I'll admit it. I had originally pirated "Dreamfall", for any of a number of contrived reasons. I loved it, and am still loving it. So when I opened up Steam one day to find it available for purchase, I immediately payed for it and eased my conscience. I get the feeling I'd do the same for a number of games. How is this different from just ordering the games from Amazon? To be honest, I really don't know. Maybe it's my resistance towards actually accumulating more physical junk.
Note where GP said "1) Regrow organs that have worn out." The human brain is an organ, no?
That's the thing - will simply regrowing the brain or causing new neurons to form actually have the effect of staving off senility? If neurons in certain pathways die, will having new neurons appear in random locations, not connected to anything, will that result in any improvement? What will your mind, your consciousness be like when 50% of the neurons within it are new ones you didn't have when you were born? While I suppose it would have beneficial effects on cognitive ability, I can't help but think it could also have some rather strange, unpredicted effects.
Personally, I'd love to live forever, but only if I can be guaranteed to not become a crazy old coot who thinks his toothbrush is stealing money from his wallet while he sleeps.
Okay, I realize that there is humor value in this, but I was actually speaking from experience. I went to go visit childhood friend's grandfather (our families are close) and at the age of 105, he really *does* think everyone and occasionally, some things, are stealing from him. It's gotten to the point where his children are afraid to visit him for fear that the accusations will come a rolling out. And this man in his earlier years was about the nicest fellow you could meet, spending pretty much all of his (earlier) retirement years working for charitable causes. It's a pretty unfortunate situation, and it scares the bejeesus out of me that I could wind up the same way.
Basically if the human race can do two things: 1) Regrow organs that have worn out and 2) cure cancer, we'll live for a very long time.
Meaninglessly, unless we can determine the mechanisms of senility and treat/prevent them. Personally, I'd love to live forever, but only if I can be guaranteed to not become a crazy old coot who thinks his toothbrush is stealing money from his wallet while he sleeps.
Please,/. and Sourceforge, for the love of dog, create an open source system for the management of open source movie scripts! I've dreamt of this and only not done it myself for lack of ability.
Imagine a system where multiple authors could contribute to a WIP screenplay, with a group of project leaders at the helm. A movie studio could purchase the rights to a project, and the contributors would donate the proceeds to charities and foundations of their choosing, divided as desired. In exchange, those so devoted and committed would receive rights to approve and nix studio decisions on visualisations, casting, and staffing (i.e no Uwe Boll), in addition to being able to sleep soundly at night, knowing that the works which inspired them will be preserved in spirit.
During the authoring and editing process, discussions much like those which are held on this very page could help resolve disputes or vagaries in the adaptation. Slashcode is great this way. You visit your personalized SlashScript homepage and see all of the adaptations-in-progess that you are interested in, posted by discussion topic and franchise. Click. Read. Participate. If you are so inclined, become a project contributor. If not, add your two cents to a particular issue.
So read the comments in this discusion.
Realize the potential we have collectively to produce works which will encourage future generations to pursue interests in computer sciences, physics, and freaky flights of fantasy. Let Keanu Reeves never be cast as an intelligent character again. Let terrible directors be dismissed, and idiotic screenplays be tossed in the rubbish. Let there never be another "I, Robot", "Alien 3", "Doom", "Resident Evil", or what may turn out to be a very bad X-Men 3.
The incentive for studios? Classics like 2001. Reduced price on screenplays. Favorable press for charitable donations.
Slightly off-topic... Well, actually, I guess it's on-topic... but I've found that it's really easy to explain file-compression to layfolk by comparing it to sudoku.
A sudoku puzzle, when complete, contains more digits than it does when unsolved. Yet there is only one solution to a given sudoku puzzle. So the starting state, which contains far less information, implies a larger volume of information which is unique to that starting state. Thus you can express the outcome of 81 digits using only some small subset of it, and applying rules to retrieve the rest.
I agree because I am one of those users who knows enough about system configurations to destroy every goddamn system I work on.
And I'm a computer programmer!
