Since it's already got skin contact with your wrist anyway, maybe it could just transmit a galvanic charge electrically up the ulner nerve in your arm to the optic senors in your brain. Basically creating a "hallucination" of the watch interface in your field of vision. Of course you could also load in MPG-6 holomovies of porn in into the iPod player and watch those without anyone being able to see! ; -)
Let's just do an excercise in stating the obvious and think what we've come to expect from game controllers. Okay so when we think game controller, for sure we've got:
L and R up on the top Six pressable buttons on your right thumb, essentially X Y Z and A B C (You can call those X, O, "Square", doodecahedron, white, black or whatever, you're not fooling us.) Left thumb main directional control, likely an analog thumbstick Nowadays, usually some directional control on the right side too! Start button Maybe Select Button? Maybe Auxiliarry top buttons like L2, R2, or Z? Maybe Auxiliarry D-pad complimenting analog sticks
Not so hard, right? From a developer's point of view, it would be nice to know that EVERY game will have access to this same pool of inputs. It would be nice to know that all your players can reasonably have this same setup while they're playing your game. Then you can design your control schema around this base up front and not have to change it with every platform you port to.
As a design excercise, trying thinking up a control scheme for an imaginary PC game, then think of what controls you want it to have. It's almost too much freedom! Sometimes when game developers are designing for PC they think "Wow, look at all those keys! A-Z, 1-9, F1-F12, *gasp* Numerical keypad! It's my priveledge, nay my DUTY to use every last one of these keys!" Then your game ships with this handy "Quick Keys Guide", an intimidating page filled with confusing symbology that scares off casual gamers. Having a standard controller really helps constrain your design choices to a managable level.
Casual Game Player: "Computer? How am I ever gonna play games on that?!" Advanced gamer: [Saying nothing, plugs PC Controller into USB slot.] Casual Gamer Player: "OH!"
Wonder how long it will be before a domain/server is running in remote parts of the world for the business
I dunno if it will be popping up anytime soon. Mandarin, the main geek who runs their server and code setup, has told me he's getting tired of this kind of thing. You're right about the quality degradation too, slower updates, things late that, and one reason for the degradation is mandarin stopped caring. Weird to think about how one person can affect things like that.
Krazy8 supposedly "offered control of isonews to the government", but by that point I think isonews was already owned by some other company, EZ Buy maybe. Krazy8 could have offered control of Sony and Microsoft as part of his plea bargain, but that wouldn't make it so. But I think what it comes down to is possession is 9/10ths of the law, and the US.gov now possesses isonews.com DNS.
There are no "AI experts", because there is no such thing as artificial intelligence in this world."... "But the field has made essentially zero progress in the last fifty years."
You're forgeting the non-critical, yet very real application of computer games! AI playes are getting MUCH more realistic "in the last fifty years." I've watched the primitive AIs in early games get more clever and harder to stump trivially. And perhaps the proudest example are the computer AIs in Quake3, Halo and Unreal Tournament Games. UT in particular has bots that are "realistic", they are good without always being perfect shots. Granted this is only a novelty application, but at $8 billion a year and climbing the games industry might well be one of the most money-making applications for AIs. At the very least it is a tangible application of the academic principles that would otherwise be confined to white appers.
Royalties are Small, the rest is Costs and Markup
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Instant Concert CDs?
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· Score: 1
I can only imagine that the RIAA would squash this one, since traditionally, there would be all sorts of copyright issues here. Royalties go to the Label, Producer, Studio, Artists, RIAA, and who knows who else.
I'm not a music lawyer or anything, but I just took some lectures on this, but still I'm not positive "Royalties" are as big as you think. As I understand it, the only royalties involved in this case would be the mechanical rights royalties (7.99 cents per song per CD copy) to the publisher*. So ten songs? About $0.79 cents per CD in royalties goes to the song publisher. You can add up all those cents and cut a single check to the Harry Fox agency, which makes the money gets to the right publisher(s). The other costs involved? Ticket sales, merchandise, and the part of the CD price that costs more than $0.79.
*Music publishers own "stables" of songs. They buy the copyrights for these songs from songwriters. Bands then pay publishers for the rights to sell song performances! Multiple bands can perform the same song, and companies like Harry Fox make sure the publisher gets the dues from them all. I _think_ that once a song has been performed publically, anyone else can "cover" that song as long as they pay the publisher. I don't know if the publisher can tell others they may not perform the copyrighted work as long as they pay. I think music copyright only gives you the right to be paid when your work is performed, not Nazi-like control of who may not perform your song and even sell performances of it.
