Re:What happens when life IS found
on
Methane on Mars?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I think most religions do not insist on literal interpretations of their texts.
Worse, they tend to insist on interpretations by an approved "authority" within the religion. In short, they then make up shit like "the Earth is the center of the Universe" or "homosexuality is an abomination before God" or "aliens are Godless animals". Then someone comes along who isn't talking shit ("Earth Orbits Sun, says Galileo; "Your Own Priests Fucked Me" boys say) an instead of admitting a mistake of Godly proportions, the authorities covers things up and insists on a holy war to destroy the non-believers.
No. You sound like one of those people who get all freaked out when some local reporter tries to sensationalize some minor event in the evening news. "Is water a deadly killer? Find out at 10!" More to the point, your sample set only covers people who are getting "harmed" by the logging of their habits (RFID is really incidental to the cases), and you never seem to notice the people who get helped. What about the suspects that get eliminated from the line-up because they had records to back up their alibi? They never get the attention of going to court to defend their actions, but that doesn't mean you can discard them from the sample.
I once got into an accident and used my handy cell phone to call 911, and the other driver immediately started accusing me of being on the phone when the accident happened. Now it was just a minor accident with no tickets issued, and I don't think they tried to defraud the insurance company, but I recall being quite happy at the time that the phone company kept records which could be used to show I was not, in fact, being distracted by the cell phone.
Now imagine how many places will use RFIDs. Every store. Public places. EVERYWHERE. Compile and cross-reference this data and you can assemble a complete picture of a person.
If a complete picture can be painted of you with just your records, you're a pretty boring person. RFID doesn't add a lot to the landscape of tracking that can be done. It's just a wireless version of the magnetic strip on the back of a plastic card. If you're paranoid about credit cards, yeah, be paranoid about RFID, too. If not, go on to lead a life that is more than a paper/electronic trail.
There is even redundency between Carbon and Cocoa in OS X.
I believe the word you were looking for there is "reuse". Carbon and Cocoa share a lot of Core code, and/or have structures that are toll-free bridged between environments. There are overlaps in functionality between the two APIs, but for the most part the code underneath is not duplicated any more than necessary. If that's the type of integration that is going to happen with the Gnome+KDE mix I'd be happy to see it. However, my money is on them not forming a nice abstraction API which they layer the KDE and Gnome APIs on top of, instead letting ego get in the way trying to make one way or the other the "winner".
It should be fairly simple to tie a speech recognition engine to some python scripts to perform simple queries and return a parsed result ready for text-to-speech conversion. One big problem the dictionary feature brings out is how the speech recognition would handle unfamiliar words. Even leaving that feature out, it would be nice to have a limited set of features I could use anywhere in the house.
Then just get a Mac already. With Speakable Items and AppleScript, it's 90% of what you want. All the software is there, it's just a question of providing a hardware interface throughout your house. Ideal for me would be support for a Bluetooth headset. Sadly, Apple only recently added headset support to OS X but without speech support (possibly Bluetooth isn't up to the task when it comes to sampling for recognition currently). If you're content to wire the house, though, you could be doing want you want tomorrow.
Consider that I might feel like listening to music, but I'm not sure what band I feel like. Flipping through the CD's let's me notice "that band I haven't listened to in a while".
How does that beat just scrolling through band names? Or just resorting your entire song library by time last played? In iTunes it took me 2 seconds to find that information. Hell, I can have a smart playlist that contains all the songs I haven't listened to in 3 months. I'm all for 3D when it is useful, but I don't see it being useful for what you suggest. What are the 3 dimensions of music such that a 3D interface would be useful in any real way instead of mere eye candy?
How is trying to replicate the natural interface that we use every day a dumb idea?
