Well except for a couple of the really quick turns i couldn't really tell the difference at all between the two. For the comparison of the balls bouncing back and forth they clearly looked different, but i couldn't tell which i actually preferred. The 60 fps one was obviously sharper, but it seemed to be flickering between positions or something and looked somewhat odd.
Clearly the person who put the video together needs to work on their marketing skills however. When trying to convince people at agree with you declaring that everyone else would "have to be blind" to disagree with them. Even if i had noticed a difference i'd be tempted to say i didn't just to spite them after that.
"note the lack of "h" - Neandertal is a placename in Germany; the Neander Valley, and it is spelled that way"
The Neaderthal skeletons found in Neander Valley were discovered in 1856, before German spelling was regularized in 1901, and thus at the time it was spelled "Neanderthal." Since scientific names are "writ in stone" once they've been formalized the species is always going to be Homo neanderthalensis, or possibly Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, depending on the results of genetic studies.
Whether the spelling of the common name should be updated to match the current German spelling is debatable, but your insistence that it has to be without an 'h' is just plain wrong. Both spellings are accepted, though as Robert J. Sawyer notes in "Is it Neanderthal or Neandertal?" about other species with similar etymological problems, "those who favor the use of the spelling 'Neandertal man' are notably silent when the topic of Peking man comes up; there's no movement to change that name to 'Beijing man,' even though the city's name is always spelled Beijing in English these days."
Another question is how to pronounce either "Neanderthal" or "Neanderthalensis," with a 't' sound or a 'th' sound. Again it's a matter for debate and there's no "correct" answer, both pronunciations are accepted. The pronunciation in German is "tal" rather than "thal," no matter which way it's spelled, but that has little bearing on the English/American pronunciation. If it was always proper to use the pronunciation from the original language then, as Robert J. Sawyer pointed out in the above article, the only proper way to pronounce "Paris" would be the way the French do, "par-ee," and anyone who insisted on doing that all the time would not come across so well in America. Given how long English has been around and how many words it has adopted there are too many other examples of adapted spellings and pronunciations that are now considered proper English to count.
So you can call it whichever you want, but i am quite happy to spell it "Neanderthal" and pronounce it with the "h" sound because that sounds most natural to me, and no reference to current German spelling or pronunciation is a valid argument against me doing so.
Would you and everyone else who tagged this "correlationisnotcausation" spend maybe two minutes thinking about what you're doing before screaming "correlation != causation" in response to every article? You just end up looking like fools. Neither article mentioned nor claimed any specific kind of correlation between presence or lack of DRM and sales, they just provided some data about theorized piracy rates for two different kinds of games. In fact one of the articles specifically said:
"From the results above, it seems clear that eliminating piracy through a stronger DRM can result in significantly increased sales - but sometimes it can have no benefit at all." i.e. no direct correlation.
And the slashdot blurb didn't say anything about correlation at all, it specifically pointed out that the piracy rate for the two games, one with DRM and one without, were essential the same. So where are you getting the idea that anyone involved claimed there was a correlation, much less a causation?
I don't mean christmas, i mean Atheist Kids Get Presents Day, but i don't want to offend all the overly sensitive christians, so i say "holidays" instead.
Did you have a Super Smash Bros save on the original Wii? I've heard that several games, SSBB among them, have copy protected save files that only work on the original console (similar to the Mii files you're having trouble with.) Though i'm not sure what it is they're supposed to protected _from_ =P
When i got out of college and got a job i mostly stopped pirating, but that was mainly because i now had the money to buy the things i wanted. (Of course now that the DRM in games is getting so nasty i'm starting to think of picking it back up again.)
When i went to work in the game industry my opinions about piracy didn't change. I put a lot of hard work into the games we released and i'd much rather people bought copies of them, but i don't get morally offended at all the people who decided to pirate them instead. They pirated the games because they wanted then, and i want people to want the games i put so much effort into.
Furthermore, for the most popular of all the games i've worked on the development team actually laughed at the efforts by management to circumvent piracy. When we weren't getting pissed off that is. The fact that we were paying $1 per CD in order to license Macrovision's latest DRM, which was "guaranteed" to completely prevent piracy was ludicrous. We knew that we could write our own copy protection that would be just as effective (ie prevent casual copying and do absolutely nothing to deter serious pirates) and save the company a couple million dollars. (And would have been quite happy to do so if they'd offered even a small fraction of that savings to us as a bonus;) Of course we were astounded when the DRM actually worked... at keeping the game from being pirated until the day after release. For a couple million dollars we prevented the game from being cracked before its actual release day, big whoop.
