Nickel City Dance Maniax 2nd Mix, beatmania 6th Mix UK Underground
GameWorks Guitar Freaks US
Aladdin's Castle @ Hawthorne Mall Taiko no Tatsujin 3
Let's see - In just one state, we have 4 Beatmania machines 2 ParaPara Paradise 3 Guitar Freaks 2 Drummania 1 Taiko no Tatsujin 1 Keyboard mania
And those are just at places that also have DDR machines, and where the machines have been listed on DDRFreak. There are likely more machines in Illinois alone.
Or as another comparison, Illusionz Magical Entertainment Center in Issaquah, WA has all of the following: Dance Maniax 2nd Mix, Guitar Freaks 7th Mix, Keyboard mania 3rd Mix, Para Para Paradise 2nd Mix, Samba de Amigo, drummania 3th Mix, drummania 6th Mix, pop'n music 5, DDR Extreme x 2, DDR USA, DDR Solo 4th Plus
To claim no more than 10 each of the machines listed is surely incorrect. Yes, there are significantly fewer Beatmanias, or Drummanias, or Keyboard Manias than there are DDR machines. But there are a significant amount. Heck, I bet there are plenty of each in California alone.
(I sure as hell plan on going to Illusionz once I manage to get moved up to the Seattle area. I loved drummania the couple times I played it here in the Chicago area, and really want to play more. Keyboard Freaks, on the other hand was hard as HELL!!)
It wasn't a criticism - just pointing out to the person I replied to that this was not nearly the type of thing he seemed to be so scared of. I was quite impressed with what they've done here, but understand that this alone doesn't mean rogue biologists can start unleashing custom viruses into the world.
That may be the case, but I have never been comfortable with classifying viruses that way. They reproduce, evolve, and are definitely not inert. If they're not "life", then they're dead things doing a fairly convincing imitation of life.
What do you think you're doing, reading the article and commenting intelligently on it? Don't you know this is Slashdot, and that type of thing is not allowed? Your comment is the first one I've seen that actually recognizes that the headline here, while not incorrect, is misleading. That the virus is not new, just a copy.
I would say that it is artificial in a way, since the virus copy they created had it's genome pieced together out of DNA from other sources.
This does mean that the technology they're using to assemble DNA sequences has gotten really quick and accurate, compared to even a year ago with the polio virus. It does seem to have the potential to open the opportunity to learn about genes by piecing them together and seeing the results. Let's hope if that route is taken, that a LOT of safety precautions are followed to prevent against the possible dangerous virus being constructed.
All they actually did was to take commercially available DNA, link it together to duplicate the DNA of an existing bacteriophage, and pop it inside a cell, and watch it go on. They just demonstrated that they have the technology to make a copy of the DNA of an existing virus.
As anyone can tell you, learning how to copy something that already exists doesn't really mean you know that much more about how it works. Just because I could write out a copy of a Chinese story doesn't mean I know anything more about what the story says, just that I can duplicate the writing correctly.
Creating NEW life forms, not just copying existing ones, is still a ways off.
Theoretically, they should be able to do this with a mammal like a feline. Sequence the DNA, build a copy, and replace the DNA in a freshly fertilized egg, and it should grow up just fine. Though the complexity of the animal would add issues that I'm not educated enough to be aware of, certainly.
But regions with warmer climates, such as Italy's famed Chianti region, could see grapes ripen too quickly under even warmer temperatures. Grapes that ripen too quickly on the vine generally have higher sugar content, which produces more alcoholic wine with less acidity and balance.
Please, tell me we're not going to lose good Chianti! It's easily my favorite variety of wine, and to have the quality decrease will be a real disappointment. I'd rather keep good Chianti around then have dozens more vineyards turning out yet more Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvingon for $9.95 supermarket bottles. Or worse yet - more of that awful White Zinfandel stuff. It's like if Kool-Aid was made into wine.
I have to wonder if their data was controlled for changes in wine producing methods and soil managment and other differences besides climate. It's not like this was a controlled experiment or anything.
I had my fun watching the enemies die on the booby traps in various ways. If there was the opportunity to knock an enemy into a booby trap instead of just finishing them off with the sword, then I always had to go that route. It was fun watching him start to put the sword away, then seeing the metal jaws "chomp" down on the enemy, blood running down the sides of the blades.
I just wish that they had put BOTH of the original PoP games as unlockables, instead of just one. And why-oh-why did they put #2 only on the one version? I never did get to play PoP2, and would have loved the chance to play it on my Gamecube.
There are still occasional cases of small development teams getting the opportunity to work on games. Jeff Minter is working on Unity for the Gamecube, for example. And while he has the resources of Lionhead behind him, I don't believe there's a large dev team there - mainly him, with support from a few other people. Of course, it remains to be seen if the game goes anywhere - it might turn out just like Ico and Rez above.
