Most people don't read the contract. First of all, they don't understand all the words in the contract, they're usually full of lawyer double-talk that makes it necessary for the typical person to have it explained. Much legal-speak has completely different meanings from the ones in common use. Think of "in camera"; most of us don't speak latin anymore, and consider a camera a device for taking pictures. How bloody hard would it be to say "in the room"?
Secondly, they put so much boilerplate garbage in there that it is extremely tedious reading. Paid at the wages I'd draw for reviewing such documents, the effort of reading would often be more costly than the real price of the service.
That sheer length also makes you tend to skim, if you do read it. Instead of looking at every word and thinking "what does that really mean?" (as you should do when dealing with anything written by a lawyer) you are tempted to take things at their first appearance.
People really should start saying "No, I'm not signing that, this (lease/license/service/purchase) is a simple thing and the contract should be under a page of normal-sized type." But it's become such common practice that you simply wouldn't be able to get many services without signing a contract that the average person just can't fully understand.
It would take an organized effort to end small-print trickery. Maybe such a group already exists... I'm going searching, I want to join!
PCS phones are different from old-style cellular phones, but they're still cellular and they're still phones.
It's like saying cellular phones aren't telephones because you find a definition like:
cellular - used to describe a two-way radio system that is designed so the portable units work in a broader area than the operating radius of a single stationary unit. Cellular systems use radio waves rather than the wires used by telephones for transmission and reception.
Mod this baby up! Think about it for a second...
on
Frankenstein Time
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· Score: 1
...it's not just funny, it's insightful.
Does this mean G.E. has to change it's slogan?
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Frankenstein Time
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I can just hear the jingle, patched over with badly warped audio...
"G.E. we bring things to life!"
Has everyone forgotten the ST:TNG episode?
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Frankenstein Time
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· Score: 2
With the g-e super-kids?
("Unnatural Selection")
They were brilliant, beautiful, healthy and psychic. They also had "active defence" immune systems that killed everyone who came near them (causing them to age rapidly).
"We screwed up this batch, lock 'em away and forget about 'em, boys!"
However, there didn't seem to be much of a legal issue...
Khan was much cooler. BTW, did they take that straight out of Heinlein's "Beyond this Horizon" or what? I mean, it's all backwards, but ST seems a lot like the opposite-world to that novel. I wonder if Monroe-Alpha looked like Spock with a goatee...
But just think of the possibilities!
on
Frankenstein Time
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· Score: 1
Just imagine the applications, in the field of removing harmful Katz genes alone! The world might never face another monster like Katz, thanks to this new technology.
Despite you blaming technology for the creation of a Katz, the terrifying truth is that he is a natural mutant, one of natures terrible, horrifying mistakes. Only through this new and wondrous technology can we spare both the world from facing another Katz, and spare some poor innocent child from the torment of being a Katz!
Just think about it for a moment, imagine what being a Katz would be like. (shudder) If we have any humanity at all, we should be willing to make any sacrifice to prevent anyone from ever having to live life as a Katz again.
"With XML, this problem goes away. I can focus on the data, not the representation. That's a big win!"
You can still hide data any stupid way in XML, like serializing your classes.
For XML to make any data more readable, certain standard ways of doing things must be followed. If you can get everyone to follow a standard way of doing things in XML, you could get them to do it with ASCII, or with a bitstream.
The XML standard is a hideous bloated tick of a document. A compliant XML parser is not a trivial piece of software. All that extra effort had better be for something pretty damned spectacular, but when you step back and take a look at the big picture, all XML really adds is bloat to everything. Monstrously bloated data files. Bloated libraries included in bloated executables. Bloated standards. Bloated resumes.
A well-documented non-XML format designed intelligently with ease of re-implementation in mind is as easy to read as a well-documented XML format designed intelligently with ease of re-implementation in mind, and poorly designed formats of both kinds are also equally difficult to read. Any ease in reading XML-based formats is purely due to the correlation of using XML and a concern with ease of re-implementation of reading programs. It is easier to read an XML-based format because someone who thinks of making an easy-to-read format is likely to think of using XML.
