Mostly right, but as another person mentioned further up, making education entirely local, in some places means the curriculum is entirely in the hands of people who by and large think black people are dishonest, the earth is only a few thousand years old, that shutting down public libraries is a perfectly fine way to save money, etc.
Trying to fix this with universal standards isn't worth the price. In order to drag the bad schools up to mediocrity, a central bureaucracy will necessarily also drag the good schools down to the same level. A policy like "no child left behind" also means "no smart kid gets ahead". Making it a federal policy tends to drag every student down to the level of the worst in the *country*.
If some small town in rural Pennsylvania decides to teach that the earth is a few thousand years old and close the local public library, that's a tragedy. But sometimes the cost of having good policies for yourself is letting other people have terrible policies for themselves.
I've got a 9600 GT (which benchmarks only about 30% slower than an 8800 GT on similar games), and I get well under 20 FPS on Far Cry 2 at 1920x1200 with the settings cranked all the way up.
I think it's funny that we're using Crysis as a benchmark, rather than an object-lesson in "what not to do in game development."
What are you talking about. Computer games have *always* been designed to have settings headroom so that they can take advantage of new hardware. Crysis is normal, not some wacky exception.
I have a year old system (quad core, 8800GT) that can literally play every game on the market at max settings... at 1920x1600!
That's bullshit. FarCry 2, for example, also wouldn't run on max on that rig. And that's good. It means that game graphics haven't stagnated. It means that games can look better, and all you need to do is upgrade to see them. Just like it's been for the past 15 years.
But really, your entire argument is crap the second you use the term "snapily" or "snappy." If you're angry at VMWare, and you install VirtualBox, your first impression will be that it's so much "snappier" even if the two are neck and neck. This is a stupid term, stop using it.
It's true that responsiveness is difficult to evaluate objectively without actually measuring it, but it's still a significant element of a good user experience.
Are you referring to the fact that our brains can handle a pack size of ~250? If so whats your point? We have always found ways of working around that limitation through hierarchy.
Have we? Does it scale? Can the result be "democratic"?
Unless of course I missed the part where people don't get to vote, must work at a state owned business and are not allowed to make most of the important decisions in their day to day life.
I see you accept the US government official definition of "free country", with the cold war era anti-red addendum and everything. Voting is meaningless if only a small range of "mainstream" candidates have a chance. Free enterprise only matters when the market isn't rigged.
Ask yourself this: Is China a free country? What *practical* freedoms do Americans have that someone in China does not? There are some examples, and those are important, but there are less than you might think.
It's specious to say that we're less free because the federal government got those rights rather than the state government. One can still leave the nation if one chooses and if enough people become unhappy with the nation, they can still secede, I'm not sure where in the constitution the right to secede was.
You touch upon the counter argument to your first sentence in your second. How many people does it take to make a policy change in a US state? At the federal level? Even organizations the size of the NRA and the Sierra club manage to accomplish surprisingly little at the federal level. Moving a policy from the states to the federal government results in a very practical decrease in the democratic control of that policy.
This is just one of those whack job libertarian ideas that because I can't Jay walk or use drugs that suddenly I'm some sort of a slave.
There's nothing "whack job" about libertarian ideas. Like any ideas, it's reasonable to disagree with them once you clearly understand them (and, necessarily, their historical and philosophical background), but simply dismissing them as crazy marks you as willfully ignorant. And there's nothing worse than being willfully ignorant (and proudly admitting to it).
If you live in that much fear of government officials, then you have bigger problems than speed cameras. In a free society, the fear, if any, goes the other way.
It does seem like that would be true, but in practice it's entirely possible that cracking hash functions (and block ciphers) is a computationally hard problem (in the "you can't do it" sense). The class of problem, in the general case, is NP-complete.
It's still information. Why should you have aright to protect your data and someone else shouldn't have the same right to protect data they've created? Oh, wait, that's it - in the former you are being hurt, but in the later it's someone else who clearly isn't as important as you. Clue - it's called hypocrisy.
Someone leaking your personal secrets could actually be "harm". The fact that you want a few more dollars in royalties doesn't mean you've been harmed, it means you're whining.
No, it doesn't owe you a payout. But if people are playing the game they clearly value it, but because they are cheap they chose to steal it instead of pay for it. Yes, I call it stealing, so save me the rationalizations why copyright violations aren't theft in such instances.
