I kind of agree. What if we don't make it there for a few hundred more years yet? Could something like this allow biological agents like viruses, bacteria, etc to evolve into forms we won't have a natural defense for once we actually do arrive in person?
Not sure if anyone else has mentioned it, but there are other ultra-violent titles with blatant sex games in them that you can play even without a patch, such as "God of War", yet this still only gets a mere "M" rating?
I'm sorry, but if the ESRB is going to change the terms defining what qualifies as an AO rated title, they need to update their ratings across the entire board, not just when they feel like punishing someone for whatever reason they see fit at the moment.
I would seriously hope Rockstar will contest this unwarranted ratings change in court siting these other games as examples of how skewed and biased the ESRB is on a per-company basis when it's supposedly impartial.
I can't say I agree with you on this. The brain is driven by a complex system of electro-chemical reactions. (Many of which we don't yet understand.) To completely disregard a flaw in this system as a cause of depression is foolish at best.
While there may be some truth to the whole "those who will themselves to be depressed will be depressed" philosophy, it's certainly not the an accurate picture of the condition itself, which can greatly vary from case to case.
I do feel that the condition is often misdiagnosed, causing many individuals who don't really need any help to get locked into taking drugs with addictive properties similar to heroin. Under many circumstances, depression in itself is a normal and healthy physical/mental response that all humans experience at some point in their lives. However, in a society where instant gratification is emphasized, the prospect of a "make me happy again" pill is all to attractive to ignore.
Once you've been hooked on one of these meds for a while, your body changes chemically, and eventually starts to require the drug to be present in order for you to continue feeling "normal".
As a result, many of these miracle depression treatments end up causing more depression rather than actually curing anything. They only go after the condition itself, rather than the cause.
Look, I've been collecting anime since way before it gained any major acceptance by broadcasters here in the U.S. I have a pretty good idea what I'm talking about on this. The fad has peaked with the general population here and is starting to recede back to being a niche market again.
In terms of market, I'm refering to adult viewers with money to spend on this stuff, not kiddie shows like Pokemon, YuGiOh, One Piece, etc which are an entirely separate market in and of themselves.
Check out the ratings in the last couple months for Adult Swim's anime line-up. They are seriously taking a plunge compared to previous months. I'm sure the same holds true for any of G4's recent offerings as well. People are bored with it and are now looking elsewhere for their entertainment.
Anyway, my point in this, is that there is a huge difference between those of us who collect and buy anime, and those who are simply casual viewers. The casual viewers had a moment to latch onto something we like and we saw it become a big industry for a brief moment of time. That time is now on it's way out. Our numbers may have grown as an effect of this brief fad, but not by enough to break out of being a niche market.
Considering I own this set, I'd have to agree with your sentiments. Sadly, it's one of the last decent releases by ADV before things changed for the worst.
If you check out the City Hunter movies that came out later on, you'll notice just how much ADV has changed in the last couple years.
For example, they now change characters' names to more english-friendly substitutes. Ryo's name is dumbed down to simply "Joe", as are many other characters' names.
There just isn't any good excuse for such blatant stupidity like this.
I'm not sure why this would really surprise anyone. ADV had a brief lucky streak where the niche market they serve suddenly became a booming industry fad here in the U.S. As a result, they grew way too fast for their primary market to sustain them. Now with the industry receding back toward being a niche market again, they're struggling to stay afloat.
Aside from that, ADV's production quality has been getting progressively worse over the last couple years. Translations are much further off from what they were in ADVs earlier years and the quality of their dubbed materials are now almost unbearable.
I'm sure the other companies like CPM and Viz are also feeling the effects of the market shift, but unlike ADV, they didn't go nuts on spending to increase their brand recognition.
If anything about this is surprising, it's that a giant like ADV didn't realize how short lived a fad can be.
You must have missed much of the exterior attack sequences on the BSG. That level of animation is neither cheap nor easy to create. As much hype as this show gets now, why would the budget for it be any less than that of a lot of shows on any other network?
