Turing was an old computer theoritician, responsible for most of the foundations of computing, like the concept of a language to describe an algorithm more complex than simple standard algebraic symbols, and the "Turing Machine." Of course there were others in the field, like von Neumann. He was also noted for being gay during which it was not only discriminated against, but outright illegal. Finally, I believe there's a statue in England of him eating an apple; noteworthy because he committed suicide by eating a poisoned apple. Quite a morbid statue, huh?
Yes, he did come up with the original Turing Test but compared to his groundwork in Computers, the turing test is like a book of science fiction: somewhat innovative, but mostly inspired by other people's (Asimov) work.
Just remember that ESR was the one who wrote about the reputation and the like to begin with, in addition to the rules of social interaction in the OSS world. He didn't write them, he wrote about them. Whether he's correct on all these points is another matter. It may be that hackers write for reputation but it seems that the appearance of writing for reputation is bad.
Thats pretty damn poor vision. The definition of legally blind is being 20/200 with corrective lenses. I can understand the reasoning behind it: lose your glasses and transform yourself into a blind agent. Not cool. If your vision is correctable with lenses then you're good to go. Colorblindness on the otherhand, probably excludes a significant number from participation. I can think of a scenario though where that might be an issue (however unlikely and theatrical it might be): cut the red wire instead of the green wire and transform yourself into a dead agent.
I seem to recall a diddy in my General Psychology class about something like the Fundamental Overattribution error or the like, which states that people (in our case interviewers) are more likely to attribute a quality to the person (the interviewee) than the situation (what the behavioral interview is looking at).
On a personal note, you're right many fortune 500 companies do use the Behavioral approach, as their hiring managers are usually grunts who worked their way up the line from cashier to head cashier to store manager, etc. I remember a really perculiar interview for a local Hastings (which has since closed down). They start things off with a nice SAT style test to gauge your overall intelligence and give you perhaps 10 minutes. I believe this is to keep people from maxxing out the test as there is something like 60 questions on the test. The other thing that stood out was "Tell me about a time you exhibited leadership." At the time I was just out of my freshman year in college and looking for a summer job.
My only previous job was a dead end stint as a movie theater grunt. All forms of independent action are strictly discouraged there. That is to say, they run 30 screens at that place and don't have time for concession grunts to waste on pleasing someone whose credit card isn't working. So any "situation" is dealt with by a manager or supervisor. Instead, leadership there was more of a trend. In odd cases where no supervisor was assigned there was a sort of politics over who wielded the radio, the communication device that whoever in charge would use to request assistance and answer to higher ups from afar. Is grabbing the radio really a situation? Not really. Is habitually grabbing the radio a trend of leadership? Probably. Hell, I would show up early just so nobody questioned my authority or made a power grab before me on the shift change. And for the most part, nobody questioned it. After a while I made the mistake of not playing the management's mind game of asking for a promotion rather than being bestowed one or solicited for it. They started expecting me to carry the torch without the benefits of recognized authority or pay, both of which would have improved my output as an employee. Anyways, back to the other crap job story.
So after considering the previous paragraph (in a much shorter time frame in which much of it was internalized) I concluded that I had not exhibited leadership in a specific situation, and moved on. Did it hurt my chances? Nope. I got the job alongside four other less savory candidates for register jockey, in which I learned the place sucked hardcore. Hastings presumes everyone is a theif. They reward you 10 percent of the loot if you turn in an employee shoplifter (I'd wager you can cut a better deal with the shoplifter himself at 50/50). They also have what I like to call "use prevention" devices on their DVDs. They put them in these cases that require a special piece of plastic to pierce the lock on. Only the damn things are impossible to open when they're not broken, which is easily done. Additionally, their inventory system is outdated and really wierd. Rather than correlate a scan code with a given price, they generate a bunch of price stickers, stick them on the book and have you punch in that number. Which makes it really easy to misprice a book or used cd for 1.99 instead of 19.99. So how do they deal with this? They keep records of all your transactions and run it against a national database of costs. If you sell too many "red line actions" a flag pops up. I'm guessing red line means below cost. So if you get the register right next to the clearance bin...