Of course perhaps my feelings might be somewhat different if i hadn't been working at EA, had actually seen some of the revenue stream make it back directly into my pockets, and hadn't been laid off along with half the rest of the studio as soon as we finished the expansion pack for the game. However i'd like to think that even if i was working at a small independent publisher and saw a small but direct percentage from each sale that as long as the company and i were getting enough to keep ourselves fed and continue working on more games that i'd still rather people pirate the game and play it than just not play it at all.
If this were correct, most of the people I know SHOULD NOT BE AFFECTED BY DRM ISSUES. Nothing to do with whether they care or not. Specifically, to the point, on topic, right on the button, THE GAME DOES NOT FUNCTION FOR THEM.
Everything you've said so far about people running into issues with DRM has implied that it has been in the past. If that is not the case then i apologize, but you are not being clear. So for the record, how many examples of people having difficulties with Spore in particular have your personally encountered? I know several people who've bought Spore and so far none of them have had any problems. I haven't even heard that many reports about problems with Spore online, though perhaps i haven't been paying attention to the right forums.
I believe that EA's "evidence" for this statistic (or at least part of it) is the number of people who've called in to have their number of installs bumped up. That's not a really great sample (and one that's likely to go up over time rather than down) but as far as i can tell it's better that what you've cited so far.
He is claiming that practically no one is being adversely affected by their current implementation of DRM right now. You are saying he's wrong because people have been adversely affected by DRM in the past. I know that you're right, but i'm also willing to grant that he _might_ be right. However it doesn't matter even if he is because his statistic is mostly irrelevant. Not incorrect, just irrelevant. I can be pissed off about their current implementation of DRM just as it stands. If we start out an argument with "DRM sucked in the past" he'll counter with "but we've improved it since then!" I'd rather start with "this implementation of DRM sucks right now as it stands for these specific reasons."
Congratulations, you've proven that something he didn't say is incorrect?
Since you failed to catch what i said, he didn't claim that 99.8% didn't care, he said 99.8% shouldn't be affected, and that statistic was particularly (and so obviously i didn't think it was worth specifying) about the implementation of DRM in their current games, as exemplified by Spore.
Everything you said is true, but you got all incensed about what the title _claimed_ he said and went off on a tangent that doesn't actually address the validity of his statistics or what they mean. Your anecdotal evidence about how many people got pissed off by DRM in the past and quit playing PC games is not particularly relevant to what percentage of people will be affected by the ("ideally" functioning) DRM in Spore in the present.
My response is that what he said is probably correct assuming everything functions correctly, but that's not particularly relevant in real world terms. In the real world things don't always work correctly 100% of the time, and furthermore we have the right to be upset about EA's actions even if it isn't statistically likely to affect us personally in a significant manner.
It's okay though, it seems like everyone else is barking up the wrong tree too. Mainly due to the mostly incorrect title. Here's what was actually said:
"We implemented a form of DRM and it's something that 99.8 percent of users wouldn't notice," claimed Riccitiello, "but for the other 0.2 percent, it became an issue and a number of them launched a cabal online to protest against it."
He's not saying that 99.8% don't care, he's saying that 99.8% won't "notice," by which i assume he actually means "won't notice as long as our DRM servers are working 100% of the time and SecuRom doesn't fuck up anything on their computer."
In saying that his statistics are probably correct. I expect that 99.8% of the users are not going to try to install the game more than three times. I expect most people will install it once, play it for awhile and then forget about it. The problem is that more than 0.2% are probably going to be affected by issues involving their DRM server at least once, and more than 0.2% are going to have problems because of SecuRom, and a lot more than 0.2% object to the install limits or the presence of SecuRom (or both) even if it wouldn't directly affect them. (And in the case of SecuRom aren't willing to try installing it to find out.)
So he's not saying that 99.8% of us don't care, he's claiming that under ideal circumstances only 0.2% of us would actually experience problems, so any complaints from the other 99.8% of us are irrelevant and/or blown out of proportion.
they remember the idiocy that is the DMCA and reform it?
