I'm not worried about Big Brother...
on
NYT on RFID
·
· Score: 1
...at least he's your brother
I'm more worried about Joe Schmoe, who with a home-made or Chinese-manufactured scanner would be able to calculate your net worth at the very moment he passes you on the street. This is a hypothetical guy who would be able to magically divine that you were carrying a 40gb iPod, a top-of-the-line Thinkpad, a cameraphone, PDA, Coach wallet, Cartier watch, and mark you as the fattest target on the block even though you have none of these things in plain view.
Mobile-phone scanners have existed for the purposes of hijacking and cloning mobile phone numbers, so I can't see it taking very long for an intrepid, technically proficient miscreant to take advantage of this great new technology which identifies individual items.
Anyone who's spent a couple of years in NYC knows that you don't count your money out in the open or wave expensive things around in the air. Imagine if they put RFID tags in our paper currency. You'd be able to tell how much money someone was carrying, without their knowing it. Just the same, someone else would be able to peer into your wallet, and even know what brand your wallet is. Same said person would be able to walk down the block inconspicuously scanning the trunks of cars in the hopes of coming across a stash of goodies, and any packages left on doorsteps, any mailboxes he passes along the way. How scary is that?
Am I missing something? Is the idea that just about *every* consumer-goods-item will have an RFID tag?
It's about damned time someone designed a propulsion system based upon the female reproductive anatomy. "Today, we unveil the future of jet propulsion, the key to the successful design and implementation of reusable low-orbit passenger aircraft, the vaginal hyperorifice dri... uh... I mean, Linear Aerospike Thruster".
...I've never felt more informed in my life! Edumucation, here I come!
GAIN CONTROL - Gain Control of the transponder is done via TT&C commands to the Flux Control Attenuator (FCA) in the satellite. The FCA is used to set the incident flux density necessary to saturate each transponder (SFD).
1) dunk healthcare workers in 90% ethanol thrice daily. It will sanitize, sterilize, and blotto-ize.
2) autoclave healthcare workers following each procedure they are involved in. Life insurance policies may not be taken out by healthcare workers.
3) (this one is serious) There are little protective slips for just about every part of a healthcare worker's body. There are face masks, gowns, shoe-covers, latex gloves, hair nets, caps, and goggles. Why not require that all cellphones in use by on-the-clock healthcare workers be kept within little, sterile, porous pouches made of material like facemasks? They can be semitransparent and still sterile, disposable, usable, and inexpensive. And just like changing gloves, you can swap them out whenever you get blood, bile, saliva, urine, and/or semen on yourself (preferably not all at the same time).
How on earth can you be an industry leader when you haven't shown anything yet? Hell, I could claim "GrubCorp(tm) is an industry-leading global purveyor of anti-cancer drugs and massage oils." without having gotten off my lazy ass to do anything.
The statement, "Infinium Labs is an industry-leading global entertainment and interactive game company" simply states that they are both leading an industry, and that they are a global entertainment/interactive game company. It doesn't state that they are leading the global gaming industry, it could just be that they are leading *an* industry. Any industry. Pick one. Like elbow sharpening or lobster training. Oh, and they make games and have an employee in Namibia.:-)
I had no idea. All of my Mac-toting acquaintances seem to have keyboards that squeezed the inverted-T cursor keys under right-shift... are they just behind the times?
I think that even more impressive than the Bluetooth wireless wizardry is the fact that this new Apple keyboard finally has a separate island for INS/DEL/HOM/END/PUP/PDN and the cursor keys.
Huzzah! The future is here! Pack your bags and let's leave the past for a shiny new future where PC users can manipulate Apple devices via the text-entry slab for hours without so much as a single vulgar slur escaping from between their lips.
I agree with you, but I've been thinking about this for a short while and haven't been able to produce... well...
What would the *right* thing to do be? Not in the moral sense, but considering that anything which can be digitized is now capable of being freely distributed, laws or not, what kind of model would serve both the needs of the consumers and the artists?
Pardon me for my (sarcasm free, despite the looks of it) lack of peripheral fore-vision, but what do/. readers consider to be viable plans for dealing with the issue, and moving on into a hypothetical future where the RIAA ceases to exist (or retreats with its tail between its legs)? Would redistribution of music be completely legal?