As such, it's really none of the RIAA's business to step in to this. It's up to the band if they want to sell mechanical copies of their live performances. One reason they might not want to is that it would compete with shrink-wrapped albums being sold in stores by their label, if they have one. Smaller bands not in thrall to a label could sell such live copies for only the costs of mechanical royalties, live engineering, and CD Duplication. This could be really good for small bands making cover albums! All they need to do is check out www.harryfox.com to make sure they are square on mechanical royalties.
Oh BTW, it's quite likely that the big labels and RIAA would be happy to use FUD and intimidation to make it seem like this kind of live recording is somehow evil, black-bearded priacy.
This makes me want to play AquaNox all the more! How else to make a high-powered combat submarine? A little supercavitating external hull with this propulsion and we're ready to rock and roll.
Hi, I'm writing from the iMac in the student lobby from Recording Workshop. It's basically a boot camp for future audio engineers. Anyway, I can share at least a little insight of the greenhorn/textbook variety.
When you go to a studio, they'll go through a couple of steps. Basically you bring in instruments and they hook up microphones to capture the raw sound to tape or hard drive. That gives you a raw take. Then you can go over the raw sound instrument by instrument to weed out instrument mistakes. That's called overdubbing. Once the engineer has all that data, they fiddle and tweak and polish the sound using all kinds of EQs and compressors and the like. The band can go home for this part. That's called Mixdown.
After that's done, the engineer gives a golden master to the band- basically, a CD with good sound songs ready to be copied. CD copying companies can burn many many copies as well as the graphics and liner notes. The band could sell copies then. After that comes promotion, which involves massive advertising campaigns, payola to radio stations, interviews, getting on MTV, and things like that. This can also include bringing in big names to sort of spread their magical aura on a project. Some producers just have a way at turning bands into successes, either through skillful management, hidden paladin-like success auras, or both! All promotion is sort of pimping an album out until it has household name recognition. This is what the RIAA sized companies are really all about. These million dollar marketing campaigns act as giant megaphones, shouting out an artist's message louder than bands not backed by an RIAA company. Have you ever bought a CD of a band you didn't know existed? Non-RIAA/Big 5 distribution and promotion channels like Napster are of course frowned on by the RIAA, in fact the RIAA would probably like to make them illegal, monopoly style. But I digress.
I can tell you a little more about the making the CD phases. There are lots of ways to get your band recorded for relatively cheap. (As in $500-$5,000 dollars.) If you live in the Coloumbus area, you can get your band recorded for free by training students at the Recording Workshop. (www.recordingworkshop.com) It's a little like getting your hair cut at a barber school but at least you'll have something on CD. The instructors here also work professionally on weekends, their rates are about $55 an hour in the studio. One instructor completed an album-level project in 144 billable hours. Elsewhere, professionals with their own studios also charge in the $30-$60/hr range for recording. Big name studios such as The Hit Factory and Sun Studios can run perhaps $200 an hour, give or take a couple hundred. Duplication costs could be maybe $1 a cd. Everything else falls under promotion. Hope this helped!
Re:Why Snood is more popular than Bust-a-Move
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Snood, the Simple Game
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· Score: 2, Insightful
There is one other single design difference that made Snood accessible to the masses: Turn based. That simple choice opens the game up to people who would ordinarily fear it. In the original Busta Move and Puzzle Bobble, you only had like 5 seconds to shoot your bubble before it was force-fired automatically. But only "hardened gamers" have the reflex skillsets to enjoy this kind of time pressure. My friends and I have long enjoyed Puzzle Bobble and Bustamove. The multiplayer in these games can have the intensity and shots per second of a Quake 3 match.
My friend's mom saw us playing those games and didn't join in. But when we later got her Snood, she was sorely addicted. Her reasoning? "It doesn't go too fast." While it's tempting to look down on the masses and gloat about our superior gamer skills, it's these downright simple games that drive games forward towards recognition amongst the non-gamer masses.
The whole Humans as Power Source part of the Matrix really bothered me. The machines would entrap humans only if they needed a resource that only humans could provide. That resource is not energy. I don't care how many BTUs of energy the human body produces, the machines could get more energy by combining "a form of fusion" in rats, cockroaches, or maybe algae. Any of those life forms would be far simpler to care for and less rebellious too.
So I've concluded that Morpheus is somewhat incorrect (GASP) and that the machines are using humans as hard drives, not batteries. Think about it. This explains the Matrix a lot better. We know that the Agents can "possess" any human by "teleporting" into them. This is essentially copying their entire data into that human's brain at amazing bandwidth. We can assume that with its great interconnectivity and ability to store huge quantities of data such as video and audio, the human mind is one of the only appropriate storage mediums for the machines. This would explain why the machines create a world that attempts to stimulate the human brain as opposed to inducing a comatose state or inflicting the newborne humans with mental retardation: Only a healthy mind makes an acceptable organic host for the machines.