Yes. People are cheap. That's how a market economy works. There's certainly nothing wrong with it.
In an effort to make *good economic decisions* companies resort to DRM and other ways to retain control; which opens up a host of other problems and is not all that successful in the end.
In video games, DRM is mostly just an excuse to deny the end user their right to resell what they've bought. It has very little to do with piracy except in press releases. Successful game companies have accepted the fact that there will be pirate players of single player computer games. They've certainly gotten over the idea that every pirate copy could have been a sale.
You have no real property rights in the IP beyond those granted by the copyright owner; only the tangible medium becomes yours. I'd argue you have a doctrine of first sale to transfer it and the associated program; but even that is not a clear cut right in all cases.
In the United States at least, "we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." It's common to include "property" among the list of rights - where the term refers to physical property like CDs, books, photocopiers, computers, etc. In the US tradition, copyright is certainly not a natural right. The French do claim it as natural right, but they are dumb and wrong.
If you own a book and a photocopier, your friend owns a ream of paper, and you both chose to make a copy of that book, that is your inalienable natural right. It's your property; no one else has any claim on it. They don't even have any reason to know what you do with it, much less control your actions.
Have you fixed any problems that wouldn't have every existed if the developers had written code that worked instead of screwing around with unnecessary premature optimizations?
Alright! So apparently Doctor-Patient Confidentiality and Privacy are right out the window... since sharing information isn't ethically wrong.
Hint: different things are different. I was clearly referring to copying copyrighted computer software. Trying to confuse the difference between personal private data and copyrighted works is an amusing distraction, but that's all it is.
If you chose to produce some software and sell it, that's your call. If the economic realities of the situation end up resulting in less money than you expected, that's your problem. The world doesn't owe you a big payout. It's your responsibility to make good economic choices.
It sucks that everyone can't be a video game developer, or a musician, or whatever they want to be full time. And it sucks that the market realities may mean that making big budget single player games (or big budget movies) may not be a feasible business model. But it sucked for buggy whip manufacturers when the car showed up; that doesn't mean that they could rationally expect the economic rules to be warped for their benefit.
Hell, right now I'm in the process of developing a video game with a small team. But we've got a coherent business model. It should make us more than enough money, and if it doesn't it'll be our own damn fault. It's certainly not based on user respect for or the effective enforcement of a 150 year government granted monopoly on copying the distribution package.
It's simple - you don't like the price, don't buy it. Wait for the price to drop. Simply because you don't like the price doesn't mean you can copy the item for free and somehow think it's not stealing.
It's simple - sharing information isn't ethically wrong. If you have some software, your friend asks for a copy, and you refuse, you're being an asshole. Sharing may be illegal, but those laws infringe on real property rights and can't be enforced anyway.
Most importantly, the measures that would be needed to enforce restrictions on sharing would destroy any free society. Enforcing such laws would require either total surveillance or the complete abolition of the general purpose computer.
It's pretty much been like this since the days of Q2 with the railgun. High-res players got better graphics while I stayed on 640x480 and hit them halfway across the map while they couldn't aim for jack because of the 'pinpoint precision' of higher resolutions.
Games where everyone has a single hitbox and you get to aim with crosshairs are a bit different. I didn't make any claim about those. I'd recommend doing the test I suggested with a recent iron sights / hit locations game.
Now I run the same games at 16900x1200, and the gameplay is improved not one bit. It doesn't even look that much prettier.
I take it you play in a 12" monitor and have crappy eyesight, yes?
If not, do me a favor and try this experiment: Load up any reasonably modern outdoor FPS (where you have to aim at medium to long range - Far Cry, Battlefield, etc) and play it at 1600x1200 and then 800x600. If you don't notice a significant game play difference then either you're on crack or we have completely different sensory systems - maybe you evolved from one of those blind deep sea fish.
The government is already stealing your money at gunpoint and spending it on stuff. Cutting that spending would be nice, but it doesn't seem to be happening. If you have some practical plan to make it happen, I'd love to hear about it. Until such a plan has succeeded, asserting that the alternative to a given spending proposal is no spending is simply false.
As long as the government is spending a bunch of money, the question of where that money gets spent is an entirely relevant one. Given the options: bombing poor brown people, subsidizing companies with failing business models, subsidizing companies with no business model but lobbying for government money, etc, basic research is probably the least harmful way for the government to spend our money.
