Well shoot from reading Slashdot, one could deduce that women are like cars but without mufflers.
No, the car analogy still works. It's like this: In Soviet Russia, you turn them on; in Capitalist America, they turn on you! (that's what the prenup was for)
I found it rather frustrating sitting through all the backstory stuff, like the drunk driving accident and boy toy one nighter causing Laura to join a campaign -- rather dull and not really that important at this stage of the game.
Evangelion was this way. You had this whole show about giant robots, aliens, god or gods, biblical allusions, the apocalypse, all this heavy-duty shit going on along with the personal angst of all the characters and then the final two episodes are a stupid acid trip inside the main character's head. We're told by the creator that the giant robots weren't the point of the show, Shinji's relationship with people is the real issue. Well Jesus Jimmy Fucknozzle, couldn't we have accomplished the same thing with an after-school special and skipped all the robots and shit? Yes, but then nobody would have watched it because Shinji was easily the worst part of the entire show. So when the fans rejected human instrumentality and the studio demanded a remake of the ending, the creator said "Oh, didn't like it? Fuck you, I'm going to make it really vile!" and so we then see every character in the show slaughtered over the course of a double feature. And Shinji still sucks.
Every story should be "about the characters." The ones that aren't are heavily plot-driven, make use of stock and cliche characters and are the weaker for it. But laying claim to characters at the expense of plot is ridiculous. The plot is what provides the events that shape the characters! It strings all the little events together to make for a coherent story! Galactica = massive self-pwn.
In the context of the U.S., its Founding Fathers were very reluctant to label as treason anything that could be used by a tyrant to strike down on legitimate internal opposition. Therefore, they were left with only two very specific acts that would be considered treason:
Section 3. Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. (...)"
"Conspiracy to rig an election" is just not on that list.
I understand but to my point of view the highest treason possible against a democracy is tampering with the voting process because it is faith in that process that serves as the underpinning for the entire society. If you cannot trust the vote, what can you trust? Tampering with the vote should have the same sense of shock and horror we reserve for pedophilia and necrophilia. The consequences should be drastic and dreadful so that even a Nixon wouldn't dream of incurring them. Frankly, it's the only crime I can think of worthy of the death penalty at a federal level, and this is coming from someone who doesn't support capital punishment in practice because the system is too flawed to carry it out equitably.
I took baby quantum mechanics a year ago (an optional 3rd semester of intro physics), and the whole predestination thing was thrown out the window to me as soon as soon as there was a probability distribution of where the particle was at any given time. My thought philosophically is that the sum of tiny deviations from the mean made it so that I could not just take an inventory of all the particles in the universe, write a program to describe their governing laws, and then the output would be every moment of of the future. I much prefer a universe of surprises.
Wouldn't the other limitation of a computer powerful enough to simulate all of the particles in a universe be that it would have to be as big or at least a significant fraction of the universe itself? And then would that not mean it was recursively simulating itself unless it was moved outside of the universe?
That a particle has free-will using the standard definition is rather disturbing. Particles, capable of making a decision implies an inherent intelligence or at least a built-in "table of actions" at some level.
And didn't Philip Pullman imply the dust had some sort of innate intelligence in the His Dark Materials series? That kind of bugged me after his explicit rejection of the Judeo-Christian godhead. So if electrons can think, does this mean or mitochondria could, too? That's only a few letters off from mitichlorians. I'm suspicious.
The proper question is "Are our coworkers ready to deal with how we'll smell like after spending time in that server room?" It'll smell like a monkey house, but probably with less feces. Unless we're working with that superstar bastard programmer a few articles back who poo'd in the lobby.
What I've always wanted to see is more scripted realism in games. For example, the Medal of Honor games worked much in the same way as a Disney theme ride with certain prescripted actions occuring when you passed by. Run across the field to the house, then the soldiers there will go through a scripted sequence of planning the next move, then they do so. You walk past the far side, a German tank triggers and comes crashing through at you. These are all nice starts. The original Aliens V. Predator game would have the human opponents freak out at random. You tear the head off of someone beside the soldier, he might drop his weapon and run screaming or start spraying the walls at random. And the most unsettling of all were the civilians who would run, cower and cringe away from you, the alien monster.
All of the above are tricks, not real intelligence but things that provide the illusion of intelligent agents engaging in realistic behavior. Critics will say the heavy scripting ruins the replay value because there's not as much room for variation and surprise but I think that it makes the games more interesting. Unfortunately, not many people go to the effort here.
I for one would love to see a shooter where I burst in on the room of baddies playing cards and see them fumble for their weapons, someone drops his, etc. It would be very realistic to have an enemy get the drop on you but his gun jams and he's left trying to clear it when you engage. As mentioned before, AVP created a sense of realism when the humans freaked out and started firing randomly.
When we get right down to it, players aren't looking to get their asses mercilessly beaten every time they play. Neither do they want a pushover opponent. Gamers want to win but they want to feel like they had to earn it. It's rarer to find gamers who want to push the working for it to masochistic levels but they do exist. They would be typified by Rogue fans. For those who don't know, Rogue is a dungeon crawler where you really should save your game except you can't except as a bookmark -- you can save it to come back later but if you die the previous save point is deliberately deleted. You have to beat the game in one go through.