The only parallel I can draw to this hypothetical future is the music/entertainment market in Hong Kong, where music *is* pirated day in and day out, and the artists make up for the losses by making paid, regular television appearances, starring in movies, advertising, and selling rights to their works to karaoke-disc publishers.
...console games of the pre-memory-card past have not been about storytelling, they were gruelling, punishing exercises in devotion and patience. Few had saves, and most were incredibly repetitive. There really should have been a reward at the end. The same expectation holds for PC games, but they have traditionally been more storytelling interactive experiences than console games. Of course, things have changed now, such that most (good) console games revolve around an intricate plot that deserves resolution, but think about it:
How many people played all the way through 100 ridiculously difficult levels in Zillion for the SMS?
How many people even finished Super Mario Brothers? Talk about repetitive, punishing, and unrewarding.
How many people finished any of the MegaMan games prior to battery-powered memory?
Point being that the endings of the old world of console games were much more important than those of PC games because you had to go through the entire thing in one sitting, performing nearly perfectly, for upwards of three hours, following god knows how many prior attempts that ended in failure. If there wasn't much of an ending, it made you want to toss the damned thing out the window.
This isn't to say that PC games were less important, but that the ability to save your progress and the general nature of PC games made the experience itself part of the reward.
Put it this way: Playing console games was like having sex with the added requirement of five hours of foreplay. If it didn't end happily, it was pretty annoying. Playing PC games was like... um... huh. I can't think of an analogy. Multiple orgasms maybe? Somebody help me out here.
Personally, I can't wait until Linux based devices have enough funding or enough wits about them to hire good industrial designers. It's all well and good if it screams tech savvy because of its underpinnings, but it's even better in terms of raising public awareness of alternatives and looking bad-ass in public if it screams with sex appeal. Imagine what it would do for Linux if a Linux-based PDA were to appear that looks as if it could have come from the studios at Apple?
I mean, Sony's Clies, while not the bestest looking devices in the world, are still certainly snazzy looking enough to warrant inquiries from passers-by and non-technically fluent peoples. The same went for Handspring's sexy but not all that useful Visor Edge.
Come on geeks, we can be smart, but we can be sexy too. Rinkydink textured ABS with ovoid buttons and felt-marker-script lettering doesn't do us any good. Go minimal. Go architectural. Go intelligent. That's what we represent, isn't it?
All we'd need is to dig a giant hole somewhere on the surface of the planet and have the space elevator keep pounding into it until mother Earth achieves a bloody-screaming orgasm, at which point all of our teeth would shatter.
Toss out a couple of kooky ideas. IANAS(cientist), IANAE(ngineer), but I am fairly kooky.
1) How about a large array of solar arrays in orbit above the planet. They could soak up pure sunlight, and fire it down to the earth in the form of a laser at ground-bound solar arrays waiting for bursts of light. Of course there would be drawbacks: Birds flying through the beams would be vaporised, as well as any aircraft which accidentally strayed off course, and there's always the chance that something might hit a satellite, shifting its aim to target a busload of nuns.
2) Combine power generation with them space elevators we keep hearing about. Aren't those supposed to generate some huge amount of static electricity? You know, giant metallic strand kilometers in length, raking the sky all the way up to zero atmosphere... Why not harness it? I have no idea how we'd get the power back down to the ground, but hey. I'm just a kook.
3) Um... geothermal taps at active volcanoes? Not necessarily a *smart* investment, but it's hot, and we know how to get electricity from hot dirt.
4) Electroactive polymers. If we can find a way to manufacture these little pads inexpensively, then why not have them running under sidewalks, highways, stairs, bowling alleys, basketball courts, train tracks, treadmills, carpets (especially at your local all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet)... They *have* to be pretty resilient if the military is planning to stick them in troops' boots. Every time a car rolls by or a pudgy fellow trundles over to get a fifth bowl of kung-pao chicken, you'd be getting something out of it.
5) Put great big magnets on top of cars, and run large coils of wire around all highways. Okay, that was stupid.