This line of thinking even hints at a possible resolution for the entire series: The humans could help the Machines invent a replacement storage medium besides human brains. Any information medium with data density equal the human brain should be sufficient. Then the machines could agree to float off into space and inhabit only worlds inhospitable to humans. (There are plenty.) This would leave the humans free to live out their lives on M class planets, although I suspect they would only pollute them to death anyway. (Agent Smith was pretty accurate in his assesment of industrial humans as viral.)
I've wanted to get this off my chest for a long time, now that I've posted on slashdot I can consider myself heard. ; -)
I know for a fact that there IS a comment relating specifically for Halloween. I unpacked all the wave files and listened to them in winamp. Nestled deep in there somewhere was something realating to Halloween. I just don't remember what it is now. For some reason, there's a lot of the narrator saying "Place Holder.... Place Holder..."
Another little gem tucked away in the files is Horny the Horned Reaper saying "The Dark Mistress m-m-m-makes me HHHHOOOOOOOOOOORRRRRRRNYYY!" Wasn't used in the final game but the wave file is still in there. ; -)
Here is Steve Gibson specifically telling Microsoft about a weakness in their sockets, allowing WindowsXP in the hands of naive users to be used as packet flooders for denial of service. He's talked to Microsoft honchos and they seemed unimpressed. But with this legislation they are for, providing the raw materials for Denial of Service attacks would be some kind of Criminal Neglect in Industrial Terrorism.
As we all know, a bill has been proposed that would require back doors in all encryption products, which is NOT okay in my book.
If the required "Backdoors Rule" is passed, it will be possible to undo erroneous legislation. The method is to use Nonviolent Protest and Civil Disobedience as demonstrated by Martin Luther King Jr. and Ghandi. So if Congress passes a law seen as unjust, ethical masses of people can choose not to obey the unjust law and accept the consequences. This is easy enough- just download the source code or a binary installer for encryption known not to have a back door and keep running it. And as part of the civil disobedience, these people must accept the unjust but pre-determined consequences. I don't know what the consequences for using non-backdoor software would be under these proposals, but the worse they are the more ridiculous they will seem. As hundreds of thousands of peaceful geeks and other ordinary citizens are say, shipped off to prison for the "crime" of using non-backdoor/escrow encryption, the government will continue to look dumber and dumber. As the government loses credibility of the criminal nature of the crypto masses, they might try to persecute the convicted and incite them to some kind of violence which would retroactively justify their unfair treatment. If they can survive the harsh treatment of this phase and remain for the most part polite in the face of injustice, the crypto law would lose all credibility and be forced to be repealed.
So if the irrational "No Crypto" legislation does go through, consider being ready to commit your own small acts of civil disobedience until the insanity is exposed and revealed. Civil disobedience requires sacrifice, but it has worked on far larger issues on this. The real question is, if our civil liberties are taken away in small enough increments, will people people be willing to make the sacrifices? You can boil a frog to death without restraining it- as long as you heat up the pot slowly enough that it can't detect the change.
The human brain doesn't have a clock speed on the Central Processing Unit- in fact, there _is_ no central clock, but our minds manage to function with a great deal of processing power. Imagine the bandwidth of the file equivilant of all the.wav,.avi,.ogg,.mp3,.txt, Optical character recognition, and AI functions we use, plus mechanical functions like bipedal balance. I've heard estimates and approximations that the brain performs about a trillion operations per second, is that about right? Pretty impressive.
An interesting thing to think about is, with no clock speed, how we still can perceive time. We need to do this to predict the paths of moving objects, like birds and arrows and spears... or more recently car trajectories when we're driving. With no absolutely authoritive center time in our minds, how do we still have such an accurate sense of time when it comes to predictiong these paths?
I personally imagine that the brain does have some sense of ratios...I imagine that neural loops have some sense of ratios... for example, if hypothetically the motor loop between between say the basal ganglia and the corpus collupsum is were twice the speed of an eyeblink? The exact milliseconds could vary between people but still give a basis for comparing motion and "time" in the real world. Of course, this would be affected by age as the loops break down- this would account for the way the old people I've seen tend to drive.
It has come to my attention that you asked the FBI to arrest Dmitri Sklyarov on grounds of delivering a speech at an academic conference.
