Two things that make the system above work is that A: the brain is pretty self-organizing, and B: the brain has more neurons to fire than the robot arms. The brain being self-organizing means that if you jam an arm control somewhere in the motor cortex, through trial and error the brain will more or less figure out where it is and how to use it. If you tried to connect a complex neurological connection to the computer in the other direction, you'd have to know exactly what each neuron effected before hooking it up. This is because of B: the brain having ridiculous amounts of neurons. The brain can flex everything until something twitches. You don't have the resolution in current computer systems to try flicking every connected neuron individually.
The more likely immoral direction would be to put monkey's brains into the next generation of Roomba. Or make the next mustang with a self-driving system built from the brain of a mustang. Or wire up your pilots to control the complex machinery with a thought.
You could also say that people have morals drilled into them though a process of socialization. There are certain morals that are inherent in the step of brain development where people realize that other people are people too. And there are morals genetically coded to do things like reduce inbreeding and to keep similar genes from stabbing other similar genes.
"Fun" gets overused as a blanket statement about games. Even basic things like "that game is using exploration for fun" or "that game confuses the player in a fun puzzle to solve." Neither of those sound terribly uncommon when people talk about "fun" in videogames, but I was actually just referring to the movie Inception. Would you primarily say that Inception was "fun", or that nearly all movies are "fun"? Then why are games like Metal Gear referred to as "fun"?
The problem is that once you take the complex sauce that is required to make a game interesting... a little exploration here, some rewards there, perception of danger, unique game rules...and just call it "fun", then all discussions about video games degrade into bouncing balls and slobbering puppies. Anything not suitable to be put in the context of an ice-cream truck is no longer a suitable subject for a video game. Is murder, divorce, and being the victim of psychological torture fun? No, but Heavy Rain was still an incredible game. Is God Of War 3 fun? It can be, but labeling it that doesn't actually advance the discussion or give a sense for why the game is compelling.
No. Games have to make war a compelling experience.
Silent Hill is not fun. Silent Hill is a frightening, hellish experience. Heavy Rain is not fun. Heavy Rain is a gripping action drama. Diablo isn't fun. Diablo is a Pavlovian masterpiece of reward pacing. Most MMO's cease being fun in the middle, and become compelling reward treadmills with social aspects. Flower isn't fun. Flower is peaceful, relaxing, and gorgeous. EA Sports Active isn't fun. It has a compelling real-world reward (getting fit).
The idea that games have to be fun is a silly generalization. Many games are compelling for reasons other than traditional "fun." You have the drive for exploration, the drive for mastery. You have tension about plot elements. You have reward pacing. The player can care about characters or events. The player can be afraid. The player can be in love. You can twist the player's anger at an enemy, or play up the player's need to understand their character. You can even just play the tension-and-release-and-tension rollercoaster carefully to make an otherwise boring experience into a compelling one. In similar ways to how Se7en was compelling, so too was Heavy Rain.
"Fun" is nowhere near as nuanced an understanding of videogames as the medium is capable of.
For one, you can make the player experience deeper loss in videogames. Say the player chooses to risk his own life to save another character during a firefight, only later to have that character die by a roadside IED. Or maybe the player builds up each of a group of characters, only to make a decision that costs one of the characters their life. When you're watching a movie, you can sympathize with characters dealing with regret. But only video games can make that regret belong to the player. Myth by Bungie explored this a little bit, with NPC warriors that you tried to herd and keep alive through multiple levels, but inevitably your little loved ones would die off one at a time because of your mistakes.
We called Iran part of the Axis of Evil, and put them on a to-be-destroyed list. I don't think we realize how often people in other parts of the world reference that really, really stupid speech.
She reverse-engineered several pieces of Apple hardware using a solid electronics workstation, then vlogged about it using equations and whiteboards. What do you want, a cherry on her head?
While I happen to think she is pretty, her physical attractiveness is irrelevant to officially being hot. For the required car analogy, that's like complaining about the Golf GTI W-12 concept car not having a working radio.
I've always wondered about this. Every police force in every city in every state seems to have a different badge. Every major city has dozens of metalwork and crafts shops that can build reasonable-looking badges. Not interacting with police officers every day, I have no idea what the badges in my home city looks like, let alone well enough to spot a fake.