I think they gave in to the temptation to show off their rendering features, rather than having them disappear into a vague sense of realism.
It screams "Look at this cool motion blur! Aren't you impressed?!"
Here's a clue to anybody writing a renderer out there: you're not trying to outdo reality.
Personally, I still haven't gotten over "A Bug's Life". The "outtakes" ending was brilliant, the only thing I can compare it to is "Ten Little Gall Force".
now let's say that this sterile member tends to become a caregiver that helps the rest of the population survive. Then that strain would have better survival characteristics than a strain without the sterile members.
Just look at hive insects. Ants, bees, termites, wasps: all mostly sexless workers caring for a breeding female and a few shiftless males.
The bright ones will leave the planet and be free to expand exponentially. The dim-witted ones will be left behind for Malthus to deal with. Once some of our eggs are out of the one basket, I give it a century before Holy Terra goes up in the Holy Fire of the Atom.
The ways of Nature are harsh, but just.
BTW, what are breasts made of? Mostly fat. A woman with large breasts and a small waist is well-fed but physically fit (and not pregnant), add in a good set of child-bearing hips, long legs (indicating maturity), and regular facial features (indicating both health and a genetic history of being able to attract the best mates), and you've got an ideal mate. In modern society, large breasts due to implants are also a sign of wealth, something people rarely admit to looking for in a mate, but never turn their noses up at. They are also a sign of willingness to surgically tamper with one's own body for some gain, which may turn out to be a damned adaptive trait in the coming years of cybernetic enhancement.
Ever hear of weed trees? I'm not talking old growth. I'm talking aspen and spruce, trees that grow to full height and die on their own in 20-40 years. There are vast areas of weed-tree forest.
Better yet, plant hemp. Hemp grows twice as fast as any wood, sucks twice as much CO2 out of the air, and makes better paper (aside from various... side benefits).
Why make the most of each tree? There's plenty more where they came from. Just because some bozos are mining essentially irreplacable and relatively small areas of old-growth wood doesn't mean we shouldn't aggressively harvest stuff that completely rejuvenates itself in 20 years and is in forests as vast as oceans and springs up in your back yard, if you don't beat it back all the time. I say better we get the use of it than the termites do (did you know there's around 2000 lbs. of termites for every living person? They use a lot more wood than we do!).
Since people criss-crossed this country with roads, the prairies don't burn every year anymore. What happened? They became overgrown with trees. The endless sea of grass is no more. It's all farm and forest, thanks to ox and tractor. That forest isn't natural any more than the farms are, and there's nothing wrong with treating them just like the farms.
When you bury cardboard in great deep landfills, it doesn't decompose. It just sits there, like a rock. Probably, it eventually turns into coal, or something similar.
Cardboard is made from wood. Wood is made by trees sucking carbon dioxide from the air. When trees die naturally and rot, or are used for fuel, they release the carbon dioxide they absorbed back into the atmosphere.
We appear to have a problem with global warming from releasing too much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, by digging up carbon-based fuels from deep in the Earth and burning them.
Think about it...
Wasteful cardboard packaging helps slow global warming by fixing carbon in the Earth.
Don't recycle! Subscribe to every newspaper and magazine that you're vaguely interested in and toss them in a landfill. Forms in triplicate and printouts of everything are part of a secret government initiative to stop global warming!
The first serious learning experience I had with programming was in assembly language, and I can't imagine a better start.
First of all, it teaches you how memory really works. Many people who start off with BASIC or some other learning language have a lot of trouble with things like C pointers. After learning assembly, C makes perfect sense.
It's simpler than you might think. One of the things that catches people in most languages is the way that you have to define the machine you're working on: you make names for everything. In assembly, the names are optional. You have a machine, with registers and addresses, and you can know exactly what it does with those.
The syntax is also simpler. Instead of fiddling with blocks and declarations and definitions, you just have tags and instructions.
You don't jump in and start throwing strings around without understanding what the computer is doing with them, instead you start right at the ground floor, doing simple arithmetic.
