People tweak their cars to go way over the legal speeding limit. They may even speed on occasion, though probably not maxxing out their engines capacity.Should they have their cars seized and houses raided?
Skroz has it completely right. I used to work in a bookstore, and to keep it simple, we used to differentiate using the terms hard and soft SF, hard being things that fit into the Ben Bova definition, like Orson Scott Card or (my personal favorite) Stanislaw Lem, and then the soft was the majority of the Star Wars books, and the like. I thought of it as "space fantasy". Not that that's bad in any way, there is some great space fantasy.
American Gods is pretty soft, although it does kind of submit at least a rational system in which gods could exist on our planet, with mindshare as their ultimate power gauge, etc. And it was an excellent book, which certainly softens the blow from the fact that it is not "hard" SF. The Harry Potter vote seemed like a sellout to me and a lot of other folks (at the store I worked at, our SF Shelver stomped around the store, clutching his press release and swearing profusely).
Re:Billions of dollars, and this is what they plan
on
Marsoweb
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
So maybe they aren't planning on using the input of a high school kid in Belgium. But there are scientists out there with access to the web, too, I believe. Putting the information out to give everyone access is not just a good idea because it gives professionals everywhere access, but because it lets folks like us get excited about space! What nerd kid wouldn't be stoked about poring over NASA's mars data looking for a suitable landing site?
This could be integrated into high school courses Earth Science classes, for major cool points. Intro astronomy classes in college could assign this as a fun project.
And besides. Maybe there IS a high school kid in Belgium who has the intelligence, talent and time to find a great spot. The internet is beautiful and scary that way- information is no longer important based on source, it is important based on utility. But that is another topic.
Goodness. Consider me completely corrected. This engine is certainly streamlined, and fascinating. I feel like there is a game to be built on it implementing the in game editing function- Tron cycling would be a perfect fit, for example.
But there are a lot of other possibilities for the real time deformation aspect. DM in a maze, controlled by a maze-master, or a just a general universal terrain master, opening up doors and creating walls at their leisure while everyone else blew each other away.
Actually, it's not TOO far off to say it's voxel-based. All of the geometry in the engine is based off of small cubes, which either rise from the floor or descend from the ceiling.
So even though the cubes themselves are polygonal, as are the creatures and what-not, the levels themselves are kinda built on a voxel-like concept.
In terms of cheating with the source, I don't believe that the game that comes with this engine is really supposed to be that big of a deal - it's more of a showcase for the engine itself.
The problem would be in the future, if full fledged
games came out using the engine.
But, I personally believe that the ideal engine would be able to still prevent cheating, even with people understanding the cheat-prevention mechanisms. It would be like the ideal encryption- even if you know the algorithm, the code should still be unbreakable without the key.
That has always been a very difficult thing to obtain, however.
On a side note, if someone DID hack the game, that would be have to be some sort of milestone for the developers, right? You're not big-time until you have cheaters!
Actually, I enjoyed the Pepsi and Gap advertisement logos, just the way they were. I thought it was a bit of commentary on consumerism and cultural permananence: We may lose our rights, but we'll always have cool, refreshing Pepsi.
It reminded me of that bad-yet-good movie Demolition Man, with Sylvester Stallone, where in the future, all restaraunts are Taco Bell.
The real issue here, for John Q. Sixpack, is convenience. Unfortunately, as always, Windows has been and will be targeted towards the masses that want simple and easy to use over security AND privacy.
Slashdot Mirror
...than that would mean that the only thing it couldn't permeate would be a Mac running OS X :)
People tweak their cars to go way over the legal speeding limit. They may even speed on occasion, though probably not maxxing out their engines capacity.Should they have their cars seized and houses raided?
No no no.
What I think we are really going for here is the decreasing of the lack of more heat dissipation.
Oh wait, is today opposite day?
"more and more, what you find in one is coming from the other." Matt Damon is going to come out of my toilet?
He should have specified WARM thermal heat.
Skroz has it completely right. I used to work in a bookstore, and to keep it simple, we used to differentiate using the terms hard and soft SF, hard being things that fit into the Ben Bova definition, like Orson Scott Card or (my personal favorite) Stanislaw Lem, and then the soft was the majority of the Star Wars books, and the like. I thought of it as "space fantasy". Not that that's bad in any way, there is some great space fantasy.
American Gods is pretty soft, although it does kind of submit at least a rational system in which gods could exist on our planet, with mindshare as their ultimate power gauge, etc. And it was an excellent book, which certainly softens the blow from the fact that it is not "hard" SF. The Harry Potter vote seemed like a sellout to me and a lot of other folks (at the store I worked at, our SF Shelver stomped around the store, clutching his press release and swearing profusely).
So maybe they aren't planning on using the input of a high school kid in Belgium. But there are scientists out there with access to the web, too, I believe. Putting the information out to give everyone access is not just a good idea because it gives professionals everywhere access, but because it lets folks like us get excited about space! What nerd kid wouldn't be stoked about poring over NASA's mars data looking for a suitable landing site?
This could be integrated into high school courses Earth Science classes, for major cool points. Intro astronomy classes in college could assign this as a fun project.
And besides. Maybe there IS a high school kid in Belgium who has the intelligence, talent and time to find a great spot. The internet is beautiful and scary that way- information is no longer important based on source, it is important based on utility. But that is another topic.
boo that the parent of this post got modded down. Hitchhiker's Guide was a great book, great game.
But there are a lot of other possibilities for the real time deformation aspect. DM in a maze, controlled by a maze-master, or a just a general universal terrain master, opening up doors and creating walls at their leisure while everyone else blew each other away.
Actually, it's not TOO far off to say it's voxel-based. All of the geometry in the engine is based off of small cubes, which either rise from the floor or descend from the ceiling.
So even though the cubes themselves are polygonal, as are the creatures and what-not, the levels themselves are kinda built on a voxel-like concept.
On the other hand, this engine seems like it was designed for the ULTIMATE Tron cycle game. ;)
In terms of cheating with the source, I don't believe that the game that comes with this engine is really supposed to be that big of a deal - it's more of a showcase for the engine itself. The problem would be in the future, if full fledged games came out using the engine. But, I personally believe that the ideal engine would be able to still prevent cheating, even with people understanding the cheat-prevention mechanisms. It would be like the ideal encryption- even if you know the algorithm, the code should still be unbreakable without the key. That has always been a very difficult thing to obtain, however. On a side note, if someone DID hack the game, that would be have to be some sort of milestone for the developers, right? You're not big-time until you have cheaters!
Actually, I enjoyed the Pepsi and Gap advertisement logos, just the way they were. I thought it was a bit of commentary on consumerism and cultural permananence: We may lose our rights, but we'll always have cool, refreshing Pepsi.
It reminded me of that bad-yet-good movie Demolition Man, with Sylvester Stallone, where in the future, all restaraunts are Taco Bell.
The real issue here, for John Q. Sixpack, is convenience. Unfortunately, as always, Windows has been and will be targeted towards the masses that want simple and easy to use over security AND privacy.