Every system I work on has been loaded with so many mods, filled with so many performance tweaks and hacks, had everything overclockable overclocked, that nothing I touch is stable anymore. Sometimes I wish I didn't know about any of this stuff just so that I wouldn't ruin my system and have to do an OS reinstall monthly. I'm a living testament to the dangers of knowledgability, or rather, the dangers of being a user that thinks he/she is knowledgable.
To all of the computers I've destroyed, I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to. I thought we were both having a good time... Until you died.
I posted this somewhere above as well, but I feel that it should be restated that not all teens would consider this unwelcome - especially if you live in a bad/rough neighborhood, as I did. When I was in my teens, I got slashed (following a brief period of harassment) outside of a convenience store by... other teens who were the type that always hung around there, and who obviously weren't keen to my ethnicity. Now that I'm older, I know how to stand up to idiots. But when you're young, you might not (I sure as heck didn't). So I might have appreciated a device like that back then.
This device could benefit the different, the tubby, the nerdy, the pasty, the scrawny, the thick-spectacled, and yes, even the *perfectly normal*, nonviolent good kids who just want to buy a Pepsi without getting stared down, mocked, or threatened by hooligans at the door.
Like my former teenage self from years ago. Back then, I actually got slashed outside of a convenience store by a bunch of kids that always hung out there (Brooklyn, yo). Being of the pasty, unarmed, physically non-threatening nerd variety, I might actually have shopped *more* at a place that had one of these.
This site is a pretty thoroughly obvious fake. In fact, you pretty much have to assume that the fakers are intentionally leaving it sufficiently fake to avoid tricking anyone even slightly technologically inclined...
While it looks like a fake, and smells like a fake, and tastes like a fake, who's paying the bandwidth bill for this fake and why? It doesn't seem like it's suffering at all from the/. effect. Maybe the webserver's running on quantum-optical hardware...
...a projectile that releases an electric charge on impact sounds like a better idea to me
I recently read somewhere about one of a few such products currently in development (sorry, can't give you links, I'm on my handheld right now. I bet you'd see it on defensetech.org though). It seemed like a really neat idea - take the shot out of a shotgun cartridge and put a piezoelectric generator in it. The force of the impact itself generates the electricity which is then discharged via contact into the victim. This effectively allows you to turn any existing shotgun into an electric-stun weapon that requires no batteries, wires, or conduits leading to the target from the wielder.
I've been stuck playing SNES, NES and Neo Geo emulators on my PSP for months now.
I find myself in the same situation. There just aren't any really good games in the PSP's library yet. Part of the problem, I believe, is that the titles available just aren't tailored to a "portable experience". A portable system really should be something you could whip out and play a for a few minutes while waiting in line at the bank, or for a bus to arrive.
But somehow, we wind up with titles like Wipeout Pure, which require us to sit through a ten second UMD load, and mash buttons through logo screens, confirm loading of user data, select game mode, and wait another ten seconds for a track to load. After that, you have a three minute stretch of white-knuckle racing that you can't pull your eyes from without ruining. The game itself is *great* sure. I agree with that. The only problem is, it's not portable.
My experience with other titles has been similar. It's gotten to the point where I've downloaded a copy of the Wipeout Pure UMD dump and put it on my memory stick just because it loads so much faster that way. The hacked/pirated version of Wipeout I have requires that a UMD be in the drive. Guess which UMD I use? The Wipeout Pure UMD. Ha Ha Ha.
Running emulators on the PSP makes it portable, for me. SNES games are just so pleasantly no-nonsense.
Do you have any idea who Michael Bay is??? He's going to shit on your childhood 10 times worse than Lucas could ever dream of. It's going to be Bad Boys 2 meets Transformers.
The screenplay is being co-written by the moron who brought us the bombs "The Core" and "Catwoman", so my guess is that John Rogers will be the one shitting all over our childhoods, and Michael Bay will simply be sculpting it into offensive shapes and taking pictures of the result.
I've read reports from The Business about what's likely to happen in the aftermath of a nuclear war, and let me tell you, it churned my stomach. The things I was expecting to happen never happened. The things I never imagined could happen would happen, and would have consequences far beyond what I could foresee.
Okay, you can't say that to a bunch of science-geeks and not actually give us any details! Please share some of the tastybits!
