I think it'd be sweet if somebody made the application so that the board just floated over the other windows, not inside of it's own window. I thought that's how it was supposed to be originally, but unfortunately I was wrong.
One of the cornerstones of the current Cocoa-y way of doing things is that the front-end and back-end are separate beasts.
Don't like the back-end? It's possible to build the app to use a program other than sjeng as its brain. It's just a matter of building with a new shell tool (and a little glue so the front-end knows how to use it).
Don't like the front end? It's also possible to build a new wrapper app for sjeng that looks however you want it to. Use the source for the existing Chess program as a template for sjeng, and then go completely nuts. Screw reskinning, design a completely different and abstract chess game!
But the windowless interface might be confusing to some users...
55 W. P - e5
55 B. P x P
56 W. N x P
56 B. B x System Preferences ?
57 W. BitTorrent - A4 !!
Kernel Panic in 4 moves
don't you think any body of laws represents a moral code?
That depends on what actions the laws are trying to prohibit, and whose moral code they're trying to support.
Laws are made by people and enforced to control people. And people have agendas. Sometimes these agendas are good and fair (ban murder), sometimes their purpose is entirely self-serving (ban oral sex), and sometimes they're just peculiar (banning taking lions to the movies).
Ask people how the laws should be changed, and you won't get just one or two answers. Many people will want new laws, many will want laws repealed, and most will want a combination.
(Do you know where I see this kind of argument the most? Freenet, where every kind of speech is possible but not all are welcome. Some speech, certain users argue, should not be allowed, but given the environment of free-wheeling and anonymity, it's awfully hard to define some of the "bad" forms, much less define them.)
The biggest problems arise when a coalition gets into government, or a government starts acting on the whims of a coalition. Suddenly laws and policies start serving one and only one group. The rest of the population becomes disenfranchised as the one group gleefully gives up everyone's right to do something that they never would do.
I won't say I'm religious, nor will I say I'm not religious, but this is the basis for my argument supporting the separation of church and state: the state cannot afford to act in the interest of only one segment of the population, no matter how religious or righteous (or self-righteous) that one group may be.
Killing a man, stealing what he earned, etc are all wrong because we believe them to be morally reprehensible and thus created laws to punish those who do it.
That is the part that practically everyone will concede to. I believe in moral absolutes. I just believe in fewer moral absolutes than many.
Does the belief that gambling is a vice have to be predicated on religion in everyone's mind? It clearly has roots there, but not everyone who opposes its legalization is religious.
Like the fact that anyone who can figure a mathematical expectation won't touch the average gambling game with a ten-foot pole? Like the fact that online gambling can be too easily rigged in favor of the house or otherwise buggy? (Have you ever seen a perfect random number generator in a computer program? Funny, me neither.)
Frankly, I don't understand this mandate... except of course it's an internationalization of the state-by-state trend of introducing progressively more and more gambling games to the public. Horse racing seems noble enough, but then you get into paramutual betting, then you get lotteries, then slot machines will want to come in... Worst of all, it's all a symptom of a common condition: tax addiction. Most governments have it.
can someone post some info on how to detect the app? (my empl is blocking access to the site).
First off, see if your employer doesn't want you getting any information about the program. They might try to prevent this by blocking access to the si... oh, wait...
It's over. The antitrust trial has gone by. A decision was made and we've stuck to it.
A decision was made, but a lot of people believe that decision was just so much tepid crap. Courts have been overturned in the past; perhaps if enough new evidence comes to light, the case can be reopened.
What now? does dragging this stuff up accomplishe anything more? It's just for microsoft bashing.
Yes, it does serve a purpose. It serves to dig up more facts and evidence should someone in the judiciary ever get wise and reevaluate that case.
Even if the trial never reopens, the Court of Public Opinion is always open. The more people learn what kinds of jiggery-pokery Microsoft has been up to, the more likely Microsoft will gets its just desserts sooner or later, and the less likely anyone else will ever pull such stunts again.
Honestly. I'm trying to figure out your attitude. "Microsoft did it, they got away with it, and that's good enough for me!" Are you always this doggedly complacent?
This whole story should be market -1 FLAMEBAIT
Need something burned down in a big hurry? Then come on down to the Flamebait Market, for all your pyromaniac needs!
(Okay, I admit it, I used Search to find that one. But the fact that it was there... And, smileys look strange when you have to type them as >:) -- and lemme tell you, that one looked even stranger. Damned recursion!)
The Peoples' Hate Affair with Apple
on
Apple Quashes pBop
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Then it gets immediate bashing from both pro-Apple and anti-Apple camps - how ugly, dysfunctional and stupid it is! Then we see an avalanche of various clones of the new Apple gizmo for Linux or Windows. And finally we hear a common outrage when Apple sends its famous "cease & desist" letters and the avalanche indeed ceases and desists.
Yeah... says something, doesn't it?
So the sequence is:
Apple creates something
People claim that the design [sucks | is ugly | is useless | is stupid | won't sell | clashes with my duvet]
The thing in question sprouts wings and takes off (metaphorically)
People copy the crap out of it
Apple sends in the lawyers
People stop copying
...right?
Step 1 is natural; they design stuff. Step 3 isn't guaranteed, but they seem to come up with quite a few hits, now don't they? Step 4 is also quite natural; if one of something is good, then a copy of it will work almost as well with a fraction of the effort! Step 5 is natural given step 4; if they don't protect their designs, then everybody will make money off of the popular ones. And step 6 is natural because, hey, lawyers are involved.