I would have bought Rez - or at least tried to - if they had released it for the Gamecube. Perhaps Sega just picked the wrong platform? After all, a game for a console that's already packed with games is going to have a harder time standing out unless it gets hype from all teh gaming magazines.
It seems telling to read that guy's column, and hear him discuss how anything under an 8.0 on Gamespot is considered a "bad game". What kind of skewing is this? That leaves no room to truly distinguish between good and great games. The average game should be right at a 5.0. That leaves plenty of variation for worse and better games to be categorized. As it is, yes, you can tell a game is a stinker if it gets a 2.5. But when a difference between 3.0 and 4.0 is less than the difference between 8.6 and 8.9, then something is off.
It's due to the skewing of all reviews toward positive, that seems likely to come from any game reviewing media that gets most of its' revenue from the game companies. How can we expect them to be unbiased? They have to watch the bottom line, and, well, honest reviews with no financial backing aren't going to last, while biased reviews with financial backing will - if the bias isn't too blatant.
I don't trust the reviews that much, other than to realize that if THEY say it sucks, then it must. If they say it doesn't, that doesn't mean the game is good.
Games that work well when played by groups appeal more to females than more solo games. Watch a Dance Dance Revolution machine at the arcade when there are a number of kids around - I've seen a number of times where a group of teenage girls would wander up to the machine, and a few of them would play. Or at home, something like Mario Kart or Mario Party can get interest. Single-player games get a lot less attention, because there's a higher interest in the social factor.
There are exceptions, myself included, but by and large, gaming needs to be a social activity to get girls involved. That's partially changing I think just because computers and games are much more part of childhood for everyone then they used to be - my sister was raised with games like I was, and while she's not as much of a gamer as I am, still plays at times.
I'm picking up the Treasures for my Gamecube, even though I already have all those games for MAME on my PC. The ability to play them on a TV, with stereo sound, and a group of friends, that's just going to be too good to pass up. I am seriously looking forward to 4 player Gauntlet sessions. I must admit to being very disappointed they left Gauntlet 2 off though.
Now, perhaps Midway should try redoing some of their best games Sega Ages style, keeping the game intact and just making it look better. After all, they blew it with Robotron X, and the new Gauntlet games don't have any of the spark of the original.
Hmm... I wonder what an open source Gauntlet like game could do, graphics wise and new feature wise, while keeping the gameplay elements that made it worthwhile...
THE "Natural Law" i speak of is: Living things have a tendency to die, either through beoming old and worn out, or through outside forces.
I don't see how this qualifies as a law in any manner. While it may be how things work from what we've seen, I see no reason to put it that way. There is no reason why a species could not have evolved that did not grow old and worn out - the fact what's around us seems to do so does not make it a MUST. And it is also conceivable that there could be a planet out there with a few life forms on it that lived together on there, and things were such that there were few, if any, outside forces that were threats to those life forms. Maybe not likely, but quite possible.
Yes, things on this planet do tend toward death. That's just the way it worked out. It's not a law, and don't fall into assuming that because it was the way nature worked, that it is somehow the right way. If you want to argue that death is good, then you can do that - but to claim "it's natural" as the justification for it, well, that just doesn't hold up by itself.
(I do understand that death does serve purposes of allowing the next generation to take over, it allows for more change, limits competition between parents and offspring, and has definite evolutionary advantages - and social advantages too. But I also feel that there would be advantages to elimiating, or at least significantly delaying death, and whether they are greater than the disadvantages is not something that can be clearly said. I still want to live indefinitely.:)
No, I just take exception to the implication that there is some natural law that requires a certain amount of people to die, and that our use of technology to cure diseases and extend lifespan is violating that law. To me, laws of nature are things that are inviolate - you cannot get around the laws of thermodynamics, for example. (And if you can, then the laws were incorrect and not laws in the first place)
Yes, I agree that technology has allowed characteristics to prosper that in the past would have been selected against due to evolutionary pressure. But to say that "Technology, along with social 'altruism' has resulted in a situation where behavior which should result in its actor dying off and failing to reproduce " is to make a leap that I think is not properly justified. To claim that a certain behavior should result in the actor dying off is to add a value judgement to something that seems inherently valueless. Evolutionary pressure that results in certain attributes being selected against does not in any way imply that those attributes deserve to be selected against, that those attributes are somehow less worthy.
Just because nature did something a certain way, does not mean that that is the right way.
Creating scarcity where it's not needed is done for economic reasons. You see it all the time - perhaps a company does a "special edition" of one of their products, and only does a small number of them, guaranteeing that there will be more people that want them than what they've produced - thus they can justify charging inflated prices for the item. From a business angle, the target is the highest profit - if creating a scarce supply of something will yield more profit than making enough for everyone, due to being able to charge higher prices in the scarce situation, they'll do so.
