And if you tried to go up against Microsoft without a law degree, no matter how "right" you are, you'd get destroyed.
That might have been said of McDonald's, too, once upon a time...
Re:Obviously not talking about Japanese Games...
on
Game with God
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· Score: 1
Addendum: oops, forgot to say what the evil religion was. I meant the cleric of Talona in the avariel village. It was refreshing, I felt, to have an evil priest who moved beyond the clichés of 'We eat babies, muhahahaha!' and into a state of dispassionate cruelty meted out to innocents out of sheer faith, knowing that Talona would restore them to health only if they proved worthy...
There was something pure about that priest, evil solely for evil's own sake without the petty motives of power or wealth behind it. I quite admired it, which was the reason that - as I mentioned - my blackguard character was quite inclined to join the faith.
When im podding down the street I get stopped by common folk, conversations are struck and I'm meeting new people all from a little white music device.
"oh I want one of those, whats yours"
You what?
Sorry, but mine (iRiver not iPod) is in my bag with cables running around my back out of sight to control panel on my belt under my T-shirt, from which nondescript earphones run to my head. Nothing visible to indicate anything other than a £20 Walkman.
I do not want every nimrod on the street to know that I'm carrying around a very portable, very expensive electronic item. Some of them might indeed 'want one of those'. I don't plan to supply them.
Re:Obviously not talking about Japanese Games...
on
Game with God
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· Score: 1
it gets really interesting in the Baldur's Gate series though. Instead of following a religion you actually become part of it.
Always wondered about that... so, I'm a cleric, and I'm about to become a what now?
Might piss off my current deity just a little.
There was a very good bit of religion in Hordes of the Underdark, I thought. Well, OK - an evil bit of religion. It's the only believable evil religion I've ever seen in an RPG: he doesn't kill you on entry, he poisons you and makes you fight to prove your worth, growing ever weaker as you do so... By the end my (extremely) evil character was feeling rather inclined to convert to this faith.
And how about the cult of the Seer? Or the Sleeping Man of Cania? All very plausible and seriously-treated religions, I thought. The Sleeping Man especially felt real, pagan myth of the finest old kind.
Thinking back through Neverwinter Nights I also recall the encampment of Ao: a group of worshippers of a supreme god who never shows himself, in a Dungeons & Dragons world in which every wandering priest can heal wounds with a touch. THAT'S faith if ever I saw it. Shame about the Python recital, though.
And what of the druids in the Neverwinter Wood? The poisoned forest spirit? Where've I seen that before, hmm... don't know, but at the time I was a ranger with a wolf companion, and I somehow thought that dire wolves were right at home in that forest.
Re:simulate religion in games?
on
Game with God
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· Score: 3, Funny
Murphy's law. If anything can go wrong, it actually does. Always.
A guy in Russia already programmed that game, I think...
Re:OGG Vorbis, what does it take to get the suppor
on
iPod Generation 4 Released
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· Score: 2, Informative
The iRiver players are nice - I mean, they must have been designed to a Slashdot specification, they do everything, Linux, ogg, no copyprotection - but I would like them to be able to assemble playlists on the fly, rather than copying in Winamp lists from the PC.
That's my niggle, anyway. Apparently iRiver are working on a firmware upgrade to add this in, which is due out somewhere between the Hurd and Duke Nukem Forever.
The fact is, there's no little Virus overlord someplace up in the sky that's trying to cause damage and harm to humans.
Another Slashdot evolutionist... there is a Virus Overlord up in the sky trying to cause damage and harm to humans! And he does it because he LOVES you! Why do you keep making him have to hurt you?
Think of it this way: in the near-distant future everyone will have full movie-studio digital video / still camera features in their mobile personal computers (which is what cell phones are turning into). Minaturisation means you could be being filmed or recorded anywhere at any time. This will have a chilling effect.
This is the big one, you know. CCTV? Who cares? Most of the time it's some bored store security guard watching, not Big Brother. But when everyone is carrying a digital camera... You'll have to assume that everything you do in a public place can be photographed without your knowledge and in practice you have no recourse, because it's not a government or a corporate camera, it's some prat with a camera phone.
I think society will just have to adapt to a world with glass walls, because we can't shove this one back into the bottle.
Europe's Ariane 5 rocket has lifted offThat's an acomplishment by itself...
Regretfully true, for that thing... Anyone know why they chose Ariane to launch this, as opposed to Titan or Proton? Cheapest option, maybe? - because it can't have been the reliability record.
Let them get on with it for a while, then get some badass trees to stomp the spammer, while sending a couple of midgets to melt down some of Bill Gates' favourite jewellery.