The only other game I've encountered that masochistic is Escape Velocity Nova, a space exploration and trading game with a realism mode. You die in the game, you die for keeps, you have to start over. To its credit, it does offer a vastly different play style. For example, you want to hit a big pirate ship for max profits, you pick a world near where they spawn and land. Each time you launch local space reloads and a pirate might respawn nearby. You have maybe a one in ten chance of taking him as a lowly player but it's fun. You keep reloading and rolling the dice until you win and you get a nice haul. If you play it in hardcore mode, you have a vastly different approach to this sort of thing. For starters, you lose your ship and it's gone, you have to buy a new one. If you lose your escape pod, you're dead. You will take a vastly different approach tackling a monster like that when you risk losing hours of progress. This seems too much like work to me but some people love it. I think they're the same ones drawn to high-risk PVP games like EVE Online. I think it's a form of gambling addiction, the risk of possibly losing a lot of stuff and the thrill of making it through.
What a remarkably obtuse thing to say. How can anyone know -- short of subjective observations, which are inherently non-scientific, i.e. revelation from such an "evolution-motivating" intelligence -- whether or not there is an intelligent motive behind any such process?
Look, if you want to ridicule the "creationists" and "intelligent design" proponents, just have the balls to come out and say it; don't pussyfoot around, trying to be clever. Or, better yet, just keep your bigotry to yourself.
Please provide a theory explaining the existence of a creator god or gods and the methods used by them in the creation of the earth and the means to prove such a theory and the scientific community will be forever in your debt.
Barring such evidence, we are left with saying "we see no evidence for an external creator, no evidence of a guiding intelligence in evolution; what we can observe can be explained by evolutionary theory and any gaps currently present in our knowledge are avenues for further research." Science looks for the best theory at hand, not the perfect one that explains every little detail since such a perfect theory is hard to come by. We may not know everything there is to know about electro-magnetism but what we do know of it allows us to make computers work which is somewhat better than the view the ancients had of lightning, i.e. thunderbolts thrown by the Zeus.
Science cannot definitively prove something does not exist but it can at least reduce the question to an irrelevance. Consider Russell's Teapot.
If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.
But since you think I'm being clever, here's another one: Don't pray in my school and I won't think in your church.
It's funny how some creatures are under such pressures they rapidly develop and others have settled into their niche so well there's been little change, thus the living fossils. It's amazing to think that the ancestors of today's megafauna were little shrew-like nothings back then and were able to progress from that to elephants and rhinos and, hell, human beings while octopi and sharks are just tooling around looking pretty much the same.
I know that there's no intelligent motive behind evolution, it is an impersonal process of optimization for a set of conditions and there's no selection bias for complexity, as we humans would view such things. It seems like the living fossils are stuck in a rut but as far as evolution is concerned, it's not concerned. There's no personified mind involved, nature is not a guiding intelligence, it's just genes playing along according to rules, rules. Still, I can't help feeling octopi's wife is nagging him "For crimminy's sake, just look at you! 95 million years and you're still mucking about on the ocean floor! There's an entire world out there of land dwellers! Those little shrews went and developed opposable thumbs and they're running the place! And just what have you accomplished, Mr. Eight Arms and no Endo-Skeleton? You just float around and let them turn you into seafood. I'm leaving you for squid! He's got backbone for an invertebrate! At least he's capable of taking out some air-breathers every now and then!"
I love learning but am sick of institutionalized education. The problem is the right way to do education is incredibly expensive, incredibly time-consuming, but if we had proper priorities as a society, would be seen as completely worth it. At this point, only idiots or saints would go into a career in education. There's no money in it, and I'm not talking about enough money to become a rich bastard, I'm talking about enough money to avoid poverty.
I'm not quite sure what the right solution is yet but I'm wondering if it might not be a good idea to start on the Young Lady's Primer. We've certainly made some advancements on the sort of technology that would be required.
The whole plan hinges on the fact that I inject myself with a parasite that allows me to control all the other infected by the engineered parasite. With this, I unleash the bio weapon on earth, destroying most of humanity while leaving the rest of the infect in a state where I can control them.
This sounds so convoluted and stupid that it has to be the plot of a Japanese game. Does it involve giant german shepherds that shoot bees out of their mouths when they bark?
What this chumwits fail to realize is that geek is bigger and broader than ever. Consider the inroads computers and video games have made into the landscape. Video games are an umpty-billion dollar a year industry and are either threatening to or have already surpassed music and movies as the biggest consumer entertainment market. This really surprises me. I mean, I like gaming but I didn't think it was that huge but there it is.
There's always been a demand for escapism entertainment. Now you can argue about hard SF and sci-fi like geeks argue trekker vs. trekkie. It doesn't really matter -- escapism is huge. Now you could be talking comic book fantasy or spaceships and aliens scifi or brooding sexual vamps and werewolves, it doesn't matter. Those of the female persuasion have embraced this sort of thing just as vigorously as the boys. Let's not overlook the amazingly huge impact of Japanese media as well -- manga, anime, etc.
The difficulty the big media types have here is they want to go for the biggest audience. They're still stuck in the 50's when a popular show could capture half the audience across the entire country. They simply can't abide by the idea of serving a niche and serving it well, keeping the overhead low so that they can enjoy a modest, dependable income.
