It appears that the deal included some expectation that Microsoft would make certain payments of capital, as well as provide the software on-time (or a reasonable software-world representation of such) which according to the story neither happened.
Its one thing if Sendo signed a paper saying "Go bankrupt and we get your stuff", another entirely if the paper said "We'll do these things to prevent you from going bankrupt, but if you do anyway, we get your stuff" and then not having "these things" done.
I like the model, since I prefer to read paper, but like the electronic version for reference.
I think the submitter is on to something here. Real books still beat e-books for actual reading. However, trying to find a specific fact can be pretty difficult, even with keyword searching (also known as "the index") and directory searching (also known as "the table of contents"). Having an electronic version and paper version of every coursebook I had in college would have been a godsend for me.
*how* does data mining work? (beyond "it makes connections between various data.") I don't recall it ever coming up in any of my classes. It seems like it would be an AI problem.
If everyone's going to go out and be paranoid, might as well know what we're being paranoid about.
The US talent is embarrassingly bad. I saw no less than five candidates who could not write a simple C routine to traverse a linked list. And this was one of the simpler questions.
This is how the system was supposed to work. Qualified US people are scarce, so find someone from another country who is fully qualified.
I have to wonder if your case is the average case though. I happen to know that one of the jobs I applied for in the months after I graduated, I had a considerable amount of experience (worked two jobs to pay my college bills) and I was told by the HR staff person that I had the fastest *correct* time on their programming test. Two weeks later I got the no-thank-you letter.
A friend of mine recently let me know that the person working "my" job there is getting paid $10k less than the job posting value in the help-wanted ad. I didn't ask what nationality that person was, I didn't want to know. In the end it wasn't about finding someone "qualified" for the job, unless by "qualified" you mean "willing to work cheap".
The fact is, experience nowadays is bullshit. Ability is bullshit. I have friends who leave chunks out of their resume so people won't automatically assume they won't work "cheap" and pass them over for someone with less experience (have you heard "You are overqualified"?). It's all about how cheap you can go. And thats where the H1B problem comes in. You may not be abused, but there are plenty of H1B people paid *far* too little for their abilities, but those people can't do anything about it. If they rock the boat, they get fired and have to go back home.
Next time I'm looking for a job, I think I'm going to scrap my resume and just hand out a card: "Programmer. Will work for $20k". Maybe if I let the companies abuse me, I'll get a shot at a job too.
I bet I'll get more job offers than anyone with a resume boasting a master's degree and a decade of experience.
A corporation's only responsibility is to make money for their owners/shareholders.
This idea needs to be crushed. Its a stupid, stupid idea in the first place, and then when you consider whats actually going on in companies, it gets even stupider.
Corporations aren't "things", they're people (thus, incorporation, from latin parts meaning roughly "into a body"). Since they are given many of the rights of people (with respect to property), they need to bear the same responsibilities.
Corporations have gotten it into their heads that they have no responsibilities other than the almighty dollar, and that if they're not paying up those dollars, society can go to Hell.
See Enron for the perfect example of a company screwing over all of society for the almighty dollar. Aside from just the employees who lost their jobs and pensions, a lot of local companies that served Enron (like office supplies, food, cleaning, etc.) went under too. The local governments no longer have the employment draw or tax income from it, and so on.
If the taxi driver has to pay to play music, does the radio station get a refund for the N people who THEY paid for too?
The problem here is that they're selling the same good (right to listen to song X) repeatedly. This is NO different from going to the auto dealer:
"That will be $15000.... oh wait, you have a family? Well, each of them *might* use the car so we'll have to work something out. Let's see, there's 5 of you so the total comes out to $75000."
Of course in the RIAA's case, later the dealer would report to the car manufacturer:
"Well, we sold one car this month, here's your $500"
Quick, we need some mothers to found a *real* MAVAV, one that preaches education and taking an interest in your children's activities. If we got a huge number of parents actually *reading* the ESRB ratings, and making sure they approve of what their kids are playing, we'd all be much better off.
No longer would parents say "Well, I had no idea that Grand Theft Auto 3 was about crime" since they would be a good parent and have done some research about the game they're buying Johnny (or at least read the back of the box).