Well the other question is, did it work for them? I'm guessing no, but maybe the manager who had to pull together a new schedule when I quit after a week of "Training" (another joke) has a different opinion. Maybe she thinks that I was a bad employee because I only balanced my register to a penny. Or that I quit having been offered a job paying more using tools that work.
To be fair, a lot of the porn out there IS degrading to women. I know its really scary the kind of person you might run into down there, but try going to a local video store (not something like blockbuster that doesn't carry adult videos). I seem to remember the diary of some unfortunate porn clerk making its rounds on the net, just google for "diary of a porn clerk." But I do agree that government legislation isn't the answer; social activistism is. If you're upset that exploitedteen.com gets such demand, then try a social experiment; make your own porn that highlights the kind of positive aspects of a sexual relationship you believe in. Unfortunately the same people who are most vocal about pron being degrading are quite ashamed of their own sexuality, to the point that such a feat would likely result in a coma.
from Dr. Jenkins can be found on joystick101.org. On one hand its a shame that his final article isn't available from another MIT branch off project, I understand the importance of reaching a venue that is a bit more well read.
Personally, I think its a hard line to defend a game like Grand Theft Auto 3 in the face of a mother who lost a child. Everyone points out that the parents should be more involved, we don't need regulation, etc. But from my understanding thats just what her grassroots organization is about. If I was Henry, I'd have probably walked out on Donahue. It probably looks bad but if you've read the transcript it would be hard to get much worse.
Your argument isn't even coherent! Part I says "I don't like home schooling" and part II says "Public schooling is useless." Or "Parents shouldn't homeschool their children" followed by "What's needed is a larger parental role in their children's education."
In a way, I agree that teenagers need time to socialize, but I disagree that school is the time or place for it. Public schooling is 7 hours of being talked at, with 3 minutes passing period. Theres no time to talk and interact with your friends like you want to, and there should be. A serious look at how teaching is needed. Lecturing is not equal to learning. I think we could get away with less school hours, and give more time to children for their own social interactions, like playing street football with the kid down the street that doesn't go to school with you for some reason.
I used to think that homeschooling was only for religious wierdos, and by and large, it still is. But now I think of it more as an act of rebellion against the instutional education system. Public schools really dislike this stuff happening right under their noses. Gatto has more to say on the failings and realities of public education; if you liked the article google for more on gatto. Whether you dislike homeschooling or not is not the question; the number of dissaffected students graduating with no hope of self-actualization demands the question, "What are we going to do to fix it?"
Or perhaps, this was a semi elaborate trolling.
Since I'd rather not reopen old wounds by talking with my personal former math teachers, I'd like to ask you as a math teacher a question. Why is the "Fundamental Theorem of Algebra"(emphasis mine(duh)) reserved for Algebra 2?
Yea, I was helping my brother with his algebra yesterday, and neither of us could remember how to multiply fractions. Its like putting real numbers and an x instead of a dot changes the whole problem in my mind. That and the concrete numbers. I mean when you learn the ideal gas law its not presented as something like P/n*V/T=R. You don't even think of fractions that way. If its all multiplies and a divide it gets a single fraction bar. The elementary fraction style just brings up bad memories of cross multiplecation and cancellation, things I learned by rote rather than understanding the forces behind it all.
Why have virtual reality communities largely failed? Because people need a compelling reason to drop face to face communication for another form. A virtual reality while sounding cool to some technophiles, doesn't do much for the most of the people out there. What exactly about a 2d representation of a 3d avatar who does a horrible job of lip synching your text appeals to people over just the text? Communities aren't something that you can really design from the ground up, they're something that grows out of something smaller. Halflife is a really big example. CounterStrike in particular. Its a good enough game to motivate people to talk about it and make connnections between players. People form clans, etc. Recently voice chat has been added which has really improved leadership and team performance. Its slowly growing out of the game that was released so long ago. There are even small projects going on to create a meta game of sorts, a sort of mercenary system in which you gain reputation by playing which bars you from playing on lower servers and ruining the game.