Back in the day, badges were difficult things to fake. Now, they're a dime a dozen. Add in ID cards that can be easily printed and laminated, and none of the normal authentications are valid any more.
In the grand scheme of things, if someone has a gun at your door and claims to be a cop with a warrant, you nod politely, upload a photograph to facebook, and let them in. Still, I wouldn't mind a key exchange with a trusted server.
It's probably best to nip anticompetitive, anti-market practices in the butt before entrenching bad practices and killing the possibility of a genuine marketplace. And e-book sales have the potential for a lot of anti-market practices.
The Connecticut AG is specifically asking them to come in and talk about it, and convince him / her that it is an OK practice. He's not pressing charges or forcing a breakup or anything. This seems reasonable.
Collusion. Apple, Amazon, (and presumably the Nook) normally have to compete with each other, trying to out-price one another. If Apple negotiates a special "vampire sale" with a publisher to co-incide with the next Twilight movie release, suddenly everyone gets books at that rate. That kills any competitive edge Apple might gain from the lowered costs, and therefore the price floor is prevented from drifting downwards. Everyone maintains the same prices at the same levels.
Basically, this is an indirect way of creating a monopoly pricing situation without directly setting prices with competitors.
Intel's canoe lake reference netbook looks fantastic.
It's easier to make a given pricepoint faster, than it is to make a given power point cheaper. Once you've sunk the ridiculous fob plant costs, it's probably about the same cost to make 1" of an i7 as it is to make 1" of a 486. Add in all of the non-flexible details of manufacturing (soldering points, shipping, etc), and it makes sense that things get faster but not necessarily cheaper.
The netbook makers are now pushing 10 hours per battery charge, with keyboards that aren't terrible and screens that are basically as big as they can be for a given size. Intel is focusing on low-power portable processors far more than at any point in their history. What features, specifically, are you upset that the netbook makers aren't improving?
Since when are touchscreens "the latest tech?" Touchscreens have been around since the 70's. My personal first touchscreen gadget was from the early 90's. Everybody and their kid has had a touchscreen DS for ten years.
Keyboards are well established, but are fidgety to manufacture and have lots of moving pieces. A touchscreen, in theory at least, should be cheaper to make. It makes sense.
Gas car for your commute, electric for your significant other's. Use the 600 mile car when traveling distances, and the 60 for cheap commuting around town. Or get your kids an electric car for getting to and from high school / events around town, but keep them from driving across state lines. Rent an electric to get from the airport to your hotel, and don't have to worry about filling it up again on the other end.
Of course, the hope is that ranges much larger than 60 miles are attainable. The Teslas have a 250 mile range. While they're well out of a reasonable price range, there should be ways of getting that number down. Similarly, there are recharge battery technologies in progress that should be chargeable in bathroom-break timeframes. All together that should be fine for a primary car.
I bought an electric motorcycle for $500. The range is about twice my normal round-trip commute, and the operating cost is negligible. These things are all over New York, and I wouldn't be surprised to see them taking off soon around the country.
An electric bike is just an electric car without a lot of the bells and whistles. We're really not that far off.
The only way to get infrastructure in place is to spend the money and develop it. The only way to develop the technology is to get industries behind it researching better and more advanced forms of tech. And if we can develop it domestically, we might have an actual sustainable car market here in the United States.
I don't know. If the technology was mature, the market mass, and the price sufficiently low, why would anyone need to step in and help develop it? Just let things take off on their own. It's only when actual help is needed to develop what could be a profitable industry domestically that the government should step in.
We gave up the car market in the 90's because our cars were "good enough" that we didn't have to invest in the future of technology. International brands stepped in with stronger developed technology bases and ate our lunch. Now we have the world's only all-electric car maker, and a potential route to future competitiveness. Should we just ignore this, because our gas-powered Fords are "good enough?"
True, but JAMMA is basically a standard plug for monitor-and-controller. It helps simplify power management and other key issues, but if a transistor goes on your game board, you're in trouble. You can't simply swap the ROM into a new generic system like a dead console, and emulating the arcade unit is still generally specific to a particular game. It will be a help to museums who have to deal with things like dead monitors. But it won't help them deal with static-fried board parts.