For small cliques, academics in US schools are also very competitive, but for all the wrong reasons. The competitiveness is often borne out of selfish and blinded-by-pride parents and arrogance of the students, which leaves the kids completely alienated in the long run.
...actually, I think the competitiveness abroad is also often borne out of selfish and blinded-by-pride parents and the arrogance of students. Maybe the only difference is that it's the consensus and not the minority.
In this country, there's a huge stigma attached to being good at math. If you are good at math, you're a nerd, where as all the cool kids suck at math, and are proud of that fact. Change the perceptions, and you'll go a long way toward improving the scores.
...academics in high-school are extremely competitive, with large numbers of students enrolled in afterschool study programs. It's actually a point of pride to be academically competent, and it's not unusual for ones' childrens' achievements to be the subject of local gossip, for better or worse, regardless of socioeconomic status.
Although it's too bad that you weren't able to visit the ocean depths due to budget constraints, I still envy you.
On that note though, why isn't there any rush to undersea tourism? The seabeds are certainly more interesting places than the areas immediately outside the atmosphere, aren't they? They're teeming with unusual lifeforms (much of which would seem to qualify for sci-fi blockbuster film fare), you get a longer stay, and you aren't exposed to radiation. I'm sure the physical requirements are less stringent as well, and I'd imagine that serving beer onboard wouldn't be entirely out of the question.
Personally, I'd rather stare out of a porthole into the maw of an angler than into the void of space. Well, at least for the number of dollars that would be involved. What exactly is the cost of an Alvin dive, anyways, and how would it compare to the projected cost of a flight on Virgin Galactic?
...really. Your reply contained hockey sticks, gay porn stars, and Jesus Christ on a unicycle. That's humor there.
...but bear in mind that like many buyers, I wasn't aware of the issues when I first made the purchase. My position is that of, "well, I already paid for it, so here's my opinion on the device over-all". And the truth is that it suits me just fine, despite the fact that my heart sank when it froze for the first time. Since a few months back though, I haven't had a single problem with it. I honestly don't know if the issues have since been resolved over at Rio.
That this alone should be reason for me to be sterilized makes me wonder how many people you must tell every day to not breed. Perhaps yours is a world inhabited by people of a much higher calibre than ours. If that's the case, then I envy you deeply. But seriously though, it was a funny read.
Set up XMMS to have a 2s pause between songs, and set up your playlist. Hit record on your MD recorder, hit play on XMMS, and walk away.
...but that's my point. It takes place in realtime, and involves creating a playlist to fit the MD, hitting record on one machine, play on another, and then waiting an hour. I've done it plenty of times, but I'm lazy and impatient, dammit, and so are a lot of people. When an alternative exists to select a bunch of files and hit "transfer", the ease-of-use and saveage-of-time make my lazy-happy-endorphin levels surge. Also, before someone mentions NetMD, I've never tried it so if you have any real-world stories regarding it do share them.
Is the same true for Nickel-Metal-Hydride batteries? I'm pretty sure that's what both of my MD players used. Either way, my typical usage habits were that I'd pick the player up out of its dock when I left for work, and drop it back in when I got home, with about two to three hours use in between, sometimes more.
I currently own a Japan-market Sharp MD-ST55 and a Sony MZ-E710. While I love the technology, it's really just become a matter of convenience. While the Karma has its problems, my MD players had battery issues which were far worse than those of the iPod. Within six months of purchase, the battery life on either of the MD players had dwindled down to less than an hour. Granted, I don't do the "correct" thing by letting them discharge all the way to zero-capacity, but I think with 30+ hour battery-life devices, it's unreasonable to expect someone to do so. Using them on my commutes, it's not like I'm going to keep track of how many hours I've been listening to music over the course of two weeks.
Even then MD was great, but I no longer have the patience to babysit an MD-deck and CD player to make compilations (I've never tried NetMD)....and then there's the matter of comparing 20gb of storage to 660MDs. While I'm very excited about HiMD technology, I can't see myself putting it to any use until HiMD players support MP3 playback.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll admit it. I had originally pirated "Dreamfall", for any of a number of contrived reasons. I loved it, and am still loving it. So when I opened up Steam one day to find it available for purchase, I immediately payed for it and eased my conscience. I get the feeling I'd do the same for a number of games. How is this different from just ordering the games from Amazon? To be honest, I really don't know. Maybe it's my resistance towards actually accumulating more physical junk.