6) Attach generators to doors. All doors. Turnstyles.
7) If only there were a way to safely transmit power. Wouldn't it be great to have all of the icky nuclear power plants to the moon and just have them send the energy home? Maybe something with quantum-entangled pairs of stuff? Like have one member on the moon being jiggled like a maraca by a nuclear furnace and the other half on Earth having its quantum-jiggles somehow harnessed for its energy?
I used to feel the way you did too, until I played Fallout (okay, I played Ultima 6 and loved it too, but that was after I played Fallout, when I found it in a bargain bin).
Fallout had this magical way of making you feel like you were in control, without making the consequences of your actions so bland and meaningless that you felt the control wasn't worth anything. Almost everything you did was reflected in the events around you, the way people spoke to you, and the game felt like a one-size-fits-all sock. No matter how bad your feet smelled or how deformed your toes were, it just fit.
Your dialogue options varied depending on your skills and your stats. If you were highly intelligent, you could talk circles around people. If you reduced your Int stat to one, your dialogue options would be reduced to "Ungh", "Gah", "Hrrrngh", and "Die".
If you ran around killing children in towns, you'd be labelled a childkiller, and townspeople hundreds of miles away would have heard about you and think you were a freak. You could be a hero, a slut, a pornstar, and get what you want via good or evil, or sleeping with the mobster's wife. But none of it felt meaningless because for everything you could possibly do, the developers had thousands of lines of scripted dialogue waiting to accommodate your actions.
Of course, most of the people I've gotten to play it have given up because of the game's immensely slow startup into the story, but once you're in, you'll love it.
I was a terrible procrastinator in college as well. I could ace exams if I studied, but it was just absolutely awful trying to manage my time.
a. social proof, i.e. studying with a bunch of people
I personally found this to be very helpful. I used to study by myself, but I never managed very high productivity levels, and half the time, I'd wind up quitting half-way to go home and watch TV. What I wound up doing was just introducing myself to random people in my classes who seemed like I'd get along with them, and who seemed like they would be willing to work hard.
We arranged tri-weekly study sessions, where we'd go over the class notes to get a better grip on what the lunatic Russian algorithmatician was talking about, and then tackle the homework.
Now the reason this helps, is that it creates accountability. Letting yourself down is much easier than letting someone else down. If you're studying alone and you ditch to go play Warcraft, you don't feel so bad. On the other hand, if you know two other people are sitting there, expecting you to participate, it's much, much, much harder to just take off for frivolous reasons (and in college, there are millions of frivolous reasons to give up in the middle of a problem set). Similarly, the time spent is more productive (usually), because you're not as likely to sit there and pick your belly button if someone is sitting across from you, working with you, periodically looking at you, and asking questions.
Questions. Those are important too. Discussion and dialogue are great hooks for keeping your mind on the task at hand. There were plenty of times when noone in the group had any idea what the correct interpretations of our professor's babblings were. We were dumbfounded at some of the things he said, and joked about it, but that's the point. Had I been by myself, I would have dropped that subject, and moved on to the next line in my class-notes. To this end, I think it's a good idea to try and find people who are approximately about as smart as you are. People who are significantly smarter are not likely to want to spend as much time as you would want in study sessions (a generalization, but I did notice that on the occasions when someone much brighter joined the group, they'd take off early). Similarly, keep stupid folks out of the group, because they will hold you back, lingering at length on concepts you don't feel like you need to spend time on. Unless they're hot, in which case, you make sure you grab that back room in the library and stay there all damn night until she can speak in binary.
...and after all that, years and years after graduating from college, I was finally diagnosed with adult ADD. Hah!
Hey, I'll help and try to make it socially unacceptable, but how about this as an interesting strategy (note that I have absolutely no idea how it could be implemented):
Take SUVs out of music videos and television shows.
Why not? The kings of bling would still have their Italian gear, Ferraris,Bentleys, and a plethora of ways to illustrate the bigness of their lives. What I'd hope is that by removing them from depictions of cool, teenagers and lesser-minded adults would be less inclined to dream of rolling down the street in a Cadillac Escalade with twenty-four inch chromed rims. We're sheep. We want them because we want to image-engineer ourselves to include that essence of power, excess, and blatant disregard for practical concerns.
