Keep that term for when people are going to die without the goods.
That's just what you think, and what Florida's legal department thinks. But that's just describing where it happens, not what it is. A more obvious, and useful definition is the one that everybody else operates with - that a limited resource is being sold for much higher than free market forces would dictate. This comes up most often when resources are inflexible, like food, but also like transportation and communication (at least, to a certain point).
Obviously, demand for essentials is more inflexible than demand for nonessential goods, but that's no reason to say that you can't price gouge nonessential goods. A certain portion of the population "needs" their morning coffee, and those people ensure that the demand for coffee doesn't go below a certain threshold.
Customer: 1) Person who potentially buys things. The one they buy from is known as a vendor. 2) (Microsoft dfn). Ugly bags of mostly water+some money. The idea is to get the money out of the bags and then be able to keep it. For some reason, the bags sort of hold on to it when it's being taken.
I'm not willing to make any claims about one argument being better than the other, you've greatly simplified the issue to make your argument (that the universe existing sans God) seem simpler.
Let me rephrase by first stating the assumptions that are necessary to consider: 1) The universe appears to have begun at some point in the past - i.e., there was an Event whereby physical laws began. 2) Before that point, the state of existence had far fewer properties
Given these assumptions: 1) God caused the event by spontaneously creating everything.
As opposed to: 1) It just happened by either:
a) A mysterious, currently unknown force somehow caused things to start up
b) without having a cause, things just started happening.
Obviously, 1b is the simplest, but it doesn't make sense. Our very concept of reality is that a closed, static system will stay the same unless acted upon. Why would it be different at the origin? Until we have an example of that kind of thing, I'm inclined to toss that explanation.
Seems pretty not simple to me. Occam's razor fails here; all the ideas have their incalculable complexities. We've ventured into the realm of wild speculation, and we don't know how to address it scientifically.
Recognize that not all your beliefs can be simplified, and sometimes you're just shooting from the hip.
These "tricks" are not difficult, as I've just demonstrated.
Neither are the many ways of doing OOP in perl, but you don't see a lot of perl packages that do that. I write my code that way, but that's not the issue.
The issue is the mountains of old javascript out there that would have to be refactored if we wanted to get them to start using namespaces. This isn't really changing, either. Lots more javascript is being written every day that doesn't use any kind of namespace methodology at all.
News flash: Libraries don't always behave the way you want. News at 11.
You're obviously implying that it's inappropriate to expect that from a library. I've never heard of a perl library in CPAN that wasn't in a module (i.e. encapsulated in a namespace). Same namespace thing with ruby, Java, python, C#. These languages have namespace mechanisms built-in, so ALL libraries have at least this behavior. Why should I have to expect less from javascript? "Because namespaces weren't built-in to the language" is a pretty lame excuse, but it is the reason, and a reason to not think of javascript as much beyond a toy.
and if you must use poorly-designed libraries, you can still do so. It's a bit like writing a C++ project and calling C code. Or, hell, it's like writing a Java project and calling C code. This is a straw-man argument. A library isn't necessarily poorly designed just because it doesn't include namespaces. At least, it isn't considered poor design by most, or there would be less libraries that have this problem. Further, it is difficult to argue the connection between poorly designed javascript+other javascript with code written in one language+code written in a different language. Namespace cluttering is a much simpler technical challenge than the one you're presenting, and can be avoided much more easily through language design.
Speaking of which, C has done fairly well without namespaces at all. I disagree. C code takes forever to write, and this is part of the reason. You can't use massive sets of C libraries together, and you need to make sophisticated tracking system to track the usage of libraries because of this problem.
Yes, obviously. I've been doing that for years. It's not real namespaces. You can's easily load & remove them like its nothing as part of the core language; you have to rely on tricks.
More importantly you have to rely on library writers adhering to this design pattern. It's just something tacked on, so very few of them do - mostly only the aforementioned modern pure javascript libraries that are trying to fix the problems with the language (Dojo, Rico).
Re:The more I learn about JavaScript...
on
GWT in Action
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· Score: 2, Interesting
But then, you still have that problem, even if it's JavaScript generated from Java code. That's not really what's going on.
GUI stuff happens in Javascript. Anything really complicated gets sent over to Java. That's why it's called an AJAX framework, not a Javascript framework.