It is naive of you to hope for this part, though. Good luck with that.
No it's not naive, in fact it's naive to think that any problem will get fixed in a timely manner when it doesn't directly affect the politicians in charge of making the laws. As the author of this article points out it was exactly such a process that led to the passage of the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act. It won't be so much specifically "remembering the idiocy of the DMCA" that results in any changes though, it will be looking forward to the next election cycle and realizing that they'll have to deal with it again in two or four years when internet media will probably be an even more effective (and necessary) medium for campaigning.
But as also pointed out in the article, that will only happen if we don't let the politicians get away with trying to craft special rules for themselves that don't apply to everyone else.
That's great, we can all agree that if it causes a risk people shouldn't do it. The problem is that people _will_ do it anyways. Some of them will do it because they're dumb, and some of them will do it because they're evil. Since there is no practical way to stop people from bringing wireless devices aboard an aircraft, where they could theoretically be putting dozens or hundreds of other people at risk as well, and there _are_ precautions the aircraft manufacturers can take to make sure wireless devices don't interfere with the aircraft's electronics, the manufacturers really ought to be taking those steps.
The argument is not "i'm an arrogant idiot and i think i ought to be able to do whatever i want regardless of the rules," the argument is "i don't want to get killed because the person sitting three rows ahead of me is an arrogant idiot who thinks they ought to be able to do whatever they want regardless of the rules."
I'll extend the argument to say that we _know_ that intelligence isn't determined by a single gene. Not only would we have figured it out a long time ago if it was based on a single gene (via a simple application of Mendelian genetics) but we've already found multiple genes relates to multiple different learning disabilities.
On top of that, the GP assumes that not only is intelligence based on a single gene, but it's also a recessive gene. Yes, it's pretty simple to find examples of "smart" people having "stupid" kids so we know it's not a single dominant gene, but it's also pretty simple to find examples of "stupid" people having "smart" kids so it also can't be a single recessive gene either. See paragraph one.
Perhaps i'm just showing my age, but i think the older and simpler music had a much bigger impact than the music from newer games, even leaving aside the cases where they're not using licensed music.
The music needs to fit the scene for which it is being played, and outside of games specifically designed as "music games" i think that's all the interaction that's necessary. The music needs to be relatively simple and somewhat repetitive. Once you've gone beyond a certain level of complexity either you're not noticing the added complexity anymore, or you're paying more attention to the music than you are to the game.
Of course a certain level of complexity is good. I don't really look back on the "music" from the Atari 2600 with great fondness. However as the ability to play more complex music in games has increased there was a point where my interest peaked and then began a general decline. I think the peak for me was around the days of Final Fantasy 6. After that the music of games in general made less and less of an impression on me. I very much enjoyed Final Fantasy 10, and the music for it was well done and pleasant to listen to, but very rarely do i get a desire to go back and listen to it again, and in fact unlike a lot of previous games i have difficulty "replaying" most of the music in my head. On the other hand more recent music from the Advance Wars music has stuck with me much more because it was constrained by the format to be simpler and more repetitive.
Of course one could argue that being complex and varied enough that the songs don't etch themselves into your brain is a good thing, but from my perspective i'm going to get more enjoyment out of the music if i remember it fondly later, especially if it's paired with memories of a particularly fun game.
"If you've already bought the game, why pay for it again? There are plenty of places to download replacement disc images."
Convenience? For $6 i get a download that i can have a fair level of trust in. The odds of getting a trojan or virus from a GOG download are much smaller than from a random torrent. The download goes a lot quicker, the 500 or so meg copy of Fallout i got last night took less than ten or twenty minutes. I was playing the game itself within a half hour of purchase. (That's probably even faster than i could have driven to the local GameStop and come back with a new game.) A torrent of the same file might have taken hours or days to finish, or might have gotten stuck at 87% and _never_ finished. GOG also has a team of developers who make any changes necessary to make sure the game is playable on modern platforms. A lot easier than having to futz around with DosBox myself or make obscure configuration changes. And having paid the $6 once, i can now download another if it's ever needed (as long as the company stays in business of course, but that's the case with all the other stores being discussed as well.)