No, the funny thing here is that AMD *did* have the performance crown, even though they had planned to give it up. Before the GTX 295, the Radeon 4870x2 was the top of the pile for single-card graphics.
And I know there are hardcore PC gamers out there, but there are only a handful of companies even bothering to push the high-end graphics, so you buy a $500 video card and there are exactly ZERO games that take full advantage of it. Wait a year or so, and you may find that one or two of the few high-end PC game makers decide to throw you a bone and add support.
This is blatantly false. What a decent ($200+) graphics card buys you today is being able to play games at decent resolution. To play todays games at 1600x1200 resolution or better, you need a decent card. And increased resolution really does mean better game play; don't imagine that it doesn't matter if you haven't spent time with it.
I say this based on personal experience. I got Far Cry 2 a couple days ago and it only runs at 1280x800 with the graphics setting cranked down on my 26" monitor. That's with an Nvidia 9600 GT, which sells for $100 today. I should really upgrade, but I hate to do it for just one generation of cards. Eh, that's what I get for buying mid-range.
So... you're recommending against ATI without having actually used it?
I'm currently using Nvidia (on price), but I was on an ATI card 6 months ago and it worked fine. The Nvidia drivers were slightly better when I switched, but only very slightly.
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Trying to fix this with universal standards isn't worth the price. In order to drag the bad schools up to mediocrity, a central bureaucracy will necessarily also drag the good schools down to the same level. A policy like "no child left behind" also means "no smart kid gets ahead". Making it a federal policy tends to drag every student down to the level of the worst in the *country*.
If some small town in rural Pennsylvania decides to teach that the earth is a few thousand years old and close the local public library, that's a tragedy. But sometimes the cost of having good policies for yourself is letting other people have terrible policies for themselves.
No, then it takes 2 people. Or, if you check that case too, 3 people. (...)
At 1920x1600?
I've got a 9600 GT (which benchmarks only about 30% slower than an 8800 GT on similar games), and I get well under 20 FPS on Far Cry 2 at 1920x1200 with the settings cranked all the way up.
What are you talking about. Computer games have *always* been designed to have settings headroom so that they can take advantage of new hardware. Crysis is normal, not some wacky exception.
That's bullshit. FarCry 2, for example, also wouldn't run on max on that rig. And that's good. It means that game graphics haven't stagnated. It means that games can look better, and all you need to do is upgrade to see them. Just like it's been for the past 15 years.
It's true that responsiveness is difficult to evaluate objectively without actually measuring it, but it's still a significant element of a good user experience.
Have we? Does it scale? Can the result be "democratic"?
I see you accept the US government official definition of "free country", with the cold war era anti-red addendum and everything. Voting is meaningless if only a small range of "mainstream" candidates have a chance. Free enterprise only matters when the market isn't rigged.
Ask yourself this: Is China a free country? What *practical* freedoms do Americans have that someone in China does not? There are some examples, and those are important, but there are less than you might think.
You touch upon the counter argument to your first sentence in your second. How many people does it take to make a policy change in a US state? At the federal level? Even organizations the size of the NRA and the Sierra club manage to accomplish surprisingly little at the federal level. Moving a policy from the states to the federal government results in a very practical decrease in the democratic control of that policy.
There's nothing "whack job" about libertarian ideas. Like any ideas, it's reasonable to disagree with them once you clearly understand them (and, necessarily, their historical and philosophical background), but simply dismissing them as crazy marks you as willfully ignorant. And there's nothing worse than being willfully ignorant (and proudly admitting to it).
And what were the group sizes for most of that time?
If you live in that much fear of government officials, then you have bigger problems than speed cameras. In a free society, the fear, if any, goes the other way.
Then target their golfing buddies and their largest campaign donors.
It does seem like that would be true, but in practice it's entirely possible that cracking hash functions (and block ciphers) is a computationally hard problem (in the "you can't do it" sense). The class of problem, in the general case, is NP-complete.
Someone leaking your personal secrets could actually be "harm". The fact that you want a few more dollars in royalties doesn't mean you've been harmed, it means you're whining.
Yes. People are cheap. That's how a market economy works. There's certainly nothing wrong with it.
In video games, DRM is mostly just an excuse to deny the end user their right to resell what they've bought. It has very little to do with piracy except in press releases. Successful game companies have accepted the fact that there will be pirate players of single player computer games. They've certainly gotten over the idea that every pirate copy could have been a sale.