What happens when everyone starts getting to work? Most buildings are within a few dozen feet of a road... will they be able to tell a building full of cellphones from a road full of cellphones?
Nice list, but should have stuck to flaws
on
Top Ten Shameful Games
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Really, just because a game sucked or was a bad idea didn't make it flawed. Now, the Elder Scrolls games (not the most recent one, it was only slightly buggy, and then only in the "usual" ways) were *seriously* flawed. I decided not to buy ES2 when I fired up the Elder Scrolls II demo, and immediately fell through the floor into a dark place where I could not move.
Custer's Revenge might have been a very bad idea, but it played exactly how its creators intended.
A completely different rant that I won't get into here is why full-screen DVDs are even released anymore? What a waste.
I have a friend in the business, and according to him: "You wouldn't believe the number of people who return DVDs complaining that they can't see everything or their dvd's broken or something. Just because they grabbed the widescreen edition instead of the fullscreen one." He's serious. Theres enough idiots out there who lack clue. Heck, my parents don't like letterbox, they claim it makes everything smaller (duh, compare to movie theatre). But will they upgrade to a wide screen tv? "Our tv has worked just fine for the last two decades!"
Yesterday MPAA agents raided Mitsubishi Labs and "confiscated" the equivalant of 1600 DVD burners at gunpoint.
The MPAA issued a press release, claiming "We must do whatever it takes to stop these pirates. If that means sidestepping the tradiotional forms of law enforcement when they have failed us, then so be it."
Likewise Mitsubishi issued a press release: "Yesterday our lab was broken into by two hoodlums in black clothing, who stole 100 of our prototype 16x dvd players."
If I produce a song and want it freely distributed, what must I do? Anyone thinking that this "DRM thing" won't affect them because they're not an "evil music pirate" or whatnot better think again.
When the content industry-envisioned "DRM world" comes about (where everything is DRM enabled) what do YOU think the default state of the "do not copy bit" is going to be? If your answer is "off", pass me some of what you've been smoking. The only way that DRM would *ever* be effective is if it banned all copying of everything, whether or not you are the owner.
Take video cameras. Sure you could be recording your own smash hit motion picture (in which case the MPAA wants to stop YOU). But what if that DV you're encoding on your computer is actually the latest MPAA-made smash hit, filmed from under your jacket?
How will mommy send her "Baby's First Steps" video to her family then? Simple, she has to prove to someone (an MPAA rep, probably) that the material she wants copyable really does belong to her. Of course, the MPAA representative's time IS money, so they will have to be fairly compensated for the time they spend reviewing the video.
Of course, once its in the hands of the MPAA, all bets are off. Don't be suprised if you get arrested because your independent smash hit was actually a complete copy of a work by an MPAA-subsidiary studio, made 3 hours after they received your video... err, I mean which has been in the works for 3 years.
If you think all of this is bullshit, just take a look at the behavior of the *IAA's now. They're willing to lie (no matter HOW fast, 1 burner is ONE BURNER) to whatever ends they want to get, and they want to get your money.
Yes, there's something strange about this article.. it starts off with some interesting stuff, and then some reasonable speculation, and then degrades into some pseudo-religious political rant about DRM and the music industry.
One only has to scroll to the end of the article to see what pseudo-religion this person is pushing: (teachmaster of LOGOLOGIE - the first cyberage-religion!)
There are other solutions to this than to simply hope nobody leaks the maps, which is what they're doing (actually, what they're doing is akin to telling people you have $10,000 buried in a can somewhere in your nice garden, but you won't tell them where. Tomorrow the garden will be gone...)
For instance, they could provide the information, along with notices that disturbing the PCB laden sediment is hazardous, as well as illegal. Then go and actually bust the people who decide it was worth the risk (use the map data to see where to catch them)
In the end, I suppose the decision has to be made based on whether the government thinks it can beat back the blithering idiot masses who don't care.
The ships themselves might not belong to the state of NY, but your ass will belong to the coast guard if you park your ship in the middle of the channel to go scuba diving.
Re:FCC should take care of this
on
DOD vs. 802.11b
·
· Score: 5, Funny
What is the military complaining about, doesn't their equipment have the FCC stamp on it?
The military version of the FCC stamp reads "This device must accept all interference, and is permitted to fire missiles back."