Of course in my case that's all beside the point since i never owned the original Fallout. However there are plenty of games that i've owned in the past that i'd be happy to pick up a new reliable copy of if they ever make it onto GOG. (MoO and MoM, X-Com, etc. Perhaps even StarCon2, despite the excellent Ur-Quan Masters project, on the chance that it might support the creation of a "real" StarCon3.)
"being a jealous curmudgeonly skeptic, i have to ask: what are the careers of his parents?
i tend to observe suspicious correlations between kids that win science fairs and kids with parents that are scientists or engineers."
I don't think the correlation is suspicious. Any kid that's following along in the "family trade," or any other activity that the parents have knowledge about (and of course an interest in) is going to have a huge advantage over kids that don't have their parents teaching them about the subject from an early age, even if just by example.
Certainly there are some cases where the parents are doing more of the work than the kids, but a lot of the time it's just the kid already having a lot of second-hand experience in the subject. In this case if one of the parents is an engineer and they came up with this theory/device i can't imagine them not patenting it themselves rather than trying to work out some kind of scam with their kid.
"Unless you have beaten the computer in Civ IV on Deity difficultly your opinion here is irrelevant!"
So in order to be "eligible" to comment on how a good intelligent AI should be designed one must first succeed at beating a so-so AI that's been given an enormous game mechanics advantage?
I've worked on games before (although not directly on AI) and i've played my fair share of games, and i know that designing an AI capable of taking on a human in a fair fight is impossible for a TBS (the "so-so" comment was not meant as a slight on Civ4 in particular, just a comment on the state of AI in general,) and i accept that until we learn more about programming AIs giving the AI huge advantages or "cheats" is the best we can do at the harder levels. However that doesn't mean that people who are playing at the "regular" difficulty (no bonuses for either side and AI at its best potential) can't spot areas that need improvement. Remember, the goal is _better_ AI. Anyone with half a brain can design _harder_ AI for any given game without even playing it just by picking which rules need to be bent or broken in favor of the computer.
They built the Dyson sphere around the planet but _not_ around the star to capture all its energy? Someone needs to grab the picture of this and caption it "Ur doin it rong!"
"I submitted this article hours earlier. Its a total mystery how slashdot editors choose favorites."
Have you considered the possibility that of the "several to write with the story," maybe, just maybe, you were not the first person to submit it? Perhaps Van Cutter Romney submitted it "hours" + 1 earlier.
If you TREAT me like a criminal, and the criminal gets better service than the paying customer, I will be the criminal. If you can give me a good reason why I should deal with sub-standard service whilst paying for it, I will buy it.
If you treat me equally as good as the pirates do, and do not burden me with anti-user technologies, I will buy and recommend it to others."
Okay fine, now stop complaining about the guy who's trying to convince the other publishers to stop treating you/us like criminals and provide a decent service. He's trying to accomplish what you claim you want.
So what? We know for a fact when the dinosaurs roamed the earth several degrees warmer than it is now. We also know the average CO2 level was quiet a bit higher.
If this is supposed to be one of those "climate change doesn't matter because it happened before in the past" arguments then how about this?
We know that most of the human race was wiped out at at least one point in the past but we seem to have recovered just fine. Since it wasn't a problem in the past then it shouldn't be a problem if we do a repeat now, right? Would you mind being the first one on the chopping block?
There are plenty of other things that happened in the past, on both historic and geologic time scales, that the human race in specific or life or general managed to survive but that i'm not particularly eager to have a repeat of during my lifetime.
"telemarketers must provide an obvious, easy and quick way for consumers to opt-out of any call, the FTC said."
Whenever i get left voicemail by telemarketers (always prerecorded messages that presumably don't realize they're talking to a real person) the first five or ten seconds get cut off, probably because the recording starts talking as soon as it thinks the phone has been picked up, and the voicemail system was giving instructions during that time rather than recording. So does this mean that they can just put the "obvious easy and quick way" right at the beginning? Even if they have to switch to live operators they can just instruct them to start talking as soon as the phone stops ringing, regardless of whether a person or machine answers, and blame the voicemail system for chopping off the opt-out part.
Of course that's presuming that the fine print has already corrected the current broken system. Being told "press 5 now in order to have your name removed from our list" when listening to a recording of a recording isn't much help.
Slashdot Mirror
Well except for a couple of the really quick turns i couldn't really tell the difference at all between the two. For the comparison of the balls bouncing back and forth they clearly looked different, but i couldn't tell which i actually preferred. The 60 fps one was obviously sharper, but it seemed to be flickering between positions or something and looked somewhat odd.
