Well, also, with consciousness, you'd have to consider the possibility of the system needlessly wandering off a given task and going off into s random tangent, relative to the information it's working on. And, depending on how fast this system is, there is the question of the system getting "bored" between idle moments. From the perspective of a computer, the way a conscious entity experiences "time" while running in that environment may be vastly distorted from our own experiences. While we tend to experience days as "getting shorter" the more we age, a computer-based entity might well experience every second exactly the same, no matter how long of an uptime it has acquired. The difference alone might even skew whatever "personality" it may have into directions we might not expect. (Though, I'd probably go with "irritable". Then again, I'm speaking entirely as a human.)
While true, conscious AI might make for a fun toy, simply watching for patterns in data and drawing new conclusions based on it should be enough by itself.
You're more likely to harm whatever relationship you have with this person, rather than help it. In all seriousness, an addiction to a game is really not that big of a deal compared to other things they could be addicted to that would directly harm them. He's not breaking any laws or harming anything by playing a game... so why not leave him be. Whatever issues he has, he'll work out for himself.
Some of the tactics mentioned here, like physically preventing access to the computer or hiding the modem, are downright asinine and will only anger and frustrate this person rather than actually help them.
By the way, did you even consider that this person may be perfectly happy just the way they are? Just because you personally would not like to live that way doesn't mean it's true for everyone. Some people have different priorities, and perhaps the best thing to do is respect that rather than shoehorning your priorities onto theirs.
When you play a game, you aren't actually causing the gore to occur... it's simply a pre-programmed reward for accomplishing a certain pre-determined task. It's the same methodology used to train dogs and teach children responsibility. You only give a reward to act as an incentive to perform a task until that task become second nature to the subject. Once that occurs, the task is simply carried out on demand for the sake of performing that task.
In a sense, you don't really ever "play" a game... the game "plays" you.
How can anyone be rightly bothered by other users who, within the confines and rules of any game, manage to play it more successfully than they can? If a game is designed in such a way that it benefits users who are smart enough to figure it out over those who aren't, then isn't the problem with the game itself?
Are these users cheating, or are the ones complaining doing so to cover up the fact that their incompetent? And what of the game developers? Is it just easier for them to hire watchdogs to go on random witch hunts for suspicious activity, rather than admit they took on a task too big for them to adequately handle through software alone?
Besides, isn't it human nature to get competitive over a limited resource when operating within a large crowd? Whether it's a determined user playing the game excessive hours to build up characters, or someone paying other users to play for them, the end result is still the same. Those who are better able and have better opportunities to play are always going to do better than those who don't. Attempting to "level" the playing field to benefit more casual users is just as unfair to users who have better resources available to them.
If anything, what these MMORPGs really need is a little McCarthyism to start weeding out these communists.
It's so amusing to see this after enduring nearly a decade of ridicule for suggesting that Microsoft would eventually build a kill switch into Windows. Not only are they doing it, they're reasoning is that the user has too much control over their own hardware to be trusted with it.
We're only a few steps a way from legalizing electronic blackmail based entirely on how deep one's pockets are. And forget about trying to level the playing field on this one... as any user with enough control over their computer to dig up dirty on a large corporate entity must have acquired that control illegally by circumventing some protective measure.
We no longer own our computers... our computers now own us.
I'm just speaking from personal experience, as I have sleep apnea myself, and nearly died because of it. It is, to an extent, "choking many times an hour", but it's not typically a complete cut-off from air. If anything, it's more like water boarding.
The problem with sleep apnea is that the strain from your body's constant struggle with it in, in itself, a form of sleep deprivation. You never actually "sleep" in any conventional sense. Instead, it's more like hundreds of micro-sleep sessions strung together back to back. (Micro-sleep is the condition where your body temporarily passes out to conserve energy when it becomes too strained for far too long. It's sort of like the body's instinctive "dead man's switch"...)
A great idea at the time for short-term storage while CD-R drives weren't yet in the hands of consumers. However, they were notorious for losing data and many eventually died at the hands of the inevitable "click of death". (Strangely enough, my father still uses one despite having a DVD-RW drive readily available to him...)
- The Apple III
The follow-up to the highly successful Apple II series, but failed to serve any real purpose in the long run. In addition, these machines had major issues with heat that would occasionally result in the processor becoming unseated, requiring the user to literally "drop" the machine to correct it.