Remember, the walled city started as a filter turned inside out, and grew from there. Its a hodge podge collection of toys, not exactly a mainstream communication device. The city itself is stored in various member's houses and supported by the members. I don't think your local realtor will put up and maintain a computer to host an online office of some virtual reality. The closests and perhaps most influential technology on the idea behind the walled city would be IRC. While in itself, the various implementations have archaic interfaces, simple techophobia is less than enough to foster such an elite community, as evidenced by the nearly crushing popularity of EFnet and DALnet. Instead, consider more obscure and private IRC servers, with explicit connection permissions.
You haven't found your virtual realities because you're looking for the wrong things. There is a difference betwen visual and virtual. The reason nobody bought into the realtime rendered virtual reality is because people like you don't have the hardware, and many people, yourself possibly included, wouldn't like the result. Virtual shopping malls. There's no room for virtual coffee houses with poetry hours, unless you want to pay a cover charge to experience a shade less of reality. You may be onto something, as many mmorpgs were simply about sitting on pillows and talking to other people with text messages. The fundamental hasn't changed much: text messaging is the standard and dressing it up doesn't help much.
I read a lot of gibson books one summer and they all sorta ran together. I guess I thought the walled city was a Virtual Light concept or something. D'oh.
Of course, this leads to such quote by Cramer or Cauchy or someother such famous mathematician: "When I suddenly find anything useful concerning my work, I stop."
While I could wax about how the actual inspiration meets the NEUROMANCER vision better than the software in the topic, theres other things I could do.
Like point out that I saw a trailer for a movie that was really influenced by Idoru. Remember, Idoru was about the star of Lo-Res marrying a digital being. A synthetic star. And marginally about the stratifcation between north and south California. Its pretty much a california centric book, focusing on north vs south and the bridge people, the economy of celebrity, and the economic impact of accelerated construction. Not much virtual reality for ya. Anyways, the movie is called Simone. Its about the creation of a virtual star. But gone is the almost transcendently gay theme of a Simo-Celtic rock band star marrying a virtual being because its the indie thing to do, replaced with just straight out sex (although in retrospect, conception with Idoru would be quite difficult) and showmanship, reminiscient of Macross Plus's theme.
Basically, this idea is stupid, and so are you. CounterStrike presents a more compelling virtual reality than DustCity and you seem to have confused your gibson books. I hope I have been thouroughly caustic.
I think that an upcoming game engine, either the next one or the one after that, will have a notably longer usable life for content creation than we have seen so far.
Right now Half-Life seems to be doing okay. It may not have the commercial creation push that engines like the new Unreal, but the end user Half Life is doing well. I don't have a pretty graph to show you about population vs time but I don't believe either of us is ignorant of reality. We also know that halflife is firmly propped by a single liscence, and the open community support will not provide for valve forever, so halflife should be on its way out soon. If everyone stopped playing today, the lifetime of the game would have been about 4 years. Thats a really long time. Its lasted through more new hardware releases than I care to count. This is may or may not be notable.
And the hl engine has evolved through time, although not nearly enough. It seems every year the public is offered a new patch that doubles the texture resolution for their baby child games. So how will the new engine break the mold while slowly evolving? Tweaking the models and adding resolution can only get you so far.
Honestly though, if half-life isn't notable enough for its shelf life, then I don't think that any game in the near future will find the adoption rate and life span of half-life. Because while real time polygon rendering may be finished with revolutions, games have not. I see 2 things changing the scene myself.
1)Real time ray tracing. Its been asserted by a few places and people that raytracing will outperform rasterization in high quality scenarios. I don't claim to fully understand their arguments or validity, but significant academic work is underway.
2) Dynamic environments. As games continue to evolve in complexity and interacivity, some are in dire need of a more flexible environment. More specifically, people want to be able to lanch a mortor or artillery shell or whatever and get visible persisting results on the dirt. A few games have approached this but the solutions have been unsatisfying to many. Using a height map yields an easily modifed environment, but it also means no rooms above rooms. Another design concern is loading times. A lot of developers have chosen graphical speed at the cost of punishing the player with load times. Dynamically or "passively" loading the data has been presented as one way of combating the load issue, but I don't see it as very compatabile with a persistant world.
