Oh, hi. Sorry I didn't recognize your screen name.
I think I found the preference setting that screws everything up. Go to the top of this page (or any story thread page) and click the pen&paper icon in the top right corner. In the 'Viewing' tab there's a setting for 'Enable Dynamic Discussions'. If that's off, you get white on white. If it's on, things look fine. At least for me.
I am using Firefox 3.0.10 right now, and I see no problem at all on Slashdot. Not the front page, not the comments, not in the sections which you describe. It seems to work whether or not I'm logged in, so it has nothing to do with my display settings.
I'm sure it's broken for some people. But I think this display bug is much more uncommon than you believe.
I wonder if it has anything to do with Add-ons? I have none, zero, as I'm not allowed to install them here at work.
Many people are using the Mission Architect (MA) to create customized story-based missions, for themselves or their friends. This enables long role-playing sessions in a coherent group, just like the tabletop games of old. The MA has brought role-playing back to this MMO-RPG. It's an amazing thing that no other game has accomplished as well.
The problem is the *reward*. Giving full xp for MA-created enemies was just stupid, and providing an easy way to cash in tickets for loot is bizarre. The MA gives such good rewards, they left very little incentive to play the regular game.
I have faith, however, that this will be fixed, and that they'll nerf the MA before long.
Alfred Bester's works were weird and hyper-real. You couldn't get away with hazy camerawork and plot elements that were forgivably nonsensical in a Bester film. You'd need to show how people can jaunt, you'd need to show small-craft space combat, and you'd need to show that glowing guy who shorts out robots near him. In other words, you can paper over many of the images in Dick's work, but with Bester you'd have to show them. And that would cost money. Demolished Man would cost $200 million to produce, and Hollywood isn't desperate enough (yet) to take a chance like that.
I'm not worried about Kindle and Amazon dominating the reader market. It turns out that the iPhone (and iPod touch) is a pretty good ebook reader itself. Especially if you get the Stanza application, which uses non-proprietary formats like PDF and ePub, and can search for free books on a lot of sites that do not use DRM, such as Project Gutenberg. I tell you, Stanza is the best non-proprietary ebook application you can get. As long as there is this kind of competition, proprietary schemes are doomed to...
What's that? Stanza was purchased by Amazon just a couple weeks ago?
Yes, it is that heavy. You're not putting it's weight on those six legs, you're putting it on a 1 cm^2 area on one of the cushions. It's going to shoot straight through that couch.
And the floor. That 1 cc of UDD weighs 130 kg, so it's exerting 1274 N of force, or 12.7 MPa of pressure. The compressive strength of hardened concrete is 30-70 MPa. I posted an earlier estimate as a joke and got it a bit wrong -- you'll hold this stuff in a concrete bunker, but it's going to smash through a wood floor.
You're right -- just think of what a boon this will be to the mining and drilling industries.
Because you know, that's all it's going to be good for. It's dense enough to fall through granite and limestone like they were tissue paper. I'm getting a figure of mechanical pressure that's about twice what hardened steel can take.
Fill a soda can with this stuff and watch it shoot down into the center of the Earth, with nothing you can do to stop it. If it's any consolation, after that it will probably fuse and explode.
I, for one, welcome our new swedish doomsday weapon.
I didn't say that you worshipped Blizzard. It was the huge number of Blizzard worshippers that gave their game a huge initial population, which lured in more people. MMOs live and die by their first year, and that's when Blizzard's followers gave them an immense advantage.
I did say that you didn't seem to have tried any other games. Glad I was mistaken, there. I haven't tried Warhammer myself, but I agree with you about Eve. I play City of Heroes, which is as deep and grind-free as WoW, if not even better by those metrics. (But CoH has dated graphics. You can't beat Blizzard for polish.) I've heard that EQ2 is as deep as WoW, and Age of Conan had potential. But those games are ghost towns because all of the players are on WoW...because that's where the people are...because that's where a lot of people started.
Many of them have achievement systems and world events. Many of them are deeper than WoW, and many have less of a grind.
The reason WoW is on top is because Blizzard programmers are top-notch. Their games are polished to perfection and brilliantly designed to induce addictive response. Because of that, Blizzard has a huge, ravenous fanbase which enabled them to start their game out strong.
