> "'A controversial database which holds the details of every child in England > has now become available for childcare professionals to access."
Which is to say, "has now become available for everybody on the planet to access."
In any case, the article continues, "Project managers are having second thoughts about the inclusion of images of the children, including genitalia shots, but wanted as much data available as possible, 'just in case'. "
I recall one company I worked for where the CEO sent out a "confidential" email to all 2000 employees telling him he was leaving the company to work for the government in an appointment position, "Psssst! Don't tell anybody about this email!" Which is, of course, the exact opposite of why he sent it out.
"What? How can I tell who told the press?!?!? I told all 2000+ of 'em to keep it quiet!"
How about 1 window per top level domain? Let's say you have a porn window open to whatbadgershavesexwith.com, and are viewing BBS picture threads there. In another window, you have CNN open and are reading some articles there.
Each of the 3 windows contains tabs for each open browse window for that domain. And, since link-based browsing creates two different heirarchies -- the domain, and the "child" links you visit, and grandchildren, and so on, which may be of different web sites, you can right-click any browser tab and "spwan off" that and all derived tabs into its own window.
The browser might remember this pattern for this site and do it automatically in the future.
Then wrap it up in some kind of neat Vista-like rolling screen thing per window holding tabs, and you're golden.
Umm, I don't know for sure, but various lint type tools do things like that already. It would not surprise me if one of them checked if the size parameter was = the size of both the dest and src.
In any case, you really want a language that would check that dynamically at runtime since many times, you don't actually know the buffer size if it wasn't allocated locally. This is inefficient, to be sure, but would really only be useful for debug builds anyway.
> The reason for this setting is that it makes for a less cluttered look > and avoids filling the screen with redundant detail.
The reason for this setting is that it apes Apple, which put the file type in a different field rather than adding it to the file's name itself.
I still recall being stunned at seeing you being able to start a program by "running" one of its files, as were several of my buddies. How in god's name did the OS know to go start that word processor or whatever?
Ya know, for the last 15 years I've been preaching that the FDA may be the far biggest killer last century. By delaying medical tech by "only" 10%, they have caused, because of lower quality of tech, more continued death and misery than they have prevented. Throw in price control via socialized medicine, and the situation could be even worse. Only 30% behind where you'd otherwise be? If you're lucky.
Skip the likelihood of such changes for the moment, but just consider the math. Would you like "free" 1979 medical care today, or "expensive" 2009 medical care? If you think the former, guess again. You just took the head of the line as the greatest mass murderer last century, surpassing Hitler and Stalin.
I fully expect to be downmodded as flamebait since this crushes cherished beliefs, the way an atheist crushes a religious person's groove by pointing out that God loves to let babies be raped to death for some reason.
I believe they need a special screen to reflect the polarized images accurately, but I don't know. It's not just IMAX in and of itself, which is just the modern version of a half-wraparound, 5 story screen.
No, it's not just nostalgia. I remember having that feel and making a note of it when it happened.
In any case, you missed my point about two issues that bust this feel in modern game engines:
1. Sudden stutters due to spinning suddenly, or a lot of special effects suddenly.
and more importantly
2. Even though the fpg be through the roof, the "smoothness" of the changing scene does not match up. I wondered above whether the ability to alter the world as you, say, run through it (which I think is done by the app by altering every scene point, though it may be done through hardware on the board itself, don't know) does not seem to be updating at the same 70fps. As if the engine is rendering 70fps but it is only able to change the polygon orientation at around 20 times per second.
So in that case, a gazillion fps won't do you any good if the scene is changed on a slower schedule.
And I will quickly add, again, that this is just a guess at what's going on. And no, motion blur doesn't fix it -- it makes it worse. The old Quake had anything but motion blur.
Films are 4D. The time dimension is represented by slices of time, or frames. You can look at any place along the movie's time dimension you want, by traveling along your own time dimension, the "real" one. You can, in theory, have multiple time dimensions just as multiple space dimensions.
Presumably, this is how everyone from Dr. Manhattan to The Prophets of DS9 view the world, though clearly things get a bit touchy when they interact with the film strip that is our reality. They have no way to predict the outcome before trying it, in our timeline, than we do. They just see the results instantly. Presumably they cannot travel along their own timeline to stop themselves from doing something they did in their own timeline's past.
