Since I first played it, I thought it would be funny to replace the in-game ads with porn. Now, the ads are just comming from some web server, donwloaded and then displayed, how hard will it be to find out what site the game is looking at, redirect the host to a local web server, and send whatever images I want? How long before someone decides it would be funny to hack the ad server and goatse everyone playing that game?
I'm mildly annoyed by all of these Tardis, K9, and Doctor Who analogies. No one would be making them except really, really hard-core science fiction fans if the show hadn't been resurrected after its 1989 cancellation and 1996 television movie.
In other words: fewer people would be talking about Doctor Who if it wasn't currently on TV. Wow. Insight into the human condition there.
At any rate, even if there were not new episodes being aired, TARDIS analogies would certainly not be dead. Perhaps in the US the show was all but forgotten until the appearance of the Ninth, but in the UK its cultural impact was far, far greater. Anything which is deceptively small, and which is larger inside than you might have originally expected, can and will be compared to the TARDIS, and not just by geeks but by anybody.
The fact that the TARDIS was bigger on the inside than on the outside was probably the most remembered thing about that show. Hotly followed by 'the special effects were awful', 'hiding behind the sofa', 'scarf', and 'you're safe if you run up the stairs'.
On a slightly more serious note, I remember a while ago some mutterings about the suitability (or lack thereof) of GM foods for people on Halal / Kosher diets (I think pig genes in tomatos was the particular exanmple used)
Does that matter?
If people don't consider this stuff acceptable for religious reasons, that's their own choice. They've chosen to elevate some holy teaching or other over the advantages of... well, cheap food, or not having diarrhoea, or the ability to survive surgery involving blood loss - whatever it might be.
Now, suppose we invent something wonderful and someone objects 'Wait - that uses pig DNA - Muslims and Jews can't possibly use it!' Well, guys, that's too bad, you know, 'cos we'd really like your money. But you think your religion's more important to you than our product, that's good and we respect that, and if someday we come up with a version that doesn't use pig DNA we'll surely try to sell it to you. Meanwhile we're not going to let your superstition hold the rest of us back. We'll go right on ahead benefiting from pig DNA, and you guys can either change your minds about that rule of yours, or suck it up and tell yourselves you'll be rewarded in heaven.
Aiming poorly? Yeah, if carpet bombing a country to hit a dart board is what you mean by aiming poorly...
Careful with such analogies. There'll be a bunch of loyal American patriots along in a minute to tell you how wrong you are, and that it's not aiming poorly, it's an enlightened foreign policy.
There's no distro of Linux I know of that plays DVDs and MP3s out of the box, simply due to the licensing issues that Windows has covered. And *everyone* listens to music on their PC, right? (I know, I know, Windows doesn't play DVDs either. But it's a lot easier to set that up in Windows.)
Huh? How is it easier?
On Windows: obtain DVD-playing software. Install. Play DVD.
On Linux: obtain DVD-playing software. Install. Play DVD.
Is it hard to obtain such software? Nope. Not on either platform. How, then, is it easier on Windows?
For example, if my next door neighbor got murdered, I might get asked to provide my fingerprints to rule me out as a subject. I might be willing to do this (provided I'm not actually guilty) but what happens afterwards?
If you're not actually guilty, why are you giving the State your fingerprints? If they think you're guilty, they can arrest you and charge you and THEN they can check your fingerprints. Not before.
Not just businesses... All institutions. This goes for governments, social organizations, etc. too.
Including countries.
Look at the state of us. Off to war again, and once more it's dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. It was bullshit when Horace said it, it was bullshit in 1914 and it's bullshit today: the oldest and greatest lie in human history. That you owe something to your country. That, because the bosses of This Country have a quarrel with That Country, the workers of Both Countries must now go and try to kill each other.
Yet enough people believe it. Salute the flag, stand for the anthem, support the troops, be proud of your history, die for your country. Bill Hicks had it right: 'Am I proud to be American? Not particularly... I mean, my parents fucked there, that's about it...'
Now, let's see China open up HER apparatus to tear down US censor blocks. Then, we'll see how soon the US declares THAT an act of war...
If the US government took actions infringing on China's sovereignty or territorial integrity, that might be an act of war. If, however, US citizens on their own initiative do so, then that's... possibly not even a crime, if they don't ever actually go to China in the process.
