itself further opportunity to spread. But it's a relatively new disease after all, give it a few millennia -- assuming it hasn't killed us off by then. But then, viruses aren't particularly known for their foresight.
Hold on a moment there. I've been thinking about this for a bit, and....
1. We don't know how much time elapsed between God's command to Adam not to eat the fruit and its actual consumption.
2. Adam and Eve were immortal until the fruit was eaten.
Immortal means: infinite length of life. There could have been thousands of millions of billions of years between the command and the act. But it *would* have happened eventually, because in infinity, all possible things happen. It was *inevitable* that they eat the fruit, it was only a matter of time.
Now, that doesn't sound like a test of free will to me. And in fact, it seems that free will is not actually mentioned in the Bible. That's just something that arose during the centuries of obsessive meditation and re-meditation over the Bible there's been in the Western world. Think about anything that much, and you'll end up seeing all kinds of things implied by it as well, which is why some of the English papers I've been reading lately strike me as the products of a sprained mind.
That new robot over in the corner is a bad influence.
He keeps bringing the other kids down. All he does is complain about the pain in all his diodes down his left side, about how the kids shouldn't talk to him about life, and making disparaging remarks about their intelligence.
Gotcha, thanks, I haven't seen the problem lately, but since it survived version changes before, I had assumed that it had just decided to not show itself for a while. Nice to hear it's probably been fixed in the version I'm using.
Just the possibility of a human mind bouncing around inside a sheep's head is a scary proposition.
Why is it that all the things that I find incredibly frightening these days, one half of my brain also finds impossibly hilarious? If Douglas Adams were alive today he'd be writing Guide entries about exactly this sort of thing.
If he didn't already. Remember the animal from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe...?
Won't it be regarded as an embrace-or-extend move by Mozilla?
Maybe. If the Mozilla foundation were a gigantic monopoly which seeked to break standards specifically for the purpose of creating compatibility problems with competing browsers in favor of their own proprietary alternative.
Wait. They're not a monopoly. They're implementing a standard and not breaking one. They're doing nothing proprietary.
Remember, it was Microsoft that coined the term "embrace and extend." Changes are not bad in and of themselves, but web browsers need to be interoperable and standards-compliant, so different browsers will render the same thing the same way. Copying IE's rendering to display those pages that are designed around IE is compatible with IE, but IE alone, and ultimately just gives Microsoft carte blanche to dictate the development of HTML. The Mozilla guys are doing it the right way here.
I have, on Windows, and when it happens it's really annoying. Even more annoying is that the problem is intermittant, and sometimes goes away on a page reload.
Thing is, it plays quite differently from, say, original Doom even graphics aside. If you like FPS games, the difference is really important.
But it still uses the same language to play. That is, you still look around, you still look for targets, you still point your aiming crosshair at them while manuevering through a camera that represents your viewpoint, your motion is still mostly limited to roving around like a tank (or, for some games, a tank with a gait), you side-step, you find weapons, weapons across FPSes tend to have similar types of weaknesses and strengths, etc. One might argue "well of course they have these things, that's what games *are*," but my response to that would be, "no, they aren't, not necessarily, and your saying that just shows your perspective is unknowingly limited."
Which isn't to say that FPS's are automatically *bad*. I know I'm not too fond of them, but I'm not against the very idea. I just think too much has been made of them. I think FPSes wouldn't be anywhere near as popular right now as they are if the people at id, many of whom are geniuses, hadn't poured so much of their genius into them. Makes me wonder what they would have done if they were more of a Will Wright turn of mind. But anyway.
There are plenty of genre-defying movies -- there just aren't so many from big studios. (Draw your own truths from that statement, and it's unlikely that I'll disagree with them.) Also, some genres have the same kind of category inflation that puzzle games and sims, from my previous message, have -- they're *called* members of a genre because people don't have better boxes in which to put them yet.
I read lots of sci-fi books, and I keep reading it because I enjoy the genre. There is to me easily enough range in it to keep me entertained.
But anything with science in it, which is a very big category, gets lumped into sci-fi. Just like anything that isn't strictly possible gets called fantasy, or something like "magic realism" if it has literary value. Those are much bigger ideaspaces than FPSes are, so I'd say your analogy fails.
Likewise I like FPS games, playing Halo 2 isn't like playing Riddick, or playing UT, or playing Doom.
But they're all much more like each other than they are like (to again draw from my favorite recent example) Katamari Damacy.