It's not because WoW is a better game than other MMOs. It's because there are gamers who revere Blizzard and don't look at other games. Blizzard has earned that kind of loyalty...but there is the sad question of what other games could have been great, if people would only have noticed them.
I think I understand our essential disagreement, here.
You believe in a 'global warming' that will melt the Antarctic ice caps and bring increased global rainfall -- the 'tropical earth' scenario.
I believe in a 'global climate change' scenario where the fringe of Antarctica melts (causing a sea level rise of 2-4 meters, not 60 meters, which is what the full ice cap melting would cause). I believe climates around the world will shift -- every arid regions that becomes wet will be balanced by a wet region becoming arid -- with an associated era of catastrophic weather.
I would say that you're neglecting several things. Antarctica is cold because of continental geology -- the Drake passage keeps it cold by allowing the circumpolar current, and unless we somehow reconnect the continents it will always remain cold. (Save for one scenario, where the global temperature is high enough that even the circumpolar current can't keep Antarctica below freezing. In that scenario, the tropics *will* burn. But I'm not saying that will happen, I'm saying it's the only way for your predictions to work out.)
You're also missing that every place that gets additional rainfall will be taking it from somewhere else. There might be a net global increase in rainfall, but a lot of currently arable land will suffer permanent droughts. You are correct that we can take advantage of the rainfall in some places, but you are neglecting the damage done by drought elsewhere.
In fact I'll end on that point -- your perspective of global climate change as an opportunity is blind to all the damage that will be done. Even the opportunities you suggest will require massive civil engineering projects which will suck away valuable resources. Your cost benefit analysis is ignoring all of the costs. So it's no wonder that you don't see climate change as a disaster. You're Lex Luthor, counting your potential new real estate, ignoring what you had to do to get it.
With that, I think I'm done with this several day old discussion. Have fun with the last word, and good luck with that perspective of yours.
I work in the climate sciences, so I just can't let your misinformation stand.
Re: Lack of sunlight over the poles.
There is a reason that large plants do not grow past the Arctic tree line. Permafrost, wind, and cold inhibit vegetation, and they will cause severe problems for agriculture. The angle of incidence of sunlight, in addition to the amount of sunlight per year, causes these effects. Antarctica will never get warm enough for agriculture to take hold -- if it does, the tropics and likely the temperate zones will be uninhabitable.
Re: Katabatic winds
You'll note that the Santa Ana winds are also devastating to vegetation. They are the reason that much of southern California is a desert. I would also point out that climate change is unlikely to mitigate the antarctic katabatic winds -- it's more likely to amplify them, because there will be more energy in the system.
Re: Desert reclamation
Natural reclamation of deserts takes thousands of years. Volcanic islands are not deserts -- the volcanic effluvium is mineral-rich, and they are by definition in wet environments with plenty of rainfall.
All that said, you may have a point with man-made desert reclamation. Those efforts are difficult and tricky (see the New Valley Project as an example) but they can be done. Technology *might* lift us out of the catastrophe. My point is that you should not depend upon so far fictional technologies as a reason to ignore an oncoming catastrophe. Even in your future world where we have terraformed the Sahara and covered Antarctica in greenhouses, those engineering feats will have come at the expense of other priorities, such as feeding the poor or preventing pandemics. One way or another, global climate change is going to be a catastrophe that will harm billions of people. It is not something to anticipate fondly, nor should we shrug and look for a silver lining. We should do everything in our power to mitigate it.
Re: Stumbling on the perfect temperature.
Read about the Anthropic Principle sometime. It's a cosmological principle, but it applies to the state of Earth's climate as well.
Greenland isn't a continent, it's an island, and it's unlikely to have very much tillable land underneath its ice sheet. Not to mention that proper colonization and utilization of a post-melt Greenland would take a century or more.
Antarctica is the same story, except it'll never be warm enough to farm. There will always be some ice cap, katabatic winds, and a general lack of sunlight over the pole.
Maybe you mean that, with added rainfall, there will be more arable land in Africa or Asia? No such luck. It takes thousands of years to turn sand back into soil, even with frequent rain. And the problem with Africa isn't the amount of land they have, it's their insane systems of 'government' to use the word loosely. They already have enough land to feed themselves, they just can't stop killing one another to use it.