It's the same sort of posturing that Saddam Hussein usedAh yes, and it worked for Saddam (holed up and captured).
We only invaded Iraq because we knew perfectly well he had none of these famous weapons. If he had had weapons of mass destruction we'd have gone nowhere near the place - note for example the total absence of Anglo-American occupation forces in Pyongyang.
Re:Fahrenheit, some ancient term?
on
X43-A on to Mach 10
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· Score: 2, Informative
Temperature is in degrees Celsius or degrees Kelvin.
No, temperature is in degrees Celsius or in Kelvin. There's no such thing as a 'degree Kelvin'.
At ground level. It lowers as altitude is raised, and scramjets aren't exactly low altitude machines...
As far as escape velocity is concerned, Soyuz is a low-altitude machine. Scramjets don't even come close.
Apollo wasn't exactly a low altitude machine. It's the only machine ever to carry a human into a domain where the Earth's gravitational influence is significantly attenuated by distance.
On the third day he rose again... he ascended into heaven...
... and is now incarnate on the planet Traal, anxiously wondering how he's going to pull off a resurrection given that the favoured form of execution there happens to be 'feeding the offender to the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast'.
I can see this, just about, but wouldn't this fall down when you have to broadcast that result back to where it came from. Since to win the lottery you need to buy a ticket from the perspective of A, not B, and from A's perspective the lottery will always have happened before you send the result to B so you can't get a response prior to this. No matter how fast the result is transmitted from A to B, it still can't get back to A before it was transmitted....
Well, let's look at this another way...
Suppose that an instant signal is sent from Alpha to the ship, as well as from Earth. We've agreed that {Earth receives signal} and {Alpha sends signal} are simultaneous in the Earth / Alpha frame, and that observers in relative motion may legitimately disagree about the order of these two events.
Therefore the ship will receive two notifications of the lottery result - one from Alpha, one from Earth. Because of their perspective on things, even though the two signals are sent simultaneously (in Earth / Alpha frame) and travel instantaneously, the crew of the ship get Earth's signal first.
Now, in this time between receiving Earth's signal and receiving Alpha's signal, the crew of the ship are in the enviable position of knowing the lottery numbers before the draw. They have an instant communicator of their own - so they can signal someone on Alpha, which in their reference frame has not yet held the lottery draw, and they can buy a ticket.
I suspect I'm going to have to draw out the spacetime diagram for this one, though... it's never quite as convincing without the mathematics.
You're suggesting that if I draw a lottery (A) and then broadcast the result (B), somebody might get the result before the lottery is drawn?
If A and B are simultaneous in your frame of reference, then A will be before B in frames of reference moving in one direction, and B will be before A in frames of reference moving in the opposite direction. So if you broadcast the result using an instantaneous communication device, then the recipient will get the result before the lottery is drawn - at least from some perspectives.
In your spaceship analogy that would be like having a ship blow up before the initial laser is even fired - that would seem impossible to me. I certainly see how order of events can be skewed by frame of reference, but I'm not sure that two events that occur in one order in one frame would appear out of order in another frame. I can see how their relative timing might differ - but not how they could pass each other.
The critical thing here is that the speed of light is the same in all reference frames.
So, in the frame of reference of the centre ship, beam A heads forwards at 300,000 km/s, and beam B heads backwards at 300,000 km/s. Since both ships are stationary, both ships are struck at the same time and explode simultaneously.
In the frame of reference of a stationary observer, in which the ships are cruising past at speed v, both beams are sent out at 300,000 km/s. The rear ship moves towards beam B at v and the front ship moves away, also at v, so the rear ship is struck first.
And in the frame of reference of a spy-ship flying at twice the speed of our warring convoy in the same direction, the three ships are moving backwards at speed v. Hence the front ship reverses onto the beam and the rear ship reverses away from it - and the front ship explodes first.
The wonderful part is that all three are correct. If two events are such that no signal travelling at lightspeed or slower can get from one to the other, then the order in which they take place is entirely dependent upon your point of view. That's why faster-than-light communication leads to madness...
give instantaeneous communication (who needs FTL comms)for 2 or 3 months and watch me rake in the big bucks (forex market - arbitaging between New York, London and Tokyo), until I get shut down or bought out.
London and Tokyo are in relative motion. What London thinks are simultaneous events, Tokyo will think are separated by a small interval of time.
Exploit! Our instant signal from London to Tokyo goes to Tokyo at a time based on London's view of what 'simultaneous' means, and our instant signal back goes to London at a time based on Tokyo's view of what 'simultaneous' means, giving us a very, very small increment into the past.