- The Nintendo Virtual Boy
This was supposed to be Nintendo's greatest foray into "3D" gaming since "Mode 7" games on the SNES... and, it was "portable". However, instead of gaming awesomeness, we got a large, clumsy, headache-inducing nightmare of a device with a very limited game library.
- Power Glove / U-Force
These "alternative" controllers for the NES were primarily brought about as a means of capitalizing on the virtual reality craze of the time. These devices could be programmed to interpret gestures from the user as input for gaming, but were often highly inaccurate. The Power Glove was "bad", but not in the way Nintendo and Hollywood wanted us to believe. In a strange way, these devices may have had a small influence on modern gaming... just take a look at the Nintendo Wii and DS, which use numerous methods of gesturing as game input.
One just has to look at anyone with untreated sleep apnea to see just how dangerous it is. You can easily identify such people just by looking for the signs... darkened eye sockets, labored breathing, swelling of the legs and body, disorientation, lethargy and bruising.
And it's not just difficulty sleeping either, the body ends up literally consuming more energy trying to sleep than it does while conscious. The lack of oxygen in the circulatory system fools the body into overproduction of red blood cells to compensate. This, in turn, leads to a dangerous shift in blood pressure to the point that the heart may cease to function under the load (chronic-conjestive lung and heart failure).
In many cases, those suffering from it are often discovered with blood oxygen levels lower than that of a cadaver.
One thing to remember though, is that the act of sleeping isn't just merely closing the eyes for a few winks, the body *needs* to rest lying down to recover from the negative effects of being upright all day. Blood that is left to pool in the legs for too long can eventually lead to dangerous blood clots.
At the very least, if you can't afford to sleep regularly, try taking a brief nap lying down once every few hours to help maintain normal circulation.
Despite how much we like the tactile experience of holding an actual printed book, it's a medium that is starting to loose its relevance in most modernized cultures. If people have access to the internet, they'll often seek out the most convenient source of information they can find to resolve an immediate problem. Books, which are static and never changing, lack much of this ease of use and quickly go out of date.
What's needed, is a new way of handling such content which allows the user to pay for it, without it being an inconvenient hassle. This means no DRM in a way that prevents the content from being used in a manner common to the user's particular needs. It should be seamless, and inexpensive.
One possibility... allow the user to buy the content as they need it. Instead of selling them the entire "book", sell them the info they need by the paragraph, page or chapter for a fraction of the cost. But, at least allow them to browse the content first, to verify it has the info they need.
Of course you should be able to release any kind of content you want. As long as you a distribution channel and an audience, the content in question shouldn't matter. (Assuming you haven't broken any laws in creating it, like child porn or snuff films.)
No matter what you create, someone is always going to be pissed off about it. If not for the content, then for their own greed. If there's money to be made off an idea, these folks are going to continually crawl out of the woodwork... either to make money off you through litigation, or to make sure you can't turn a profit if they aren't going to.
First computer I ever used was a Radio Shack TRS-80 MC-10 during the early 80's.
For those uninformed on the specs, the stock MC-10 had only 4K of RAM onboard, expandable to 20K via an external 16K module. (And god forbid you ever bumped the thing during a lengthy coding session!)
My setup also used the optional audio-cassette recorder for storage and a dot-matrix printer.
I kept that system in use all the way up to the early 90's before swapping it out for an Apple II+.
The interesting thing about the MC-10 was its unusually compact size considering the time period it was originally introduced. In the right hands, the thing could've been modded into a completely portable netbook-like device, once paired with a proper display and a power source. For that matter, an MP3 player with line-in recording could replace the audio-cassette for storage and even act as a far more advanced file system versus the older method of playing the tape until the correct program file came up. (A process almost as tedious as disk swapping in the early Macintosh days.)
Sure, I miss the little guy at times, but I doubt it'd get too far trying to run a game featuring complex 3D scenes versus the old "make a big colored block chase another colored block around the screen" games I used to write.
Omg, you're talking about this game, aren't you...
Actually, no... that game came much later on. (Donkey Kong came out in 1981, while an "official" Popeye game came out in 1983.)
If you look at Mario's earliest character designs, his outfit strongly resembles those worn Popeye and Bluto in the old animated Popeye the Sailor shorts, short of a minor color palette shift. Much of Popeye's influence on Mario is still retained in both the red/blue/white coloring and the trademark hat style shared by both characters.
It's nice being able to sleep at night knowing that we're all protected by a vague code of ethics, all selectively enforced by a group of people whom we've never met.
Look at Mario, has more name recognition than Mickey Mouse.