The whole "less is more" philosophy has worked well for science fiction in the past, why is it any different now? Would the "Alien" movies be nearly as terrifying if the viewer always sees the alien before it attacks its victims?
Aside from that, I have a feeling this idea that the "cylons look like us" may be indirectly inspired by everything going on in our world since 9/11. There is now a common paranoia in this country that an enemy lies within that looks just like everyone else, but can attack at any time. In turn, BSG is playing on this new paranoia, which is made effective by hitting the ball a little too close to home.
Interesting attempt, they have the basic elements down, but could stand to assign weight values to the objects rather than depending on the number of on-screen objects collected to move up to larger ones.
This could probably be moved into isometric 3D fairly easy, which would tremendously add to the value of this version.
If not anything else, it's an interesting look at where the Nintendo DS version of the game may go.
If you use the word "programming" in it's literal sense, it would imply any instructed task created by a human to be recreated later through automated means.
This definition of "programming" could include creations where the "programmer" never actually sees code, but merely interacts with a piece of software that records the session... such as a 3D animator or someone creating an action set in Photoshop.
These acts in and of themselves may not be considered "art", but the creations that result from these acts certainly are.
Zonk... seriously, this stuff is getting old. I'm as much a Mac fan as the next guy, but this kind of stuff getting posted on a daily basis is just asking for a flame war. There are far better places to post this kind of Mac evangelism than here.
Unless I'm mistaken, most of us here expect to discuss topics of actual intelligence, rather than repeatedly beating each other over the head with such pointless debates like Mac vs PC.
I'm not suggesting that all Mac-related articles are bad. If Apple manages to do something truly revolutionary for the computing industry, I'm sure we'd like to know about it. But please, for the love of God, stop polluting Slashdot with this kind of nonsense to satisify your own personal biases.
It amazes me how many people are jumping to conclusions on this. It is not coming to "Cartoon Network" as in daytime programming, it's coming to "Cartoon Network" as the Time Warner controlled entity. Not everyone knows what "Adult Swim" is yet outside of the fan-base, so it make sense for them to announce this using the larger, more recognizable brand name. Hell, Funimation announced Full Metal Alchemist the same way... on Cartoon Network.
Yes, Evangelion has had two episodes air under Toonami years ago, but only as part of a ADV advertising campaign camouflaged as a "giant robot week". This in no way should reflect upon the official release of the series to Cartoon Network.
Aside from thar, we're talking about a company largely based in the bible-thumping south. Evangelion is too well known for it's anti-religion themes to get approval for anything other than Adult Swim. Considering that the FCC is drunk with power under the super-religious, dictatorial Bush administration, why would they even risk it?
"The way I used to memorize pi was to cut it at every four digits and try to associate some kind of logic with each chunk. For example, 3.14 1592 6535 8979 3238 4626 each of four digit groups seems to have some kind of pattern, except the first one, no?"
That is pretty interesting, but not so much for the Pi memorization stuff in itself though.
It's seems to be extremely common for humans to memorize large groups of numbers in segments of 3's and 4's. Think of the way one memorizes a lengthy phone number or credit card info. As long as the source we obtained the info from breaks it up into the 3-4 segments, odds our we'll memorize it easily. But if one deviates from that pattern to something like 5-2 segments or one large string, it usually will end up throwing most people off.
As for these guys that memorize Pi to thousands of digits, there are some out there who believe this may not be an entirely logical/memory driven process, but may instead be assisted (or handled entirely) by the abstract elements of the brain.
The fansub thing seems to have relatively little to do with the current anime market here in the US.
Back when ADV, CPM and Viz were only serving a niche market, the success of fansubs was necessary to rate how well a series would get adopted here in the US.
Hell, some of us have had fansubs on hand even before the internet became a household thing. There were entire communities devoted to archiving and duplicating fansubs on VHS... and you were grateful if it was a crappy 17th generation copy with fuzzy images and scrambling glitches.