I partially disagree. The "old crop", i.e. very old, ala Quake, had some interesting properties the modern crop do not.
Quake I consider the first "true" 3D game because the tilt up and down were rendered in true 3D, whereas previous shooters like Duke Nukem, Doom, and Wolf 3D used a rendering trick that took out one of the matrix multiplications or something. This had the effect of reducing the rendering processor power needed (which was for 386 machines, with no hardware acceleration). But a side effect was you couldn't tilt up and down with proper rendering, though they did do a little distortion trick to simulate it, which got uglier the further you tilted.
Anyhoo, with the Quake software renderer (prior to the first Quake-capable 3D cards like 3dFX and, ultimately, Matrox PowerVR) you had a blocky scene, but with more CPU horsepower, you could get 60-70 fps, which was so smooth you lost any traces of stutter or flickering at the edges of notice. It became like looking through a window at a real world.
Nowadays you get that fast of an fps, but things just don't have that effect. And that's not including the immersion-breaking stutters as the system pages or loads a lot of new data into the card, or whatever, when you turn suddenly or a bunch of sparklies explode.
It's also possible the software/hardware/whatever cannot warp all the 3D triangles or whatever when you turn, at 70+ fps, even thought the hardware can render it that quickly. So you'd still get a kind of stutter as you turned even if the fps was through the roof. But I don't know enough about 3D programming anymore to know if this is an issue (wasn't this the T part of the "new" T&L cards 7 years ago or whatever?)
Seriously, though, the Polar Express sequence when the kid's trudging along the top of the train in the dark with snow and howling winds takes on a whole new level of terror that's not there in the 2D version. No longer is it just a "flat" thing to walk along.
In fact, it was such a powerful sequence, I'm surprised it's taking this long to get here as a mass market thing. It's only been 2 years since the local Showcase installed a 3D-capable IMAX theater, and then it's only used for Pixar releases and the like, and even then it's only 1 of 4 theater rooms showing the film, the other 3 being normal, non-3D, non-IMAX screens.
Nah, this'll be a bigger change, the kind you say "I can't believe we didn't have that!", like you do about the Internet, or a TiVo, or the frictionless, free-spinning mouse wheel from the big Logitech Revolution. Not a small change like B&W -> Color TV, or Color TV -> HDTV.
This is true. Quantum Mechanics' "true randomness" could sit atop a perfectly deterministic deeper reality. When Einstein said he believed in "reality", he meant there were definite objects out there with definite properties. QM wipes that away -- *at that level*. Of course, an even deeper reality would basically make the QM level a sort of virtual world, which doesn't exactly help Einstein's case, even if it were to be deterministic. The "real stuff" he believed existed would now be twice-removed, so to speak, from "reality".
> the UK Home Office checked whether its interpretation of the law suited Phorm, > before issuing advice on the legality of the controversial advertising service.
From this, it sounds like someone's bitching that a private citizen or group of citizens had the temerity to ask if a particular course of action they wanted to take, would be considered legal or not, before they took it.
Oh. My. God. How horrifically unreasonable! People should, what, not be allowed to ask if some action is illegal or legal before they do it? WTF kind of policy is that?
> could the world of high-end PC graphics simply go away?
No. They can get their sorry asses back to developing real 3D immersion, don't care how, goggles, special screens, or whatever, and the associated wraparound technology for immersion.
Hint: I don't want motion blur so it looks like a movie -- that's a fault of the movies, and you're reproducing it?!?!?
One of the most realistic 3D renderings I saw was actually many years ago with Quake. Running with the horrible, blocky software renderer, on a newer (for that time) machine, you got fantastic refresh rates in excess of 70 fps.
Long gone were the last vestiges of any kind of motion issues, which, sorry for the naysayers around here, do exist well past a paltry 30 or even 45 fps.
Also, given the RAM wasn't an issue, there were no stutters as you entered an area, or just turned around quickly. This lead to a phenomenal feeling that you were looking through a window of your monitor into an actual world out there.