Wow. Thanks for the information. This is why I love slashdot.
That's the thing - will simply regrowing the brain or causing new neurons to form actually have the effect of staving off senility? If neurons in certain pathways die, will having new neurons appear in random locations, not connected to anything, will that result in any improvement? What will your mind, your consciousness be like when 50% of the neurons within it are new ones you didn't have when you were born? While I suppose it would have beneficial effects on cognitive ability, I can't help but think it could also have some rather strange, unpredicted effects.
Okay, I realize that there is humor value in this, but I was actually speaking from experience. I went to go visit childhood friend's grandfather (our families are close) and at the age of 105, he really *does* think everyone and occasionally, some things, are stealing from him. It's gotten to the point where his children are afraid to visit him for fear that the accusations will come a rolling out. And this man in his earlier years was about the nicest fellow you could meet, spending pretty much all of his (earlier) retirement years working for charitable causes. It's a pretty unfortunate situation, and it scares the bejeesus out of me that I could wind up the same way.
Meaninglessly, unless we can determine the mechanisms of senility and treat/prevent them. Personally, I'd love to live forever, but only if I can be guaranteed to not become a crazy old coot who thinks his toothbrush is stealing money from his wallet while he sleeps.
OMG! That's not jelly! EEEEEEWWWWWW!
I find that these days, it's more likely to start with "wtf?" or "omglol".
...but exciting, definitely.
Imagine a system where multiple authors could contribute to a WIP screenplay, with a group of project leaders at the helm. A movie studio could purchase the rights to a project, and the contributors would donate the proceeds to charities and foundations of their choosing, divided as desired. In exchange, those so devoted and committed would receive rights to approve and nix studio decisions on visualisations, casting, and staffing (i.e no Uwe Boll), in addition to being able to sleep soundly at night, knowing that the works which inspired them will be preserved in spirit.
During the authoring and editing process, discussions much like those which are held on this very page could help resolve disputes or vagaries in the adaptation. Slashcode is great this way. You visit your personalized SlashScript homepage and see all of the adaptations-in-progess that you are interested in, posted by discussion topic and franchise. Click. Read. Participate. If you are so inclined, become a project contributor. If not, add your two cents to a particular issue.
So read the comments in this discusion.
Realize the potential we have collectively to produce works which will encourage future generations to pursue interests in computer sciences, physics, and freaky flights of fantasy. Let Keanu Reeves never be cast as an intelligent character again. Let terrible directors be dismissed, and idiotic screenplays be tossed in the rubbish. Let there never be another "I, Robot", "Alien 3", "Doom", "Resident Evil", or what may turn out to be a very bad X-Men 3.
The incentive for studios? Classics like 2001. Reduced price on screenplays. Favorable press for charitable donations.
WHO'S WITH ME?!? (I've never shouted on /. before)
A sudoku puzzle, when complete, contains more digits than it does when unsolved. Yet there is only one solution to a given sudoku puzzle. So the starting state, which contains far less information, implies a larger volume of information which is unique to that starting state. Thus you can express the outcome of 81 digits using only some small subset of it, and applying rules to retrieve the rest.
I'm a goddamn genius!
And I'm a computer programmer!
Every system I work on has been loaded with so many mods, filled with so many performance tweaks and hacks, had everything overclockable overclocked, that nothing I touch is stable anymore. Sometimes I wish I didn't know about any of this stuff just so that I wouldn't ruin my system and have to do an OS reinstall monthly. I'm a living testament to the dangers of knowledgability, or rather, the dangers of being a user that thinks he/she is knowledgable.
To all of the computers I've destroyed, I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to. I thought we were both having a good time... Until you died.
This device could benefit the different, the tubby, the nerdy, the pasty, the scrawny, the thick-spectacled, and yes, even the *perfectly normal*, nonviolent good kids who just want to buy a Pepsi without getting stared down, mocked, or threatened by hooligans at the door.
Please keep that in mind.