I like Javascript, but it has the same problem as PHP: no namespaces. Using it as a real language would causes the same problems you see there: security issues, hard-to-read code, difficulty refactoring, interoperability problems, etc. You can actually see those problems and the various mechanisms to overcome them in a lot of the modern pure-javascript libraries (prototype especially is known for breaking existing javascript libraries, for example).
Do you have any idea of the duties of the Attorney General? The Attorney General is not the President's private counsel. The Attorney General is the PEOPLE'S COUNSEL. As such, his loyalties are to the People of the United States, NOT the President. Of course this could easily be written to talk about the president: Do you have any idea of the duties of the President? The President is not his contributor's President . The President is the PEOPLE'S PRESIDENT. As such, his loyalties are to the People of the United States, NOT his campaign contributors.
send you to another level of consciousness...If you're sitting around "objectively judging" music, that "music" you're listening to isn't doing a thing for you. You're wrong. Your intellect and your emotions are tied together; you have only one mind. You can (and if at all possible, should) feel emotions and knowing why you feel them. It makes the experience more vivid; it's like putting on glasses and seeing the world clearly. As with most things, to study music is to appreciate it more. Because I study, I can let the music wash over me and know it for all that it is instead of merely passively listening.
I would know the skill of the artist who made it, and the recording engineer who mastered it, as well as understanding and experiencing the emotive and intellectual message that everyone involved is trying to send while I enjoy it. Anyone can hear, but you have to train yourself to listen critically if you really want to achieve "another level of consciousness" as it pertains to music. If you do this, you'll probably begin to understand not just that you like particular pieces, but exactly why.
I started on that when I got into audio recording work in high school. After a few years I realized that the emotional responses I felt were pretty much tied to a complex patterns in the music itself. Roughly speaking, I can classify the most moving music objectively using the criteria I stated in my post. It's a bit different for everyone, but there's a surprising commonality in how music moves people among everyone in the human race.
Hopefully that wasn't too incoherent. I'm pretty tired.
I am almost 30. I stopped going to school not too long ago. Granted, it was grad school, but still...
My experience is not subjective. I have objective standards by which I judge music. Strong melodic lines (and by "strong" I mean "with consistent application of music theory", attention to the center of pitch, good vocal support, complexity, a large amount of variation in frequency, and novelty are the things I value in music. Basically, I want my music to be made by people incredibly proficient musicians, and no amount of style, feel, or groove is going to replace that.
Judging on those criteria - which, by the way, can be measured objectively in absolutely every genre, rap sort of fails the "strong melodic lines" and "variation in frequency" tests almost on purpose, and people still like it, but I never have an probably never will. Only very, very novel rap is enjoyable for me. Most ska, punk, and emo fails good vocal support and center of pitch. Most of those guys just can't sing very well, so I don't like them. Rock as a whole is generally bad at the "full frequency range" thing - falling down somewhere in the midrange most of the time. Usually it's male singers that could do with some female vocalists, or vice versa (appropriately voiced string instruments would also do the trick). There are, of course, exceptions to everything. A good musician isn't going to let a genre full of crap keep him down.
Anyway...by my objective criteria, the mid-ninties had an abundance of good songs - something like 10 a year on the pop charts - which I mostly attribute to a resurge in popularity of folk ideas; there were more people concentrated more on blending and making the music work together and less on being star performers.
Before and after that period have gone back to being pretty bad by my standards.
I'm sure that things will go back to how they were. As it is, there's more than enough good recordings made within the last 100 years that I haven't yet listened to. I can wait.
What's my point in all this? While I'm certain that there are people who listen to music because it's familiar to what they like and are used to, this isn't everybody. Some of us have good reasons for thinking that today's music is mostly crap.
Television is still mostly paid for by commercials. Any channel not generating much viewership isn't generating much sales. Either that, or the target audience doesn't buy things as much.
Either way, a la carte would end up looking exactly the same...except probably with less variety, since channels that are currently not competing would start.
Of course, I'm with the majority, so it'd be great for me. USA, Cartoon Network, Sci-Fi Channel, and Comedy Central are my channels, and I know that they're all pretty popular. Then again...I wonder what's more popular. It could lead to more of that reality-tv crap infesting my channels. There are already full channels that run nothing else.
Consider this: it's much easier for man to take a viewpoint he knows very little about when he knows even less about an alternative one. This is, of course, a false dichotomy. Why should you have to choose?