Then along came hardware renderers, better resolution, colors, whatnot. But it's still not the same. Even if you get a good fps, as I do in town on, say, Dungeons and Dragons Online, when you start moving, turning, or have a sudden bunch of explosive special effects, the machine stutters. Whether this is due to paging, or loading the objects to the video card, or whatever, I don't know. The point is, I don't care.
I'd rather trade off the next pointless increase on this or that bizarre feature or resolution, in favor of cleaning up these stutter issues that detract from realism. And then integrate true 3D. And then integrate a wraparound scenario, be it a special bubble display, or a motion sensor in your 3D goggle headset. I don't care.
But I wanna see that all at a smooth 70+ fps before the next 3D card that can do 45 fps of 8000x16000 resolution just so I can see lovely grey cement with rust stains on it stutter as I run into town to sell my stuff.
Sigh. Yes, I know you can get 3D goggles and software that makes true 3D out of almost any 3D game. Yes I know you can get multiple huge monitors for a wraparound (but I have great difficulty finding a site where people actually do this for a game, say, 3 widescreens side-by-side, such that you are looking at your character in the middle of the middle screen, rather than his split ass in-between the two screens of a dual setup, and what card(s), FPS, and so on. Actual links, not "well, check out this card which has 3 video outs and should do that in theory.
At the risk of being flamemodded, I would like to add to this. There is a certain impropriety of government using tax money to create competition to the private sector, while relying on the private sector's expensively-designed technology to do all the work, be it last mile*, or just good old Cisco industrial routers. Government pretending to be awesome to the people by doing things like this is nothing new.
That any organization could do this, private or otherwise, using legislation forcing open others' infrastructure is bad enough. For a government agency to do this is just shameful. You tax the population, who provides the technology to begin with thanks to their private enterprises, such as AT&T, to eviscerate the profits they get, which is what drove them to begin with**. That stuff doesn't just magically appear, to be taken advantage of by an heroes.
* By the way, "last mile" is an example of rent-seeking by big business, using the easily accepted meme that it's too costly or difficult or against Jesus or something, and that The Government must come in and do it. In any case, it's hardly the "natural" monopoly one poster suggested. By accepting that position, he's already granted that which he sought to prove.
** Insert standard rebuttal here likening business charging $10 extra to thieves getting in the way of your peaceful virtual commune.
As much as he doesn't deserve it, I hope a court throws out any legal action against him with the words, "The government, seriously, wants it to be illegal for people to mass-email their elected officials? Bzzzzzt! Guess again and thanks for playing!"
> University researchers in the UK have put together a team tasked with predicting > the next big thing in terms of communication technologies, in a bid to tackle > ethical pitfalls before they become a problem.
MP: So, what have you figured out? What is the biggest Intertuby-thing on the horizon with ethical issues?
Scientist: We've determined the biggest ethical threats are enormous government studies of Internet technology leading to possible government censorship, monitoring, and regulation.
MP: "A need for increased government participation is shown!", got it.
> There are also challenges that unlock upgrades for Nathan. These could be as simple as > doing five zip kicks or as complex as killing a specific enemy with a specific move. > It's a great way to add depth to the game and encourage the player to use all of > the moves available to them.
No it isn't. Good game design is a great way to get people to use all the available movies: Because they are fun and spectacular to do, and don't feel gimped.
"Rewards" is a piss-poor way to encourage the player to use all the available moves. I am reminded of "combos" from, among many other games, the City of Heroes new melee class of dual blade wielding. You get combo rewards of additional effects or damage for using what are, in reality, very pathetic moves you'd never otherwise use.
This forces you to make combos the game designers want you to do, which is the exact opposite of a free-form combat character, which is exactly what the CoH Scrapper class is. No more clever "attack chains" -- some doof who knows less about the fun of a scrapper has pre-designed some for you, so you can play your own style, and be gimped, or play their style, and be fun-gimped.
*Sigh* Who puts people in charge of these game designs?
> "Six volunteers have climbed into a small metal capsule in Moscow as part of a three-month experiment meant > to simulate a voyage to Mars. The crew -- a German engineer, a French airline pilot, and four Russians"
"In addition to just living bottled up, they will also test various astronaut procedures to cover a wide range of possibilities. These include micrometeor punctures, heart attacks, and the deaths of crewmembers, including the unexpected deaths of the German and the Frenchman, due to arbitrary reason should more intense scrutiny of the approaching Mars detect possible advanced civilization artifacts."