It is immensely satisfying to manage even simple arithmetic when you're first starting out in assembly language, and rightly so. To do a simple thing like A=12+B/4-D in assembly requires that you learn to order your instructions in a sensible manner and manage the temporary results.
It is rewarding precisely because it is difficult. Once you've managed to do any simple task, you are drawn back by the challenge. Best of all, after a brief intro, you're ready to jump into Knuth's TAoCP, which lays a solid foundation for any future programming task.
(I wrote a utility for learning assembly language, called easynasm)
Personally, I don't think freedom means Big Brother telling all his little plebs to play nicely with each other.
Freedom means being able to do anything you're willing to take responsibility for. There are ways to protect your privacy on the internet. So long as the government doesn't take those away, we shouldn't expect them to start forcing replacements on us.
What exactly in "land of the free and home of the brave" implies massive government regulation of private business to protect the pathetically defenseless masses?
They've got the money, they're the best ones to sue. Make a quick buck, stomp on some important people, and then leave the little guys alone so everybody admires them.
Then with no clear industry-dominant browsers, people would have to start obeying the standards. Then, anyone could write a web browser, because they would just have to follow the standards instead of matching all the commonly exploited bugs in NSN and MSIE.
NS screwed up the web with their "extensions", and MS has pretty much taken over this disgusting business for them. If they both go, so does the E&E strategy that keeps down all of their competitors.
Gunbuster: Teenage girls doing calesthenics in giant mecha to save humanity! There's a moral twist that makes it worthwhile on other levels.
I also like Gall Force for two distinguishing characteristics: -BFGs on a whole other scale -it brings to mind a quote from DS9's Garrack "the repetitive epic is the very pinnacle of Cardassian literature" (watch it all, and you'll understand; I hope this series gets continued forever) Besides, when you're done watching the real series, you get to see "Ten Little Gallforce" and laugh until you lose control of your sphincters.
Vision of Escaflowne (Tenkuu no Escaflowne/Escaflowne of the High Sky) is only semi-sci-fi; it's a retro-tech fantasy where people have sword fights in mecha.
Burn Up W is pretty funny, too. Not only has "body armor never looked this good", but it's the only anime I've ever seen where somebody questions the wisdom of building a giant battle robot; it's just kind of accepted in other anime.
The old Robotech stuff is worth watching, if you haven't seen it. It's funnier than people give it credit for. "Alright, let's fly the alien spaceship." "Whoops, we just accidentally folded space and took a city with us, out to around Pluto" "Just fold space right back where we came from." "Actually, the fold engines didn't come along for the ride." "Okay, just use the anti-gravity drives" "We didn't install them very well, they ripped right out" "Did you f***ers do anything right!" "Umm, I think we've still got some rockets..."
Most recent sci-fi films, animated or otherwise, including the Mother Movie (Star Wars) construct their films around the premise that in the future there is a technologically advanced, demonic alien culture out there which has ravaged our planet; loathes humanity and is determined to wipe us out for murky reasons in the most vicious possible way at all costs.
Geez, if you want to make sweeping (and basically wrong) generalizations, try not to use an example that doesn't fit the pattern.
-Star Wars isn't set in the future, it's set in the distant past -the bad guys in Star Wars are human -they have a very clear motive of maintaining their galactic empire -the humans are more of a threat to the aliens than vice versa -"we" don't have a single home planet in Star Wars -the humans have the best technology we see
I think part of why Star Wars is so popular is that humans are portrayed as the real ass-kickers of the galaxy, instead of the more common self-deprecating "Oh, the aliens are so superior, we're so useless, we need other aliens to help us or we'll all die. But at least we're the Good Guys, because we haven't invaded any planets (yet)." Star Trek has a bit of the same feel, though it has a much less realistic view of human morality.
Personally, I think recent science fiction films have had a wide variety of different situations, and BEMs were more common back in the early days. Destruction/conquering of Earth is not really a common theme.