There are laws to help enforce this artifical scarcity - if I produce 500 gold-edition widgets, it doesn't matter if you have the means to produce 500,000 of them. You can't legally do so if there are patents/copyrights/trademarks involved in the widget.
The current system has come about to handle scarcity. If it breaks down as scarcity disappears, that will be a problem if there is not an alternative system that can be put in place. Say that tomorrow someone created nanotech assemblers, and then gave out a box that could essentially build anything from dirt and air and garbage. That would elimiate much of the scarcity issues around, and would pretty much elimiate our economy in one blow. But then what would happen? Chaos, most likely, until a new system comes into place to handle it.
He's not wrong, when you understand where he's coming from.
Spam could be looked at as coming into existence because technology has developed enough to allow the means of data transmission to become cheap enough that large amounts of that technology can be deployed, leading to an abundance of capacity on the network. When you don't have any issues of shortage of network capacity, then there is no reason to put much of a charge for using that capacity. Thus, people can spam huge numbers of e-mails because the abundance has allowed it to be done so cheaply.
If capacity was scarce, and they had to charge, say, $.25 an e-mail, spam wouldn't exist due to economics. There was fax spam because the people sending the spams had minimal costs - just phone calls, which in some places are unlimited for a fixed fee (abundancy of phone network capacity leading to this). But because fax spam cost the receipients in fax supplies, they had reason to ban it.
we can save people who should by natural law be removed to make space for the next guy.
What is this "natural law" you speak of? Other than the laws of physics, I know of no natural laws out there.
Perhaps you are thinking about "survival of the fittest", which people often misinterpret so that they believe that only the fittest individuals should live and the rest should die. That concept works only in generalizations - that a more fit individual will have a greater likelihood of surviving, but that like all probability, nothing is fixed. The most fit individual in a population could be the one gored by an ox, leaving the less fit to move on.
Yes, technology is used to increase life expectancy, allowing people to live that would have died a thousand years ago. But there's no "law" that states that person should have died - it just happens that way. Humans work toward extending their lifespans and saving others - that's a part of our "human nature" that we have due to evolution. Saving people with technology is just as natural as being killed.
On the Enterprise, most people are partof Starfleet and thus have duties for their rank, and have to do them. But that can't be the way it is everywhere.
Perhaps the goal would be to make the jobs less crappy. Or find ways to have robots or some other automated method do those jobs, and then there are people that just have to fix the robots - which would likely be a bit more interesting.
But abundance/scarcity is closely linked to economics.
The current economic system that we have in place is designed around scarcity. Resources and capital are scarce, and thus you can't possibly have as much for everyone as they'd like. Thus you have market forces and all that, depending on the amount of demand for the scarce resource.
If scarcity were to disappear completely, and everyone could have as much of something as they wanted, then the system breaks down. You end up needing artificial means to create a scarcity, trying to create that negative factor that the system was designed to deal with.
His references deal with economic issues and abundance at the same time. For spam, for example - there's an abundance of internet capacity to allow for mass amounts of e-mail to be sent cheaply. If there wasn't an abundance, e-mail wouldn't be cheap, and the economic decisions regarding spam would likely be different.
You know, I'm all for having tax-free gasoline as long as we stop subsidizing the hell out of it. Did you know that if all the money that goes into subsidizing automobile transportation was cut, and all of that cost was added into gasoline, you'd be paying between $3.70 to $6.50 more per gallon?
You're getting to drive your automobile around for much cheaper than it should cost due to subsidies, and you're going to complain about adding taxes?
Until we Americans are paying more than $5 per gallon, we have absolutely no room to complain about any gas taxes, because we're already getting it cheaper than we should thanks to government subsidies. Heck, it could go over $8 a gallon if all the subsidies are removed.
If you want a game to be long, fine. Just make it WORTH CONTINUING TO PLAY.
Tattoo this on the heads of the people writing this article.
A game that is done well and stays interesting can be extremely long. In fact, those are the games you WANT to be longer because you don't want to stop playing them. I easily got 30+ hours of play out of my first time through Eternal Darkness because it was so interesting and fun. And at the end? I was upset - because there wasn't more to play. I wanted more.
A game only ends up unfinished on the shelf when it stops keeping your interest enough for you to finish it. That can be either a puzzle that is difficult or obscure to complete, the difficulty ramping up too quickly leading to frustration, or just getting repetitive. Zelda: The Wind Waker hasn't been in my Gamecube for months, and was never finished. What happened? I got to a point where there were two next things to complete, and it seemed that the items I needed to compelte those were on other islands, and those islands required items from the first islands. I'm sure that's not the case, but I didn't have any clue where to go, so I stopped playing.
You know, when I see this sort of complete lack of respect and concern for fellow people, I lose any hope for the future of humanity.
