would be barred from placing an ad using their *own* trademark. I think the issue is being placed at the wrong level: the people placing the ad should be held responsible for infringement (if I try to advertise adult materials under the "playmate" label, *I*, not the search engine, have infringed). If, on the other hand, playmates toys decides to pay for an advertisment, surely you don't suggest that this is wrong?
Best encouragment I made for myself to exercise was attaching a low power (386) computer with a terminal program to a stationary bike. Strap the keyboard in an accessable place and play muds for a while... amazing what motivation to not die in a dungeon will do for you.
That's the theory anyway. However, since DVD menus on some of my early DVDs are glitchy on current *regular* DVD player, I worry about these new players. Not being a video/audiophile, I don't really care what the new format will allow so much as that it will be software compatible with my existing DVDs. My VHS collection doesn't collect that much dust (my boy still likes Godzilla movies, and how much resolution do you really need to watch Tokyo gets leveled again?), but you have already seen the major stores pull VHS or put it back in some dark corner.
I'm used to the upgrade cycle on my PC. As a programmer/designer, I can understand that the abstraction layers we have built by burning cycles has made software easier to build. What I don't want is another purchase round with the same content I already have, for a marginal increase in quality (which I won't really appreciate, having a 36" CRT instead of a HD TV). [And I'm not buying HD until the wars around it stop either.]
This should allow for a smoother transition for consumers to adopt this new format.
For who? Why do I care what happens at the factory. What it *does* mean is that the product can be scaled up for large production quicker, which should hopefully mean lower prices sooner. However, it means *nothing* as far as my transition... I won't know what the next generation DVD is like to transition to until I see how well companies handle backwards compatibility. If it fails to run *any* DVD collection, I will consider it a failure, because all the factory efficiency in the world won't make me toss my existing DVD collections.
I would do it this way today, if I were to do it again. Back then, CD emulation tools were primative. Some games we were able to get to run via NOCD mods or the existing CD tools, but it was just a major pain overall.
Additionally, tools for locking the desktops down are much more powerful, but so is the complexity of the game install. Most of the games we ran were DOS (which meant a custom menu loaded and selected most games directly - nice). Windows XP's Kiosk mode would be something to investigate (especially the ability to prevent most desktop interactions).
Where do you work that you can see 4-6 years down the road? Corporate culture has integrated "process improvement" to such a degree, I feel good if the spec is good for 4 - 6 MONTHS. 4-6 years from now, I would expect everything I write to be unrecognizable.
(That said, I do have one customer who is running on a database I wrote in 1986, but then again, they don't get "process improvement".)
As a younger geek businessman I ran the numbers on such a place and tried to operate one back in the days of 386/486s. It may seem easy on the surface to run such a center, but make sure you factor in administration (some automated method to reload the machines from images in particular), hardware replacement costs (these centers are *hard* on equipment, due to the "it isn't mine attitude") and general manpower requirement to supervise sales and usage.
If you have already considered these things, there are some things you can do that increase your revenue and customer retention:
#1 - Snack bar/coffee shop (depending on your demographic). This should be a separate space adjacent to the computers (allowing drinks and electronics to coexist is not for the weak). You will need a different license to serve food.
#2 - Adequate space for people to chill out. Atmosphere is key here to retain people and bring them back. Consider TVs like you see in sports bars, except maybe some can be showing the action in the game area. Remember the restrooms: don't make them some pit of dispair... people will avoid coming back.
#3 - Special events. People will filter in and out, but on those slow days (Monday through Thursday, normally) having special events like tournaments is key to keeping an adequate number of paying customers.
As far as hardware, you need to run games well, but not to bleeding edge. Since you will replace hardware every year (although the old hardware can then be tasked with server duty or older games), buy something in the mid range. Don't skimp on monitors though: large displays are a good investment, as they will last 3-5 years. Optical mice (no cleaning required, more precision) and throwaway keyboards (they take tons of abuse). Forget about joysticks, they are mostly obsolete, and were a huge expense back in the day.
You can also consider consoles to augment the PCs: many have great multiplayer support, and on a LAN they rock. Just remember that console or PC, it has to be in a locked cabnets and thus is a pain to change out games), or you can kiss your investment goodbye. (Even with locked cabnets we lost games all the time, usually to brute force attacks, but sometimes to "could you switch this game/distraction created" events).