Actually, that wasn't Adobe's problem with Skylarov. They arrested him because he was lead programmer on a piece of software that broke Adobe's Ebooks format, allowing people to change ebooks to unprotected PDF. And he didn't make that program just to demonstrate an academic principle, he wrote it so that he could sell it for $99 bucks a pop (he was selling it at his company's web site, and the funds were transferred through an United States payment company.)
I don't think there are any practical uses for such a conversion tool that would make it worth $99. I doubt it was somehow more functional that the Ebook reader. So, the only purpose of selling it was to make a quick buck from people who wanted to crack ebooks to sell them on the black market or maybe give them away to friends. That's where he lost the moral high ground. If I lived in Russia's economy I'd probably try to make some money that way too.
I'm personally for sharing data with friends, but Adobe isn't. Adobe needs to convince publishers that people will have to pay for Ebooks. Adobe can't have companies showing how easy it is to break Ebooks security and selling tools to do it. They could have tried strengthening Ebooks until it was strong enough to actually secure book content, but that was apparently too difficult or troublesome for them. So instead Adobe used the FBI as their personal business enforcers and had them capture Skylarov when he came to visit the US. This happened to be when he was in the US giving a talk about how he broke Adobe's weak Ebooks security. It was an opportunity for Adobe to put him out of business and shut him up at the same time. An opportunity made possible with by and with the blessing of the DMCA
The question to me is, should the DMCA allow companies like Adobe to use the FBI as their own personal brute squad over relatively minor software-related issues? How minor is minor? How naughty does a software maker have to be before they will be seen as actually needing to be arrested? Embarassing Adobe is perhaps slightly troublesome to the public but I think the FBI should be reserved for issues much more directly related to public saftey and wellfare.
Anyway, my point was that Skylarov wasn't just making knowledge availble at an academic conference, he was trying to sell a commercial product with no purpose other than to break through Adobe's Ebooks Encryption. The DMCA says that's bad enough for jail and no bail. I personally really don't think so.
Perhaps the trick is to establish residency in another country, such as the Principality of Sealand? What about countries who aren't members of this treaty? Are they free from the treaty or repressed by it?
Naw, peace leads to having enough free time to build things like McDonalds. As opposed to concentration camps, and smoking piles of rubble.
Well, we don't totally have world peace, maybe that's why McDonalds is the norm for now. Maybe as we get more and more peace, we get botannical music gardens or whatever else is "better" than McDonalds ; -)
Summary Meme of what Mr. Slippery Said
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Shared Source?
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· Score: 1
I'm Worried About Sabotage (Paranoid)
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To the Moon, Alice
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· Score: 2
"I mean, look at all the failures that have happened in both the American and Russian space programs."
If there is such a thing as a sinister government agency that doesn't want to be shown up by single civilian, couldn't they easily trash this operation? There must be quite a few ways to make a rocket blow up that looks accidental. (Lasers were the first long range, hard-to-detect idea that came to mind.)
If anything goes wrong, the common public is going to assume that it's because it was a dumbass idea for civilians to go into space. They'll leave it to massively funded government projects. No one is going to look for tiny laser burns on the peroxide tanks.
"Getting into space is a little more complex than strapping a whole lot of explosives to something, and praying:)" This is exactly the meme hypothetical sinister government agencies would want to perpetuate, and one that would be locked in if this little operation is destroyed by sabotage.
There's a chance it could fail on its own, but if it were sabotage how would anyone tell the difference? A comprehensive, accurate wreckage investigation would have to be conducted by neutral sources.
St. Olaf college (www.stolaf.edu) deletes all accounts of graduating seniors three months after they graduate. I personally can't conceive of why any institution would throw such a cheap and effective way of maintaining community among its graduates. Pennies a year per account must be too much for their stingy computing department.
"E-mail accounts are for CURRENT paying customers. As a graduate, you are a FORMER paying customer. Goodbye."
The poor hardworking people doing fundraising at Phonathon can't even use e-mail accounts as an answer the question in potential givers' minds: "Before I pay out my hard-earned cash, what has St. Olaf done for me _lately_? I can at least get a lousy e-mail account, right?"
This will probably get me the baseball bat treatment, but:
Maybe the parents should have encouraged their slain children to play MORE video games, so they would have had the skills and reflexes to dodge out of the line of fire...
Slashdot Mirror
Since it's already got skin contact with your wrist anyway, maybe it could just transmit a galvanic charge electrically up the ulner nerve in your arm to the optic senors in your brain. Basically creating a "hallucination" of the watch interface in your field of vision. Of course you could also load in MPG-6 holomovies of porn in into the iPod player and watch those without anyone being able to see! ; -)
Let's just do an excercise in stating the obvious and think what we've come to expect from game controllers. Okay so when we think game controller, for sure we've got:
L and R up on the top
Six pressable buttons on your right thumb, essentially X Y Z and A B C (You can call those X, O, "Square", doodecahedron, white, black or whatever, you're not fooling us.)