Their Myth monopoly is unacceptable! Other companies should also be able to create Myth games and compatable clients. Why, if your friend has Myth, you have to buy Myth just play a network game against him. They deliberately produce incompatabilities between different version of their software, too. I bought Myth, but then people around me started buying Myth II, and I couldn't play with them until I bought Myth as well! I paid for it, but I don't have to like the stinking monopolist bastards who forced me to; I think anyone would be totally justified to make unauthorized copies of their software, if you can avoid inadvertantly purchasing it with their aggressive bundling.
But what is truly intolerable is the way they're using their Myth dominance to force their way into the Oni market! They are blatantly leveraging one monopoly into another.
And look at these hopelessly generic names: Myth, Oni. How many games are there based on a myth? Oni may be uncommon in North American games, but they are a standard feature of Japanese games. It is unacceptable for them to claim trademark rights for these generic concepts (actually, they themselves argues that "Oni" was a generic name, because there was an obscure game of the same name, but you don't see them letting us know! I bet if any of you wrote a game called "Oni", they'd sue you anyways).
I notice that they limit you to a millisecond per turn. Is Iocaine Powder fast enough for that? I wouldn't have thought that any fairly sophisticated prediction system would be fast enough. I suppose, though, that a millisecond does give you a few hundred thousand cycles, but given a history of several hundred turns, that isn't a lot of cycles to spend per turn in the history.
In a real tournament, you don't factor in just how badly you kick the asses of the worst players. This makes it a silly game of "guess who's playing". 2nd order roshambo: as silly as 1st order roshambo, and as painful as roshambeau.
For example, say there is one program that always uses rock (GOR), one with a sophisticated adaptive mechanism (IP), and 10,000 that always use scissors.
IP does very well, against these trivial opponents: on average missing the first 1, then recognising the pattern and getting every one after that.
GOR, however, wins every match, except against IP, against whom it loses every match after the first one (which is a toss-up).
At 1000 points per match, this gives GOR a score of 10 million and IP a score of around 9 thousand less than GOR. GOR wins over IP, despite the fact that IP beat every opponent GOR did, and beat GOR to boot.
It's all about the opponents. Remember that they're fluffing it up with enough ultra-stupid dummies that you don't have a hope in hell unless you beat these dummies soundly. Without the dummies, and in a real elimination tournament, a random-bot would have a fair crack at it, and there wouldn't be any point to it.
Of course, random(optimal) could still win, just as a monkey at a typewriter could recreate the complete works of Shakespeare, but it would take countless billions of tries for one to beat this system; there aren't enough people with computers to beat it that way. Of course, since the bots are the environment, if several dozen random bots were to enter for every non-random bot (including dummies), they would wash out the results in random noise (for every dummy you beat by 600 points, you'd face 50 random-bots that would randomly change your score up or down by, say, around 100 points), and all programs would be about equally likely to win (so a random-bot would probably take home the prize).
They have to restrict random-bots or strategy could become irrelevant and it would be 1st order silly, instead of 2nd order silly 8P
(and it is 2nd order silly; the basic way to win is simple to state, if complicated to implement: beat the trivial stupids, beat what you made to beat the trivial stupids, then beat what you have now, but the more levels of trickery you detect and beat, the more guesses you waste screwing around figuring out your opponent's strategy and the smaller the margin of victory, so you have to prioritize what level of trickery to try first, ending in the same sort of random guess that characterizes roshambo, except that you've spent a lot more effort...)
They have to pay credit card fees to make those charges, and they give away about $45,000/day to new users (about 9,000 new users per day, getting $5 each for joining).
Don't get me wrong, I think the idea can work. I just don't think they're making money yet. I also wonder if they will ever be truly international, being based on credit cards and such. Unlike e-gold, they have to be able to chase down cases of credit-card fraud and suchlike.
Slashdot Mirror
Most people don't read the contract. First of all, they don't understand all the words in the contract, they're usually full of lawyer double-talk that makes it necessary for the typical person to have it explained. Much legal-speak has completely different meanings from the ones in common use. Think of "in camera"; most of us don't speak latin anymore, and consider a camera a device for taking pictures. How bloody hard would it be to say "in the room"?
