Another little nigle; if the earth were a snowball a mere 2000 years ago, don't you think the egyptians and the chinese would've at least mentioned it? Or at least worn warmer clothes?
Snowball earth seems very shaky to me...not in the least due to the geological evidence, but also because I don't see how exactly the warming up process would happen.
Considering what this US administartion has done to even undeniable scientific evidence, how they retroactively redact their statements which even have been made part of the public record (we never said Iraq had WMD's/we never said 'stay the course'), how they lie about funding and success of their own programs (no child left behind, katrina victims), etc etc etc, my answer would be 'yes'; most of what comes out of this government's PR orifice is already packaged as propaganda. They don't need yet another propaganda filter; they spend enough public money on spin already.
"Get your news from multiple and diverse news outlets and any reasonably intelligent person can sort out the bullshit from the facts and get a general idea of what the real truth happens to be."
The problem with that is that mutliple and diverse newssources are getting scarce. Nearly all of the news in the US in the form of radio, print and television is in the hands of about five people. Five!
And the news out of Iraq? There are now only 9 (NINE!!!!!) accredited reporters in Iraq. There used to be around 250 (embedded and not). And those nine are pretty much confined to the green zone.
Without relying on on-the-ground bloggers, the only thing coming out of Iraq is already pretty much US propaganda if you rely on US print, radio and tv.
Which were they? The reg tweaks I found did jack shit, as did the backing up of those two activation files. And how do you figure it's the hardware detection which hoses up that operation?
I'm not trying to be sarcastic or anything: I'm genuinely curious.
Oh yeah? I had a motherboard which blew it's USB connections and an PCI slot. So I bought another motherboard and switched everything (cpu, ram, HDD etc). Good luck doing that; not only do you have to re-activate, you have to fscking reinstall windows.
Why? Because of that MS no-new-hardware-allowed rule. Bastards. A new install of windows and other installed programs and settings takes/days/ to get fully done. Sure, I'd done some searching on changing a mobo with xp, but none of the tricks which would have stopped a total reinstall worked properly.
Microsoft owes me two days pay due to their 'anti-piracy'measures. Appart from the idiocy of equating new hardware with piracy, lets talk about an OS where you have to perform a total reinstall when you change your motherboard...that's just insane.
It's been in the cards for a while...the idea isn't new (hell, even I've discussed it on- and offline many a time). How they could get a patent on this is beyond me, for all the examples in books, magazines and on the 'net.
Don't get me wrong, Oblivion is a great game with great looks and some cool gameplay...but it's basically three different dungeons (cave, ruin and other ruin) and three different cities copy/pated and strewn across a map. Morrowind had a much greater sense of being a large world with the cites actualy having different vibes and the landscape changing as you went along. Oblivion doesn't do that as well as morrowind does.
Man, that would be cool...Morrowind in the Oblivion engine:P
Especially since the system, whilst it will have some quite interesting applications and the research will yield interesting results, can't work. A computer cannot distinguish between a fact and a lie told as fact...garbage in, and all that.
Let me rephrase that with an example:
'I am ten years old' and 'I am twenty years old'. Which is fact, which is lie? Better yet: 'we believe Iraq has WMD' versus 'we beleive Iraq has no WMD'. No matter what algorythms or heuristics you throw at this, all a computer at most can tell you is 'sometimes when used in conjunction with this phrase, the statement is false'...but that helps you IN NO WAY, because it means the statement can also be true...the indicator means nothing...you get as many false positives as false negatives...hell, even a ratio would be meaningless in intelligence gathering.
That's only true if you fill the solids...if you use manifolds (a 'shell' of voxels...which is what polygons approach when their size -> size of voxel:) ) you're essentially doing a compression of information. Sure, if the polygon approaches the size of a polygon, you loose the advantage (as a poly is defined by three vertexes and a voxel is essentially one vertex/point in space), but when you can define that crate (a standard spatial device used in games:P) using planes, you're much better off with a polygon.
The only thing voxels would be better at is ground deformation, as it then becomes a huge particle physics simulation. But that's insane as the computations are off the hook (and even storing data for statics is three orders of magnitude greater because you're defining a volume per point [nxnxn!] instead of using planes).
