If there is an Operational System that is secure enough to be resistant to hostile military attacks, it must certainly be kept 1) developed by the military itself 2) restricted for the general public, for the same reasons strong cryptography was back in the days. Who would be fool to let a tool like that potentially fall in the hands of the enemies (whatever side they are)?
A lone genius who developed it themselves and just posted it on the internet, perhaps?
The Canadian Cancer Society quotes in their latest stats that 1 in 4 will contract some form of cancer in their lifetime
That's actually better than it used to be, then. The statistic I grew up hearing was that 1 in 3 would get cancer. Since as you will surely agree anecdotal evidence is the very best kind, and correlation equals causation, we can now conclude that mobile phones PREVENT CANCER! Woo hoo!
Who are you to know for a fact that something intelligent didn't create everything, something had to come from somewhere no one knows so why it is that it has to be nothing. Frankly I haven't seen much come from nothing I haven't seen any proof of that so I don't know why people think that it takes less faith to believe that there is no god than it does to believe that there is.
Which is easier to believe:
1) The Universe exists uncaused
2) An intelligent entity capable of designing and creating the Universe exists uncaused
Personally, I'd say that (1) is easier, since (2) effectively includes (1), and then some more. Until and unless given a very good reason indeed to think otherwise, I'll go with (1).
So the ancient Hebrews were murderers just as much as Mohammed was? What does that prove? I don't see where the grandparent poster mentioned that he was a Christian or a Jew, just that he didn't think much of the founder of Islam.
And before anyone thinks the Europeans did this on purpose, let me remind everyone that germ theory came about hundreds of years later. The Europeans certainly did not know that merely coming in contact with the native Americans would end in mass death.
We caught on pretty damn quick, though. Hey, guys, let's end this war. Here, have some blankets as a peace offering. No, no, we didn't get them from a smallpox hospital...
Sure, if either the ice on Greenland or the West Shelf of Antarctica melts, sea levels will rise (at least) 20 feet. If both melt, sea levels will rise 40 feet. Of course, no scientist (that I'm aware of) is predicting either to happen in the next 100 years. So, his facts were right, but the implication (that this would happen reasonably soon if things don't change) is not.
You've got to be American, if anything over a hundred years is not 'reasonably soon'. Maybe this is the reason Europeans are more concerned about climate change - it's not all that crap about Americans liking their great big thirsty cars, it's just that they're not used to thinking long-term.
100 years isn't a very long time. Certainly not when considering the issues we have to deal with here. We're talking about either completely restructuring our economy either to run on totally different fuels or to run on much less energy or both, or we're talking about massive relocations of population as arable territory shifts and lands get flooded, and enormous engineering projects as the world suddenly reaches for textbooks in Dutch about how to build really huge earthworks.
If you had reason to believe that 200 years from now, all land under ten metres from sea level would be in the drink, you'd better start thinking about how to deal with it right now.
I've been waiting for some manufacturer to offer an inexpensive CMOS image sensor and microphone unit that plugs into an iPod and records compressed digital video. I'm surprised it hasn't happened yet. You clip the unit to the front of your shirt, plug it into your iPod, and you're good to go for hours. In a few more years iPods will have the capacity to record days of continuous video as long as the battery holds out. I worry far less what the government will do with the images made of me; the goverment can at least be changed or influenced by votes, legislation, and protests. I have no influence whatsoever over the hundreds of individuals who'll also be keeping me under surveillance.
I actually think that something like this is our best defence. Sousveillance. Let Big Brother watch the streets at all times if he wishes. Very well, but if he chooses to send out the filth to suppress a legitimate demonstration, they'll be on camera too. Cameras they maybe can't see. Cameras that are connected to 3G phones, that instantly relay all they see to servers in another country. Cameras such that they have no hope of neutering with 'right you scum, hand over the film!'
If what we fear is that the State will abuse the power it gains by this pervasive surveillance, let's make sure that anything the State tries to do is in turn surveilled by the people. And any abuse of power of any kind will surely be on Youtube within an hour.
... Never mind the civil liberties crap. We have a bigger problem. Here, on what may be the most geek-heavy community on earth, someone quotes 'V for Vendetta' and refers to it as a 'recent movie' as opposed to a 'classic 1980s comic series'. And gets +5 Informative for doing so.
The Wii controls helped keep the combat feeling fresh, where the GameCube falls flat. But the advancements other games have made in dynamic since the release of Ocarina just leave the series feeling like something of a dinosaur.