Also to be fair, the ones who fight hardest against the spread of their works are the executives who are focused on the bottom line. Most creative professionals I've met are more sympathetic, as their driving factor tends to be more about audience size. Of course, that's why executives are the ones we trust to keep companies solvent.
Look at the gigantic size of the metallic components in a 2600. The solder joints, heat dissipation, overall speed all lead to higher durability. Remember, that was a system that gave code direct control over the beam during every scan line, because there wasn't anything like a graphics processor or a display buffer.
The newer, more advanced technology tends to stress hardware more and die faster. I would be surprised if many 2600's died of natural causes. I'd also be surprised if more than 80% of the original batch of PS3's were still around.
You can still buy new NES and Genesis consoles from Asia. Obscure / difficult ones like Vextrex are right out, but a lot of this old hardware "rotting" away is actually quite accessible.
I'm reminded of old cars. There are many great old cars worth preserving from the 1930's. But you're not going to be able to keep the original leather and parts... those will eventually rot away. That's the nature of the beast.
Arcade units in the 80's were largely purpose-built machines with non-standard technology. Keeping old machines alive is quite a pain. Emulated versions can be very close, and accessible to everyone. You can't always keep the exact leather, but you can keep the soul.
If I knowingly let my car rot to the point where a wheel falls off on the freeway and kills a bystander, I'm liable for manslaughter. If there are 700 violations of safety regulations that someone approved of, which let an oil platform rot to the point where it exploded killing 10, why are they not liable for manslaughter?
Slashdot Mirror
Two things that make the system above work is that A: the brain is pretty self-organizing, and B: the brain has more neurons to fire than the robot arms. The brain being self-organizing means that if you jam an arm control somewhere in the motor cortex, through trial and error the brain will more or less figure out where it is and how to use it. If you tried to connect a complex neurological connection to the computer in the other direction, you'd have to know exactly what each neuron effected before hooking it up. This is because of B: the brain having ridiculous amounts of neurons. The brain can flex everything until something twitches. You don't have the resolution in current computer systems to try flicking every connected neuron individually.
The more likely immoral direction would be to put monkey's brains into the next generation of Roomba. Or make the next mustang with a self-driving system built from the brain of a mustang. Or wire up your pilots to control the complex machinery with a thought.
Remind me never to throw Christmas at your house.
You could also say that people have morals drilled into them though a process of socialization. There are certain morals that are inherent in the step of brain development where people realize that other people are people too. And there are morals genetically coded to do things like reduce inbreeding and to keep similar genes from stabbing other similar genes.
We used to bridge current directly through people's brains for therapy, at pretty high power levels. That sucker seems reasonably resilient.
"Fun" gets overused as a blanket statement about games. Even basic things like "that game is using exploration for fun" or "that game confuses the player in a fun puzzle to solve." Neither of those sound terribly uncommon when people talk about "fun" in videogames, but I was actually just referring to the movie Inception. Would you primarily say that Inception was "fun", or that nearly all movies are "fun"? Then why are games like Metal Gear referred to as "fun"?
The problem is that once you take the complex sauce that is required to make a game interesting... a little exploration here, some rewards there, perception of danger, unique game rules...and just call it "fun", then all discussions about video games degrade into bouncing balls and slobbering puppies. Anything not suitable to be put in the context of an ice-cream truck is no longer a suitable subject for a video game. Is murder, divorce, and being the victim of psychological torture fun? No, but Heavy Rain was still an incredible game. Is God Of War 3 fun? It can be, but labeling it that doesn't actually advance the discussion or give a sense for why the game is compelling.
Games, by definition, have to make war fun.
No. Games have to make war a compelling experience.
Silent Hill is not fun. Silent Hill is a frightening, hellish experience.
Heavy Rain is not fun. Heavy Rain is a gripping action drama.
Diablo isn't fun. Diablo is a Pavlovian masterpiece of reward pacing.
Most MMO's cease being fun in the middle, and become compelling reward treadmills with social aspects.