As far as layout of the game area, I personally prefer semi private quarter cubicles (obscures line of site to the monitor, but not the people) arranged in circles. Remember good office chairs if you want people to remain for long periods of time.
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing... I worry about when some of these people "contact" penny arcade while the artists are in a mood, and are presented with four letter words, decapitations (probably in a homoerotic setting) and the whole "vibe" that Penny Arcade gives off.
I think that Gabe and gang did an excellent thing, and I love the comic. I do however doubt they are the *best* group to try to distract people from the negative images of gaming when they are the type of comic that my (no very easily offended) wife won't read.
I can understand your mixed feelings. Personally, I use open source extensively and have released some minor contributions to those projects I use. I think in the long run, it is a slow moving ball of snow at the top of a very large mountain: it doesn't look like much sometimes, but it will continue to roll and gain size and speed.
That said, the commercial prospects around it will always be running madly on top of a rolling ball of snow (to continue with and strain the analogy). Some might manage to remain on top for a bit, but eventually they will bet rolled over and become part of the main bulk, rolling down the hill.
In the end, a huge amount of general purpose software will be subsumed by the bulk of our rolling ball, and all will benefit from it. But to build a business (that isn't consulting based) on it seems worse than building on a house on a bed of sand... it's building a house on a rolling snowball (OK, now I just *snapped* the analogy in pieces).
I think perhaps he was complaining about the incessant need to do pair jumps by switching primary characters (how many places has lift/tornado/lift/tornado alternations... that's not a puzzle, that's just gratuitous).
Actaully, did a bit more exploration. Individual updates are installing fine. Multiples are glitchy (with a key error). I'm guessing a bug in up2date is causing problems with more than one package.
Hmmmm. I don't get the 2.6 kernel channel, but there were some problems this morning when I tried to run updates about signatures. Later this morning I tried again, and bash and such seemed to have correct signatures. I don't know if perhaps I connecting to a different distribution server, or if perhaps they finally fixed the keys.
As I said above, Fedora is for those who want to be on the bleeding edge (although I haven't yet taken the 2.6 plunge: bleeding and decapitating myself are different). I have had minor glitches in the update service, but for the most part it has run as well as the old Redhat 9.0 that it was upgraded from.
I get tired of hearing whines about Fedora support - the whole point behind Fedora is to create a development distribution that can be used as a basis for stable distributions. I personally use it on my workstation, because I prefer to remain up to the minute so I know what to expect when I *do* release an updated package to my servers.
However, I *do not* run it on servers. If you are unhappy at the prices for Redhat's new server offerings, please complain about *that*, not the freely available distribution that acts as a feeder to it.
A lot of these companies have a huge backlog of titles that would require recompiles and minor changes to timing to make them usable on modern machines. Release them using the same bandwidth they are paying for to distribute patches, and you have a huge marketing opprotunity.
It especially makes sense when you have sequels that are vastly improved (original GTA vs the double pack). So why don't we see this more often?
Actually, I think she is undead. It would explain a lot. It is a shame that so many cool people show up on that show, because I always feel woozy after listing to "aaand NExt oNN the Diiiane rrreehm shooow", with the wierd pitch and speed variations.
I love Asimov. I have read hundreds of his books. Everything of his I have seen converted to movie form has been awful. I have heard mention of Bicentennial Man. Bah, that was sheer brilliance compared to the eye gouging horror that was Nightfall. Ahhhh, my brain hurts just remembering.... make it stop!
Having balanced classes in muds, "It's not like you couldn't balance Jedi" made me laugh. If the Jedi aren't as cool as they are in the movies (i.e., the are comparable to "Master Chef"), then those who unlocked the slot would hate how "nerfed" they are.
No, the reason they were "unlocked" slots was so they could be "munchkin" characters. The balance they are trying to use now is "if you use your skills, people can kill you", and "oh, and as they kill you, you run the risk of losing your progress". Which means a Jedi must only use Jedi skills when nobody is looking, if they don't want to risk being PKed into the ground.
Actually, considering the mythos, that seems acceptable to me. Those who love a challenge will love being flashy and then fending off the challengers. But it places Jedi even further from the orndinary players realm.