That leaves step 2: people saying that Apple's designs are bad. It farts liberally in the face of step 3, so it must have something to do with step 1: the fact that Apple made it.
And now I'm scratching my head and wondering why.
What does Apple do that makes them so evil that people will decry their products without even a second glance? Why do certain journalists feel the need to predict its imminent downfall for verging on 30 years? How do so many become so thoroughly programmed to be so hostile?
And no, I don't have the answer. That's why I'm asking.
I don't know just what kind of state Creatures is in, but it is a great simulation of, well, "creatures" that hatch from eggs, grow up, mate, make more eggs and so on. You get to teach them to talk, to eat and whatever.
On an iMac? Sorry, that dog won't hunt.
I actually had Creatures (first version) for the Mac. Sometimes it ran okay, but others it was quite horrible, mostly owing to its construction with old Microsoft development tools for the Mac. Yes, they tried a direct cross-compile from the optimized-for-Windows, and it showed. Painfully.
What's more, they had a very limited vocabulary and response matrix. I remember making jokes about how limited it was, way back when it was possible to post to a newsgroup without looking like fresh meat to a spammer. That's how long ago it was.
According to the page you posted, the subsequent products, Creatures 2, Creatures 3, and Docking Station, are all PC software. The iBooks would need to run VPC to handle those, and then I'd worry about performance.
It's not just the Sierras, and it's not just you
on
Chernobyl...18 Years Later
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Urban archaeology doesn't have the following of some hobbies, like stamp-collecting or professional sports, but I can see its appeal.
All constructions, like all people, have life cycles. They're built/conceived, people move in, they're lived-in, they have make-overs/get remodeled, they have mid-life crises/get remodeled tastelessly to hide the structure's growing problems, the spirit leaves/people move out, and get torn down.
If the area is busy enough, there's no gap between moving out and tearing down. And if the area is really busy, there's no gap between the tearing down and the building up, the quest eternal for the Next Big Thing.
Sometimes places die, and this interests people. Pripyat has the dubious distinction of actually being killed, and of course there's some interest in its slowly decaying municipal corpse. And there are other ways for a place to die suddenly too.
Obligatory links:
Lost America (desert junk + long exposure + cool lighting = art)
Dark Passage (Where hospitals go to die, it seems)
Abandoned Places (Can a man really fall in love with a doorknob?)
Come to think of it, there's a place not far from me, pretty much right in the middle of Annapolis, which I need to snap pictures of for posterity's sake. Sure, I'll be using a digital camera, but...
These days, some parents and lawmakers are taking aim at the video game industry by trying to ban sales of violently or sexually graphic games to minors. Since there are varying degrees of violence in the games, lawmakers are targeting only the most graphic -- where players vulgarly target and kill human beings.
Gosh, there's no loaded language here, is there? Let's try that last sentence again:
...where players vulgarly target and kill computer-generated replicas of human beings.
Okay, editorial qualm aside, my mood on this is mixed.
On the one hand, it would be nice to keep the especially violent video games out of the hands of mental children. Note:not minors, but those people who lack the common sense to know that no video game should be used as a guide to life. Some minors show greater maturity and understanding of the world than people four times their physical age.
But on the other hand, open the door for them and they'll dive through and keep running. After they act to keep violent videogames out of the hands of minors, they'll question whether adults should have them, and then they'll question the rights of the manufacturers to exist. I don't want to live in a completely child-safe world. I went through childhood once already, thankyaverramuch.
It's yet another slippery slope, liberally lubricated with morality and insecurity, which a third of the population wants to climb, a third wants to hold a particular position on (though no two people in that third can agree where on the slope that position should be), and a third wants to ride to the very bottom (shouted "wheeeeeeeee!" optional).
Much as I'd like to join the group that wants to climb out of that particular hole, until someone successfully passes a ban on idiocy, I feel a line needs to be held somewhere.
Um dude, if you think the way chess pieces move has any relation to the way things move in reality you need to take like 2 make that 3 steps back from your computer:) Reality has a certain logic.
I beg your pardon? Who said anything about reality? We're talking logic here.
I do not, for instance, think that in reality, armed riders on horses automatically move 37 to the left or right of the direction in which they're facing. Nor do I think that male footmen only have the option of moving forward or attacking things at their sides, nor if they break through enemy lines and reach the edge of the world do they have the option of turning into female soverigns.
However, within the context of the chessboard, things make some sense. With regards to board layout and the ways that the pieces move, everything is highly structured, ordered, and consistent. Within its own reality, chess is logical.
Reality and logic overlap each other, but neither completely covers the other. It's possible to have logic without reality (All elephants are pink / Paul is an elephant / Therefore Paul is pink), and reality without logic (the scenes depicted in the paintings of Picasso or Salvador Dali), and in some rare cases, neither (trickle-down economics).
Silly? Maybe, but let's take each of these individually. I bet we can learn something from them anyway.
Chess,
Illogical? Chess is such a logical game that it risks being boring. Except for one or two exceptions (en passant captures and castling), each piece's moves are the same throughout the game. The board remains constant. (And while there are variations from Steve Jackson Games, even they have their own internal logic.)
Tron,
That depends which version of Tron you're talking about. The premise of the movie may have been far-fetched, but the arcade game was a collection of minigames. They don't necessarily have to have anything to do with each other; the story serves as a unifying theme.
