Um, the current Legends of Zork? Granted, there's little more than click, click, return to base, click... but the pictures and the text at least try to capture the flavour. I'll give them credit for trying, but at the moment it's rather dull.
I always parsed "on crack" to refer to speed and (perceived) agility, and "on steroids" to refer to muscle and power. A program on crack is one that reacts so blazingly fast it's scary. A program on steroids is one that suddenly takes over so many other tasks you wonder how it got the muscles. Lean versus beefed up.
Reading TFH, I would say Google Wave is both. A system that has gulped down tonnes of steroids, but is smoking so much crack it still zips around (unless you have an older browser, in which case it loses balance and crashes into the walls).
As the other poster stated, NASA itself states that the flag was knocked over by the blast - "Buzz" looked out and saw it happen while Neil was piloting the ascent module.
As for the ascents being gentle, apparently they didn't feel that way on the inside. Also, although the lunar surface is (almost) a vacuum, there would have been a tiny breeze from the engine exhaust. It would rapidly dissipate, of course, but it still was enough to scatter some things.
So I don't think all tracks would be erased, but at the same time I think it's valid that the first footprints might already be smudged. And let's be honest: wouldn't a cool part of this probe be taking a look and answering questions like this?
Actually, the first bootprints might have survived due to the LEM base acting as an umbrella. Sure, the flag may have been knocked over (Aldrin saw it fall), but the lack of atmosphere means there would be no swirling of the dust.
You touched upon the two most important facets: lunar exploration is covered by international treaties, and national laws become relevant when you return back into that country's territory. IIRC there are some laws that govern US citizens' involvement in other space programmes since it is a legitimate issue of national security.
IIRC the LEM already knocked it over when it blasted off for the return flight. Theoretically a lot of the bootprints will also have been erased by the exhaust as well.
I think there's a lot of value to returning to the sites, if only to see how the material withstood the stress of the temperature swings from night and day, long term effects of being in a vacuum and exposed to the solar winds and so on.
You must not do a lot of CSS coding, or deal with multiple monitors. One centimetre on one screen is not the same on another. The usage of Pica, inches, millimetres and so on is only really recommended for print use. When used with screen resolutions, they are calculated into pixels based on the browser's preferences (often only switchable between 72dpi and 96dpi).
Even on prepress monitors, I have yet to see a monitor where a centimetre on the screen is equal to a centimetre on a ruler held to the screen.
A lot of these sorts of schemes assume some sort of fixed pixel size such as 96 dpi, a fantasy that hasn't been true since, well, ages. Some LED screens have up to 150 dpi resolution, others as low as 72dpi. If the scale is wrong, then the pixels won't line up and the decoder is then useless.
Now, I admit it's possible that the creator of this scheme might have solved this, but I doubt it. A colour filter like those games whose clues are read through a red plastic foil viewer would be far too easy to crack, for example.
I can't escape the impression that this is just security theatre and not serious security after all.
Thank you for entirely missing the point and getting it all wrong.
No, the model is the one used by a concert or a book pre-sale. Attendees/prospective buyers make a binding pledge to purchase, under the provision that X tickets/books must be pre-ordered before the concert can happen (or the book be sent to the printer). Should the goal amount not be reached, the money is never transferred.
There already are online games that live from such donations and subscriptions. The money spent on the game also goes to financing incremental improvements and new content in the game.
But you must also realise that even your little example is skewed by the fact that there really are manufacturers who rely upon pre-orders to retool their manufacturing lines. "Well, Mister Postmaster General, we can make the delivery variation for you, thanks to your pre-order of five thousand vans..."
Going back to the hated car analogy, your suggested business model is no different than a car dealer selling used cars on the same lot as the new cars. Or, say, if Games Workshop stores allowed used miniatures trading on site. Or a used collectable baseball card store owned by Upper Deck.
Like the parent to your post wrote, copyright only deals with the right to make copies. It was never intended to deal with the matter of what happens to those copies once made, only provide the publisher a tool to keep other commercial publishers from leeching off of their work, from a time when the act of publishing was expensive.
I would suggest that the "pre-sale" model will eventually help pay for developing games. A game production team cobbles together a demo for free, and subscribers sign up in advance, promising payment upon delivery of the finished game. These subscribers then have bragging rights to receiving advance copies and other goodies.