The Wii controls on Twilight Princess are a pointer for the way forward. Some parts worked really well - I could never go back to aiming the bow or the hookshot with an analogue stick. Some didn't - shield thrust was misread as spin attack far too often. While it was well done, it was really a dressed-up Gamecube game and from time to time it showed.
I actually think EA did a better job than Nintendo on porting a game to the Wii controls. The Godfather: Blackhand Edition. The game's not as good as Zelda, but the Wii controls are perfect. They took a pretty good game and made it great.
With the lessons learned from this first generation of Wii games, I'm expecting to see some really interesting things done by about Christmas. And then in time - well, probably around 2010 or so - Nintendo will put out a Zelda game designed for Wii from day one. That'll be something to see. Well, no, it won't, it'll be a Wii game. That'll be something to play.
I love Zelda games, so I hate to agree with this assessment. However, I noticed while playing Twilight Princess that I instinctively knew the answers to most puzzles and boss fights. Heck, I even walked into dungeons and started guessing the sort of obstacles I'd face and the sort of treasures I'd find based on familiar themes. I'm sure I can't be the only loyal fan suffering from Zelda deja vu.
I got a certain amount of that. Might have been because I'd replayed Ocarina during the month or so before the Wii launch, in preparation. Twilight Princess is certainly similar to Ocarina. Then again, between Ocarina and Twilight Princess we've had three old-style top-down games on the Gameboy and GBA, and two rather differently-styled games on the N64 and Gamecube. It's not as if Nintendo don't vary on the Zelda theme.
Nope, fans will happily rescue the same fucking princess over and over again
Not always the same princess. Zelda's just a traditional name in the royal family of Hyrule. I make it at least four Zeldas through history. Ocarina Zelda, Twilight Princess Zelda, Link to the Past Zelda (who may or may not be the same Zelda as Sleeping Zelda), and Original Zelda.
I remember as a young lad LOATHING the second zelda game, and for the longest time it was the only one I hadn't beaten. But when i got the disc for the GC with the first two games on it, I decided that it was time i beat it just so i could say i had beat them all. It quickly became one of my favorites.
People hated Zelda 2 because it wasn't top-down like the original. Nintendo went back to top-down with the SNES and Gameboy versions and the fanboys were happy. Then they went 3D. Your beloved top-down format is dead, fanboy! And just to rub it in, what names are these for characters? Rauru, Ruto, Saria, Mido, Nabooru, Darunia...
But Ocarina was so very, very good that everyone forgot it wasn't top-down. Now you play Zelda 2 and you don't see a departure from Zelda 1, you see a precursor to Ocarina, and you don't get the hate on any more.
Hell, this was the first Zelda game where I've ever given two-shits about the characters. Before, they were just an excuse for gameplay, now, I actually care about them.
One word: Marin.
At the point where I realised what would happen if I actually did wake the Wind Fish, I almost cried. At that point, the true hero should have sacrificed his hope of returning to Hyrule, thrown away his sword and gone and raised a family on the island. I should have stopped playing Zelda there and then and fired up Harvest Moon.
Instead I played through to the end, defeated the Wind Fish's nightmare and woke it. And of course the island, the people, the animal village, their whole world...
And Marin...
I'm sorry, it's been over a decade and I'm still going to go and weep uncontrollably.
In the original Legend of Zelda, the only thing that kept you from moving around freely in the world (I'm simplifying things a bit), is that fact that you just didn't go to some regions because the enemies were too dangerous over there given your current skills.
Broadly true, although later dungeons had rooms that were impossible to get through unless you had the Ladder, which IIRC was found in a dungeon you needed the Raft to get to. You could play most of the dungeons a bit out of sequence, but it was rarely a good idea (except that I always left dungeon 6 till last - Bubble, Like Like and Wizzrobe in the same room equal pain.)
My main complaint along these lines is that you get to know the game design, and think 'Right, I picked up this item in the last dungeon, it must be what I use to get into the next one, and it must be essential to solve the puzzles inside it and then probably will never be used again.' Which got me in trouble at the end of Twilight Princess - I'd completely forgotten I had the boomerang and got slaughtered repeatedly by Zant until I finally caught on.
Sidequest nonsense: Newer Zelda titles have too many sidequest. In the original Legend of Zelda, I actually cared for finding all heart containers, but with the inflation of fractions of pieces of hearts in current games, it's just a pain. Things get worse when you have to find 100+ spiders or ghosts. It doesn't add to the game and the reward that you get out of these quests is never worth the effort. My recommendation: Integrate sidequest into the storyline and have one single meaningful artifact as reward.