The later arcade game Discs of Tron was also very highly logical. It was a shoot-em-up with various challenge elements that had to be dealt with, including barriers appearing across the playing field and varying levels of platform.
I can't speak for Tron 2.0, but it probably has its own internal logic too. (Would some poster confirm this please?)
and Warioware.
Ah, now this is an interesting choice of game to bring up under this topic. Like Tron (the original), it's a collection of minigames. But where Tron has four games, Warioware's number in the hundreds. And it's hard to demonstrate any logic, internal or otherwise, when the games are changing so quickly.
Or rather, it's hard to find the logic in Warioware until you step back and take a look at the big picture. The mini-games are individual challenges which seemingly have nothing to do with each other. In fact, they seem intentionally disassociated from one another.
Here's a game to compare it with: Trivial Pursuit. The questions fall into categories, but they don't necessarily have anything to do with one another. The questions aren't the game. The game is an overall test of knowledge. Likewise, in Warioware, the minigames themselves aren't the game. The game is an overall test of mental agility and the ability to switch quickly from one task to another.
Someone else posted, and I generally agree: the games need some sort of internal logic in order to be comprehensible. In the case of Warioware, though, the game itself is the ability to deal with the apparent illogical barrage of activities.
Those pesky non-disclosure agreements! You've tried scrubbing, you've tried soaking...
I find it interesting that development on the guts for the PS3 began in 2001 when the PS2 first came out. They had no idea if it would boom or bust and they started working on the successor that same year.
Given that, the development cycle on the PS3 was probably influenced by the potential boominess or bustiness of the PS2.
PS2 selling well? PS3 development can take a good, long time. The gamers will be happy that we got all the quality into the product.
PS2 jamming up the distribution channels like the morning after free samples night at the cheese shop? Quick, get that PS3 up and running stat! We need a new next big thing to make up for our last next big thing! (And it would probably be coming out right now with fewer bells and whistles.)
I also want to see what kind of power-effort curve they design into PS3.
More than once I've cited the design philosophy behind the PS2: make a powerful system, and developers will learn to deal with its complexities. Contrast this with the Xbox's take: make a system easy to develop with, and developers will get more power out of it.
I want to know how that strategy worked for them, and will they be continuing it on the next next-generation game-box.
Finally, someone has admitted (and I would say emphasized) that they have the right to do such things.
Meanwhile, I worry about repercussions of a statement like that. Maybe it's because I read Slashdot.
So here's a politician who says someone has the right to do something, but in practically the same breath says that the thing is wrong. How long will it be before some politician (I wouldn't put it past Lieberman himslf) says that the rights themselves should be eliminated? And this is an election year, too, so any slippery slope that may exist has been lathered down with extra suck-up grease by pinwheels who want to sound like they're responding to issues (even invented ones).
There are still charges that need to be responded to. One concession does not mean the pressure's off. This could simply be the start of a new attack.
Don't the studios have a vested interest in lenghtening the life span of a console? Add potential features strategicly so as to have some "wow" left over. The Madden series of games gets better looking every year on the same hardware. sort of like forward expectation control and management.
Not really. The manufacturers may have a vested interest in lengthening the life span of a console, but the third-party developers have a vested interest in pushing as much "wow" into their games as possible. Unless they're lazy, distracted, or disinterested.
It's not that EA Sports had the extra "wow" to give on previous games. I seriously doubt that any video game project manager, on a Madden football title or any other, will look at test-play footage and say...
"Whoa, this is too much! Our players won't be able to handle all these elements of quality! Send this stuff back to the art department and have them muddied up, and maybe rough up the edges of the texture maps so they can see where they begin and end. We have to get the end-users to warm to these developments slowly or they'll be shocked and go play something else."
The Madden games look better every year on the same hardware because they produce the games annually, and each year they learn some more about the process from the previous year's efforts.
That said, can developers get lazy? Yes, and on any platform too. Who wants to reinvent the rendering engine when the one in the previous game (or this textbook) worked so well? Sooner or later it happens to everyone. The PS2 has a sharper learning curve. Getting lazy when developing on it does more damage and produces lackluster results. The Xbox was designed with a smoother curve, such that it required less effort to produce good product, which makes it a good sell to the average developer.
Sony's thinking, way back then, was that because no developer wants to produce an average game, they'll take the time to master the technology in the PS2, so they built it with as much potential as they could cram in. Given the topic, that thinking, noble as it might have been, seems to be hurting them now. People who develop something that looks good on the Xbox take a look at the PS2's devkit, say "What the hell is all this?", and just shove some code in a folder and compile it. "Aw hell," they'll say, "this is Sony. They can make anything look good. And if it doesn't, we'll blame them for making their tools so hard to use."
The only way to really compare the two platforms would be to build identical games from scratch using the same basic specs and ALL the tools and tricks that each platform makes available. So far as I know, nobody's done that. (Corrections, anybody? Please?) Were they to do that, my money'd be on the PS2 to pump out more wow, even though it came out months before the Xbox. Steeper learning curve, but higher potential.
Being able to express unpopular topics or even matters deemed to be too taboo by a restrictive society and even being able to discuss them is what makes (semi-)anonymous systems such as Freenet and Mute so important these days.
I don't know Mute (will look it up now, thanks), but Freenet has its own moral dilemma, brought about because everybody has their own idea what constitutes free speech and what is allowable in a free society.