Secondly, they put so much boilerplate garbage in there that it is extremely tedious reading. Paid at the wages I'd draw for reviewing such documents, the effort of reading would often be more costly than the real price of the service.
That sheer length also makes you tend to skim, if you do read it. Instead of looking at every word and thinking "what does that really mean?" (as you should do when dealing with anything written by a lawyer) you are tempted to take things at their first appearance.
People really should start saying "No, I'm not signing that, this (lease/license/service/purchase) is a simple thing and the contract should be under a page of normal-sized type." But it's become such common practice that you simply wouldn't be able to get many services without signing a contract that the average person just can't fully understand.
It would take an organized effort to end small-print trickery. Maybe such a group already exists... I'm going searching, I want to join!
PCS phones are different from old-style cellular phones, but they're still cellular and they're still phones.
It's like saying cellular phones aren't telephones because you find a definition like:
cellular - used to describe a two-way radio system that is designed so the portable units work in a broader area than the operating radius of a single stationary unit. Cellular systems use radio waves rather than the wires used by telephones for transmission and reception.
...it's not just funny, it's insightful.
I can just hear the jingle, patched over with badly warped audio...
"G.E. we bring things to life!"
With the g-e super-kids?
("Unnatural Selection")
They were brilliant, beautiful, healthy and psychic. They also had "active defence" immune systems that killed everyone who came near them (causing them to age rapidly).
"We screwed up this batch, lock 'em away and forget about 'em, boys!"
However, there didn't seem to be much of a legal issue...
Khan was much cooler. BTW, did they take that straight out of Heinlein's "Beyond this Horizon" or what? I mean, it's all backwards, but ST seems a lot like the opposite-world to that novel. I wonder if Monroe-Alpha looked like Spock with a goatee...
Just imagine the applications, in the field of removing harmful Katz genes alone! The world might never face another monster like Katz, thanks to this new technology.
Despite you blaming technology for the creation of a Katz, the terrifying truth is that he is a natural mutant, one of natures terrible, horrifying mistakes. Only through this new and wondrous technology can we spare both the world from facing another Katz, and spare some poor innocent child from the torment of being a Katz!
Just think about it for a moment, imagine what being a Katz would be like. (shudder) If we have any humanity at all, we should be willing to make any sacrifice to prevent anyone from ever having to live life as a Katz again.
"With XML, this problem goes away. I can focus on the data, not the representation. That's a big win!"
You can still hide data any stupid way in XML, like serializing your classes.
For XML to make any data more readable, certain standard ways of doing things must be followed. If you can get everyone to follow a standard way of doing things in XML, you could get them to do it with ASCII, or with a bitstream.
The XML standard is a hideous bloated tick of a document. A compliant XML parser is not a trivial piece of software. All that extra effort had better be for something pretty damned spectacular, but when you step back and take a look at the big picture, all XML really adds is bloat to everything. Monstrously bloated data files. Bloated libraries included in bloated executables. Bloated standards. Bloated resumes.
A well-documented non-XML format designed intelligently with ease of re-implementation in mind is as easy to read as a well-documented XML format designed intelligently with ease of re-implementation in mind, and poorly designed formats of both kinds are also equally difficult to read. Any ease in reading XML-based formats is purely due to the correlation of using XML and a concern with ease of re-implementation of reading programs. It is easier to read an XML-based format because someone who thinks of making an easy-to-read format is likely to think of using XML.
I think they gave in to the temptation to show off their rendering features, rather than having them disappear into a vague sense of realism.
It screams "Look at this cool motion blur! Aren't you impressed?!"
Here's a clue to anybody writing a renderer out there: you're not trying to outdo reality.
Personally, I still haven't gotten over "A Bug's Life". The "outtakes" ending was brilliant, the only thing I can compare it to is "Ten Little Gall Force".
now let's say that this sterile member tends to become a caregiver that helps the rest of the population survive. Then that strain would have better survival characteristics than a strain without the sterile members.