Now just relay back and forth until you build up enough time to be economically useful. Result: ULTIMATE profits. The ability to predict the future with total accuracy would make you... well, 'rich' doesn't cut it. You'd rule the universe.
If the cause particles (photons) take longer to reach me than the effect particles (gravitons), so what?
If we can send a faster-than-light signal, we can exploit relativity to send signals into the past.
First, we need to realise that 'simultaneous' is a relative concept. Consider three evenly spaced spacecraft flying past you in a line. The centre ship fires lasers at the front and back ships, and when the beam reaches them they explode. Simultaneously? No: the lead ship is flying directly away from the beam, while the tail ship is flying towards it, so the ship at the back blows up first, and the ship at the front blows up later. But from the point of view of the captain of the centre ship? Both the other ships are stationary relative to him, so the beams reach them simultaneously.
In general, events that are simultaneous for one observer will not be simultaneous for an observer in relative motion.
Let us now suppose that we wish to cheat on the Alpha Centauri state lottery. At time t=0 in the frame of reference of Alpha Centauri the draw is made, and an instantaneous signal is sent to Earth with the result. The signal arrives at time t=0 (Earth is in the same reference frame, because it's not moving at any significant speed relative to Alpha.)
So, from the perspective of observers on Earth or Alpha, event A (signal sent from Alpha) is simultaneous with event B (signal received on Earth).
However, simultaniety is relative. Let us post an agent in a spacecraft moving at high speed relative to Earth and Alpha, such that from his point of view event A takes place after event B. This is quite possible, as we saw above in the example of the simultaneous shootings. Now when we receive our signal on Earth we relay it - instantaneously - to our agent, who then relays it - again instantaneously - to Alpha Centauri, allowing us to know the result of the lottery ahead of time and buy a guaranteed winning ticket.
Conclusion: instantaneous signalling buggers up causality.
I concur. Dear God but the FX5200 is a pisspoor excuse for a video card. Beats the Voodoo4 I replaced, but even going from that ancient thing I wasn't exactly blown away.
One big advantage, though: the thing's fanless. Might be a good choice for a media-centre PC, but it's no gaming card.
You mean you're going to nail Him up again? For crimeny's sake, man, why?
Same as last time, for stirring up political insurrection. From what I hear he plans to set up as global dictator when he gets back, an empire that will last a thousand years. Personally, I vote 'no' to this.
Owners of SuSE are second-largest Linux supplier: really, who'd have thought it? I eagerly await Slashdot's coverage of papal philosophical leanings and silvan ursine defecatory habits.
I hate to be picky but "Open Source"? Wouldn't a better analogy be GPL? I mean what source is there in Television?
Think 'expanded universe'.
Suppose MediaCo come up with CoolSFShow. They make a couple of seasons, it's moderately popular. They place CoolSFShow's copyright under some Open Source-style licence.
Now fans are free to write and publish their own derivative works - CoolSFShow spinoffs. But MediaCo are also free - because they chose a GPLish licence - to take those derivatives and use them themselves.
MediaCo just got a swarm of enthusiastic geek scriptwriters and idea people. Granted, most fanfics are crap, but much of the Star Wars expanded universe is far, far superior to the bloody awful prequels...
I don't burn stuff onto CDs to give to my friends anymore either. Why not?
MP3 player.
Best gadget I ever bought by far. I know I'll pretty much always have it with me, just like my phone, and I've got about thirty gigs free on it even after loading my entire music collection.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 40 gig USB2 hard disk on a bus into town... I bet I beat any consumer broadband connection available in the UK today. I get to trade media with my friends with no connectivity bills and absolutely no prospect of media cartel lawsuits unless the buggers have hired a private eye to follow me around. Terrific toy:-)
Slashdot Mirror
That might have been said of McDonald's, too, once upon a time...
There was something pure about that priest, evil solely for evil's own sake without the petty motives of power or wealth behind it. I quite admired it, which was the reason that - as I mentioned - my blackguard character was quite inclined to join the faith.
You what?
Sorry, but mine (iRiver not iPod) is in my bag with cables running around my back out of sight to control panel on my belt under my T-shirt, from which nondescript earphones run to my head. Nothing visible to indicate anything other than a £20 Walkman.
I do not want every nimrod on the street to know that I'm carrying around a very portable, very expensive electronic item. Some of them might indeed 'want one of those'. I don't plan to supply them.
Always wondered about that... so, I'm a cleric, and I'm about to become a what now?
Might piss off my current deity just a little.