Consequently, I see many Freenet users (who generally support free speech) bemoaning the presence of child pornography (one of the biggest taboos out there, it seems) on the Freenet itself. Mashed together into one sentence it's actually funny: "Information should not be repressed, but the jerk who posted that should be shot."
From the article:
So if you want to figure out what we can't say, look at the machinery of fashion and try to predict what it would make unsayable. What groups are powerful but nervous, and what ideas would they like to suppress? What ideas were tarnished by association when they ended up on the losing side of a recent struggle? If a self-consciously cool person wanted to differentiate himself from preceding fashions (e.g. from his parents), which of their ideas would he tend to reject? What are conventional-minded people afraid of saying?
It'll be interesting to see what taboos are created as a result of an internal conflict...
People are getting to dang PC if they can't seperate the goings on within a game to what's actually going on in real life.
Nope, sorry, that's not quite right. I agree that people are getting too damn politically correct, but that symptom is reflected in the Haitians comment in the game (which I have yet to play; I'd better grab my copy of the value pack before it gets yanked off the shelves), not in the inability to tell fantasy from reality.
The fantasy/reality confusion is symptomatic of something even more troubling: a lack of both
critical thinking skills and
morality.
Critical thinking and comprehension are big things. A good school will teach you how to think, and from there everything falls into place. A bad school will teach you what to think, and people will either sink or swim in the real world depending on what they learn of the thinking and understanding process itself.
There are a lot of bad thinkers out there. They're the sort of people who will read a passage of text, fail to comprehend its deeper meaning, pick out a few keywords, appearantly string them together randomly to form their own concept, and act as if they just read that.
(You may wonder what sort of message people get from practically any medium. You may even become afraid to produce any such works yourself for fear of being critically misinterpreted. Thus, free speech is such a fragile concept that even stupidity can have chilling effects on it.)
In the case of GTA, the message of the game would seem to be "gang warfare is bad." (Remember, I haven't played it yet.) But the way it's told in game is rather convoluted, so people are seeing the "gang warfare" aspect and completely blanking on the "is bad" part.
It greatly troubles me that we have a government full of people that either (a) are these types or (b) pander to these types to garner support.
Morality is something I think I should cover in another steaming load of screed. But I'll say now: it doesn't mean "religious".
However lame you may think Peter Ludlow is for his pastime, EA has done something much lamer:
Rule #1: Don't Shoot the Messenger. No matter how distasteful the message may be, you can not and should not blame a person just because he delivers it.
Now it looks like EA is trying to sweep whatever nastiness he was reporting about under the rug...and you'll have to wonder what else they're hiding.
To summarise the article, a group of reporters were pissed that they weren't invited to attend the conference.
That's no surprise. If I recall correctly, the G7 summits are intended to be discussions on global economic policy, to which none of the affected people (pretty much everybody but government officials) are ever invited. (In fact, I don't hear of many economists going to those conferences either; if I'm wrong, please correct.)
As for press not getting in, sure you may loathe muckraker reporting (many people do), but sometimes there's just too much muck to allow to pile up. Do you really want your government to be deciding elements of policy without any input from its constituency? That's becoming the norm, and guerilla reporting may soon be the only way the operation of said government can come to light.
They disected a security card, and found (shock, horror) that it contained features designed to maintain security at said conference. Since this is the only dirt they managed to find, they spin it up into a sky-is-falling end-of-the-world privacy story.
Yeah, I see where the article could sound like sour grapes. But then there's something to be said for the irony of the situation, and I'm glad that someone was in there to highlight it.
Government officials attend privacy and security conference.
Reporters crash privacy and security conference, demonstrating lack of security.
Reporters analyze badges from privacy and not-security conference and find RFID tags, demonstrating lack of privacy.
Article about lack-of-privacy and not-security conference reaches the public.
???
Privacy!!
I'm not perfectly sure, but I think that next-to-the-last step should be Citizens of the world slap their respective governments upside the head and scream "What were you goobers THINKING??"
What if you try to show something as dangerous as a picture of a woman's chest in the US.. or even worst.. an actually woman's chest!! You might get thrown in jail... Hey kids might be hurt by female anatomy!
Gasp, shock, and horrors! We must form a task force at once to stop all these breast-feeding criminal abusers from perpetrating their heinous deeds against helpless hungry children!
And the younger they are, the more harm could befall them! Womens' anatomy must be kept out of the childbearing process at all costs! Think of the children, man!
Of course they will, but as long as systems have a digital out (or a least speakers) there will be a way to get your "fair use" out of the music you buy.
Will we? Much of the industry's research has been devoted to trying to filter unauthorized content (read: "pirated" music, with emphasis on the ironic quotes) out of the public stream. The all-digital path to your speakers makes it easier for any one component in the chain to deny you the use of the music you paid for, which is why the whole DRM firestorm popped up in the first place. You probably meant an analog out.
Does it strike anyone else as ironic that music industry leaders are obsessed with the a-holes in music technology, while we're obsessed with the a-holes in the music industry?
Why dont' the state BOR's or any superindendents step up and say "not in our schools!"??
Because the board of regents/board of education wants to get elected next term, and probably don't think they can get away with turning the **AA representatives away. They don't want to be seen as supporting the actions of "pirates" because they don't want to be:
sued by the **AA, which they can't afford, or
voted out of office by the parents (astroturfed into action by the **AA).