Regarding my fanboy status: I don't own Star Wars movies or toys (except a few lego sets for my son). I based "everyone wants to be a Jedi" on my conversations with non hard core gamers: "So, would you every try a game like Star Wars Galaxies?" which is usually responded to with a variant of "Being a Jedi would be cool!".
Not if being a Jedi means months of boring toil to just unlock a slot where you get PKed for smiling wrong.
While I admit that it seems pretty lame, they did explicit tell people that it would be rare to see Jedi. Frankly, it sounds like they made it too easy, with the holocubes giving 4/5s of the solution.
The fundamental problem with licensed MMORPGs is that everyone wants to be the canonical characters. This was a problem back in the day of text muds - those who build upon a "hot property" (usually illegally, but lets ignore that for now) found that they had unhappy players because everyone wanted to be "character X" where X is the most power, cool and unbalanced character you can imagine. Its like a kingdom made of nobody but kings.
In SWG, they *thought* they could avoid that by making the Jedi slot nearly randomly distributed. 32 skills, pick 5, means your chance of picking correctly is (5/32*4/31*3/30*2/29*1/28) = 4.9 in a million. So some clues were obviously necessary, and they could basically meter the Jedi slots. The holocrons difficult means only those who really want it are going to become Jedi. For the player who wants to be Jedi, this may suck, may force them out of the game and probably isn't worth it.
The real error was revealing the secret formula. Now that it is clear how base and arbitrary the formula is, people aren't happy. Of course not: they all wanted to be Luke, and now that possibility has been taken from them.
To paraphrase The Graduate, "In one word - biotech. The future, my boy, is biotech." Almost everything that is promised by nanotech devices will be inspired by, copied from or created out of biotech research. "Classic nano-tech" (the use of bulky, expensive machines to affect the nano-world) doesn't scale. Great for looking at nano stuff, but not for making it.
There are already rumblings that some of the computer components in the fairly near future will be created by organic chemical processes depositing layers at accuracies that classic nano-tech might have achieved, but at a *scale* that makes it useful. A recent "IEEE Computer Magazine" had an article on using viruses to create transistor junctions. Even if this *particular* road dead ends, it seems impossible that organic nanotech won't be the preferred approach to making all things tiny and intricate, especially once we fall below the scale that chip masks are useful.
This has been one of the best book to movie conversions I have seen. Especially considering that this is an incredibly difficult work to start with. The things that were removed wihtout shame (poetry), combined (multitudes of side characters) and left out intentionally, but with a sidelong glance (Tom Bombadill alone causes endless arguments because not enough detail is in the *books* to make a case for what he is supposed to represent. However, one of his poems does sneak into the second movie, although recited by Treebeard) show the dedication put into this movie. It would have been so easy to coast on the later movies (production costs were recovered from the first movie alone), but these are not the products of coasting, but of true affection for the grand story - the story that launched a thousand imitating "great arc fantasy" novels.
While Japan had very advanced Robotic Technology, it lacked the launch vehicle capability. On the other hand the United States had a very advanced Space programme but did not possess Robotic technology, Dr Dayal added.
Somehow I doubt that the US didn't have the robotic technology... I imagine a seasons worth of battlebots constructors could handle this task.
The SR will use solar energy to activate its 'wrist' movement and to navigate through space.
In fact, that confirms it. I think any of the spinner bots would work...
I'm curious why you use the terms "unhealthy" as you do. Perhaps from your perspective (or even a casual observer's perspective) player competition is unhealthy. Having coded muds for 10 years back in the day, I can safely say that our experiments with less competitive environments were total flops, and our grand experiment in competitive gaming (a full political system built on top of an existing clan codebase) was our greatest success.
Interestingly, our political system codified ranking *within a clan* (to a degree), but it simply caused the warring *between* the clans to become more fluid as people tried to accumulate the "new flavor" of power: votes. Joining a huge clan may have benefits, but moving up is near impossible, so new splinter clans were regularly formed.
So, while this might be "unhealthy" in some regard, it was the best thing we ever did for the health of the mud itself. Why complain about Everquest's similar success in player competition?
Non competitive games are cool (I have a book of them from the 70's, and they can be fun), but like many artifacts of the 70's, they have little staying power today. How many games of Earthball were played this year? People become bored without competition, as evidenced by the quick transformation of playing with an Earthball into some giant size soccer derivitive with it.