Even more interesting, is the fact that Mario only came into existence because Nintendo couldn't get the rights to use "Popeye the Sailor" in a game. The concept would later be remade into what we now know as "Donkey Kong".
From what I understand of services like this, they basically create a database of all papers submitted to their system, then use the collective average of all those papers to determine how much of any newly submitted paper is "plagerized" before adding that paper into the database.
The concern I have with such a system is that despite all of the english language's complexity, there is only a finite number of logical word combination within reason on any given topic. What happens when the system finally has samplings of every feasible word combination? Do all papers then come back flagged as plagerized, regardless of their content?
The problem grows exponentially if the system is also watching for thesaurus substitutions on top of this.
Who knows... it might even be possible to break such a system using a well-crafted Kant generator to "build" papers that are 100% unique from one another, but still using a shared database of keywords that would appear correct in context to the topic at hand.
I had an idea for a virtual cemetery nearly 15 years ago. Probably not as pretty as some of the current stuff, but it did have elements to it that were very similar to today's social networking sites like facebook or myspace, allowing those with connections through a common dead person to interact and exchange thoughts on their fallen comrades.
At the time though, I decided it was probably too goulish to be marketable.
You know, this "turn it in" thing sounds like a system just waiting to fail. The more data they add to the thing, the number of possible combinations of words on a topic that aren't going to trigger as "plagerized" gets reduced.
Eventually, such system could make it impossible for any student to write a legitimate paper on anything because every conceivable combination of words within sentences and sentence fragments will probably be in the database already. If this system is also compensating for plagerism accomplished by thesaurus style "find and replace" methods, it could fail even faster.
One has to wonder when this system will hit the point of no return...
We'll just code around it once we can duplicate the molecules that make up the human genome. After all, there's no law against creating synthetic humans that are entirely identical to their natural counterparts, right?
(What, you didn't think you were special now, did ya?)
Slashdot Mirror
Well, also, with consciousness, you'd have to consider the possibility of the system needlessly wandering off a given task and going off into s random tangent, relative to the information it's working on. And, depending on how fast this system is, there is the question of the system getting "bored" between idle moments. From the perspective of a computer, the way a conscious entity experiences "time" while running in that environment may be vastly distorted from our own experiences. While we tend to experience days as "getting shorter" the more we age, a computer-based entity might well experience every second exactly the same, no matter how long of an uptime it has acquired. The difference alone might even skew whatever "personality" it may have into directions we might not expect. (Though, I'd probably go with "irritable". Then again, I'm speaking entirely as a human.)
While true, conscious AI might make for a fun toy, simply watching for patterns in data and drawing new conclusions based on it should be enough by itself.
make it too rich and capable, and Apple might abandon web browsing on the iPhone altogether to prevent sites from competing with the app store.
Skynet takes many forms... don't be fooled by it's cuteness.
Stop meddling!
You're more likely to harm whatever relationship you have with this person, rather than help it. In all seriousness, an addiction to a game is really not that big of a deal compared to other things they could be addicted to that would directly harm them. He's not breaking any laws or harming anything by playing a game... so why not leave him be. Whatever issues he has, he'll work out for himself.
Some of the tactics mentioned here, like physically preventing access to the computer or hiding the modem, are downright asinine and will only anger and frustrate this person rather than actually help them.
By the way, did you even consider that this person may be perfectly happy just the way they are? Just because you personally would not like to live that way doesn't mean it's true for everyone. Some people have different priorities, and perhaps the best thing to do is respect that rather than shoehorning your priorities onto theirs.
When you play a game, you aren't actually causing the gore to occur... it's simply a pre-programmed reward for accomplishing a certain pre-determined task. It's the same methodology used to train dogs and teach children responsibility. You only give a reward to act as an incentive to perform a task until that task become second nature to the subject. Once that occurs, the task is simply carried out on demand for the sake of performing that task.
In a sense, you don't really ever "play" a game... the game "plays" you.
I've also heard that cola can cause bone to deteriorate, due to the phosphoric acid many of them contain.
How can anyone be rightly bothered by other users who, within the confines and rules of any game, manage to play it more successfully than they can? If a game is designed in such a way that it benefits users who are smart enough to figure it out over those who aren't, then isn't the problem with the game itself?
Are these users cheating, or are the ones complaining doing so to cover up the fact that their incompetent? And what of the game developers? Is it just easier for them to hire watchdogs to go on random witch hunts for suspicious activity, rather than admit they took on a task too big for them to adequately handle through software alone?