Given any number of opposing theories and an incredible lack of data, you don't actually have to decide which one is right. In fact, you should probably be stiving to further your data without advancing any theory at all lest your bias color the results.
Historically, scientists were dragged kicking and screaming to the theory of evolution, because nothing else fit the facts. Scientists were dragged kicking and screaming to the theory of evolution because men felt the need for an answer to questions of origins and didn't want one based upon religion. Nothing fits the facts very well yet. There aren't enough of them to define a theory well.
I'm ready to accept evolution, or any other theory of origins of any kind, when we figure out how to duplicate the process. We can barely even transform one type of lifeform into another type of lifeform.
"McFarlane has a vision of Oz that is a dark, edgy and muscular PG-13, without a singing Munchkin in sight," wrote journalist Michael Fleming. "That was clear with a toy line he launched several years ago that featured a buxom Dorothy and Toto re-imagined as an over-sized snarling warthog.
Olson's vision is of a bit tamer PG movie and hopefully the two can find some middle ground of compromise that will please them both and not hurt the final product. This was missing from the end: McFarlane and Olson are also planning on releasing a new hip, edgy version of the Care Bears based mostly on Sin City. The "Care Bear Stare" will be reimagined as beam weapons mounted on the bears heads that melt off peoples faces. A sequel of "Milo and Otis" set twenty years later is also scheduled as the newest spin on "Pet Cemetary."
While nothing else is really complete, these two want to assure you that the plan to replace every warm, fuzzy childhood story with nightmarish tales so that you'll lose all sense of past and therefore be willing to watch anything is proceeding according to plan and scheduled to be complete by the year 2015.
Eh. Any game "at the adult level" isn't good if by that you mean that children will be playing with adults...
I played full-contact football all the time when I was 8. Heck, that was probably the least aggressive game we played. Sometimes we'd just forgo games entirely and just beat on each other - boxing, wrestling, freestyle, etc.
Contrary to popular belief, while innocent, children are often times hardier and less likely to get hurt than their often much more sedentary parents. So unless the game involves weapons, kids can play it just fine.
in order to appease all the helicopter parents that can't read labels and think videogames == kids
Don't oversimplify. The video game industry is following standards set by Nintendo. Can you imagine sex or blood in a Zelda game? Its like a cartoon.
The goal isn't to make games just for kids. There's a difference between, for example, Baby Einstein, and Harry Potter. I'd watch the latter but not the former; they want their games to have a broad appeal.
Why is this? It goes way beyond videogames=kids. Its a societal tradition that games - be they sports, video, board, trivia - in fact, of all forms are almost always appropriate for everybody, and the ones that aren't have been specifically designed as deviant (and, for example, have the word "Adult" somewhere in their title). There hasn't been a fine line.
OTOH, content - especially film - has been pushing the envelope of appropriateness since its inception. So what's the shift here? Games are becoming content. It's not about playing or winning. It's about watching. For this reason, I think it makes sense that any game that doesn't want to deal with ESRB should be allowed to declare their game a movie and let the MPAA give them a rating (and distribute only in those places that sell movies).
Are we all just waiting around until bacteria become superior and wipe us out?
That would not be in the bacteria's best interest. Killing all potential hosts means no more resources from the host (read Andromeda Strain, btw; very good philosophical discussion of destructive microbes, and the movie doesn't give it justice).
If the bacteria become superior then they'll fit nicely into the ecosystem of their hosts.
Each time I hear about things like this, I become less and less impressed. You said it yourself: "Announcements", while all these breakthroughs are occurring in the lab, the We hear so much about nano-technology and all these brilliant ground breaking devices only to... never actually see them. Of course, most of the time, those announcements are not sitting on a working prototype. They're trying to raise money for development.
This is a new idea in academia. That's a totally different thing. It's either a hoax (which, in this case is incredibly easy to prove, so it probably isn't), or it's really something that's useful. Hopefully it'll spawn a bunch of research into similar approaches for nanotech batteries so that eventually we have something really awesome that does this.
So, to summarize: * C is an example of procedural programming. * Haskell is an example of functional programming. * L-systems are an example of procedural content generation (content generated by a procedure, in a deterministic fashion). To continue the summary (and clarify): * Marshmallows do funny things if you lower the pressure enough. * Cheeseburgers are often considered delicious * Like the above comments, programming language type is a red herring. Procedural content generation is a misnomer. It just means that the content is mostly programatically generated on the fly instead of being simply rendered.