This comment is just silly... point #2 is totaly unrelated to his prior comments as many open source projects are *not* command line oriented. If you think FOSS somehow equals command line, you have not explored very far.
Point #1 may be valid for your speaker, but most of the open source tools I work with are web based PHP projects. Surely you are not claiming that Open Office is "desktopically (making up words is fun!) bankrupt", and the result of "BOFH" mindsets. Or Gnome and KDE exist because all FOSS creaters hate GUIs.
If you are going to troll by creating a straw man argument, at least attack one that is credible.
Re:How does this reduce spam in any shape or form?
on
SPF Design Frozen
·
· Score: 1
Ok, so you think this won't work. What do *you* suggest be done in its stead? Although this is a minor step forward, the major steps forward (like, oh I don't know, requiring encrypted passwords (SPA) before a send, which is already available) seem to never take hold because of some downlevel client user whining about lack of access.
Your argument regarding DNS entries that spammers control is valid, but weak in that *any* solution must allow a domain holder to still send mail. What it *does* do, is stuff them back into more easily filtered domains boxes, rather than joe jobbing my domain name. Your complaint about it not slowing spam is also not completely valid: I don't give a flying fruit loop if someone else implements it as long as it prevents domains *I* am responsible for maintaining being joe jobbed. If others aren't that bright, it doesn't *worsen* my situation. It makes it better. Those who don't implement it will be made to look worse and worse as they become the primary targets of joe jobs, and eventually peer pressure will cause them to implement.
Since it is easy to implement, I don't see why *not* to move forward with this. Your argument is like saying "Well, it's not a good as an armed guard, keycard security and name badges, so why should I lock my front door?" Perhaps so people don't walts in from the street and steal your TV?
Since you didn't specify where you are, and fire codes depend on local, I will assume you live in Greater Elbonia.
Greater Elbonia has virtually no safety laws, being mostly mud flats with little natural resources and almost no government. Therefor, if extension cords are out (which surprises me, but perhaps they short out in the mud) and you can't get drops properly placed by building maintenance (and I can imagine how hard that is in Greater Elbonia), I would suggest beaming microwaves from the wall to the rack.
This has several advantages: *
Lunch now becomes a simple matter of placing your food between the microwave emitter and the rack. Don't place too much food there at once, or your might cause a power drop.
Any annoying building inspectors or managers should be directed through the microwave beam, thus saving you much more time in the future not dealing with annoying building codes or management requests.
Hey, no cords!
* Advantages may be outweighed by frying every circuit in your computers.
Slashdot Mirror
According to your logic, this site:
http://www.playmatestoys.com/
would be barred from placing an ad using their *own* trademark. I think the issue is being placed at the wrong level: the people placing the ad should be held responsible for infringement (if I try to advertise adult materials under the "playmate" label, *I*, not the search engine, have infringed). If, on the other hand, playmates toys decides to pay for an advertisment, surely you don't suggest that this is wrong?
Best encouragment I made for myself to exercise was attaching a low power (386) computer with a terminal program to a stationary bike. Strap the keyboard in an accessable place and play muds for a while... amazing what motivation to not die in a dungeon will do for you.
That's the theory anyway. However, since DVD menus on some of my early DVDs are glitchy on current *regular* DVD player, I worry about these new players. Not being a video/audiophile, I don't really care what the new format will allow so much as that it will be software compatible with my existing DVDs. My VHS collection doesn't collect that much dust (my boy still likes Godzilla movies, and how much resolution do you really need to watch Tokyo gets leveled again?), but you have already seen the major stores pull VHS or put it back in some dark corner.
I'm used to the upgrade cycle on my PC. As a programmer/designer, I can understand that the abstraction layers we have built by burning cycles has made software easier to build. What I don't want is another purchase round with the same content I already have, for a marginal increase in quality (which I won't really appreciate, having a 36" CRT instead of a HD TV). [And I'm not buying HD until the wars around it stop either.]
For who? Why do I care what happens at the factory. What it *does* mean is that the product can be scaled up for large production quicker, which should hopefully mean lower prices sooner. However, it means *nothing* as far as my transition... I won't know what the next generation DVD is like to transition to until I see how well companies handle backwards compatibility. If it fails to run *any* DVD collection, I will consider it a failure, because all the factory efficiency in the world won't make me toss my existing DVD collections.