Just look at hive insects. Ants, bees, termites, wasps: all mostly sexless workers caring for a breeding female and a few shiftless males.
...after the next big die-off.
The bright ones will leave the planet and be free to expand exponentially. The dim-witted ones will be left behind for Malthus to deal with. Once some of our eggs are out of the one basket, I give it a century before Holy Terra goes up in the Holy Fire of the Atom.
The ways of Nature are harsh, but just.
BTW, what are breasts made of? Mostly fat. A woman with large breasts and a small waist is well-fed but physically fit (and not pregnant), add in a good set of child-bearing hips, long legs (indicating maturity), and regular facial features (indicating both health and a genetic history of being able to attract the best mates), and you've got an ideal mate. In modern society, large breasts due to implants are also a sign of wealth, something people rarely admit to looking for in a mate, but never turn their noses up at. They are also a sign of willingness to surgically tamper with one's own body for some gain, which may turn out to be a damned adaptive trait in the coming years of cybernetic enhancement.
Ever hear of weed trees? I'm not talking old growth. I'm talking aspen and spruce, trees that grow to full height and die on their own in 20-40 years. There are vast areas of weed-tree forest.
Better yet, plant hemp. Hemp grows twice as fast as any wood, sucks twice as much CO2 out of the air, and makes better paper (aside from various... side benefits).
Why make the most of each tree? There's plenty more where they came from. Just because some bozos are mining essentially irreplacable and relatively small areas of old-growth wood doesn't mean we shouldn't aggressively harvest stuff that completely rejuvenates itself in 20 years and is in forests as vast as oceans and springs up in your back yard, if you don't beat it back all the time. I say better we get the use of it than the termites do (did you know there's around 2000 lbs. of termites for every living person? They use a lot more wood than we do!).
Since people criss-crossed this country with roads, the prairies don't burn every year anymore. What happened? They became overgrown with trees. The endless sea of grass is no more. It's all farm and forest, thanks to ox and tractor. That forest isn't natural any more than the farms are, and there's nothing wrong with treating them just like the farms.
When you bury cardboard in great deep landfills, it doesn't decompose. It just sits there, like a rock. Probably, it eventually turns into coal, or something similar.
Cardboard is made from wood. Wood is made by trees sucking carbon dioxide from the air. When trees die naturally and rot, or are used for fuel, they release the carbon dioxide they absorbed back into the atmosphere.
We appear to have a problem with global warming from releasing too much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, by digging up carbon-based fuels from deep in the Earth and burning them.
Think about it...
Wasteful cardboard packaging helps slow global warming by fixing carbon in the Earth.
Don't recycle! Subscribe to every newspaper and magazine that you're vaguely interested in and toss them in a landfill. Forms in triplicate and printouts of everything are part of a secret government initiative to stop global warming!
The first serious learning experience I had with programming was in assembly language, and I can't imagine a better start.
First of all, it teaches you how memory really works. Many people who start off with BASIC or some other learning language have a lot of trouble with things like C pointers. After learning assembly, C makes perfect sense.
It's simpler than you might think. One of the things that catches people in most languages is the way that you have to define the machine you're working on: you make names for everything. In assembly, the names are optional. You have a machine, with registers and addresses, and you can know exactly what it does with those.
The syntax is also simpler. Instead of fiddling with blocks and declarations and definitions, you just have tags and instructions.
You don't jump in and start throwing strings around without understanding what the computer is doing with them, instead you start right at the ground floor, doing simple arithmetic.
It is immensely satisfying to manage even simple arithmetic when you're first starting out in assembly language, and rightly so. To do a simple thing like A=12+B/4-D in assembly requires that you learn to order your instructions in a sensible manner and manage the temporary results.
It is rewarding precisely because it is difficult. Once you've managed to do any simple task, you are drawn back by the challenge. Best of all, after a brief intro, you're ready to jump into Knuth's TAoCP, which lays a solid foundation for any future programming task.
(I wrote a utility for learning assembly language, called easynasm)
This is a guy who puts his dreams, resume, and personal stories up on his website. How concerned can he really be about privacy?