Left thumb main directional control, likely an analog thumbstick
Nowadays, usually some directional control on the right side too!
Start button
Maybe Select Button?
Maybe Auxiliarry top buttons like L2, R2, or Z?
Maybe Auxiliarry D-pad complimenting analog sticks
Not so hard, right?
From a developer's point of view, it would be nice to know that EVERY game will have access to this same pool of inputs. It would be nice to know that all your players can reasonably have this same setup while they're playing your game. Then you can design your control schema around this base up front and not have to change it with every platform you port to.
As a design excercise, trying thinking up a control scheme for an imaginary PC game, then think of what controls you want it to have. It's almost too much freedom! Sometimes when game developers are designing for PC they think "Wow, look at all those keys! A-Z, 1-9, F1-F12, *gasp* Numerical keypad! It's my priveledge, nay my DUTY to use every last one of these keys!" Then your game ships with this handy "Quick Keys Guide", an intimidating page filled with confusing symbology that scares off casual gamers. Having a standard controller really helps constrain your design choices to a managable level.
Casual Game Player: "Computer? How am I ever gonna play games on that?!"
Advanced gamer: [Saying nothing, plugs PC Controller into USB slot.]
Casual Gamer Player: "OH!"
Wonder how long it will be before a domain/server is running in remote parts of the world for the business
I dunno if it will be popping up anytime soon. Mandarin, the main geek who runs their server and code setup, has told me he's getting tired of this kind of thing. You're right about the quality degradation too, slower updates, things late that, and one reason for the degradation is mandarin stopped caring. Weird to think about how one person can affect things like that.
Krazy8 supposedly "offered control of isonews to the government", but by that point I think isonews was already owned by some other company, EZ Buy maybe. Krazy8 could have offered control of Sony and Microsoft as part of his plea bargain, but that wouldn't make it so. But I think what it comes down to is possession is 9/10ths of the law, and the US.gov now possesses isonews.com DNS.
There are no "AI experts", because there is no such thing as artificial intelligence in this world." ... "But the field has made essentially zero progress in the last fifty years."
You're forgeting the non-critical, yet very real application of computer games! AI playes are getting MUCH more realistic "in the last fifty years." I've watched the primitive AIs in early games get more clever and harder to stump trivially. And perhaps the proudest example are the computer AIs in Quake3, Halo and Unreal Tournament Games. UT in particular has bots that are "realistic", they are good without always being perfect shots. Granted this is only a novelty application, but at $8 billion a year and climbing the games industry might well be one of the most money-making applications for AIs. At the very least it is a tangible application of the academic principles that would otherwise be confined to white appers.
I can only imagine that the RIAA would squash this one, since traditionally, there would be all sorts of copyright issues here. Royalties go to the Label, Producer, Studio, Artists, RIAA, and who knows who else.
I'm not a music lawyer or anything, but I just took some lectures on this, but still I'm not positive "Royalties" are as big as you think. As I understand it, the only royalties involved in this case would be the mechanical rights royalties (7.99 cents per song per CD copy) to the publisher*. So ten songs? About $0.79 cents per CD in royalties goes to the song publisher. You can add up all those cents and cut a single check to the Harry Fox agency, which makes the money gets to the right publisher(s). The other costs involved? Ticket sales, merchandise, and the part of the CD price that costs more than $0.79.
*Music publishers own "stables" of songs. They buy the copyrights for these songs from songwriters. Bands then pay publishers for the rights to sell song performances! Multiple bands can perform the same song, and companies like Harry Fox make sure the publisher gets the dues from them all. I _think_ that once a song has been performed publically, anyone else can "cover" that song as long as they pay the publisher. I don't know if the publisher can tell others they may not perform the copyrighted work as long as they pay. I think music copyright only gives you the right to be paid when your work is performed, not Nazi-like control of who may not perform your song and even sell performances of it.
As such, it's really none of the RIAA's business to step in to this. It's up to the band if they want to sell mechanical copies of their live performances. One reason they might not want to is that it would compete with shrink-wrapped albums being sold in stores by their label, if they have one. Smaller bands not in thrall to a label could sell such live copies for only the costs of mechanical royalties, live engineering, and CD Duplication. This could be really good for small bands making cover albums! All they need to do is check out www.harryfox.com to make sure they are square on mechanical royalties.
Oh BTW, it's quite likely that the big labels and RIAA would be happy to use FUD and intimidation to make it seem like this kind of live recording is somehow evil, black-bearded priacy.