It's all about repeated iteration over a particular type of finite automata with a particular string.
And then then string is the content, isn't it? Interesting point here is that this is something of a continuum. You could make your procedures more complex, and then require less content to produce the something. On the other hand, you could go the other way and have absolutely every piece of content actually be written in your programming language. When you think about it that way, it becomes a lot more obvious. You're talking about whether most of the work is going into the content creation, or into the rendering engine.
If most of the work is in the engine, it's really easy to make lots of new kinds of content since you don't have to do as much work to make the content. However, making a powerful engine sure requires a lot of work, doesn't it? You have to make your engine handle absolutely every special case that you could ignore if it wasn't normally applicable to a very specific content instance.
Sounds like the master format for native camera usage should store a palette to specify each kind of filter in front of the images, a transformation that converts from array coordinates into however the coordinates are actually laid out (including which filter is over which point), and an array of intensity values (i.e. grayscale).
That should specify each possible output accurately and allow for a huge amount of compression (at least huge for lossless compression).
I like to goof around with programming while traveling. Can it run gcc? Yes.
Cross compile for the AVR microcontroller families? Yes, but the processor isn't beefy, so don't make anything too complicated. USB controller is a strange, dual-mode capable device (host and client), so if you've got a USB on-chip programmer you can use that with it.
Does it have an even remotely usable keyboard? It has no keyboard. When you need one, use a bluetooth or USB one. Frogpad was mentioned for its portability.
How many USB ports? One. Keep in mind that the device is slightly bigger than a Pocket PC. I call it a wide screen pda.
Ethernet? Dialup? No. Sadly, it also includes no ISDN port, floppy drive, parallel port, serial port, or any other kind of port that you'll almost never use. Why do you want these for your portable device? Bluetooth and 802.11b/g are the kickers. If you need these things, you've missed the point of owning one of these - it has only what you need for the internet.
Why pay 8.00 for five DRM scarred songs that only only intented to be used on a single device from itunes when you can buy the same 5 songs outright for about the same amount from this service?
I disagree. I think that with the making of the PS1, Sony started the process of loosing the console race. It was then that we knew that there were multiple manufacturers who could compete with Nintendo, and the race was on.
If this happened it would probably do the opposite - tying the race back down - with everything in the hands of Nintendo again.
Of course, lawyers loose means everyone will lose at least a little.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Keep that term for when people are going to die without the goods.
That's just what you think, and what Florida's legal department thinks. But that's just describing where it happens, not what it is. A more obvious, and useful definition is the one that everybody else operates with - that a limited resource is being sold for much higher than free market forces would dictate. This comes up most often when resources are inflexible, like food, but also like transportation and communication (at least, to a certain point).
Obviously, demand for essentials is more inflexible than demand for nonessential goods, but that's no reason to say that you can't price gouge nonessential goods. A certain portion of the population "needs" their morning coffee, and those people ensure that the demand for coffee doesn't go below a certain threshold.
Customer:
1) Person who potentially buys things. The one they buy from is known as a vendor.
2) (Microsoft dfn). Ugly bags of mostly water+some money. The idea is to get the money out of the bags and then be able to keep it. For some reason, the bags sort of hold on to it when it's being taken.
Or are they getting too big...
It's almost as though they're not so much a simple underdog compared to Intel, but rather, a company founded only a year later and the eighth largest semiconductor business in the world.
I think we'd all do well to remember that AMD==f(Intel), where "f" doesn't actually represent a very significant transformation.
I'm not willing to make any claims about one argument being better than the other, you've greatly simplified the issue to make your argument (that the universe existing sans God) seem simpler.
Let me rephrase by first stating the assumptions that are necessary to consider:
1) The universe appears to have begun at some point in the past - i.e., there was an Event whereby physical laws began.
2) Before that point, the state of existence had far fewer properties
Given these assumptions:
1) God caused the event by spontaneously creating everything.
As opposed to:
1) It just happened by either:
a) A mysterious, currently unknown force somehow caused things to start up
b) without having a cause, things just started happening.