It's not just dumb, it is profoundly stupid. It's the kind of idea thought up by someone who doesn't grok technology. The main problem is that 3D is about space, and with the computer we've already moved on to hyperspace. A real folder gets cumbersome if it nests other, bigger folders. A real location called Slashdot would require you to leave your current location and take time to walk/run/ride there, whereat you would slowly move between article rooms looking for discussions. I vastly prefer the hyperfolder, which contains all manner of objects, and the hyperlink, which instantly takes me to what I want. The 3D interface is absolutely brain dead until someone can puzzle out representations for information (much like WIMP in 2D) that makes working with it easier.
Open source, bad? HOW DARE YOU!!!11one!!!!....but seriously, Apple has M$ completely stomped.
Then open source developers have MS stomped as well, if they were smart enough to chose GNUstep. It uses the same methods for localization that Apple's Cocoa apps do.
It's kind of a catch-22. Questions that are easy for a computer to generate, are easy for a computer to answer. Questions that are hard for a computer to answer, are hard for a computer to generate.
That's partly true, but when it comes to semantics vs. syntax, it works something like a one-way hash. If I offer up "LDFLDFJJ", there is semantically within that string a concept of pairings. There are many ways to express that in a syntax that is used to generate questions. I could reference the number 2, the word two, twice, twins, pairs, repeats, duplicates, multiples, etc. Put within the context of a full question, it makes answering a question on semantics very difficult for a computer, even if the same computer might have generated that question.
Someone could just spend five minutes figuring out all the answers to your fixed set of 20-30 questions . Answering your questions is probably easier than making up in the first place.
Sure; so what's your point? What you say is already an attack to employ on CAPTCHA systems. The point of the article and discussion thread is about using automated systems. I was just making a note that the use of syntax instead of semantics made breaking the system easier to automate. Is the whole field kind of pointless when you can hire someone at minimum wage to answer 500 of these queries an hour? Absolutely. That's why I'm not going to spend any time implementing a challenge-response system.
I think the SPAM Captcha interceptor could be made better by including with a text message that says something like. Change the letter that is third (random position) to the letter "F"
Once you go the route of text semantics, you can get rid of the relatively large and cumbersome image altogether. The main reason a CAPTCHA can be cracked is because they are simple "syntax" problems (you type what you see) that AI research has been able to tackle pretty easy. OCR software doesn't really have to improve all that much to automatically crack most sites.
Once you go with natural language processing, then you've stuck out a much tougher nut to crack. Even without the picture, there are all manner of questions that can be formulated about a plain, relatively short string like "LDFLDFJJ" that are easy for the generating computer to ask and for a human to answer, but difficult for another computer to understand.
And if you wanted to get real tricky, go for deep semantics of real sentences. I can think of craploads of questions I could ask about "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog". Something like that does require a human to make up the questions, but I could spend five minutes in one day to easily come up with 20 or 30 that a computer would probably not figure out in the next 10 years.
If a company wants to stay in business (particularly a publicly traded company) they will want to sell their product through as many channels as they possibly can. Deals with PC manufacturers provide income that might not be earned otherwise.
That's true, but it doesn't change my statement. Yes, they'll take what they couldn't otherwise get, but they'd still want to keep their name on a good product. It's a tight spot for all companies involved, because brand X might take the chance to go on its own if the market is good enough, or the rebrander Y could just drop them to go with a cheaper alternative if they thought the Y name was more valuable than having the X product. It's not an easy dynamic to figure out, which is why Apple probably does the smart thing in controlling as much as they can themselves.
Interestingly, they started working with HP not too long back to rebrand the iPod. So, despite the Apple brand being quite strong, clearly they've worked out some way it makes more sense to be a product supplier as well. I think that is most interesting because I wonder what Apple will do in the future. It would be really cute to see HP rebrand Apple desktops as well. After all, they currently just rebrand various Wintel machines, so would it be out of the question to introduce a rebranded iMac into their lineup?
Apple is in an enviable position of having both good tech and a good brand, so they can pretty much play the game any way they figure makes the most sense. Gateway, on the other hand, is just another box builder with a mediocre brand name. The purchase of eMachines does nothing for them. They would have been smarter to try and jump HP's gun in partnering with Apple.
