Why does everything *need* to be interactive? If I write a book, and just happen to use the Internet as a delivery mechanism, why should I care if it's truly "interactive"? The same goes for movies. It'sfilmed, and shown for the approval or disapproval of audiences. Games are and should be interactive, but somethings might not benefit from users getting involved.
Having The Matrix win some academy awards didn't depend on the audience being able to see the process. It was a group of film industry bignames voting on what *they* thought deserved to win. Interactivity would be if the public at large could nominate and vote by themselves.
Besides, I don't see how this year's Oscars were any different from the last ~70 years. A small group of people voted for what they liked, or what they were encouraged to like by others. Simple as that.
>The G4 can do, on average, calculations in 1/4 >the amount of clock cycles that a PentiumIII >takes. This makes a 500MHz G4 around twice >as fast as a 1GHz P3, and thats not even using >the velocity engine which is capable of >sustaining a gigaflop.
That's nice, but what's the price comparison? The fastest processor in the universe is useless to expand a company's mainstream market if it's too expensive for Joe Web-Mail-Spreadsheet-and-Games.
Anyway, my original point was that all the content rules simply don't apply, as decreed by the CRTC (our version of the FCC) recently. The link on my original post has the full press release. Interestingly, the CRTC doesn't consider transmissions on the Internet as broadcasting. I wonder how this will apply to legal decisions in the future...
It's all a damn good thing, too, since I sure don't wanna see that broomstick Dion naked. She needs to eat more.
>Only trouble is, a number of Australian porn >sites have neatly sidestepped the regulations >by having their sites hosted on U.S. servers.
Interesting point. I don't know if it was mentioned in a/. article before, but Canada has no restrictions regarding content on Internet sites, as stated in this document. Wanna set up a porn server? Try Toronto...
Thanks go out to mt friend Glen Burke for this one. I was too scared to ask him where he came up with it.
Basically, you take expresso beans, the herbal tea of your choice, instant coffee mix, instant cappuchino mix, and mix it all up in a blender on the highest setting. In a coffee mug, add the blenderized powder, boiling hot water, and about 5 sugar cubes. If it's a little too harsh for you, add chocolate and/or maple syrup to taste.
>One of the best examples is the Internet. It was >originally designed to let our military computers >run during the advent of a nuclear war. I was always under the impression that ARPANET was designed to share system resources among researchers. Those researchers might have sold it to their military bosses by passing it off as a backup communications system, though. Does anyone know the whole story?
>But, well, just had to mention it somewhere, >y'know? Yeah, I understand perfectly. As cliched as Asimov's Three Laws are, if a machine can be given a proper description of humans, and the ability to successfully compare that description and a real human, then those laws might work.
You strike me as the sort of person who believes in parents teaching their kids good moral values. The situation with AI could be quite similiar to parenting.
NOTE: I said *moral* values, not *religious* values. There's a BIG difference, everyone!
But as a more flippant comment, us Discordians already have our Goddess incarnated in technology:/dev/random.:)
Arthur C. Clarke also had an interesting idea about voting in his book "The Songs of Distant Earth". He wrote about a small colony of humans, where everyone's name was in the central computer (a *non*-AI kind of computer) and the computer randomly picked one. That person was forced to serve as the colony's leader until the next election and the poor guy/gal could finally get out of office. One sentence in the book is along the lines of "We want the kind of person who'd be dragged kicking and screaming into office, then do as good a job as possible so they'd get time off for good behaviour."
I probably got the quote wrong, since it's been a few years since I reaed the book, but the idea has stuck in my mind ever since.
>Our obsession with technology is killing us. Well, it's killing my back account, at least...
>We can wake up and save ourselves, or we can keep >on marching down the road to extinction. Wake up? I never sleep thanks to one of my friend's recipes for something called God Coffee.
>A tiny number of immensely rich people benefit >and the rest of us suffer. Err, yeah. I guess bringing huge medical advances that prevent horribly debilitating diseases *is* a bad thing. Oh, damn, I'm being serious... sorry.
>This is not God's plan for the world. Nah, God's plan was to go to Fiji with his cat and sell donuts. That was a *great* Red Dwarf episode. Dwayne Dibbly?! Dwayne Dibbly?!
>God gave the Earth to mankind, not to one man or >another. I'll admit the dude's popular, but Mankind doesn't own the world. He's got a pretty solid lock on a lot of fans, though.
>The elites have unparalleled power, The bastards! They're using SCSI ports!
