This has already happened. Originally Ultima Online included the ability to dismember human corpses, get paid bounties for turning in criminals' heads to town guards, and if one were so inclined, to make human jerky. All that had to go for the game to be legal in Germany.
You're less likely to see such things ever be an issue in current/future games. Whereas UO began as a crazy experiment no one expected to take off, MMOGs now are designed from the beginning to be mass-market behemoths with suits, marketing, and the legal department fully involved at every step.
Just because the Ma and Pa's down at the computer fair can build you PC for only 3% mark up it doesn't mean that a real computer company has to follow the same deeply flawed business plan.
If Apple starts selling x86, they are selling the same product as Ma and Pa, and the market is going to make damn well sure they have the same low markup when comparing Apples and PCs really is comparing apples to apples. x86 only sells at low markups; Apple wants to sell at high markups; ergo Apple doesn't want to sell x86.
Such a move doesn't make sense for Apple. They have a really nice OS, but their business is selling hardware at absurd markups. They can only justify those markups when the hardware is drastically differentiated from commodity hardware. Even if they create some licensing/DRM scheme to limit OS X to Apple hardware, such a slim difference will make consumers look hard at what exactly they are paying for. If they do try to limit the OS to the hardware, I expect an explosion of interest and development in GNUstep on Darwin that will steal their thunder fairly quickly. Then all they're left with is a pretty stylish case (which in the end is probably what sells the most boxes anyway.)
As someone who is still a Matrix fan even through all three movies, I'd love to take part in this story - but my experience with the Matrix Online late in the beta was a very poor one. The leveling process was long and grueling, the randomly generated quests were repetitive and usually broken, character classes were severely unbalanced, and the interface was perversely obtuse. Has anyone still playing found that they've improved any?
Some game designers still harbor the illusion that they can stamp out griefing. Players will always piss each other off and will always find ways to express that. It's best just to start with the assumption that players will use every possible means to attack each other for any reason and no reason at all. Design from there.
Under the terms with Intel, HP's Itanium development team, which includes several hundred engineers, will be acquired by Intel and remain in Ft. Collins, Colo., according to the report.
"HP will continue to use Itanium chips in its servers and will pledge $3 billion over the next three years in developing Itanium as a competitor in the $20 billion high-end server market," according to the report. "HP is winding down its other microprocessor architectures and getting out of that business entirely, having settled on using Intel's Itanium, Xeon, Pentium and Celeron processors, as well as Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s Opteron, Athlon and Sempron chips."
The change I would make does not have to do with voter registration/identification. I would introduce some sort of runoff system, so that people would not feel that votes for third parties are "wasted." There's a lot of political vector space left unrepresented by the two parties.
ALICE and all the other Eliza-derived chat bots are just parlor tricks. Consider:
Human: All men are mortal, and Socrates is a man. ALICE: Therefore, Socrates are mortal and Socrates is a man. Human: Is Socrates mortal? ALICE: Maybe. Ask Alison if it is. Human: Remember that my shirt is green. ALICE: Don't worry I will remember it. Human: What color is my shirt? ALICE: I can't see in color, only black and white.
The Turing test is given entirely too much attention. Every article on AI for popular audiences has to drag it up. While imitating a human might be proof of intelligence, it is certainly not a requisite. Already by 1980 AI could run circles around ALICE in logic and knowledge representation, which is more properly characteristic of intelligence than half-convincing small talk.
The argument that ballistic missile defense is useless because there are other ways to deliver nuclear weapons is spurious. You don't disband the infantry just because they can't shoot down jet aircraft, and you don't take the locks off your front door just because a burglar could use a window. We need missile defense to handle the missiles, and we'll develop other procedures to handle the other attacks.
This probably isn't a nuclear detonation, since they would be instantly detected, due to the huge flash created. Back in the 80s, we had satellite technology to detect nuclear explosions. Don't you think we have it now?
The Pentagon would know instantly. The media could easily be days behind.
I can one up this ESA guy and suggest terreforming Mars and populating it with all of Earth's species. Where does one sign up to be a professional suggester?