True, however you've got to admit, from the marketing prospective, there is a great advantage to rebranding... the final product has your name on it! Another major advantage, this time for the customer is tech support from a single house.
Neither is an plus. For the first, you're giving your name to a product you don't control. If a company makes great products, they're going to want to keep their name on it. The only way you'll get to rebrand something is if you drop a lot of money for something good (not up Gateway's alley) or get something inferior (more common by far). So, bully, you've just attached your name to a bad product. Now, your second "advantage", you have to support it. This crappy thing you have no control over is now taking customer service away from supporting your primary product. Disaster all around.
Like it or not, most of the people who buy from a company like Gateway are not going to drive down the street to see if the same camera costs a few bucks less, they'll buy it from Gateway or even along with their desktop or laptop and have support from the same company.
Ever been to an Apple Store? They have cameras and other stuff all over the place, they're just smart enough not to label them as Apple products.
At least cheaters you kick and they go cheat somewhere else. TKs keep coming back cause they enjoy it too damn much. Not to mention TKs have a sad history of coming back with different name.
Of course, that kind of makes me wonder why games all seem to have a static view of what a "team" is. Anyone who is killing more of one team than another should automatically be considered friend/foe as appropriate. Hell, I'd like to see things go a step further and have a "neutral" designation where people are dumped (and/or possibly where they start the game) to spawn when their kill stats don't identify them to be siding with any one particular team. Give them crappy weapons and make it take 30 seconds to run a maze or something to get back into the real action, and I think you'll do a lot to eliminate the (anti-)social factors that contribute to TKs.
What you end up with is two games; A mortal game, and an immortal game. When you die, you end up in your gods plane of existance as an immortal noob.
I like that idea a lot. I would tweak it: the worlds mirror each other in such a way that that your ghost/soul could attack a living players and if you won in the ghost realm, you could take over their character (and they could try to do the same to someone else if they wanted to quickly get back in the "mortal" game). I'd put a time limit on the attempts, too, so that if you can't find someone weak enough to possess you have to go to some greater lengths (like the quests you suggest) in order to become mortal again. Of course, it could just turn out to be so much fun in the immortal world that you wouldn't care about joining the living again.:-)
It would make the most sense to not have such cameras actually permanently storing the pictures it takes. The cameras would instead wirelessly transmit each picture as it is taken to your home computer.
Honestly, how would that make any more sense? They're proposing a system that takes 2 or 3 pictures a second! In order to transmit them over cell phones they'd have to be ultra-low quality. Even for most WiFi, anything with reasonable quality (say 100 or 250K each picture) is quite a bit of chatter to constantly be pushing around for one person, let alone deploying these devices in any number. Let's face it, it's currently a dumb idea for personal protection regardless of technology being used.
There is no other way to bend spacetime, than with mass/energy. There isn't a way to cheat.
To "cheat" could simply mean to do the bending at a very high efficiency. Just because it takes a lot of energy to bend something doesn't mean it's all wasted. Just like a spring being unsprung, the unbending of space might return a lot of what was put into it.
I suppose if you were not bending spacetime, it wouldn't be so bad.
Yeah, that's the tricky "teleportation" method of travel, where people assume there is a way to take a volume from one location and move it to another location with the only energy requirements being what it takes to shift the same volume to an adjacent vacuum (or, looking at it another way, to turn the volume into a vacuum). Tricky to accomplish without a magical (zero space/time) extra dimension.
For FireFly, I don't think they got into the habit of doing the Trek-know-babble the, and they left the details of how the ships get around (FTL or otherwise) as a bit of a mystery. I think that's a good thing, because trying to explain "impossible" tech often gets writers into deep trouble with those who know, or think they know, better.
Here's a big Fuck You to the person who wrote that variant, and to all the other virus writers out there.
Be sure to save a bigger "Fuck You" for the person inside your own company that decided to put Microsoft on every desktop. That person should be fired. I seriously hope that person was not you.