Another model could be "we will make a sequel to Game X if we reach our goal of $Y donations", leaving it up to prospective game players to donate whatever they want. It would be a little like the advance that a book publisher pays an author, but coming from the commons and donations after the game's release are thus slightly analogue to royalties and incentives to refine the game.
The sale of used games also means that the first purchaser did not consider the game worth keeping, and thus decides to share ownership with someone else. The original purchaser owned it for the first part of the game's life, the person buying it second-hand the second part, and so on.
Of course, often there is a middleman who also charges a fee, since he is the one who brings the deal between the first purchaser and the second-hand purchaser together. It's this "agent's fee" that the game publishers resent, since it suggests that they could have earned the full price plus the agent's fee if they had only set the price slightly lower and gotten both customers without a middleman skimming off the top.
I like used games from an environmental point of view. It extends the usable lifespan of the physical media, and means less copies have to circulate around - once the game loses interest for you, pass it on to someone who will still enjoy it. I am just not that big a fan of the disposable mindset.
Actually, it is highly relevant for many of us web geeks, due to the tangled mess that copyright and inspiration versus derivative works is. In an indirect way, this could influence things like source code, where a company sues a smaller company for copyright infringement, and then the coder who wrote the code in the first place steps in, claiming that the supposed copyright holder only licensed the code from him and didn't get full copy rights.
I personally think this case ought to go to Mr. Fairey, since his painting could have used any of a number of photographs as a reference and the work in making the painting was his. His mistake was giving the photographer credit, and then the AP thought it deserved a piece of the profits since they were the distributors.
Agreed. My experience with GURPS is also good, though I regret that they never incorporated the Bang!/Skill/Specialty system into the fourth edition. (To clarify: Bang! skills were very broad, suited for "cinematic" play, where the Professor from Gilligan's Island is a good example of using the "Science!" skill. Skills were as advertised, and specialties were in finer detail, such as PHP/MySQL being a specialty of the Programming skill).
Computer game designers often balk at skill-point systems, though, since they introduce too many variables into the character database. As enjoyable as it might be for the players, the servers now have to keep track of the skill levels in every single skill rather than just calculate the skill as a combo of class and level. Even though data storage is no longer an issue, the old prejudices still remain.
It's easier to make an online D&D character sheet generator than a GURPS character sheet generator. I know, I've tried.
I see it more as "this guy is mocking me! I may not be able to do much to this asshole, but I can sure make his life miserable for a few hours!"
I think a lot of TSA employees are a little resentful of the reputation they have, and are just looking for ways to lash out (which ruins their reputation even more, and so on).
The term comes from the Frankfurt Parliament of 1848, where the "democratic" factions desiring democratic government similar to the United States sat on the left, "liberal" (personal freedoms and moderate change) sat in the middle and "conservatives" wanting to retain authoritarian rule aristocrats sat on the right.
The right wing is therefore authoritarian, desiring a strong ruler. The Bush administration was therefore very right-wing, and your view is one that could be considered liberal under the way the rest of the world understands these terms. The same could be said for the actions of the TSA, performing in a very authoritarian way in trying to suppress criticism with as much zeal as they are supposed to be doing their job (which is to provide for the safety of travellers).
Actually, I think you're also committing the "No True Scotsman" logical fallacy, but I this is not the place for prolonged debate about that.
If anything, the current circumnavigating of the Twitter Freeze within Iran should point out why it's self-defeating in the end to censor traffic. It just doesn't work, and there's no guarantee that it won't be abused.
I tend to disagreement about there being no chance for an Incredibles sequel. Even superheroes get older. Kids grow up. A sequel could centre upon how the family adapts to Mum and Dad losing their powers to old age, the kids facing the challenges of having their own lives, yet dealing with Dad attempting one last hurrah even though he's far past his prime. Plenty of chances for slapstick and emotion (I can see Flash racing between classes and home, getting the folks their prescription medication from the pharmacy and barely making it back in time, or sitting in a lecture with a professor that talks really, really, slow). Maybe it seems too dark for you to do a story about seeing how old age takes away so much, but Toy Story 2 also dealt with mortality.