As a 2004 grad of Duke, I'm guessing this has a lot to do with Kazaa. There are untold gigabytes per day of illegal files zooming around the campus network. They don't want to put stops on internet use, but its clearly a problem both from a network infrastructure standpoint and an RIAA CYA standpoint. If they can push iTunes, it could ameliorate the problems caused by file sharing and soften the student outcry should they decide to block Kazaa traffic.
As for language tapes, there's already a library of cassettes no one bothers with anyway.
Changing the Xbox architecture is a necessity to make the venture profitable, and breaking compatability is an unfortunate side effect.
Unlike the PS2, the Xbox2 won't need binary compatability to have a large library of games at launch. They are still using a Windows/DirectX environment, so ports should be simple for any PC/Xbox developer to release for all three simultaneously.
I ran into this problem about a year ago. Figuring the attacks were using the RPC exploit that was making the news about that time, I disabled RPC over TCP/IP and was able to patch with no further trouble. Accepting RPCs over TCP probably has a purpose in some enterprise environment, but not for me, so I left it off.
I don't know if the current attacks are using the same route, but if you want to try, just find HKEY_CURRENT_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/Microsoft/Rpc/DCOM Protocols in the registry and take ncacn_tcpip out of the string. Probably have to reboot.
Apple has always been certain not to offer any "new world" Macs in a tower case for less than $2000. It seems like a bad move, discouraging people from switiching into Apples, but at least they are consistent. I would have bought an Apple by now if they kept selling a Power Mac a generation or two behind in the $1000 range, but I will never buy the eMac/iMac style computers they offer for that price segment.
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This has already happened. Originally Ultima Online included the ability to dismember human corpses, get paid bounties for turning in criminals' heads to town guards, and if one were so inclined, to make human jerky. All that had to go for the game to be legal in Germany.
You're less likely to see such things ever be an issue in current/future games. Whereas UO began as a crazy experiment no one expected to take off, MMOGs now are designed from the beginning to be mass-market behemoths with suits, marketing, and the legal department fully involved at every step.
Just because the Ma and Pa's down at the computer fair can build you PC for only 3% mark up it doesn't mean that a real computer company has to follow the same deeply flawed business plan.
If Apple starts selling x86, they are selling the same product as Ma and Pa, and the market is going to make damn well sure they have the same low markup when comparing Apples and PCs really is comparing apples to apples. x86 only sells at low markups; Apple wants to sell at high markups; ergo Apple doesn't want to sell x86.
Such a move doesn't make sense for Apple. They have a really nice OS, but their business is selling hardware at absurd markups. They can only justify those markups when the hardware is drastically differentiated from commodity hardware. Even if they create some licensing/DRM scheme to limit OS X to Apple hardware, such a slim difference will make consumers look hard at what exactly they are paying for. If they do try to limit the OS to the hardware, I expect an explosion of interest and development in GNUstep on Darwin that will steal their thunder fairly quickly. Then all they're left with is a pretty stylish case (which in the end is probably what sells the most boxes anyway.)
As someone who is still a Matrix fan even through all three movies, I'd love to take part in this story - but my experience with the Matrix Online late in the beta was a very poor one. The leveling process was long and grueling, the randomly generated quests were repetitive and usually broken, character classes were severely unbalanced, and the interface was perversely obtuse. Has anyone still playing found that they've improved any?
Do you emit radiation? No? Then you're made of dark matter.
If there were no software patents, the big companies would appropriate all the innovations and dominate through marketing instead of invention.
Wait a minute...
I was irritated to find that the drivers are proprietary
Here's the link you need: http://www.rickross.com/deprogramming.html
Shadowbane was a MMOG with a hybrid release well before WoW.
Some game designers still harbor the illusion that they can stamp out griefing. Players will always piss each other off and will always find ways to express that. It's best just to start with the assumption that players will use every possible means to attack each other for any reason and no reason at all. Design from there.
The under-reported second half of TFA:
Under the terms with Intel, HP's Itanium development team, which includes several hundred engineers, will be acquired by Intel and remain in Ft. Collins, Colo., according to the report.
