Actually, there is an excellent argument against prisons, at least in thier current form - it's provable that, as a rule, jail sentences do NOT reduce crime, they are ineffective as a deterent, and convicted criminals have a tendency to commit further crimes.
Not saying that we should just leave criminals alone, or that we should ignore terrorist attacks, but the methods we use, in the one case a PROVEN to not work as desired, and in the second case, are likely to not work as desired. Therefore, we need to come up with different solutions.
News flash - bombing Afghanistan isn't gonna make your daughter any safer. It might make you FEEL safer, but it won't make terrorism from there go away.
Airliners can often/usually survive the loss of an engine - but obviously, the loss of an engine during take-off is much worse. There's also a huge difference between an engine shutting down for whatever reason and an engine exploding and falling off - the second will cause all sorts of damage to the control surfaces, wing, etc.
SafeDisc copy protection works more or less the same way - theres huge, unreadable chunks of garbage data, that for techical and very clever reasons won't copy correctly. I read the technical data, but I'm not an engineer and have forgotten most of it:P But apparently it abuses CD error correction much the same way that these copy protected CDs to.
Just as a nitpick, blue laws are rarely if ever enforeced UNLESS some sort of excuse for harrassing a group or individual is needed - thus validating his point about them. They're used at will by the majority to constrain the minority. Granted, it's rare, but the possibility is there and the laws should be stricken.
As to the rest of your points - America did some pretty great things, and as a rule we've never been overtly expansionistic. But to say that we've never bullied other countries for profit is ridiculous. I'd have to do more research than I have time for to provide you with articles at the moment, but we supported and aided a military dictatorship in Central America for the benefit of Dole. The gulf war was about protecting our oil interests, not about any sort of concern for human rights or democracy.
Nobody is saying that free speach is some magic cure-all that will save the world. We're saying it's both morally and practically superior to the alternative.
I also submit that people in Afghanistan have the RIGHT to hate the US - many of them even have very good reasons. They have the right to listen to and to spread the word of Bin Laden and his buddies. They don't, of course, have the right to fly airliners into our cities.
Freedom of speech is not some magic bullet that will fix all the problems of the world. And in cases where it obviously isn't working, like in some parts or Europe, legislation is required to stem some of the flow of poison directed at the minds of our children.
You know, this reads almost EXACTLY like a statement from a fundamentalist school board when they published a list of books that our school library couldn't carry. Most of them, such as Catcher in the Rye, were banned because they advocated un-American behavior like rebellion.
You really should re-read your own words, and realize that what you are doing is EXACTLY the same as the Taliban or any facist regime - YOU are deciding what are good, proper ideas and suppressing any alternative to them.
As was discussed (at greath length) in the story about VR and CAVE, theres alot of problems to solve with FPS shooters and full-immersion VR. However, manipulative games like Black & White could translate to VR with next to zero diffuculty - in fact, I imagine that, given drivers, you could play Black & White with a VR headset and a Power Glove with no hacking of the game required at all. Hrm... gotta find me a cheap headset...
Slightly off-topic - thinkgeek.com has a headset designed for watching DVD movies thats supposed to be equivalent to watching an 18 foot projection screen. It's pretty pricey (600 bucks) and wouldn't support head movement, but has anybody hooked one of these up to a tv-out? I hear alot of the problem with VR headsets is the low resolution of the LCD screens, does this solve that problem somehow?
I'd like to take this opportunity to rant about how amazing System Shock 2 is - I used to play this on my laptop on the way to work, and I had to stop because of the strange looks I was getting as I'd twist around trying to hide from the zombies. And this on a laptop display, with cheapo headphones, on a TRAIN. I played a couple times on my desktop at home and decided that I was risking severe trauma.
Re:first person shooters on consoles and bungie.
on
First Review of Halo
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· Score: 1
The nintendo 64 controler worked pretty well for me, at least on Goldeneye which was all I ever played on it.