I don't live in the US, but even I can see that most news stations are firmly pro Bush. How else do you explain the free passes and non-quetsions that get askled of him. Compare the fallout the press gives based on importance of the subject matter: a blowjob and a war. If a false reason for war (and going all Stalin-esque with respect to secret police/torture/wiretapping) gets less attention than a blowjob, then you can pretty much say the press favours the latter side, dontchathink?
Put it like this: a fair, balanced and neutral press in a 'free' country should roast an elected official who condones torture and the wiretapping of it's citizens (or, come to that, the forcing thruogh of legislation without getting the people who vote on it to read said legislature). That didn't happen.
WTF does tha have to do with anything? MS and EA actively promote modding too (XNA, mechwarrior code opensourced). What they do not promote (and neither do Valve and EPIC) is stealing someone else's hard work (universe, unit designs etc) and using that as the basis for your game. Shit, these guys are really dumb to not expect being taken down; the mod world know that if you mod using someone elses IP, they will stop you.
If, however, you create a mod with you own ideas, universe, units etc, no-one will stop you.
Because Bungie might want to create a Halo RTS of their own (Halo was originally designed to be a RTS, only they found their design worked better as an FPS)? If the mod sucks, a Halo RTS has been tainted in the public eye, and if the mod roicks, why buy a Bungie made Halo RTS? That's why Bungie/MS are putting a stop to this project.
Furthermore, the team behind the mod KNEW this could happen. Everyone who steals ideas know it can and does happen. Especially in the mod scene; you've all heard the stories about the DBZ/StarWars/Trekkie mods which got stopped. They knew the risks, took the risk, and now they're whining. They should develop their own IP.
Red vs Blue is so not a good example to put here. It's machinima based off the engine; you watch a movie. It's not a game you play. It's not something a potential Bungie Halo RTS has to win market share from. And even the Halo movie won't have anything to win back from Red vs Blue, as they are totally different things. RvB is something so far removed from the Halo franchise that of course it gets left alone...it's not threatening/infringing in any way to what Bungie is trying to sell.
Yeah...and most of them are original IP, made by the modders, not ripped off from a popular franchise because the modders were to lame to think up their own stuff.
"Because its assumed nobody will care -- as is the case with "normal" 3D video game vendors like ID Software."
Again, only if it's original IP: CounterStrike was an original mod...it did not steal the environment from, say, Blade Runner. Same for ActionQuake, Team Fortress etc etc etc.
"Nobody cares" only happens if it's original IP (and if it's good, people will care and offer you a job...look at CS, Team Fortress and Portal). People care when you're ripping them off.
Now, of course, if there were a decent copyright law like there used to be in the old days, in a decade or so the limited monopoly granted by copyright would revert back to the public domain and everyone and his dog could create their own stuff based on a setting they have grown up on/with. Sadlly that isn't the case anymore.
Nice snark...unfortunately, it's totally besides the point. As the GP post about HL and CounterStrike.
It's an intellectual property thing; CS was a thing the makers dreamt up themselves...totally their own material. Many mods are, and very few mods based off someone elses IP doesn't get stopped. This Halo RTS thing is a bunch of modders too lazy/uncreative to think up their own IP, thus they nick someone elses and use that for their mod. All well and cool, but if Bungie wants to create their own Halo RTS, they have this thing munching at their market. Obviously they don't want that....they thought up the whole universe, so they get to play with it and make sure it isn't tarnished by a crap mod or a great mod takes away some of the market of their Halo RTS game (if ever they decide to make one).
Now, as copyright once worked, this would be a good thing for the creator (Bungie), as they'd get to enjoy the fruits of their labour (money from what they created/designed/thought up) AND it would be ok for the community because after a limited time the universe would end up in public space, so everyone who grew up on Halo could then play around with it.
However, that process has been circumvented by Disney; the legislation is now such that if I see a movie now (or even one the day I was born!), I will never be allowed to play with that universe, as the copyright won't expire for years (until the authors death+25 years or some such rubish...). Longer than a lifetime is per definition not a 'limited time'.
But in the end, that is not a reason to throw out the baby with the bathwater: the modders will just have to think up their own IP (and thank god....I'm sick of the Flood).