"HP will continue to use Itanium chips in its servers and will pledge $3 billion over the next three years in developing Itanium as a competitor in the $20 billion high-end server market," according to the report. "HP is winding down its other microprocessor architectures and getting out of that business entirely, having settled on using Intel's Itanium, Xeon, Pentium and Celeron processors, as well as Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s Opteron, Athlon and Sempron chips."
If I were the maker of CoH, I'd countersue Marvel for their pen-and-ink system's capability of duplicating CoH's trademark characters.
The change I would make does not have to do with voter registration/identification. I would introduce some sort of runoff system, so that people would not feel that votes for third parties are "wasted." There's a lot of political vector space left unrepresented by the two parties.
It's a metal box.
However pretty it may look, it's still just a metal box.
Where did they get the idea anyone would pay $200 for it?
ALICE and all the other Eliza-derived chat bots are just parlor tricks. Consider:
Human: All men are mortal, and Socrates is a man.
ALICE: Therefore, Socrates are mortal and Socrates is a man.
Human: Is Socrates mortal?
ALICE: Maybe. Ask Alison if it is.
Human: Remember that my shirt is green.
ALICE: Don't worry I will remember it.
Human: What color is my shirt?
ALICE: I can't see in color, only black and white.
The Turing test is given entirely too much attention. Every article on AI for popular audiences has to drag it up. While imitating a human might be proof of intelligence, it is certainly not a requisite. Already by 1980 AI could run circles around ALICE in logic and knowledge representation, which is more properly characteristic of intelligence than half-convincing small talk.
The argument that ballistic missile defense is useless because there are other ways to deliver nuclear weapons is spurious. You don't disband the infantry just because they can't shoot down jet aircraft, and you don't take the locks off your front door just because a burglar could use a window. We need missile defense to handle the missiles, and we'll develop other procedures to handle the other attacks.
This probably isn't a nuclear detonation, since they would be instantly detected, due to the huge flash created. Back in the 80s, we had satellite technology to detect nuclear explosions. Don't you think we have it now?
The Pentagon would know instantly. The media could easily be days behind.
I can one up this ESA guy and suggest terreforming Mars and populating it with all of Earth's species. Where does one sign up to be a professional suggester?
As a 2004 grad of Duke, I'm guessing this has a lot to do with Kazaa. There are untold gigabytes per day of illegal files zooming around the campus network. They don't want to put stops on internet use, but its clearly a problem both from a network infrastructure standpoint and an RIAA CYA standpoint. If they can push iTunes, it could ameliorate the problems caused by file sharing and soften the student outcry should they decide to block Kazaa traffic.
As for language tapes, there's already a library of cassettes no one bothers with anyway.
It also features a cold-fusion power supply, egg beater, clothes washer, monopole magnet, a 50" plasma display, and platinum coated interconnects.
Seriously, I'm skeptical of these specs, as MS's supposed objective is to lose LESS money per unit sold.
Changing the Xbox architecture is a necessity to make the venture profitable, and breaking compatability is an unfortunate side effect.
Unlike the PS2, the Xbox2 won't need binary compatability to have a large library of games at launch. They are still using a Windows/DirectX environment, so ports should be simple for any PC/Xbox developer to release for all three simultaneously.
I ran into this problem about a year ago. Figuring the attacks were using the RPC exploit that was making the news about that time, I disabled RPC over TCP/IP and was able to patch with no further trouble. Accepting RPCs over TCP probably has a purpose in some enterprise environment, but not for me, so I left it off.
I don't know if the current attacks are using the same route, but if you want to try, just find HKEY_CURRENT_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/Microsoft/Rpc/DCOM Protocols in the registry and take ncacn_tcpip out of the string. Probably have to reboot.
Apple has always been certain not to offer any "new world" Macs in a tower case for less than $2000. It seems like a bad move, discouraging people from switiching into Apples, but at least they are consistent. I would have bought an Apple by now if they kept selling a Power Mac a generation or two behind in the $1000 range, but I will never buy the eMac/iMac style computers they offer for that price segment.
Did someone just discover that data can be graphed? What is the innovation here?
Of course, languages never evolve over time.
Yes, 128-bit computing is the future. I have all sorts of exabyte-sized files I need to memory-map.