The problem right now, is ADV and the rest got lucky due to a fluke in our culture that turned anime into a fad for a few years. Due to this fluke, ADV and the rest grew uncontrollably to the point that their niche market can no longer sustain them. Now that the fad of anime in the US is on it's way out, these compaanies are going to be struggling to stay afloat.
If anyone is suffering from this, it's the consumers still buying products from these companies. Costs are higher than ever on new anime and the quality of work done on these newer titles is far worse than when these companies only served a niche markets. If this doesn't drive an otherwse faithful customer to piracy, I don't know what else will.
While this certainly sounds interesting, I can't see Apple committing entirely to flash drives until they hit the 80-100GB point.
However, one thing I can see Apple doing is giving the user 8-10GB of high speed flash memory to use in tandem with a standard hard drive, in which the user can install the OS and their primary applications. The benefit to this, is that it could make the system faster, while allowing it to conserve power at the same time. (The only time the hard drive is accessed is to either write data, or read user-selected data / secondary applications.)
Why are they giving these children felony charges for being intelligent enough to see through such pathetically weak security? At the very least, the school should have assigned each machine a separate password based on serial number.
In all seriousness, if they really wanted to ensure security on these systems, they shouldn't have allowed the students to take them out of the school.
I'm more worried about how long it'll take for this thing to get bored, once it reaches that state. If they are going for the full human experience, how are they going to prevent sensory deprivation?
Will they use some kind of skin grafting onto a chip to let it "feel" things using the nerves in it, instead of simply simulating it with pressure/temperature sensors?
Isn't this the nature of the internet in general? Almost all data uploaded to the internet is copied and stored elsewhere across several thousands of computer.
For example, if I take my own website down after running it for several years, can I really blame anyone but myself for residual data left behind in caches and search engines?
Once you put data on the internet, don't ever count on being able to completely remove it. Someone, somewhere will always have a copy of it in some form.
I'd like to see some kind of electronics recycling program set up (possibly at the federal level) that makes it easy for the average person to drop off their unwanted electronic devices.
At the moment, I have a pile of computers lying around that I'd like to get rid off, but I don't want it to end up in a landfill or have their most toxic parts scattered on the ground of a third world country.
I can always donate working hardware to schools in the community, but what about stuff like these $30 dvd players with a 6 month life span? I can't just keep piling this stuff up over the years.
I seem to recall similar attempts like this being shot down by Philips.
They demanded that all references to "Compact Disc"/"CD" and the CD logo be removed from the packaging since the product deviates from the CD audio standard, potentially resulting in confusion and problems for the end user.
Of course, I could see this same point preventing enhanced CDs with additional non-audio content from being made.
I love the mac about as much as the next guy, but do we really need these "x switches to Mac" threads posted on a daily basis? This practically begs to reduce slashdot to just another forum for mac vs pc flame wars.
Isn't this the same kind of reasoning that has led to things like witch hunts and the spanish inquisition? This is a dangerous way of thinking that criminalizes anyone with a desire to preserve their privacy... something our current government would love to turn into law at the drop of a hat.
This is a huge problem for flat color animation in general. Kind of like applying low quality JPEG compression to line-art. It just doesn't work.
They need to start branching the digital standard a bit and create a lossless compression algorithm specifically for animation. Something similar to how GIF compression works.
I'm inclined to agree with you on this. If you ever watched the commentary for all 80+ episodes of the series, they discuss this topic stating it would be extremely difficult to revive the series due to most of the crew moving on to do other work elsewhere in the industry.
Of course, I'd love to see this proven wrong, as Futurama was a fantastic series, but I really don't see this happening, unless much of the staff is replaced with newer (and possibly less skilled) people.
Slashdot Mirror
I kind of agree. What if we don't make it there for a few hundred more years yet? Could something like this allow biological agents like viruses, bacteria, etc to evolve into forms we won't have a natural defense for once we actually do arrive in person?