Nah, the real typo was in "Mandarin Chinese". It should have been either "Space Mandarin" or "Future Chinese". To pretend we know how a language will be pronounced in 500 years is silly. Every heard Old English? Woof!
So lemme get this straight...there are no bad guy players? Everyone's good? That sucks!
That is generally the problem with MMORPGs: false economies. They put roles in the game that humans don't get to play. That is, clearly the game will support bad guys and probably super-villains, but (jokes on you!) *you* don't get to play them. That does indeed suck.
Another big false economy is the spawn, and related spawn camp, aka an unbalanced environment. It sounds like this game will essentially be the same, where thugs will appear out of nowhere. Where the citizens are constantly in peril, yet they never leave nor do prisons ever fill up despite your efforts. Somehow the whole situation persists despite being massively unbalanced.
A lot of online games won't go anywhere if they don't have a balanced system in place right from the beginning. Even already popular games like EQ get tiresome for players when they realize they're kept from interesting roles that are reserved for NPCs, or when the item they fought so hard to get can be had for cheap when someone figures out how the system just drops it into the game under a certain condition.
We are about to ship a cross platform Struts (java) based application and needed a simple, low maintenance, low overhead, cross-platform,truly free and fast sql engine.
It's probably too late for you, but other's making the same choice might also want to consider SQLite.
Per your suggestion, I'm looking into it. My initial impression is that, like most MUDs, it is lacking something to draw me in deeper. I'm plunked into a rich world, but I don't have any reason to care why I'm there. What's a newbie to do: kill rats and gather butterflies? I'm tired of such artificial economies in games. The whole thing seems very cumbersome and pointless to me. I will play it some more over the weekend, but so far I don't find it a particularly approachable game.
Slashdot Mirror
I think most religions do not insist on literal interpretations of their texts.
Worse, they tend to insist on interpretations by an approved "authority" within the religion. In short, they then make up shit like "the Earth is the center of the Universe" or "homosexuality is an abomination before God" or "aliens are Godless animals". Then someone comes along who isn't talking shit ("Earth Orbits Sun, says Galileo; "Your Own Priests Fucked Me" boys say) an instead of admitting a mistake of Godly proportions, the authorities covers things up and insists on a holy war to destroy the non-believers.
Scared yet?
No. You sound like one of those people who get all freaked out when some local reporter tries to sensationalize some minor event in the evening news. "Is water a deadly killer? Find out at 10!" More to the point, your sample set only covers people who are getting "harmed" by the logging of their habits (RFID is really incidental to the cases), and you never seem to notice the people who get helped. What about the suspects that get eliminated from the line-up because they had records to back up their alibi? They never get the attention of going to court to defend their actions, but that doesn't mean you can discard them from the sample.
I once got into an accident and used my handy cell phone to call 911, and the other driver immediately started accusing me of being on the phone when the accident happened. Now it was just a minor accident with no tickets issued, and I don't think they tried to defraud the insurance company, but I recall being quite happy at the time that the phone company kept records which could be used to show I was not, in fact, being distracted by the cell phone.
Now imagine how many places will use RFIDs. Every store. Public places. EVERYWHERE. Compile and cross-reference this data and you can assemble a complete picture of a person.
If a complete picture can be painted of you with just your records, you're a pretty boring person. RFID doesn't add a lot to the landscape of tracking that can be done. It's just a wireless version of the magnetic strip on the back of a plastic card. If you're paranoid about credit cards, yeah, be paranoid about RFID, too. If not, go on to lead a life that is more than a paper/electronic trail.
There is even redundency between Carbon and Cocoa in OS X.
I believe the word you were looking for there is "reuse". Carbon and Cocoa share a lot of Core code, and/or have structures that are toll-free bridged between environments. There are overlaps in functionality between the two APIs, but for the most part the code underneath is not duplicated any more than necessary. If that's the type of integration that is going to happen with the Gnome+KDE mix I'd be happy to see it. However, my money is on them not forming a nice abstraction API which they layer the KDE and Gnome APIs on top of, instead letting ego get in the way trying to make one way or the other the "winner".