Clearly the person who put the video together needs to work on their marketing skills however. When trying to convince people at agree with you declaring that everyone else would "have to be blind" to disagree with them. Even if i had noticed a difference i'd be tempted to say i didn't just to spite them after that.
"note the lack of "h" - Neandertal is a placename in Germany; the Neander Valley, and it is spelled that way"
The Neaderthal skeletons found in Neander Valley were discovered in 1856, before German spelling was regularized in 1901, and thus at the time it was spelled "Neanderthal." Since scientific names are "writ in stone" once they've been formalized the species is always going to be Homo neanderthalensis, or possibly Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, depending on the results of genetic studies.
Whether the spelling of the common name should be updated to match the current German spelling is debatable, but your insistence that it has to be without an 'h' is just plain wrong. Both spellings are accepted, though as Robert J. Sawyer notes in "Is it Neanderthal or Neandertal?" about other species with similar etymological problems, "those who favor the use of the spelling 'Neandertal man' are notably silent when the topic of Peking man comes up; there's no movement to change that name to 'Beijing man,' even though the city's name is always spelled Beijing in English these days."
Another question is how to pronounce either "Neanderthal" or "Neanderthalensis," with a 't' sound or a 'th' sound. Again it's a matter for debate and there's no "correct" answer, both pronunciations are accepted. The pronunciation in German is "tal" rather than "thal," no matter which way it's spelled, but that has little bearing on the English/American pronunciation. If it was always proper to use the pronunciation from the original language then, as Robert J. Sawyer pointed out in the above article, the only proper way to pronounce "Paris" would be the way the French do, "par-ee," and anyone who insisted on doing that all the time would not come across so well in America. Given how long English has been around and how many words it has adopted there are too many other examples of adapted spellings and pronunciations that are now considered proper English to count.
So you can call it whichever you want, but i am quite happy to spell it "Neanderthal" and pronounce it with the "h" sound because that sounds most natural to me, and no reference to current German spelling or pronunciation is a valid argument against me doing so.
"that's why I don't trust my bag to any woman"
Not even when it's coated with lube?
Would you and everyone else who tagged this "correlationisnotcausation" spend maybe two minutes thinking about what you're doing before screaming "correlation != causation" in response to every article? You just end up looking like fools. Neither article mentioned nor claimed any specific kind of correlation between presence or lack of DRM and sales, they just provided some data about theorized piracy rates for two different kinds of games. In fact one of the articles specifically said:
"From the results above, it seems clear that eliminating piracy through a stronger DRM can result in significantly increased sales - but sometimes it can have no benefit at all." i.e. no direct correlation.
And the slashdot blurb didn't say anything about correlation at all, it specifically pointed out that the piracy rate for the two games, one with DRM and one without, were essential the same. So where are you getting the idea that anyone involved claimed there was a correlation, much less a causation?
I don't mean christmas, i mean Atheist Kids Get Presents Day, but i don't want to offend all the overly sensitive christians, so i say "holidays" instead.
Did you have a Super Smash Bros save on the original Wii? I've heard that several games, SSBB among them, have copy protected save files that only work on the original console (similar to the Mii files you're having trouble with.) Though i'm not sure what it is they're supposed to protected _from_ =P
When i got out of college and got a job i mostly stopped pirating, but that was mainly because i now had the money to buy the things i wanted. (Of course now that the DRM in games is getting so nasty i'm starting to think of picking it back up again.)
;) Of course we were astounded when the DRM actually worked... at keeping the game from being pirated until the day after release. For a couple million dollars we prevented the game from being cracked before its actual release day, big whoop.
When i went to work in the game industry my opinions about piracy didn't change. I put a lot of hard work into the games we released and i'd much rather people bought copies of them, but i don't get morally offended at all the people who decided to pirate them instead. They pirated the games because they wanted then, and i want people to want the games i put so much effort into.