Meanwhile we'll be losing land from Europe, Asia, and America. And *if* we get more rain, it's likely to come in the form of heat-driven storm systems -- more thunderstorms, larger and more frequent hurricanes.
Global climate change is going to be a bad thing, with very few upsides, for the vast majority of the human race. Trying to discuss its opportunities is like...well, you're talking about 'investing' in *catastrophe*. Only supervillains think like that. We should try to avert the catastrophe, if we can.
My first reaction on reading this article? Of *course* quantum theory is closer to human thought than Markov modelling.
Markov theory (assuming I understand it correctly) involves discrete separable states with transient (but still separable) intermediate states. Quantum mechanics involves superpositioned states -- states that are not separable, of which several can exist at the same time.
Have you ever felt angry and sad at the same time? Happy and excited? Hungry and in pain? The human brain doesn't do discrete, separable emotional states. We're always some superposition of emotions, thoughts, and needs.
As for wishful thinking, it's a state of hoping for one outcome while being mentally prepared for its opposite. Wishful thinking is, by definition, a superposition of mental states. Of course QM describes it better.
When you think about it, this entire line of research deserves one big 'Duh'. But then, I suppose most great insights seem obvious after they've been discovered.
You're assuming a woman that needs to fight for power. An already empowered woman thinks much like a man but with a more social perspective, with no deception because that kills social relationships. An empowered woman is really a treat to converse with and to know.
How do you find an empowered woman? My advice would be to stop treating women like alien creatures and assuming they're always trying to deceive you.
Reviewing it was not illegal. Downloading it was illegal. It does not matter that it was downloaded for review.
You can argue about whether or not the law is fair in this case, but it is clear; downloading the movie broke the law. I would expect the man to be fired by almost any company, once the copyright holder complained about his column.
I'm trying to figure out if pairing achievements with webforums is genius or the beginning of the end of a useful internet. Maybe the end of the era of work productivity, at least.
Puzzle games are a different animal. They can use the same puzzle over and over again, with algorithmically generated variations. For Tetris, the algorithm just chooses between 6 blocks and where to start them. Some players are happy with no more than that.
But most games have 'content' -- pre-generated tasks, events, and challenges. This content has to be created by a human, by hand. (Well, it doesn't have to be, but as games have gotten more complex, very few of them even try to provide algorithmically generated content.)
So the manpower you put on a game does translate into replayability. And manpower directly correlates with budget.
What we need is more games with engrossing gameplay and randomly generated maps, enemies, and challenges. The state of game AI isn't quite up to managing that, yet, but it'll get there.
Or the last tool of those who know that every other recourse has been neutered by an oppressive government.
Fortunately, the legal system might still work in this case, so violence isn't necessary. But it's an option that will always, should always, exist. Without it we are slaves.
I disagree that 'gameplay has stagnated'. There are major expansions two or three times a year, and gameplay has changed radically several times with the introduction of inventions and flashbacks. Soon we'll have the Mission Architect, which will be a revolution for the industry, let alone the game.
There's no disputing that CoH is dated and showing its age. But there's a lot of life in the old girl, yet.
We know for sure that the current CoH team has nothing to do with Champions Online. This is the old team, the one that screwed up while managing the game in the first few years then abandoned it for cash. Some of the players of CoH still bear a grudge from those days, and will not be trying Champions.
CO is in no way a direct successor for CoH. It is a competitor, and one whose development team is starting out with a reputation for good programming but poor management.
So do what Asheron's Call did. When the city of Arwic became the de facto center of their world, and a huge, laggy population settled there...the devs blew it up. Blew up the whole town. Nothing left but a crater. And IIRC they created a few new towns to give the players more options. But the message was clear -- don't cluster together, or the enemy will find you.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, hi. Sorry I didn't recognize your screen name.
I think I found the preference setting that screws everything up. Go to the top of this page (or any story thread page) and click the pen&paper icon in the top right corner. In the 'Viewing' tab there's a setting for 'Enable Dynamic Discussions'. If that's off, you get white on white. If it's on, things look fine. At least for me.
