As far as I know, I'm the only conscious being in this simulated universe and nothing else is rendered or precisely computed until I observe it. What appears to be fundamental laws of the universe could very well be high level abstractions that are run at "good enough" quality for my personal experience to be believable, and only have more dedicated and precise simulations when I'm measuring the data personally. And even that could be unreliable. When you live in a system that controls everything, can you trust even your basic observations?
Also, if the fundamental laws of physics are determined by a simulation, why would anyone assume that the operators of the simulation would copy their own laws of physics exactly?
They use the helium to pressurize the oxygen tank. In low gravity with no engines ignited, the liquid oxygen just sloshes around, floating everywhere. They need the liquid oxygen to be at the back of the tank in order to reignite the engine for later burns. Having the tank pressurized with helium pushes the liquid oxygen down to the back.
I can't wait to hear the rant Tim Sweeney goes on when he hears this. The only gaming store he hasn't insinuated is evil is Steam, and that's probably because he knows that's a loosing battle. I wonder how much money Epic has spent to develop their Epic Games Launcher.
I prefer Hanlon's razor. "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
The most likely reason, in my opinion, is incompetence.
(a)Offense.—Except as provided in subsection (c) of this section whoever—
(1) intentionally accesses without authorization a facility through which an electronic communication service is provided; or
(2) intentionally exceeds an authorization to access that facility;
and thereby obtains, alters, or prevents authorized access to a wire or electronic communication while it is in electronic storage in such system shall be punished as provided in subsection (b) of this section.
In other words, if something is preventing you from accessing content, bypassing it is a violation. Blocking ads itself isn't a violation, but blocking something that hides content unless you turn off ad blocking is.
Some time in the future, SpaceX *does* plan on performing landing at Cape Canaveral. They already have control of what was formerly called Launch Complex 13. SpaceX has now renamed it "Landing Complex 1".
The machine's designers must not be able to explain how their original code led to this new program.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. I have severe problem with this. This is like looking at obscurity and declaring it a soul. The measure of intelligence is that we can't understand it? Intelligence through obfuscation? There should be no way for a designer to not be able to figure out why their machine produced what it did given enough debugging.
Just nitpicking, but the write speed of a dual-layer Blu-Ray disc is nearly 12 minutes at 16x.
What I'm mainly worried about is that the spin rate of a plastic disc has a definite RPM speed limit. I think we've all seen the videos of what happens to discs that are spun too fast (and if you haven't, there's some neat videos of it on YouTube). Will these archival discs be made of a different core material to facilitate faster spin speeds?
This from an organization that, when they recently redesigned their website, *still* didn't get around to forwarding http://nasa.gov/ to http://www.nasa.gov? Who would've thought?
No, if this NSA kerfluffle has amounted to anything, it's that open source software and open standards only give users a false sense of security if no one is willing to audit the software. See: The Dual EC_DRNG algorithm.
"Valve's attempt at a console-killer"? Really? No, this is Valve's panicked reaction to what had been the Xbox One's planned digital game sharing, which MS had to temporarily shelve while they re-wrote how the Xbox One handles disc-based games. If you don't remember, the Xbox One was originally going to let any console owner set 10 people to be members of their family sharing plan. Those "family" members (MS stated that they didn't have to be family), could then check out any game out of the owner's library at any time.
Here's the difference between the two plans:
Steam: If the owner of a shared game wants to play any game in their library, any person playing the shared game will be booted, even if the owner wants to play a different game than the one being shared. You are accessing a shared account, not a shared game. Also, Steam knows this immediately. The person accessing the shared library "will be given a few minutes to either purchase the game or quit playing." You can infer from this that shared gaming will not support offline mode... I.E., Always-on internet access is required to access a shared library.
Xbox One: The system treated shared games as a temporary license transfer. The library wasn't shared; individual games were. Your friend could play the game you lended to them without interrupting your play of any other game on in your library. To handle this license sharing, the Xbox One would, once per day, detect the status of the games and licenses on a console. Despite the constant FUD, the Xbox One *never* required an always-on connection. The requirement was for the console to be connected to the Internet at least once a day while the system did a license check for lended games.