If things ever reach the point that people are being killed off for being "useless", then I hope humanity drives itself extinct as soon as possible, so that perhaps a better species can evolve intelligence and perhaps create something worthwhile.
Ah, but were the people whose jobs were eliminated by computers able to take over those new jobs?
Imagine that McDonalds developed a system to automate their grease distribution centers (fast food "restaurants"). Yes, there will be a need to create all those robots and maintain them - but there will be fewer people needed to do all that than to run the places currently. Thus a net decrease in jobs - and what do the people that lose their jobs do? If one fast food chain could automate, then they all could - all those workers without jobs.
Is it possible new jobs will be created to absorb all those workers? I grant that it's possible - though if so, why aren't those jobs being created now?
This is important to think about - robots and other means of automation will only continue to get cheaper, better, and more versatile.
There are a number of jobs out there where no matter how much or how little you pay people, at some point, a machine will be able to do the job better and cheaper.
Considering that there are a large number of people in the US alone that work in simple labor and service jobs, jobs that are probably the most vunerable to automation, what happens when those jobs disappear? Not just a few jobs here and there - but when automation is good enough that pretty much those entire job fields disappear. Currently they're like the jobs of last resort - what's left?
If that occured in the current society, you'd have a sudden huge jump in unemployment filings, suddenly large amounts of people jobless - often with entire areas having their main sources of employment disappear entirely. These would be people with not a lot of job skills, and little opportunities for them to work. What would be done if millions of people were out of work and had no job prospects? There's not enough money available for a safety net for all of them, and there continues to be efforts to reduce that safety net. Do those of us in higher up jobs that are not (yet) vunerable to automation just let them suffer? Think about the chain of damage on the current capitalism system, when that entire segment of the population is lacking the money to purchase anything. Reduced sales all around, thus people being laid off as not needed, more unemployment claims and less purchasing power - sounds like a death spiral.
The possibilities for a future with nanotech and strong automation seem to have a lot of possibility, as I can imagine a world that is able to provide for all basic necessities in a comfortable manner without requiring people to work. But bar a wholesale bottom-up rebuilding of society to enable that, I don't expect things would head in that direction - and I don't feel very positive about any other direction that could be taken.
The electronic machines offer a number of advantages.
1) Quick tallying of votes. After a few elections, the accuracy of the machines can be determined. Then just perhaps a few random recounts in districts to verify that the accuracy continues to be up to par, and most can be assumed to be correct unless close enough to justify a recount.
2) Easy to modify UI if it is determined that the existing one has issues that negatively impact peoples' voting. If a mechanical voting system is determined to have issues (such as butterfly ballots), you need to get new machines. Computer voting can have the UI changed much more easily.
3) Less paper use. Only one paper ballot is printed for each voter, and a lot less is needed to be printed, since you only need to indicate who was voted for, not all the candidates.
4) Better prevention of spoiled ballots. With a punch card, if I had, say, a mis-aligned ballot, I could vote for the wrong people, or vote for two people for the same office. There are ways to spoil most paper ballots by mis-voting. Computer voting can validate someone's vote on the spot, inform them if they didn't vote for certain office, and prevent multiple votes for one office.
5) Quicker adaptation should the voting system change. Yes, it is unlikely we'll see a change from the first-past-the-post voting system in use now (the worst of all possible systems), but if it does happen, mechanical voting systems are going to be pretty much obsolete in most cases. Electrionic voting just requires a software update (if done right), and they're ready to go. The electronic machines might also be highly useful for other voting systems, as it could be easier to vote correctly in more complex systems here than on mechanical voting machines.
With everything I've seen, I'm unable to resist coming to one of two conclusions about all this.
One - the people in charge of this are incompetent and defensive about it to the point of forcing bad solutions and defects on the system to cover their incompetence. Perhaps they figured (one way or another) that this could gain them profit, and someone with no computer knowledge whatsoever was put in charge and continues to force his ideas on the system, no matter how bad it is.
Two - it is deliberate. They are intentionally making a mess of this in some sort of calculated way to give them influence over the election results.
Which conclusion to go with? I'm not certain. The standard rule is to never attribute to malice what can be approproately explained by simple incompetence, but the level of incompetence here is so drastic that it starts to stretch belief. Essentially, there would have to be incompetence throughout the entire development team for these voting machines. I guess opressive managment can drive out all the people who know what they're doing, so perhaps that could be an explanation...
Slashdot Mirror
You won't find more than 10 of each machine I've mentioned above in the entire U.S., while there are easily thousands of DDR machines.