There's a huge market out there for brain-boggling entertainment. People want the unusual, want the unexpected. The problem is that the Sci-Fi Channel has insisted on doing it in the most ignorant, pigheaded, and insulting manner possible.
For starters, Sci-Fi Channel Original Movies universally mean piss awful drek spanked together with the most miserable of standards, CGI monster of the week crap that's poorly conceived, written, acted, and directed. Rod Serling was able to create art with crappy cameras and a SFX budget of cigar butts and sawdust. Sci-Fi doesn't care. They just want to crank out low-expectation shit and expect people to lap it up. What about when they put that contemptible fuckspat John Edwards on? Not the presidential candidate but the spook whisperer. How in the hell is this sci-fi? And what about that Ghost Hunters crap? I can well appreciate the odd UFO and cryptid show but Sci-Fi stuck to this tabloid crap the way the History Channel clings to WWII shows.
I think the biggest problem they have here is that their product is aimed at bright geeks but management wants to market it to idiot chump TV watchers who throw money at anything with tits and explosions. Proper geeks will either Tivo what they want to watch or buy the DVD's -- advertising-supported television will simply not be cost-effective here. But this is going to be the future, folks. People are getting used to watching their TV curled up in bed on the laptop or on the train with the ipod or just plug the computer into the TV and watch the torrent. People have demonstrated they will pay money to watch the show but they're not going to pay through the nose. And there are so many new areas of entertainment to explore, the market for old school passives is going to keep suffering from greater competition.
I think what we're seeing here is the same cause for the failure of Air America. Right wing radio listeners tend to be whiter, older, and have grown up listening to radio. There's not many converts amongst the youth. The target audience for Air America, the liberals, tend to be less likely to listen to radio to begin with and more likely to be getting their news and views from alternative media or television. This was a fight Air America could not win because the market simply wasn't there, even as Air America hosts in other venues such as Rachel Maddow are enjoying phenomenal success.
Once Galactica is finished will they even have anything scifi-related in the line-up? I know they canned the Dresden Files on account of being too expensive and the push to end Galactica is along similar lines. What, are these people stupid? Do they not realize scifi shows are always the most expensive there are to produce and have been so sinc
whoops, too many i's. Then again, their leader's lookin' awfully covetous of his neighbors --
If you're new and want a clue where not to go to don't you go where fascism sits (snap snap) Putin on the blitz! Different border nations know don't you bait the bear or you'll get blown to bits (snap snap) Putin on the blitz!
What the hell is wrong with my iPhone / iPod application and why do I not get any answers after months of waiting ?
So you got an iPhone and thought it was a great device and you decided to write software for it:
* You learned objective-C and Cocoa programming
* You paid 99$ to register as an official developer
* You wrote a nice application
* You submitted your application.
* and then...
Image:mail.png It doesn't get rejected, but you get a message that says...
Your application YourApp is requiring unexpected additional time for review. We apologize for the delay, and will update you with further status as soon as we are able. Thank you for your patience.
Looks like nothing to worry about. So...
* You wait for a week, then two, then three, four, five, six...
* You write e-mails to devprograms
* You make phone calls to developer support
But you never get any answer ? After a pair of months you get used to the idea that your app will never be accepted nor rejected. Image:question.png So what is happening really ?
Knowningly or not you most likely hit on one of the "secretly forbidden" features that Apple doesn't want on the AppStore. Those are issues that are not specifically mentionned in the agreement and that they are not willing to defend. Their solution, which is unofficial but which has proven to be systematic is to let developers linger in silence for ever.
It's a cool technology but Apple's engaging in superdickery here, same as the American cell carriers. Apple had to use their clout to get unmetered broadband from ATT but cheering them on for that feels kind of like WWIII Ukrainians cheering on the nazis for pushing out the communists.
Shows like 'House' glorify it and apparently make people think it is okay to be an asshole as long as you get the job done.
It isn't?
If you're really that good they'll keep you around but be willing to chuck you the first time a viable replacement comes around. Few people like an asshole.
I think they made up the crapping in the pot story here but the craziest one I ever heard of was a coworker who told me about his pipeline uncle up in Alaska. This guy lived on whiskey and ciggies and had to be drinking his way into an early grave. He was the kind of alcoholic at this point who was fucked up if he wasn't fucked up, would get the shakes and all. But he was the best welder they had, could do the stuff nobody else even wanted to risk. So he got to stay in the cab of the truck and drink his ass off until it was time to do the weld and then he'd come out, do it, then crawl back into the cab for more booze.
In the situations like this I've personally seen, it's not so much that the asshole in question is the greatest whatever he does ever, it's just that nobody else knows what he does and can't be bothered to learn. Just like you have the petty tyrant situation evolve amongst IT geeks, you get the Glengarry guys who amp it up with the testosterone and freak out. The biggest exception for this is in sales roles where a guy is bringing the company in millions in hard cash and so all manner of behavior is tolerated. He's probably still respectful and polite to his superiors and equals but is a monster to those lower on the ladder.
The thing I laugh about in these situations is the person whose cache happens to be specialized knowledge useful only to the company they are in. An asshole like a House could presumably work in any hospital he wants but someone whose head is full of institutional knowledge would bring little of value to a new employer. If a petty tyrant like that were to lose his perch, he'd be back to square one.