>and they abuse it to spew leftist propaganda into >our homes. Without high technology, the IRS and >the Federal Reserve would wither and die >immediately. So would most hospital patients. Neener neener neener.
>High technology is the leftist instrument of >control. Yeah, us right-handers must rise up! We must throw off thee shackles of our left-handed oppressors! UNITE!
>Why buy a Windows or a Linux box when your >PS2/Dolphin plays DVDs on the TV and allows you >to browse the web and send emails ? Because, believe it or not, email, the web, and games/movies are not the only reasons for owning a PC. I want a *real* computer, one that I can tear down and rebuild myself, one that I can completely reconfigure on a whim, one that can burn CDs, store a few thousand MP3s, and that I can do some coding on. I want the power to customize, not to be given a preset configuration by Sony or Sega or Nintendo.
The whole reason that console systems, which are notoriously weak in power when compared with a moderately-priced PC, are even alive today is because they're cheap. If someone just wants to play games, and not get a $1300 computer, you can pick up an N64 for about $100. If the price of PCs falls, and the price of consoles goes up as it's doing now, I suspect that more people will think a year or two down the line that it's worth it to spend a few extra bucks and get that $700 PC instead of that $500 console.
This is one reason that the Gameboy is still going strong. It's over a decade old, an eternity for a gadget in the modern world, but it's always been a cheap system with cheap games. As long as consoles remain cheap, people will buy them. When they become too much like crippled PCs, people will just say, "Hey! I can get a real computer for a little bit more money!"
Please spare me the "but consoles are getting faster and better" argument. I know they are. But remember: so are computers. The oh-so-hyped Dolphins and X-Boxes of the future will always be miles behind the average home PC.
I don't know about MW 1 and 2, since I never played them, but 3 is clearly the best mecha game out right now on Windows. I admit the storyline in 3 was a little on the dull side, but the graphics, sound and gameplay were top-rate, especially multiplayer. I always love DM Mech3. It's a lot more tactical than a pure reflex game like UT or Q3, which I also enjoy, don't get me wrong:), but it rewards the team leader who can make quick, good decisions.
BTW, does HG2 have a multiplayer mode? If it does, I think I'll preorder it...
Oh, man... mecha and Linux... does it get *any* cooler?
On a somewhat related note, are there any figures anywhere for sales of Linux-based commercial software? I'm wondering how many of us actually bought WP8 and the like.
o_O You know all their names? Yikes. I just remember that I hate the show.
Starlight girls? (/me pulls out a few Starlight plushies and his plastic imitation Silence Glaive) Lalala, this is the way we behead Taiki, behead Taiki, behead Taiki, this is the way we behead Taiki...
Okay, only a few deranged anime fans are ever gonna get that reference...
A little clarification on the (shudder) Jem issue: I was born in 1980, and have some rather bad memories of my younger sister screaming her head off whenever she couldn't watch that wretched show. I, being a right-minded kid, wanted to watch Transformers which was on another channel at the same time, and she got rather loud whenever she didn't get her way. Those shrill screams still haunt me today.
But it's really cool that Transformers is being re-released. Come on, all you Transfans, admit your desire to watch it again, if you don't already have bootleg tapes. 'Til all are one!
>It's the bounty hunters, ambitious military >officers, rebel agents, etc. that are the fun >roles to play, and the people you want to >be unpredictable allies or opponents. Agreed, and there are other types of SW roles that would be fun. Personally, I'd like to be a mercenary spy. That would be pretty interesting. Maybe give spies the ability to use limited abilities from a lot of other classes so that they can impersonate others.
Heh. Instead of a battle of reflexes, when you go up against a boss you battle him by having a metaphysical discussion on the nature of humanity, and whoever has the better deus ex machina as an ace in the hole wins.
Actually, that does sound kind of good, ronfar. Sort of like a combat alt.philosophy.moderated.
And, of course, I'd want to be The Mule. Along with ten million other folks. Maybe a Speaker would be cool to play... they'd have horrible attack limitations, though.
I agree with all your comments, with one exception:
>BTW, in the US, Nazi propaganda is legal (AFAIK), >and I've yet to ear an American to ridicule them.
This is not true. For every neo-Nazi group in North America, there's about a dozen different groups educating people about the Holocaust. Believe me, except in the deep, deep south of the US (and even there it's very rare) you will not find anyone who will defend the Nazis. Hell, not even the most right-wing of the christian churches will say anything encouraging about the Nazis.