That's what makes Pixar movies so good: the way they craft stories around sometimes difficult issues like losing your family (Finding Nemo), standing up for your beliefs (A Bug's Life) or our "disposable goods" mentality (Wall-E).
Point 2 could be considered debatable, as Darwin (the Unix core of Mac OS X) is considered a BSD-derivative. The mascot for Darwin even reflects this as a platypus wearing a devil hat and wielding a trident. So Darwin is technically the third desktop-oriented BSD distro.
This doesn't lessen your argument, though. It's just a footnote you should be aware of, since Darwin is rarely seen without the Aqua desktop environment and is well hidden from the average user.
Oh, and yes, I personally have tried out KDE on a Mac. Though it didn't wow me enough to abandon the default Mac OS X setup, I did like what I saw.
Ah, thank you. I suspected you were aiming for funny, but it's hard to parody something that is so absurd. I have seen comments like yours where the poster was deadly earnest.
Next time I have mod points, I plan on modding all political comments "funny". After all, that must be the intent, and it works better than calling it "flamebait". Cheers!
Um, it's a little facetious to discount the body's own ability to regenerate even neural disorders. Often a spa works not directly, but in helping the brain and the associated hormones, neurotransmitters and so on "kick-start" themselves back into repairing the damage.
Sometimes the big pharma pills are just the same thing: a nudge in the right direction, with the hefty price tag due to all the work needed to give an effect without too many side effects.
Hah, libs are all nuts. I love it! I have yet to meet a liberal who was happy or content with their lives.
You sound quite bitter about it.
On a more serious note, progressives are by definition never satisfied; they feel that there is always room for improvement. This is not bitterness, however. It is more like a painter always trying to improve the picture, never satisfied with what he's made. The opposite is the conservative, who thinks things used to be better in the past and tries to recapture that ideal moment. Both can become bitter when they are set back for prolonged periods.
And by the way, you do realise that the opposite of the Liberal is the Authoritarian, don't you?
Slashdot Mirror
Um, the current Legends of Zork? Granted, there's little more than click, click, return to base, click... but the pictures and the text at least try to capture the flavour. I'll give them credit for trying, but at the moment it's rather dull.
I always parsed "on crack" to refer to speed and (perceived) agility, and "on steroids" to refer to muscle and power. A program on crack is one that reacts so blazingly fast it's scary. A program on steroids is one that suddenly takes over so many other tasks you wonder how it got the muscles. Lean versus beefed up.
Reading TFH, I would say Google Wave is both. A system that has gulped down tonnes of steroids, but is smoking so much crack it still zips around (unless you have an older browser, in which case it loses balance and crashes into the walls).
As the other poster stated, NASA itself states that the flag was knocked over by the blast - "Buzz" looked out and saw it happen while Neil was piloting the ascent module.
As for the ascents being gentle, apparently they didn't feel that way on the inside. Also, although the lunar surface is (almost) a vacuum, there would have been a tiny breeze from the engine exhaust. It would rapidly dissipate, of course, but it still was enough to scatter some things.
So I don't think all tracks would be erased, but at the same time I think it's valid that the first footprints might already be smudged. And let's be honest: wouldn't a cool part of this probe be taking a look and answering questions like this?
Actually, the first bootprints might have survived due to the LEM base acting as an umbrella. Sure, the flag may have been knocked over (Aldrin saw it fall), but the lack of atmosphere means there would be no swirling of the dust.
You touched upon the two most important facets: lunar exploration is covered by international treaties, and national laws become relevant when you return back into that country's territory. IIRC there are some laws that govern US citizens' involvement in other space programmes since it is a legitimate issue of national security.
IIRC the LEM already knocked it over when it blasted off for the return flight. Theoretically a lot of the bootprints will also have been erased by the exhaust as well.
I think there's a lot of value to returning to the sites, if only to see how the material withstood the stress of the temperature swings from night and day, long term effects of being in a vacuum and exposed to the solar winds and so on.
You must not do a lot of CSS coding, or deal with multiple monitors. One centimetre on one screen is not the same on another. The usage of Pica, inches, millimetres and so on is only really recommended for print use. When used with screen resolutions, they are calculated into pixels based on the browser's preferences (often only switchable between 72dpi and 96dpi).