I am using Firefox 3.0.10 right now, and I see no problem at all on Slashdot. Not the front page, not the comments, not in the sections which you describe. It seems to work whether or not I'm logged in, so it has nothing to do with my display settings.
I'm sure it's broken for some people. But I think this display bug is much more uncommon than you believe.
I wonder if it has anything to do with Add-ons? I have none, zero, as I'm not allowed to install them here at work.
Having someone modded 'Troll' calling another person racist for not liking green skin... ...actually, makes a sort of sense.
The content isn't the problem.
Many people are using the Mission Architect (MA) to create customized story-based missions, for themselves or their friends. This enables long role-playing sessions in a coherent group, just like the tabletop games of old. The MA has brought role-playing back to this MMO-RPG. It's an amazing thing that no other game has accomplished as well.
The problem is the *reward*. Giving full xp for MA-created enemies was just stupid, and providing an easy way to cash in tickets for loot is bizarre. The MA gives such good rewards, they left very little incentive to play the regular game.
I have faith, however, that this will be fixed, and that they'll nerf the MA before long.
Phillip K. Dick's works were weird and surreal.
Alfred Bester's works were weird and hyper-real. You couldn't get away with hazy camerawork and plot elements that were forgivably nonsensical in a Bester film. You'd need to show how people can jaunt, you'd need to show small-craft space combat, and you'd need to show that glowing guy who shorts out robots near him. In other words, you can paper over many of the images in Dick's work, but with Bester you'd have to show them. And that would cost money. Demolished Man would cost $200 million to produce, and Hollywood isn't desperate enough (yet) to take a chance like that.
I'm not worried about Kindle and Amazon dominating the reader market. It turns out that the iPhone (and iPod touch) is a pretty good ebook reader itself. Especially if you get the Stanza application, which uses non-proprietary formats like PDF and ePub, and can search for free books on a lot of sites that do not use DRM, such as Project Gutenberg. I tell you, Stanza is the best non-proprietary ebook application you can get. As long as there is this kind of competition, proprietary schemes are doomed to...
What's that? Stanza was purchased by Amazon just a couple weeks ago?
Oh.
Nevermind, then.
Yes, it is that heavy. You're not putting it's weight on those six legs, you're putting it on a 1 cm^2 area on one of the cushions. It's going to shoot straight through that couch.
And the floor. That 1 cc of UDD weighs 130 kg, so it's exerting 1274 N of force, or 12.7 MPa of pressure. The compressive strength of hardened concrete is 30-70 MPa. I posted an earlier estimate as a joke and got it a bit wrong -- you'll hold this stuff in a concrete bunker, but it's going to smash through a wood floor.
You're right -- just think of what a boon this will be to the mining and drilling industries.
Because you know, that's all it's going to be good for. It's dense enough to fall through granite and limestone like they were tissue paper. I'm getting a figure of mechanical pressure that's about twice what hardened steel can take.
Fill a soda can with this stuff and watch it shoot down into the center of the Earth, with nothing you can do to stop it. If it's any consolation, after that it will probably fuse and explode.
I, for one, welcome our new swedish doomsday weapon.
I didn't say that you worshipped Blizzard. It was the huge number of Blizzard worshippers that gave their game a huge initial population, which lured in more people. MMOs live and die by their first year, and that's when Blizzard's followers gave them an immense advantage.
I did say that you didn't seem to have tried any other games. Glad I was mistaken, there. I haven't tried Warhammer myself, but I agree with you about Eve. I play City of Heroes, which is as deep and grind-free as WoW, if not even better by those metrics. (But CoH has dated graphics. You can't beat Blizzard for polish.) I've heard that EQ2 is as deep as WoW, and Age of Conan had potential. But those games are ghost towns because all of the players are on WoW...because that's where the people are...because that's where a lot of people started.
You haven't even tried any other MMOs, have you?
Many of them have achievement systems and world events. Many of them are deeper than WoW, and many have less of a grind.
The reason WoW is on top is because Blizzard programmers are top-notch. Their games are polished to perfection and brilliantly designed to induce addictive response. Because of that, Blizzard has a huge, ravenous fanbase which enabled them to start their game out strong.