Not 100% sure about System Shock, as I never played it, but System Shock 2 (an INCREDIBLE game) was Looking Glass. Thief and Thief 2 were looking glass as well, and while not FP _shooters_, are also incredible - Thief 3 is in development and will be an Xbox game (*sniff*)
The knees: Go look at a dog. Now pick up it's front paws and make it stand on the hind legs. Notice the knees? Leg structure like this is the norm in quadrupeds and has been used on aliens as long as theres been science fiction. There's even a name for it, which I forget. Digigrade? It's actually got some advantages over human knee structure when running or jumping, but it kinda sucks if you have to climb something. There any climbing in Halo?:P
The psi-blade - it actually looks alot more like the Soul Reaver from Legacy of Kain to me - but again, "psi-blades", and swords attached to your arm are pretty much a staple of sci-fi/fantasy, and have been for a long time. The only other thing I see is yellow body armor.
Once upon a time there were RealMedia decoders for other players (winamp, in particular) until Real pitched a fit and made them go away. Now you can still play RealMedia files on other players (again, winamp) but you have to have realplayer installed and the only implementations I've seen are buggy. Lets hear it for proprietarty protocols that lock you into using annoying software.
Oh, and I love the way they make is sound like a huge, fatal error when "You computer is not properly configured to show media files!"
At a mall I was at in Georgia, the atm was plugged via modem into the wall - you could see the wire coming out of the (probably very sold) ATM case and going into the wall. It would have been simple to hunker down there and tap in. Weren't even any cameras there - the ATMS cameras were pointed forward to get people using the ATM.
He was also talking about people who copy books and then sell them, making a commercial profit, thus ACTUALLY depriving the owner of REAL sales - not potentially depriving the owner of projected sales, which is the most that can be said for p2p sharing.
Amusing how she uses Prince as an example of an artist distributing his own music, since he's a classic example of an artist being fucked over by the record companies - the whole "artist formerly known as" thing was a bit excessive, but was done because Sony actually owned the rights to his name - not just his recording name, either, his actual birth name. Messed up stuff.
Lacking the numbes, I can't make any claims, but I'd be interested in seeing the total usership of p2p apps compared to the voter turnout in the last election.
Granted the basic validity of your other arguments, but solar cells and wind plants don't generate any toxic waste at all when used - I'm kind of seeing a recurring trend in your posts:P - I'm curious if you have any hard, factual solutions to some of the problems with fission - fuel disposal being a big one. Safety record aside (which is, overall, pretty good) a nuke plant that goes up goes up in a BIG way - but if your wind turbine breaks down, thats all that happens - your turbine breaks down. Also remember that it doesn't have to be just one type of power generation - retrofit those tropical oil platforms into the (forgot acronym) thermal conversion plants others have talked about, install wind farms where it's practical, advocate the usage of solar power in homes (side note: My mother is a teacher, and her small rural building runs off solar and makes a small amount of money by selling power back to the grid. Theres no reason this wouldn't be practical in new buildings, especially given government incentives)
Multiple levels would be a problem - people in Quake are pretty accustmed to just walking off of 30 foot drops. You might manage something cool with wires, but that leads to a whole new chunk of complexity.
I'm suprised nobody has mentioned the Dream Park books by Larry Niven - these used tech exactly like people are describing, with VR goggles providing and overlay to a real environment. Also, in those games, the world-class participents were all incredible athletes, since it involved real fighting - however, there were technical handicaps to represent your characters abilities - a character with high sword skills would get alot more leeway in what was considered a "hit", for example.
While on the train this morning (:P) I realized that a REALLY great game for this sort of application would be Black & White - all the interaction is already done via a single "hand" and gestures anyway. Other 3-D, RTS games like Populous or Sacrifice would work, too, but they rely more on keyboard shortcuts.
One of the big problems I see with using a VR helmet for a FPS is that your head can't spin 360 degrees in a tenth of a second. I suppose you could use some sort of accelerator, but that would mean that you aren't looking at where your head is pointed, which is kind of the point of using the glasses in the first place. Body vests that allow body movement as well as helmets for head movement would be cool, though - but then you're getting back into the money realm, and you've have to hack the engine to have 2 discrete POV rotation points.