Personally, I don't think freedom means Big Brother telling all his little plebs to play nicely with each other.
Freedom means being able to do anything you're willing to take responsibility for. There are ways to protect your privacy on the internet. So long as the government doesn't take those away, we shouldn't expect them to start forcing replacements on us.
What exactly in "land of the free and home of the brave" implies massive government regulation of private business to protect the pathetically defenseless masses?
...because I'm outraged for the wrong reason.
/. to be pissed that someone's not getting sued for patent infringement.
It really is a stupid patent, and it's not fashionable on
I figured there would be at least 30 "this is an outrage!" messages with nothing worthwhile to say.
They've got the money, they're the best ones to sue. Make a quick buck, stomp on some important people, and then leave the little guys alone so everybody admires them.
Then with no clear industry-dominant browsers, people would have to start obeying the standards. Then, anyone could write a web browser, because they would just have to follow the standards instead of matching all the commonly exploited bugs in NSN and MSIE.
NS screwed up the web with their "extensions", and MS has pretty much taken over this disgusting business for them. If they both go, so does the E&E strategy that keeps down all of their competitors.
Finally, freedom finds the web!
Muahahahaha!
How dare they choose to sue the ISPs!
Obviously, the people writing the browsers are the ones who are infringing on the patent.
They must sue MS! We must make this clear to them!
(cypherpunk, cypherpunk seems to work here, too)
Gunbuster: Teenage girls doing calesthenics in giant mecha to save humanity! There's a moral twist that makes it worthwhile on other levels.
I also like Gall Force for two distinguishing characteristics:
-BFGs on a whole other scale
-it brings to mind a quote from DS9's Garrack "the repetitive epic is the very pinnacle of Cardassian literature" (watch it all, and you'll understand; I hope this series gets continued forever)
Besides, when you're done watching the real series, you get to see "Ten Little Gallforce" and laugh until you lose control of your sphincters.
Vision of Escaflowne (Tenkuu no Escaflowne/Escaflowne of the High Sky) is only semi-sci-fi; it's a retro-tech fantasy where people have sword fights in mecha.
Burn Up W is pretty funny, too. Not only has "body armor never looked this good", but it's the only anime I've ever seen where somebody questions the wisdom of building a giant battle robot; it's just kind of accepted in other anime.
The old Robotech stuff is worth watching, if you haven't seen it. It's funnier than people give it credit for. "Alright, let's fly the alien spaceship." "Whoops, we just accidentally folded space and took a city with us, out to around Pluto" "Just fold space right back where we came from." "Actually, the fold engines didn't come along for the ride." "Okay, just use the anti-gravity drives" "We didn't install them very well, they ripped right out" "Did you f***ers do anything right!" "Umm, I think we've still got some rockets..."
Most recent sci-fi films, animated or otherwise, including the Mother Movie (Star Wars) construct their films around the premise that in the future there is a technologically advanced, demonic alien culture out there which has ravaged our planet; loathes humanity and is determined to wipe us out for murky reasons in the most vicious possible way at all costs.
Geez, if you want to make sweeping (and basically wrong) generalizations, try not to use an example that doesn't fit the pattern.
-Star Wars isn't set in the future, it's set in the distant past
-the bad guys in Star Wars are human
-they have a very clear motive of maintaining their galactic empire
-the humans are more of a threat to the aliens than vice versa
-"we" don't have a single home planet in Star Wars
-the humans have the best technology we see
I think part of why Star Wars is so popular is that humans are portrayed as the real ass-kickers of the galaxy, instead of the more common self-deprecating "Oh, the aliens are so superior, we're so useless, we need other aliens to help us or we'll all die. But at least we're the Good Guys, because we haven't invaded any planets (yet)." Star Trek has a bit of the same feel, though it has a much less realistic view of human morality.
Personally, I think recent science fiction films have had a wide variety of different situations, and BEMs were more common back in the early days. Destruction/conquering of Earth is not really a common theme.