Oh, and as for that other demographic comprised of those who regularly go through their video archives of "Dawson's Creek" and "The Gilmore Girls", sorry. You'll have to lose your SUVs too.
Strangely enough, it doesn't seem like it wobbles. I'm not sure what they did with the suspension, maybe it's just that all of the weight is centered very, very, very close to the ground, but from the videos, it seemed like the darn thing stuck to the ground like glue while the vintage coupe which took the next lap lifted its side off of the ground at half the speed and twice the wheelbase. I'm impressed.
I'm all for the future. Science is my friend, and when it cooks, I'll eat. When it drives, I'll ride shotgun. If buying one of these means putting one more penny in Science's piggy-bank, one more penny towards getting us to a sci-fi future, then damn, I'll do it.
If I become crippled after a T-collision with an SUV, then god-damn, I sure as hell hope that my loss leads to further sentiments against large, gas guzzling tanks being driven by teenagers who neither sport, nor utilize their monster's two billion goddamn cubic feet of space for anything other than subwoofers and amps. Let SUVs and pickups be for the people who need 'em. Anyone who can't prove that the only things they pack into their cavernous cargo-beds aren't their egos and pretenses shouldn't be driving ten-ton war-chariots.
...and employ thousands of people to beautify our cities, construct and decorate centers for the arts, play state-funded musical acts, and whatnot. In addition to providing people with jobs, we'd make our cities nicer places to live, and encourage both potential artists of all types as well as increase consumption and interest in the arts (of all types).
In my little dream, we'd wind up with a world where people have no need for those jobs taken over by automation, because they'd be producing things which by their very nature aren't able to be mass-produced. It would be a renaissance of handcrafts and appreciation for locally-produced goods, creating a sub-economy which in a way mimics the pre-industrial local economies of old.
By employing artists to work on public projects, such as murals and park sculptures and mosaics, maybe we'd be able to foster a society which takes pride in the things which surround them, and work to preserve the works on the walls, instead of defacing them. "Hey, whaddaya know. Jim Jones' kid from down the block worked on that." Many, many parts of the streets, the municipal garages, the subway stations and the parks, would be testaments to the work done by people from your neighborhood.
Maybe, just maybe, we'd wind up saving money then on sanitation costs, repair and public maintenance costs... Land values everywhere would rise, community and civic pride would return, and on that road trip to another city, you'd actually be able to easily find nifty souvenirs that aren't pumped out of a factory in China. What a world it would be! An anti-industrial movement, not fighting the industry, just filling the void automation and industrialization create, filling it in with a renewed interest in all of the things that simply cannot (or should not) be mass-produced by automatons.
I started up Steam when I heard the news, selected the second HL2 teaser video, and was honestly expecting to wait twenty minutes for a 640x480 movie to appear in a little window. I run to the bathroom to let loose the flood from my bladder, and by the time I get back, there's full-screen-video playing, without compression artifacts, and it really looked like... like... the game. Sharp polygons and all. What format was it in?
Although that does seem like it'll make for a nice patch, there are some issues which I feel need to be addressed in order to make Real Life a more enjoyable experience for its player-base.
Deal with griefers more harshly. Ban 'em. Kick 'em. Boot 'em. Take away their loot. I'm pretty tired of walking around town and hearing racist remarks, having people get in my way just to be in the way, sauntering across the street when there's a line of traffic waiting to pass, and PK-ing in no-PK-zones. .
Object persistence. It looks like the way the game works now, dropped objects have infinite persistence. Since dropping objects like candy wrappers and soda cans is not prohibited in-game, and since players are obviously too stupid and lazy to pick up after themselves, I'd like to suggest that dropped objects expire after an hour or so and are removed from the system. .
Reduce the setting for "caloric value" of edibles. Come on, I'm not fat, but I'd sure like to eat pie three times a day. Obesity is a problem, and that wallhack ain't gonna be much fun if everyone on the planet weighs 300lbs. .