This TLD was in the works, but people had a hard time deciding what exactly constitutes a company that qualifies for.screw-customers-for-profit. The SCFP movement started to falter when internal factions broke free, wanting.screw-customers-for-profit-with-ky and.screw-customers-for-profit-nolube, to differentiate levels of screwing.
The whole thing was scrapped when the SCFP movement told ICANN that under their new TLD scheme, they would have to change their domain to end in.screw-customers-with-a-large-branch-full-of-splin ters
Re:What Google and investors in it should think ab
on
Google vs. Evil
·
· Score: 1
Excellent observation. Too bad the army of day traders couldn't care less about how the company does, only how many days they have to hold it to turn a profit.
As for the "real" investors, I wonder how many of them even bother to see past the numbers on the SEC filing or their broker's reports, or if they just say "Hm, most popular search engine. Thats cool" and toss their money at it without actually looking to see where those numbers came from. Have you looked at yahoo's stock pages? I bet not a single article there is on the morality of any company, or even how they make money. They're all about "new product, buy stock!" or "might declare bankruptcy, sell!"
"It's optimized for animation? Yes, all video codecs are optimized for animation."
I think the poster means animation as opposed to live action movies. Many compression schemes make assumptions about the video stream that do not necessarially hold true for a computer generated animation or a drawn animation. Qualities such as color histograms, shading, gradients, and such tend to be different for cartoons (think two tone purple mountains with white tops on yellow ground) and real life. In general, live action movies tend to have similar colors, together.
As for DiVX;-), I do not know if it makes assumptions that break down in non-live action cases.
Since I fit in the class of "addicts", I figured I would post my thoughts and observations of myself..
I think the social interaction is very much undervalued here. When I was in college, I worked two jobs to pay my way, so "free time" was rare. However, from both of my jobs I could get on the internet, and I wound up spending entire days playing MUDs and chatting on IRC. Thanks to the wonders of screen, I could go from home to class to my jobs, and simply reattach to my running IRC session. Sure, I had no girlfriend, but then again, none of the girls I knew would have enjoyed being taken on a date involving a 3AM moonlit stroll through the campus, since I got off work after the bars and resturaunts and such closed. Chatting online gave me a chance to talk to people instead of staring at a terminal in an empty server room late at night. I even picked up speed typing skills to boot. I greatly valued my social interaction with these "virtual" people.
Only, these people are no more "virtual" than I am! I have known some of them for almost a decade. Some I have visited in person, and had a blast getting to see the so-called "virtual" person. Others are in other countries, places I'll never get to go but love to hear about. Calling these people "virtual" is an insult to their real world counterparts.
I now work 9-to-5 as a software developer, and I don't get to IRC from work. I don't have time at home on the evenings to play games much, but I still chat with my friends on evenings. Perhaps people might call me an "addict" still, but I don't let it interfere with other things I want to do.
If you lost it in all that rambling, the point here is twofold: 1) social interaction is social interaction. Ask yourself what benefits do you gain from constraining people to be in the same place at the same time (aside from the possibility of sex)? 2) The internet provides a useful source of social interaction. Turning it off (regulating it, in other words) because some people can't handle their addiction won't help anyone.
Well, you turn the deer brainstems over to the government, and eat the rest of the deer. Five years later, some people knock on your door, and when you answer it, they shoot you and take your brainstem. Then they compare the brainstems, and see whether you contracted this disease from eating the deer you killed.
Ten years and millions of government dollars later, they announce their research findings: "While it appears that eating deer infected with Chronic Wasting Disease will not cause you to be infected by the disease, our research indicates that deer hunters are at a high risk of sudden death."
Re:Immobots vs. Computers
on
Immobile Robots
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Tossing the probe in with the rest of these "immobots" is a bad example, since it is mobile after all. The control system turned the robot, or in this case, the probe.
The problem is that the word "robot" is being misused (well, redefined perhaps) here. Ever since it was first applied in the play R.U.R., "robot" has always indicated a mobile machine, usually with some fashion of humanoid appendages (arms, head, sometimes legs). Primary parts of the goal of robotics are path planning (how to move an arm to pick up an object, or how to mow the lawn without hitting the puppy running back and forth), and environmental awareness (being aware that the puppy or the object is there to be avoided or picked up in the first place.)