Well, here we are 18 months and 6 days later, finally getting a look at Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. Windows users patiently waiting for Longhorn may not be sympathetic, but the longer wait for Tiger is something new to Mac OS X users.
Saying Nintendogs isn't original: well, it's a much, much more detailed example of a virtual pet than the Tamagotchi one he brought up, enough so that it transcends the extremely simplistic "gameplay" that Tamagotchi had. He missed the boat on this one though: if he wanted to find a program that was similar to Nintendogs, he could have mentioned Dogz, which is almost forgotten now but was a nice little niche once upon a time. Still, Nintendogs seems to be doing extraordinarily well in Japan....
The music-creation game he mentioned is probably Electroplankton, one of the weirder DS programs (I hesitate to call it a game) coming down the pike. I doubt it's as similar to the Mac program he mentioned than he thinks it is. But even if it were similar, I doubt Nintendo knew anything about it, and neither does most gamers I'd guess, so it doesn't matter.
It's weird seeing Dvorak, who probably knows next to nothing about video games, decrying the lack of originality in gaming. I, and a good many others here, have been doing that for years, but of course we don't have a column/loudspeaker in PC Magazine to get people to listen to us. His listing of genres (and, I presume Iwata's too), was: shooters, puzzles and mazes, adventure games, sports games, and simulations
Of these, Shooters and Sports are legitimate narrow genres: they each have a fairly narrow design language, and while they may have subgenres that are differentiated by each other (especially in sports), it isn't as much as you might think it'd be. (The metagames -- player trading, training, that kind of thing -- surrounding most team sports games are usually pretty similar.)
Adventure games, in practice, are fairly narrow as well, but it's *possible* to break out of that field. This is why Nintendo usually tries putting one huge "gimmick" into every Zelda game they release, like time travel, a three-day system, or an oceanic overworld. Even so, the basic 3D Zelda play mechanics have now been around since Ocarina of Time; shame that it looks like Nintendo has been cowed into not messing around with the series all that much in the next installment, after the furor over Wind Waker's cel shading.
The other two "genres," puzzle/maze (maze?!) and simulation, tend to be catch-all categories; even if someone does release a genre-busting game, many people will lump it into one of these two categories rather than try to devise a new one. (Oh, the times I've seen Mario Party listed, when a genre is demanded, as a puzzle game!) Most games look like puzzles from a sufficently distant perspective, though some are "real-time kinetic puzzles," that is, action games. And most games simulate *something*, even if that thing isn't excessively realistic.
Halo and Halo 2 may innovate within the genre of the first-person shooter, but it's still firmly within that genre, and thus is, by definition, derivative. Even if it were the utmost exemplar of a FPS, it'd still, alas, be a FPS.
the company claimed it had received little negative feedback on the issue.
In other news, a noted chemical manufacturer was found to have been dumping toxic waste products into a nearby water supply for years. In their defense, company spokesmen claims they had received little negative on the issue.
Local police have been caught on camera beating up suspected felons. When cornered on the issue, they responded by saying that there had been little negative feedback on the issue -- at least, from anyone who mattered.
In a press conference today, Bush defended his administration's handling of the war on terrorism by saying that they had little negative feedback on the issue. (Possibly because they had suppressed their own report on the issue; outside sources indicate that terrorist activity around the world is four times worse than in the previous year.)
There, three possible responses to the negative feedback defense. Pick your favorite, I need a drink after this.
Better example: Rad Racer, which was produced by Square but published by Nintendo themselves in the U.S., and used the same red-blue 3D, if not the same engine as Worldrunner.
3D projection has been used in games before - Sega's "Hologram: Time Traveler" game, a rather dopey Dragon's Lair type game with live action footage is an example, though it wasn't true 3D.
And 3D itself has also been used, by Nintendo themselves in the Virtual Boy, and by Sega with their Master System's interesting, but not interesting enough, special glasses.
But yeah, it'd be cool if this were it, and in full color, and could be viewed by everyone in the room without everyone needing special expensive headgear.
Well, they could always have just bundled a stripped-down tool. Or just used the open portions of PDF, which is what I think Apple does. And such a PDF feature would be a part of Office, not Windows, sort of thing.
What it is, is that I need to stop posting on Slashdot in the middle of the night. I wasn't even thinking about licensing in that sense.
And of course my saying that will lead people to respond "but it's exactly the same sense," and I'll have to say, "Okay, I meant it with that "royalty-free" modifier behind it.