There was a very good bit of religion in Hordes of the Underdark, I thought. Well, OK - an evil bit of religion. It's the only believable evil religion I've ever seen in an RPG: he doesn't kill you on entry, he poisons you and makes you fight to prove your worth, growing ever weaker as you do so... By the end my (extremely) evil character was feeling rather inclined to convert to this faith.
And how about the cult of the Seer? Or the Sleeping Man of Cania? All very plausible and seriously-treated religions, I thought. The Sleeping Man especially felt real, pagan myth of the finest old kind.
Thinking back through Neverwinter Nights I also recall the encampment of Ao: a group of worshippers of a supreme god who never shows himself, in a Dungeons & Dragons world in which every wandering priest can heal wounds with a touch. THAT'S faith if ever I saw it. Shame about the Python recital, though.
And what of the druids in the Neverwinter Wood? The poisoned forest spirit? Where've I seen that before, hmm... don't know, but at the time I was a ranger with a wolf companion, and I somehow thought that dire wolves were right at home in that forest.
A guy in Russia already programmed that game, I think...
That's my niggle, anyway. Apparently iRiver are working on a firmware upgrade to add this in, which is due out somewhere between the Hurd and Duke Nukem Forever.
Another Slashdot evolutionist... there is a Virus Overlord up in the sky trying to cause damage and harm to humans! And he does it because he LOVES you! Why do you keep making him have to hurt you?
This is the big one, you know. CCTV? Who cares? Most of the time it's some bored store security guard watching, not Big Brother. But when everyone is carrying a digital camera... You'll have to assume that everything you do in a public place can be photographed without your knowledge and in practice you have no recourse, because it's not a government or a corporate camera, it's some prat with a camera phone.
I think society will just have to adapt to a world with glass walls, because we can't shove this one back into the bottle.
Regretfully true, for that thing... Anyone know why they chose Ariane to launch this, as opposed to Titan or Proton? Cheapest option, maybe? - because it can't have been the reliability record.
Let them get on with it for a while, then get some badass trees to stomp the spammer, while sending a couple of midgets to melt down some of Bill Gates' favourite jewellery.
We only invaded Iraq because we knew perfectly well he had none of these famous weapons. If he had had weapons of mass destruction we'd have gone nowhere near the place - note for example the total absence of Anglo-American occupation forces in Pyongyang.
No, temperature is in degrees Celsius or in Kelvin. There's no such thing as a 'degree Kelvin'.
At ground level. It lowers as altitude is raised, and scramjets aren't exactly low altitude machines...
As far as escape velocity is concerned, Soyuz is a low-altitude machine. Scramjets don't even come close.
Apollo wasn't exactly a low altitude machine. It's the only machine ever to carry a human into a domain where the Earth's gravitational influence is significantly attenuated by distance.
... and is now incarnate on the planet Traal, anxiously wondering how he's going to pull off a resurrection given that the favoured form of execution there happens to be 'feeding the offender to the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast'.
Well, let's look at this another way...
Suppose that an instant signal is sent from Alpha to the ship, as well as from Earth. We've agreed that {Earth receives signal} and {Alpha sends signal} are simultaneous in the Earth / Alpha frame, and that observers in relative motion may legitimately disagree about the order of these two events.
Therefore the ship will receive two notifications of the lottery result - one from Alpha, one from Earth. Because of their perspective on things, even though the two signals are sent simultaneously (in Earth / Alpha frame) and travel instantaneously, the crew of the ship get Earth's signal first.
Now, in this time between receiving Earth's signal and receiving Alpha's signal, the crew of the ship are in the enviable position of knowing the lottery numbers before the draw. They have an instant communicator of their own - so they can signal someone on Alpha, which in their reference frame has not yet held the lottery draw, and they can buy a ticket.
I suspect I'm going to have to draw out the spacetime diagram for this one, though... it's never quite as convincing without the mathematics.
If A and B are simultaneous in your frame of reference, then A will be before B in frames of reference moving in one direction, and B will be before A in frames of reference moving in the opposite direction. So if you broadcast the result using an instantaneous communication device, then the recipient will get the result before the lottery is drawn - at least from some perspectives.
In your spaceship analogy that would be like having a ship blow up before the initial laser is even fired - that would seem impossible to me. I certainly see how order of events can be skewed by frame of reference, but I'm not sure that two events that occur in one order in one frame would appear out of order in another frame. I can see how their relative timing might differ - but not how they could pass each other.
The critical thing here is that the speed of light is the same in all reference frames.