Like my former teenage self from years ago. Back then, I actually got slashed outside of a convenience store by a bunch of kids that always hung out there (Brooklyn, yo). Being of the pasty, unarmed, physically non-threatening nerd variety, I might actually have shopped *more* at a place that had one of these.
While it looks like a fake, and smells like a fake, and tastes like a fake, who's paying the bandwidth bill for this fake and why? It doesn't seem like it's suffering at all from the /. effect. Maybe the webserver's running on quantum-optical hardware...
I recently read somewhere about one of a few such products currently in development (sorry, can't give you links, I'm on my handheld right now. I bet you'd see it on defensetech.org though). It seemed like a really neat idea - take the shot out of a shotgun cartridge and put a piezoelectric generator in it. The force of the impact itself generates the electricity which is then discharged via contact into the victim. This effectively allows you to turn any existing shotgun into an electric-stun weapon that requires no batteries, wires, or conduits leading to the target from the wielder.
Just thought you'd like ta know.
I find myself in the same situation. There just aren't any really good games in the PSP's library yet. Part of the problem, I believe, is that the titles available just aren't tailored to a "portable experience". A portable system really should be something you could whip out and play a for a few minutes while waiting in line at the bank, or for a bus to arrive.
But somehow, we wind up with titles like Wipeout Pure, which require us to sit through a ten second UMD load, and mash buttons through logo screens, confirm loading of user data, select game mode, and wait another ten seconds for a track to load. After that, you have a three minute stretch of white-knuckle racing that you can't pull your eyes from without ruining. The game itself is *great* sure. I agree with that. The only problem is, it's not portable.
My experience with other titles has been similar. It's gotten to the point where I've downloaded a copy of the Wipeout Pure UMD dump and put it on my memory stick just because it loads so much faster that way. The hacked/pirated version of Wipeout I have requires that a UMD be in the drive. Guess which UMD I use? The Wipeout Pure UMD. Ha Ha Ha.
Running emulators on the PSP makes it portable, for me. SNES games are just so pleasantly no-nonsense.
The screenplay is being co-written by the moron who brought us the bombs "The Core" and "Catwoman", so my guess is that John Rogers will be the one shitting all over our childhoods, and Michael Bay will simply be sculpting it into offensive shapes and taking pictures of the result.
Okay, you can't say that to a bunch of science-geeks and not actually give us any details! Please share some of the tastybits!
On that note though, why isn't there any rush to undersea tourism? The seabeds are certainly more interesting places than the areas immediately outside the atmosphere, aren't they? They're teeming with unusual lifeforms (much of which would seem to qualify for sci-fi blockbuster film fare), you get a longer stay, and you aren't exposed to radiation. I'm sure the physical requirements are less stringent as well, and I'd imagine that serving beer onboard wouldn't be entirely out of the question.
Personally, I'd rather stare out of a porthole into the maw of an angler than into the void of space. Well, at least for the number of dollars that would be involved. What exactly is the cost of an Alvin dive, anyways, and how would it compare to the projected cost of a flight on Virgin Galactic?
...but bear in mind that like many buyers, I wasn't aware of the issues when I first made the purchase. My position is that of, "well, I already paid for it, so here's my opinion on the device over-all". And the truth is that it suits me just fine, despite the fact that my heart sank when it froze for the first time. Since a few months back though, I haven't had a single problem with it. I honestly don't know if the issues have since been resolved over at Rio.
That this alone should be reason for me to be sterilized makes me wonder how many people you must tell every day to not breed. Perhaps yours is a world inhabited by people of a much higher calibre than ours. If that's the case, then I envy you deeply. But seriously though, it was a funny read.
Is the same true for Nickel-Metal-Hydride batteries? I'm pretty sure that's what both of my MD players used. Either way, my typical usage habits were that I'd pick the player up out of its dock when I left for work, and drop it back in when I got home, with about two to three hours use in between, sometimes more.
Even then MD was great, but I no longer have the patience to babysit an MD-deck and CD player to make compilations (I've never tried NetMD). ...and then there's the matter of comparing 20gb of storage to 660MDs. While I'm very excited about HiMD technology, I can't see myself putting it to any use until HiMD players support MP3 playback.