Besides, isn't it human nature to get competitive over a limited resource when operating within a large crowd? Whether it's a determined user playing the game excessive hours to build up characters, or someone paying other users to play for them, the end result is still the same. Those who are better able and have better opportunities to play are always going to do better than those who don't. Attempting to "level" the playing field to benefit more casual users is just as unfair to users who have better resources available to them.
If anything, what these MMORPGs really need is a little McCarthyism to start weeding out these communists.
It's so amusing to see this after enduring nearly a decade of ridicule for suggesting that Microsoft would eventually build a kill switch into Windows. Not only are they doing it, they're reasoning is that the user has too much control over their own hardware to be trusted with it.
We're only a few steps a way from legalizing electronic blackmail based entirely on how deep one's pockets are. And forget about trying to level the playing field on this one... as any user with enough control over their computer to dig up dirty on a large corporate entity must have acquired that control illegally by circumventing some protective measure.
We no longer own our computers... our computers now own us.
I'm just speaking from personal experience, as I have sleep apnea myself, and nearly died because of it. It is, to an extent, "choking many times an hour", but it's not typically a complete cut-off from air. If anything, it's more like water boarding.
The problem with sleep apnea is that the strain from your body's constant struggle with it in, in itself, a form of sleep deprivation. You never actually "sleep" in any conventional sense. Instead, it's more like hundreds of micro-sleep sessions strung together back to back. (Micro-sleep is the condition where your body temporarily passes out to conserve energy when it becomes too strained for far too long. It's sort of like the body's instinctive "dead man's switch"...)
I'd probably have a few other items on the list:
- The Iomega ZIP drive
A great idea at the time for short-term storage while CD-R drives weren't yet in the hands of consumers. However, they were notorious for losing data and many eventually died at the hands of the inevitable "click of death". (Strangely enough, my father still uses one despite having a DVD-RW drive readily available to him...)
- The Apple III
The follow-up to the highly successful Apple II series, but failed to serve any real purpose in the long run. In addition, these machines had major issues with heat that would occasionally result in the processor becoming unseated, requiring the user to literally "drop" the machine to correct it.
- The Nintendo Virtual Boy
This was supposed to be Nintendo's greatest foray into "3D" gaming since "Mode 7" games on the SNES... and, it was "portable". However, instead of gaming awesomeness, we got a large, clumsy, headache-inducing nightmare of a device with a very limited game library.
- Power Glove / U-Force
These "alternative" controllers for the NES were primarily brought about as a means of capitalizing on the virtual reality craze of the time. These devices could be programmed to interpret gestures from the user as input for gaming, but were often highly inaccurate. The Power Glove was "bad", but not in the way Nintendo and Hollywood wanted us to believe. In a strange way, these devices may have had a small influence on modern gaming... just take a look at the Nintendo Wii and DS, which use numerous methods of gesturing as game input.
One just has to look at anyone with untreated sleep apnea to see just how dangerous it is. You can easily identify such people just by looking for the signs... darkened eye sockets, labored breathing, swelling of the legs and body, disorientation, lethargy and bruising.
And it's not just difficulty sleeping either, the body ends up literally consuming more energy trying to sleep than it does while conscious. The lack of oxygen in the circulatory system fools the body into overproduction of red blood cells to compensate. This, in turn, leads to a dangerous shift in blood pressure to the point that the heart may cease to function under the load (chronic-conjestive lung and heart failure).
In many cases, those suffering from it are often discovered with blood oxygen levels lower than that of a cadaver.
One thing to remember though, is that the act of sleeping isn't just merely closing the eyes for a few winks, the body *needs* to rest lying down to recover from the negative effects of being upright all day. Blood that is left to pool in the legs for too long can eventually lead to dangerous blood clots.
At the very least, if you can't afford to sleep regularly, try taking a brief nap lying down once every few hours to help maintain normal circulation.
Despite how much we like the tactile experience of holding an actual printed book, it's a medium that is starting to loose its relevance in most modernized cultures. If people have access to the internet, they'll often seek out the most convenient source of information they can find to resolve an immediate problem. Books, which are static and never changing, lack much of this ease of use and quickly go out of date.
What's needed, is a new way of handling such content which allows the user to pay for it, without it being an inconvenient hassle. This means no DRM in a way that prevents the content from being used in a manner common to the user's particular needs. It should be seamless, and inexpensive.
One possibility... allow the user to buy the content as they need it. Instead of selling them the entire "book", sell them the info they need by the paragraph, page or chapter for a fraction of the cost. But, at least allow them to browse the content first, to verify it has the info they need.
