Why would one need justification in "pirating" games?
The entire notion of there being something wrong with individuals sharing our cultural heritage is foolish. Mario is probably more well known today than Hamlet - game pirates are providing a valuabe social service by distributing and preserving his story.
For a two legged robot, you probably don't want it to be able to stand stable with zero power. Human's sure can't do that, and humans are what you'd be trying to copy. I'm betting you lose a good chunk of control for very little gain.
There's a shot in the initial space battle where the camera zooms in on Anakin's fighter. Way in, far too close for the flow of the scene in the theater. That shot was for small screen SDTVs.
In filming for SDTV, there's a filming style that minimizes the effect of the low screen resolution - never have more than a couple characters on the screen at once doing important stuff, zoom way in on faces when people talk, etc.
Obviously when you watch content shot in that style on a HDTV, you won't notice much of a difference. All the extra detail you're seeing is detail that the director expected not to be there - you get to see pores and nosehairs on the actor, and there's no plot-relevent details that aren't taking up half the screen anyway.
For a better comparison, you'd need to watch a movie that suffered in the conversion from theater to pan & scan SDTV. Try a high buget war movie like Saving Private Ryan.
The problem is - those movies haven't been released on HD media yet, because there is no mature HD disk format yet. In fact, the only significant HDTV content is broadcast television - which is simultaniously broadcast as SDTV, so it's filmed for SDTV.
In conclusion, HDTV will be amazing once content is widely availble that takes proper advantage of it. The personal electronics companies really need to remind the media content companies who's really important, and get them to release functional HDTV content rather than screwing around and costing the hardware companies billions of dollars by stalling.
I an assure you that pirate spend money - they just spend it on worthwhile things instead of replacing perfectly good computer monitors with crappier ones just because a couple corporations have conspired to try to force people to use defective software.
If you think that people should have access to forks and knives, can I assume that you also support their having access to personal nuclear weapons? If you don't think that they're responsible enough for nukes, then they obviously aren't responsible enough for silverware.
A news story always is prepared by a reporter - which means that there can always be bias. The advantage to decentralized media is that the viewer can try select a source with minimal bias, or get their information from multiple sources with different bias.
The only way you'll ever be able to get completely unbiased information is to witness events yourself, and even then you won't get the whole story because you can't see everything at once.
If you're talking about presidential elections in the United States, the actual number ends up being smaller than that because of the electoral college. Unfortunately, It still doesn't matter.
The numbers of people involved in elections are so large that individuals are (correctly) apathetic about the whole process. People only vote to prevent the "bag guy party" from wining an implementing their hot button policies - banning or pubically funding abortion is a good one. Most of the political races are pre-decided, with only a few - highly publicised - positions switching back and forth between the dominant parties. In the end, the political system in the United States is driven by the economics of political donations - and the system has been optimized to minimize the cost of maintaining the status quo.
The significant political question is "Is my company donating enough money to ensure that we get the government contract that will pay for donations in the next election cycle?"
Against that backdrop, any sort of straightforward "democratic revolution" is impossible - there just isn't the money for it in the right parts of the economy. It might be possible to slowly accomplish something by attacking the weak points - house races are something I mentioned in an earlier thread, but I doubt it would be possible to get more than a couple seats before the encumbants noticed and started defending against that technique.
A more effective technique might be pushing for a state or group of states to withdraw from the union - to reduce the scale of the economic system, thus making individual efforts more relevent in the future. Unfortunately, there are bad precidents for that course of action.
That would be much more meaningful if the current government didn't get to use tax money to fund their public relations. Large scale governments have built very effective systems to counter this sort of democratic activism.
If even two peers manage to get a chunk off the same transmission you save bandwidth. Especially with the current asynchronous connection fad it would increase bittorrent download speeds considerably while reducing total bandwidth used.
It doesn't matter if a couple peers miss a transmission. You don't retransmit to that same group - you instead transmit that piece to the new group that needs it when nessisary, a new group that includes those from the old group that missed it the first time.
The simplest implementation would create a shitload of multicast groups, perhaps something like (n!) of them per torrent - therefore the multicast implementation would have to store recipient lists in packets rather than having centrally specified multicast groups.
A good start would be house races. A strong campaign for a house race in a small state could get a vote in the house for only tens of thousands of votes.
There are actually a couple of political strategies that might be able to make a noticable impact with a feasible amount of effort. The problem is describing things in an approachable enough form to convince people to participate.
It's true that getting into space will take economic resources, but that doesn't mean that there are unsolvable engineering problems like the post I was replying to implied.
An obvious solution to this one is shown in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Rotation, especially partial rotation, does make some of the navigation math harder - but that's the sort of problem that's easilly solved with a computer.
It's one of the many things that the engineers would have to consider in designing space vessels/habitats, but I'd expect it to be one of the (comparitively) easy parts. At worst, it would make propulsion harder than it already is by increasing the overall mass.
The best explaination that I've heard that supports F&P having achieved cold fusion sounds a lot like the kite example. Just because they weren't able to come up with a description of how to achieve cold fusion doesn't mean they didn't get it to happen in their lab by dumb luck.
For running todays consumer desktop applications any common desktop processor sold this century will do. That's true, it's been true for six years, and posting on Slashdot about it is getting old.
Nevertheless, the processor industry is absolutely not stagnating - it's just that you aren't interested in what they're developing because you haven't gotten hooked by any killer app that requires high performance yet.
Re:Where's the innovation in FPS?
on
Prey Review
·
· Score: 1
Have you played FarCry? The AI behaviour in that game was a little more complex than your average FPS.