In Illinois:
Mitsuwa Marketplace (J-Toys)
Para Para Paradise 2nd Mix, beatmania CM
Duckets GameStation
Para Para Paradise
Diversions
Guitar Freaks US, HipHopMania CM2
Ford City Mall: Tilt
Pump It Up, drummania
Aladdin's Castle - Chicago Ridge Mall
Guitar Freaks, Keyboard mania, drummania 3th Mix
Gateway Fun Park
Pump It Up, beatmania CM
Nickel City
Dance Maniax 2nd Mix, beatmania 6th Mix UK Underground
GameWorks
Guitar Freaks US
Aladdin's Castle @ Hawthorne Mall
Taiko no Tatsujin 3
Let's see - In just one state, we have
4 Beatmania machines
2 ParaPara Paradise
3 Guitar Freaks
2 Drummania
1 Taiko no Tatsujin
1 Keyboard mania
And those are just at places that also have DDR machines, and where the machines have been listed on DDRFreak. There are likely more machines in Illinois alone.
Or as another comparison, Illusionz Magical Entertainment Center in Issaquah, WA has all of the following: Dance Maniax 2nd Mix, Guitar Freaks 7th Mix, Keyboard mania 3rd Mix, Para Para Paradise 2nd Mix, Samba de Amigo, drummania 3th Mix, drummania 6th Mix, pop'n music 5, DDR Extreme x 2, DDR USA, DDR Solo 4th Plus
To claim no more than 10 each of the machines listed is surely incorrect. Yes, there are significantly fewer Beatmanias, or Drummanias, or Keyboard Manias than there are DDR machines. But there are a significant amount. Heck, I bet there are plenty of each in California alone.
(I sure as hell plan on going to Illusionz once I manage to get moved up to the Seattle area. I loved drummania the couple times I played it here in the Chicago area, and really want to play more. Keyboard Freaks, on the other hand was hard as HELL!!)
It wasn't a criticism - just pointing out to the person I replied to that this was not nearly the type of thing he seemed to be so scared of. I was quite impressed with what they've done here, but understand that this alone doesn't mean rogue biologists can start unleashing custom viruses into the world.
That may be the case, but I have never been comfortable with classifying viruses that way. They reproduce, evolve, and are definitely not inert. If they're not "life", then they're dead things doing a fairly convincing imitation of life.
What do you think you're doing, reading the article and commenting intelligently on it? Don't you know this is Slashdot, and that type of thing is not allowed? Your comment is the first one I've seen that actually recognizes that the headline here, while not incorrect, is misleading. That the virus is not new, just a copy.
I would say that it is artificial in a way, since the virus copy they created had it's genome pieced together out of DNA from other sources.
This does mean that the technology they're using to assemble DNA sequences has gotten really quick and accurate, compared to even a year ago with the polio virus. It does seem to have the potential to open the opportunity to learn about genes by piecing them together and seeing the results. Let's hope if that route is taken, that a LOT of safety precautions are followed to prevent against the possible dangerous virus being constructed.
All they actually did was to take commercially available DNA, link it together to duplicate the DNA of an existing bacteriophage, and pop it inside a cell, and watch it go on. They just demonstrated that they have the technology to make a copy of the DNA of an existing virus.
As anyone can tell you, learning how to copy something that already exists doesn't really mean you know that much more about how it works. Just because I could write out a copy of a Chinese story doesn't mean I know anything more about what the story says, just that I can duplicate the writing correctly.
Creating NEW life forms, not just copying existing ones, is still a ways off.
Theoretically, they should be able to do this with a mammal like a feline. Sequence the DNA, build a copy, and replace the DNA in a freshly fertilized egg, and it should grow up just fine. Though the complexity of the animal would add issues that I'm not educated enough to be aware of, certainly.
But regions with warmer climates, such as Italy's famed Chianti region, could see grapes ripen too quickly under even warmer temperatures. Grapes that ripen too quickly on the vine generally have higher sugar content, which produces more alcoholic wine with less acidity and balance.
Please, tell me we're not going to lose good Chianti! It's easily my favorite variety of wine, and to have the quality decrease will be a real disappointment. I'd rather keep good Chianti around then have dozens more vineyards turning out yet more Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvingon for $9.95 supermarket bottles. Or worse yet - more of that awful White Zinfandel stuff. It's like if Kool-Aid was made into wine.
I have to wonder if their data was controlled for changes in wine producing methods and soil managment and other differences besides climate. It's not like this was a controlled experiment or anything.
I had my fun watching the enemies die on the booby traps in various ways. If there was the opportunity to knock an enemy into a booby trap instead of just finishing them off with the sword, then I always had to go that route. It was fun watching him start to put the sword away, then seeing the metal jaws "chomp" down on the enemy, blood running down the sides of the blades.
I just wish that they had put BOTH of the original PoP games as unlockables, instead of just one. And why-oh-why did they put #2 only on the one version? I never did get to play PoP2, and would have loved the chance to play it on my Gamecube.