Then people will respond "You think there's something wrong with that?" And I'll have to issue yet another half-awake mea culpa in response.
By the time we get the precise meaning that resided in my brain that night here honed down to the appropriate number of decimal places, Longhorn will probably be out and in use for three months.
Okay, granted, my bad, maybe I should have phrased it differently. Still, the words "royalty-free licensing" seem oddly meancing in a negative-space kind of way, like saying, "Oh! And feel free to use our wondrous work in any way you wish! We won't even charge you for it!"
Slashdot Mirror
Errr... I think that's with random number generators, not necessarily with people or other real world entities.
Looked at from a certain way, everything is a random number generator (admittedly, some are better than others), but that's beside the point. Over an infinite period of time, *ALL* possible things happen. Random number generators are just one of the easier ways to explain this, but it applies to all things with a non-zero probability, and practically nothing that isn't forbidden by an actual law of physics has zero probability. Any non-zero number times infinity is infinity, so, anything that can happen will, granted an infinite time-frame.
That logic is quite flawed. I could live forever and vow never to visit China, for instance. One can conceive of a world where I go on living but never visit China. So long as nothing forces me to go there, I could quite easily make the choice not to ad infinitum.
False. This shows a misunderstanding of the nature of infinity. Eventually, something will happen to cause you to go to China. If it doesn't happen after the first fifty billion years, then maybe it'll happen after the next fifty billion. If not then, then the fifty billion after that. There will never be an end to the number of fifty billion year periods.
Further, since we're talking about infinity here, you will go to China an infinite number of times. Hope you like kung pao!
Honestly, I'm a Christian, and I've never met another Christian who spouted crap like "God put them there to test our faith"....
... That's just flaming stupid.
I have.
I agree.
The problem with Intelligent Design is that it's a transparent attempt to make the doubt of evolution seem scientific, much more than a credible theory. Instead of being built from the ground up as science first, it seems custom-built to get into classrooms by any means necessary. That's not just bad, it's evil. Evil, callous, cynical, manipulative, and dangerous.
I'm going to have to disagree with you on this one. "Most"? 90% of the Christians I personally know tell me that the Bible is the literal word of God, and evolution is one of Satan's attempts to derail good Christians and keep them from the kingdom of Heaven.
I know a lot of Christians.
Aren't Catholics Christians too? There's a hell of a lot of Catholics, and it's not a religion that takes a literal view on everything in the Bible, in my understanding. (On the other hand, there's that whole communion issue, which seems rather odd -- "Funny, it doesn't taste like Christ-blood.")
Anyway, the point I'm making is that just because you may be surrounded by a lot of Christians, it doesn't mean that they're all the same. Most Christians, numerically-speaking, aren't living in the United States.
- Cancer - Aids
Intelligent Design or millions upon millions of years of evolution and adaptation - either way, the design of life is far from flawless or without "bugs."
Cancer: The problem there is, evolution doesn't optimize for the effeciency of individuals, but of the species as a whole. It's very possible that the flaw that allows for cancer (which seems to be present throughout most mammalian life) has other benefits.
Aids: Unfortunately, this is an example of evolution's success -- it's an epidemic that's been spead to a large number of people, is it no From the point of view of the Aids virus, it's a success.
Of course it could also be argued that, by killing the host, Aids denies itself further opportunity to spread. But it's a relatively new disease after all, give it a few millennia -- assuming it hasn't killed us off by then. But then, viruses aren't particularly known for their foresight.
Hold on a moment there. I've been thinking about this for a bit, and....
1. We don't know how much time elapsed between God's command to Adam not to eat the fruit and its actual consumption.
2. Adam and Eve were immortal until the fruit was eaten.
Immortal means: infinite length of life. There could have been thousands of millions of billions of years between the command and the act. But it *would* have happened eventually, because in infinity, all possible things happen. It was *inevitable* that they eat the fruit, it was only a matter of time.
Now, that doesn't sound like a test of free will to me. And in fact, it seems that free will is not actually mentioned in the Bible. That's just something that arose during the centuries of obsessive meditation and re-meditation over the Bible there's been in the Western world. Think about anything that much, and you'll end up seeing all kinds of things implied by it as well, which is why some of the English papers I've been reading lately strike me as the products of a sprained mind.
That new robot over in the corner is a bad influence.
He keeps bringing the other kids down. All he does is complain about the pain in all his diodes down his left side, about how the kids shouldn't talk to him about life, and making disparaging remarks about their intelligence.