It's not because WoW is a better game than other MMOs. It's because there are gamers who revere Blizzard and don't look at other games. Blizzard has earned that kind of loyalty...but there is the sad question of what other games could have been great, if people would only have noticed them.
I think I understand our essential disagreement, here.
You believe in a 'global warming' that will melt the Antarctic ice caps and bring increased global rainfall -- the 'tropical earth' scenario.
I believe in a 'global climate change' scenario where the fringe of Antarctica melts (causing a sea level rise of 2-4 meters, not 60 meters, which is what the full ice cap melting would cause). I believe climates around the world will shift -- every arid regions that becomes wet will be balanced by a wet region becoming arid -- with an associated era of catastrophic weather.
I would say that you're neglecting several things. Antarctica is cold because of continental geology -- the Drake passage keeps it cold by allowing the circumpolar current, and unless we somehow reconnect the continents it will always remain cold. (Save for one scenario, where the global temperature is high enough that even the circumpolar current can't keep Antarctica below freezing. In that scenario, the tropics *will* burn. But I'm not saying that will happen, I'm saying it's the only way for your predictions to work out.)
You're also missing that every place that gets additional rainfall will be taking it from somewhere else. There might be a net global increase in rainfall, but a lot of currently arable land will suffer permanent droughts. You are correct that we can take advantage of the rainfall in some places, but you are neglecting the damage done by drought elsewhere.
In fact I'll end on that point -- your perspective of global climate change as an opportunity is blind to all the damage that will be done. Even the opportunities you suggest will require massive civil engineering projects which will suck away valuable resources. Your cost benefit analysis is ignoring all of the costs. So it's no wonder that you don't see climate change as a disaster. You're Lex Luthor, counting your potential new real estate, ignoring what you had to do to get it.
With that, I think I'm done with this several day old discussion. Have fun with the last word, and good luck with that perspective of yours.
You're neglecting that
I work in the climate sciences, so I just can't let your misinformation stand.
Re: Lack of sunlight over the poles.
There is a reason that large plants do not grow past the Arctic tree line. Permafrost, wind, and cold inhibit vegetation, and they will cause severe problems for agriculture. The angle of incidence of sunlight, in addition to the amount of sunlight per year, causes these effects. Antarctica will never get warm enough for agriculture to take hold -- if it does, the tropics and likely the temperate zones will be uninhabitable.
Re: Katabatic winds
You'll note that the Santa Ana winds are also devastating to vegetation. They are the reason that much of southern California is a desert. I would also point out that climate change is unlikely to mitigate the antarctic katabatic winds -- it's more likely to amplify them, because there will be more energy in the system.
Re: Desert reclamation
Natural reclamation of deserts takes thousands of years. Volcanic islands are not deserts -- the volcanic effluvium is mineral-rich, and they are by definition in wet environments with plenty of rainfall.
All that said, you may have a point with man-made desert reclamation. Those efforts are difficult and tricky (see the New Valley Project as an example) but they can be done. Technology *might* lift us out of the catastrophe. My point is that you should not depend upon so far fictional technologies as a reason to ignore an oncoming catastrophe. Even in your future world where we have terraformed the Sahara and covered Antarctica in greenhouses, those engineering feats will have come at the expense of other priorities, such as feeding the poor or preventing pandemics. One way or another, global climate change is going to be a catastrophe that will harm billions of people. It is not something to anticipate fondly, nor should we shrug and look for a silver lining. We should do everything in our power to mitigate it.
Re: Stumbling on the perfect temperature.
Read about the Anthropic Principle sometime. It's a cosmological principle, but it applies to the state of Earth's climate as well.
What continent are you talking about?
Greenland isn't a continent, it's an island, and it's unlikely to have very much tillable land underneath its ice sheet. Not to mention that proper colonization and utilization of a post-melt Greenland would take a century or more.
Antarctica is the same story, except it'll never be warm enough to farm. There will always be some ice cap, katabatic winds, and a general lack of sunlight over the pole.
Maybe you mean that, with added rainfall, there will be more arable land in Africa or Asia? No such luck. It takes thousands of years to turn sand back into soil, even with frequent rain. And the problem with Africa isn't the amount of land they have, it's their insane systems of 'government' to use the word loosely. They already have enough land to feed themselves, they just can't stop killing one another to use it.