> The name of a pod has no effect on it's usefulness.
That's true. But there's still an official level of propriety on the order of the Queen of England's at the highest level. It's the same ghostly frowner who disapproved Clinton playing sax on Arsenio Hall, who thought the Beach Boys would be a terrible image to have play at the White House, who doesn't like Obama making jokes, and a hundred other things.
NASA did this before once, with the naming of the aerodynamic test shuttle vehicle "Enterprise", after guess what ship, in response to mass pressure. Of course, no real shuttle would be named that.:rolleyes
NASA Manager 1: So, they really chose "Colbert"? Sheesh.
NASA Manager 2: Ya, what can ya do? Anyway, the fine prints says we can now choose to use that, or just fall back on the name we picked out by committee.
Nasa Manager 1: What was that?
Nasa Manager 2: "The People's Valuable Scientific and Industrial Value Benefits Research For The Future Podule"
Well, they deliberately leave out the politics, or try to.
Of course, a wonderful world where machines spit out food and clothing and anything else, for next to nothing, including copies of themselves, is kind of the way some on the far left view the industrial might of the West. It just "happens", magically, independent of the people doing the work themselves, so it's find to therefore have massive government blah blah blah.
> "They've hired Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, and Damon Lindelof to write the screenplay."
" 'The screenplays will be fully new stories,' said Kurtzman, a desire echoed by fans. Moreover, they've also hired all the actors for the next film, though, most ominously, not Sylar. However, he is scheduled to make a cameo at the end of the one after that and has been signed for the one after that."
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry, but "Man turned on by young wife" is hardly something unexpected, or something a wife needs to check.
Now "Young wife physically turned on by wealthy 50-something man" would be a useful test for the man.
If he cared. Which he probably doesn't.
Nevermind.
> "'A controversial database which holds the details of every child in England
> has now become available for childcare professionals to access."
Which is to say, "has now become available for everybody on the planet to access."
In any case, the article continues, "Project managers are having second thoughts about the inclusion of images of the children, including genitalia shots, but wanted as much data available as possible, 'just in case'. "
I recall one company I worked for where the CEO sent out a "confidential" email to all 2000 employees telling him he was leaving the company to work for the government in an appointment position, "Psssst! Don't tell anybody about this email!" Which is, of course, the exact opposite of why he sent it out.
"What? How can I tell who told the press?!?!? I told all 2000+ of 'em to keep it quiet!"
How about 1 window per top level domain? Let's say you have a porn window open to whatbadgershavesexwith.com, and are viewing BBS picture threads there. In another window, you have CNN open and are reading some articles there.
Each of the 3 windows contains tabs for each open browse window for that domain. And, since link-based browsing creates two different heirarchies -- the domain, and the "child" links you visit, and grandchildren, and so on, which may be of different web sites, you can right-click any browser tab and "spwan off" that and all derived tabs into its own window.
The browser might remember this pattern for this site and do it automatically in the future.
Then wrap it up in some kind of neat Vista-like rolling screen thing per window holding tabs, and you're golden.
Huge, impregnable bunker under VP's residence. This and other shocking news at 11!
I wonder if there's a bunker under the White House, too?
Umm, I don't know for sure, but various lint type tools do things like that already. It would not surprise me if one of them checked if the size parameter was = the size of both the dest and src.
In any case, you really want a language that would check that dynamically at runtime since many times, you don't actually know the buffer size if it wasn't allocated locally. This is inefficient, to be sure, but would really only be useful for debug builds anyway.
> The reason for this setting is that it makes for a less cluttered look
> and avoids filling the screen with redundant detail.
The reason for this setting is that it apes Apple, which put the file type in a different field rather than adding it to the file's name itself.
I still recall being stunned at seeing you being able to start a program by "running" one of its files, as were several of my buddies. How in god's name did the OS know to go start that word processor or whatever?