Re:All new 3D Shooters are missing one thing...
on
Prey Review
·
· Score: 1
It's not completely gone. Serious Sam II has coop mode.
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The entire notion of there being something wrong with individuals sharing our cultural heritage is foolish. Mario is probably more well known today than Hamlet - game pirates are providing a valuabe social service by distributing and preserving his story.
For a two legged robot, you probably don't want it to be able to stand stable with zero power. Human's sure can't do that, and humans are what you'd be trying to copy. I'm betting you lose a good chunk of control for very little gain.
That works great until you want to do something really off the wall... like input.
Yup. Having an algorithim make up 75% of your pixels is definately just as good as having all the real pixels to begin with.
Next thing you'll have 16 color VGA screenshots to prove that a $100 and a $500 video card have the same image quality.
Uhh... assuming that you're at the optmal view distance, what other possible advantage could an image quality jump produce?
There's a shot in the initial space battle where the camera zooms in on Anakin's fighter. Way in, far too close for the flow of the scene in the theater. That shot was for small screen SDTVs.
In filming for SDTV, there's a filming style that minimizes the effect of the low screen resolution - never have more than a couple characters on the screen at once doing important stuff, zoom way in on faces when people talk, etc.
Obviously when you watch content shot in that style on a HDTV, you won't notice much of a difference. All the extra detail you're seeing is detail that the director expected not to be there - you get to see pores and nosehairs on the actor, and there's no plot-relevent details that aren't taking up half the screen anyway.
For a better comparison, you'd need to watch a movie that suffered in the conversion from theater to pan & scan SDTV. Try a high buget war movie like Saving Private Ryan.
The problem is - those movies haven't been released on HD media yet, because there is no mature HD disk format yet. In fact, the only significant HDTV content is broadcast television - which is simultaniously broadcast as SDTV, so it's filmed for SDTV.
In conclusion, HDTV will be amazing once content is widely availble that takes proper advantage of it. The personal electronics companies really need to remind the media content companies who's really important, and get them to release functional HDTV content rather than screwing around and costing the hardware companies billions of dollars by stalling.
I an assure you that pirate spend money - they just spend it on worthwhile things instead of replacing perfectly good computer monitors with crappier ones just because a couple corporations have conspired to try to force people to use defective software.
If you think that people should have access to forks and knives, can I assume that you also support their having access to personal nuclear weapons? If you don't think that they're responsible enough for nukes, then they obviously aren't responsible enough for silverware.
I still get 2 or 3 spam messages a day through my greylisting setup. It's livable, but it's not the 0 spam messages that I wish I was seeing.
The only way you'll ever be able to get completely unbiased information is to witness events yourself, and even then you won't get the whole story because you can't see everything at once.
When the legal process produces a result that is questionable, it deserves to be questioned.
The numbers of people involved in elections are so large that individuals are (correctly) apathetic about the whole process. People only vote to prevent the "bag guy party" from wining an implementing their hot button policies - banning or pubically funding abortion is a good one. Most of the political races are pre-decided, with only a few - highly publicised - positions switching back and forth between the dominant parties. In the end, the political system in the United States is driven by the economics of political donations - and the system has been optimized to minimize the cost of maintaining the status quo.
The significant political question is "Is my company donating enough money to ensure that we get the government contract that will pay for donations in the next election cycle?"
Against that backdrop, any sort of straightforward "democratic revolution" is impossible - there just isn't the money for it in the right parts of the economy. It might be possible to slowly accomplish something by attacking the weak points - house races are something I mentioned in an earlier thread, but I doubt it would be possible to get more than a couple seats before the encumbants noticed and started defending against that technique.
A more effective technique might be pushing for a state or group of states to withdraw from the union - to reduce the scale of the economic system, thus making individual efforts more relevent in the future. Unfortunately, there are bad precidents for that course of action.
That would be much more meaningful if the current government didn't get to use tax money to fund their public relations. Large scale governments have built very effective systems to counter this sort of democratic activism.
Any time the ISP gets owned on bandwidth (or in any other way) because they handed out crappy asymmetric connections is a good time.
It doesn't matter if a couple peers miss a transmission. You don't retransmit to that same group - you instead transmit that piece to the new group that needs it when nessisary, a new group that includes those from the old group that missed it the first time.
The simplest implementation would create a shitload of multicast groups, perhaps something like (n!) of them per torrent - therefore the multicast implementation would have to store recipient lists in packets rather than having centrally specified multicast groups.
A good start would be house races. A strong campaign for a house race in a small state could get a vote in the house for only tens of thousands of votes.
There are actually a couple of political strategies that might be able to make a noticable impact with a feasible amount of effort. The problem is describing things in an approachable enough form to convince people to participate.
It's true that getting into space will take economic resources, but that doesn't mean that there are unsolvable engineering problems like the post I was replying to implied.
An obvious solution to this one is shown in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Rotation, especially partial rotation, does make some of the navigation math harder - but that's the sort of problem that's easilly solved with a computer.
It's one of the many things that the engineers would have to consider in designing space vessels/habitats, but I'd expect it to be one of the (comparitively) easy parts. At worst, it would make propulsion harder than it already is by increasing the overall mass.
The best explaination that I've heard that supports F&P having achieved cold fusion sounds a lot like the kite example. Just because they weren't able to come up with a description of how to achieve cold fusion doesn't mean they didn't get it to happen in their lab by dumb luck.
Nevertheless, the processor industry is absolutely not stagnating - it's just that you aren't interested in what they're developing because you haven't gotten hooked by any killer app that requires high performance yet.
Have you played FarCry? The AI behaviour in that game was a little more complex than your average FPS.
It's not completely gone. Serious Sam II has coop mode.