Flower isn't fun. Flower is peaceful, relaxing, and gorgeous.
EA Sports Active isn't fun. It has a compelling real-world reward (getting fit).
The idea that games have to be fun is a silly generalization. Many games are compelling for reasons other than traditional "fun." You have the drive for exploration, the drive for mastery. You have tension about plot elements. You have reward pacing. The player can care about characters or events. The player can be afraid. The player can be in love. You can twist the player's anger at an enemy, or play up the player's need to understand their character. You can even just play the tension-and-release-and-tension rollercoaster carefully to make an otherwise boring experience into a compelling one. In similar ways to how Se7en was compelling, so too was Heavy Rain.
"Fun" is nowhere near as nuanced an understanding of videogames as the medium is capable of.
For one, you can make the player experience deeper loss in videogames. Say the player chooses to risk his own life to save another character during a firefight, only later to have that character die by a roadside IED. Or maybe the player builds up each of a group of characters, only to make a decision that costs one of the characters their life. When you're watching a movie, you can sympathize with characters dealing with regret. But only video games can make that regret belong to the player. Myth by Bungie explored this a little bit, with NPC warriors that you tried to herd and keep alive through multiple levels, but inevitably your little loved ones would die off one at a time because of your mistakes.
We called Iran part of the Axis of Evil, and put them on a to-be-destroyed list. I don't think we realize how often people in other parts of the world reference that really, really stupid speech.
Considering my laptops seem to eat traditional disk-based HDD's in about 2 years, I'd consider SSD's the longer-lived option.
My laptop's hard drive already utilizes heat-assisted magnetic erasing, though it tends to work on an entire drive at a time.
She reverse-engineered several pieces of Apple hardware using a solid electronics workstation, then vlogged about it using equations and whiteboards. What do you want, a cherry on her head?
While I happen to think she is pretty, her physical attractiveness is irrelevant to officially being hot. For the required car analogy, that's like complaining about the Golf GTI W-12 concept car not having a working radio.
http://www.chriscanfield.net/Offsite/fbiRobocopPony.jpg
I've always wondered about this. Every police force in every city in every state seems to have a different badge. Every major city has dozens of metalwork and crafts shops that can build reasonable-looking badges. Not interacting with police officers every day, I have no idea what the badges in my home city looks like, let alone well enough to spot a fake.
Back in the day, badges were difficult things to fake. Now, they're a dime a dozen. Add in ID cards that can be easily printed and laminated, and none of the normal authentications are valid any more.
In the grand scheme of things, if someone has a gun at your door and claims to be a cop with a warrant, you nod politely, upload a photograph to facebook, and let them in. Still, I wouldn't mind a key exchange with a trusted server.
It's probably best to nip anticompetitive, anti-market practices in the butt before entrenching bad practices and killing the possibility of a genuine marketplace. And e-book sales have the potential for a lot of anti-market practices.
The Connecticut AG is specifically asking them to come in and talk about it, and convince him / her that it is an OK practice. He's not pressing charges or forcing a breakup or anything. This seems reasonable.
The iterative price is near zero. The initial unit price may be a million dollars.
Collusion. Apple, Amazon, (and presumably the Nook) normally have to compete with each other, trying to out-price one another. If Apple negotiates a special "vampire sale" with a publisher to co-incide with the next Twilight movie release, suddenly everyone gets books at that rate. That kills any competitive edge Apple might gain from the lowered costs, and therefore the price floor is prevented from drifting downwards. Everyone maintains the same prices at the same levels.
Basically, this is an indirect way of creating a monopoly pricing situation without directly setting prices with competitors.
Intel's canoe lake reference netbook looks fantastic.
It's easier to make a given pricepoint faster, than it is to make a given power point cheaper. Once you've sunk the ridiculous fob plant costs, it's probably about the same cost to make 1" of an i7 as it is to make 1" of a 486. Add in all of the non-flexible details of manufacturing (soldering points, shipping, etc), and it makes sense that things get faster but not necessarily cheaper.
The netbook makers are now pushing 10 hours per battery charge, with keyboards that aren't terrible and screens that are basically as big as they can be for a given size. Intel is focusing on low-power portable processors far more than at any point in their history. What features, specifically, are you upset that the netbook makers aren't improving?