This makes me want to play AquaNox all the more! How else to make a high-powered combat submarine? A little supercavitating external hull with this propulsion and we're ready to rock and roll.
Hi, I'm writing from the iMac in the student lobby from Recording Workshop. It's basically a boot camp for future audio engineers. Anyway, I can share at least a little insight of the greenhorn/textbook variety.
When you go to a studio, they'll go through a couple of steps. Basically you bring in instruments and they hook up microphones to capture the raw sound to tape or hard drive. That gives you a raw take. Then you can go over the raw sound instrument by instrument to weed out instrument mistakes. That's called overdubbing. Once the engineer has all that data, they fiddle and tweak and polish the sound using all kinds of EQs and compressors and the like. The band can go home for this part. That's called Mixdown.
After that's done, the engineer gives a golden master to the band- basically, a CD with good sound songs ready to be copied. CD copying companies can burn many many copies as well as the graphics and liner notes. The band could sell copies then. After that comes promotion, which involves massive advertising campaigns, payola to radio stations, interviews, getting on MTV, and things like that. This can also include bringing in big names to sort of spread their magical aura on a project. Some producers just have a way at turning bands into successes, either through skillful management, hidden paladin-like success auras, or both! All promotion is sort of pimping an album out until it has household name recognition. This is what the RIAA sized companies are really all about. These million dollar marketing campaigns act as giant megaphones, shouting out an artist's message louder than bands not backed by an RIAA company. Have you ever bought a CD of a band you didn't know existed? Non-RIAA/Big 5 distribution and promotion channels like Napster are of course frowned on by the RIAA, in fact the RIAA would probably like to make them illegal, monopoly style. But I digress.
I can tell you a little more about the making the CD phases. There are lots of ways to get your band recorded for relatively cheap. (As in $500-$5,000 dollars.) If you live in the Coloumbus area, you can get your band recorded for free by training students at the Recording Workshop. (www.recordingworkshop.com) It's a little like getting your hair cut at a barber school but at least you'll have something on CD. The instructors here also work professionally on weekends, their rates are about $55 an hour in the studio. One instructor completed an album-level project in 144 billable hours. Elsewhere, professionals with their own studios also charge in the $30-$60/hr range for recording. Big name studios such as The Hit Factory and Sun Studios can run perhaps $200 an hour, give or take a couple hundred. Duplication costs could be maybe $1 a cd. Everything else falls under promotion. Hope this helped!
There is one other single design difference that made Snood accessible to the masses: Turn based. That simple choice opens the game up to people who would ordinarily fear it. In the original Busta Move and Puzzle Bobble, you only had like 5 seconds to shoot your bubble before it was force-fired automatically. But only "hardened gamers" have the reflex skillsets to enjoy this kind of time pressure. My friends and I have long enjoyed Puzzle Bobble and Bustamove. The multiplayer in these games can have the intensity and shots per second of a Quake 3 match.
My friend's mom saw us playing those games and didn't join in. But when we later got her Snood, she was sorely addicted. Her reasoning? "It doesn't go too fast." While it's tempting to look down on the masses and gloat about our superior gamer skills, it's these downright simple games that drive games forward towards recognition amongst the non-gamer masses.
The whole Humans as Power Source part of the Matrix really bothered me. The machines would entrap humans only if they needed a resource that only humans could provide. That resource is not energy. I don't care how many BTUs of energy the human body produces, the machines could get more energy by combining "a form of fusion" in rats, cockroaches, or maybe algae. Any of those life forms would be far simpler to care for and less rebellious too.
So I've concluded that Morpheus is somewhat incorrect (GASP) and that the machines are using humans as hard drives, not batteries. Think about it. This explains the Matrix a lot better. We know that the Agents can "possess" any human by "teleporting" into them. This is essentially copying their entire data into that human's brain at amazing bandwidth. We can assume that with its great interconnectivity and ability to store huge quantities of data such as video and audio, the human mind is one of the only appropriate storage mediums for the machines. This would explain why the machines create a world that attempts to stimulate the human brain as opposed to inducing a comatose state or inflicting the newborne humans with mental retardation: Only a healthy mind makes an acceptable organic host for the machines.
This line of thinking even hints at a possible resolution for the entire series: The humans could help the Machines invent a replacement storage medium besides human brains. Any information medium with data density equal the human brain should be sufficient. Then the machines could agree to float off into space and inhabit only worlds inhospitable to humans. (There are plenty.) This would leave the humans free to live out their lives on M class planets, although I suspect they would only pollute them to death anyway. (Agent Smith was pretty accurate in his assesment of industrial humans as viral.)