A lot of what I pointed out is almost a simple restating of what you've said, but I wish to underline the significance of these things. Game creaters want malleable levels, to create new game mechanics that underscore creation and destruction, primarily.
Of course, in those days immigration wasn't so regulated and limited. Now we have quotas of legal immigrants, which originated after the Great War. Its interesting that you attribute the liberation of the colonies to a Nationalistic view, given that at the time they were not a nation. I suspect the bigger cause was fear of being brought to trial afterwards for some reason. After the Declaration there was no going back. While the English people may have seen the Revolutionary war similar to how we saw the Vietnam war, those in charge of the British Empire were not happy.
Which is why we should restrict public servants to a single liscence, but give them the leeway required to serve the good of the public. If both you and the public servant truely have the good of the people in mind, then I don't think legislation is nessecary, and if you and the servant disagree, then one of you may be wrong.
Also please try and capitalize Free here, it helps us distinguish between the "free good" meaning and the newspeak meaning Stallman and others created. =(
But there's a somewhat famous story of a guy (occasionally attributed to MIT) who found a way to beat roulette, sort of. The idea was that although the game is in the favor of the house, if you're allowed to place bets while the ball is rolling you can shift the odds in your favor. The guy put a computer in his shoe heel to tell him where to bid, with some sort of feedback and a wire running through his pantleg.
There is a price associated with anonymity. How do you suggest we counter the liability of loaning books to strangers? The price you pay with anonymity is trust. Nobody inherantly trusts strangers for long.
Usually you don't publish your MOD chip schematics, to prevent exactly that. They're not terribly worried about reverse engineering, as if you could do the job, you'd probably profit more from reverse engineering the xbox instead;). So yea its security through obscurity, but they're not going for a secure modchip really. Just one that they alone can sell to the masses.
Slashdot Mirror
Turing was an old computer theoritician, responsible for most of the foundations of computing, like the concept of a language to describe an algorithm more complex than simple standard algebraic symbols, and the "Turing Machine." Of course there were others in the field, like von Neumann. He was also noted for being gay during which it was not only discriminated against, but outright illegal. Finally, I believe there's a statue in England of him eating an apple; noteworthy because he committed suicide by eating a poisoned apple. Quite a morbid statue, huh?
Yes, he did come up with the original Turing Test but compared to his groundwork in Computers, the turing test is like a book of science fiction: somewhat innovative, but mostly inspired by other people's (Asimov) work.
Just remember that ESR was the one who wrote about the reputation and the like to begin with, in addition to the rules of social interaction in the OSS world. He didn't write them, he wrote about them. Whether he's correct on all these points is another matter. It may be that hackers write for reputation but it seems that the appearance of writing for reputation is bad.
Thats pretty damn poor vision. The definition of legally blind is being 20/200 with corrective lenses. I can understand the reasoning behind it: lose your glasses and transform yourself into a blind agent. Not cool. If your vision is correctable with lenses then you're good to go. Colorblindness on the otherhand, probably excludes a significant number from participation. I can think of a scenario though where that might be an issue (however unlikely and theatrical it might be): cut the red wire instead of the green wire and transform yourself into a dead agent.
Seems like it didn't really pan out in keeping the 3dfx name alive...
I seem to recall a diddy in my General Psychology class about something like the Fundamental Overattribution error or the like, which states that people (in our case interviewers) are more likely to attribute a quality to the person (the interviewee) than the situation (what the behavioral interview is looking at).
On a personal note, you're right many fortune 500 companies do use the Behavioral approach, as their hiring managers are usually grunts who worked their way up the line from cashier to head cashier to store manager, etc. I remember a really perculiar interview for a local Hastings (which has since closed down). They start things off with a nice SAT style test to gauge your overall intelligence and give you perhaps 10 minutes. I believe this is to keep people from maxxing out the test as there is something like 60 questions on the test. The other thing that stood out was "Tell me about a time you exhibited leadership." At the time I was just out of my freshman year in college and looking for a summer job.