Obviously, 1b is the simplest, but it doesn't make sense. Our very concept of reality is that a closed, static system will stay the same unless acted upon. Why would it be different at the origin? Until we have an example of that kind of thing, I'm inclined to toss that explanation.
Seems pretty not simple to me. Occam's razor fails here; all the ideas have their incalculable complexities. We've ventured into the realm of wild speculation, and we don't know how to address it scientifically.
Recognize that not all your beliefs can be simplified, and sometimes you're just shooting from the hip.
These "tricks" are not difficult, as I've just demonstrated.
Neither are the many ways of doing OOP in perl, but you don't see a lot of perl packages that do that. I write my code that way, but that's not the issue.
The issue is the mountains of old javascript out there that would have to be refactored if we wanted to get them to start using namespaces. This isn't really changing, either. Lots more javascript is being written every day that doesn't use any kind of namespace methodology at all.
News flash: Libraries don't always behave the way you want. News at 11.
You're obviously implying that it's inappropriate to expect that from a library. I've never heard of a perl library in CPAN that wasn't in a module (i.e. encapsulated in a namespace). Same namespace thing with ruby, Java, python, C#. These languages have namespace mechanisms built-in, so ALL libraries have at least this behavior. Why should I have to expect less from javascript?
"Because namespaces weren't built-in to the language" is a pretty lame excuse, but it is the reason, and a reason to not think of javascript as much beyond a toy.
and if you must use poorly-designed libraries, you can still do so. It's a bit like writing a C++ project and calling C code. Or, hell, it's like writing a Java project and calling C code.
This is a straw-man argument. A library isn't necessarily poorly designed just because it doesn't include namespaces. At least, it isn't considered poor design by most, or there would be less libraries that have this problem. Further, it is difficult to argue the connection between poorly designed javascript+other javascript with code written in one language+code written in a different language. Namespace cluttering is a much simpler technical challenge than the one you're presenting, and can be avoided much more easily through language design.
Speaking of which, C has done fairly well without namespaces at all.
I disagree. C code takes forever to write, and this is part of the reason. You can't use massive sets of C libraries together, and you need to make sophisticated tracking system to track the usage of libraries because of this problem.
Yes, obviously. I've been doing that for years. It's not real namespaces. You can's easily load & remove them like its nothing as part of the core language; you have to rely on tricks.
More importantly you have to rely on library writers adhering to this design pattern. It's just something tacked on, so very few of them do - mostly only the aforementioned modern pure javascript libraries that are trying to fix the problems with the language (Dojo, Rico).
GUI stuff happens in Javascript. Anything really complicated gets sent over to Java. That's why it's called an AJAX framework, not a Javascript framework.
I like Javascript, but it has the same problem as PHP: no namespaces. Using it as a real language would causes the same problems you see there: security issues, hard-to-read code, difficulty refactoring, interoperability problems, etc. You can actually see those problems and the various mechanisms to overcome them in a lot of the modern pure-javascript libraries (prototype especially is known for breaking existing javascript libraries, for example).
Do you have any idea of the duties of the President? The President is not his contributor's President . The President is the PEOPLE'S PRESIDENT. As such, his loyalties are to the People of the United States, NOT his campaign contributors.
I hope things change.
I would know the skill of the artist who made it, and the recording engineer who mastered it, as well as understanding and experiencing the emotive and intellectual message that everyone involved is trying to send while I enjoy it. Anyone can hear, but you have to train yourself to listen critically if you really want to achieve "another level of consciousness" as it pertains to music. If you do this, you'll probably begin to understand not just that you like particular pieces, but exactly why.
I started on that when I got into audio recording work in high school. After a few years I realized that the emotional responses I felt were pretty much tied to a complex patterns in the music itself. Roughly speaking, I can classify the most moving music objectively using the criteria I stated in my post. It's a bit different for everyone, but there's a surprising commonality in how music moves people among everyone in the human race.
Hopefully that wasn't too incoherent. I'm pretty tired.
Yeah, kind of.
I am almost 30. I stopped going to school not too long ago. Granted, it was grad school, but still...
My experience is not subjective. I have objective standards by which I judge music. Strong melodic lines (and by "strong" I mean "with consistent application of music theory", attention to the center of pitch, good vocal support, complexity, a large amount of variation in frequency, and novelty are the things I value in music. Basically, I want my music to be made by people incredibly proficient musicians, and no amount of style, feel, or groove is going to replace that.