Sidequests I like, but keep the rewards coming at regular intervals. I'll hunt Skulltulas because every so often I get something cool. Bugs and Poes don't seem to work quite the same way.
Difficulty: Zelda has gotten too easy. Without even going through the pain of getting all bottles, I only died once before completing the game for the first time. Especially the dungeon bosses were too easy.
Dungeon bosses, yes, trivially easy. I never was once threatened by them until (as I mentioned above) I forgot I had the boomerang:-) Those bloody Ironknuckle-descended beasties, though, they were a bit of fun all right. Especially once you'd got the armour off them and they suddenly got very, very quick and good at blocking.
To be fair, though: how hard were the old games? Really? The puzzles were obscure because the graphics were too basic to give subtle hints, and the old crones whose job it was to deal out the hints had to be translated from a language where one character can be a whole word, but with no extra space. The combat, though - how hard is it to beat the two Dodongos in the second dungeon in Legend of Zelda? How hard was it to beat them in Ocarina? Go back and play the old games today - they're on Virtual Console if your NES doesn't work anymore. Are they really as hard as you remember, or have twenty years of experience made you really, really good at Zelda games?
Don't reinvent the wheel: It's true that fans of the Zelda series don't want to see everything changed. So new items are always fine, but not too many. Instead, how about bringing back some items from the previous games: sword throwing, magic wand, rings, etc.
Wasn't the dual hookshot great, though? I loved that in the sky city. Spider-Man, Spider-Man, does whatever a spider can...
Sword throwing really works better in 2D, I think. It's still there in the Gameboy games. The Blue and Red Ring roughly correspond to the different tunics you get nowadays. A magic wand would be nice, and could work well on Wii, but it would probably end up being a re-heated Ocarina. Learn spell gestures as you travel around Hyrule. SHIELD, JUMP, LIFE, FAIRY, FIRE, REFLECT, SPELL, THUNDER...
Just admit you're stealing. I would have so much less a problem with it if you didn't go down the "digital copy is not theft since I didn't deprive anyone of anything physical". You did deprive them - of money.
Suppose I decide not to buy a CD, but a DVD instead. My decision has deprived the CD manufacturer of money. Have I stolen anything? No.
Suppose I decide to produce a CD of my own. Many people choose to buy my CD instead of somebody else's. I have deprived that other CD manufacturer of money. Have I stolen anything? Again, no.
There are many ways to deprive people of money. Not all of them are stealing. Not all of them are even illegal.
An inability to predict does not mean that the apparent randomness is real. Just because we can't observe accurately all the conditions at present does not mean they are necessarily unpredictable. Things appear random but may not actually be.
That's called a hidden-variable theory: that there are things going on that we cannot see, properties of, say, a radioactive nucleus, which determine exactly when it will decay even if we cannot observe them and predict the time of decay for ourselves.
It's possible, but if you want a hidden variable theory then the Bell inequality requires that it be a nonlocal theory. That means information transferred faster than light, which means information transferred back in time, which means all sorts of nasty things happen that you might not want in a tidy Universe.
Ironically, if you want to keep determinism, it seems you have to give up on causality:-)
Hundreds of islands. Great Britain, 6/32 of Ireland, and a swarm of islands of various sizes around the coasts of both.
The currency is pounds sterling, but most places will accept euro's, at least in London.
Maybe parts of London, where there are likely to be lots of visitors from the mainland around, and perhaps in other tourist-heavy areas, but not in most of the country.
Was I the only one who immediately remembered flying to the Hotice star system, there to raid the INRA bioweapons facility and steal the antidote to the mycoid weapon that had destroyed all the Thargoids' hyperdrives, and then heading back to Miackce to deliver it to the alien overlords and receive, in exchange for my betrayal of all humanity, the most powerful starship in the game?
Slashdot Mirror
A lone genius who developed it themselves and just posted it on the internet, perhaps?
That's actually better than it used to be, then. The statistic I grew up hearing was that 1 in 3 would get cancer. Since as you will surely agree anecdotal evidence is the very best kind, and correlation equals causation, we can now conclude that mobile phones PREVENT CANCER! Woo hoo!
God says you will surely die. The snake says you will not die, but will become wise like God.
If you don't already have knowledge of good and evil, how are you meant to choose?
Which is easier to believe:
1) The Universe exists uncaused
2) An intelligent entity capable of designing and creating the Universe exists uncaused
Personally, I'd say that (1) is easier, since (2) effectively includes (1), and then some more. Until and unless given a very good reason indeed to think otherwise, I'll go with (1).
Just once, I'd like to see someone cite a source for this ridiculous claim. I bet it's that Channel 4 'documentary'.