I believe it's because of our collective guilt over our own Holocaust, the genocide of the Native Americans/Indians (whatever term you prefer) over the past centuries. It may not be as blatant as the Jewish Holocaust, but these mass murders also occured. I think everytime that the public here demands that the US and Canada get involved in the ethnic conflicts going on elsewhere in the world, it's because of that guilt.
There are a few cases where some neo-Nazi made some public comments, but the public here is extremely hostile to those publicity-seekers that spread neo-Nazi propaganda.
Here's one case that's happened very close to where I live, actually: A public school teacher named Malcolm Ross in the city of Moncton in New Brunswick, Canada, wrote a book that downplayed the death toll of the Holocaust. Apparently, he did this in private, and never discussed his views in class at all. (I believe he was a math teacher, but that's just rumor. The media never said what he taught.) When someone found out about this book, he was fired on the spot. He appealed the firing to the Labour Relations Board (a board that decides on whether disputed firings are reasonable and maintains standards on workplace safety, among other things) and won, but was not given a teaching job after the DOE's phones rang off the hook for several days straight. This wasn't censorship, this was public pressure.
Nazi propaganda may be legal, but it's harshly condemned by everyone. It doesn't need to be made illegal, because everyone knows it's a lie, and parents make damn sure to tell thir kids about the Holocaust.
Slashdot Mirror
Am I the only one who has visions of two programmers talking out of sync with their mouth movements?
"Huh. So you wish. To review my code. You must be eager. To die. Huh."
>Does anyone besides me find it a little creepy
>that he's *smiling* in his mug shot?
(goes back to look at the picture again)
O_O
Oi vey.
>The idea's yours if you want it.....
Thanks! I'll send it along to the usual anime fanfic newsgroups in a week or so.
Why does everything *need* to be interactive? If I write a book, and just happen to use the Internet as a delivery mechanism, why should I care if it's truly "interactive"? The same goes for movies. It'sfilmed, and shown for the approval or disapproval of audiences. Games are and should be interactive, but somethings might not benefit from users getting involved.
Having The Matrix win some academy awards didn't depend on the audience being able to see the process. It was a group of film industry bignames voting on what *they* thought deserved to win. Interactivity would be if the public at large could nominate and vote by themselves.
Besides, I don't see how this year's Oscars were any different from the last ~70 years. A small group of people voted for what they liked, or what they were encouraged to like by others. Simple as that.
I vote ESR as Leon. He's got the gun thing going for him, too. Hmm. Now I have to go write that fanfiction idea. (Grin)
Now, what OSes would Nene use? I'm thinking dual boot BeOS/Slackware, with a nice bright, cheerful bashprompt theme under Linux.
>The G4 can do, on average, calculations in 1/4
>the amount of clock cycles that a PentiumIII
>takes. This makes a 500MHz G4 around twice
>as fast as a 1GHz P3, and thats not even using
>the velocity engine which is capable of
>sustaining a gigaflop.
That's nice, but what's the price comparison? The fastest processor in the universe is useless to expand a company's mainstream market if it's too expensive for Joe Web-Mail-Spreadsheet-and-Games.
Heh. :)
Anyway, my original point was that all the content rules simply don't apply, as decreed by the CRTC (our version of the FCC) recently. The link on my original post has the full press release. Interestingly, the CRTC doesn't consider transmissions on the Internet as broadcasting. I wonder how this will apply to legal decisions in the future...
It's all a damn good thing, too, since I sure don't wanna see that broomstick Dion naked. She needs to eat more.
>Only trouble is, a number of Australian porn
/. article before, but Canada has no restrictions regarding content on Internet sites, as stated in this document. Wanna set up a porn server? Try Toronto...
>sites have neatly sidestepped the regulations
>by having their sites hosted on U.S. servers.
Interesting point. I don't know if it was mentioned in a
Thanks go out to mt friend Glen Burke for this one. I was too scared to ask him where he came up with it.
Basically, you take expresso beans, the herbal tea of your choice, instant coffee mix, instant cappuchino mix, and mix it all up in a blender on the highest setting. In a coffee mug, add the blenderized powder, boiling hot water, and about 5 sugar cubes. If it's a little too harsh for you, add chocolate and/or maple syrup to taste.
Jolt, eat your heart out.
>One of the best examples is the Internet. It was
>originally designed to let our military computers
>run during the advent of a nuclear war.