It should be fairly simple to tie a speech recognition engine to some python scripts to perform simple queries and return a parsed result ready for text-to-speech conversion. One big problem the dictionary feature brings out is how the speech recognition would handle unfamiliar words. Even leaving that feature out, it would be nice to have a limited set of features I could use anywhere in the house.
Then just get a Mac already. With Speakable Items and AppleScript, it's 90% of what you want. All the software is there, it's just a question of providing a hardware interface throughout your house. Ideal for me would be support for a Bluetooth headset. Sadly, Apple only recently added headset support to OS X but without speech support (possibly Bluetooth isn't up to the task when it comes to sampling for recognition currently). If you're content to wire the house, though, you could be doing want you want tomorrow.
Consider that I might feel like listening to music, but I'm not sure what band I feel like. Flipping through the CD's let's me notice "that band I haven't listened to in a while".
How does that beat just scrolling through band names? Or just resorting your entire song library by time last played? In iTunes it took me 2 seconds to find that information. Hell, I can have a smart playlist that contains all the songs I haven't listened to in 3 months. I'm all for 3D when it is useful, but I don't see it being useful for what you suggest. What are the 3 dimensions of music such that a 3D interface would be useful in any real way instead of mere eye candy?
How is trying to replicate the natural interface that we use every day a dumb idea?
It's not just dumb, it is profoundly stupid. It's the kind of idea thought up by someone who doesn't grok technology. The main problem is that 3D is about space, and with the computer we've already moved on to hyperspace. A real folder gets cumbersome if it nests other, bigger folders. A real location called Slashdot would require you to leave your current location and take time to walk/run/ride there, whereat you would slowly move between article rooms looking for discussions. I vastly prefer the hyperfolder, which contains all manner of objects, and the hyperlink, which instantly takes me to what I want. The 3D interface is absolutely brain dead until someone can puzzle out representations for information (much like WIMP in 2D) that makes working with it easier.
Your choice between a flashing "Loser!" and a scrolling "Even I don't want to have sex with me."
Open source, bad? HOW DARE YOU!!!11one!!!! ....but seriously, Apple has M$ completely stomped.
Then open source developers have MS stomped as well, if they were smart enough to chose GNUstep. It uses the same methods for localization that Apple's Cocoa apps do.
Ever notice how slashbot dorks will start arguments with the word 'actually'.
Because starting a sentence with "ever notice" makes you look nothing like Andy Rooney . . .
When are those panels of randomly blinking lights going to make it on the market?
. . . done that. Sadly limited to the desktop until someone gets me one of these.
It's kind of a catch-22. Questions that are easy for a computer to generate, are easy for a computer to answer. Questions that are hard for a computer to answer, are hard for a computer to generate.
That's partly true, but when it comes to semantics vs. syntax, it works something like a one-way hash. If I offer up "LDFLDFJJ", there is semantically within that string a concept of pairings. There are many ways to express that in a syntax that is used to generate questions. I could reference the number 2, the word two, twice, twins, pairs, repeats, duplicates, multiples, etc. Put within the context of a full question, it makes answering a question on semantics very difficult for a computer, even if the same computer might have generated that question.
Someone could just spend five minutes figuring out all the answers to your fixed set of 20-30 questions . Answering your questions is probably easier than making up in the first place.
Sure; so what's your point? What you say is already an attack to employ on CAPTCHA systems. The point of the article and discussion thread is about using automated systems. I was just making a note that the use of syntax instead of semantics made breaking the system easier to automate. Is the whole field kind of pointless when you can hire someone at minimum wage to answer 500 of these queries an hour? Absolutely. That's why I'm not going to spend any time implementing a challenge-response system.