Theme shards. Separate worlds for different kinds of players. Let there be a PK world, and a non-PK world. Let the thieves and killers have their own bloody playground. Let there be a "free love" shard, where clothing is banned (you can leave it behind in your home shard). Let there be a nerd-shard, where those of lower intellects fear to tread because Starfleet uniforms are just too scary that way. .
Add drops from other mobs. Really. I want to go out, find a rat, stomp on it for a while, and retrieve from its carcass six gold pieces, a silver ring, and a pair of Prada boots.
It would be fantastic if they could strike up a deal with the proper-owners of arcade boards and titles to set up a system where the Phantom runs a modified version of MAME, and Inifinium Labs' networks provide on-request ROMs to subscribers. Every time you hit "insert quarter", you get charged a nickel. Two cents go to the holder of the copyright, two to Infinium Labs, and one cent to PETA (I just threw that last one in for fun).
It'd be like having an infinitely large arcade in your home, and you wouldn't be doing it illegally. The people who wrote the software will be reimbursed, possibly even twenty five years after they stopped producing that game.
Also, imagine if they implemented something along the lines of Kaillera. You could team up with your kid brother from a thousand miles away to play NARC together, just like you did in high school, at the corner arcade.
I feel pretty much the same way. I've been in the industry and absolutely inundated with marketing-speak, advertisements, and all manner of evangelical whatnot, but it never seemed like anyone was attempting to sell a well-defined strategy. No matter the source, it seemed that the "monolithic" aspect of their sales-push was so pervasive as to make all of the information presented seem hokey.
In the end, that's fine with me. I'll not support any switch to a.Net framework. Hokey is hokey. If they maintain this approach with promises of e-panaceas and superbright futures, then it will only encourage the skeptics (largely, "us") to stand their ground.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm more worried about Joe Schmoe, who with a home-made or Chinese-manufactured scanner would be able to calculate your net worth at the very moment he passes you on the street. This is a hypothetical guy who would be able to magically divine that you were carrying a 40gb iPod, a top-of-the-line Thinkpad, a cameraphone, PDA, Coach wallet, Cartier watch, and mark you as the fattest target on the block even though you have none of these things in plain view.
Mobile-phone scanners have existed for the purposes of hijacking and cloning mobile phone numbers, so I can't see it taking very long for an intrepid, technically proficient miscreant to take advantage of this great new technology which identifies individual items.
Anyone who's spent a couple of years in NYC knows that you don't count your money out in the open or wave expensive things around in the air. Imagine if they put RFID tags in our paper currency. You'd be able to tell how much money someone was carrying, without their knowing it. Just the same, someone else would be able to peer into your wallet, and even know what brand your wallet is. Same said person would be able to walk down the block inconspicuously scanning the trunks of cars in the hopes of coming across a stash of goodies, and any packages left on doorsteps, any mailboxes he passes along the way. How scary is that?
Am I missing something? Is the idea that just about *every* consumer-goods-item will have an RFID tag?
It's about damned time someone designed a propulsion system based upon the female reproductive anatomy.
"Today, we unveil the future of jet propulsion, the key to the successful design and implementation of reusable low-orbit passenger aircraft, the vaginal hyperorifice dri... uh... I mean, Linear Aerospike Thruster".
Wowzers!
As do my lobsters continually get dulled.
1) dunk healthcare workers in 90% ethanol thrice daily. It will sanitize, sterilize, and blotto-ize.
2) autoclave healthcare workers following each procedure they are involved in. Life insurance policies may not be taken out by healthcare workers.
3) (this one is serious) There are little protective slips for just about every part of a healthcare worker's body. There are face masks, gowns, shoe-covers, latex gloves, hair nets, caps, and goggles. Why not require that all cellphones in use by on-the-clock healthcare workers be kept within little, sterile, porous pouches made of material like facemasks? They can be semitransparent and still sterile, disposable, usable, and inexpensive. And just like changing gloves, you can swap them out whenever you get blood, bile, saliva, urine, and/or semen on yourself (preferably not all at the same time).