From what I've seen, it's inadvisable for companies to tolerate people like this in their ranks but most companies don't operate in a fashion people would be proud to emulate. In most places it seems to be "I know this isn't how we should be doing things but this is the way we are." It could be from a lack of budget, poor leadership, politics, whatever. The thing I would caution anyone about is a towering asshole who has remained at a company for a long, long time probably has protection. Even if he is an asshole, if you get in a fight with him on something, you're likely to be the one coming out with a hurting. Doesn't matter whether you're right or wrong, you're outta there. I saw this very thing happen with a marketing director the owners thought pooped gold. In fact he pooped glowing nuclear waste and contaminated the entire company but the owners were slow on the uptake. People who got into conflicts with the guy got canned. He came into conflict with me but I didn't rise to the bait and did appropriate CYA and IT did not come under his jurisdiction so I was safe until he quit. It was only then that the owners found out about his transuranic turds.
You'd have to change the animal so much that it wouldn't seem recognizable. The old formula has become such a cliche that there's absolutely nothing you can reuse from it. Reset button at the end of the episode, lame. Space anomalies, lame. Gritty scifi future with lots of angst, made lame by overexposure on Galactica. Aliens who look exactly like us save for bumpy foreheads? I could buy it when I was younger but it's just ridiculous these days. (I'll probably be in the minority on this one.) Time-travel plots, squishy techno-babble science plots, holodeck plots, everything that makes Trek Trek is what's been killing it. It's like asking "Can we make a healthy Big Mac?" Yeah, and by the time you're done removing everything that's bad about that burger, you're left with nothing but lettuce and sesame seeds.
I'd say Firefly was a great model on how to do a space show that wasn't Trek but it died after a season. I'm not really sure how that happened given the fan support, it must have just been Fox superdickery more than anything else. But aside from that, Firefly gave us a space show that was like Trek only in so much as there were spaceships -- everything else was as different from Trek as it was from other shows. Even the basic premise -- "Imagine you made a TV show about Han Solo before he and Chewie joined the Rebellion" -- even that description carries certain assumptions the show blew away.
Galactica has good production values and good acting but the writing is a crime. Half of the uber-plot of the show is a mystery, what's the Cylon's angle? What are their motivations? Why did they do what they did? And a good mystery writer needs to know how it happened before the first chapter's written because support for the whodunnit has to be written in to every subsequent chapter. Not having a clue and just pulling it out of his ass at the end is cheap and unsatisfying and that's the approach Galactica's taken. Heroes as well for that matter, and Heroes season 1 was completely awesome, it was only the later post-Fuller seasons that turned into a giant crap sandwich. But as far as BSG goes, the original was completely derivative of Star Wars and the remake seems to draw a lot more from network dramas in terms of pacing and feel.
I'd say Babylon 5 was the true post-Trek show. You could see the inspiration from Trek but it also drew on a hell of a lot of other sources, really steeped in scifi goodness. It moved beyond what Trek was and DS9, Voyager, Enterprise, they were all muddling around at the same level. They never really rose to the challenge. The times they tried, they were just ripping off B5 plots instead of doing something bigger, better, and smarter. And that's sad because for all of the greatness that was B5, there was still room for improvement.
I remain in the "stick a fork in Trek and call it done" camp. I'll take a look at the new movie just to be charitable but my expectations are extremely low. I'm willing to be surprised. I just feel that if they really want to do a wonders of space exploration and discovery show, they should really nix the whole Trek thing and come up with something brand new. The CGI has come so far these days, they can get away with stuff that couldn't have been imagined.
Now all we need are web casters, ultra-sticky material for the hands and feet, and someone to beat Tobby MacGuire with a bar of soap in a sock if he comes anywhere near it.
The original idea we had with the Air Force station was that we'd require people up there to twiddle the knobs and operate the cameras. This fits with the old pulp image of space where computers weren't quite on the drawing board but a manned spy satellite is about as useless as a manned telephone exchange with human operators plugging in connections.
What we're finding is there's less and less justification for human beings to be in space. That's practical justifications. I still want our giant Babylon 5 space stations at L4 and L5, but the only justification there is the total awesome factor. Back when they were talking about the orbital power sats in the 70's, the idea was that the first significant orbital presence would be from the construction workers. Well, telepresence could probably handle most of the complicated tasks.
I can't imagine what the practical military applications would be for a dedicated military space station. Scifi had assumed there would be a market for satellite maintenance and repair but the economics have shown that it's cheaper to launch a replacement than repair the old one. Given we've got that same system going for desktop computers on the ground, I doubt that will ever change for satellites. Even for expensive equipment like the Hubble, the economics of on-orbit repair seem to be skewed in favor of cheaper, disposable satellites.
Slashdot Mirror
Well shoot from reading Slashdot, one could deduce that women are like cars but without mufflers.
No, the car analogy still works. It's like this: In Soviet Russia, you turn them on; in Capitalist America, they turn on you! (that's what the prenup was for)
"about the characters"
I found it rather frustrating sitting through all the backstory stuff, like the drunk driving accident and boy toy one nighter causing Laura to join a campaign -- rather dull and not really that important at this stage of the game.