You know, I've thought about this too...but it's nothing some fourrier analysis wouldn't solve quite easily. But I haven't heard anything about a dedicated fourier analysis chip/dsp in the Revolution, which would we an obvious choice to include in the hardware, if only for user input decoding. Maybe that's what the physics chip is for?
Ain't that the truth. A friend of mine set up some 'xbox parties'; with a couple of beamers, about twenty people would have fun playing Halo2 to start with. But every one of those parties has ended with everyone playing some game or other on the two gamecubes. Nintendo knows multiplayer gaming fun.
Like checking the A: drive EVERY SINGLE TIME that damn box comes up (most used when installing drivers, but also on other occasions). That's one of the most annoying pieces of cruft I've ever come across...especially in this day and age of bootfromcd/flashdrives/etc.
How hard can it be to code it so it will only check the a: drive after you actually tell it to look there for drivers?!?!?!?
That, and leaving in the ability for installers to install to a coded location you cannot change. That's not just annoying as hell, but REALLY fucked up.
I only kinda agree; the fact is there's very little innovation going on, merely a rehash of what';s been done before. How is this helping the cutting edge of technology, which is NASA's implied mandate ever since they helped develop the tech for ICBM's?
Now Lockheed Martin is getting big bucks to develop a rocket with a capsule to land on the moon. Yeah, never seen that before. Big challange. Pork is what this is.
Dev's are going nuts with the Revolution; not only are they having tons of fun toying with it, that has translated into a massive amount of devs actually developing for it (probably not in small part due to the low cost of a dev kit and the lower specs also translating into a cheaper content pipeline). This means many games at or near launch, which means more great games at or near launch. I know people who are getting/have an xbox/ps3...but most are getting a Revolution on the side. These sales, together with the people only getting Nintendo's entry in this round of the console wars means MUCH more market penetration for the Revolution; it's already shining:)
Slashdot Mirror
Another little nigle; if the earth were a snowball a mere 2000 years ago, don't you think the egyptians and the chinese would've at least mentioned it? Or at least worn warmer clothes?
Snowball earth seems very shaky to me...not in the least due to the geological evidence, but also because I don't see how exactly the warming up process would happen.
Considering what this US administartion has done to even undeniable scientific evidence, how they retroactively redact their statements which even have been made part of the public record (we never said Iraq had WMD's/we never said 'stay the course'), how they lie about funding and success of their own programs (no child left behind, katrina victims), etc etc etc, my answer would be 'yes'; most of what comes out of this government's PR orifice is already packaged as propaganda. They don't need yet another propaganda filter; they spend enough public money on spin already.
"Get your news from multiple and diverse news outlets and any reasonably intelligent person can sort out the bullshit from the facts and get a general idea of what the real truth happens to be."
The problem with that is that mutliple and diverse newssources are getting scarce. Nearly all of the news in the US in the form of radio, print and television is in the hands of about five people. Five!
And the news out of Iraq? There are now only 9 (NINE!!!!!) accredited reporters in Iraq. There used to be around 250 (embedded and not). And those nine are pretty much confined to the green zone.
Without relying on on-the-ground bloggers, the only thing coming out of Iraq is already pretty much US propaganda if you rely on US print, radio and tv.
Cheney isn't enough of a fool (in the medieval sense); unlike Bush, he won't adequately distract 'the people' from who is wielding the real power.
It's kind of frightening how people think 1984 was a how-to manual, and cribb ideas from Douglas Adams.
There's a difference between propaganda and genuine information.
Which were they? The reg tweaks I found did jack shit, as did the backing up of those two activation files. And how do you figure it's the hardware detection which hoses up that operation?
I'm not trying to be sarcastic or anything: I'm genuinely curious.
Oh yeah? I had a motherboard which blew it's USB connections and an PCI slot. So I bought another motherboard and switched everything (cpu, ram, HDD etc). Good luck doing that; not only do you have to re-activate, you have to fscking reinstall windows.
/days/ to get fully done. Sure, I'd done some searching on changing a mobo with xp, but none of the tricks which would have stopped a total reinstall worked properly.
Why? Because of that MS no-new-hardware-allowed rule. Bastards. A new install of windows and other installed programs and settings takes
Microsoft owes me two days pay due to their 'anti-piracy'measures. Appart from the idiocy of equating new hardware with piracy, lets talk about an OS where you have to perform a total reinstall when you change your motherboard...that's just insane.