The MPAA and its cartel-like ilk has made a career of throwing its money around for maximum results, no matter how specious its arguments or how self-righteous its goals. And while they can't necessarily afford to buy politicians outright, they can certainly make enough contributions to own several timeshares in them.
In the end it's just another corporation trying to save it's own ass.
Indeed. And it's another schoolboard trying to save its collective ass.
It's like Coke coming in and preaching that "drinking Pepsi destroys our employee's way of life, because you're using another product".
Funny you use that metaphor. In a 'future' episodes of The Simpsons, they showed the inside of the elementary school where all the students were watching a wall-sized television screen...
"If you had two cans of Pepsi, and you gave one can to a friend, how many cans of delicious refreshment would you have left?"
(student in front row) "Pepsi?"
"Partial credit!"
I can't help thinking that the MPAA's action is more like that.
Don't get me started on the whole school situation. They tend to be underfunded, employ teachers with colorful qualifications and sometimes dubious abilities, are staffed by administrators to cover their own asses first and shout questions later, and have their options sorely limited by busybody parents whose idea of 'child abuse' makes Amnesty International look like a leather bar on Saturday night.
Under those conditions, I'd have to imagine that a school board would be eager to have anyone in class who can teach those snots anything.
That place is about a stone's throw from my home. I wonder if they're hiring...
I wonder if you can do the world a great public service if you do get hired there:
"Oh, I'm sorry, but while we were moving the information and all backups from the old building to the new campus they fell over in the truck and the truck caught fire just before falling into the Potomac and exploding. Was it important?"
Someone who's not afraid to *protect* business? Good god man, have you any idea what you're saying?! The DMCA was passed to protect business! Every copyright term extension has been to protect business! I say business has enough protection - what about protecting people for once?
I couldn't agree more with this sentiment. The thing that confuses lots of people is that there are all kinds of "protection" and things they're being protected from (or a different way to think about it, at the expense of).
Take tariffs, for instance. They are government-sanctioned protections for native industries (and in some rare cases, consumers). What are they being protected from? Foreign industries. Consumers occasionally benefit from this protection by being shielded from inferior goods. This is traditional protectionism.
Taxation in general is an attempt to protect the government (or at least what shreds of fiscal solvency it has left) at the expense of the people and business.
Of late we've been seeing a lot more protectionism, and much worse varieties of it at that. The DMCA was intended to be a protection for content providers against "pirates and hackers." However, that legislation has done more to hurt consumers, limit their choices, and create dozens of little monopolies, from inkjet cartridges (manufacturers' attempts to lock people into *their* brand by introducing DMCA-worthy measures to guard against "cheap replacements") to music (intentionally broken CDs designed to play only on certain devices) to...who knows what's next?
Businesses have managed to wheedle protections against their own customers out of the government. Meanwhile, "consumer advocacy" seems to be more or less dead in the water because consumers don't have much of a lobby in Washington.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the cornerstones of the current Cocoa-y way of doing things is that the front-end and back-end are separate beasts.
Don't like the back-end? It's possible to build the app to use a program other than sjeng as its brain. It's just a matter of building with a new shell tool (and a little glue so the front-end knows how to use it).
Don't like the front end? It's also possible to build a new wrapper app for sjeng that looks however you want it to. Use the source for the existing Chess program as a template for sjeng, and then go completely nuts. Screw reskinning, design a completely different and abstract chess game!
But the windowless interface might be confusing to some users...
55 W. P - e555 B. P x P
56 W. N x P
56 B. B x System Preferences ?
57 W. BitTorrent - A4 !!
Kernel Panic in 4 moves
That depends on what actions the laws are trying to prohibit, and whose moral code they're trying to support.
Laws are made by people and enforced to control people. And people have agendas. Sometimes these agendas are good and fair (ban murder), sometimes their purpose is entirely self-serving (ban oral sex), and sometimes they're just peculiar (banning taking lions to the movies).
Ask people how the laws should be changed, and you won't get just one or two answers. Many people will want new laws, many will want laws repealed, and most will want a combination.
(Do you know where I see this kind of argument the most? Freenet, where every kind of speech is possible but not all are welcome. Some speech, certain users argue, should not be allowed, but given the environment of free-wheeling and anonymity, it's awfully hard to define some of the "bad" forms, much less define them.)
The biggest problems arise when a coalition gets into government, or a government starts acting on the whims of a coalition. Suddenly laws and policies start serving one and only one group. The rest of the population becomes disenfranchised as the one group gleefully gives up everyone's right to do something that they never would do.
I won't say I'm religious, nor will I say I'm not religious, but this is the basis for my argument supporting the separation of church and state: the state can not afford to act in the interest of only one segment of the population, no matter how religious or righteous (or self-righteous) that one group may be.
That is the part that practically everyone will concede to. I believe in moral absolutes. I just believe in fewer moral absolutes than many.
Like the fact that anyone who can figure a mathematical expectation won't touch the average gambling game with a ten-foot pole? Like the fact that online gambling can be too easily rigged in favor of the house or otherwise buggy? (Have you ever seen a perfect random number generator in a computer program? Funny, me neither.)
Frankly, I don't understand this mandate... except of course it's an internationalization of the state-by-state trend of introducing progressively more and more gambling games to the public. Horse racing seems noble enough, but then you get into paramutual betting, then you get lotteries, then slot machines will want to come in... Worst of all, it's all a symptom of a common condition: tax addiction. Most governments have it.
First off, see if your employer doesn't want you getting any information about the program. They might try to prevent this by blocking access to the si... oh, wait...