Furthermore, for the most popular of all the games i've worked on the development team actually laughed at the efforts by management to circumvent piracy. When we weren't getting pissed off that is. The fact that we were paying $1 per CD in order to license Macrovision's latest DRM, which was "guaranteed" to completely prevent piracy was ludicrous. We knew that we could write our own copy protection that would be just as effective (ie prevent casual copying and do absolutely nothing to deter serious pirates) and save the company a couple million dollars. (And would have been quite happy to do so if they'd offered even a small fraction of that savings to us as a bonus
Of course perhaps my feelings might be somewhat different if i hadn't been working at EA, had actually seen some of the revenue stream make it back directly into my pockets, and hadn't been laid off along with half the rest of the studio as soon as we finished the expansion pack for the game. However i'd like to think that even if i was working at a small independent publisher and saw a small but direct percentage from each sale that as long as the company and i were getting enough to keep ourselves fed and continue working on more games that i'd still rather people pirate the game and play it than just not play it at all.
If this were correct, most of the people I know SHOULD NOT BE AFFECTED BY DRM ISSUES. Nothing to do with whether they care or not. Specifically, to the point, on topic, right on the button, THE GAME DOES NOT FUNCTION FOR THEM.
Everything you've said so far about people running into issues with DRM has implied that it has been in the past. If that is not the case then i apologize, but you are not being clear. So for the record, how many examples of people having difficulties with Spore in particular have your personally encountered? I know several people who've bought Spore and so far none of them have had any problems. I haven't even heard that many reports about problems with Spore online, though perhaps i haven't been paying attention to the right forums.
I believe that EA's "evidence" for this statistic (or at least part of it) is the number of people who've called in to have their number of installs bumped up. That's not a really great sample (and one that's likely to go up over time rather than down) but as far as i can tell it's better that what you've cited so far.
He is claiming that practically no one is being adversely affected by their current implementation of DRM right now. You are saying he's wrong because people have been adversely affected by DRM in the past. I know that you're right, but i'm also willing to grant that he _might_ be right. However it doesn't matter even if he is because his statistic is mostly irrelevant. Not incorrect, just irrelevant. I can be pissed off about their current implementation of DRM just as it stands. If we start out an argument with "DRM sucked in the past" he'll counter with "but we've improved it since then!" I'd rather start with "this implementation of DRM sucks right now as it stands for these specific reasons."
Congratulations, you've proven that something he didn't say is incorrect?
Since you failed to catch what i said, he didn't claim that 99.8% didn't care, he said 99.8% shouldn't be affected, and that statistic was particularly (and so obviously i didn't think it was worth specifying) about the implementation of DRM in their current games, as exemplified by Spore.
Everything you said is true, but you got all incensed about what the title _claimed_ he said and went off on a tangent that doesn't actually address the validity of his statistics or what they mean. Your anecdotal evidence about how many people got pissed off by DRM in the past and quit playing PC games is not particularly relevant to what percentage of people will be affected by the ("ideally" functioning) DRM in Spore in the present.
My response is that what he said is probably correct assuming everything functions correctly, but that's not particularly relevant in real world terms. In the real world things don't always work correctly 100% of the time, and furthermore we have the right to be upset about EA's actions even if it isn't statistically likely to affect us personally in a significant manner.
"We implemented a form of DRM and it's something that 99.8 percent of users wouldn't notice," claimed Riccitiello, "but for the other 0.2 percent, it became an issue and a number of them launched a cabal online to protest against it."
He's not saying that 99.8% don't care, he's saying that 99.8% won't "notice," by which i assume he actually means "won't notice as long as our DRM servers are working 100% of the time and SecuRom doesn't fuck up anything on their computer."
In saying that his statistics are probably correct. I expect that 99.8% of the users are not going to try to install the game more than three times. I expect most people will install it once, play it for awhile and then forget about it. The problem is that more than 0.2% are probably going to be affected by issues involving their DRM server at least once, and more than 0.2% are going to have problems because of SecuRom, and a lot more than 0.2% object to the install limits or the presence of SecuRom (or both) even if it wouldn't directly affect them. (And in the case of SecuRom aren't willing to try installing it to find out.)
So he's not saying that 99.8% of us don't care, he's claiming that under ideal circumstances only 0.2% of us would actually experience problems, so any complaints from the other 99.8% of us are irrelevant and/or blown out of proportion.
they remember the idiocy that is the DMCA and reform it?
It is naive of you to hope for this part, though. Good luck with that.