I would do it this way today, if I were to do it again. Back then, CD emulation tools were primative. Some games we were able to get to run via NOCD mods or the existing CD tools, but it was just a major pain overall.
Additionally, tools for locking the desktops down are much more powerful, but so is the complexity of the game install. Most of the games we ran were DOS (which meant a custom menu loaded and selected most games directly - nice). Windows XP's Kiosk mode would be something to investigate (especially the ability to prevent most desktop interactions).
Where do you work that you can see 4-6 years down the road? Corporate culture has integrated "process improvement" to such a degree, I feel good if the spec is good for 4 - 6 MONTHS. 4-6 years from now, I would expect everything I write to be unrecognizable.
(That said, I do have one customer who is running on a database I wrote in 1986, but then again, they don't get "process improvement".)
As a younger geek businessman I ran the numbers on such a place and tried to operate one back in the days of 386/486s. It may seem easy on the surface to run such a center, but make sure you factor in administration (some automated method to reload the machines from images in particular), hardware replacement costs (these centers are *hard* on equipment, due to the "it isn't mine attitude") and general manpower requirement to supervise sales and usage.
If you have already considered these things, there are some things you can do that increase your revenue and customer retention:
#1 - Snack bar/coffee shop (depending on your demographic). This should be a separate space adjacent to the computers (allowing drinks and electronics to coexist is not for the weak). You will need a different license to serve food.
#2 - Adequate space for people to chill out. Atmosphere is key here to retain people and bring them back. Consider TVs like you see in sports bars, except maybe some can be showing the action in the game area. Remember the restrooms: don't make them some pit of dispair... people will avoid coming back.
#3 - Special events. People will filter in and out, but on those slow days (Monday through Thursday, normally) having special events like tournaments is key to keeping an adequate number of paying customers.
As far as hardware, you need to run games well, but not to bleeding edge. Since you will replace hardware every year (although the old hardware can then be tasked with server duty or older games), buy something in the mid range. Don't skimp on monitors though: large displays are a good investment, as they will last 3-5 years. Optical mice (no cleaning required, more precision) and throwaway keyboards (they take tons of abuse). Forget about joysticks, they are mostly obsolete, and were a huge expense back in the day.
You can also consider consoles to augment the PCs: many have great multiplayer support, and on a LAN they rock. Just remember that console or PC, it has to be in a locked cabnets and thus is a pain to change out games), or you can kiss your investment goodbye. (Even with locked cabnets we lost games all the time, usually to brute force attacks, but sometimes to "could you switch this game/distraction created" events).
As far as layout of the game area, I personally prefer semi private quarter cubicles (obscures line of site to the monitor, but not the people) arranged in circles. Remember good office chairs if you want people to remain for long periods of time.
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing... I worry about when some of these people "contact" penny arcade while the artists are in a mood, and are presented with four letter words, decapitations (probably in a homoerotic setting) and the whole "vibe" that Penny Arcade gives off.
I think that Gabe and gang did an excellent thing, and I love the comic. I do however doubt they are the *best* group to try to distract people from the negative images of gaming when they are the type of comic that my (no very easily offended) wife won't read.
I can understand your mixed feelings. Personally, I use open source extensively and have released some minor contributions to those projects I use. I think in the long run, it is a slow moving ball of snow at the top of a very large mountain: it doesn't look like much sometimes, but it will continue to roll and gain size and speed.
That said, the commercial prospects around it will always be running madly on top of a rolling ball of snow (to continue with and strain the analogy). Some might manage to remain on top for a bit, but eventually they will bet rolled over and become part of the main bulk, rolling down the hill.
In the end, a huge amount of general purpose software will be subsumed by the bulk of our rolling ball, and all will benefit from it. But to build a business (that isn't consulting based) on it seems worse than building on a house on a bed of sand... it's building a house on a rolling snowball (OK, now I just *snapped* the analogy in pieces).
I think perhaps he was complaining about the incessant need to do pair jumps by switching primary characters (how many places has lift/tornado/lift/tornado alternations... that's not a puzzle, that's just gratuitous).
Actaully, did a bit more exploration. Individual updates are installing fine. Multiples are glitchy (with a key error). I'm guessing a bug in up2date is causing problems with more than one package.