In the United States at least, "we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." It's common to include "property" among the list of rights - where the term refers to physical property like CDs, books, photocopiers, computers, etc. In the US tradition, copyright is certainly not a natural right. The French do claim it as natural right, but they are dumb and wrong.
If you own a book and a photocopier, your friend owns a ream of paper, and you both chose to make a copy of that book, that is your inalienable natural right. It's your property; no one else has any claim on it. They don't even have any reason to know what you do with it, much less control your actions.
Have you fixed any problems that wouldn't have every existed if the developers had written code that worked instead of screwing around with unnecessary premature optimizations?
Hint: different things are different. I was clearly referring to copying copyrighted computer software. Trying to confuse the difference between personal private data and copyrighted works is an amusing distraction, but that's all it is.
If you chose to produce some software and sell it, that's your call. If the economic realities of the situation end up resulting in less money than you expected, that's your problem. The world doesn't owe you a big payout. It's your responsibility to make good economic choices.
It sucks that everyone can't be a video game developer, or a musician, or whatever they want to be full time. And it sucks that the market realities may mean that making big budget single player games (or big budget movies) may not be a feasible business model. But it sucked for buggy whip manufacturers when the car showed up; that doesn't mean that they could rationally expect the economic rules to be warped for their benefit.
Hell, right now I'm in the process of developing a video game with a small team. But we've got a coherent business model. It should make us more than enough money, and if it doesn't it'll be our own damn fault. It's certainly not based on user respect for or the effective enforcement of a 150 year government granted monopoly on copying the distribution package.
There's nothing wrong with getting things for free. The idea that someone has to get paid for everything all the time is absurd.
I agree. But the gameplay is even better if the exploits don't make the game look like shit.
It's simple - sharing information isn't ethically wrong. If you have some software, your friend asks for a copy, and you refuse, you're being an asshole. Sharing may be illegal, but those laws infringe on real property rights and can't be enforced anyway.
Most importantly, the measures that would be needed to enforce restrictions on sharing would destroy any free society. Enforcing such laws would require either total surveillance or the complete abolition of the general purpose computer.
And you're arguing that poor hit detection due to huge pixels improves gameplay?
Games where everyone has a single hitbox and you get to aim with crosshairs are a bit different. I didn't make any claim about those. I'd recommend doing the test I suggested with a recent iron sights / hit locations game.
I take it you play in a 12" monitor and have crappy eyesight, yes?
If not, do me a favor and try this experiment: Load up any reasonably modern outdoor FPS (where you have to aim at medium to long range - Far Cry, Battlefield, etc) and play it at 1600x1200 and then 800x600. If you don't notice a significant game play difference then either you're on crack or we have completely different sensory systems - maybe you evolved from one of those blind deep sea fish.
The government is already stealing your money at gunpoint and spending it on stuff. Cutting that spending would be nice, but it doesn't seem to be happening. If you have some practical plan to make it happen, I'd love to hear about it. Until such a plan has succeeded, asserting that the alternative to a given spending proposal is no spending is simply false.
As long as the government is spending a bunch of money, the question of where that money gets spent is an entirely relevant one. Given the options: bombing poor brown people, subsidizing companies with failing business models, subsidizing companies with no business model but lobbying for government money, etc, basic research is probably the least harmful way for the government to spend our money.
No, the funny thing here is that AMD *did* have the performance crown, even though they had planned to give it up. Before the GTX 295, the Radeon 4870x2 was the top of the pile for single-card graphics.
This is blatantly false. What a decent ($200+) graphics card buys you today is being able to play games at decent resolution. To play todays games at 1600x1200 resolution or better, you need a decent card. And increased resolution really does mean better game play; don't imagine that it doesn't matter if you haven't spent time with it.
I say this based on personal experience. I got Far Cry 2 a couple days ago and it only runs at 1280x800 with the graphics setting cranked down on my 26" monitor. That's with an Nvidia 9600 GT, which sells for $100 today. I should really upgrade, but I hate to do it for just one generation of cards. Eh, that's what I get for buying mid-range.
So... you're recommending against ATI without having actually used it?
I'm currently using Nvidia (on price), but I was on an ATI card 6 months ago and it worked fine. The Nvidia drivers were slightly better when I switched, but only very slightly.