No it's not naive, in fact it's naive to think that any problem will get fixed in a timely manner when it doesn't directly affect the politicians in charge of making the laws. As the author of this article points out it was exactly such a process that led to the passage of the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act. It won't be so much specifically "remembering the idiocy of the DMCA" that results in any changes though, it will be looking forward to the next election cycle and realizing that they'll have to deal with it again in two or four years when internet media will probably be an even more effective (and necessary) medium for campaigning.
But as also pointed out in the article, that will only happen if we don't let the politicians get away with trying to craft special rules for themselves that don't apply to everyone else.
That's great, we can all agree that if it causes a risk people shouldn't do it. The problem is that people _will_ do it anyways. Some of them will do it because they're dumb, and some of them will do it because they're evil. Since there is no practical way to stop people from bringing wireless devices aboard an aircraft, where they could theoretically be putting dozens or hundreds of other people at risk as well, and there _are_ precautions the aircraft manufacturers can take to make sure wireless devices don't interfere with the aircraft's electronics, the manufacturers really ought to be taking those steps.
The argument is not "i'm an arrogant idiot and i think i ought to be able to do whatever i want regardless of the rules," the argument is "i don't want to get killed because the person sitting three rows ahead of me is an arrogant idiot who thinks they ought to be able to do whatever they want regardless of the rules."
I'll extend the argument to say that we _know_ that intelligence isn't determined by a single gene. Not only would we have figured it out a long time ago if it was based on a single gene (via a simple application of Mendelian genetics) but we've already found multiple genes relates to multiple different learning disabilities.
On top of that, the GP assumes that not only is intelligence based on a single gene, but it's also a recessive gene. Yes, it's pretty simple to find examples of "smart" people having "stupid" kids so we know it's not a single dominant gene, but it's also pretty simple to find examples of "stupid" people having "smart" kids so it also can't be a single recessive gene either. See paragraph one.
Perhaps i'm just showing my age, but i think the older and simpler music had a much bigger impact than the music from newer games, even leaving aside the cases where they're not using licensed music.
The music needs to fit the scene for which it is being played, and outside of games specifically designed as "music games" i think that's all the interaction that's necessary. The music needs to be relatively simple and somewhat repetitive. Once you've gone beyond a certain level of complexity either you're not noticing the added complexity anymore, or you're paying more attention to the music than you are to the game.
Of course a certain level of complexity is good. I don't really look back on the "music" from the Atari 2600 with great fondness. However as the ability to play more complex music in games has increased there was a point where my interest peaked and then began a general decline. I think the peak for me was around the days of Final Fantasy 6. After that the music of games in general made less and less of an impression on me. I very much enjoyed Final Fantasy 10, and the music for it was well done and pleasant to listen to, but very rarely do i get a desire to go back and listen to it again, and in fact unlike a lot of previous games i have difficulty "replaying" most of the music in my head. On the other hand more recent music from the Advance Wars music has stuck with me much more because it was constrained by the format to be simpler and more repetitive.
Of course one could argue that being complex and varied enough that the songs don't etch themselves into your brain is a good thing, but from my perspective i'm going to get more enjoyment out of the music if i remember it fondly later, especially if it's paired with memories of a particularly fun game.
"If you've already bought the game, why pay for it again? There are plenty of places to download replacement disc images."
Convenience? For $6 i get a download that i can have a fair level of trust in. The odds of getting a trojan or virus from a GOG download are much smaller than from a random torrent. The download goes a lot quicker, the 500 or so meg copy of Fallout i got last night took less than ten or twenty minutes. I was playing the game itself within a half hour of purchase. (That's probably even faster than i could have driven to the local GameStop and come back with a new game.) A torrent of the same file might have taken hours or days to finish, or might have gotten stuck at 87% and _never_ finished. GOG also has a team of developers who make any changes necessary to make sure the game is playable on modern platforms. A lot easier than having to futz around with DosBox myself or make obscure configuration changes. And having paid the $6 once, i can now download another if it's ever needed (as long as the company stays in business of course, but that's the case with all the other stores being discussed as well.)
Of course in my case that's all beside the point since i never owned the original Fallout. However there are plenty of games that i've owned in the past that i'd be happy to pick up a new reliable copy of if they ever make it onto GOG. (MoO and MoM, X-Com, etc. Perhaps even StarCon2, despite the excellent Ur-Quan Masters project, on the chance that it might support the creation of a "real" StarCon3.)