It's been in the cards for a while...the idea isn't new (hell, even I've discussed it on- and offline many a time). How they could get a patent on this is beyond me, for all the examples in books, magazines and on the 'net.
No...morrowind is bigger. And more varied.
:P
Don't get me wrong, Oblivion is a great game with great looks and some cool gameplay...but it's basically three different dungeons (cave, ruin and other ruin) and three different cities copy/pated and strewn across a map. Morrowind had a much greater sense of being a large world with the cites actualy having different vibes and the landscape changing as you went along. Oblivion doesn't do that as well as morrowind does.
Man, that would be cool...Morrowind in the Oblivion engine
Especially since the system, whilst it will have some quite interesting applications and the research will yield interesting results, can't work. A computer cannot distinguish between a fact and a lie told as fact...garbage in, and all that.
Let me rephrase that with an example:
'I am ten years old' and 'I am twenty years old'. Which is fact, which is lie? Better yet: 'we believe Iraq has WMD' versus 'we beleive Iraq has no WMD'. No matter what algorythms or heuristics you throw at this, all a computer at most can tell you is 'sometimes when used in conjunction with this phrase, the statement is false'...but that helps you IN NO WAY, because it means the statement can also be true...the indicator means nothing...you get as many false positives as false negatives...hell, even a ratio would be meaningless in intelligence gathering.
Except, of course, that the Wii doesn't do DVD playback.
Which I don't mind; I have multiple dvd players anyway, and it makes teh Wii cheaper since they don't have to licence the dvd encryption stuff.
That's only true if you fill the solids...if you use manifolds (a 'shell' of voxels...which is what polygons approach when their size -> size of voxel :) ) you're essentially doing a compression of information. Sure, if the polygon approaches the size of a polygon, you loose the advantage (as a poly is defined by three vertexes and a voxel is essentially one vertex/point in space), but when you can define that crate (a standard spatial device used in games :P) using planes, you're much better off with a polygon.
The only thing voxels would be better at is ground deformation, as it then becomes a huge particle physics simulation. But that's insane as the computations are off the hook (and even storing data for statics is three orders of magnitude greater because you're defining a volume per point [nxnxn!] instead of using planes).
I'm sorry, but WTF?
I don't live in the US, but even I can see that most news stations are firmly pro Bush. How else do you explain the free passes and non-quetsions that get askled of him. Compare the fallout the press gives based on importance of the subject matter: a blowjob and a war. If a false reason for war (and going all Stalin-esque with respect to secret police/torture/wiretapping) gets less attention than a blowjob, then you can pretty much say the press favours the latter side, dontchathink?
Put it like this: a fair, balanced and neutral press in a 'free' country should roast an elected official who condones torture and the wiretapping of it's citizens (or, come to that, the forcing thruogh of legislation without getting the people who vote on it to read said legislature). That didn't happen.
The answer to all those questions is a resounding YES. It depends on how rich and/or corrupt you are if you can make them stop doing so.
WTF does tha have to do with anything? MS and EA actively promote modding too (XNA, mechwarrior code opensourced). What they do not promote (and neither do Valve and EPIC) is stealing someone else's hard work (universe, unit designs etc) and using that as the basis for your game. Shit, these guys are really dumb to not expect being taken down; the mod world know that if you mod using someone elses IP, they will stop you.
If, however, you create a mod with you own ideas, universe, units etc, no-one will stop you.
Because Bungie might want to create a Halo RTS of their own (Halo was originally designed to be a RTS, only they found their design worked better as an FPS)? If the mod sucks, a Halo RTS has been tainted in the public eye, and if the mod roicks, why buy a Bungie made Halo RTS? That's why Bungie/MS are putting a stop to this project.
Furthermore, the team behind the mod KNEW this could happen. Everyone who steals ideas know it can and does happen. Especially in the mod scene; you've all heard the stories about the DBZ/StarWars/Trekkie mods which got stopped. They knew the risks, took the risk, and now they're whining. They should develop their own IP.
Red vs Blue is so not a good example to put here. It's machinima based off the engine; you watch a movie. It's not a game you play. It's not something a potential Bungie Halo RTS has to win market share from. And even the Halo movie won't have anything to win back from Red vs Blue, as they are totally different things. RvB is something so far removed from the Halo franchise that of course it gets left alone...it's not threatening/infringing in any way to what Bungie is trying to sell.