Ya know, for the last 15 years I've been preaching that the FDA may be the far biggest killer last century. By delaying medical tech by "only" 10%, they have caused, because of lower quality of tech, more continued death and misery than they have prevented. Throw in price control via socialized medicine, and the situation could be even worse. Only 30% behind where you'd otherwise be? If you're lucky.
Skip the likelihood of such changes for the moment, but just consider the math. Would you like "free" 1979 medical care today, or "expensive" 2009 medical care? If you think the former, guess again. You just took the head of the line as the greatest mass murderer last century, surpassing Hitler and Stalin.
I fully expect to be downmodded as flamebait since this crushes cherished beliefs, the way an atheist crushes a religious person's groove by pointing out that God loves to let babies be raped to death for some reason.
I believe they need a special screen to reflect the polarized images accurately, but I don't know. It's not just IMAX in and of itself, which is just the modern version of a half-wraparound, 5 story screen.
No, it's not just nostalgia. I remember having that feel and making a note of it when it happened.
In any case, you missed my point about two issues that bust this feel in modern game engines:
1. Sudden stutters due to spinning suddenly, or a lot of special effects suddenly.
and more importantly
2. Even though the fpg be through the roof, the "smoothness" of the changing scene does not match up. I wondered above whether the ability to alter the world as you, say, run through it (which I think is done by the app by altering every scene point, though it may be done through hardware on the board itself, don't know) does not seem to be updating at the same 70fps. As if the engine is rendering 70fps but it is only able to change the polygon orientation at around 20 times per second.
So in that case, a gazillion fps won't do you any good if the scene is changed on a slower schedule.
And I will quickly add, again, that this is just a guess at what's going on. And no, motion blur doesn't fix it -- it makes it worse. The old Quake had anything but motion blur.
Films are 4D. The time dimension is represented by slices of time, or frames. You can look at any place along the movie's time dimension you want, by traveling along your own time dimension, the "real" one. You can, in theory, have multiple time dimensions just as multiple space dimensions.
Presumably, this is how everyone from Dr. Manhattan to The Prophets of DS9 view the world, though clearly things get a bit touchy when they interact with the film strip that is our reality. They have no way to predict the outcome before trying it, in our timeline, than we do. They just see the results instantly. Presumably they cannot travel along their own timeline to stop themselves from doing something they did in their own timeline's past.
I partially disagree. The "old crop", i.e. very old, ala Quake, had some interesting properties the modern crop do not.
Quake I consider the first "true" 3D game because the tilt up and down were rendered in true 3D, whereas previous shooters like Duke Nukem, Doom, and Wolf 3D used a rendering trick that took out one of the matrix multiplications or something. This had the effect of reducing the rendering processor power needed (which was for 386 machines, with no hardware acceleration). But a side effect was you couldn't tilt up and down with proper rendering, though they did do a little distortion trick to simulate it, which got uglier the further you tilted.
Anyhoo, with the Quake software renderer (prior to the first Quake-capable 3D cards like 3dFX and, ultimately, Matrox PowerVR) you had a blocky scene, but with more CPU horsepower, you could get 60-70 fps, which was so smooth you lost any traces of stutter or flickering at the edges of notice. It became like looking through a window at a real world.
Nowadays you get that fast of an fps, but things just don't have that effect. And that's not including the immersion-breaking stutters as the system pages or loads a lot of new data into the card, or whatever, when you turn suddenly or a bunch of sparklies explode.
It's also possible the software/hardware/whatever cannot warp all the 3D triangles or whatever when you turn, at 70+ fps, even thought the hardware can render it that quickly. So you'd still get a kind of stutter as you turned even if the fps was through the roof. But I don't know enough about 3D programming anymore to know if this is an issue (wasn't this the T part of the "new" T&L cards 7 years ago or whatever?)
He also named his hero "Hiro", jesus, he totally copied Heroes on NBC! >:-(
Seriously, though, the Polar Express sequence when the kid's trudging along the top of the train in the dark with snow and howling winds takes on a whole new level of terror that's not there in the 2D version. No longer is it just a "flat" thing to walk along.