Unfortunately for this line of reasoning, the US established an awkward precedent when they invaded Afghanistan and deposed its de facto government in revenge for acts allegedly perpetrated by a private resident of Afghanistan on his own initiative...
Presumably you want to go somewhere that freedom and liberty are held in high regard, right? But you need more than that, because individual bad-apple politicians can appear anywhere.
If I flee a growing tyranny to a country that remains free, I don't care whether my destination will still be a free country in a hundred years' time; it's better now.
A lot of people fled Germany in the 1930s and came to the UK and USA. Today, the UK and USA are steering terribly close to the Dark Side... but that doesn't mean that getting the hell out of Germany back then wasn't still a good idea.
In short: right now the US is insane. Moving to a country which may or may not go mad in the future is better than staying in a country which is, at present, indubitably bananas.
I know I'm not the only one to be excited about this. right?
Hi there, Mr Bailey...
Re:I agree - why no decentralization of energy?
on
"H-Prize" Announced
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
What if anyone really could easily and rapidly convert water into hydrogen? (spare me the jabs on how easy electrolysis already is, please)
Excuse me? Electrolysis IS easy and quick, it's just energy-intensive. So what you're asking for is a way to extract the hydrogen without paying the price in energy.
Well, then we'd be living in a different universe. One where you can convert water to hydrogen and oxygen, and then burn the hydrogen in oxygen to make water again, and yet have a net energy output from the process.
Thermodynamics is not your friend in this project, I'm afraid.
You can build systems to make it easy and quick to separate hydrogen from water, but they take a lot of energy which has to come from somewhere. I suppose this could conceivably be your rooftop solar farm, but it's more likely to be the grid.
It doesn't matter where you get your hydrogen from all realistic methods cost more energy than they produce.
Not entirely the case. You can obtain hydrogen from methane or other hydrocarbons, then burn it in oxygen for a net energy gain. But if you're doing that, then you might as well just burn the hydrocarbons, which is what we do anyway.
If you're extracting hydrogen from water, then all methods cost more energy than they produce - second law of thermodynamics. But this isn't necessarily a show-stopper. Suppose you have a nuclear breeder reactor. It's an very efficient source of energy, and can manufacture enormous quantities of hydrogen which can then be shipped around the country to fuel cars; or it can supply huge amounts of electricity to recharge hydrogen fuel cells, depending on which way we choose to run the hydrogen economy.
Despite the fact that you're wasting energy by electrolysing water to make hydrogen which you then burn back to water, there are benefits. All the pollution generated is in a single, probably remote location, rather than on the city streets. And if technology changes at some point, you can replace the nuclear reactors with new superefficient photovoltaics, or fusion, or microwave relay or whatever it may be, and you don't have to refit a quarter of a billion cars.
... Sorry to reply twice, but you know how it is...
Rereading that rant I wrote earlier about rotten AI behaviour, I remembered one case in which I was unpleasantly surprised by a very, very good AI action. I've since been told that this was actually a scripted encounter, but it still stands as an example of the way enemies should behave. Even if it was rigged, it had to say 'if player tries this sort of thing, respond like this...'
It's the original Half-Life. I'm trying to escape from Black Mesa in the face of a rather large military task-force dedicated to trying to kill me.
Around a corner I come, out of a narrow corridor into the open, and there are _loads_ of these soldiers, some dug in, some standing around. Yikes. Don't fancy this much. So, I play it a bit cunning: I spray the area with random fire, enough to alert all of them to my presence, and then duck back round the corner and select a nice heavy weapon. The plan: bloody stupid AI will charge straight into the corridor and I can mow them down in a narrow, confined space.
So, I'm sitting there waiting for the enemy to appear. What do I get instead?
* clink! clink! clink! *
... and onto the floor in front of me there rolls a grenade. Perfect throw, spot on target.
The great advance in Oblivion: Most non-enemy NPCs have schedules - they go to sleep at a certain time or stand in a specific location at a certain time
Haven't played Oblivion, but there was one game I played in which scheduled NPCs were done well: Majora's Mask. Clearly this only works because the entire game takes place over Groundhog Weekend, and so the designers can schedule every last move over those three days in intricate detail... I doubt you could realistically do it with a more open-ended game.
I really don't care how it does that- extra resources, quicker unit building, whatever.