Seems to like kickball, though.
Gotcha, thanks, I haven't seen the problem lately, but since it survived version changes before, I had assumed that it had just decided to not show itself for a while. Nice to hear it's probably been fixed in the version I'm using.
Just the possibility of a human mind bouncing around inside a sheep's head is a scary proposition.
Why is it that all the things that I find incredibly frightening these days, one half of my brain also finds impossibly hilarious? If Douglas Adams were alive today he'd be writing Guide entries about exactly this sort of thing.
If he didn't already. Remember the animal from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe...?
Hey wow, thanks! I'll make sure to remember this.
Won't it be regarded as an embrace-or-extend move by Mozilla?
Maybe. If the Mozilla foundation were a gigantic monopoly which seeked to break standards specifically for the purpose of creating compatibility problems with competing browsers in favor of their own proprietary alternative.
Wait. They're not a monopoly. They're implementing a standard and not breaking one. They're doing nothing proprietary.
Remember, it was Microsoft that coined the term "embrace and extend." Changes are not bad in and of themselves, but web browsers need to be interoperable and standards-compliant, so different browsers will render the same thing the same way. Copying IE's rendering to display those pages that are designed around IE is compatible with IE, but IE alone, and ultimately just gives Microsoft carte blanche to dictate the development of HTML. The Mozilla guys are doing it the right way here.
I have, on Windows, and when it happens it's really annoying. Even more annoying is that the problem is intermittant, and sometimes goes away on a page reload.
Bots: "Amiga?! (snicker snort)"
It was Joel, by the way, and a fairly early season too, possibly second.
Thing is, it plays quite differently from, say, original Doom even graphics aside. If you like FPS games, the difference is really important.
But it still uses the same language to play. That is, you still look around, you still look for targets, you still point your aiming crosshair at them while manuevering through a camera that represents your viewpoint, your motion is still mostly limited to roving around like a tank (or, for some games, a tank with a gait), you side-step, you find weapons, weapons across FPSes tend to have similar types of weaknesses and strengths, etc. One might argue "well of course they have these things, that's what games *are*," but my response to that would be, "no, they aren't, not necessarily, and your saying that just shows your perspective is unknowingly limited."
Which isn't to say that FPS's are automatically *bad*. I know I'm not too fond of them, but I'm not against the very idea. I just think too much has been made of them. I think FPSes wouldn't be anywhere near as popular right now as they are if the people at id, many of whom are geniuses, hadn't poured so much of their genius into them. Makes me wonder what they would have done if they were more of a Will Wright turn of mind. But anyway.
There are plenty of genre-defying movies -- there just aren't so many from big studios. (Draw your own truths from that statement, and it's unlikely that I'll disagree with them.) Also, some genres have the same kind of category inflation that puzzle games and sims, from my previous message, have -- they're *called* members of a genre because people don't have better boxes in which to put them yet.
I read lots of sci-fi books, and I keep reading it because I enjoy the genre. There is to me easily enough range in it to keep me entertained.
But anything with science in it, which is a very big category, gets lumped into sci-fi. Just like anything that isn't strictly possible gets called fantasy, or something like "magic realism" if it has literary value. Those are much bigger ideaspaces than FPSes are, so I'd say your analogy fails.
Likewise I like FPS games, playing Halo 2 isn't like playing Riddick, or playing UT, or playing Doom.
But they're all much more like each other than they are like (to again draw from my favorite recent example) Katamari Damacy.
All of the fragility of DVD disks, with none of the good movies!
Honestly, Napoleon Dynamite is the only movie given in the story that I care anything, and I mean anything, about.
Well, here we are 18 months and 6 days later, finally getting a look at Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. Windows users patiently waiting for Longhorn may not be sympathetic, but the longer wait for Tiger is something new to Mac OS X users.
Crow (smug): "What about System 7?"
Servo (irate): "THEY'RE WORKING ON IT!!"
Saying Nintendogs isn't original: well, it's a much, much more detailed example of a virtual pet than the Tamagotchi one he brought up, enough so that it transcends the extremely simplistic "gameplay" that Tamagotchi had. He missed the boat on this one though: if he wanted to find a program that was similar to Nintendogs, he could have mentioned Dogz, which is almost forgotten now but was a nice little niche once upon a time. Still, Nintendogs seems to be doing extraordinarily well in Japan....