There are still occasional cases of small development teams getting the opportunity to work on games. Jeff Minter is working on Unity for the Gamecube, for example. And while he has the resources of Lionhead behind him, I don't believe there's a large dev team there - mainly him, with support from a few other people. Of course, it remains to be seen if the game goes anywhere - it might turn out just like Ico and Rez above.
I would have bought Rez - or at least tried to - if they had released it for the Gamecube. Perhaps Sega just picked the wrong platform? After all, a game for a console that's already packed with games is going to have a harder time standing out unless it gets hype from all teh gaming magazines.
It seems telling to read that guy's column, and hear him discuss how anything under an 8.0 on Gamespot is considered a "bad game". What kind of skewing is this? That leaves no room to truly distinguish between good and great games. The average game should be right at a 5.0. That leaves plenty of variation for worse and better games to be categorized. As it is, yes, you can tell a game is a stinker if it gets a 2.5. But when a difference between 3.0 and 4.0 is less than the difference between 8.6 and 8.9, then something is off.
It's due to the skewing of all reviews toward positive, that seems likely to come from any game reviewing media that gets most of its' revenue from the game companies. How can we expect them to be unbiased? They have to watch the bottom line, and, well, honest reviews with no financial backing aren't going to last, while biased reviews with financial backing will - if the bias isn't too blatant.
I don't trust the reviews that much, other than to realize that if THEY say it sucks, then it must. If they say it doesn't, that doesn't mean the game is good.
Games that work well when played by groups appeal more to females than more solo games. Watch a Dance Dance Revolution machine at the arcade when there are a number of kids around - I've seen a number of times where a group of teenage girls would wander up to the machine, and a few of them would play. Or at home, something like Mario Kart or Mario Party can get interest. Single-player games get a lot less attention, because there's a higher interest in the social factor.
There are exceptions, myself included, but by and large, gaming needs to be a social activity to get girls involved. That's partially changing I think just because computers and games are much more part of childhood for everyone then they used to be - my sister was raised with games like I was, and while she's not as much of a gamer as I am, still plays at times.
I'm picking up the Treasures for my Gamecube, even though I already have all those games for MAME on my PC. The ability to play them on a TV, with stereo sound, and a group of friends, that's just going to be too good to pass up. I am seriously looking forward to 4 player Gauntlet sessions. I must admit to being very disappointed they left Gauntlet 2 off though.
Now, perhaps Midway should try redoing some of their best games Sega Ages style, keeping the game intact and just making it look better. After all, they blew it with Robotron X, and the new Gauntlet games don't have any of the spark of the original.
Hmm... I wonder what an open source Gauntlet like game could do, graphics wise and new feature wise, while keeping the gameplay elements that made it worthwhile...
THE "Natural Law" i speak of is: Living things have a tendency to die, either through beoming old and worn out, or through outside forces.
:)
I don't see how this qualifies as a law in any manner. While it may be how things work from what we've seen, I see no reason to put it that way. There is no reason why a species could not have evolved that did not grow old and worn out - the fact what's around us seems to do so does not make it a MUST. And it is also conceivable that there could be a planet out there with a few life forms on it that lived together on there, and things were such that there were few, if any, outside forces that were threats to those life forms. Maybe not likely, but quite possible.
Yes, things on this planet do tend toward death. That's just the way it worked out. It's not a law, and don't fall into assuming that because it was the way nature worked, that it is somehow the right way. If you want to argue that death is good, then you can do that - but to claim "it's natural" as the justification for it, well, that just doesn't hold up by itself.
(I do understand that death does serve purposes of allowing the next generation to take over, it allows for more change, limits competition between parents and offspring, and has definite evolutionary advantages - and social advantages too. But I also feel that there would be advantages to elimiating, or at least significantly delaying death, and whether they are greater than the disadvantages is not something that can be clearly said. I still want to live indefinitely.
No, I just take exception to the implication that there is some natural law that requires a certain amount of people to die, and that our use of technology to cure diseases and extend lifespan is violating that law. To me, laws of nature are things that are inviolate - you cannot get around the laws of thermodynamics, for example. (And if you can, then the laws were incorrect and not laws in the first place)
Yes, I agree that technology has allowed characteristics to prosper that in the past would have been selected against due to evolutionary pressure. But to say that "Technology, along with social 'altruism' has resulted in a situation where behavior which should result in its actor dying off and failing to reproduce " is to make a leap that I think is not properly justified. To claim that a certain behavior should result in the actor dying off is to add a value judgement to something that seems inherently valueless. Evolutionary pressure that results in certain attributes being selected against does not in any way imply that those attributes deserve to be selected against, that those attributes are somehow less worthy.
Just because nature did something a certain way, does not mean that that is the right way.