Meanwhile we'll be losing land from Europe, Asia, and America. And *if* we get more rain, it's likely to come in the form of heat-driven storm systems -- more thunderstorms, larger and more frequent hurricanes.
Global climate change is going to be a bad thing, with very few upsides, for the vast majority of the human race. Trying to discuss its opportunities is like...well, you're talking about 'investing' in *catastrophe*. Only supervillains think like that. We should try to avert the catastrophe, if we can.
After all, what is the law?
No spill blood!
Who makes the rules?
Someone else!
What happens when we break the law?
A trip to the house of pain!
My first reaction on reading this article? Of *course* quantum theory is closer to human thought than Markov modelling.
Markov theory (assuming I understand it correctly) involves discrete separable states with transient (but still separable) intermediate states. Quantum mechanics involves superpositioned states -- states that are not separable, of which several can exist at the same time.
Have you ever felt angry and sad at the same time? Happy and excited? Hungry and in pain? The human brain doesn't do discrete, separable emotional states. We're always some superposition of emotions, thoughts, and needs.
As for wishful thinking, it's a state of hoping for one outcome while being mentally prepared for its opposite. Wishful thinking is, by definition, a superposition of mental states. Of course QM describes it better.
When you think about it, this entire line of research deserves one big 'Duh'. But then, I suppose most great insights seem obvious after they've been discovered.
You're assuming a woman that needs to fight for power. An already empowered woman thinks much like a man but with a more social perspective, with no deception because that kills social relationships. An empowered woman is really a treat to converse with and to know.
How do you find an empowered woman? My advice would be to stop treating women like alien creatures and assuming they're always trying to deceive you.
Reviewing it was not illegal. Downloading it was illegal. It does not matter that it was downloaded for review.
You can argue about whether or not the law is fair in this case, but it is clear; downloading the movie broke the law. I would expect the man to be fired by almost any company, once the copyright holder complained about his column.
Yes. So wake me when the robots start experimenting on catgirls.
In fact, I'll need pictures as proof.
Moderators should just refuse to moderate April Fool's stories. The story's from an alternate reality; let them moderate their own insane events.
I'm trying to figure out if pairing achievements with webforums is genius or the beginning of the end of a useful internet. Maybe the end of the era of work productivity, at least.
Eh...not quite true.
Puzzle games are a different animal. They can use the same puzzle over and over again, with algorithmically generated variations. For Tetris, the algorithm just chooses between 6 blocks and where to start them. Some players are happy with no more than that.
But most games have 'content' -- pre-generated tasks, events, and challenges. This content has to be created by a human, by hand. (Well, it doesn't have to be, but as games have gotten more complex, very few of them even try to provide algorithmically generated content.)
So the manpower you put on a game does translate into replayability. And manpower directly correlates with budget.
What we need is more games with engrossing gameplay and randomly generated maps, enemies, and challenges. The state of game AI isn't quite up to managing that, yet, but it'll get there.
Or the last tool of those who know that every other recourse has been neutered by an oppressive government.
Fortunately, the legal system might still work in this case, so violence isn't necessary. But it's an option that will always, should always, exist. Without it we are slaves.
I disagree that 'gameplay has stagnated'. There are major expansions two or three times a year, and gameplay has changed radically several times with the introduction of inventions and flashbacks. Soon we'll have the Mission Architect, which will be a revolution for the industry, let alone the game.
There's no disputing that CoH is dated and showing its age. But there's a lot of life in the old girl, yet.
We know for sure that the current CoH team has nothing to do with Champions Online. This is the old team, the one that screwed up while managing the game in the first few years then abandoned it for cash. Some of the players of CoH still bear a grudge from those days, and will not be trying Champions.
CO is in no way a direct successor for CoH. It is a competitor, and one whose development team is starting out with a reputation for good programming but poor management.
So do what Asheron's Call did. When the city of Arwic became the de facto center of their world, and a huge, laggy population settled there...the devs blew it up. Blew up the whole town. Nothing left but a crater. And IIRC they created a few new towns to give the players more options. But the message was clear -- don't cluster together, or the enemy will find you.