I don't mind the player having a handicap, but I don't like AI cheating. For instance, if it says in the manual
'At Ultra Hard level, all the computer players gain +1 of each resource from each square, and will be much more likely to trade resources and technologies with each other than with you'
- then fair enough. You know the rules, you know they're stacked against you, but you can plan for it. You can say to yourself 'That city will be producing about x shields and so can produce one spearman per y turns, and therefore my attacks must succeed m times, which will necessitate a strike force of n units...' Or some such. Only the hardcore will go so far as to compute the numbers, but anyone might try their hand at weakening the enemy by targeting their resource infrastructure. Mines, roads, farms, solar collecters, whatever.
If, however, the AI is cheating - pulling free units out of its ass whenever necessary, for instance - then you can't make plans of this kind, and the game loses a lot of interest. Why target the AI's resources when for all you know it'll just conjure up extra units anyway? Might as well just send in the horde and butcher them all, brutal and ignorant though that strategy is.
But that wasn't what really pissed me off. Nope. What pissed me off was when, in Civ 2, I'd exchange world maps with an AI player I knew only had triremes (which sink if sent into open ocean) and see their shipping lanes, where their triremes had sailed across the ocean in a perfectly straight line towards land the AI had clearly already known was there...
If I swiftly and easily kill all N-1 enemies in a group, the Nth one ought to get a clue and run away with its tail between its legs, beg for mercy or at least try a different strategy.
THAT'S something I'd like to see. I've been replaying KOTOR this last week. During much of this game you're moving between four planets looking for parts of a Star Map to lead you to the villain's secret base. On each one, somewhere there's an ambush by three Dark Jedi who are out to kill you.
The first one of these you encounter is a hard battle. The fourth, however, is likely to be terribly easy, because you've levelled half a dozen times in the interim, while they've been hanging around in the cantina ogling the dancers.
So, along come these three Dark Jedi, to kill me off for their master. They charge towards me... BZZZZZT! Force Lightning, one shot, all three of them are instantly reduced to one-quarter health.
Do they
a) run like hell the other way?
b) kneel before me and swear allegiance to me as their new Dark Lord?
c) give up the whole Sith thing and go and become bantha herders?
d) just shite it and stand there in a panic?
Nope. They keep coming. Admirable loyalty to their cause, I suppose, but really, really stupid.
Same with all these RPGs... in Neverwinter Nights, my warrior was wandering the docks and getting jumped by the local bandits. And killing them with a single katana blow. And then using the Great Cleave feat to do it again, and again, and again, butchering up to six of them in a single turn. And still they come, rushing eagerly forward to be massacred. I mean, come on, show some initiative, fuck off and hide and throw darts or something, you know?
Or how about the gang of pirates who attacked my party in Baldur's Gate 2? Just after coming out of Spellhold? Here we are, a bunch of mighty heroes in bloodstained armour, openly carrying massive swords most of which are glowing and one of which is talking, on a street full of ordinary civilians, and these pirates choose us to mug. What the hell were they thinking? We chopped them all up in thirty seconds flat and fed 'em to Boo.
I'd like AIs to realise when they're out of their depth and leg it. It would add a certain something to the experience... your sorcerer fires off his Super-Duper Slaughtering Bolt of Greater Mayhem into the midst of the crowd of orcish assailants, half of them drop dead on the spot, and the rest of them run. Might add a little to the old underused lawful / chaotic axis, too: do you mercilessly butcher fleeing enemies, shooting them in the back with Crossbow Bolts of Sycoraxic Vengeance or perhaps a spell of Belgrano's Greater Torpedo, or honourably let them live and risk running into an ambush they prepare a little further down the road?
They've got to get over it, just like the people in Europe had to get over their anti-German feelings
Remember, though, that the Germans have done a far bigger sackcloth-and-ashes repentance routine since the war than have the Japanese. I gather they still officially deny what happened at Nanking, which is scarcely conducive to good relations. Then there was that business last year with the rather... questionable content of some of their high school history books. From what I see there's still a huge problem with the attitude of the Japanese themselves to the war... sure, they 'regret' it, so we hear whenever they almost but not quite apologise. But it sometimes seems like what they regret is that they lost.
I think he's refering to the C-buttons, which could easily be used in conjuntion with the L & R buttons.