Nanosoccer? Let me know when they're actually playing Quantum Soccer!
"being a jealous curmudgeonly skeptic, i have to ask: what are the careers of his parents?
i tend to observe suspicious correlations between kids that win science fairs and kids with parents that are scientists or engineers."
I don't think the correlation is suspicious. Any kid that's following along in the "family trade," or any other activity that the parents have knowledge about (and of course an interest in) is going to have a huge advantage over kids that don't have their parents teaching them about the subject from an early age, even if just by example.
Certainly there are some cases where the parents are doing more of the work than the kids, but a lot of the time it's just the kid already having a lot of second-hand experience in the subject. In this case if one of the parents is an engineer and they came up with this theory/device i can't imagine them not patenting it themselves rather than trying to work out some kind of scam with their kid.
"Unless you have beaten the computer in Civ IV on Deity difficultly your opinion here is irrelevant!"
So in order to be "eligible" to comment on how a good intelligent AI should be designed one must first succeed at beating a so-so AI that's been given an enormous game mechanics advantage?
I've worked on games before (although not directly on AI) and i've played my fair share of games, and i know that designing an AI capable of taking on a human in a fair fight is impossible for a TBS (the "so-so" comment was not meant as a slight on Civ4 in particular, just a comment on the state of AI in general,) and i accept that until we learn more about programming AIs giving the AI huge advantages or "cheats" is the best we can do at the harder levels. However that doesn't mean that people who are playing at the "regular" difficulty (no bonuses for either side and AI at its best potential) can't spot areas that need improvement. Remember, the goal is _better_ AI. Anyone with half a brain can design _harder_ AI for any given game without even playing it just by picking which rules need to be bent or broken in favor of the computer.
They built the Dyson sphere around the planet but _not_ around the star to capture all its energy? Someone needs to grab the picture of this and caption it "Ur doin it rong!"
I hate to burn karma for this, but i'd like to point out that although the parent comment certainly contains flamebait, it is not at all offtopic.
"I submitted this article hours earlier. Its a total mystery how slashdot editors choose favorites."
Have you considered the possibility that of the "several to write with the story," maybe, just maybe, you were not the first person to submit it? Perhaps Van Cutter Romney submitted it "hours" + 1 earlier.
"OK. Here's my rule I follow.
If you TREAT me like a criminal, and the criminal gets better service than the paying customer, I will be the criminal. If you can give me a good reason why I should deal with sub-standard service whilst paying for it, I will buy it.
If you treat me equally as good as the pirates do, and do not burden me with anti-user technologies, I will buy and recommend it to others."
Okay fine, now stop complaining about the guy who's trying to convince the other publishers to stop treating you/us like criminals and provide a decent service. He's trying to accomplish what you claim you want.
"Not saying you're not right or wrong but it's not just size and speed that matter."
Wuss! I'm ready to declare right now without equivocation that he is right or wrong!
So what? We know for a fact when the dinosaurs roamed the earth several degrees warmer than it is now. We also know the average CO2 level was quiet a bit higher.
If this is supposed to be one of those "climate change doesn't matter because it happened before in the past" arguments then how about this?
We know that most of the human race was wiped out at at least one point in the past but we seem to have recovered just fine. Since it wasn't a problem in the past then it shouldn't be a problem if we do a repeat now, right? Would you mind being the first one on the chopping block?
There are plenty of other things that happened in the past, on both historic and geologic time scales, that the human race in specific or life or general managed to survive but that i'm not particularly eager to have a repeat of during my lifetime.
"telemarketers must provide an obvious, easy and quick way for consumers to opt-out of any call, the FTC said."
Whenever i get left voicemail by telemarketers (always prerecorded messages that presumably don't realize they're talking to a real person) the first five or ten seconds get cut off, probably because the recording starts talking as soon as it thinks the phone has been picked up, and the voicemail system was giving instructions during that time rather than recording. So does this mean that they can just put the "obvious easy and quick way" right at the beginning? Even if they have to switch to live operators they can just instruct them to start talking as soon as the phone stops ringing, regardless of whether a person or machine answers, and blame the voicemail system for chopping off the opt-out part.
Of course that's presuming that the fine print has already corrected the current broken system. Being told "press 5 now in order to have your name removed from our list" when listening to a recording of a recording isn't much help.