In fact, it was such a powerful sequence, I'm surprised it's taking this long to get here as a mass market thing. It's only been 2 years since the local Showcase installed a 3D-capable IMAX theater, and then it's only used for Pixar releases and the like, and even then it's only 1 of 4 theater rooms showing the film, the other 3 being normal, non-3D, non-IMAX screens.
Nah, this'll be a bigger change, the kind you say "I can't believe we didn't have that!", like you do about the Internet, or a TiVo, or the frictionless, free-spinning mouse wheel from the big Logitech Revolution. Not a small change like B&W -> Color TV, or Color TV -> HDTV.
This is true. Quantum Mechanics' "true randomness" could sit atop a perfectly deterministic deeper reality. When Einstein said he believed in "reality", he meant there were definite objects out there with definite properties. QM wipes that away -- *at that level*. Of course, an even deeper reality would basically make the QM level a sort of virtual world, which doesn't exactly help Einstein's case, even if it were to be deterministic. The "real stuff" he believed existed would now be twice-removed, so to speak, from "reality".
...and so would prostitutes.
It is a bad summary.
> the UK Home Office checked whether its interpretation of the law suited Phorm,
> before issuing advice on the legality of the controversial advertising service.
From this, it sounds like someone's bitching that a private citizen or group of citizens had the temerity to ask if a particular course of action they wanted to take, would be considered legal or not, before they took it.
Oh. My. God. How horrifically unreasonable! People should, what, not be allowed to ask if some action is illegal or legal before they do it? WTF kind of policy is that?
> could the world of high-end PC graphics simply go away?
No. They can get their sorry asses back to developing real 3D immersion, don't care how, goggles, special screens, or whatever, and the associated wraparound technology for immersion.
Hint: I don't want motion blur so it looks like a movie -- that's a fault of the movies, and you're reproducing it?!?!?
One of the most realistic 3D renderings I saw was actually many years ago with Quake. Running with the horrible, blocky software renderer, on a newer (for that time) machine, you got fantastic refresh rates in excess of 70 fps.
Long gone were the last vestiges of any kind of motion issues, which, sorry for the naysayers around here, do exist well past a paltry 30 or even 45 fps.
Also, given the RAM wasn't an issue, there were no stutters as you entered an area, or just turned around quickly. This lead to a phenomenal feeling that you were looking through a window of your monitor into an actual world out there.
Then along came hardware renderers, better resolution, colors, whatnot. But it's still not the same. Even if you get a good fps, as I do in town on, say, Dungeons and Dragons Online, when you start moving, turning, or have a sudden bunch of explosive special effects, the machine stutters. Whether this is due to paging, or loading the objects to the video card, or whatever, I don't know. The point is, I don't care.
I'd rather trade off the next pointless increase on this or that bizarre feature or resolution, in favor of cleaning up these stutter issues that detract from realism. And then integrate true 3D. And then integrate a wraparound scenario, be it a special bubble display, or a motion sensor in your 3D goggle headset. I don't care.
But I wanna see that all at a smooth 70+ fps before the next 3D card that can do 45 fps of 8000x16000 resolution just so I can see lovely grey cement with rust stains on it stutter as I run into town to sell my stuff.
Sigh. Yes, I know you can get 3D goggles and software that makes true 3D out of almost any 3D game. Yes I know you can get multiple huge monitors for a wraparound (but I have great difficulty finding a site where people actually do this for a game, say, 3 widescreens side-by-side, such that you are looking at your character in the middle of the middle screen, rather than his split ass in-between the two screens of a dual setup, and what card(s), FPS, and so on. Actual links, not "well, check out this card which has 3 video outs and should do that in theory.
At the risk of being flamemodded, I would like to add to this. There is a certain impropriety of government using tax money to create competition to the private sector, while relying on the private sector's expensively-designed technology to do all the work, be it last mile*, or just good old Cisco industrial routers. Government pretending to be awesome to the people by doing things like this is nothing new.
That any organization could do this, private or otherwise, using legislation forcing open others' infrastructure is bad enough. For a government agency to do this is just shameful. You tax the population, who provides the technology to begin with thanks to their private enterprises, such as AT&T, to eviscerate the profits they get, which is what drove them to begin with**. That stuff doesn't just magically appear, to be taken advantage of by an heroes.