Since when are touchscreens "the latest tech?" Touchscreens have been around since the 70's. My personal first touchscreen gadget was from the early 90's. Everybody and their kid has had a touchscreen DS for ten years.
Keyboards are well established, but are fidgety to manufacture and have lots of moving pieces. A touchscreen, in theory at least, should be cheaper to make. It makes sense.
Gas car for your commute, electric for your significant other's. Use the 600 mile car when traveling distances, and the 60 for cheap commuting around town. Or get your kids an electric car for getting to and from high school / events around town, but keep them from driving across state lines. Rent an electric to get from the airport to your hotel, and don't have to worry about filling it up again on the other end.
Of course, the hope is that ranges much larger than 60 miles are attainable. The Teslas have a 250 mile range. While they're well out of a reasonable price range, there should be ways of getting that number down. Similarly, there are recharge battery technologies in progress that should be chargeable in bathroom-break timeframes. All together that should be fine for a primary car.
I bought an electric motorcycle for $500. The range is about twice my normal round-trip commute, and the operating cost is negligible. These things are all over New York, and I wouldn't be surprised to see them taking off soon around the country.
An electric bike is just an electric car without a lot of the bells and whistles. We're really not that far off.
The only way to get infrastructure in place is to spend the money and develop it. The only way to develop the technology is to get industries behind it researching better and more advanced forms of tech. And if we can develop it domestically, we might have an actual sustainable car market here in the United States.
I don't know. If the technology was mature, the market mass, and the price sufficiently low, why would anyone need to step in and help develop it? Just let things take off on their own. It's only when actual help is needed to develop what could be a profitable industry domestically that the government should step in.
We gave up the car market in the 90's because our cars were "good enough" that we didn't have to invest in the future of technology. International brands stepped in with stronger developed technology bases and ate our lunch. Now we have the world's only all-electric car maker, and a potential route to future competitiveness. Should we just ignore this, because our gas-powered Fords are "good enough?"
True, but JAMMA is basically a standard plug for monitor-and-controller. It helps simplify power management and other key issues, but if a transistor goes on your game board, you're in trouble. You can't simply swap the ROM into a new generic system like a dead console, and emulating the arcade unit is still generally specific to a particular game. It will be a help to museums who have to deal with things like dead monitors. But it won't help them deal with static-fried board parts.
Also to be fair, the ones who fight hardest against the spread of their works are the executives who are focused on the bottom line. Most creative professionals I've met are more sympathetic, as their driving factor tends to be more about audience size. Of course, that's why executives are the ones we trust to keep companies solvent.
Don't worry: 3D TV's will soon allow you to turn your $500 PS3 into a $20 Virtual Boy.
Kidding aside, Wario Land and Teleroboxers are both worth owning on the Virtual Boy. And 3D Tetris in 3D is rather fun.
Look at the gigantic size of the metallic components in a 2600. The solder joints, heat dissipation, overall speed all lead to higher durability. Remember, that was a system that gave code direct control over the beam during every scan line, because there wasn't anything like a graphics processor or a display buffer.
The newer, more advanced technology tends to stress hardware more and die faster. I would be surprised if many 2600's died of natural causes. I'd also be surprised if more than 80% of the original batch of PS3's were still around.
You can still buy new NES and Genesis consoles from Asia. Obscure / difficult ones like Vextrex are right out, but a lot of this old hardware "rotting" away is actually quite accessible.
I'm reminded of old cars. There are many great old cars worth preserving from the 1930's. But you're not going to be able to keep the original leather and parts... those will eventually rot away. That's the nature of the beast.
Arcade units in the 80's were largely purpose-built machines with non-standard technology. Keeping old machines alive is quite a pain. Emulated versions can be very close, and accessible to everyone. You can't always keep the exact leather, but you can keep the soul.
If I knowingly let my car rot to the point where a wheel falls off on the freeway and kills a bystander, I'm liable for manslaughter. If there are 700 violations of safety regulations that someone approved of, which let an oil platform rot to the point where it exploded killing 10, why are they not liable for manslaughter?