However, the examples in the articles don't have direct contact to physical appendages, rather, they have a model of the appendages internally to work on. While not making for an impressive sight, these have the advantage of allowing the designer to break free of the anthropomorphism all too common in robotics. Why does a robot need arms and a head? The original article talks about controlling a water treatment system where these appendages are rivers and treatment tanks. Unlike traditional robotics, the goal isn't physical path planning, rather, its planning a course of action that solves a problem. The larger such systems become, the more complex their model will become, which will require greater environmental awareness than visual object identification.
The development in this field will surely help the "real" robots, as advancements in developing these models will continue until the robot is capable of extending these models itself, which will allow your lawnmower to decide that its also important to avoid hitting the neighbor's cat that your puppy has been chasing around your lawn, even though you forgot to tell it about the cat.
I like games where some new idea is brought up. Like Fantavision, an early PS2 puzzle game where you built your own fireworks displays and watched them go off. Or that Mosquito game, where you fly around sucking blood. Lets not forget Ico, it redefined the puzzler to add incredible ambience.
Coming up on the RPG end is.hack (also ps2), which is set in a multiplayer online world, without actually being online. According to what I've heard, it actually works well. Xenosaga will be coming out next year as well, while I haven't heard much about the Japanese release, if its anything like Xenogears, by the end you'll be caught actually thinking about the role of humanity.
Gamecube has its innovation too, I've been thinking of getting a gamecube for Animal Crossing, and maybe Evolution Worlds (ok, that one might not be a good example of "innovation" but I thought the first two Evolution games on dreamcast were cute, and this looks exactly like those did) . Other than that, super monkey ball is pretty innovative. Nintendo more-or-less created the idea of "party games" (at least for parties not wanting to play football all day).
The biggest problem with "innovation" is that its unwelcome in the markets. Take a look in the history on slashdot and read the Unfinished Adventures article. Face it, the sad truth is that things that blow up with blood and guts sell well. Being able to beat up hookers is an added bonus. Bucking the trend results in product cancellation, or in the case of console games from Japan, just not showing up on this side of the ocean.
Personally I'm hoping that the upcoming PS2 release of the Sakura Taisen games will mean we will finally get to play Sakura Taisen/Sakura Wars here in English. That would be great innovation, at least in our market.
Slashdot Mirror
It appears that the deal included some expectation that Microsoft would make certain payments of capital, as well as provide the software on-time (or a reasonable software-world representation of such) which according to the story neither happened.
Its one thing if Sendo signed a paper saying "Go bankrupt and we get your stuff", another entirely if the paper said "We'll do these things to prevent you from going bankrupt, but if you do anyway, we get your stuff" and then not having "these things" done.
I like the model, since I prefer to read paper, but like the electronic version for reference.
I think the submitter is on to something here. Real books still beat e-books for actual reading. However, trying to find a specific fact can be pretty difficult, even with keyword searching (also known as "the index") and directory searching (also known as "the table of contents"). Having an electronic version and paper version of every coursebook I had in college would have been a godsend for me.
*how* does data mining work? (beyond "it makes connections between various data.") I don't recall it ever coming up in any of my classes. It seems like it would be an AI problem.
If everyone's going to go out and be paranoid, might as well know what we're being paranoid about.
The US talent is embarrassingly bad. I saw no less than five candidates who could not write a simple C routine to traverse a linked list. And this was one of the simpler questions.
This is how the system was supposed to work. Qualified US people are scarce, so find someone from another country who is fully qualified.
I have to wonder if your case is the average case though. I happen to know that one of the jobs I applied for in the months after I graduated, I had a considerable amount of experience (worked two jobs to pay my college bills) and I was told by the HR staff person that I had the fastest *correct* time on their programming test. Two weeks later I got the no-thank-you letter.
A friend of mine recently let me know that the person working "my" job there is getting paid $10k less than the job posting value in the help-wanted ad. I didn't ask what nationality that person was, I didn't want to know. In the end it wasn't about finding someone "qualified" for the job, unless by "qualified" you mean "willing to work cheap".