Creating scarcity where it's not needed is done for economic reasons. You see it all the time - perhaps a company does a "special edition" of one of their products, and only does a small number of them, guaranteeing that there will be more people that want them than what they've produced - thus they can justify charging inflated prices for the item. From a business angle, the target is the highest profit - if creating a scarce supply of something will yield more profit than making enough for everyone, due to being able to charge higher prices in the scarce situation, they'll do so.
There are laws to help enforce this artifical scarcity - if I produce 500 gold-edition widgets, it doesn't matter if you have the means to produce 500,000 of them. You can't legally do so if there are patents/copyrights/trademarks involved in the widget.
The current system has come about to handle scarcity. If it breaks down as scarcity disappears, that will be a problem if there is not an alternative system that can be put in place. Say that tomorrow someone created nanotech assemblers, and then gave out a box that could essentially build anything from dirt and air and garbage. That would elimiate much of the scarcity issues around, and would pretty much elimiate our economy in one blow. But then what would happen? Chaos, most likely, until a new system comes into place to handle it.
He's not wrong, when you understand where he's coming from.
Spam could be looked at as coming into existence because technology has developed enough to allow the means of data transmission to become cheap enough that large amounts of that technology can be deployed, leading to an abundance of capacity on the network. When you don't have any issues of shortage of network capacity, then there is no reason to put much of a charge for using that capacity. Thus, people can spam huge numbers of e-mails because the abundance has allowed it to be done so cheaply.
If capacity was scarce, and they had to charge, say, $.25 an e-mail, spam wouldn't exist due to economics. There was fax spam because the people sending the spams had minimal costs - just phone calls, which in some places are unlimited for a fixed fee (abundancy of phone network capacity leading to this). But because fax spam cost the receipients in fax supplies, they had reason to ban it.
we can save people who should by natural law be removed to make space for the next guy.
What is this "natural law" you speak of? Other than the laws of physics, I know of no natural laws out there.
Perhaps you are thinking about "survival of the fittest", which people often misinterpret so that they believe that only the fittest individuals should live and the rest should die. That concept works only in generalizations - that a more fit individual will have a greater likelihood of surviving, but that like all probability, nothing is fixed. The most fit individual in a population could be the one gored by an ox, leaving the less fit to move on.
Yes, technology is used to increase life expectancy, allowing people to live that would have died a thousand years ago. But there's no "law" that states that person should have died - it just happens that way. Humans work toward extending their lifespans and saving others - that's a part of our "human nature" that we have due to evolution. Saving people with technology is just as natural as being killed.
On the Enterprise, most people are partof Starfleet and thus have duties for their rank, and have to do them. But that can't be the way it is everywhere.
Perhaps the goal would be to make the jobs less crappy. Or find ways to have robots or some other automated method do those jobs, and then there are people that just have to fix the robots - which would likely be a bit more interesting.
But abundance/scarcity is closely linked to economics.
The current economic system that we have in place is designed around scarcity. Resources and capital are scarce, and thus you can't possibly have as much for everyone as they'd like. Thus you have market forces and all that, depending on the amount of demand for the scarce resource.
If scarcity were to disappear completely, and everyone could have as much of something as they wanted, then the system breaks down. You end up needing artificial means to create a scarcity, trying to create that negative factor that the system was designed to deal with.
His references deal with economic issues and abundance at the same time. For spam, for example - there's an abundance of internet capacity to allow for mass amounts of e-mail to be sent cheaply. If there wasn't an abundance, e-mail wouldn't be cheap, and the economic decisions regarding spam would likely be different.
You know, I'm all for having tax-free gasoline as long as we stop subsidizing the hell out of it. Did you know that if all the money that goes into subsidizing automobile transportation was cut, and all of that cost was added into gasoline, you'd be paying between $3.70 to $6.50 more per gallon?
You're getting to drive your automobile around for much cheaper than it should cost due to subsidies, and you're going to complain about adding taxes?
Until we Americans are paying more than $5 per gallon, we have absolutely no room to complain about any gas taxes, because we're already getting it cheaper than we should thanks to government subsidies. Heck, it could go over $8 a gallon if all the subsidies are removed.
If you want a game to be long, fine. Just make it WORTH CONTINUING TO PLAY.
Tattoo this on the heads of the people writing this article.
A game that is done well and stays interesting can be extremely long. In fact, those are the games you WANT to be longer because you don't want to stop playing them. I easily got 30+ hours of play out of my first time through Eternal Darkness because it was so interesting and fun. And at the end? I was upset - because there wasn't more to play. I wanted more.
A game only ends up unfinished on the shelf when it stops keeping your interest enough for you to finish it. That can be either a puzzle that is difficult or obscure to complete, the difficulty ramping up too quickly leading to frustration, or just getting repetitive. Zelda: The Wind Waker hasn't been in my Gamecube for months, and was never finished. What happened? I got to a point where there were two next things to complete, and it seemed that the items I needed to compelte those were on other islands, and those islands required items from the first islands. I'm sure that's not the case, but I didn't have any clue where to go, so I stopped playing.