When I'm playing emulated N64 games on PC (with a Gravis Eliminator gamepad), I assign one of the analogue sticks to be the C-buttons. That works quite nicely. The only awkward bit I find is that using one of the shoulder buttons for Z doesn't feel quite right; there's nothing quite like the trigger grip on the original controllers...
I suspect that there would be more war in the short run. There is a lot of money in the Middle East. If the world stopped buying their major export, they would likely go into a major depression. Countries that go from wealthy to extreamly poor in a very small amount of time have a tendency to go to war.
Sure, but it would most likely be with each other - a bunch of recently impoverished nations scrapping over whatever pitiful resources they have left. Assuming (whether by biodiesel, or by nuclear / hydrogen, or whatever) that nobody needs their oil any more, would we even care? Or would we completely ignore the whole lot of them the way we do with all the bloody mayhem in Africa?
I can imagine the EU would be concerned - we'd have a massive refugee problem on our hands - but I doubt the US would pay the slightest attention.
Slashdot Mirror
* forwards this post to Jack Thompson *
In other words: fewer people would be talking about Doctor Who if it wasn't currently on TV. Wow. Insight into the human condition there.
At any rate, even if there were not new episodes being aired, TARDIS analogies would certainly not be dead. Perhaps in the US the show was all but forgotten until the appearance of the Ninth, but in the UK its cultural impact was far, far greater. Anything which is deceptively small, and which is larger inside than you might have originally expected, can and will be compared to the TARDIS, and not just by geeks but by anybody.
The fact that the TARDIS was bigger on the inside than on the outside was probably the most remembered thing about that show. Hotly followed by 'the special effects were awful', 'hiding behind the sofa', 'scarf', and 'you're safe if you run up the stairs'.
True, but at the end of the show he's usually credited as 'Doctor Who' rather than 'The Doctor'.
Does that matter?
If people don't consider this stuff acceptable for religious reasons, that's their own choice. They've chosen to elevate some holy teaching or other over the advantages of... well, cheap food, or not having diarrhoea, or the ability to survive surgery involving blood loss - whatever it might be.
Now, suppose we invent something wonderful and someone objects 'Wait - that uses pig DNA - Muslims and Jews can't possibly use it!' Well, guys, that's too bad, you know, 'cos we'd really like your money. But you think your religion's more important to you than our product, that's good and we respect that, and if someday we come up with a version that doesn't use pig DNA we'll surely try to sell it to you. Meanwhile we're not going to let your superstition hold the rest of us back. We'll go right on ahead benefiting from pig DNA, and you guys can either change your minds about that rule of yours, or suck it up and tell yourselves you'll be rewarded in heaven.
Careful with such analogies. There'll be a bunch of loyal American patriots along in a minute to tell you how wrong you are, and that it's not aiming poorly, it's an enlightened foreign policy.
Huh? How is it easier?
On Windows: obtain DVD-playing software. Install. Play DVD.
On Linux: obtain DVD-playing software. Install. Play DVD.
Is it hard to obtain such software? Nope. Not on either platform. How, then, is it easier on Windows?
If you're not actually guilty, why are you giving the State your fingerprints? If they think you're guilty, they can arrest you and charge you and THEN they can check your fingerprints. Not before.
You're a free man, for fuck's sake. Act like it.
Including countries.
Look at the state of us. Off to war again, and once more it's dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. It was bullshit when Horace said it, it was bullshit in 1914 and it's bullshit today: the oldest and greatest lie in human history. That you owe something to your country. That, because the bosses of This Country have a quarrel with That Country, the workers of Both Countries must now go and try to kill each other.
Yet enough people believe it. Salute the flag, stand for the anthem, support the troops, be proud of your history, die for your country. Bill Hicks had it right: 'Am I proud to be American? Not particularly... I mean, my parents fucked there, that's about it...'
He is Foul Ole Ron!
That's not my daddy!
... haven't laughed out loud at a book for a while, but that did it all right :-)
If the US government took actions infringing on China's sovereignty or territorial integrity, that might be an act of war. If, however, US citizens on their own initiative do so, then that's... possibly not even a crime, if they don't ever actually go to China in the process.
Unfortunately for this line of reasoning, the US established an awkward precedent when they invaded Afghanistan and deposed its de facto government in revenge for acts allegedly perpetrated by a private resident of Afghanistan on his own initiative...
