One thing that has me worried about String Theory in general is that whenever something comes up that seems to disprove parts of it, the theory adds some complexity to deal with the problem. This sort of escalating complexity is usually a sign of a flawed theory.
Of course most scientists seem to be a little wary of string theory too. The problem is that while it sucks, nobody has come up with anything better yet. If think if someone came up with a competing theory that was a bit more elegant you would see scientists flocking to it in a hurry. You can't just give up entirely on String Theory until you have something better. For all we know it might be the right answer. The inability to even make simple lab tests to prove or disprove it is a major concern too, people would be a lot more comfortable with the theory if we could actually test it.
I'm hoping they have something like Task Forces where you basically park your regular character at home and instead take over some pre-built named characters with nifty powers/abilities.
I suspect that the signature heros will spend most of their time just handing out missions/task forces however. Cryptic has never shown much initative for moving past the bog standard MMO gameplay elements however, so don't expect something radically new and different.
For what it's worth, I suspect about 75% of the horror stories about paypal are complete fabrications. I hear about all of these people online who supposedly lost thousands of dollars through Paypal, but I've never met anyone in person who has had much trouble with them at all. A lot of the horror stories have somewhat fishy details too, like why the other side wasn't saying anything and how they were able to just casually close their Paypal account. It doesn't help that websites that make a big deal about how Paypal sucks link to alternate sites that are extremely shady.
What do you think it means when the Government says their "freezing the assets of the terrorists"?
The worst part is that unless you can prove to both Paypal and Homeland Security that you're not who they think you are, you're up a creek, and neither Paypal nor Homeland Security are any fun to deal with.
As I see it, they were highly pessimistic with the original estimates because they really didn't know what they'd find. Given the design there is no reason they can't run for quite a long time (basically until they have system failure on something critical).
Because there are only certain launch windows where you can reach Mars in a reasonable amount of time. There are sweet spots where the distance between the Earth and Mars is minimized. Obviously NASA and the JPL time their launches to occur during those sweet spots.
The original estimates on their lifetime were wildly pessimistic though. Basically, the JPL wants more stories of how they "exceeded design specifications 20 times over!" instead of "big failure of a robot fails early, losers!"
It seems to me that once you're getting up to that much content, you'd better be looking at procedural content generation more and more just so you don't completely blow your budget on the art department. The rub is of course that once you start doing stuff procedurally, then you don't need massive amounts of space anymore.
You just did a pretty good job of pointing out how retarded fanboi arguments are:
DCFanboi: You don't have many games for your just-released PS2! (Duh, it just launched)
PS2Fanboi: But it plays DVDs! (total non-sequitor, and completely retarded when you consider that it supported a HUGE base of PSx games yet the Fanboi decided to focus on the crappy DVD player instead).
Yeah, it seems like the only way this would work would be some horrible legislation requring game makers to make their games impossible to mod (encrypted somehow?) without some sort of key from the ESRB, and the ESRB only gives out the key after rating the mod. Obviously mod authors aren't going to go through normal channels most of the time, so you need to force them to have their stuff rated.
Or you could just pass a law banning all third party mods entirely. It's basically the same thing as above. Neither solution gets to the heart of the matter though: mods you download from the internet will obviously nullify the ESRB rating. If you care about that rating, then don't download mods. I mean seriously. It's completely retarded to force game companies to become internet police, tracking down anybody who might make something that could change their ESRB rating.
I wonder how the ESRB would react if someone built a program that could search through the datafiles to any game, locate texture data, and replace it with a texture of naked boobs? Would every game have to be AO?
In some ways it is accurate though. I mean back in 1950 you no doubt had futurists predicting that you'd get an ENIAC in the palm of your hand for $10 and look at what kind of calculators you can buy these days that are considerably faster than the ENIAC.
Actually, you wouldn't have. Everybody back then thought we were going to build computers that took up entire city blocks and would get up into the millions of computations per second range. The personal computer took them by almost complete surprise from what I've seen. Futurists are just science fiction authors that can't be bothered to come up with a story. Their accuracy is about on par with Nostradamous.
The problem with using this in games is that you're going to have to look away from the screen to see what's on the keys, probably refocusing your eyes in the process. Do that a lot and you'll fatigue your eyes quickly. If you never do it then it's a big waste.
The other problem with what you're suggesting is that such information is almost always on the screen anyway, so there is no point in putting it on the keyboard too.