The statement, "Infinium Labs is an industry-leading global entertainment and interactive game company" simply states that they are both leading an industry, and that they are a global entertainment/interactive game company. It doesn't state that they are leading the global gaming industry, it could just be that they are leading *an* industry. Any industry. Pick one. Like elbow sharpening or lobster training. Oh, and they make games and have an employee in Namibia. :-)
I had no idea. All of my Mac-toting acquaintances seem to have keyboards that squeezed the inverted-T cursor keys under right-shift... are they just behind the times?
Huzzah! The future is here! Pack your bags and let's leave the past for a shiny new future where PC users can manipulate Apple devices via the text-entry slab for hours without so much as a single vulgar slur escaping from between their lips.
Probably not until after you tried to wipe it off the floor.
What would the *right* thing to do be? Not in the moral sense, but considering that anything which can be digitized is now capable of being freely distributed, laws or not, what kind of model would serve both the needs of the consumers and the artists?
Pardon me for my (sarcasm free, despite the looks of it) lack of peripheral fore-vision, but what do /. readers consider to be viable plans for dealing with the issue, and moving on into a hypothetical future where the RIAA ceases to exist (or retreats with its tail between its legs)? Would redistribution of music be completely legal?
The only parallel I can draw to this hypothetical future is the music/entertainment market in Hong Kong, where music *is* pirated day in and day out, and the artists make up for the losses by making paid, regular television appearances, starring in movies, advertising, and selling rights to their works to karaoke-disc publishers.
Help me out here.
...with a nice bouquet of flowers.
I find this at once sweet, silly, and entertaining. Still, maybe he'll visit a monument to Asimov one day and bring even nicer flowers.
- How many people played all the way through 100 ridiculously difficult levels in Zillion for the SMS?
- How many people even finished Super Mario Brothers? Talk about repetitive, punishing, and unrewarding.
- How many people finished any of the MegaMan games prior to battery-powered memory?
Point being that the endings of the old world of console games were much more important than those of PC games because you had to go through the entire thing in one sitting, performing nearly perfectly, for upwards of three hours, following god knows how many prior attempts that ended in failure. If there wasn't much of an ending, it made you want to toss the damned thing out the window.This isn't to say that PC games were less important, but that the ability to save your progress and the general nature of PC games made the experience itself part of the reward.
Put it this way: Playing console games was like having sex with the added requirement of five hours of foreplay. If it didn't end happily, it was pretty annoying. Playing PC games was like... um... huh. I can't think of an analogy. Multiple orgasms maybe? Somebody help me out here.
I mean, Sony's Clies, while not the bestest looking devices in the world, are still certainly snazzy looking enough to warrant inquiries from passers-by and non-technically fluent peoples. The same went for Handspring's sexy but not all that useful Visor Edge.
Come on geeks, we can be smart, but we can be sexy too. Rinkydink textured ABS with ovoid buttons and felt-marker-script lettering doesn't do us any good. Go minimal. Go architectural. Go intelligent. That's what we represent, isn't it?
All we'd need is to dig a giant hole somewhere on the surface of the planet and have the space elevator keep pounding into it until mother Earth achieves a bloody-screaming orgasm, at which point all of our teeth would shatter.
1) How about a large array of solar arrays in orbit above the planet. They could soak up pure sunlight, and fire it down to the earth in the form of a laser at ground-bound solar arrays waiting for bursts of light. Of course there would be drawbacks: Birds flying through the beams would be vaporised, as well as any aircraft which accidentally strayed off course, and there's always the chance that something might hit a satellite, shifting its aim to target a busload of nuns.
2) Combine power generation with them space elevators we keep hearing about. Aren't those supposed to generate some huge amount of static electricity? You know, giant metallic strand kilometers in length, raking the sky all the way up to zero atmosphere... Why not harness it? I have no idea how we'd get the power back down to the ground, but hey. I'm just a kook.
3) Um... geothermal taps at active volcanoes? Not necessarily a *smart* investment, but it's hot, and we know how to get electricity from hot dirt.
4) Electroactive polymers. If we can find a way to manufacture these little pads inexpensively, then why not have them running under sidewalks, highways, stairs, bowling alleys, basketball courts, train tracks, treadmills, carpets (especially at your local all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet)... They *have* to be pretty resilient if the military is planning to stick them in troops' boots. Every time a car rolls by or a pudgy fellow trundles over to get a fifth bowl of kung-pao chicken, you'd be getting something out of it.