My only previous job was a dead end stint as a movie theater grunt. All forms of independent action are strictly discouraged there. That is to say, they run 30 screens at that place and don't have time for concession grunts to waste on pleasing someone whose credit card isn't working. So any "situation" is dealt with by a manager or supervisor. Instead, leadership there was more of a trend. In odd cases where no supervisor was assigned there was a sort of politics over who wielded the radio, the communication device that whoever in charge would use to request assistance and answer to higher ups from afar. Is grabbing the radio really a situation? Not really. Is habitually grabbing the radio a trend of leadership? Probably. Hell, I would show up early just so nobody questioned my authority or made a power grab before me on the shift change. And for the most part, nobody questioned it. After a while I made the mistake of not playing the management's mind game of asking for a promotion rather than being bestowed one or solicited for it. They started expecting me to carry the torch without the benefits of recognized authority or pay, both of which would have improved my output as an employee. Anyways, back to the other crap job story.
So after considering the previous paragraph (in a much shorter time frame in which much of it was internalized) I concluded that I had not exhibited leadership in a specific situation, and moved on. Did it hurt my chances? Nope. I got the job alongside four other less savory candidates for register jockey, in which I learned the place sucked hardcore. Hastings presumes everyone is a theif. They reward you 10 percent of the loot if you turn in an employee shoplifter (I'd wager you can cut a better deal with the shoplifter himself at 50/50). They also have what I like to call "use prevention" devices on their DVDs. They put them in these cases that require a special piece of plastic to pierce the lock on. Only the damn things are impossible to open when they're not broken, which is easily done. Additionally, their inventory system is outdated and really wierd. Rather than correlate a scan code with a given price, they generate a bunch of price stickers, stick them on the book and have you punch in that number. Which makes it really easy to misprice a book or used cd for 1.99 instead of 19.99. So how do they deal with this? They keep records of all your transactions and run it against a national database of costs. If you sell too many "red line actions" a flag pops up. I'm guessing red line means below cost. So if you get the register right next to the clearance bin...
Well the other question is, did it work for them? I'm guessing no, but maybe the manager who had to pull together a new schedule when I quit after a week of "Training" (another joke) has a different opinion. Maybe she thinks that I was a bad employee because I only balanced my register to a penny. Or that I quit having been offered a job paying more using tools that work.
To be fair, a lot of the porn out there IS degrading to women. I know its really scary the kind of person you might run into down there, but try going to a local video store (not something like blockbuster that doesn't carry adult videos). I seem to remember the diary of some unfortunate porn clerk making its rounds on the net, just google for "diary of a porn clerk." But I do agree that government legislation isn't the answer; social activistism is. If you're upset that exploitedteen.com gets such demand, then try a social experiment; make your own porn that highlights the kind of positive aspects of a sexual relationship you believe in. Unfortunately the same people who are most vocal about pron being degrading are quite ashamed of their own sexuality, to the point that such a feat would likely result in a coma.
from Dr. Jenkins can be found on joystick101.org. On one hand its a shame that his final article isn't available from another MIT branch off project, I understand the importance of reaching a venue that is a bit more well read. Personally, I think its a hard line to defend a game like Grand Theft Auto 3 in the face of a mother who lost a child. Everyone points out that the parents should be more involved, we don't need regulation, etc. But from my understanding thats just what her grassroots organization is about. If I was Henry, I'd have probably walked out on Donahue. It probably looks bad but if you've read the transcript it would be hard to get much worse.
In a way, I agree that teenagers need time to socialize, but I disagree that school is the time or place for it. Public schooling is 7 hours of being talked at, with 3 minutes passing period. Theres no time to talk and interact with your friends like you want to, and there should be. A serious look at how teaching is needed. Lecturing is not equal to learning. I think we could get away with less school hours, and give more time to children for their own social interactions, like playing street football with the kid down the street that doesn't go to school with you for some reason.