The fact is, experience nowadays is bullshit. Ability is bullshit. I have friends who leave chunks out of their resume so people won't automatically assume they won't work "cheap" and pass them over for someone with less experience (have you heard "You are overqualified"?). It's all about how cheap you can go. And thats where the H1B problem comes in. You may not be abused, but there are plenty of H1B people paid *far* too little for their abilities, but those people can't do anything about it. If they rock the boat, they get fired and have to go back home.
Next time I'm looking for a job, I think I'm going to scrap my resume and just hand out a card: "Programmer. Will work for $20k". Maybe if I let the companies abuse me, I'll get a shot at a job too.
I bet I'll get more job offers than anyone with a resume boasting a master's degree and a decade of experience.
A corporation's only responsibility is to make money for their owners/shareholders.
This idea needs to be crushed. Its a stupid, stupid idea in the first place, and then when you consider whats actually going on in companies, it gets even stupider.
Corporations aren't "things", they're people (thus, incorporation, from latin parts meaning roughly "into a body"). Since they are given many of the rights of people (with respect to property), they need to bear the same responsibilities.
Corporations have gotten it into their heads that they have no responsibilities other than the almighty dollar, and that if they're not paying up those dollars, society can go to Hell.
See Enron for the perfect example of a company screwing over all of society for the almighty dollar. Aside from just the employees who lost their jobs and pensions, a lot of local companies that served Enron (like office supplies, food, cleaning, etc.) went under too. The local governments no longer have the employment draw or tax income from it, and so on.
If the taxi driver has to pay to play music, does the radio station get a refund for the N people who THEY paid for too?
The problem here is that they're selling the same good (right to listen to song X) repeatedly. This is NO different from going to the auto dealer:
"That will be $15000.... oh wait, you have a family? Well, each of them *might* use the car so we'll have to work something out. Let's see, there's 5 of you so the total comes out to $75000."
Of course in the RIAA's case, later the dealer would report to the car manufacturer:
"Well, we sold one car this month, here's your $500"
Quick, we need some mothers to found a *real* MAVAV, one that preaches education and taking an interest in your children's activities. If we got a huge number of parents actually *reading* the ESRB ratings, and making sure they approve of what their kids are playing, we'd all be much better off.
No longer would parents say "Well, I had no idea that Grand Theft Auto 3 was about crime" since they would be a good parent and have done some research about the game they're buying Johnny (or at least read the back of the box).
What happens when everyone starts getting to work? Most buildings are within a few dozen feet of a road... will they be able to tell a building full of cellphones from a road full of cellphones?
Really, just because a game sucked or was a bad idea didn't make it flawed. Now, the Elder Scrolls games (not the most recent one, it was only slightly buggy, and then only in the "usual" ways) were *seriously* flawed. I decided not to buy ES2 when I fired up the Elder Scrolls II demo, and immediately fell through the floor into a dark place where I could not move.
Custer's Revenge might have been a very bad idea, but it played exactly how its creators intended.
I have a friend in the business, and according to him: "You wouldn't believe the number of people who return DVDs complaining that they can't see everything or their dvd's broken or something. Just because they grabbed the widescreen edition instead of the fullscreen one." He's serious. Theres enough idiots out there who lack clue. Heck, my parents don't like letterbox, they claim it makes everything smaller (duh, compare to movie theatre). But will they upgrade to a wide screen tv? "Our tv has worked just fine for the last two decades!"
Yesterday MPAA agents raided Mitsubishi Labs and "confiscated" the equivalant of 1600 DVD burners at gunpoint.
The MPAA issued a press release, claiming "We must do whatever it takes to stop these pirates. If that means sidestepping the tradiotional forms of law enforcement when they have failed us, then so be it."
Likewise Mitsubishi issued a press release: "Yesterday our lab was broken into by two hoodlums in black clothing, who stole 100 of our prototype 16x dvd players."
If I produce a song and want it freely distributed, what must I do? Anyone thinking that this "DRM thing" won't affect them because they're not an "evil music pirate" or whatnot better think again.
When the content industry-envisioned "DRM world" comes about (where everything is DRM enabled) what do YOU think the default state of the "do not copy bit" is going to be? If your answer is "off", pass me some of what you've been smoking. The only way that DRM would *ever* be effective is if it banned all copying of everything, whether or not you are the owner.