Terrorists.
Why, because before then they were Freedom Fighters. Heroic patriots standing up for their freedom from the terrible aggression of the Soviet army.
Hell, both James Bond and Rambo helped out al-Qae... sorry, the Afghan Mujaheddin against the Russians.
If I flee a growing tyranny to a country that remains free, I don't care whether my destination will still be a free country in a hundred years' time; it's better now.
A lot of people fled Germany in the 1930s and came to the UK and USA. Today, the UK and USA are steering terribly close to the Dark Side... but that doesn't mean that getting the hell out of Germany back then wasn't still a good idea.
In short: right now the US is insane. Moving to a country which may or may not go mad in the future is better than staying in a country which is, at present, indubitably bananas.
Hi there, Mr Bailey...
Excuse me? Electrolysis IS easy and quick, it's just energy-intensive. So what you're asking for is a way to extract the hydrogen without paying the price in energy.
Well, then we'd be living in a different universe. One where you can convert water to hydrogen and oxygen, and then burn the hydrogen in oxygen to make water again, and yet have a net energy output from the process.
Thermodynamics is not your friend in this project, I'm afraid.
You can build systems to make it easy and quick to separate hydrogen from water, but they take a lot of energy which has to come from somewhere. I suppose this could conceivably be your rooftop solar farm, but it's more likely to be the grid.
Not entirely the case. You can obtain hydrogen from methane or other hydrocarbons, then burn it in oxygen for a net energy gain. But if you're doing that, then you might as well just burn the hydrocarbons, which is what we do anyway.
If you're extracting hydrogen from water, then all methods cost more energy than they produce - second law of thermodynamics. But this isn't necessarily a show-stopper. Suppose you have a nuclear breeder reactor. It's an very efficient source of energy, and can manufacture enormous quantities of hydrogen which can then be shipped around the country to fuel cars; or it can supply huge amounts of electricity to recharge hydrogen fuel cells, depending on which way we choose to run the hydrogen economy.
Despite the fact that you're wasting energy by electrolysing water to make hydrogen which you then burn back to water, there are benefits. All the pollution generated is in a single, probably remote location, rather than on the city streets. And if technology changes at some point, you can replace the nuclear reactors with new superefficient photovoltaics, or fusion, or microwave relay or whatever it may be, and you don't have to refit a quarter of a billion cars.
Rereading that rant I wrote earlier about rotten AI behaviour, I remembered one case in which I was unpleasantly surprised by a very, very good AI action. I've since been told that this was actually a scripted encounter, but it still stands as an example of the way enemies should behave. Even if it was rigged, it had to say 'if player tries this sort of thing, respond like this...'
It's the original Half-Life. I'm trying to escape from Black Mesa in the face of a rather large military task-force dedicated to trying to kill me.
Around a corner I come, out of a narrow corridor into the open, and there are _loads_ of these soldiers, some dug in, some standing around. Yikes. Don't fancy this much. So, I play it a bit cunning: I spray the area with random fire, enough to alert all of them to my presence, and then duck back round the corner and select a nice heavy weapon. The plan: bloody stupid AI will charge straight into the corridor and I can mow them down in a narrow, confined space.
So, I'm sitting there waiting for the enemy to appear. What do I get instead?
* clink! clink! clink! *
... and onto the floor in front of me there rolls a grenade. Perfect throw, spot on target.
Oh bugger.
Haven't played Oblivion, but there was one game I played in which scheduled NPCs were done well: Majora's Mask. Clearly this only works because the entire game takes place over Groundhog Weekend, and so the designers can schedule every last move over those three days in intricate detail... I doubt you could realistically do it with a more open-ended game.
I don't mind the player having a handicap, but I don't like AI cheating. For instance, if it says in the manual
'At Ultra Hard level, all the computer players gain +1 of each resource from each square, and will be much more likely to trade resources and technologies with each other than with you'
- then fair enough. You know the rules, you know they're stacked against you, but you can plan for it. You can say to yourself 'That city will be producing about x shields and so can produce one spearman per y turns, and therefore my attacks must succeed m times, which will necessitate a strike force of n units...' Or some such. Only the hardcore will go so far as to compute the numbers, but anyone might try their hand at weakening the enemy by targeting their resource infrastructure. Mines, roads, farms, solar collecters, whatever.