I was always under the impression that ARPANET was designed to share system resources among researchers. Those researchers might have sold it to their military bosses by passing it off as a backup communications system, though. Does anyone know the whole story?
>But, well, just had to mention it somewhere,
/dev/random. :)
>y'know?
Yeah, I understand perfectly. As cliched as Asimov's Three Laws are, if a machine can be given a proper description of humans, and the ability to successfully compare that description and a real human, then those laws might work.
You strike me as the sort of person who believes in parents teaching their kids good moral values. The situation with AI could be quite similiar to parenting.
NOTE: I said *moral* values, not *religious* values. There's a BIG difference, everyone!
But as a more flippant comment, us Discordians already have our Goddess incarnated in technology:
Arthur C. Clarke also had an interesting idea about voting in his book "The Songs of Distant Earth". He wrote about a small colony of humans, where everyone's name was in the central computer (a *non*-AI kind of computer) and the computer randomly picked one. That person was forced to serve as the colony's leader until the next election and the poor guy/gal could finally get out of office. One sentence in the book is along the lines of "We want the kind of person who'd be dragged kicking and screaming into office, then do as good a job as possible so they'd get time off for good behaviour."
I probably got the quote wrong, since it's been a few years since I reaed the book, but the idea has stuck in my mind ever since.
Sorry for the off-topic post...
Indeed. I've got limited experience in Java, but my AI instructor, a Lisp guru extraordinaire, refers to Java as Crippled C.
>Our obsession with technology is killing us.
Well, it's killing my back account, at least...
>We can wake up and save ourselves, or we can keep
>on marching down the road to extinction.
Wake up? I never sleep thanks to one of my friend's recipes for something called God Coffee.
>A tiny number of immensely rich people benefit
>and the rest of us suffer.
Err, yeah. I guess bringing huge medical advances that prevent horribly debilitating diseases *is* a bad thing. Oh, damn, I'm being serious... sorry.
>This is not God's plan for the world.
Nah, God's plan was to go to Fiji with his cat and sell donuts. That was a *great* Red Dwarf episode. Dwayne Dibbly?! Dwayne Dibbly?!
>God gave the Earth to mankind, not to one man or
>another.
I'll admit the dude's popular, but Mankind doesn't own the world. He's got a pretty solid lock on a lot of fans, though.
>The elites have unparalleled power,
The bastards! They're using SCSI ports!
>and they abuse it to spew leftist propaganda into
>our homes. Without high technology, the IRS and
>the Federal Reserve would wither and die
>immediately.
So would most hospital patients. Neener neener neener.
>High technology is the leftist instrument of
>control.
Yeah, us right-handers must rise up! We must throw off thee shackles of our left-handed oppressors! UNITE!
Ah, hell. I'm bored.
>Why buy a Windows or a Linux box when your
>PS2/Dolphin plays DVDs on the TV and allows you
>to browse the web and send emails ?
Because, believe it or not, email, the web, and games/movies are not the only reasons for owning a PC. I want a *real* computer, one that I can tear down and rebuild myself, one that I can completely reconfigure on a whim, one that can burn CDs, store a few thousand MP3s, and that I can do some coding on. I want the power to customize, not to be given a preset configuration by Sony or Sega or Nintendo.
The whole reason that console systems, which are notoriously weak in power when compared with a moderately-priced PC, are even alive today is because they're cheap. If someone just wants to play games, and not get a $1300 computer, you can pick up an N64 for about $100. If the price of PCs falls, and the price of consoles goes up as it's doing now, I suspect that more people will think a year or two down the line that it's worth it to spend a few extra bucks and get that $700 PC instead of that $500 console.
This is one reason that the Gameboy is still going strong. It's over a decade old, an eternity for a gadget in the modern world, but it's always been a cheap system with cheap games. As long as consoles remain cheap, people will buy them. When they become too much like crippled PCs, people will just say, "Hey! I can get a real computer for a little bit more money!"
Please spare me the "but consoles are getting faster and better" argument. I know they are. But remember: so are computers. The oh-so-hyped Dolphins and X-Boxes of the future will always be miles behind the average home PC.
I don't know about MW 1 and 2, since I never played them, but 3 is clearly the best mecha game out right now on Windows. I admit the storyline in 3 was a little on the dull side, but the graphics, sound and gameplay were top-rate, especially multiplayer. I always love DM Mech3. It's a lot more tactical than a pure reflex game like UT or Q3, which I also enjoy, don't get me wrong :), but it rewards the team leader who can make quick, good decisions.