I've wanted to get this off my chest for a long time, now that I've posted on slashdot I can consider myself heard. ; -)
"That's United ---->GNU------/LINUX to you!!
I know for a fact that there IS a comment relating specifically for Halloween. I unpacked all the wave files and listened to them in winamp. Nestled deep in there somewhere was something realating to Halloween. I just don't remember what it is now. For some reason, there's a lot of the narrator saying "Place Holder.... Place Holder..."
Another little gem tucked away in the files is Horny the Horned Reaper saying "The Dark Mistress m-m-m-makes me HHHHOOOOOOOOOOORRRRRRRNYYY!" Wasn't used in the final game but the wave file is still in there. ; -)
http://grc.com/dos/sockettome.htm
Here is Steve Gibson specifically telling Microsoft about a weakness in their sockets, allowing WindowsXP in the hands of naive users to be used as packet flooders for denial of service. He's talked to Microsoft honchos and they seemed unimpressed. But with this legislation they are for, providing the raw materials for Denial of Service attacks would be some kind of Criminal Neglect in Industrial Terrorism.
As we all know, a bill has been proposed that would require back doors in all encryption products, which is NOT okay in my book.
If the required "Backdoors Rule" is passed, it will be possible to undo erroneous legislation. The method is to use Nonviolent Protest and Civil Disobedience as demonstrated by Martin Luther King Jr. and Ghandi. So if Congress passes a law seen as unjust, ethical masses of people can choose not to obey the unjust law and accept the consequences. This is easy enough- just download the source code or a binary installer for encryption known not to have a back door and keep running it. And as part of the civil disobedience, these people must accept the unjust but pre-determined consequences. I don't know what the consequences for using non-backdoor software would be under these proposals, but the worse they are the more ridiculous they will seem. As hundreds of thousands of peaceful geeks and other ordinary citizens are say, shipped off to prison for the "crime" of using non-backdoor/escrow encryption, the government will continue to look dumber and dumber. As the government loses credibility of the criminal nature of the crypto masses, they might try to persecute the convicted and incite them to some kind of violence which would retroactively justify their unfair treatment. If they can survive the harsh treatment of this phase and remain for the most part polite in the face of injustice, the crypto law would lose all credibility and be forced to be repealed.
So if the irrational "No Crypto" legislation does go through, consider being ready to commit your own small acts of civil disobedience until the insanity is exposed and revealed. Civil disobedience requires sacrifice, but it has worked on far larger issues on this. The real question is, if our civil liberties are taken away in small enough increments, will people people be willing to make the sacrifices? You can boil a frog to death without restraining it- as long as you heat up the pot slowly enough that it can't detect the change.
The human brain doesn't have a clock speed on the Central Processing Unit- in fact, there _is_ no central clock, but our minds manage to function with a great deal of processing power. Imagine the bandwidth of the file equivilant of all the .wav, .avi, .ogg, .mp3, .txt, Optical character recognition, and AI functions we use, plus mechanical functions like bipedal balance. I've heard estimates and approximations that the brain performs about a trillion operations per second, is that about right? Pretty impressive.
An interesting thing to think about is, with no clock speed, how we still can perceive time. We need to do this to predict the paths of moving objects, like birds and arrows and spears... or more recently car trajectories when we're driving. With no absolutely authoritive center time in our minds, how do we still have such an accurate sense of time when it comes to predictiong these paths?
I personally imagine that the brain does have some sense of ratios...I imagine that neural loops have some sense of ratios... for example, if hypothetically the motor loop between between say the basal ganglia and the corpus collupsum is were twice the speed of an eyeblink? The exact milliseconds could vary between people but still give a basis for comparing motion and "time" in the real world. Of course, this would be affected by age as the loops break down- this would account for the way the old people I've seen tend to drive.
"Ahh, another hard day at work. Now what should I do? Think I'll play some Heroes 3."
(Frontal lobe shrinks, supposedly.)
"Looks like I saved at the end of a turn. Next day. Day 6 + 1 = Day 7"
(Entire brain grows with this heady goodness.)
"I'll hire some cavaliers, they're good at stabbing things!!"
(Brain withers under the pure gaming poison.)
"Hmm, Cavaliers cost 1200 gold and I want 4 of them, I'll have to drop, ERRGGG... 4800 large on this."
(Brain grows)
"There's some troglodytes! I'm smash them good!"
(Brain deflates like old balloon)
"Uh oh, there are more trogolodytes than I planned- 7 groups of 60, that's, uhh..."
(And so on.)
NASA needs to simply glue machine guns to every launch vehicle they have to assure permanent funding.