If, however, the AI is cheating - pulling free units out of its ass whenever necessary, for instance - then you can't make plans of this kind, and the game loses a lot of interest. Why target the AI's resources when for all you know it'll just conjure up extra units anyway? Might as well just send in the horde and butcher them all, brutal and ignorant though that strategy is.
But that wasn't what really pissed me off. Nope. What pissed me off was when, in Civ 2, I'd exchange world maps with an AI player I knew only had triremes (which sink if sent into open ocean) and see their shipping lanes, where their triremes had sailed across the ocean in a perfectly straight line towards land the AI had clearly already known was there...
THAT'S something I'd like to see. I've been replaying KOTOR this last week. During much of this game you're moving between four planets looking for parts of a Star Map to lead you to the villain's secret base. On each one, somewhere there's an ambush by three Dark Jedi who are out to kill you.
The first one of these you encounter is a hard battle. The fourth, however, is likely to be terribly easy, because you've levelled half a dozen times in the interim, while they've been hanging around in the cantina ogling the dancers.
So, along come these three Dark Jedi, to kill me off for their master. They charge towards me... BZZZZZT! Force Lightning, one shot, all three of them are instantly reduced to one-quarter health.
Do they
a) run like hell the other way?
b) kneel before me and swear allegiance to me as their new Dark Lord?
c) give up the whole Sith thing and go and become bantha herders?
d) just shite it and stand there in a panic?
Nope. They keep coming. Admirable loyalty to their cause, I suppose, but really, really stupid.
Same with all these RPGs... in Neverwinter Nights, my warrior was wandering the docks and getting jumped by the local bandits. And killing them with a single katana blow. And then using the Great Cleave feat to do it again, and again, and again, butchering up to six of them in a single turn. And still they come, rushing eagerly forward to be massacred. I mean, come on, show some initiative, fuck off and hide and throw darts or something, you know?
Or how about the gang of pirates who attacked my party in Baldur's Gate 2? Just after coming out of Spellhold? Here we are, a bunch of mighty heroes in bloodstained armour, openly carrying massive swords most of which are glowing and one of which is talking, on a street full of ordinary civilians, and these pirates choose us to mug. What the hell were they thinking? We chopped them all up in thirty seconds flat and fed 'em to Boo.
I'd like AIs to realise when they're out of their depth and leg it. It would add a certain something to the experience... your sorcerer fires off his Super-Duper Slaughtering Bolt of Greater Mayhem into the midst of the crowd of orcish assailants, half of them drop dead on the spot, and the rest of them run. Might add a little to the old underused lawful / chaotic axis, too: do you mercilessly butcher fleeing enemies, shooting them in the back with Crossbow Bolts of Sycoraxic Vengeance or perhaps a spell of Belgrano's Greater Torpedo, or honourably let them live and risk running into an ambush they prepare a little further down the road?
Remember, though, that the Germans have done a far bigger sackcloth-and-ashes repentance routine since the war than have the Japanese. I gather they still officially deny what happened at Nanking, which is scarcely conducive to good relations. Then there was that business last year with the rather... questionable content of some of their high school history books. From what I see there's still a huge problem with the attitude of the Japanese themselves to the war... sure, they 'regret' it, so we hear whenever they almost but not quite apologise. But it sometimes seems like what they regret is that they lost.
Not sure about that last bit. That would likely be either India or the UK.
* whistles innocently and hopes like hell nobody mentions that little fracas with all the heroin *
When I'm playing emulated N64 games on PC (with a Gravis Eliminator gamepad), I assign one of the analogue sticks to be the C-buttons. That works quite nicely. The only awkward bit I find is that using one of the shoulder buttons for Z doesn't feel quite right; there's nothing quite like the trigger grip on the original controllers...
Sure, but it would most likely be with each other - a bunch of recently impoverished nations scrapping over whatever pitiful resources they have left. Assuming (whether by biodiesel, or by nuclear / hydrogen, or whatever) that nobody needs their oil any more, would we even care? Or would we completely ignore the whole lot of them the way we do with all the bloody mayhem in Africa?
I can imagine the EU would be concerned - we'd have a massive refugee problem on our hands - but I doubt the US would pay the slightest attention.