5) Put great big magnets on top of cars, and run large coils of wire around all highways. Okay, that was stupid.
6) Attach generators to doors. All doors. Turnstyles.
7) If only there were a way to safely transmit power. Wouldn't it be great to have all of the icky nuclear power plants to the moon and just have them send the energy home? Maybe something with quantum-entangled pairs of stuff? Like have one member on the moon being jiggled like a maraca by a nuclear furnace and the other half on Earth having its quantum-jiggles somehow harnessed for its energy?
Probably not, huh?
Your dialogue options varied depending on your skills and your stats. If you were highly intelligent, you could talk circles around people. If you reduced your Int stat to one, your dialogue options would be reduced to "Ungh", "Gah", "Hrrrngh", and "Die".
If you ran around killing children in towns, you'd be labelled a childkiller, and townspeople hundreds of miles away would have heard about you and think you were a freak. You could be a hero, a slut, a pornstar, and get what you want via good or evil, or sleeping with the mobster's wife. But none of it felt meaningless because for everything you could possibly do, the developers had thousands of lines of scripted dialogue waiting to accommodate your actions.
Of course, most of the people I've gotten to play it have given up because of the game's immensely slow startup into the story, but once you're in, you'll love it.
We arranged tri-weekly study sessions, where we'd go over the class notes to get a better grip on what the lunatic Russian algorithmatician was talking about, and then tackle the homework.
Now the reason this helps, is that it creates accountability. Letting yourself down is much easier than letting someone else down. If you're studying alone and you ditch to go play Warcraft, you don't feel so bad. On the other hand, if you know two other people are sitting there, expecting you to participate, it's much, much, much harder to just take off for frivolous reasons (and in college, there are millions of frivolous reasons to give up in the middle of a problem set). Similarly, the time spent is more productive (usually), because you're not as likely to sit there and pick your belly button if someone is sitting across from you, working with you, periodically looking at you, and asking questions.
Questions. Those are important too. Discussion and dialogue are great hooks for keeping your mind on the task at hand. There were plenty of times when noone in the group had any idea what the correct interpretations of our professor's babblings were. We were dumbfounded at some of the things he said, and joked about it, but that's the point. Had I been by myself, I would have dropped that subject, and moved on to the next line in my class-notes. To this end, I think it's a good idea to try and find people who are approximately about as smart as you are. People who are significantly smarter are not likely to want to spend as much time as you would want in study sessions (a generalization, but I did notice that on the occasions when someone much brighter joined the group, they'd take off early). Similarly, keep stupid folks out of the group, because they will hold you back, lingering at length on concepts you don't feel like you need to spend time on. Unless they're hot, in which case, you make sure you grab that back room in the library and stay there all damn night until she can speak in binary.
...and after all that, years and years after graduating from college, I was finally diagnosed with adult ADD. Hah!
Take SUVs out of music videos and television shows.
Why not? The kings of bling would still have their Italian gear, Ferraris, Bentleys, and a plethora of ways to illustrate the bigness of their lives. What I'd hope is that by removing them from depictions of cool, teenagers and lesser-minded adults would be less inclined to dream of rolling down the street in a Cadillac Escalade with twenty-four inch chromed rims. We're sheep. We want them because we want to image-engineer ourselves to include that essence of power, excess, and blatant disregard for practical concerns.
Oh, and as for that other demographic comprised of those who regularly go through their video archives of "Dawson's Creek" and "The Gilmore Girls", sorry. You'll have to lose your SUVs too.
I'm all for the future. Science is my friend, and when it cooks, I'll eat. When it drives, I'll ride shotgun. If buying one of these means putting one more penny in Science's piggy-bank, one more penny towards getting us to a sci-fi future, then damn, I'll do it.