So, in the frame of reference of the centre ship, beam A heads forwards at 300,000 km/s, and beam B heads backwards at 300,000 km/s. Since both ships are stationary, both ships are struck at the same time and explode simultaneously.
In the frame of reference of a stationary observer, in which the ships are cruising past at speed v, both beams are sent out at 300,000 km/s. The rear ship moves towards beam B at v and the front ship moves away, also at v, so the rear ship is struck first.
And in the frame of reference of a spy-ship flying at twice the speed of our warring convoy in the same direction, the three ships are moving backwards at speed v. Hence the front ship reverses onto the beam and the rear ship reverses away from it - and the front ship explodes first.
The wonderful part is that all three are correct. If two events are such that no signal travelling at lightspeed or slower can get from one to the other, then the order in which they take place is entirely dependent upon your point of view. That's why faster-than-light communication leads to madness...
London and Tokyo are in relative motion. What London thinks are simultaneous events, Tokyo will think are separated by a small interval of time.
Exploit! Our instant signal from London to Tokyo goes to Tokyo at a time based on London's view of what 'simultaneous' means, and our instant signal back goes to London at a time based on Tokyo's view of what 'simultaneous' means, giving us a very, very small increment into the past.
Now just relay back and forth until you build up enough time to be economically useful. Result: ULTIMATE profits. The ability to predict the future with total accuracy would make you... well, 'rich' doesn't cut it. You'd rule the universe.
If we can send a faster-than-light signal, we can exploit relativity to send signals into the past.
First, we need to realise that 'simultaneous' is a relative concept. Consider three evenly spaced spacecraft flying past you in a line. The centre ship fires lasers at the front and back ships, and when the beam reaches them they explode. Simultaneously? No: the lead ship is flying directly away from the beam, while the tail ship is flying towards it, so the ship at the back blows up first, and the ship at the front blows up later. But from the point of view of the captain of the centre ship? Both the other ships are stationary relative to him, so the beams reach them simultaneously.
In general, events that are simultaneous for one observer will not be simultaneous for an observer in relative motion.
Let us now suppose that we wish to cheat on the Alpha Centauri state lottery. At time t=0 in the frame of reference of Alpha Centauri the draw is made, and an instantaneous signal is sent to Earth with the result. The signal arrives at time t=0 (Earth is in the same reference frame, because it's not moving at any significant speed relative to Alpha.)
So, from the perspective of observers on Earth or Alpha, event A (signal sent from Alpha) is simultaneous with event B (signal received on Earth).
However, simultaniety is relative. Let us post an agent in a spacecraft moving at high speed relative to Earth and Alpha, such that from his point of view event A takes place after event B. This is quite possible, as we saw above in the example of the simultaneous shootings. Now when we receive our signal on Earth we relay it - instantaneously - to our agent, who then relays it - again instantaneously - to Alpha Centauri, allowing us to know the result of the lottery ahead of time and buy a guaranteed winning ticket.
Conclusion: instantaneous signalling buggers up causality.
My guess is that the Navy would be using density waves in the water. Infrasound, basically.
One big advantage, though: the thing's fanless. Might be a good choice for a media-centre PC, but it's no gaming card.
Same as last time, for stirring up political insurrection. From what I hear he plans to set up as global dictator when he gets back, an empire that will last a thousand years. Personally, I vote 'no' to this.
Well, yes. Yes, I would. They just bought SuSE.
Owners of SuSE are second-largest Linux supplier: really, who'd have thought it? I eagerly await Slashdot's coverage of papal philosophical leanings and silvan ursine defecatory habits.
Yes, that's true. Only for the vast majority of the human race.
Think 'expanded universe'.
Suppose MediaCo come up with CoolSFShow. They make a couple of seasons, it's moderately popular. They place CoolSFShow's copyright under some Open Source-style licence.
Now fans are free to write and publish their own derivative works - CoolSFShow spinoffs. But MediaCo are also free - because they chose a GPLish licence - to take those derivatives and use them themselves.
MediaCo just got a swarm of enthusiastic geek scriptwriters and idea people. Granted, most fanfics are crap, but much of the Star Wars expanded universe is far, far superior to the bloody awful prequels...
MP3 player.
Best gadget I ever bought by far. I know I'll pretty much always have it with me, just like my phone, and I've got about thirty gigs free on it even after loading my entire music collection.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 40 gig USB2 hard disk on a bus into town... I bet I beat any consumer broadband connection available in the UK today. I get to trade media with my friends with no connectivity bills and absolutely no prospect of media cartel lawsuits unless the buggers have hired a private eye to follow me around. Terrific toy :-)