Slashdot Mirror
Not saying that we should just leave criminals alone, or that we should ignore terrorist attacks, but the methods we use, in the one case a PROVEN to not work as desired, and in the second case, are likely to not work as desired. Therefore, we need to come up with different solutions.
News flash - bombing Afghanistan isn't gonna make your daughter any safer. It might make you FEEL safer, but it won't make terrorism from there go away.
Airliners can often/usually survive the loss of an engine - but obviously, the loss of an engine during take-off is much worse. There's also a huge difference between an engine shutting down for whatever reason and an engine exploding and falling off - the second will cause all sorts of damage to the control surfaces, wing, etc.
SafeDisc copy protection works more or less the same way - theres huge, unreadable chunks of garbage data, that for techical and very clever reasons won't copy correctly. I read the technical data, but I'm not an engineer and have forgotten most of it :P But apparently it abuses CD error correction much the same way that these copy protected CDs to.
Just as a nitpick, blue laws are rarely if ever enforeced UNLESS some sort of excuse for harrassing a group or individual is needed - thus validating his point about them. They're used at will by the majority to constrain the minority. Granted, it's rare, but the possibility is there and the laws should be stricken.
As to the rest of your points - America did some pretty great things, and as a rule we've never been overtly expansionistic. But to say that we've never bullied other countries for profit is ridiculous. I'd have to do more research than I have time for to provide you with articles at the moment, but we supported and aided a military dictatorship in Central America for the benefit of Dole. The gulf war was about protecting our oil interests, not about any sort of concern for human rights or democracy.
I also submit that people in Afghanistan have the RIGHT to hate the US - many of them even have very good reasons. They have the right to listen to and to spread the word of Bin Laden and his buddies. They don't, of course, have the right to fly airliners into our cities.
Freedom of speech is not some magic bullet that will fix all the problems of the world. And in cases where it obviously isn't working, like in some parts or Europe, legislation is required to stem some of the flow of poison directed at the minds of our children.
You know, this reads almost EXACTLY like a statement from a fundamentalist school board when they published a list of books that our school library couldn't carry. Most of them, such as Catcher in the Rye, were banned because they advocated un-American behavior like rebellion.
You really should re-read your own words, and realize that what you are doing is EXACTLY the same as the Taliban or any facist regime - YOU are deciding what are good, proper ideas and suppressing any alternative to them.
As was discussed (at greath length) in the story about VR and CAVE, theres alot of problems to solve with FPS shooters and full-immersion VR. However, manipulative games like Black & White could translate to VR with next to zero diffuculty - in fact, I imagine that, given drivers, you could play Black & White with a VR headset and a Power Glove with no hacking of the game required at all. Hrm... gotta find me a cheap headset...
Slightly off-topic - thinkgeek.com has a headset designed for watching DVD movies thats supposed to be equivalent to watching an 18 foot projection screen. It's pretty pricey (600 bucks) and wouldn't support head movement, but has anybody hooked one of these up to a tv-out? I hear alot of the problem with VR headsets is the low resolution of the LCD screens, does this solve that problem somehow?
In the cartoon, American Maid actually seemed to have a clue, which put her at least a few points up on anyone else.
I'd like to take this opportunity to rant about how amazing System Shock 2 is - I used to play this on my laptop on the way to work, and I had to stop because of the strange looks I was getting as I'd twist around trying to hide from the zombies. And this on a laptop display, with cheapo headphones, on a TRAIN. I played a couple times on my desktop at home and decided that I was risking severe trauma.
The nintendo 64 controler worked pretty well for me, at least on Goldeneye which was all I ever played on it.