A decision was made, but a lot of people believe that decision was just so much tepid crap. Courts have been overturned in the past; perhaps if enough new evidence comes to light, the case can be reopened.
Yes, it does serve a purpose. It serves to dig up more facts and evidence should someone in the judiciary ever get wise and reevaluate that case.
Even if the trial never reopens, the Court of Public Opinion is always open. The more people learn what kinds of jiggery-pokery Microsoft has been up to, the more likely Microsoft will gets its just desserts sooner or later, and the less likely anyone else will ever pull such stunts again.
Honestly. I'm trying to figure out your attitude. "Microsoft did it, they got away with it, and that's good enough for me!" Are you always this doggedly complacent?
Need something burned down in a big hurry? Then come on down to the Flamebait Market, for all your pyromaniac needs!
Then you're obviously not browsing at a low enough threshold. >:)
(Okay, I admit it, I used Search to find that one. But the fact that it was there... And, smileys look strange when you have to type them as >:) -- and lemme tell you, that one looked even stranger. Damned recursion!)
Yeah... says something, doesn't it?
So the sequence is:
Step 1 is natural; they design stuff. Step 3 isn't guaranteed, but they seem to come up with quite a few hits, now don't they? Step 4 is also quite natural; if one of something is good, then a copy of it will work almost as well with a fraction of the effort! Step 5 is natural given step 4; if they don't protect their designs, then everybody will make money off of the popular ones. And step 6 is natural because, hey, lawyers are involved.
That leaves step 2: people saying that Apple's designs are bad. It farts liberally in the face of step 3, so it must have something to do with step 1: the fact that Apple made it.
And now I'm scratching my head and wondering why.
What does Apple do that makes them so evil that people will decry their products without even a second glance? Why do certain journalists feel the need to predict its imminent downfall for verging on 30 years? How do so many become so thoroughly programmed to be so hostile?
And no, I don't have the answer. That's why I'm asking.
The decent citizens will stop having sex.
The outlaws will continue having sex.
Wait three generations, and your problem's solved!
On an iMac? Sorry, that dog won't hunt.
I actually had Creatures (first version) for the Mac. Sometimes it ran okay, but others it was quite horrible, mostly owing to its construction with old Microsoft development tools for the Mac. Yes, they tried a direct cross-compile from the optimized-for-Windows, and it showed. Painfully.
What's more, they had a very limited vocabulary and response matrix. I remember making jokes about how limited it was, way back when it was possible to post to a newsgroup without looking like fresh meat to a spammer. That's how long ago it was.
According to the page you posted, the subsequent products, Creatures 2, Creatures 3, and Docking Station, are all PC software. The iBooks would need to run VPC to handle those, and then I'd worry about performance.
Urban archaeology doesn't have the following of some hobbies, like stamp-collecting or professional sports, but I can see its appeal.
All constructions, like all people, have life cycles. They're built/conceived, people move in, they're lived-in, they have make-overs/get remodeled, they have mid-life crises/get remodeled tastelessly to hide the structure's growing problems, the spirit leaves/people move out, and get torn down.
If the area is busy enough, there's no gap between moving out and tearing down. And if the area is really busy, there's no gap between the tearing down and the building up, the quest eternal for the Next Big Thing.
Sometimes places die, and this interests people. Pripyat has the dubious distinction of actually being killed, and of course there's some interest in its slowly decaying municipal corpse. And there are other ways for a place to die suddenly too.
Obligatory links:
Come to think of it, there's a place not far from me, pretty much right in the middle of Annapolis, which I need to snap pictures of for posterity's sake. Sure, I'll be using a digital camera, but...
Say, have you noticed that musical group names seem to follow unities of theme? Consider the 60s:
...and the 90s:
From the article (yes, I read it):
Gosh, there's no loaded language here, is there? Let's try that last sentence again:
Okay, editorial qualm aside, my mood on this is mixed.
On the one hand, it would be nice to keep the especially violent video games out of the hands of mental children. Note: not minors, but those people who lack the common sense to know that no video game should be used as a guide to life. Some minors show greater maturity and understanding of the world than people four times their physical age.
But on the other hand, open the door for them and they'll dive through and keep running. After they act to keep violent videogames out of the hands of minors, they'll question whether adults should have them, and then they'll question the rights of the manufacturers to exist. I don't want to live in a completely child-safe world. I went through childhood once already, thankyaverramuch.
It's yet another slippery slope, liberally lubricated with morality and insecurity, which a third of the population wants to climb, a third wants to hold a particular position on (though no two people in that third can agree where on the slope that position should be), and a third wants to ride to the very bottom (shouted "wheeeeeeeee!" optional).
Much as I'd like to join the group that wants to climb out of that particular hole, until someone successfully passes a ban on idiocy, I feel a line needs to be held somewhere.
I beg your pardon? Who said anything about reality? We're talking logic here.
I do not, for instance, think that in reality, armed riders on horses automatically move 37 to the left or right of the direction in which they're facing. Nor do I think that male footmen only have the option of moving forward or attacking things at their sides, nor if they break through enemy lines and reach the edge of the world do they have the option of turning into female soverigns.
However, within the context of the chessboard, things make some sense. With regards to board layout and the ways that the pieces move, everything is highly structured, ordered, and consistent. Within its own reality, chess is logical.