* By the way, "last mile" is an example of rent-seeking by big business, using the easily accepted meme that it's too costly or difficult or against Jesus or something, and that The Government must come in and do it. In any case, it's hardly the "natural" monopoly one poster suggested. By accepting that position, he's already granted that which he sought to prove.
** Insert standard rebuttal here likening business charging $10 extra to thieves getting in the way of your peaceful virtual commune.
As much as he doesn't deserve it, I hope a court throws out any legal action against him with the words, "The government, seriously, wants it to be illegal for people to mass-email their elected officials? Bzzzzzt! Guess again and thanks for playing!"
> University researchers in the UK have put together a team tasked with predicting
> the next big thing in terms of communication technologies, in a bid to tackle
> ethical pitfalls before they become a problem.
MP: So, what have you figured out? What is the biggest Intertuby-thing on the horizon with ethical issues?
Scientist: We've determined the biggest ethical threats are enormous government studies of Internet technology leading to possible government censorship, monitoring, and regulation.
MP: "A need for increased government participation is shown!", got it.
> There are also challenges that unlock upgrades for Nathan. These could be as simple as
> doing five zip kicks or as complex as killing a specific enemy with a specific move.
> It's a great way to add depth to the game and encourage the player to use all of
> the moves available to them.
No it isn't. Good game design is a great way to get people to use all the available movies: Because they are fun and spectacular to do, and don't feel gimped.
"Rewards" is a piss-poor way to encourage the player to use all the available moves. I am reminded of "combos" from, among many other games, the City of Heroes new melee class of dual blade wielding. You get combo rewards of additional effects or damage for using what are, in reality, very pathetic moves you'd never otherwise use.
This forces you to make combos the game designers want you to do, which is the exact opposite of a free-form combat character, which is exactly what the CoH Scrapper class is. No more clever "attack chains" -- some doof who knows less about the fun of a scrapper has pre-designed some for you, so you can play your own style, and be gimped, or play their style, and be fun-gimped.
*Sigh* Who puts people in charge of these game designs?
I wouldn't gladly sleep there:
> "Six volunteers have climbed into a small metal capsule in Moscow as part of a three-month experiment meant
> to simulate a voyage to Mars. The crew -- a German engineer, a French airline pilot, and four Russians"
"In addition to just living bottled up, they will also test various astronaut procedures to cover a wide range of possibilities. These include micrometeor punctures, heart attacks, and the deaths of crewmembers, including the unexpected deaths of the German and the Frenchman, due to arbitrary reason should more intense scrutiny of the approaching Mars detect possible advanced civilization artifacts."
> The name of a pod has no effect on it's usefulness.
That's true. But there's still an official level of propriety on the order of the Queen of England's at the highest level. It's the same ghostly frowner who disapproved Clinton playing sax on Arsenio Hall, who thought the Beach Boys would be a terrible image to have play at the White House, who doesn't like Obama making jokes, and a hundred other things.
NASA did this before once, with the naming of the aerodynamic test shuttle vehicle "Enterprise", after guess what ship, in response to mass pressure. Of course, no real shuttle would be named that. :rolleyes
NASA Manager 1: So, they really chose "Colbert"? Sheesh.
NASA Manager 2: Ya, what can ya do? Anyway, the fine prints says we can now choose to use that, or just fall back on the name we picked out by committee.
Nasa Manager 1: What was that?
Nasa Manager 2: "The People's Valuable Scientific and Industrial Value Benefits Research For The Future Podule"
Well, they deliberately leave out the politics, or try to.
Of course, a wonderful world where machines spit out food and clothing and anything else, for next to nothing, including copies of themselves, is kind of the way some on the far left view the industrial might of the West. It just "happens", magically, independent of the people doing the work themselves, so it's find to therefore have massive government blah blah blah.
> "They've hired Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, and Damon Lindelof to write the screenplay."
" 'The screenplays will be fully new stories,' said Kurtzman, a desire echoed by fans. Moreover, they've also hired all the actors for the next film, though, most ominously, not Sylar. However, he is scheduled to make a cameo at the end of the one after that and has been signed for the one after that ."
ZOMFGWTF! You had to learn something about his real life just to know his character isn't pure affectation?