I wouldn't count on it. When you're buying in quantities as large as Google is there is no small chance that they designed thier own motherboard and case specifically for their purposes. There's no point getting the floppy controller, USB, and any of the other stuff that you normally get (even on server machines) that's totally useless to Google. They probably paid a lot of attention to the power consumption, not only to install the smallest reliable power supply possible, but also to figure out how many they can cram into a rack and how much power/cooling they'll need.
Indeed, it seems to me that the TFAs author might in fact be complaining that he sucks at Tomb Raider. It's also possible he's taking time to read all of the story bits in the game and do all of the minigames and whatnot while someone who only cares about beating the final boss can finish it in much less time.
Those time estimates are totally bogus anyway. Who even looks at them?
Rumble pack technology provider publishes paper saying people want Rumble technology? Who would have thought?
Personally, I didn't find much value in the rumble packs in the PS2. I've always hated how they call it "Force Feedback" too, since it's no such thing. I usually leave them on, but it's not like having the controller vibrate in my hands has really enhanced the game experiance. I think the tilt sensors will be far more interesting, although most likely just used as an occasional novelty by game designers. I'm expecting fighting games where you can duck left and right by tilting the controller (which would be more natural than the shoulder buttons they use now) and lots of use in minigames.
Is that net or gross though. Lawsuits are expensive and it's easy to see how a few stubborn eggs could really increase your legal costs and cut into the bottom line.
All it would mean is the fraudster would have to modify votes in a specific way (perhaps keyed on a hash by the voter number) such that the website would report whatever the user specified isntead of what was actually counted.
Also, you'd have thugs following you home checking your number against the web site to make sure you voted their way. No thanks.
The worst parts about these fights is that it's millions of words in thousands of forms and blogs over what amounts to a 2% performance difference. BFD.
Because if it was on Adult Swim they would probably hire a couple of 8 year olds to draw and write the series, like most everything else they put on there these days.
Slashdot Mirror
AM is where you get all of the news you can care to listen to from radical far wing screwballs.
One thing that has me worried about String Theory in general is that whenever something comes up that seems to disprove parts of it, the theory adds some complexity to deal with the problem. This sort of escalating complexity is usually a sign of a flawed theory.
Of course most scientists seem to be a little wary of string theory too. The problem is that while it sucks, nobody has come up with anything better yet. If think if someone came up with a competing theory that was a bit more elegant you would see scientists flocking to it in a hurry. You can't just give up entirely on String Theory until you have something better. For all we know it might be the right answer. The inability to even make simple lab tests to prove or disprove it is a major concern too, people would be a lot more comfortable with the theory if we could actually test it.
Heck, there are large parts of the US that can't get DSL at all, nor cable. Satellite internet still sucks too.
I'm hoping they have something like Task Forces where you basically park your regular character at home and instead take over some pre-built named characters with nifty powers/abilities.
I suspect that the signature heros will spend most of their time just handing out missions/task forces however. Cryptic has never shown much initative for moving past the bog standard MMO gameplay elements however, so don't expect something radically new and different.
For what it's worth, I suspect about 75% of the horror stories about paypal are complete fabrications. I hear about all of these people online who supposedly lost thousands of dollars through Paypal, but I've never met anyone in person who has had much trouble with them at all. A lot of the horror stories have somewhat fishy details too, like why the other side wasn't saying anything and how they were able to just casually close their Paypal account. It doesn't help that websites that make a big deal about how Paypal sucks link to alternate sites that are extremely shady.
Huh, how did you close your Paypal account? Nobody else on Slashdot seems to be able to figure that out.
What do you think it means when the Government says their "freezing the assets of the terrorists"?
The worst part is that unless you can prove to both Paypal and Homeland Security that you're not who they think you are, you're up a creek, and neither Paypal nor Homeland Security are any fun to deal with.
As I see it, they were highly pessimistic with the original estimates because they really didn't know what they'd find. Given the design there is no reason they can't run for quite a long time (basically until they have system failure on something critical).
Because there are only certain launch windows where you can reach Mars in a reasonable amount of time. There are sweet spots where the distance between the Earth and Mars is minimized. Obviously NASA and the JPL time their launches to occur during those sweet spots.
The original estimates on their lifetime were wildly pessimistic though. Basically, the JPL wants more stories of how they "exceeded design specifications 20 times over!" instead of "big failure of a robot fails early, losers!"