So yeah, you can call this a great accomplishment by Valve and their "console-killer" if you want. You can hail the greatness Valve. But you have to ask yourself, why when Microsoft did it, were they burnt the stake and when Valve does it they're uplifted as a savior?
Exede user here. Here's my typical experience with my satellite connection:
Minimum latency: 700 ms
Download speed: Paying for 12 Mbps. Real speed: around 20 Mbps. Yes, actually faster than advertised. However, due to the built-in latency, websites feel a little slower to load.
Upload speed: Paying for 3 Mbps. Real speed: Usually 1 Mbps. They obviously put low priority on uploads.
Data cap: 15 GB/month. However, data is unmetered between 12 AM and 5 AM.
Internet access Essentially unfiltered. Bittorrent is throttled. However, enabling protocol encryption bypasses the throttling.
My main issue with Exede is that it's DNS is flaky and sometimes requires me to cycle my network connection to fix. Even worse, it uses a proxy to hijack all port 53 DNS requests, so you can't choose an alternate server with the standard port. Netalyzr's log info on this:
UDP access to remote DNS servers (port 53) appears to pass through a firewall or proxy. The client was unable to transmit a non-DNS traffic on this UDP port, but was able to transmit a legitimate DNS request, suggesting that a proxy, NAT, or firewall intercepted and blocked the deliberately invalid request.
A DNS proxy or firewall caused the client's direct DNS request to arrive from another IP address. Instead of your IP address, the request came from [Redacted].
A DNS proxy or firewall generated a new request rather than passing the client's request unmodified.
But other than that, it's still a *vast* improvement over the dial up I had for 15 years.
The main problem I've had is that every newer router I've tried in the 3 or 4 years have has had horrible reliability problems... dropped connections and the like. I got tired of messing with them and spent the $50 on the WRT54GL (which is what it's still going for on Newegg: and haven't had an issue like that since. Sure, the wireless is slower, but my WRT54GL's been running stably and consistently despite not having been rebooted in over 2 months. whereas the newest router I had required a full router reboot every couple days. That wasn't my doing. That wasn't a faulty hardware. That was the default setting in the router's setup page under its "maintenance" page. The default setting had the router set to reboot on Tuesdays and Fridays.
Do they make new routers that can maintain a stable connection for under $100?
Amazon reviews of games are completely useless. Almost all reviews for popular games are from people who never played the game and are instead riding the hate circlejerk. I bet if you looked at the reviews for SimCity, less than 5% of them would be verified Amazon purchases.
I don't know if many people on Slashdot have noticed, but this is *not* an untimely change. Why? The price of many new CD releases is now lower than the price of an MP3 album. When Taylor Swift's "Red" album came out, the CD cost $9. The MP3 album cost $15. This is not an isolated incident.
A game that costs $100,000 to make, but sells at $2/game has to sell over 50,000 copies to make a profit. A game that costs $2,500,000 but sells at $50 has to sell the same. Your first point is only valid if you're willing to pay a higher percentage of the cost.
Dear Indie Game Devs:
Your game isn't intrinsically better than others because it looks like a SNES game.
Stop making games that think that difficulty for difficulty sake is the best mechanic a game can have.
Stop making clones of games from the early 1990s.
Stop refusing to sell your game on marketplaces like Steam, Origin, and the Windows Store. You are not hurting "the Man"; you are hurting gamers and yourself.
PC Gamers:
Buy games that you like.
If a game is worth playing, it's worth paying for. No excuses.
The *only* point made when you pirate a game is that the PC has a pirating problem. You are not hurting "the Man"; you are hurting gamers and yourself.
4G, if you can get it, isn't much worse than satellite. I currently have Exede. $75/month for 15 GB of data usage, 12 Mbps. Unlimited data 12-5 AM. However, satellite has a built-in latency of 700ms. Don't expect to be playing any games that require low lag. Also, that latency is definitely felt while surfing.
Or use Google Chrome. It has an Google-built PDF reader and Google-managed Flash updates. You never have to touch an Adobe installer ever again.
But if you're anti-EULA, Foxit is no help. Point of comparison: The Foxit EULA is 3,683 words long. The Adobe section in Google Chrome's EULA (which covers Flash) is 2,476. Google Chrome's ToS in the EULA is 3,983 words.