The best games are long and interesting.
You know, when I see this sort of complete lack of respect and concern for fellow people, I lose any hope for the future of humanity.
If things ever reach the point that people are being killed off for being "useless", then I hope humanity drives itself extinct as soon as possible, so that perhaps a better species can evolve intelligence and perhaps create something worthwhile.
Ah, but were the people whose jobs were eliminated by computers able to take over those new jobs?
Imagine that McDonalds developed a system to automate their grease distribution centers (fast food "restaurants"). Yes, there will be a need to create all those robots and maintain them - but there will be fewer people needed to do all that than to run the places currently. Thus a net decrease in jobs - and what do the people that lose their jobs do? If one fast food chain could automate, then they all could - all those workers without jobs.
Is it possible new jobs will be created to absorb all those workers? I grant that it's possible - though if so, why aren't those jobs being created now?
This is important to think about - robots and other means of automation will only continue to get cheaper, better, and more versatile.
There are a number of jobs out there where no matter how much or how little you pay people, at some point, a machine will be able to do the job better and cheaper.
Considering that there are a large number of people in the US alone that work in simple labor and service jobs, jobs that are probably the most vunerable to automation, what happens when those jobs disappear? Not just a few jobs here and there - but when automation is good enough that pretty much those entire job fields disappear. Currently they're like the jobs of last resort - what's left?
If that occured in the current society, you'd have a sudden huge jump in unemployment filings, suddenly large amounts of people jobless - often with entire areas having their main sources of employment disappear entirely. These would be people with not a lot of job skills, and little opportunities for them to work. What would be done if millions of people were out of work and had no job prospects? There's not enough money available for a safety net for all of them, and there continues to be efforts to reduce that safety net. Do those of us in higher up jobs that are not (yet) vunerable to automation just let them suffer? Think about the chain of damage on the current capitalism system, when that entire segment of the population is lacking the money to purchase anything. Reduced sales all around, thus people being laid off as not needed, more unemployment claims and less purchasing power - sounds like a death spiral.
The possibilities for a future with nanotech and strong automation seem to have a lot of possibility, as I can imagine a world that is able to provide for all basic necessities in a comfortable manner without requiring people to work. But bar a wholesale bottom-up rebuilding of society to enable that, I don't expect things would head in that direction - and I don't feel very positive about any other direction that could be taken.
The electronic machines offer a number of advantages.
1) Quick tallying of votes. After a few elections, the accuracy of the machines can be determined. Then just perhaps a few random recounts in districts to verify that the accuracy continues to be up to par, and most can be assumed to be correct unless close enough to justify a recount.
2) Easy to modify UI if it is determined that the existing one has issues that negatively impact peoples' voting. If a mechanical voting system is determined to have issues (such as butterfly ballots), you need to get new machines. Computer voting can have the UI changed much more easily.
3) Less paper use. Only one paper ballot is printed for each voter, and a lot less is needed to be printed, since you only need to indicate who was voted for, not all the candidates.
4) Better prevention of spoiled ballots. With a punch card, if I had, say, a mis-aligned ballot, I could vote for the wrong people, or vote for two people for the same office. There are ways to spoil most paper ballots by mis-voting. Computer voting can validate someone's vote on the spot, inform them if they didn't vote for certain office, and prevent multiple votes for one office.
5) Quicker adaptation should the voting system change. Yes, it is unlikely we'll see a change from the first-past-the-post voting system in use now (the worst of all possible systems), but if it does happen, mechanical voting systems are going to be pretty much obsolete in most cases. Electrionic voting just requires a software update (if done right), and they're ready to go. The electronic machines might also be highly useful for other voting systems, as it could be easier to vote correctly in more complex systems here than on mechanical voting machines.
Good enough reasons?
With everything I've seen, I'm unable to resist coming to one of two conclusions about all this.
One - the people in charge of this are incompetent and defensive about it to the point of forcing bad solutions and defects on the system to cover their incompetence. Perhaps they figured (one way or another) that this could gain them profit, and someone with no computer knowledge whatsoever was put in charge and continues to force his ideas on the system, no matter how bad it is.
Two - it is deliberate. They are intentionally making a mess of this in some sort of calculated way to give them influence over the election results.
Which conclusion to go with? I'm not certain. The standard rule is to never attribute to malice what can be approproately explained by simple incompetence, but the level of incompetence here is so drastic that it starts to stretch belief. Essentially, there would have to be incompetence throughout the entire development team for these voting machines. I guess opressive managment can drive out all the people who know what they're doing, so perhaps that could be an explanation...