Evangelion was this way. You had this whole show about giant robots, aliens, god or gods, biblical allusions, the apocalypse, all this heavy-duty shit going on along with the personal angst of all the characters and then the final two episodes are a stupid acid trip inside the main character's head. We're told by the creator that the giant robots weren't the point of the show, Shinji's relationship with people is the real issue. Well Jesus Jimmy Fucknozzle, couldn't we have accomplished the same thing with an after-school special and skipped all the robots and shit? Yes, but then nobody would have watched it because Shinji was easily the worst part of the entire show. So when the fans rejected human instrumentality and the studio demanded a remake of the ending, the creator said "Oh, didn't like it? Fuck you, I'm going to make it really vile!" and so we then see every character in the show slaughtered over the course of a double feature. And Shinji still sucks.
Every story should be "about the characters." The ones that aren't are heavily plot-driven, make use of stock and cliche characters and are the weaker for it. But laying claim to characters at the expense of plot is ridiculous. The plot is what provides the events that shape the characters! It strings all the little events together to make for a coherent story! Galactica = massive self-pwn.
Drink it down, let it circulate, comes back out none too different. Guess I'll be using budweiser as the base then.
Seriously people, at what point do we get off the couch and take back this country? Obama can stimulate my ass.
That might make your prostate happy but what about the rest of us?
In the context of the U.S., its Founding Fathers were very reluctant to label as treason anything that could be used by a tyrant to strike down on legitimate internal opposition. Therefore, they were left with only two very specific acts that would be considered treason:
Section 3. Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. (...)"
"Conspiracy to rig an election" is just not on that list.
I understand but to my point of view the highest treason possible against a democracy is tampering with the voting process because it is faith in that process that serves as the underpinning for the entire society. If you cannot trust the vote, what can you trust? Tampering with the vote should have the same sense of shock and horror we reserve for pedophilia and necrophilia. The consequences should be drastic and dreadful so that even a Nixon wouldn't dream of incurring them. Frankly, it's the only crime I can think of worthy of the death penalty at a federal level, and this is coming from someone who doesn't support capital punishment in practice because the system is too flawed to carry it out equitably.
I took baby quantum mechanics a year ago (an optional 3rd semester of intro physics), and the whole predestination thing was thrown out the window to me as soon as soon as there was a probability distribution of where the particle was at any given time. My thought philosophically is that the sum of tiny deviations from the mean made it so that I could not just take an inventory of all the particles in the universe, write a program to describe their governing laws, and then the output would be every moment of of the future. I much prefer a universe of surprises.
Wouldn't the other limitation of a computer powerful enough to simulate all of the particles in a universe be that it would have to be as big or at least a significant fraction of the universe itself? And then would that not mean it was recursively simulating itself unless it was moved outside of the universe?
That a particle has free-will using the standard definition is rather disturbing. Particles, capable of making a decision implies an inherent intelligence or at least a built-in "table of actions" at some level.
And didn't Philip Pullman imply the dust had some sort of innate intelligence in the His Dark Materials series? That kind of bugged me after his explicit rejection of the Judeo-Christian godhead. So if electrons can think, does this mean or mitochondria could, too? That's only a few letters off from mitichlorians. I'm suspicious.
As someone who is about 3/4 of the way though the 3rd season, all I can say is:
Fuck you, asshole
If it's any consolation, the revelation makes as little sense in context as it does out of it.
The proper question is "Are our coworkers ready to deal with how we'll smell like after spending time in that server room?" It'll smell like a monkey house, but probably with less feces. Unless we're working with that superstar bastard programmer a few articles back who poo'd in the lobby.
So how should we be choosing and celebrating free software's past achievements?"
Declare it must be 5-o'clock somewhere, start drinking.
What I've always wanted to see is more scripted realism in games. For example, the Medal of Honor games worked much in the same way as a Disney theme ride with certain prescripted actions occuring when you passed by. Run across the field to the house, then the soldiers there will go through a scripted sequence of planning the next move, then they do so. You walk past the far side, a German tank triggers and comes crashing through at you. These are all nice starts. The original Aliens V. Predator game would have the human opponents freak out at random. You tear the head off of someone beside the soldier, he might drop his weapon and run screaming or start spraying the walls at random. And the most unsettling of all were the civilians who would run, cower and cringe away from you, the alien monster.
All of the above are tricks, not real intelligence but things that provide the illusion of intelligent agents engaging in realistic behavior. Critics will say the heavy scripting ruins the replay value because there's not as much room for variation and surprise but I think that it makes the games more interesting. Unfortunately, not many people go to the effort here.
I for one would love to see a shooter where I burst in on the room of baddies playing cards and see them fumble for their weapons, someone drops his, etc. It would be very realistic to have an enemy get the drop on you but his gun jams and he's left trying to clear it when you engage. As mentioned before, AVP created a sense of realism when the humans freaked out and started firing randomly.
When we get right down to it, players aren't looking to get their asses mercilessly beaten every time they play. Neither do they want a pushover opponent. Gamers want to win but they want to feel like they had to earn it. It's rarer to find gamers who want to push the working for it to masochistic levels but they do exist. They would be typified by Rogue fans. For those who don't know, Rogue is a dungeon crawler where you really should save your game except you can't except as a bookmark -- you can save it to come back later but if you die the previous save point is deliberately deleted. You have to beat the game in one go through.