Wisconsin now sucks as a place to live. This type of crap never would have flown back in the day of Tommy Thompson's reign.
Before long, we're going to end up as one of the red states, and our once proudly held progressive streak will come to an end.
Of course you should be able to release any kind of content you want. As long as you a distribution channel and an audience, the content in question shouldn't matter. (Assuming you haven't broken any laws in creating it, like child porn or snuff films.)
No matter what you create, someone is always going to be pissed off about it. If not for the content, then for their own greed. If there's money to be made off an idea, these folks are going to continually crawl out of the woodwork... either to make money off you through litigation, or to make sure you can't turn a profit if they aren't going to.
Pak Chooie Unf
First computer I ever used was a Radio Shack TRS-80 MC-10 during the early 80's.
For those uninformed on the specs, the stock MC-10 had only 4K of RAM onboard, expandable to 20K via an external 16K module. (And god forbid you ever bumped the thing during a lengthy coding session!)
My setup also used the optional audio-cassette recorder for storage and a dot-matrix printer.
I kept that system in use all the way up to the early 90's before swapping it out for an Apple II+.
The interesting thing about the MC-10 was its unusually compact size considering the time period it was originally introduced. In the right hands, the thing could've been modded into a completely portable netbook-like device, once paired with a proper display and a power source. For that matter, an MP3 player with line-in recording could replace the audio-cassette for storage and even act as a far more advanced file system versus the older method of playing the tape until the correct program file came up. (A process almost as tedious as disk swapping in the early Macintosh days.)
Sure, I miss the little guy at times, but I doubt it'd get too far trying to run a game featuring complex 3D scenes versus the old "make a big colored block chase another colored block around the screen" games I used to write.
Omg, you're talking about this game, aren't you...
Actually, no... that game came much later on. (Donkey Kong came out in 1981, while an "official" Popeye game came out in 1983.)
If you look at Mario's earliest character designs, his outfit strongly resembles those worn Popeye and Bluto in the old animated Popeye the Sailor shorts, short of a minor color palette shift. Much of Popeye's influence on Mario is still retained in both the red/blue/white coloring and the trademark hat style shared by both characters.
It's nice being able to sleep at night knowing that we're all protected by a vague code of ethics, all selectively enforced by a group of people whom we've never met.
Look at Mario, has more name recognition than Mickey Mouse.
Even more interesting, is the fact that Mario only came into existence because Nintendo couldn't get the rights to use "Popeye the Sailor" in a game. The concept would later be remade into what we now know as "Donkey Kong".
...the company with a 100% success rate in stopping the spread of swine flu, by killing the patients who spread swine flu.
Isn't this just a theramin with a third axis?
From what I understand of services like this, they basically create a database of all papers submitted to their system, then use the collective average of all those papers to determine how much of any newly submitted paper is "plagerized" before adding that paper into the database.
The concern I have with such a system is that despite all of the english language's complexity, there is only a finite number of logical word combination within reason on any given topic. What happens when the system finally has samplings of every feasible word combination? Do all papers then come back flagged as plagerized, regardless of their content?
The problem grows exponentially if the system is also watching for thesaurus substitutions on top of this.
Who knows... it might even be possible to break such a system using a well-crafted Kant generator to "build" papers that are 100% unique from one another, but still using a shared database of keywords that would appear correct in context to the topic at hand.
I had an idea for a virtual cemetery nearly 15 years ago. Probably not as pretty as some of the current stuff, but it did have elements to it that were very similar to today's social networking sites like facebook or myspace, allowing those with connections through a common dead person to interact and exchange thoughts on their fallen comrades.
At the time though, I decided it was probably too goulish to be marketable.
In hindsight though... *sigh*
You know, this "turn it in" thing sounds like a system just waiting to fail. The more data they add to the thing, the number of possible combinations of words on a topic that aren't going to trigger as "plagerized" gets reduced.
Eventually, such system could make it impossible for any student to write a legitimate paper on anything because every conceivable combination of words within sentences and sentence fragments will probably be in the database already. If this system is also compensating for plagerism accomplished by thesaurus style "find and replace" methods, it could fail even faster.
One has to wonder when this system will hit the point of no return...
We'll just code around it once we can duplicate the molecules that make up the human genome. After all, there's no law against creating synthetic humans that are entirely identical to their natural counterparts, right?
(What, you didn't think you were special now, did ya?)