The music-creation game he mentioned is probably Electroplankton, one of the weirder DS programs (I hesitate to call it a game) coming down the pike. I doubt it's as similar to the Mac program he mentioned than he thinks it is. But even if it were similar, I doubt Nintendo knew anything about it, and neither does most gamers I'd guess, so it doesn't matter.
It's weird seeing Dvorak, who probably knows next to nothing about video games, decrying the lack of originality in gaming. I, and a good many others here, have been doing that for years, but of course we don't have a column/loudspeaker in PC Magazine to get people to listen to us. His listing of genres (and, I presume Iwata's too), was: shooters, puzzles and mazes, adventure games, sports games, and simulations
Of these, Shooters and Sports are legitimate narrow genres: they each have a fairly narrow design language, and while they may have subgenres that are differentiated by each other (especially in sports), it isn't as much as you might think it'd be. (The metagames -- player trading, training, that kind of thing -- surrounding most team sports games are usually pretty similar.)
Adventure games, in practice, are fairly narrow as well, but it's *possible* to break out of that field. This is why Nintendo usually tries putting one huge "gimmick" into every Zelda game they release, like time travel, a three-day system, or an oceanic overworld. Even so, the basic 3D Zelda play mechanics have now been around since Ocarina of Time; shame that it looks like Nintendo has been cowed into not messing around with the series all that much in the next installment, after the furor over Wind Waker's cel shading.
The other two "genres," puzzle/maze (maze?!) and simulation, tend to be catch-all categories; even if someone does release a genre-busting game, many people will lump it into one of these two categories rather than try to devise a new one. (Oh, the times I've seen Mario Party listed, when a genre is demanded, as a puzzle game!) Most games look like puzzles from a sufficently distant perspective, though some are "real-time kinetic puzzles," that is, action games. And most games simulate *something*, even if that thing isn't excessively realistic.
Halo and Halo 2 may innovate within the genre of the first-person shooter, but it's still firmly within that genre, and thus is, by definition, derivative. Even if it were the utmost exemplar of a FPS, it'd still, alas, be a FPS.
the company claimed it had received little negative feedback on the issue.
In other news, a noted chemical manufacturer was found to have been dumping toxic waste products into a nearby water supply for years. In their defense, company spokesmen claims they had received little negative on the issue.
Local police have been caught on camera beating up suspected felons. When cornered on the issue, they responded by saying that there had been little negative feedback on the issue -- at least, from anyone who mattered.
In a press conference today, Bush defended his administration's handling of the war on terrorism by saying that they had little negative feedback on the issue. (Possibly because they had suppressed their own report on the issue; outside sources indicate that terrorist activity around the world is four times worse than in the previous year.)
There, three possible responses to the negative feedback defense. Pick your favorite, I need a drink after this.
Better example: Rad Racer, which was produced by Square but published by Nintendo themselves in the U.S., and used the same red-blue 3D, if not the same engine as Worldrunner.
3D projection has been used in games before - Sega's "Hologram: Time Traveler" game, a rather dopey Dragon's Lair type game with live action footage is an example, though it wasn't true 3D.
And 3D itself has also been used, by Nintendo themselves in the Virtual Boy, and by Sega with their Master System's interesting, but not interesting enough, special glasses.
But yeah, it'd be cool if this were it, and in full color, and could be viewed by everyone in the room without everyone needing special expensive headgear.
Well, they could always have just bundled a stripped-down tool. Or just used the open portions of PDF, which is what I think Apple does. And such a PDF feature would be a part of Office, not Windows, sort of thing.
It's not so much that.
What it is, is that I need to stop posting on Slashdot in the middle of the night. I wasn't even thinking about licensing in that sense.
And of course my saying that will lead people to respond "but it's exactly the same sense," and I'll have to say, "Okay, I meant it with that "royalty-free" modifier behind it.
Then people will respond "You think there's something wrong with that?" And I'll have to issue yet another half-awake mea culpa in response.
By the time we get the precise meaning that resided in my brain that night here honed down to the appropriate number of decimal places, Longhorn will probably be out and in use for three months.
Liverwurst.
Okay, granted, my bad, maybe I should have phrased it differently. Still, the words "royalty-free licensing" seem oddly meancing in a negative-space kind of way, like saying, "Oh! And feel free to use our wondrous work in any way you wish! We won't even charge you for it!"
What IS it with the score on this message? It's been up to +2 Insightful and down to -1 Troll twice now.
I'm not complaining, either way. Just weird, 's all.