BTW, does HG2 have a multiplayer mode? If it does, I think I'll preorder it...
Oh, man... mecha and Linux... does it get *any* cooler?
On a somewhat related note, are there any figures anywhere for sales of Linux-based commercial software? I'm wondering how many of us actually bought WP8 and the like.
o_O You know all their names? Yikes. I just remember that I hate the show.
Starlight girls? (/me pulls out a few Starlight plushies and his plastic imitation Silence Glaive) Lalala, this is the way we behead Taiki, behead Taiki, behead Taiki, this is the way we behead Taiki...
Okay, only a few deranged anime fans are ever gonna get that reference...
A little clarification on the (shudder) Jem issue: I was born in 1980, and have some rather bad memories of my younger sister screaming her head off whenever she couldn't watch that wretched show. I, being a right-minded kid, wanted to watch Transformers which was on another channel at the same time, and she got rather loud whenever she didn't get her way. Those shrill screams still haunt me today.
But it's really cool that Transformers is being re-released. Come on, all you Transfans, admit your desire to watch it again, if you don't already have bootleg tapes. 'Til all are one!
...AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGHHHHHHH HHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Do you realize how many painful memories I have of that wretched show?! Goddammit, I thought that I'd never have to hear about Jem again...
>It's the bounty hunters, ambitious military
:)
>officers, rebel agents, etc. that are the fun
>roles to play, and the people you want to
>be unpredictable allies or opponents.
Agreed, and there are other types of SW roles that would be fun. Personally, I'd like to be a mercenary spy. That would be pretty interesting. Maybe give spies the ability to use limited abilities from a lot of other classes so that they can impersonate others.
Hint, hint, Lucasarts.
Heh. Instead of a battle of reflexes, when you go up against a boss you battle him by having a metaphysical discussion on the nature of humanity, and whoever has the better deus ex machina as an ace in the hole wins.
Actually, that does sound kind of good, ronfar. Sort of like a combat alt.philosophy.moderated.
And, of course, I'd want to be The Mule. Along with ten million other folks. Maybe a Speaker would be cool to play... they'd have horrible attack limitations, though.
I agree with all your comments, with one exception:
>BTW, in the US, Nazi propaganda is legal (AFAIK),
>and I've yet to ear an American to ridicule them.
This is not true. For every neo-Nazi group in North America, there's about a dozen different groups educating people about the Holocaust. Believe me, except in the deep, deep south of the US (and even there it's very rare) you will not find anyone who will defend the Nazis. Hell, not even the most right-wing of the christian churches will say anything encouraging about the Nazis.
I believe it's because of our collective guilt over our own Holocaust, the genocide of the Native Americans/Indians (whatever term you prefer) over the past centuries. It may not be as blatant as the Jewish Holocaust, but these mass murders also occured. I think everytime that the public here demands that the US and Canada get involved in the ethnic conflicts going on elsewhere in the world, it's because of that guilt.
There are a few cases where some neo-Nazi made some public comments, but the public here is extremely hostile to those publicity-seekers
that spread neo-Nazi propaganda.
Here's one case that's happened very close to where I live, actually: A public school teacher named Malcolm Ross in the city of Moncton in New Brunswick, Canada, wrote a book that downplayed the death toll of the Holocaust. Apparently, he did this in private, and never discussed his views in class at all. (I believe he was a math teacher, but that's just rumor. The media never said what he taught.) When someone found out about this book, he was fired on the spot. He appealed the firing to the Labour Relations Board (a board that decides on whether disputed firings are reasonable and maintains standards on workplace safety, among other things) and won, but was not given a teaching job after the DOE's phones rang off the hook for several days straight. This wasn't censorship, this was public pressure.
Nazi propaganda may be legal, but it's harshly condemned by everyone. It doesn't need to be made illegal, because everyone knows it's a lie, and parents make damn sure to tell thir kids about the Holocaust.
Err, sorry for the long post...
Korea was more of the entire world's fault, rather than just the US. At least, that's the impression that I got from my history classes.
>>You don't have a "right" to view mp3s,
:)
>>especially ripped off mp3s.
>That's right, when will people learn? You have >no right to view mp3s!!!
Maybe Shadowcaster just hates plugins.
>You want safe sex, try abstinence before marriage
>and monogamy after.
Assuming, of course, that one wants marriage at all. Which some of us don't.