I used to think that homeschooling was only for religious wierdos, and by and large, it still is. But now I think of it more as an act of rebellion against the instutional education system. Public schools really dislike this stuff happening right under their noses. Gatto has more to say on the failings and realities of public education; if you liked the article google for more on gatto. Whether you dislike homeschooling or not is not the question; the number of dissaffected students graduating with no hope of self-actualization demands the question, "What are we going to do to fix it?" Or perhaps, this was a semi elaborate trolling.
Since I'd rather not reopen old wounds by talking with my personal former math teachers, I'd like to ask you as a math teacher a question. Why is the "Fundamental Theorem of Algebra"(emphasis mine(duh)) reserved for Algebra 2?
Yea, I was helping my brother with his algebra yesterday, and neither of us could remember how to multiply fractions. Its like putting real numbers and an x instead of a dot changes the whole problem in my mind. That and the concrete numbers. I mean when you learn the ideal gas law its not presented as something like P/n*V/T=R. You don't even think of fractions that way. If its all multiplies and a divide it gets a single fraction bar. The elementary fraction style just brings up bad memories of cross multiplecation and cancellation, things I learned by rote rather than understanding the forces behind it all.
Thats not fair, thats like playing the creative suicide game. Even if you somehow manage to win, you've really lost.
Is emergency health care workers who are on call. Would you jam the signal of an ER surgeon without him knowing it?
Why have virtual reality communities largely failed? Because people need a compelling reason to drop face to face communication for another form. A virtual reality while sounding cool to some technophiles, doesn't do much for the most of the people out there. What exactly about a 2d representation of a 3d avatar who does a horrible job of lip synching your text appeals to people over just the text? Communities aren't something that you can really design from the ground up, they're something that grows out of something smaller. Halflife is a really big example. CounterStrike in particular. Its a good enough game to motivate people to talk about it and make connnections between players. People form clans, etc. Recently voice chat has been added which has really improved leadership and team performance. Its slowly growing out of the game that was released so long ago. There are even small projects going on to create a meta game of sorts, a sort of mercenary system in which you gain reputation by playing which bars you from playing on lower servers and ruining the game.
Remember, the walled city started as a filter turned inside out, and grew from there. Its a hodge podge collection of toys, not exactly a mainstream communication device. The city itself is stored in various member's houses and supported by the members. I don't think your local realtor will put up and maintain a computer to host an online office of some virtual reality. The closests and perhaps most influential technology on the idea behind the walled city would be IRC. While in itself, the various implementations have archaic interfaces, simple techophobia is less than enough to foster such an elite community, as evidenced by the nearly crushing popularity of EFnet and DALnet. Instead, consider more obscure and private IRC servers, with explicit connection permissions.
You haven't found your virtual realities because you're looking for the wrong things. There is a difference betwen visual and virtual. The reason nobody bought into the realtime rendered virtual reality is because people like you don't have the hardware, and many people, yourself possibly included, wouldn't like the result. Virtual shopping malls. There's no room for virtual coffee houses with poetry hours, unless you want to pay a cover charge to experience a shade less of reality. You may be onto something, as many mmorpgs were simply about sitting on pillows and talking to other people with text messages. The fundamental hasn't changed much: text messaging is the standard and dressing it up doesn't help much.
I read a lot of gibson books one summer and they all sorta ran together. I guess I thought the walled city was a Virtual Light concept or something. D'oh.
Of course, this leads to such quote by Cramer or Cauchy or someother such famous mathematician: "When I suddenly find anything useful concerning my work, I stop."
While I could wax about how the actual inspiration meets the NEUROMANCER vision better than the software in the topic, theres other things I could do.
Like point out that I saw a trailer for a movie that was really influenced by Idoru. Remember, Idoru was about the star of Lo-Res marrying a digital being. A synthetic star. And marginally about the stratifcation between north and south California. Its pretty much a california centric book, focusing on north vs south and the bridge people, the economy of celebrity, and the economic impact of accelerated construction. Not much virtual reality for ya. Anyways, the movie is called Simone. Its about the creation of a virtual star. But gone is the almost transcendently gay theme of a Simo-Celtic rock band star marrying a virtual being because its the indie thing to do, replaced with just straight out sex (although in retrospect, conception with Idoru would be quite difficult) and showmanship, reminiscient of Macross Plus's theme.