Take video cameras. Sure you could be recording your own smash hit motion picture (in which case the MPAA wants to stop YOU). But what if that DV you're encoding on your computer is actually the latest MPAA-made smash hit, filmed from under your jacket?
How will mommy send her "Baby's First Steps" video to her family then? Simple, she has to prove to someone (an MPAA rep, probably) that the material she wants copyable really does belong to her. Of course, the MPAA representative's time IS money, so they will have to be fairly compensated for the time they spend reviewing the video.
Of course, once its in the hands of the MPAA, all bets are off. Don't be suprised if you get arrested because your independent smash hit was actually a complete copy of a work by an MPAA-subsidiary studio, made 3 hours after they received your video... err, I mean which has been in the works for 3 years.
If you think all of this is bullshit, just take a look at the behavior of the *IAA's now. They're willing to lie (no matter HOW fast, 1 burner is ONE BURNER) to whatever ends they want to get, and they want to get your money.
One only has to scroll to the end of the article to see what pseudo-religion this person is pushing:
(teachmaster of LOGOLOGIE - the first cyberage-religion!)
off the guy with the table at the street corner downtown?
There are other solutions to this than to simply hope nobody leaks the maps, which is what they're doing (actually, what they're doing is akin to telling people you have $10,000 buried in a can somewhere in your nice garden, but you won't tell them where. Tomorrow the garden will be gone...)
For instance, they could provide the information, along with notices that disturbing the PCB laden sediment is hazardous, as well as illegal. Then go and actually bust the people who decide it was worth the risk (use the map data to see where to catch them)
In the end, I suppose the decision has to be made based on whether the government thinks it can beat back the blithering idiot masses who don't care.
The ships themselves might not belong to the state of NY, but your ass will belong to the coast guard if you park your ship in the middle of the channel to go scuba diving.
The military version of the FCC stamp reads "This device must accept all interference, and is permitted to fire missiles back."
This TLD was in the works, but people had a hard time deciding what exactly constitutes a company that qualifies for .screw-customers-for-profit. The SCFP movement started to falter when internal factions broke free, wanting .screw-customers-for-profit-with-ky and .screw-customers-for-profit-nolube, to differentiate levels of screwing.
.screw-customers-with-a-large-branch-full-of-splin ters
The whole thing was scrapped when the SCFP movement told ICANN that under their new TLD scheme, they would have to change their domain to end in
Excellent observation. Too bad the army of day traders couldn't care less about how the company does, only how many days they have to hold it to turn a profit.
As for the "real" investors, I wonder how many of them even bother to see past the numbers on the SEC filing or their broker's reports, or if they just say "Hm, most popular search engine. Thats cool" and toss their money at it without actually looking to see where those numbers came from. Have you looked at yahoo's stock pages? I bet not a single article there is on the morality of any company, or even how they make money. They're all about "new product, buy stock!" or "might declare bankruptcy, sell!"
Have you checked your referrer list? I wonder how many of them come to your site through your .sig on slashdot.
I think the poster means animation as opposed to live action movies. Many compression schemes make assumptions about the video stream that do not necessarially hold true for a computer generated animation or a drawn animation. Qualities such as color histograms, shading, gradients, and such tend to be different for cartoons (think two tone purple mountains with white tops on yellow ground) and real life. In general, live action movies tend to have similar colors, together.
As for DiVX ;-), I do not know if it makes assumptions that break down in non-live action cases.
Since I fit in the class of "addicts", I figured I would post my thoughts and observations of myself..
I think the social interaction is very much undervalued here. When I was in college, I worked two jobs to pay my way, so "free time" was rare. However, from both of my jobs I could get on the internet, and I wound up spending entire days playing MUDs and chatting on IRC. Thanks to the wonders of screen, I could go from home to class to my jobs, and simply reattach to my running IRC session. Sure, I had no girlfriend, but then again, none of the girls I knew would have enjoyed being taken on a date involving a 3AM moonlit stroll through the campus, since I got off work after the bars and resturaunts and such closed. Chatting online gave me a chance to talk to people instead of staring at a terminal in an empty server room late at night. I even picked up speed typing skills to boot. I greatly valued my social interaction with these "virtual" people.