Judging on those criteria - which, by the way, can be measured objectively in absolutely every genre, rap sort of fails the "strong melodic lines" and "variation in frequency" tests almost on purpose, and people still like it, but I never have an probably never will. Only very, very novel rap is enjoyable for me. Most ska, punk, and emo fails good vocal support and center of pitch. Most of those guys just can't sing very well, so I don't like them. Rock as a whole is generally bad at the "full frequency range" thing - falling down somewhere in the midrange most of the time. Usually it's male singers that could do with some female vocalists, or vice versa (appropriately voiced string instruments would also do the trick). There are, of course, exceptions to everything. A good musician isn't going to let a genre full of crap keep him down.
Anyway...by my objective criteria, the mid-ninties had an abundance of good songs - something like 10 a year on the pop charts - which I mostly attribute to a resurge in popularity of folk ideas; there were more people concentrated more on blending and making the music work together and less on being star performers.
Before and after that period have gone back to being pretty bad by my standards.
I'm sure that things will go back to how they were. As it is, there's more than enough good recordings made within the last 100 years that I haven't yet listened to. I can wait.
What's my point in all this? While I'm certain that there are people who listen to music because it's familiar to what they like and are used to, this isn't everybody. Some of us have good reasons for thinking that today's music is mostly crap.
Television is still mostly paid for by commercials. Any channel not generating much viewership isn't generating much sales. Either that, or the target audience doesn't buy things as much.
Either way, a la carte would end up looking exactly the same...except probably with less variety, since channels that are currently not competing would start.
Of course, I'm with the majority, so it'd be great for me. USA, Cartoon Network, Sci-Fi Channel, and Comedy Central are my channels, and I know that they're all pretty popular. Then again...I wonder what's more popular. It could lead to more of that reality-tv crap infesting my channels. There are already full channels that run nothing else.
Given any number of opposing theories and an incredible lack of data, you don't actually have to decide which one is right. In fact, you should probably be stiving to further your data without advancing any theory at all lest your bias color the results. Historically, scientists were dragged kicking and screaming to the theory of evolution, because nothing else fit the facts. Scientists were dragged kicking and screaming to the theory of evolution because men felt the need for an answer to questions of origins and didn't want one based upon religion.
Nothing fits the facts very well yet. There aren't enough of them to define a theory well.
I'm ready to accept evolution, or any other theory of origins of any kind, when we figure out how to duplicate the process. We can barely even transform one type of lifeform into another type of lifeform.
Are we saying what we want for a $30 monthly fee?
Here's what I want:
$29.95/mo unlimited telepathy+teleportation
If they can achieve that the phone system is done. So is the airline industry. Probably the education system as well.
Only problem? We have no idea how to do it.
OH! Forgot something. I'd also like a pony.
Olson's vision is of a bit tamer PG movie and hopefully the two can find some middle ground of compromise that will please them both and not hurt the final product. This was missing from the end:
McFarlane and Olson are also planning on releasing a new hip, edgy version of the Care Bears based mostly on Sin City. The "Care Bear Stare" will be reimagined as beam weapons mounted on the bears heads that melt off peoples faces. A sequel of "Milo and Otis" set twenty years later is also scheduled as the newest spin on "Pet Cemetary."
While nothing else is really complete, these two want to assure you that the plan to replace every warm, fuzzy childhood story with nightmarish tales so that you'll lose all sense of past and therefore be willing to watch anything is proceeding according to plan and scheduled to be complete by the year 2015.
Not unless you can prove that Wikipedia actually believes things. I think that only applies to humans. :)
Eh. Any game "at the adult level" isn't good if by that you mean that children will be playing with adults...
I played full-contact football all the time when I was 8. Heck, that was probably the least aggressive game we played. Sometimes we'd just forgo games entirely and just beat on each other - boxing, wrestling, freestyle, etc.
Contrary to popular belief, while innocent, children are often times hardier and less likely to get hurt than their often much more sedentary parents. So unless the game involves weapons, kids can play it just fine.
in order to appease all the helicopter parents that can't read labels and think videogames == kids
Don't oversimplify. The video game industry is following standards set by Nintendo. Can you imagine sex or blood in a Zelda game? Its like a cartoon.
The goal isn't to make games just for kids. There's a difference between, for example, Baby Einstein, and Harry Potter. I'd watch the latter but not the former; they want their games to have a broad appeal.