If I become crippled after a T-collision with an SUV, then god-damn, I sure as hell hope that my loss leads to further sentiments against large, gas guzzling tanks being driven by teenagers who neither sport, nor utilize their monster's two billion goddamn cubic feet of space for anything other than subwoofers and amps. Let SUVs and pickups be for the people who need 'em. Anyone who can't prove that the only things they pack into their cavernous cargo-beds aren't their egos and pretenses shouldn't be driving ten-ton war-chariots.
In my little dream, we'd wind up with a world where people have no need for those jobs taken over by automation, because they'd be producing things which by their very nature aren't able to be mass-produced. It would be a renaissance of handcrafts and appreciation for locally-produced goods, creating a sub-economy which in a way mimics the pre-industrial local economies of old.
By employing artists to work on public projects, such as murals and park sculptures and mosaics, maybe we'd be able to foster a society which takes pride in the things which surround them, and work to preserve the works on the walls, instead of defacing them. "Hey, whaddaya know. Jim Jones' kid from down the block worked on that." Many, many parts of the streets, the municipal garages, the subway stations and the parks, would be testaments to the work done by people from your neighborhood.
Maybe, just maybe, we'd wind up saving money then on sanitation costs, repair and public maintenance costs... Land values everywhere would rise, community and civic pride would return, and on that road trip to another city, you'd actually be able to easily find nifty souvenirs that aren't pumped out of a factory in China. What a world it would be! An anti-industrial movement, not fighting the industry, just filling the void automation and industrialization create, filling it in with a renewed interest in all of the things that simply cannot (or should not) be mass-produced by automatons.
Just a dream. A nice little dream.
I started up Steam when I heard the news, selected the second HL2 teaser video, and was honestly expecting to wait twenty minutes for a 640x480 movie to appear in a little window. I run to the bathroom to let loose the flood from my bladder, and by the time I get back, there's full-screen-video playing, without compression artifacts, and it really looked like... like... the game. Sharp polygons and all. What format was it in?
- Deal with griefers more harshly. Ban 'em. Kick 'em. Boot 'em. Take away their loot. I'm pretty tired of walking around town and hearing racist remarks, having people get in my way just to be in the way, sauntering across the street when there's a line of traffic waiting to pass, and PK-ing in no-PK-zones.
- Object persistence. It looks like the way the game works now, dropped objects have infinite persistence. Since dropping objects like candy wrappers and soda cans is not prohibited in-game, and since players are obviously too stupid and lazy to pick up after themselves, I'd like to suggest that dropped objects expire after an hour or so and are removed from the system.
- Reduce the setting for "caloric value" of edibles. Come on, I'm not fat, but I'd sure like to eat pie three times a day. Obesity is a problem, and that wallhack ain't gonna be much fun if everyone on the planet weighs 300lbs.
- Theme shards. Separate worlds for different kinds of players. Let there be a PK world, and a non-PK world. Let the thieves and killers have their own bloody playground. Let there be a "free love" shard, where clothing is banned (you can leave it behind in your home shard). Let there be a nerd-shard, where those of lower intellects fear to tread because Starfleet uniforms are just too scary that way.
- Add drops from other mobs. Really. I want to go out, find a rat, stomp on it for a while, and retrieve from its carcass six gold pieces, a silver ring, and a pair of Prada boots.
That's about it. Is that asking too much?.
.
.
.
It would be fantastic if they could strike up a deal with the proper-owners of arcade boards and titles to set up a system where the Phantom runs a modified version of MAME, and Inifinium Labs' networks provide on-request ROMs to subscribers. Every time you hit "insert quarter", you get charged a nickel. Two cents go to the holder of the copyright, two to Infinium Labs, and one cent to PETA (I just threw that last one in for fun).
It'd be like having an infinitely large arcade in your home, and you wouldn't be doing it illegally. The people who wrote the software will be reimbursed, possibly even twenty five years after they stopped producing that game.
Also, imagine if they implemented something along the lines of Kaillera. You could team up with your kid brother from a thousand miles away to play NARC together, just like you did in high school, at the corner arcade.
In the end, that's fine with me. I'll not support any switch to a .Net framework. Hokey is hokey. If they maintain this approach with promises of e-panaceas and superbright futures, then it will only encourage the skeptics (largely, "us") to stand their ground.