Basically, this idea is stupid, and so are you. CounterStrike presents a more compelling virtual reality than DustCity and you seem to have confused your gibson books. I hope I have been thouroughly caustic.
I think that an upcoming game engine, either the next one or the one after that, will have a notably longer usable life for content creation than we have seen so far.
Right now Half-Life seems to be doing okay. It may not have the commercial creation push that engines like the new Unreal, but the end user Half Life is doing well. I don't have a pretty graph to show you about population vs time but I don't believe either of us is ignorant of reality. We also know that halflife is firmly propped by a single liscence, and the open community support will not provide for valve forever, so halflife should be on its way out soon. If everyone stopped playing today, the lifetime of the game would have been about 4 years. Thats a really long time. Its lasted through more new hardware releases than I care to count. This is may or may not be notable.
And the hl engine has evolved through time, although not nearly enough. It seems every year the public is offered a new patch that doubles the texture resolution for their baby child games. So how will the new engine break the mold while slowly evolving? Tweaking the models and adding resolution can only get you so far.
Honestly though, if half-life isn't notable enough for its shelf life, then I don't think that any game in the near future will find the adoption rate and life span of half-life. Because while real time polygon rendering may be finished with revolutions, games have not. I see 2 things changing the scene myself.
1)Real time ray tracing. Its been asserted by a few places and people that raytracing will outperform rasterization in high quality scenarios. I don't claim to fully understand their arguments or validity, but significant academic work is underway.
2) Dynamic environments. As games continue to evolve in complexity and interacivity, some are in dire need of a more flexible environment. More specifically, people want to be able to lanch a mortor or artillery shell or whatever and get visible persisting results on the dirt. A few games have approached this but the solutions have been unsatisfying to many. Using a height map yields an easily modifed environment, but it also means no rooms above rooms. Another design concern is loading times. A lot of developers have chosen graphical speed at the cost of punishing the player with load times. Dynamically or "passively" loading the data has been presented as one way of combating the load issue, but I don't see it as very compatabile with a persistant world.
A lot of what I pointed out is almost a simple restating of what you've said, but I wish to underline the significance of these things. Game creaters want malleable levels, to create new game mechanics that underscore creation and destruction, primarily.
Now all my intercollegiate... "transfers" will procede faster than I can burn them to CD!
Of course, in those days immigration wasn't so regulated and limited. Now we have quotas of legal immigrants, which originated after the Great War. Its interesting that you attribute the liberation of the colonies to a Nationalistic view, given that at the time they were not a nation. I suspect the bigger cause was fear of being brought to trial afterwards for some reason. After the Declaration there was no going back. While the English people may have seen the Revolutionary war similar to how we saw the Vietnam war, those in charge of the British Empire were not happy.
Which is why we should restrict public servants to a single liscence, but give them the leeway required to serve the good of the public. If both you and the public servant truely have the good of the people in mind, then I don't think legislation is nessecary, and if you and the servant disagree, then one of you may be wrong.
Also please try and capitalize Free here, it helps us distinguish between the "free good" meaning and the newspeak meaning Stallman and others created. =(
But there's a somewhat famous story of a guy (occasionally attributed to MIT) who found a way to beat roulette, sort of. The idea was that although the game is in the favor of the house, if you're allowed to place bets while the ball is rolling you can shift the odds in your favor. The guy put a computer in his shoe heel to tell him where to bid, with some sort of feedback and a wire running through his pantleg.
Rather than trust a gut feeling, ASK HER!!!!!
You know its possible to write software blitters. I believe that theres one in Michael Abrash's Black Book of Computer Graphics.
There is a price associated with anonymity. How do you suggest we counter the liability of loaning books to strangers? The price you pay with anonymity is trust. Nobody inherantly trusts strangers for long.
Usually you don't publish your MOD chip schematics, to prevent exactly that. They're not terribly worried about reverse engineering, as if you could do the job, you'd probably profit more from reverse engineering the xbox instead ;). So yea its security through obscurity, but they're not going for a secure modchip really. Just one that they alone can sell to the masses.