So _that's_ why there were twin chainguns mounted on the asteroid rovers in Armageddon. I couldn't for the life of me figure that one out- until now.
It has come to my attention that you asked the FBI to arrest Dmitri Sklyarov on grounds of delivering a speech at an academic conference. Actually, that wasn't Adobe's problem with Skylarov. They arrested him because he was lead programmer on a piece of software that broke Adobe's Ebooks format, allowing people to change ebooks to unprotected PDF. And he didn't make that program just to demonstrate an academic principle, he wrote it so that he could sell it for $99 bucks a pop (he was selling it at his company's web site, and the funds were transferred through an United States payment company.)
I don't think there are any practical uses for such a conversion tool that would make it worth $99. I doubt it was somehow more functional that the Ebook reader. So, the only purpose of selling it was to make a quick buck from people who wanted to crack ebooks to sell them on the black market or maybe give them away to friends. That's where he lost the moral high ground. If I lived in Russia's economy I'd probably try to make some money that way too.
I'm personally for sharing data with friends, but Adobe isn't. Adobe needs to convince publishers that people will have to pay for Ebooks. Adobe can't have companies showing how easy it is to break Ebooks security and selling tools to do it. They could have tried strengthening Ebooks until it was strong enough to actually secure book content, but that was apparently too difficult or troublesome for them. So instead Adobe used the FBI as their personal business enforcers and had them capture Skylarov when he came to visit the US. This happened to be when he was in the US giving a talk about how he broke Adobe's weak Ebooks security. It was an opportunity for Adobe to put him out of business and shut him up at the same time. An opportunity made possible with by and with the blessing of the DMCA
The question to me is, should the DMCA allow companies like Adobe to use the FBI as their own personal brute squad over relatively minor software-related issues? How minor is minor? How naughty does a software maker have to be before they will be seen as actually needing to be arrested? Embarassing Adobe is perhaps slightly troublesome to the public but I think the FBI should be reserved for issues much more directly related to public saftey and wellfare.
Anyway, my point was that Skylarov wasn't just making knowledge availble at an academic conference, he was trying to sell a commercial product with no purpose other than to break through Adobe's Ebooks Encryption. The DMCA says that's bad enough for jail and no bail. I personally really don't think so.
Perhaps the trick is to establish residency in another country, such as the Principality of Sealand? What about countries who aren't members of this treaty? Are they free from the treaty or repressed by it?
Naw, peace leads to having enough free time to build things like McDonalds. As opposed to concentration camps, and smoking piles of rubble.
Well, we don't totally have world peace, maybe that's why McDonalds is the norm for now. Maybe as we get more and more peace, we get botannical music gardens or whatever else is "better" than McDonalds ; -)
So,The GPL isn't "viral", it's "genetic".
Jolly good show Dr. Holmes! ; -)
"I mean, look at all the failures that have happened in both the American and Russian space programs."
:)" This is exactly the meme hypothetical sinister government agencies would want to perpetuate, and one that would be locked in if this little operation is destroyed by sabotage.
If there is such a thing as a sinister government agency that doesn't want to be shown up by single civilian, couldn't they easily trash this operation? There must be quite a few ways to make a rocket blow up that looks accidental. (Lasers were the first long range, hard-to-detect idea that came to mind.)
If anything goes wrong, the common public is going to assume that it's because it was a dumbass idea for civilians to go into space. They'll leave it to massively funded government projects. No one is going to look for tiny laser burns on the peroxide tanks.
"Getting into space is a little more complex than strapping a whole lot of explosives to something, and praying
There's a chance it could fail on its own, but if it were sabotage how would anyone tell the difference? A comprehensive, accurate wreckage investigation would have to be conducted by neutral sources.
We'll see. I hope it works perfectly.
Melchior? Belthasar? Gaspar?
>Chrono Trigger
St. Olaf college (www.stolaf.edu) deletes all accounts of graduating seniors three months after they graduate. I personally can't conceive of why any institution would throw such a cheap and effective way of maintaining community among its graduates. Pennies a year per account must be too much for their stingy computing department.
"E-mail accounts are for CURRENT paying customers. As a graduate, you are a FORMER paying customer. Goodbye."
The poor hardworking people doing fundraising at Phonathon can't even use e-mail accounts as an answer the question in potential givers' minds:
"Before I pay out my hard-earned cash, what has St. Olaf done for me _lately_? I can at least get a lousy e-mail account, right?"
Apparently not..
This will probably get me the baseball bat treatment, but:
Maybe the parents should have encouraged their slain children to play MORE video games, so they would have had the skills and reflexes to dodge out of the line of fire...