I think the SPAM Captcha interceptor could be made better by including with a text message that says something like. Change the letter that is third (random position) to the letter "F"
Once you go the route of text semantics, you can get rid of the relatively large and cumbersome image altogether. The main reason a CAPTCHA can be cracked is because they are simple "syntax" problems (you type what you see) that AI research has been able to tackle pretty easy. OCR software doesn't really have to improve all that much to automatically crack most sites.
Once you go with natural language processing, then you've stuck out a much tougher nut to crack. Even without the picture, there are all manner of questions that can be formulated about a plain, relatively short string like "LDFLDFJJ" that are easy for the generating computer to ask and for a human to answer, but difficult for another computer to understand.
And if you wanted to get real tricky, go for deep semantics of real sentences. I can think of craploads of questions I could ask about "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog". Something like that does require a human to make up the questions, but I could spend five minutes in one day to easily come up with 20 or 30 that a computer would probably not figure out in the next 10 years.
If a company wants to stay in business (particularly a publicly traded company) they will want to sell their product through as many channels as they possibly can. Deals with PC manufacturers provide income that might not be earned otherwise.
That's true, but it doesn't change my statement. Yes, they'll take what they couldn't otherwise get, but they'd still want to keep their name on a good product. It's a tight spot for all companies involved, because brand X might take the chance to go on its own if the market is good enough, or the rebrander Y could just drop them to go with a cheaper alternative if they thought the Y name was more valuable than having the X product. It's not an easy dynamic to figure out, which is why Apple probably does the smart thing in controlling as much as they can themselves.
Interestingly, they started working with HP not too long back to rebrand the iPod. So, despite the Apple brand being quite strong, clearly they've worked out some way it makes more sense to be a product supplier as well. I think that is most interesting because I wonder what Apple will do in the future. It would be really cute to see HP rebrand Apple desktops as well. After all, they currently just rebrand various Wintel machines, so would it be out of the question to introduce a rebranded iMac into their lineup?
Apple is in an enviable position of having both good tech and a good brand, so they can pretty much play the game any way they figure makes the most sense. Gateway, on the other hand, is just another box builder with a mediocre brand name. The purchase of eMachines does nothing for them. They would have been smarter to try and jump HP's gun in partnering with Apple.
True, however you've got to admit, from the marketing prospective, there is a great advantage to rebranding... the final product has your name on it! Another major advantage, this time for the customer is tech support from a single house.
Neither is an plus. For the first, you're giving your name to a product you don't control. If a company makes great products, they're going to want to keep their name on it. The only way you'll get to rebrand something is if you drop a lot of money for something good (not up Gateway's alley) or get something inferior (more common by far). So, bully, you've just attached your name to a bad product. Now, your second "advantage", you have to support it. This crappy thing you have no control over is now taking customer service away from supporting your primary product. Disaster all around.
Like it or not, most of the people who buy from a company like Gateway are not going to drive down the street to see if the same camera costs a few bucks less, they'll buy it from Gateway or even along with their desktop or laptop and have support from the same company.
Ever been to an Apple Store? They have cameras and other stuff all over the place, they're just smart enough not to label them as Apple products.
At least cheaters you kick and they go cheat somewhere else. TKs keep coming back cause they enjoy it too damn much. Not to mention TKs have a sad history of coming back with different name.
Of course, that kind of makes me wonder why games all seem to have a static view of what a "team" is. Anyone who is killing more of one team than another should automatically be considered friend/foe as appropriate. Hell, I'd like to see things go a step further and have a "neutral" designation where people are dumped (and/or possibly where they start the game) to spawn when their kill stats don't identify them to be siding with any one particular team. Give them crappy weapons and make it take 30 seconds to run a maze or something to get back into the real action, and I think you'll do a lot to eliminate the (anti-)social factors that contribute to TKs.
What you end up with is two games; A mortal game, and an immortal game. When you die, you end up in your gods plane of existance as an immortal noob.