Even on prepress monitors, I have yet to see a monitor where a centimetre on the screen is equal to a centimetre on a ruler held to the screen.
A lot of these sorts of schemes assume some sort of fixed pixel size such as 96 dpi, a fantasy that hasn't been true since, well, ages. Some LED screens have up to 150 dpi resolution, others as low as 72dpi. If the scale is wrong, then the pixels won't line up and the decoder is then useless.
Now, I admit it's possible that the creator of this scheme might have solved this, but I doubt it. A colour filter like those games whose clues are read through a red plastic foil viewer would be far too easy to crack, for example.
I can't escape the impression that this is just security theatre and not serious security after all.
Thank you for entirely missing the point and getting it all wrong.
No, the model is the one used by a concert or a book pre-sale. Attendees/prospective buyers make a binding pledge to purchase, under the provision that X tickets/books must be pre-ordered before the concert can happen (or the book be sent to the printer). Should the goal amount not be reached, the money is never transferred.
There already are online games that live from such donations and subscriptions. The money spent on the game also goes to financing incremental improvements and new content in the game.
But you must also realise that even your little example is skewed by the fact that there really are manufacturers who rely upon pre-orders to retool their manufacturing lines. "Well, Mister Postmaster General, we can make the delivery variation for you, thanks to your pre-order of five thousand vans..."
Going back to the hated car analogy, your suggested business model is no different than a car dealer selling used cars on the same lot as the new cars. Or, say, if Games Workshop stores allowed used miniatures trading on site. Or a used collectable baseball card store owned by Upper Deck.
Like the parent to your post wrote, copyright only deals with the right to make copies. It was never intended to deal with the matter of what happens to those copies once made, only provide the publisher a tool to keep other commercial publishers from leeching off of their work, from a time when the act of publishing was expensive.
I would suggest that the "pre-sale" model will eventually help pay for developing games. A game production team cobbles together a demo for free, and subscribers sign up in advance, promising payment upon delivery of the finished game. These subscribers then have bragging rights to receiving advance copies and other goodies.
Another model could be "we will make a sequel to Game X if we reach our goal of $Y donations", leaving it up to prospective game players to donate whatever they want. It would be a little like the advance that a book publisher pays an author, but coming from the commons and donations after the game's release are thus slightly analogue to royalties and incentives to refine the game.
The sale of used games also means that the first purchaser did not consider the game worth keeping, and thus decides to share ownership with someone else. The original purchaser owned it for the first part of the game's life, the person buying it second-hand the second part, and so on.
Of course, often there is a middleman who also charges a fee, since he is the one who brings the deal between the first purchaser and the second-hand purchaser together. It's this "agent's fee" that the game publishers resent, since it suggests that they could have earned the full price plus the agent's fee if they had only set the price slightly lower and gotten both customers without a middleman skimming off the top.
I like used games from an environmental point of view. It extends the usable lifespan of the physical media, and means less copies have to circulate around - once the game loses interest for you, pass it on to someone who will still enjoy it. I am just not that big a fan of the disposable mindset.
Actually, it is highly relevant for many of us web geeks, due to the tangled mess that copyright and inspiration versus derivative works is. In an indirect way, this could influence things like source code, where a company sues a smaller company for copyright infringement, and then the coder who wrote the code in the first place steps in, claiming that the supposed copyright holder only licensed the code from him and didn't get full copy rights.
I personally think this case ought to go to Mr. Fairey, since his painting could have used any of a number of photographs as a reference and the work in making the painting was his. His mistake was giving the photographer credit, and then the AP thought it deserved a piece of the profits since they were the distributors.
Agreed. My experience with GURPS is also good, though I regret that they never incorporated the Bang!/Skill/Specialty system into the fourth edition. (To clarify: Bang! skills were very broad, suited for "cinematic" play, where the Professor from Gilligan's Island is a good example of using the "Science!" skill. Skills were as advertised, and specialties were in finer detail, such as PHP/MySQL being a specialty of the Programming skill).
Computer game designers often balk at skill-point systems, though, since they introduce too many variables into the character database. As enjoyable as it might be for the players, the servers now have to keep track of the skill levels in every single skill rather than just calculate the skill as a combo of class and level. Even though data storage is no longer an issue, the old prejudices still remain.