Not sure if anyone else has mentioned it, but there are other ultra-violent titles with blatant sex games in them that you can play even without a patch, such as "God of War", yet this still only gets a mere "M" rating?
I'm sorry, but if the ESRB is going to change the terms defining what qualifies as an AO rated title, they need to update their ratings across the entire board, not just when they feel like punishing someone for whatever reason they see fit at the moment.
I would seriously hope Rockstar will contest this unwarranted ratings change in court siting these other games as examples of how skewed and biased the ESRB is on a per-company basis when it's supposedly impartial.
I can't say I agree with you on this. The brain is driven by a complex system of electro-chemical reactions. (Many of which we don't yet understand.) To completely disregard a flaw in this system as a cause of depression is foolish at best.
While there may be some truth to the whole "those who will themselves to be depressed will be depressed" philosophy, it's certainly not the an accurate picture of the condition itself, which can greatly vary from case to case.
I do feel that the condition is often misdiagnosed, causing many individuals who don't really need any help to get locked into taking drugs with addictive properties similar to heroin. Under many circumstances, depression in itself is a normal and healthy physical/mental response that all humans experience at some point in their lives. However, in a society where instant gratification is emphasized, the prospect of a "make me happy again" pill is all to attractive to ignore.
Once you've been hooked on one of these meds for a while, your body changes chemically, and eventually starts to require the drug to be present in order for you to continue feeling "normal".
As a result, many of these miracle depression treatments end up causing more depression rather than actually curing anything. They only go after the condition itself, rather than the cause.
Look, I've been collecting anime since way before it gained any major acceptance by broadcasters here in the U.S. I have a pretty good idea what I'm talking about on this. The fad has peaked with the general population here and is starting to recede back to being a niche market again.
In terms of market, I'm refering to adult viewers with money to spend on this stuff, not kiddie shows like Pokemon, YuGiOh, One Piece, etc which are an entirely separate market in and of themselves.
Check out the ratings in the last couple months for Adult Swim's anime line-up. They are seriously taking a plunge compared to previous months. I'm sure the same holds true for any of G4's recent offerings as well. People are bored with it and are now looking elsewhere for their entertainment.
Anyway, my point in this, is that there is a huge difference between those of us who collect and buy anime, and those who are simply casual viewers. The casual viewers had a moment to latch onto something we like and we saw it become a big industry for a brief moment of time. That time is now on it's way out. Our numbers may have grown as an effect of this brief fad, but not by enough to break out of being a niche market.
Considering I own this set, I'd have to agree with your sentiments. Sadly, it's one of the last decent releases by ADV before things changed for the worst.
If you check out the City Hunter movies that came out later on, you'll notice just how much ADV has changed in the last couple years.
For example, they now change characters' names to more english-friendly substitutes. Ryo's name is dumbed down to simply "Joe", as are many other characters' names.
There just isn't any good excuse for such blatant stupidity like this.
I'm not sure why this would really surprise anyone. ADV had a brief lucky streak where the niche market they serve suddenly became a booming industry fad here in the U.S. As a result, they grew way too fast for their primary market to sustain them. Now with the industry receding back toward being a niche market again, they're struggling to stay afloat.
Aside from that, ADV's production quality has been getting progressively worse over the last couple years. Translations are much further off from what they were in ADVs earlier years and the quality of their dubbed materials are now almost unbearable.
I'm sure the other companies like CPM and Viz are also feeling the effects of the market shift, but unlike ADV, they didn't go nuts on spending to increase their brand recognition.
If anything about this is surprising, it's that a giant like ADV didn't realize how short lived a fad can be.
You must have missed much of the exterior attack sequences on the BSG. That level of animation is neither cheap nor easy to create. As much hype as this show gets now, why would the budget for it be any less than that of a lot of shows on any other network?