It seems to me that once you're getting up to that much content, you'd better be looking at procedural content generation more and more just so you don't completely blow your budget on the art department. The rub is of course that once you start doing stuff procedurally, then you don't need massive amounts of space anymore.
You just did a pretty good job of pointing out how retarded fanboi arguments are:
DCFanboi: You don't have many games for your just-released PS2! (Duh, it just launched)
PS2Fanboi: But it plays DVDs! (total non-sequitor, and completely retarded when you consider that it supported a HUGE base of PSx games yet the Fanboi decided to focus on the crappy DVD player instead).
Yeah, it seems like the only way this would work would be some horrible legislation requring game makers to make their games impossible to mod (encrypted somehow?) without some sort of key from the ESRB, and the ESRB only gives out the key after rating the mod. Obviously mod authors aren't going to go through normal channels most of the time, so you need to force them to have their stuff rated.
Or you could just pass a law banning all third party mods entirely. It's basically the same thing as above. Neither solution gets to the heart of the matter though: mods you download from the internet will obviously nullify the ESRB rating. If you care about that rating, then don't download mods. I mean seriously. It's completely retarded to force game companies to become internet police, tracking down anybody who might make something that could change their ESRB rating.
I wonder how the ESRB would react if someone built a program that could search through the datafiles to any game, locate texture data, and replace it with a texture of naked boobs? Would every game have to be AO?
In some ways it is accurate though. I mean back in 1950 you no doubt had futurists predicting that you'd get an ENIAC in the palm of your hand for $10 and look at what kind of calculators you can buy these days that are considerably faster than the ENIAC.
Actually, you wouldn't have. Everybody back then thought we were going to build computers that took up entire city blocks and would get up into the millions of computations per second range. The personal computer took them by almost complete surprise from what I've seen. Futurists are just science fiction authors that can't be bothered to come up with a story. Their accuracy is about on par with Nostradamous.
Yep, that skycar has been only a few years away from your dealership...for nearly three decades now.
The problem with using this in games is that you're going to have to look away from the screen to see what's on the keys, probably refocusing your eyes in the process. Do that a lot and you'll fatigue your eyes quickly. If you never do it then it's a big waste.
The other problem with what you're suggesting is that such information is almost always on the screen anyway, so there is no point in putting it on the keyboard too.
I wouldn't count on it. When you're buying in quantities as large as Google is there is no small chance that they designed thier own motherboard and case specifically for their purposes. There's no point getting the floppy controller, USB, and any of the other stuff that you normally get (even on server machines) that's totally useless to Google. They probably paid a lot of attention to the power consumption, not only to install the smallest reliable power supply possible, but also to figure out how many they can cram into a rack and how much power/cooling they'll need.
Indeed, it seems to me that the TFAs author might in fact be complaining that he sucks at Tomb Raider. It's also possible he's taking time to read all of the story bits in the game and do all of the minigames and whatnot while someone who only cares about beating the final boss can finish it in much less time.
Those time estimates are totally bogus anyway. Who even looks at them?
Rumble pack technology provider publishes paper saying people want Rumble technology? Who would have thought?
Personally, I didn't find much value in the rumble packs in the PS2. I've always hated how they call it "Force Feedback" too, since it's no such thing. I usually leave them on, but it's not like having the controller vibrate in my hands has really enhanced the game experiance. I think the tilt sensors will be far more interesting, although most likely just used as an occasional novelty by game designers. I'm expecting fighting games where you can duck left and right by tilting the controller (which would be more natural than the shoulder buttons they use now) and lots of use in minigames.
Is that net or gross though. Lawsuits are expensive and it's easy to see how a few stubborn eggs could really increase your legal costs and cut into the bottom line.
That's because .avi is not a streamable file format. It stores the metadata in a big chunk at the end of the file.
All it would mean is the fraudster would have to modify votes in a specific way (perhaps keyed on a hash by the voter number) such that the website would report whatever the user specified isntead of what was actually counted.
Also, you'd have thugs following you home checking your number against the web site to make sure you voted their way. No thanks.
Tom Goes to the Mayor, Squidbillies, etc...
Venture Brothers is a damn fine show however.
The worst parts about these fights is that it's millions of words in thousands of forms and blogs over what amounts to a 2% performance difference. BFD.
Because if it was on Adult Swim they would probably hire a couple of 8 year olds to draw and write the series, like most everything else they put on there these days.