Hmmmm. I don't get the 2.6 kernel channel, but there were some problems this morning when I tried to run updates about signatures. Later this morning I tried again, and bash and such seemed to have correct signatures. I don't know if perhaps I connecting to a different distribution server, or if perhaps they finally fixed the keys.
As I said above, Fedora is for those who want to be on the bleeding edge (although I haven't yet taken the 2.6 plunge: bleeding and decapitating myself are different). I have had minor glitches in the update service, but for the most part it has run as well as the old Redhat 9.0 that it was upgraded from.
I get tired of hearing whines about Fedora support - the whole point behind Fedora is to create a development distribution that can be used as a basis for stable distributions. I personally use it on my workstation, because I prefer to remain up to the minute so I know what to expect when I *do* release an updated package to my servers.
However, I *do not* run it on servers. If you are unhappy at the prices for Redhat's new server offerings, please complain about *that*, not the freely available distribution that acts as a feeder to it.
A lot of these companies have a huge backlog of titles that would require recompiles and minor changes to timing to make them usable on modern machines. Release them using the same bandwidth they are paying for to distribute patches, and you have a huge marketing opprotunity.
It especially makes sense when you have sequels that are vastly improved (original GTA vs the double pack). So why don't we see this more often?
Actually, I think she is undead. It would explain a lot. It is a shame that so many cool people show up on that show, because I always feel woozy after listing to "aaand NExt oNN the Diiiane rrreehm shooow", with the wierd pitch and speed variations.
I love Asimov. I have read hundreds of his books. Everything of his I have seen converted to movie form has been awful. I have heard mention of Bicentennial Man. Bah, that was sheer brilliance compared to the eye gouging horror that was Nightfall. Ahhhh, my brain hurts just remembering.... make it stop!
Having balanced classes in muds, "It's not like you couldn't balance Jedi" made me laugh. If the Jedi aren't as cool as they are in the movies (i.e., the are comparable to "Master Chef"), then those who unlocked the slot would hate how "nerfed" they are.
No, the reason they were "unlocked" slots was so they could be "munchkin" characters. The balance they are trying to use now is "if you use your skills, people can kill you", and "oh, and as they kill you, you run the risk of losing your progress". Which means a Jedi must only use Jedi skills when nobody is looking, if they don't want to risk being PKed into the ground.
Actually, considering the mythos, that seems acceptable to me. Those who love a challenge will love being flashy and then fending off the challengers. But it places Jedi even further from the orndinary players realm.
Regarding my fanboy status: I don't own Star Wars movies or toys (except a few lego sets for my son). I based "everyone wants to be a Jedi" on my conversations with non hard core gamers: "So, would you every try a game like Star Wars Galaxies?" which is usually responded to with a variant of "Being a Jedi would be cool!".
Not if being a Jedi means months of boring toil to just unlock a slot where you get PKed for smiling wrong.
While I admit that it seems pretty lame, they did explicit tell people that it would be rare to see Jedi. Frankly, it sounds like they made it too easy, with the holocubes giving 4/5s of the solution.
The fundamental problem with licensed MMORPGs is that everyone wants to be the canonical characters. This was a problem back in the day of text muds - those who build upon a "hot property" (usually illegally, but lets ignore that for now) found that they had unhappy players because everyone wanted to be "character X" where X is the most power, cool and unbalanced character you can imagine. Its like a kingdom made of nobody but kings.
In SWG, they *thought* they could avoid that by making the Jedi slot nearly randomly distributed. 32 skills, pick 5, means your chance of picking correctly is (5/32*4/31*3/30*2/29*1/28) = 4.9 in a million. So some clues were obviously necessary, and they could basically meter the Jedi slots. The holocrons difficult means only those who really want it are going to become Jedi. For the player who wants to be Jedi, this may suck, may force them out of the game and probably isn't worth it.
The real error was revealing the secret formula. Now that it is clear how base and arbitrary the formula is, people aren't happy. Of course not: they all wanted to be Luke, and now that possibility has been taken from them.
To paraphrase The Graduate, "In one word - biotech. The future, my boy, is biotech." Almost everything that is promised by nanotech devices will be inspired by, copied from or created out of biotech research. "Classic nano-tech" (the use of bulky, expensive machines to affect the nano-world) doesn't scale. Great for looking at nano stuff, but not for making it.