The first self-driving cars that hit the market will likely be so decked out in analytics software and video cameras, that it would take the police about 2 minutes to figure out who was at fault in a crash.
What I find particularly worrying is that, at least initially, many of the ethical choices programmed into these machines will have been written by people who tend to be heavy on the Aspergers side of empathy (as many technically inclined people are). Should we really be leaving decisions like this to people who literally can't understand how most of humanity behaves?
Slashdot Mirror
You really think Steam Machines affected the Windows Store at all? That's the funniest thing I've heard all day.
As far as I know, I'm the only conscious being in this simulated universe and nothing else is rendered or precisely computed until I observe it. What appears to be fundamental laws of the universe could very well be high level abstractions that are run at "good enough" quality for my personal experience to be believable, and only have more dedicated and precise simulations when I'm measuring the data personally. And even that could be unreliable. When you live in a system that controls everything, can you trust even your basic observations? Also, if the fundamental laws of physics are determined by a simulation, why would anyone assume that the operators of the simulation would copy their own laws of physics exactly?
All of their patents are open, sure. That's not stopping them from having trade secrets that they haven't patented.
They use the helium to pressurize the oxygen tank. In low gravity with no engines ignited, the liquid oxygen just sloshes around, floating everywhere. They need the liquid oxygen to be at the back of the tank in order to reignite the engine for later burns. Having the tank pressurized with helium pushes the liquid oxygen down to the back.
GAH, *Losing. Stupid typos.
I can't wait to hear the rant Tim Sweeney goes on when he hears this. The only gaming store he hasn't insinuated is evil is Steam, and that's probably because he knows that's a loosing battle. I wonder how much money Epic has spent to develop their Epic Games Launcher.
I prefer Hanlon's razor. "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." The most likely reason, in my opinion, is incompetence.
(a)Offense.—Except as provided in subsection (c) of this section whoever—
and thereby obtains, alters, or prevents authorized access to a wire or electronic communication while it is in electronic storage in such system shall be punished as provided in subsection (b) of this section.
In other words, if something is preventing you from accessing content, bypassing it is a violation. Blocking ads itself isn't a violation, but blocking something that hides content unless you turn off ad blocking is.
In a probably not unrelated event, Microsoft has agreed to invest $100 million into Uber.
Some time in the future, SpaceX *does* plan on performing landing at Cape Canaveral. They already have control of what was formerly called Launch Complex 13. SpaceX has now renamed it "Landing Complex 1".
The machine's designers must not be able to explain how their original code led to this new program.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. I have severe problem with this. This is like looking at obscurity and declaring it a soul. The measure of intelligence is that we can't understand it? Intelligence through obfuscation? There should be no way for a designer to not be able to figure out why their machine produced what it did given enough debugging.
Just nitpicking, but the write speed of a dual-layer Blu-Ray disc is nearly 12 minutes at 16x. What I'm mainly worried about is that the spin rate of a plastic disc has a definite RPM speed limit. I think we've all seen the videos of what happens to discs that are spun too fast (and if you haven't, there's some neat videos of it on YouTube). Will these archival discs be made of a different core material to facilitate faster spin speeds?
This from an organization that, when they recently redesigned their website, *still* didn't get around to forwarding http://nasa.gov/ to http://www.nasa.gov? Who would've thought?
No, if this NSA kerfluffle has amounted to anything, it's that open source software and open standards only give users a false sense of security if no one is willing to audit the software. See: The Dual EC_DRNG algorithm.
"Valve's attempt at a console-killer"? Really? No, this is Valve's panicked reaction to what had been the Xbox One's planned digital game sharing, which MS had to temporarily shelve while they re-wrote how the Xbox One handles disc-based games. If you don't remember, the Xbox One was originally going to let any console owner set 10 people to be members of their family sharing plan. Those "family" members (MS stated that they didn't have to be family), could then check out any game out of the owner's library at any time.
Here's the difference between the two plans:
Steam: If the owner of a shared game wants to play any game in their library, any person playing the shared game will be booted, even if the owner wants to play a different game than the one being shared. You are accessing a shared account, not a shared game. Also, Steam knows this immediately. The person accessing the shared library "will be given a few minutes to either purchase the game or quit playing." You can infer from this that shared gaming will not support offline mode... I.E., Always-on internet access is required to access a shared library.