Come off it. An intelligent entity evolved in my Spore game will have visited every star in the Elite 4 galaxy before that game ever gets completed.
So the ancient Hebrews were murderers just as much as Mohammed was? What does that prove? I don't see where the grandparent poster mentioned that he was a Christian or a Jew, just that he didn't think much of the founder of Islam.
We caught on pretty damn quick, though. Hey, guys, let's end this war. Here, have some blankets as a peace offering. No, no, we didn't get them from a smallpox hospital...
You've got to be American, if anything over a hundred years is not 'reasonably soon'. Maybe this is the reason Europeans are more concerned about climate change - it's not all that crap about Americans liking their great big thirsty cars, it's just that they're not used to thinking long-term.
100 years isn't a very long time. Certainly not when considering the issues we have to deal with here. We're talking about either completely restructuring our economy either to run on totally different fuels or to run on much less energy or both, or we're talking about massive relocations of population as arable territory shifts and lands get flooded, and enormous engineering projects as the world suddenly reaches for textbooks in Dutch about how to build really huge earthworks.
If you had reason to believe that 200 years from now, all land under ten metres from sea level would be in the drink, you'd better start thinking about how to deal with it right now.
I actually think that something like this is our best defence. Sousveillance. Let Big Brother watch the streets at all times if he wishes. Very well, but if he chooses to send out the filth to suppress a legitimate demonstration, they'll be on camera too. Cameras they maybe can't see. Cameras that are connected to 3G phones, that instantly relay all they see to servers in another country. Cameras such that they have no hope of neutering with 'right you scum, hand over the film!'
If what we fear is that the State will abuse the power it gains by this pervasive surveillance, let's make sure that anything the State tries to do is in turn surveilled by the people. And any abuse of power of any kind will surely be on Youtube within an hour.
... Never mind the civil liberties crap. We have a bigger problem. Here, on what may be the most geek-heavy community on earth, someone quotes 'V for Vendetta' and refers to it as a 'recent movie' as opposed to a 'classic 1980s comic series'. And gets +5 Informative for doing so.
"THE PALACE HAS A FALSE WALL" - some guy in Nabooru
The Wii controls on Twilight Princess are a pointer for the way forward. Some parts worked really well - I could never go back to aiming the bow or the hookshot with an analogue stick. Some didn't - shield thrust was misread as spin attack far too often. While it was well done, it was really a dressed-up Gamecube game and from time to time it showed.
I actually think EA did a better job than Nintendo on porting a game to the Wii controls. The Godfather: Blackhand Edition. The game's not as good as Zelda, but the Wii controls are perfect. They took a pretty good game and made it great.
With the lessons learned from this first generation of Wii games, I'm expecting to see some really interesting things done by about Christmas. And then in time - well, probably around 2010 or so - Nintendo will put out a Zelda game designed for Wii from day one. That'll be something to see. Well, no, it won't, it'll be a Wii game. That'll be something to play.
I got a certain amount of that. Might have been because I'd replayed Ocarina during the month or so before the Wii launch, in preparation. Twilight Princess is certainly similar to Ocarina. Then again, between Ocarina and Twilight Princess we've had three old-style top-down games on the Gameboy and GBA, and two rather differently-styled games on the N64 and Gamecube. It's not as if Nintendo don't vary on the Zelda theme.
Not always the same princess. Zelda's just a traditional name in the royal family of Hyrule. I make it at least four Zeldas through history. Ocarina Zelda, Twilight Princess Zelda, Link to the Past Zelda (who may or may not be the same Zelda as Sleeping Zelda), and Original Zelda.
I'd rather you didn't take it. That would be stealing.
However, if you come by and wave a magic wand and create yourself exact duplicates, it wouldn't bother me.
People hated Zelda 2 because it wasn't top-down like the original. Nintendo went back to top-down with the SNES and Gameboy versions and the fanboys were happy. Then they went 3D. Your beloved top-down format is dead, fanboy! And just to rub it in, what names are these for characters? Rauru, Ruto, Saria, Mido, Nabooru, Darunia...
But Ocarina was so very, very good that everyone forgot it wasn't top-down. Now you play Zelda 2 and you don't see a departure from Zelda 1, you see a precursor to Ocarina, and you don't get the hate on any more.
One word: Marin.
At the point where I realised what would happen if I actually did wake the Wind Fish, I almost cried. At that point, the true hero should have sacrificed his hope of returning to Hyrule, thrown away his sword and gone and raised a family on the island. I should have stopped playing Zelda there and then and fired up Harvest Moon.