The only other game I've encountered that masochistic is Escape Velocity Nova, a space exploration and trading game with a realism mode. You die in the game, you die for keeps, you have to start over. To its credit, it does offer a vastly different play style. For example, you want to hit a big pirate ship for max profits, you pick a world near where they spawn and land. Each time you launch local space reloads and a pirate might respawn nearby. You have maybe a one in ten chance of taking him as a lowly player but it's fun. You keep reloading and rolling the dice until you win and you get a nice haul. If you play it in hardcore mode, you have a vastly different approach to this sort of thing. For starters, you lose your ship and it's gone, you have to buy a new one. If you lose your escape pod, you're dead. You will take a vastly different approach tackling a monster like that when you risk losing hours of progress. This seems too much like work to me but some people love it. I think they're the same ones drawn to high-risk PVP games like EVE Online. I think it's a form of gambling addiction, the risk of possibly losing a lot of stuff and the thrill of making it through.
Twinkle, twinkle, little bat!
How I wonder what you're at!
Up above the world you fly,
Like a teatray in the sky.
Quick, somebody chase him and see if he can crawl up the wall!
What a remarkably obtuse thing to say. How can anyone know -- short of subjective observations, which are inherently non-scientific, i.e. revelation from such an "evolution-motivating" intelligence -- whether or not there is an intelligent motive behind any such process?
Look, if you want to ridicule the "creationists" and "intelligent design" proponents, just have the balls to come out and say it; don't pussyfoot around, trying to be clever. Or, better yet, just keep your bigotry to yourself.
Please provide a theory explaining the existence of a creator god or gods and the methods used by them in the creation of the earth and the means to prove such a theory and the scientific community will be forever in your debt.
Barring such evidence, we are left with saying "we see no evidence for an external creator, no evidence of a guiding intelligence in evolution; what we can observe can be explained by evolutionary theory and any gaps currently present in our knowledge are avenues for further research." Science looks for the best theory at hand, not the perfect one that explains every little detail since such a perfect theory is hard to come by. We may not know everything there is to know about electro-magnetism but what we do know of it allows us to make computers work which is somewhat better than the view the ancients had of lightning, i.e. thunderbolts thrown by the Zeus.
Science cannot definitively prove something does not exist but it can at least reduce the question to an irrelevance. Consider Russell's Teapot.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot
If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.
But since you think I'm being clever, here's another one: Don't pray in my school and I won't think in your church.
It's funny how some creatures are under such pressures they rapidly develop and others have settled into their niche so well there's been little change, thus the living fossils. It's amazing to think that the ancestors of today's megafauna were little shrew-like nothings back then and were able to progress from that to elephants and rhinos and, hell, human beings while octopi and sharks are just tooling around looking pretty much the same.
I know that there's no intelligent motive behind evolution, it is an impersonal process of optimization for a set of conditions and there's no selection bias for complexity, as we humans would view such things. It seems like the living fossils are stuck in a rut but as far as evolution is concerned, it's not concerned. There's no personified mind involved, nature is not a guiding intelligence, it's just genes playing along according to rules, rules. Still, I can't help feeling octopi's wife is nagging him "For crimminy's sake, just look at you! 95 million years and you're still mucking about on the ocean floor! There's an entire world out there of land dwellers! Those little shrews went and developed opposable thumbs and they're running the place! And just what have you accomplished, Mr. Eight Arms and no Endo-Skeleton? You just float around and let them turn you into seafood. I'm leaving you for squid! He's got backbone for an invertebrate! At least he's capable of taking out some air-breathers every now and then!"
I love learning but am sick of institutionalized education. The problem is the right way to do education is incredibly expensive, incredibly time-consuming, but if we had proper priorities as a society, would be seen as completely worth it. At this point, only idiots or saints would go into a career in education. There's no money in it, and I'm not talking about enough money to become a rich bastard, I'm talking about enough money to avoid poverty.
I'm not quite sure what the right solution is yet but I'm wondering if it might not be a good idea to start on the Young Lady's Primer. We've certainly made some advancements on the sort of technology that would be required.
The whole plan hinges on the fact that I inject myself with a parasite that allows me to control all the other infected by the engineered parasite. With this, I unleash the bio weapon on earth, destroying most of humanity while leaving the rest of the infect in a state where I can control them.
This sounds so convoluted and stupid that it has to be the plot of a Japanese game. Does it involve giant german shepherds that shoot bees out of their mouths when they bark?
What this chumwits fail to realize is that geek is bigger and broader than ever. Consider the inroads computers and video games have made into the landscape. Video games are an umpty-billion dollar a year industry and are either threatening to or have already surpassed music and movies as the biggest consumer entertainment market. This really surprises me. I mean, I like gaming but I didn't think it was that huge but there it is.
There's always been a demand for escapism entertainment. Now you can argue about hard SF and sci-fi like geeks argue trekker vs. trekkie. It doesn't really matter -- escapism is huge. Now you could be talking comic book fantasy or spaceships and aliens scifi or brooding sexual vamps and werewolves, it doesn't matter. Those of the female persuasion have embraced this sort of thing just as vigorously as the boys. Let's not overlook the amazingly huge impact of Japanese media as well -- manga, anime, etc.