I like that idea a lot. I would tweak it: the worlds mirror each other in such a way that that your ghost/soul could attack a living players and if you won in the ghost realm, you could take over their character (and they could try to do the same to someone else if they wanted to quickly get back in the "mortal" game). I'd put a time limit on the attempts, too, so that if you can't find someone weak enough to possess you have to go to some greater lengths (like the quests you suggest) in order to become mortal again. Of course, it could just turn out to be so much fun in the immortal world that you wouldn't care about joining the living again. :-)
It would make the most sense to not have such cameras actually permanently storing the pictures it takes. The cameras would instead wirelessly transmit each picture as it is taken to your home computer.
Honestly, how would that make any more sense? They're proposing a system that takes 2 or 3 pictures a second! In order to transmit them over cell phones they'd have to be ultra-low quality. Even for most WiFi, anything with reasonable quality (say 100 or 250K each picture) is quite a bit of chatter to constantly be pushing around for one person, let alone deploying these devices in any number. Let's face it, it's currently a dumb idea for personal protection regardless of technology being used.
There is no other way to bend spacetime, than with mass/energy. There isn't a way to cheat.
To "cheat" could simply mean to do the bending at a very high efficiency. Just because it takes a lot of energy to bend something doesn't mean it's all wasted. Just like a spring being unsprung, the unbending of space might return a lot of what was put into it.
I suppose if you were not bending spacetime, it wouldn't be so bad.
Yeah, that's the tricky "teleportation" method of travel, where people assume there is a way to take a volume from one location and move it to another location with the only energy requirements being what it takes to shift the same volume to an adjacent vacuum (or, looking at it another way, to turn the volume into a vacuum). Tricky to accomplish without a magical (zero space/time) extra dimension.
For FireFly, I don't think they got into the habit of doing the Trek-know-babble the, and they left the details of how the ships get around (FTL or otherwise) as a bit of a mystery. I think that's a good thing, because trying to explain "impossible" tech often gets writers into deep trouble with those who know, or think they know, better.
Here's a big Fuck You to the person who wrote that variant, and to all the other virus writers out there.
Be sure to save a bigger "Fuck You" for the person inside your own company that decided to put Microsoft on every desktop. That person should be fired. I seriously hope that person was not you.
You misspelled 'mispronounce'... ;)
Nah, the real typo was in "Mandarin Chinese". It should have been either "Space Mandarin" or "Future Chinese". To pretend we know how a language will be pronounced in 500 years is silly. Every heard Old English? Woof!
The second impact may have been in the Indian Ocean.
And you thought it was just tech jobs that got outsourced to India!
So lemme get this straight...there are no bad guy players? Everyone's good? That sucks!
That is generally the problem with MMORPGs: false economies. They put roles in the game that humans don't get to play. That is, clearly the game will support bad guys and probably super-villains, but (jokes on you!) *you* don't get to play them. That does indeed suck.
Another big false economy is the spawn, and related spawn camp, aka an unbalanced environment. It sounds like this game will essentially be the same, where thugs will appear out of nowhere. Where the citizens are constantly in peril, yet they never leave nor do prisons ever fill up despite your efforts. Somehow the whole situation persists despite being massively unbalanced.
A lot of online games won't go anywhere if they don't have a balanced system in place right from the beginning. Even already popular games like EQ get tiresome for players when they realize they're kept from interesting roles that are reserved for NPCs, or when the item they fought so hard to get can be had for cheap when someone figures out how the system just drops it into the game under a certain condition.
We are about to ship a cross platform Struts (java) based application and needed a simple, low maintenance, low overhead, cross-platform,truly free and fast sql engine.
It's probably too late for you, but other's making the same choice might also want to consider SQLite.
Then you should check out Achaea
Per your suggestion, I'm looking into it. My initial impression is that, like most MUDs, it is lacking something to draw me in deeper. I'm plunked into a rich world, but I don't have any reason to care why I'm there. What's a newbie to do: kill rats and gather butterflies? I'm tired of such artificial economies in games. The whole thing seems very cumbersome and pointless to me. I will play it some more over the weekend, but so far I don't find it a particularly approachable game.