Only, these people are no more "virtual" than I am! I have known some of them for almost a decade. Some I have visited in person, and had a blast getting to see the so-called "virtual" person. Others are in other countries, places I'll never get to go but love to hear about. Calling these people "virtual" is an insult to their real world counterparts.
I now work 9-to-5 as a software developer, and I don't get to IRC from work. I don't have time at home on the evenings to play games much, but I still chat with my friends on evenings. Perhaps people might call me an "addict" still, but I don't let it interfere with other things I want to do.
If you lost it in all that rambling, the point here is twofold:
1) social interaction is social interaction. Ask yourself what benefits do you gain from constraining people to be in the same place at the same time (aside from the possibility of sex)?
2) The internet provides a useful source of social interaction. Turning it off (regulating it, in other words) because some people can't handle their addiction won't help anyone.
Well, you turn the deer brainstems over to the government, and eat the rest of the deer. Five years later, some people knock on your door, and when you answer it, they shoot you and take your brainstem. Then they compare the brainstems, and see whether you contracted this disease from eating the deer you killed.
Ten years and millions of government dollars later, they announce their research findings: "While it appears that eating deer infected with Chronic Wasting Disease will not cause you to be infected by the disease, our research indicates that deer hunters are at a high risk of sudden death."
Tossing the probe in with the rest of these "immobots" is a bad example, since it is mobile after all. The control system turned the robot, or in this case, the probe.
The problem is that the word "robot" is being misused (well, redefined perhaps) here. Ever since it was first applied in the play R.U.R., "robot" has always indicated a mobile machine, usually with some fashion of humanoid appendages (arms, head, sometimes legs). Primary parts of the goal of robotics are path planning (how to move an arm to pick up an object, or how to mow the lawn without hitting the puppy running back and forth), and environmental awareness (being aware that the puppy or the object is there to be avoided or picked up in the first place.)
However, the examples in the articles don't have direct contact to physical appendages, rather, they have a model of the appendages internally to work on. While not making for an impressive sight, these have the advantage of allowing the designer to break free of the anthropomorphism all too common in robotics. Why does a robot need arms and a head? The original article talks about controlling a water treatment system where these appendages are rivers and treatment tanks. Unlike traditional robotics, the goal isn't physical path planning, rather, its planning a course of action that solves a problem. The larger such systems become, the more complex their model will become, which will require greater environmental awareness than visual object identification.
The development in this field will surely help the "real" robots, as advancements in developing these models will continue until the robot is capable of extending these models itself, which will allow your lawnmower to decide that its also important to avoid hitting the neighbor's cat that your puppy has been chasing around your lawn, even though you forgot to tell it about the cat.
What do you call innovative games?
.hack (also ps2), which is set in a multiplayer online world, without actually being online. According to what I've heard, it actually works well. Xenosaga will be coming out next year as well, while I haven't heard much about the Japanese release, if its anything like Xenogears, by the end you'll be caught actually thinking about the role of humanity.
I like games where some new idea is brought up. Like Fantavision, an early PS2 puzzle game where you built your own fireworks displays and watched them go off. Or that Mosquito game, where you fly around sucking blood. Lets not forget Ico, it redefined the puzzler to add incredible ambience.
Coming up on the RPG end is
Gamecube has its innovation too, I've been thinking of getting a gamecube for Animal Crossing, and maybe Evolution Worlds (ok, that one might not be a good example of "innovation" but I thought the first two Evolution games on dreamcast were cute, and this looks exactly like those did) . Other than that, super monkey ball is pretty innovative. Nintendo more-or-less created the idea of "party games" (at least for parties not wanting to play football all day).
The biggest problem with "innovation" is that its unwelcome in the markets. Take a look in the history on slashdot and read the Unfinished Adventures article. Face it, the sad truth is that things that blow up with blood and guts sell well. Being able to beat up hookers is an added bonus. Bucking the trend results in product cancellation, or in the case of console games from Japan, just not showing up on this side of the ocean.
Personally I'm hoping that the upcoming PS2 release of the Sakura Taisen games will mean we will finally get to play Sakura Taisen/Sakura Wars here in English. That would be great innovation, at least in our market.