Xbox One: The system treated shared games as a temporary license transfer. The library wasn't shared; individual games were. Your friend could play the game you lended to them without interrupting your play of any other game on in your library. To handle this license sharing, the Xbox One would, once per day, detect the status of the games and licenses on a console. Despite the constant FUD, the Xbox One *never* required an always-on connection. The requirement was for the console to be connected to the Internet at least once a day while the system did a license check for lended games.
So yeah, you can call this a great accomplishment by Valve and their "console-killer" if you want. You can hail the greatness Valve. But you have to ask yourself, why when Microsoft did it, were they burnt the stake and when Valve does it they're uplifted as a savior?
Exede user here. Here's my typical experience with my satellite connection:
My main issue with Exede is that it's DNS is flaky and sometimes requires me to cycle my network connection to fix. Even worse, it uses a proxy to hijack all port 53 DNS requests, so you can't choose an alternate server with the standard port. Netalyzr's log info on this:
UDP access to remote DNS servers (port 53) appears to pass through a firewall or proxy. The client was unable to transmit a non-DNS traffic on this UDP port, but was able to transmit a legitimate DNS request, suggesting that a proxy, NAT, or firewall intercepted and blocked the deliberately invalid request. A DNS proxy or firewall caused the client's direct DNS request to arrive from another IP address. Instead of your IP address, the request came from [Redacted]. A DNS proxy or firewall generated a new request rather than passing the client's request unmodified.
But other than that, it's still a *vast* improvement over the dial up I had for 15 years.
The main problem I've had is that every newer router I've tried in the 3 or 4 years have has had horrible reliability problems... dropped connections and the like. I got tired of messing with them and spent the $50 on the WRT54GL (which is what it's still going for on Newegg: and haven't had an issue like that since. Sure, the wireless is slower, but my WRT54GL's been running stably and consistently despite not having been rebooted in over 2 months. whereas the newest router I had required a full router reboot every couple days. That wasn't my doing. That wasn't a faulty hardware. That was the default setting in the router's setup page under its "maintenance" page. The default setting had the router set to reboot on Tuesdays and Fridays.
Do they make new routers that can maintain a stable connection for under $100?
Url, fbzrgvzrf lbh whfg tbggn tb jvgu gur sybj.
Amazon reviews of games are completely useless. Almost all reviews for popular games are from people who never played the game and are instead riding the hate circlejerk. I bet if you looked at the reviews for SimCity, less than 5% of them would be verified Amazon purchases.
I don't know if many people on Slashdot have noticed, but this is *not* an untimely change. Why? The price of many new CD releases is now lower than the price of an MP3 album. When Taylor Swift's "Red" album came out, the CD cost $9. The MP3 album cost $15. This is not an isolated incident.
A game that costs $100,000 to make, but sells at $2/game has to sell over 50,000 copies to make a profit. A game that costs $2,500,000 but sells at $50 has to sell the same. Your first point is only valid if you're willing to pay a higher percentage of the cost.
Dear Indie Game Devs:
PC Gamers:
4G, if you can get it, isn't much worse than satellite. I currently have Exede. $75/month for 15 GB of data usage, 12 Mbps. Unlimited data 12-5 AM. However, satellite has a built-in latency of 700ms. Don't expect to be playing any games that require low lag. Also, that latency is definitely felt while surfing.
Or use Google Chrome. It has an Google-built PDF reader and Google-managed Flash updates. You never have to touch an Adobe installer ever again.
But if you're anti-EULA, Foxit is no help. Point of comparison: The Foxit EULA is 3,683 words long. The Adobe section in Google Chrome's EULA (which covers Flash) is 2,476. Google Chrome's ToS in the EULA is 3,983 words.
The first self-driving cars that hit the market will likely be so decked out in analytics software and video cameras, that it would take the police about 2 minutes to figure out who was at fault in a crash.
What I find particularly worrying is that, at least initially, many of the ethical choices programmed into these machines will have been written by people who tend to be heavy on the Aspergers side of empathy (as many technically inclined people are). Should we really be leaving decisions like this to people who literally can't understand how most of humanity behaves?