Reality and logic overlap each other, but neither completely covers the other. It's possible to have logic without reality (All elephants are pink / Paul is an elephant / Therefore Paul is pink), and reality without logic (the scenes depicted in the paintings of Picasso or Salvador Dali), and in some rare cases, neither (trickle-down economics).
Silly? Maybe, but let's take each of these individually. I bet we can learn something from them anyway.
Illogical? Chess is such a logical game that it risks being boring. Except for one or two exceptions (en passant captures and castling), each piece's moves are the same throughout the game. The board remains constant. (And while there are variations from Steve Jackson Games, even they have their own internal logic.)
That depends which version of Tron you're talking about. The premise of the movie may have been far-fetched, but the arcade game was a collection of minigames. They don't necessarily have to have anything to do with each other; the story serves as a unifying theme.
The later arcade game Discs of Tron was also very highly logical. It was a shoot-em-up with various challenge elements that had to be dealt with, including barriers appearing across the playing field and varying levels of platform.
I can't speak for Tron 2.0, but it probably has its own internal logic too. (Would some poster confirm this please?)
Ah, now this is an interesting choice of game to bring up under this topic. Like Tron (the original), it's a collection of minigames. But where Tron has four games, Warioware's number in the hundreds. And it's hard to demonstrate any logic, internal or otherwise, when the games are changing so quickly.
Or rather, it's hard to find the logic in Warioware until you step back and take a look at the big picture. The mini-games are individual challenges which seemingly have nothing to do with each other. In fact, they seem intentionally disassociated from one another.
Here's a game to compare it with: Trivial Pursuit. The questions fall into categories, but they don't necessarily have anything to do with one another. The questions aren't the game. The game is an overall test of knowledge. Likewise, in Warioware, the minigames themselves aren't the game. The game is an overall test of mental agility and the ability to switch quickly from one task to another.
Trivial Pursuit : questionsSomeone else posted, and I generally agree: the games need some sort of internal logic in order to be comprehensible. In the case of Warioware, though, the game itself is the ability to deal with the apparent illogical barrage of activities.
Those pesky non-disclosure agreements! You've tried scrubbing, you've tried soaking...
I find it interesting that development on the guts for the PS3 began in 2001 when the PS2 first came out. They had no idea if it would boom or bust and they started working on the successor that same year.
Given that, the development cycle on the PS3 was probably influenced by the potential boominess or bustiness of the PS2.
I also want to see what kind of power-effort curve they design into PS3.
More than once I've cited the design philosophy behind the PS2: make a powerful system, and developers will learn to deal with its complexities. Contrast this with the Xbox's take: make a system easy to develop with, and developers will get more power out of it.
I want to know how that strategy worked for them, and will they be continuing it on the next next-generation game-box.
Meanwhile, I worry about repercussions of a statement like that. Maybe it's because I read Slashdot.
So here's a politician who says someone has the right to do something, but in practically the same breath says that the thing is wrong. How long will it be before some politician (I wouldn't put it past Lieberman himslf) says that the rights themselves should be eliminated? And this is an election year, too, so any slippery slope that may exist has been lathered down with extra suck-up grease by pinwheels who want to sound like they're responding to issues (even invented ones).
There are still charges that need to be responded to. One concession does not mean the pressure's off. This could simply be the start of a new attack.
Not really. The manufacturers may have a vested interest in lengthening the life span of a console, but the third-party developers have a vested interest in pushing as much "wow" into their games as possible. Unless they're lazy, distracted, or disinterested.
It's not that EA Sports had the extra "wow" to give on previous games. I seriously doubt that any video game project manager, on a Madden football title or any other, will look at test-play footage and say...
The Madden games look better every year on the same hardware because they produce the games annually, and each year they learn some more about the process from the previous year's efforts.
That said, can developers get lazy? Yes, and on any platform too. Who wants to reinvent the rendering engine when the one in the previous game (or this textbook) worked so well? Sooner or later it happens to everyone. The PS2 has a sharper learning curve. Getting lazy when developing on it does more damage and produces lackluster results. The Xbox was designed with a smoother curve, such that it required less effort to produce good product, which makes it a good sell to the average developer.
Sony's thinking, way back then, was that because no developer wants to produce an average game, they'll take the time to master the technology in the PS2, so they built it with as much potential as they could cram in. Given the topic, that thinking, noble as it might have been, seems to be hurting them now. People who develop something that looks good on the Xbox take a look at the PS2's devkit, say "What the hell is all this?", and just shove some code in a folder and compile it. "Aw hell," they'll say, "this is Sony. They can make anything look good. And if it doesn't, we'll blame them for making their tools so hard to use."
The only way to really compare the two platforms would be to build identical games from scratch using the same basic specs and ALL the tools and tricks that each platform makes available. So far as I know, nobody's done that. (Corrections, anybody? Please?) Were they to do that, my money'd be on the PS2 to pump out more wow, even though it came out months before the Xbox. Steeper learning curve, but higher potential.
I don't know Mute (will look it up now, thanks), but Freenet has its own moral dilemma, brought about because everybody has their own idea what constitutes free speech and what is allowable in a free society.
Consequently, I see many Freenet users (who generally support free speech) bemoaning the presence of child pornography (one of the biggest taboos out there, it seems) on the Freenet itself. Mashed together into one sentence it's actually funny: "Information should not be repressed, but the jerk who posted that should be shot."
From the article:
It'll be interesting to see what taboos are created as a result of an internal conflict...