The difficulty the big media types have here is they want to go for the biggest audience. They're still stuck in the 50's when a popular show could capture half the audience across the entire country. They simply can't abide by the idea of serving a niche and serving it well, keeping the overhead low so that they can enjoy a modest, dependable income.
There's a huge market out there for brain-boggling entertainment. People want the unusual, want the unexpected. The problem is that the Sci-Fi Channel has insisted on doing it in the most ignorant, pigheaded, and insulting manner possible.
For starters, Sci-Fi Channel Original Movies universally mean piss awful drek spanked together with the most miserable of standards, CGI monster of the week crap that's poorly conceived, written, acted, and directed. Rod Serling was able to create art with crappy cameras and a SFX budget of cigar butts and sawdust. Sci-Fi doesn't care. They just want to crank out low-expectation shit and expect people to lap it up. What about when they put that contemptible fuckspat John Edwards on? Not the presidential candidate but the spook whisperer. How in the hell is this sci-fi? And what about that Ghost Hunters crap? I can well appreciate the odd UFO and cryptid show but Sci-Fi stuck to this tabloid crap the way the History Channel clings to WWII shows.
I think the biggest problem they have here is that their product is aimed at bright geeks but management wants to market it to idiot chump TV watchers who throw money at anything with tits and explosions. Proper geeks will either Tivo what they want to watch or buy the DVD's -- advertising-supported television will simply not be cost-effective here. But this is going to be the future, folks. People are getting used to watching their TV curled up in bed on the laptop or on the train with the ipod or just plug the computer into the TV and watch the torrent. People have demonstrated they will pay money to watch the show but they're not going to pay through the nose. And there are so many new areas of entertainment to explore, the market for old school passives is going to keep suffering from greater competition.
I think what we're seeing here is the same cause for the failure of Air America. Right wing radio listeners tend to be whiter, older, and have grown up listening to radio. There's not many converts amongst the youth. The target audience for Air America, the liberals, tend to be less likely to listen to radio to begin with and more likely to be getting their news and views from alternative media or television. This was a fight Air America could not win because the market simply wasn't there, even as Air America hosts in other venues such as Rachel Maddow are enjoying phenomenal success.
Once Galactica is finished will they even have anything scifi-related in the line-up? I know they canned the Dresden Files on account of being too expensive and the push to end Galactica is along similar lines. What, are these people stupid? Do they not realize scifi shows are always the most expensive there are to produce and have been so sinc
When did WWIII take place again...?
whoops, too many i's. Then again, their leader's lookin' awfully covetous of his neighbors --
If you're new and want a clue
where not to go to don't you go
where fascism sits (snap snap)
Putin on the blitz!
Different border nations know
don't you bait the bear or you'll get
blown to bits (snap snap)
Putin on the blitz!
Putz! I can't believe you just let Apple win on this point via Godwin's Law.
I could have been comparing them to the communists. :)
The iphone is awesome and I want one but it's still a walled garden so I'm avoiding it. Here's a perfect example:
http://appstorehell.chocoflop.com/wiki/Main_Page
What the hell is wrong with my iPhone / iPod application and why do I not get any answers after months of waiting ?
So you got an iPhone and thought it was a great device and you decided to write software for it:
* You learned objective-C and Cocoa programming
* You paid 99$ to register as an official developer
* You wrote a nice application
* You submitted your application.
* and then...
Image:mail.png It doesn't get rejected, but you get a message that says...
Your application YourApp is requiring unexpected additional time for review. We apologize for the delay, and will update you with further status as soon as we are able. Thank you for your patience.
Looks like nothing to worry about. So...
* You wait for a week, then two, then three, four, five, six...
* You write e-mails to devprograms
* You make phone calls to developer support
But you never get any answer ? After a pair of months you get used to the idea that your app will never be accepted nor rejected.
Image:question.png So what is happening really ?
Knowningly or not you most likely hit on one of the "secretly forbidden" features that Apple doesn't want on the AppStore. Those are issues that are not specifically mentionned in the agreement and that they are not willing to defend. Their solution, which is unofficial but which has proven to be systematic is to let developers linger in silence for ever.
It's a cool technology but Apple's engaging in superdickery here, same as the American cell carriers. Apple had to use their clout to get unmetered broadband from ATT but cheering them on for that feels kind of like WWIII Ukrainians cheering on the nazis for pushing out the communists.
Shows like 'House' glorify it and apparently make people think it is okay to be an asshole as long as you get the job done.
It isn't?
If you're really that good they'll keep you around but be willing to chuck you the first time a viable replacement comes around. Few people like an asshole.
I think they made up the crapping in the pot story here but the craziest one I ever heard of was a coworker who told me about his pipeline uncle up in Alaska. This guy lived on whiskey and ciggies and had to be drinking his way into an early grave. He was the kind of alcoholic at this point who was fucked up if he wasn't fucked up, would get the shakes and all. But he was the best welder they had, could do the stuff nobody else even wanted to risk. So he got to stay in the cab of the truck and drink his ass off until it was time to do the weld and then he'd come out, do it, then crawl back into the cab for more booze.