Their Myth monopoly is unacceptable! Other companies should also be able to create Myth games and compatable clients. Why, if your friend has Myth, you have to buy Myth just play a network game against him. They deliberately produce incompatabilities between different version of their software, too. I bought Myth, but then people around me started buying Myth II, and I couldn't play with them until I bought Myth as well! I paid for it, but I don't have to like the stinking monopolist bastards who forced me to; I think anyone would be totally justified to make unauthorized copies of their software, if you can avoid inadvertantly purchasing it with their aggressive bundling.
But what is truly intolerable is the way they're using their Myth dominance to force their way into the Oni market! They are blatantly leveraging one monopoly into another.
And look at these hopelessly generic names: Myth, Oni. How many games are there based on a myth? Oni may be uncommon in North American games, but they are a standard feature of Japanese games. It is unacceptable for them to claim trademark rights for these generic concepts (actually, they themselves argues that "Oni" was a generic name, because there was an obscure game of the same name, but you don't see them letting us know! I bet if any of you wrote a game called "Oni", they'd sue you anyways).
I notice that they limit you to a millisecond per turn. Is Iocaine Powder fast enough for that? I wouldn't have thought that any fairly sophisticated prediction system would be fast enough. I suppose, though, that a millisecond does give you a few hundred thousand cycles, but given a history of several hundred turns, that isn't a lot of cycles to spend per turn in the history.
In a real tournament, you don't factor in just how badly you kick the asses of the worst players. This makes it a silly game of "guess who's playing". 2nd order roshambo: as silly as 1st order roshambo, and as painful as roshambeau.
For example, say there is one program that always uses rock (GOR), one with a sophisticated adaptive mechanism (IP), and 10,000 that always use scissors.
IP does very well, against these trivial opponents: on average missing the first 1, then recognising the pattern and getting every one after that.
GOR, however, wins every match, except against IP, against whom it loses every match after the first one (which is a toss-up).
At 1000 points per match, this gives GOR a score of 10 million and IP a score of around 9 thousand less than GOR. GOR wins over IP, despite the fact that IP beat every opponent GOR did, and beat GOR to boot.
It's all about the opponents. Remember that they're fluffing it up with enough ultra-stupid dummies that you don't have a hope in hell unless you beat these dummies soundly. Without the dummies, and in a real elimination tournament, a random-bot would have a fair crack at it, and there wouldn't be any point to it.
Of course, random(optimal) could still win, just as a monkey at a typewriter could recreate the complete works of Shakespeare, but it would take countless billions of tries for one to beat this system; there aren't enough people with computers to beat it that way. Of course, since the bots are the environment, if several dozen random bots were to enter for every non-random bot (including dummies), they would wash out the results in random noise (for every dummy you beat by 600 points, you'd face 50 random-bots that would randomly change your score up or down by, say, around 100 points), and all programs would be about equally likely to win (so a random-bot would probably take home the prize).
They have to restrict random-bots or strategy could become irrelevant and it would be 1st order silly, instead of 2nd order silly 8P
(and it is 2nd order silly; the basic way to win is simple to state, if complicated to implement: beat the trivial stupids, beat what you made to beat the trivial stupids, then beat what you have now, but the more levels of trickery you detect and beat, the more guesses you waste screwing around figuring out your opponent's strategy and the smaller the margin of victory, so you have to prioritize what level of trickery to try first, ending in the same sort of random guess that characterizes roshambo, except that you've spent a lot more effort...)
Who can anticipate the greatest number of lousy implementations that will show up?
You really have to hard-code recognition of the basic categories, since you aren't allowed to take the time to do a thorough analysis.
So, forget clever coding. It's grinding through all the bad ideas that will win this one.
They have to pay credit card fees to make those charges, and they give away about $45,000/day to new users (about 9,000 new users per day, getting $5 each for joining).
Don't get me wrong, I think the idea can work. I just don't think they're making money yet. I also wonder if they will ever be truly international, being based on credit cards and such. Unlike e-gold, they have to be able to chase down cases of credit-card fraud and suchlike.