There are already rumblings that some of the computer components in the fairly near future will be created by organic chemical processes depositing layers at accuracies that classic nano-tech might have achieved, but at a *scale* that makes it useful. A recent "IEEE Computer Magazine" had an article on using viruses to create transistor junctions. Even if this *particular* road dead ends, it seems impossible that organic nanotech won't be the preferred approach to making all things tiny and intricate, especially once we fall below the scale that chip masks are useful.
This has been one of the best book to movie conversions I have seen. Especially considering that this is an incredibly difficult work to start with. The things that were removed wihtout shame (poetry), combined (multitudes of side characters) and left out intentionally, but with a sidelong glance (Tom Bombadill alone causes endless arguments because not enough detail is in the *books* to make a case for what he is supposed to represent. However, one of his poems does sneak into the second movie, although recited by Treebeard) show the dedication put into this movie. It would have been so easy to coast on the later movies (production costs were recovered from the first movie alone), but these are not the products of coasting, but of true affection for the grand story - the story that launched a thousand imitating "great arc fantasy" novels.
Somehow I doubt that the US didn't have the robotic technology... I imagine a seasons worth of battlebots constructors could handle this task.
In fact, that confirms it. I think any of the spinner bots would work...
I'm curious why you use the terms "unhealthy" as you do. Perhaps from your perspective (or even a casual observer's perspective) player competition is unhealthy. Having coded muds for 10 years back in the day, I can safely say that our experiments with less competitive environments were total flops, and our grand experiment in competitive gaming (a full political system built on top of an existing clan codebase) was our greatest success.
Interestingly, our political system codified ranking *within a clan* (to a degree), but it simply caused the warring *between* the clans to become more fluid as people tried to accumulate the "new flavor" of power: votes. Joining a huge clan may have benefits, but moving up is near impossible, so new splinter clans were regularly formed.
So, while this might be "unhealthy" in some regard, it was the best thing we ever did for the health of the mud itself. Why complain about Everquest's similar success in player competition?
Non competitive games are cool (I have a book of them from the 70's, and they can be fun), but like many artifacts of the 70's, they have little staying power today. How many games of Earthball were played this year? People become bored without competition, as evidenced by the quick transformation of playing with an Earthball into some giant size soccer derivitive with it.
This comment is just silly... point #2 is totaly unrelated to his prior comments as many open source projects are *not* command line oriented. If you think FOSS somehow equals command line, you have not explored very far.
Point #1 may be valid for your speaker, but most of the open source tools I work with are web based PHP projects. Surely you are not claiming that Open Office is "desktopically (making up words is fun!) bankrupt", and the result of "BOFH" mindsets. Or Gnome and KDE exist because all FOSS creaters hate GUIs.
If you are going to troll by creating a straw man argument, at least attack one that is credible.
Ok, so you think this won't work. What do *you* suggest be done in its stead? Although this is a minor step forward, the major steps forward (like, oh I don't know, requiring encrypted passwords (SPA) before a send, which is already available) seem to never take hold because of some downlevel client user whining about lack of access.
Your argument regarding DNS entries that spammers control is valid, but weak in that *any* solution must allow a domain holder to still send mail. What it *does* do, is stuff them back into more easily filtered domains boxes, rather than joe jobbing my domain name. Your complaint about it not slowing spam is also not completely valid: I
don't give a flying fruit loop if someone else implements it as long as it prevents domains *I* am responsible for maintaining being joe jobbed. If others aren't that bright, it doesn't *worsen* my situation. It makes it better. Those who don't implement it will be made to look worse and worse as they become the primary targets of joe jobs, and eventually peer pressure will cause them to implement.
Since it is easy to implement, I don't see why *not* to move forward with this. Your argument is like saying "Well, it's not a good as an armed guard, keycard security and name badges, so why should I lock my front door?" Perhaps so people don't walts in from the street and steal your TV?
Greater Elbonia has virtually no safety laws, being mostly mud flats with little natural resources and almost no government. Therefor, if extension cords are out (which surprises me, but perhaps they short out in the mud) and you can't get drops properly placed by building maintenance (and I can imagine how hard that is in Greater Elbonia), I would suggest beaming microwaves from the wall to the rack.
This has several advantages: *
* Advantages may be outweighed by frying every circuit in your computers.