Why is this? It goes way beyond videogames=kids. Its a societal tradition that games - be they sports, video, board, trivia - in fact, of all forms are almost always appropriate for everybody, and the ones that aren't have been specifically designed as deviant (and, for example, have the word "Adult" somewhere in their title).
There hasn't been a fine line.
OTOH, content - especially film - has been pushing the envelope of appropriateness since its inception. So what's the shift here? Games are becoming content. It's not about playing or winning. It's about watching. For this reason, I think it makes sense that any game that doesn't want to deal with ESRB should be allowed to declare their game a movie and let the MPAA give them a rating (and distribute only in those places that sell movies).
Are we all just waiting around until bacteria become superior and wipe us out?
That would not be in the bacteria's best interest. Killing all potential hosts means no more resources from the host (read Andromeda Strain, btw; very good philosophical discussion of destructive microbes, and the movie doesn't give it justice).
If the bacteria become superior then they'll fit nicely into the ecosystem of their hosts.
This is a new idea in academia. That's a totally different thing. It's either a hoax (which, in this case is incredibly easy to prove, so it probably isn't), or it's really something that's useful. Hopefully it'll spawn a bunch of research into similar approaches for nanotech batteries so that eventually we have something really awesome that does this.
* C is an example of procedural programming.
* Haskell is an example of functional programming.
* L-systems are an example of procedural content generation (content generated by a procedure, in a deterministic fashion). To continue the summary (and clarify):
* Marshmallows do funny things if you lower the pressure enough.
* Cheeseburgers are often considered delicious
* Like the above comments, programming language type is a red herring. Procedural content generation is a misnomer. It just means that the content is mostly programatically generated on the fly instead of being simply rendered.
It's all about repeated iteration over a particular type of finite automata with a particular string.
And then then string is the content, isn't it? Interesting point here is that this is something of a continuum. You could make your procedures more complex, and then require less content to produce the something. On the other hand, you could go the other way and have absolutely every piece of content actually be written in your programming language.
When you think about it that way, it becomes a lot more obvious.
You're talking about whether most of the work is going into the content creation, or into the rendering engine.
If most of the work is in the engine, it's really easy to make lots of new kinds of content since you don't have to do as much work to make the content. However, making a powerful engine sure requires a lot of work, doesn't it? You have to make your engine handle absolutely every special case that you could ignore if it wasn't normally applicable to a very specific content instance.
Sounds like the master format for native camera usage should store a palette to specify each kind of filter in front of the images, a transformation that converts from array coordinates into however the coordinates are actually laid out (including which filter is over which point), and an array of intensity values (i.e. grayscale).
That should specify each possible output accurately and allow for a huge amount of compression (at least huge for lossless compression).
JP2000 is alive and well in GIS raster imagery. Gigantic maps need formats that look good and are resolution independent.
Cool. Now what OS does it run?
Debian
I like to goof around with programming while traveling. Can it run gcc?
Yes.
Cross compile for the AVR microcontroller families?
Yes, but the processor isn't beefy, so don't make anything too complicated. USB controller is a strange, dual-mode capable device (host and client), so if you've got a USB on-chip programmer you can use that with it.
Does it have an even remotely usable keyboard?
It has no keyboard. When you need one, use a bluetooth or USB one. Frogpad was mentioned for its portability.
How many USB ports?
One. Keep in mind that the device is slightly bigger than a Pocket PC. I call it a wide screen pda.
Ethernet? Dialup?
No. Sadly, it also includes no ISDN port, floppy drive, parallel port, serial port, or any other kind of port that you'll almost never use.
Why do you want these for your portable device? Bluetooth and 802.11b/g are the kickers. If you need these things, you've missed the point of owning one of these - it has only what you need for the internet.
Why pay 8.00 for five DRM scarred songs that only only intented to be used on a single device from itunes when you can buy the same 5 songs outright for about the same amount from this service?
Fixed that for you.
would instantly loose not just the console race
:)
I disagree. I think that with the making of the PS1, Sony started the process of loosing the console race. It was then that we knew that there were multiple manufacturers who could compete with Nintendo, and the race was on.
If this happened it would probably do the opposite - tying the race back down - with everything in the hands of Nintendo again.
Of course, lawyers loose means everyone will lose at least a little.