Instead I played through to the end, defeated the Wind Fish's nightmare and woke it. And of course the island, the people, the animal village, their whole world...
And Marin...
I'm sorry, it's been over a decade and I'm still going to go and weep uncontrollably.
Broadly true, although later dungeons had rooms that were impossible to get through unless you had the Ladder, which IIRC was found in a dungeon you needed the Raft to get to. You could play most of the dungeons a bit out of sequence, but it was rarely a good idea (except that I always left dungeon 6 till last - Bubble, Like Like and Wizzrobe in the same room equal pain.)
My main complaint along these lines is that you get to know the game design, and think 'Right, I picked up this item in the last dungeon, it must be what I use to get into the next one, and it must be essential to solve the puzzles inside it and then probably will never be used again.' Which got me in trouble at the end of Twilight Princess - I'd completely forgotten I had the boomerang and got slaughtered repeatedly by Zant until I finally caught on.
Sidequest nonsense: Newer Zelda titles have too many sidequest. In the original Legend of Zelda, I actually cared for finding all heart containers, but with the inflation of fractions of pieces of hearts in current games, it's just a pain. Things get worse when you have to find 100+ spiders or ghosts. It doesn't add to the game and the reward that you get out of these quests is never worth the effort. My recommendation: Integrate sidequest into the storyline and have one single meaningful artifact as reward.
Sidequests I like, but keep the rewards coming at regular intervals. I'll hunt Skulltulas because every so often I get something cool. Bugs and Poes don't seem to work quite the same way.
Difficulty: Zelda has gotten too easy. Without even going through the pain of getting all bottles, I only died once before completing the game for the first time. Especially the dungeon bosses were too easy.
Dungeon bosses, yes, trivially easy. I never was once threatened by them until (as I mentioned above) I forgot I had the boomerang :-) Those bloody Ironknuckle-descended beasties, though, they were a bit of fun all right. Especially once you'd got the armour off them and they suddenly got very, very quick and good at blocking.
To be fair, though: how hard were the old games? Really? The puzzles were obscure because the graphics were too basic to give subtle hints, and the old crones whose job it was to deal out the hints had to be translated from a language where one character can be a whole word, but with no extra space. The combat, though - how hard is it to beat the two Dodongos in the second dungeon in Legend of Zelda? How hard was it to beat them in Ocarina? Go back and play the old games today - they're on Virtual Console if your NES doesn't work anymore. Are they really as hard as you remember, or have twenty years of experience made you really, really good at Zelda games?
Don't reinvent the wheel: It's true that fans of the Zelda series don't want to see everything changed. So new items are always fine, but not too many. Instead, how about bringing back some items from the previous games: sword throwing, magic wand, rings, etc.
Wasn't the dual hookshot great, though? I loved that in the sky city. Spider-Man, Spider-Man, does whatever a spider can...
Sword throwing really works better in 2D, I think. It's still there in the Gameboy games. The Blue and Red Ring roughly correspond to the different tunics you get nowadays. A magic wand would be nice, and could work well on Wii, but it would probably end up being a re-heated Ocarina. Learn spell gestures as you travel around Hyrule. SHIELD, JUMP, LIFE, FAIRY, FIRE, REFLECT, SPELL, THUNDER...
Suppose I decide not to buy a CD, but a DVD instead. My decision has deprived the CD manufacturer of money. Have I stolen anything? No.
Suppose I decide to produce a CD of my own. Many people choose to buy my CD instead of somebody else's. I have deprived that other CD manufacturer of money. Have I stolen anything? Again, no.
There are many ways to deprive people of money. Not all of them are stealing. Not all of them are even illegal.
That's called a hidden-variable theory: that there are things going on that we cannot see, properties of, say, a radioactive nucleus, which determine exactly when it will decay even if we cannot observe them and predict the time of decay for ourselves.
It's possible, but if you want a hidden variable theory then the Bell inequality requires that it be a nonlocal theory. That means information transferred faster than light, which means information transferred back in time, which means all sorts of nasty things happen that you might not want in a tidy Universe.
Ironically, if you want to keep determinism, it seems you have to give up on causality :-)
1926 called, they want their certainty back.
Hundreds of islands. Great Britain, 6/32 of Ireland, and a swarm of islands of various sizes around the coasts of both.
The currency is pounds sterling, but most places will accept euro's, at least in London.
Maybe parts of London, where there are likely to be lots of visitors from the mainland around, and perhaps in other tourist-heavy areas, but not in most of the country.
Nobody was trying to support a population of six billion settled agriculturalists at the time, though.
... I probably was, wasn't I?