The whole "less is more" philosophy has worked well for science fiction in the past, why is it any different now? Would the "Alien" movies be nearly as terrifying if the viewer always sees the alien before it attacks its victims?
Aside from that, I have a feeling this idea that the "cylons look like us" may be indirectly inspired by everything going on in our world since 9/11. There is now a common paranoia in this country that an enemy lies within that looks just like everyone else, but can attack at any time. In turn, BSG is playing on this new paranoia, which is made effective by hitting the ball a little too close to home.
Interesting attempt, they have the basic elements down, but could stand to assign weight values to the objects rather than depending on the number of on-screen objects collected to move up to larger ones.
This could probably be moved into isometric 3D fairly easy, which would tremendously add to the value of this version.
If not anything else, it's an interesting look at where the Nintendo DS version of the game may go.
If you use the word "programming" in it's literal sense, it would imply any instructed task created by a human to be recreated later through automated means.
This definition of "programming" could include creations where the "programmer" never actually sees code, but merely interacts with a piece of software that records the session... such as a 3D animator or someone creating an action set in Photoshop.
These acts in and of themselves may not be considered "art", but the creations that result from these acts certainly are.
Zonk... seriously, this stuff is getting old. I'm as much a Mac fan as the next guy, but this kind of stuff getting posted on a daily basis is just asking for a flame war. There are far better places to post this kind of Mac evangelism than here.
Unless I'm mistaken, most of us here expect to discuss topics of actual intelligence, rather than repeatedly beating each other over the head with such pointless debates like Mac vs PC.
I'm not suggesting that all Mac-related articles are bad. If Apple manages to do something truly revolutionary for the computing industry, I'm sure we'd like to know about it. But please, for the love of God, stop polluting Slashdot with this kind of nonsense to satisify your own personal biases.
Thank you.
It amazes me how many people are jumping to conclusions on this. It is not coming to "Cartoon Network" as in daytime programming, it's coming to "Cartoon Network" as the Time Warner controlled entity. Not everyone knows what "Adult Swim" is yet outside of the fan-base, so it make sense for them to announce this using the larger, more recognizable brand name. Hell, Funimation announced Full Metal Alchemist the same way... on Cartoon Network.
Yes, Evangelion has had two episodes air under Toonami years ago, but only as part of a ADV advertising campaign camouflaged as a "giant robot week". This in no way should reflect upon the official release of the series to Cartoon Network.
Aside from thar, we're talking about a company largely based in the bible-thumping south. Evangelion is too well known for it's anti-religion themes to get approval for anything other than Adult Swim. Considering that the FCC is drunk with power under the super-religious, dictatorial Bush administration, why would they even risk it?
"The way I used to memorize pi was to cut it at every four digits and try to associate some kind of logic with each chunk. For example, 3.14 1592 6535 8979 3238 4626 each of four digit groups seems to have some kind of pattern, except the first one, no?"
That is pretty interesting, but not so much for the Pi memorization stuff in itself though.
It's seems to be extremely common for humans to memorize large groups of numbers in segments of 3's and 4's. Think of the way one memorizes a lengthy phone number or credit card info. As long as the source we obtained the info from breaks it up into the 3-4 segments, odds our we'll memorize it easily. But if one deviates from that pattern to something like 5-2 segments or one large string, it usually will end up throwing most people off.
As for these guys that memorize Pi to thousands of digits, there are some out there who believe this may not be an entirely logical/memory driven process, but may instead be assisted (or handled entirely) by the abstract elements of the brain.
The fansub thing seems to have relatively little to do with the current anime market here in the US.
Back when ADV, CPM and Viz were only serving a niche market, the success of fansubs was necessary to rate how well a series would get adopted here in the US.
Hell, some of us have had fansubs on hand even before the internet became a household thing. There were entire communities devoted to archiving and duplicating fansubs on VHS... and you were grateful if it was a crappy 17th generation copy with fuzzy images and scrambling glitches.