In the situations like this I've personally seen, it's not so much that the asshole in question is the greatest whatever he does ever, it's just that nobody else knows what he does and can't be bothered to learn. Just like you have the petty tyrant situation evolve amongst IT geeks, you get the Glengarry guys who amp it up with the testosterone and freak out. The biggest exception for this is in sales roles where a guy is bringing the company in millions in hard cash and so all manner of behavior is tolerated. He's probably still respectful and polite to his superiors and equals but is a monster to those lower on the ladder.
The thing I laugh about in these situations is the person whose cache happens to be specialized knowledge useful only to the company they are in. An asshole like a House could presumably work in any hospital he wants but someone whose head is full of institutional knowledge would bring little of value to a new employer. If a petty tyrant like that were to lose his perch, he'd be back to square one.
From what I've seen, it's inadvisable for companies to tolerate people like this in their ranks but most companies don't operate in a fashion people would be proud to emulate. In most places it seems to be "I know this isn't how we should be doing things but this is the way we are." It could be from a lack of budget, poor leadership, politics, whatever. The thing I would caution anyone about is a towering asshole who has remained at a company for a long, long time probably has protection. Even if he is an asshole, if you get in a fight with him on something, you're likely to be the one coming out with a hurting. Doesn't matter whether you're right or wrong, you're outta there. I saw this very thing happen with a marketing director the owners thought pooped gold. In fact he pooped glowing nuclear waste and contaminated the entire company but the owners were slow on the uptake. People who got into conflicts with the guy got canned. He came into conflict with me but I didn't rise to the bait and did appropriate CYA and IT did not come under his jurisdiction so I was safe until he quit. It was only then that the owners found out about his transuranic turds.
You'd have to change the animal so much that it wouldn't seem recognizable. The old formula has become such a cliche that there's absolutely nothing you can reuse from it. Reset button at the end of the episode, lame. Space anomalies, lame. Gritty scifi future with lots of angst, made lame by overexposure on Galactica. Aliens who look exactly like us save for bumpy foreheads? I could buy it when I was younger but it's just ridiculous these days. (I'll probably be in the minority on this one.) Time-travel plots, squishy techno-babble science plots, holodeck plots, everything that makes Trek Trek is what's been killing it. It's like asking "Can we make a healthy Big Mac?" Yeah, and by the time you're done removing everything that's bad about that burger, you're left with nothing but lettuce and sesame seeds.
I'd say Firefly was a great model on how to do a space show that wasn't Trek but it died after a season. I'm not really sure how that happened given the fan support, it must have just been Fox superdickery more than anything else. But aside from that, Firefly gave us a space show that was like Trek only in so much as there were spaceships -- everything else was as different from Trek as it was from other shows. Even the basic premise -- "Imagine you made a TV show about Han Solo before he and Chewie joined the Rebellion" -- even that description carries certain assumptions the show blew away.
Galactica has good production values and good acting but the writing is a crime. Half of the uber-plot of the show is a mystery, what's the Cylon's angle? What are their motivations? Why did they do what they did? And a good mystery writer needs to know how it happened before the first chapter's written because support for the whodunnit has to be written in to every subsequent chapter. Not having a clue and just pulling it out of his ass at the end is cheap and unsatisfying and that's the approach Galactica's taken. Heroes as well for that matter, and Heroes season 1 was completely awesome, it was only the later post-Fuller seasons that turned into a giant crap sandwich. But as far as BSG goes, the original was completely derivative of Star Wars and the remake seems to draw a lot more from network dramas in terms of pacing and feel.
I'd say Babylon 5 was the true post-Trek show. You could see the inspiration from Trek but it also drew on a hell of a lot of other sources, really steeped in scifi goodness. It moved beyond what Trek was and DS9, Voyager, Enterprise, they were all muddling around at the same level. They never really rose to the challenge. The times they tried, they were just ripping off B5 plots instead of doing something bigger, better, and smarter. And that's sad because for all of the greatness that was B5, there was still room for improvement.
I remain in the "stick a fork in Trek and call it done" camp. I'll take a look at the new movie just to be charitable but my expectations are extremely low. I'm willing to be surprised. I just feel that if they really want to do a wonders of space exploration and discovery show, they should really nix the whole Trek thing and come up with something brand new. The CGI has come so far these days, they can get away with stuff that couldn't have been imagined.
Now all we need are web casters, ultra-sticky material for the hands and feet, and someone to beat Tobby MacGuire with a bar of soap in a sock if he comes anywhere near it.
The original idea we had with the Air Force station was that we'd require people up there to twiddle the knobs and operate the cameras. This fits with the old pulp image of space where computers weren't quite on the drawing board but a manned spy satellite is about as useless as a manned telephone exchange with human operators plugging in connections.
What we're finding is there's less and less justification for human beings to be in space. That's practical justifications. I still want our giant Babylon 5 space stations at L4 and L5, but the only justification there is the total awesome factor. Back when they were talking about the orbital power sats in the 70's, the idea was that the first significant orbital presence would be from the construction workers. Well, telepresence could probably handle most of the complicated tasks.
I can't imagine what the practical military applications would be for a dedicated military space station. Scifi had assumed there would be a market for satellite maintenance and repair but the economics have shown that it's cheaper to launch a replacement than repair the old one. Given we've got that same system going for desktop computers on the ground, I doubt that will ever change for satellites. Even for expensive equipment like the Hubble, the economics of on-orbit repair seem to be skewed in favor of cheaper, disposable satellites.