Yeah...and most of them are original IP, made by the modders, not ripped off from a popular franchise because the modders were to lame to think up their own stuff.
"Because its assumed nobody will care -- as is the case with "normal" 3D video game vendors like ID Software."
Again, only if it's original IP: CounterStrike was an original mod...it did not steal the environment from, say, Blade Runner. Same for ActionQuake, Team Fortress etc etc etc.
"Nobody cares" only happens if it's original IP (and if it's good, people will care and offer you a job...look at CS, Team Fortress and Portal). People care when you're ripping them off.
Now, of course, if there were a decent copyright law like there used to be in the old days, in a decade or so the limited monopoly granted by copyright would revert back to the public domain and everyone and his dog could create their own stuff based on a setting they have grown up on/with. Sadlly that isn't the case anymore.
Nice snark...unfortunately, it's totally besides the point. As the GP post about HL and CounterStrike.
It's an intellectual property thing; CS was a thing the makers dreamt up themselves...totally their own material. Many mods are, and very few mods based off someone elses IP doesn't get stopped. This Halo RTS thing is a bunch of modders too lazy/uncreative to think up their own IP, thus they nick someone elses and use that for their mod. All well and cool, but if Bungie wants to create their own Halo RTS, they have this thing munching at their market. Obviously they don't want that....they thought up the whole universe, so they get to play with it and make sure it isn't tarnished by a crap mod or a great mod takes away some of the market of their Halo RTS game (if ever they decide to make one).
Now, as copyright once worked, this would be a good thing for the creator (Bungie), as they'd get to enjoy the fruits of their labour (money from what they created/designed/thought up) AND it would be ok for the community because after a limited time the universe would end up in public space, so everyone who grew up on Halo could then play around with it.
However, that process has been circumvented by Disney; the legislation is now such that if I see a movie now (or even one the day I was born!), I will never be allowed to play with that universe, as the copyright won't expire for years (until the authors death+25 years or some such rubish...). Longer than a lifetime is per definition not a 'limited time'.
But in the end, that is not a reason to throw out the baby with the bathwater: the modders will just have to think up their own IP (and thank god....I'm sick of the Flood).
You know, I've thought about this too...but it's nothing some fourrier analysis wouldn't solve quite easily. But I haven't heard anything about a dedicated fourier analysis chip/dsp in the Revolution, which would we an obvious choice to include in the hardware, if only for user input decoding. Maybe that's what the physics chip is for?
Just point the controller up, down, up down left right left right and then poush the a, b start buttons :)
Ain't that the truth. A friend of mine set up some 'xbox parties'; with a couple of beamers, about twenty people would have fun playing Halo2 to start with. But every one of those parties has ended with everyone playing some game or other on the two gamecubes. Nintendo knows multiplayer gaming fun.
Like checking the A: drive EVERY SINGLE TIME that damn box comes up (most used when installing drivers, but also on other occasions). That's one of the most annoying pieces of cruft I've ever come across...especially in this day and age of bootfromcd/flashdrives/etc.
How hard can it be to code it so it will only check the a: drive after you actually tell it to look there for drivers?!?!?!?
That, and leaving in the ability for installers to install to a coded location you cannot change. That's not just annoying as hell, but REALLY fucked up.
I only kinda agree; the fact is there's very little innovation going on, merely a rehash of what';s been done before. How is this helping the cutting edge of technology, which is NASA's implied mandate ever since they helped develop the tech for ICBM's?
Now Lockheed Martin is getting big bucks to develop a rocket with a capsule to land on the moon. Yeah, never seen that before. Big challange. Pork is what this is.
Dev's are going nuts with the Revolution; not only are they having tons of fun toying with it, that has translated into a massive amount of devs actually developing for it (probably not in small part due to the low cost of a dev kit and the lower specs also translating into a cheaper content pipeline). This means many games at or near launch, which means more great games at or near launch. I know people who are getting/have an xbox/ps3...but most are getting a Revolution on the side. These sales, together with the people only getting Nintendo's entry in this round of the console wars means MUCH more market penetration for the Revolution; it's already shining :)