Nope, sorry, that's not quite right. I agree that people are getting too damn politically correct, but that symptom is reflected in the Haitians comment in the game (which I have yet to play; I'd better grab my copy of the value pack before it gets yanked off the shelves), not in the inability to tell fantasy from reality.
The fantasy/reality confusion is symptomatic of something even more troubling: a lack of both
Critical thinking and comprehension are big things. A good school will teach you how to think, and from there everything falls into place. A bad school will teach you what to think, and people will either sink or swim in the real world depending on what they learn of the thinking and understanding process itself.
There are a lot of bad thinkers out there. They're the sort of people who will read a passage of text, fail to comprehend its deeper meaning, pick out a few keywords, appearantly string them together randomly to form their own concept, and act as if they just read that.
(You may wonder what sort of message people get from practically any medium. You may even become afraid to produce any such works yourself for fear of being critically misinterpreted. Thus, free speech is such a fragile concept that even stupidity can have chilling effects on it.)
In the case of GTA, the message of the game would seem to be "gang warfare is bad." (Remember, I haven't played it yet.) But the way it's told in game is rather convoluted, so people are seeing the "gang warfare" aspect and completely blanking on the "is bad" part.
It greatly troubles me that we have a government full of people that either (a) are these types or (b) pander to these types to garner support.
Morality is something I think I should cover in another steaming load of screed. But I'll say now: it doesn't mean "religious".
However lame you may think Peter Ludlow is for his pastime, EA has done something much lamer:
Rule #1: Don't Shoot the Messenger. No matter how distasteful the message may be, you can not and should not blame a person just because he delivers it.
Now it looks like EA is trying to sweep whatever nastiness he was reporting about under the rug ...and you'll have to wonder what else they're hiding.
Maybe they should rename it "The Slums"?
That's no surprise. If I recall correctly, the G7 summits are intended to be discussions on global economic policy, to which none of the affected people (pretty much everybody but government officials) are ever invited. (In fact, I don't hear of many economists going to those conferences either; if I'm wrong, please correct.)
As for press not getting in, sure you may loathe muckraker reporting (many people do), but sometimes there's just too much muck to allow to pile up. Do you really want your government to be deciding elements of policy without any input from its constituency? That's becoming the norm, and guerilla reporting may soon be the only way the operation of said government can come to light.
Yeah, I see where the article could sound like sour grapes. But then there's something to be said for the irony of the situation, and I'm glad that someone was in there to highlight it.
I'm not perfectly sure, but I think that next-to-the-last step should be Citizens of the world slap their respective governments upside the head and scream "What were you goobers THINKING??"
At least, that's my take on it...
Gasp, shock, and horrors! We must form a task force at once to stop all these breast-feeding criminal abusers from perpetrating their heinous deeds against helpless hungry children!
And the younger they are, the more harm could befall them! Womens' anatomy must be kept out of the childbearing process at all costs! Think of the children, man!
Will we? Much of the industry's research has been devoted to trying to filter unauthorized content (read: "pirated" music, with emphasis on the ironic quotes) out of the public stream. The all-digital path to your speakers makes it easier for any one component in the chain to deny you the use of the music you paid for, which is why the whole DRM firestorm popped up in the first place. You probably meant an analog out.
Does it strike anyone else as ironic that music industry leaders are obsessed with the a-holes in music technology, while we're obsessed with the a-holes in the music industry?
The MPAA and its cartel-like ilk has made a career of throwing its money around for maximum results, no matter how specious its arguments or how self-righteous its goals. And while they can't necessarily afford to buy politicians outright, they can certainly make enough contributions to own several timeshares in them.
Indeed. And it's another schoolboard trying to save its collective ass. Funny you use that metaphor. In a 'future' episodes of The Simpsons, they showed the inside of the elementary school where all the students were watching a wall-sized television screen... I can't help thinking that the MPAA's action is more like that. Don't get me started on the whole school situation. They tend to be underfunded, employ teachers with colorful qualifications and sometimes dubious abilities, are staffed by administrators to cover their own asses first and shout questions later, and have their options sorely limited by busybody parents whose idea of 'child abuse' makes Amnesty International look like a leather bar on Saturday night.Under those conditions, I'd have to imagine that a school board would be eager to have anyone in class who can teach those snots anything.
I wonder if you can do the world a great public service if you do get hired there:
"Oh, I'm sorry, but while we were moving the information and all backups from the old building to the new campus they fell over in the truck and the truck caught fire just before falling into the Potomac and exploding. Was it important?"
Take tariffs, for instance. They are government-sanctioned protections for native industries (and in some rare cases, consumers). What are they being protected from? Foreign industries. Consumers occasionally benefit from this protection by being shielded from inferior goods. This is traditional protectionism.
Taxation in general is an attempt to protect the government (or at least what shreds of fiscal solvency it has left) at the expense of the people and business. Of late we've been seeing a lot more protectionism, and much worse varieties of it at that. The DMCA was intended to be a protection for content providers against "pirates and hackers." However, that legislation has done more to hurt consumers, limit their choices, and create dozens of little monopolies, from inkjet cartridges (manufacturers' attempts to lock people into *their* brand by introducing DMCA-worthy measures to guard against "cheap replacements") to music (intentionally broken CDs designed to play only on certain devices) to ...who knows what's next?
Businesses have managed to wheedle protections against their own customers out of the government. Meanwhile, "consumer advocacy" seems to be more or less dead in the water because consumers don't have much of a lobby in Washington.