The problem right now, is ADV and the rest got lucky due to a fluke in our culture that turned anime into a fad for a few years. Due to this fluke, ADV and the rest grew uncontrollably to the point that their niche market can no longer sustain them. Now that the fad of anime in the US is on it's way out, these compaanies are going to be struggling to stay afloat.
If anyone is suffering from this, it's the consumers still buying products from these companies. Costs are higher than ever on new anime and the quality of work done on these newer titles is far worse than when these companies only served a niche markets. If this doesn't drive an otherwse faithful customer to piracy, I don't know what else will.
While this certainly sounds interesting, I can't see Apple committing entirely to flash drives until they hit the 80-100GB point.
However, one thing I can see Apple doing is giving the user 8-10GB of high speed flash memory to use in tandem with a standard hard drive, in which the user can install the OS and their primary applications. The benefit to this, is that it could make the system faster, while allowing it to conserve power at the same time. (The only time the hard drive is accessed is to either write data, or read user-selected data / secondary applications.)
Why are they giving these children felony charges for being intelligent enough to see through such pathetically weak security? At the very least, the school should have assigned each machine a separate password based on serial number.
In all seriousness, if they really wanted to ensure security on these systems, they shouldn't have allowed the students to take them out of the school.
Is the technology for barcode readers much different from that wich most optical mice use for position tracking?
If not, why not create a custom mouse driver that can recognize a barcode when the mouse rolls over one?
I'm more worried about how long it'll take for this thing to get bored, once it reaches that state. If they are going for the full human experience, how are they going to prevent sensory deprivation?
Will they use some kind of skin grafting onto a chip to let it "feel" things using the nerves in it, instead of simply simulating it with pressure/temperature sensors?
And what of other stuff like taste and smell?
Isn't this the nature of the internet in general? Almost all data uploaded to the internet is copied and stored elsewhere across several thousands of computer.
For example, if I take my own website down after running it for several years, can I really blame anyone but myself for residual data left behind in caches and search engines?
Once you put data on the internet, don't ever count on being able to completely remove it. Someone, somewhere will always have a copy of it in some form.
I'd like to see some kind of electronics recycling program set up (possibly at the federal level) that makes it easy for the average person to drop off their unwanted electronic devices.
At the moment, I have a pile of computers lying around that I'd like to get rid off, but I don't want it to end up in a landfill or have their most toxic parts scattered on the ground of a third world country.
I can always donate working hardware to schools in the community, but what about stuff like these $30 dvd players with a 6 month life span? I can't just keep piling this stuff up over the years.
I seem to recall similar attempts like this being shot down by Philips.
They demanded that all references to "Compact Disc"/"CD" and the CD logo be removed from the packaging since the product deviates from the CD audio standard, potentially resulting in confusion and problems for the end user.
Of course, I could see this same point preventing enhanced CDs with additional non-audio content from being made.
I love the mac about as much as the next guy, but do we really need these "x switches to Mac" threads posted on a daily basis? This practically begs to reduce slashdot to just another forum for mac vs pc flame wars.
I'd like to think we're past that stage.
Isn't this the same kind of reasoning that has led to things like witch hunts and the spanish inquisition? This is a dangerous way of thinking that criminalizes anyone with a desire to preserve their privacy... something our current government would love to turn into law at the drop of a hat.
This is a huge problem for flat color animation in general. Kind of like applying low quality JPEG compression to line-art. It just doesn't work.
They need to start branching the digital standard a bit and create a lossless compression algorithm specifically for animation. Something similar to how GIF compression works.
I'm inclined to agree with you on this. If you ever watched the commentary for all 80+ episodes of the series, they discuss this topic stating it would be extremely difficult to revive the series due to most of the crew moving on to do other work elsewhere in the industry.
Of course, I'd love to see this proven wrong, as Futurama was a fantastic series, but I really don't see this happening, unless much of the staff is replaced with newer (and possibly less skilled) people.
George Lucas sues AT&T after logo in space is confused with the Death Star.