Not 100% sure about System Shock, as I never played it, but System Shock 2 (an INCREDIBLE game) was Looking Glass. Thief and Thief 2 were looking glass as well, and while not FP _shooters_, are also incredible - Thief 3 is in development and will be an Xbox game (*sniff*)
The psi-blade - it actually looks alot more like the Soul Reaver from Legacy of Kain to me - but again, "psi-blades", and swords attached to your arm are pretty much a staple of sci-fi/fantasy, and have been for a long time. The only other thing I see is yellow body armor.
Once upon a time there were RealMedia decoders for other players (winamp, in particular) until Real pitched a fit and made them go away. Now you can still play RealMedia files on other players (again, winamp) but you have to have realplayer installed and the only implementations I've seen are buggy. Lets hear it for proprietarty protocols that lock you into using annoying software.
Oh, and I love the way they make is sound like a huge, fatal error when "You computer is not properly configured to show media files!"
Yeah, but then the burden goes back to the bank.
At a mall I was at in Georgia, the atm was plugged via modem into the wall - you could see the wire coming out of the (probably very sold) ATM case and going into the wall. It would have been simple to hunker down there and tap in. Weren't even any cameras there - the ATMS cameras were pointed forward to get people using the ATM.
The people paying 5 grand per pound for launch fees, thats who.
Now, what _I_ read in my history texts is that Hitler just altered the Iron? (forget the name) cross, by moving all the cossbars to the right.
Jordan Knight, perhaps?! *gasp* *eeeeeeeee!!!*
He was also talking about people who copy books and then sell them, making a commercial profit, thus ACTUALLY depriving the owner of REAL sales - not potentially depriving the owner of projected sales, which is the most that can be said for p2p sharing.
Amusing how she uses Prince as an example of an artist distributing his own music, since he's a classic example of an artist being fucked over by the record companies - the whole "artist formerly known as" thing was a bit excessive, but was done because Sony actually owned the rights to his name - not just his recording name, either, his actual birth name. Messed up stuff.
Lacking the numbes, I can't make any claims, but I'd be interested in seeing the total usership of p2p apps compared to the voter turnout in the last election.
Granted the basic validity of your other arguments, but solar cells and wind plants don't generate any toxic waste at all when used - I'm kind of seeing a recurring trend in your posts :P - I'm curious if you have any hard, factual solutions to some of the problems with fission - fuel disposal being a big one. Safety record aside (which is, overall, pretty good) a nuke plant that goes up goes up in a BIG way - but if your wind turbine breaks down, thats all that happens - your turbine breaks down. Also remember that it doesn't have to be just one type of power generation - retrofit those tropical oil platforms into the (forgot acronym) thermal conversion plants others have talked about, install wind farms where it's practical, advocate the usage of solar power in homes (side note: My mother is a teacher, and her small rural building runs off solar and makes a small amount of money by selling power back to the grid. Theres no reason this wouldn't be practical in new buildings, especially given government incentives)
Multiple levels would be a problem - people in Quake are pretty accustmed to just walking off of 30 foot drops. You might manage something cool with wires, but that leads to a whole new chunk of complexity.
I'm suprised nobody has mentioned the Dream Park books by Larry Niven - these used tech exactly like people are describing, with VR goggles providing and overlay to a real environment. Also, in those games, the world-class participents were all incredible athletes, since it involved real fighting - however, there were technical handicaps to represent your characters abilities - a character with high sword skills would get alot more leeway in what was considered a "hit", for example.
While on the train this morning (:P) I realized that a REALLY great game for this sort of application would be Black & White - all the interaction is already done via a single "hand" and gestures anyway. Other 3-D, RTS games like Populous or Sacrifice would work, too, but they rely more on keyboard shortcuts.
One of the big problems I see with using a VR helmet for a FPS is that your head can't spin 360 degrees in a tenth of a second. I suppose you could use some sort of accelerator, but that would mean that you aren't looking at where your head is pointed, which is kind of the point of using the glasses in the first place. Body vests that allow body movement as well as helmets for head movement would be cool, though - but then you're getting back into the money realm, and you've have to hack the engine to have 2 discrete POV rotation points.