It's easier to make an online D&D character sheet generator than a GURPS character sheet generator. I know, I've tried.
I see it more as "this guy is mocking me! I may not be able to do much to this asshole, but I can sure make his life miserable for a few hours!"
I think a lot of TSA employees are a little resentful of the reputation they have, and are just looking for ways to lash out (which ruins their reputation even more, and so on).
Historically, you are wrong.
The term comes from the Frankfurt Parliament of 1848, where the "democratic" factions desiring democratic government similar to the United States sat on the left, "liberal" (personal freedoms and moderate change) sat in the middle and "conservatives" wanting to retain authoritarian rule aristocrats sat on the right.
The right wing is therefore authoritarian, desiring a strong ruler. The Bush administration was therefore very right-wing, and your view is one that could be considered liberal under the way the rest of the world understands these terms. The same could be said for the actions of the TSA, performing in a very authoritarian way in trying to suppress criticism with as much zeal as they are supposed to be doing their job (which is to provide for the safety of travellers).
Actually, I think you're also committing the "No True Scotsman" logical fallacy, but I this is not the place for prolonged debate about that.
If anything, the current circumnavigating of the Twitter Freeze within Iran should point out why it's self-defeating in the end to censor traffic. It just doesn't work, and there's no guarantee that it won't be abused.
I tend to disagreement about there being no chance for an Incredibles sequel. Even superheroes get older. Kids grow up. A sequel could centre upon how the family adapts to Mum and Dad losing their powers to old age, the kids facing the challenges of having their own lives, yet dealing with Dad attempting one last hurrah even though he's far past his prime. Plenty of chances for slapstick and emotion (I can see Flash racing between classes and home, getting the folks their prescription medication from the pharmacy and barely making it back in time, or sitting in a lecture with a professor that talks really, really, slow). Maybe it seems too dark for you to do a story about seeing how old age takes away so much, but Toy Story 2 also dealt with mortality.
That's what makes Pixar movies so good: the way they craft stories around sometimes difficult issues like losing your family (Finding Nemo), standing up for your beliefs (A Bug's Life) or our "disposable goods" mentality (Wall-E).
I still can't stand the way they butchered the Victor Hugo novel. Where was Pierre Gringoire? How the heck did the complex character of Claude Frollo become such a cliché? And why did they have to turn Clopin Trouillefou into a joke?
Give me the original, where La Esmeralda is hanged.
Point 2 could be considered debatable, as Darwin (the Unix core of Mac OS X) is considered a BSD-derivative. The mascot for Darwin even reflects this as a platypus wearing a devil hat and wielding a trident. So Darwin is technically the third desktop-oriented BSD distro.
This doesn't lessen your argument, though. It's just a footnote you should be aware of, since Darwin is rarely seen without the Aqua desktop environment and is well hidden from the average user.
Oh, and yes, I personally have tried out KDE on a Mac. Though it didn't wow me enough to abandon the default Mac OS X setup, I did like what I saw.
Ah, thank you. I suspected you were aiming for funny, but it's hard to parody something that is so absurd. I have seen comments like yours where the poster was deadly earnest.
Next time I have mod points, I plan on modding all political comments "funny". After all, that must be the intent, and it works better than calling it "flamebait". Cheers!
Um, it's a little facetious to discount the body's own ability to regenerate even neural disorders. Often a spa works not directly, but in helping the brain and the associated hormones, neurotransmitters and so on "kick-start" themselves back into repairing the damage.
Sometimes the big pharma pills are just the same thing: a nudge in the right direction, with the hefty price tag due to all the work needed to give an effect without too many side effects.
Are you mad? That's a horrible way to treat whiskey! It should be sipped, not shot at!
"The cure is quite simple: we merely amputate the head."
Hah, libs are all nuts. I love it! I have yet to meet a liberal who was happy or content with their lives.
You sound quite bitter about it.
On a more serious note, progressives are by definition never satisfied; they feel that there is always room for improvement. This is not bitterness, however. It is more like a painter always trying to improve the picture, never satisfied with what he's made. The opposite is the conservative, who thinks things used to be better in the past and tries to recapture that ideal moment. Both can become bitter when they are set back for prolonged periods.
And by the way, you do realise that the opposite of the Liberal is the Authoritarian, don't you?