Complet[e]ly unworkable. Assume a household with 3 children. Are we supposed to set up a dedicated computer room instead of their bedrooms (where kids have had their PCs since..forever...1981 in my case) and make sure there is a full time watcher?
My own solution was to put the main 'net-enabled computer squarely in the middle of my kitchen-dining area, on the end of the counter there. (Those low-footprint iMac-style designs do have an extremely practical side.)
Also, for what it's worth, computers in the bedroom are about like TVs in the bedroom: kind of a bad idea, parenting wise, and just for anyone. My life is a little better for not having either one of them in the bedroom, leaving alone kids. The TV and the computer are in common areas. Yeah, it means I have to listen to the kids playing their games and whatever. I kind of like the noise.
(Since 1981? You have kids who are at least 24 (assuming they were newborn infants in '81) whose 'net access you're actively needing to control? You'd be able to define conditions on which they can live under your roof by then, and treat them like adults over that.)
Kids over 13 or so can stay home alone. Do we lock up the computer room when the adults are out? Computing to the current generation is as pervasive as book reading was the one before. They will have free access to it whatever we think.
There are ISPs that can help with this. As a parent if you want to control access you can, without involving a totalitarian government approach... Speaking of the pervasive reading problem you're referring to. (Which provoked a quite analogous reaction from frightened parents whose kids read the new dime paperbacks.)
There are Eliza bots on IM today, absent only the come-on for downloading something nasty.
I've stumbled across at least one page in which people's reactions to Eliza's odd phrasings were compiled. Not too many of the IMers recognized that they weren't dealing with a mind on the other end; a healthy share of them kept right on asking whether Eliza was up for something or other. After several exchanges the live person usually just bailed in mild frustration to find someone more cooperative.
Really we're fortunate that virus/trojan writers tend to be just as lazy and marginally competent as the people they dupe. A couple of simple phrases, the suggestion of someone loving the recipient... It's the bare sinews of human nature they're touching on, and not subtle at all. A really resourceful virus author could do far more damage, but the kiddies seem to be content to prey on their peers.
This will happen between the Revolution and the DS, anyway, whether it's the controller or not. Anyone who's activated the "Tingle Tuner" in Zelda -- Windwaker knows Nintendo "cross sells" their products this way.
This sounds like the sort of business M.O. we'd all be cynical about, but by gum it genuinely is fun.
I don't see how Nintendo is any more innovative than anyone else in regards to software
Personally I don't think Nintendo's been any more innovative than anyone else in the colors they use for their AC adapters, either, as long as we're limiting the discussion to score "points."
Yeah, it is kind of hard to say that the software's no different when no games have been announced for the new machine. But apparently you didn't notice that the Revolution controller is something new and completely unlike the "We smooshed existing controllers a little" offerings from Sony and MS? Apparently you didn't notice that, between the DS and the few public features of the Revolution, Nintendo surely is encouraging unique programming styles? There's a whole bevy of interesting games using the DS's stylus control, including surgery titles where you make sutures by zig zagging with it. The Revolution controller's tech demos were more interesting than anything MS has ever done.
You're right that the third party problem is what Nintendo has to get past. But the games you cite as examples of moribund franchises with nothing but re-tweaked graphics are not particularly good examples of that. If you want a mediocre franchise resting on its laurels, Zelda isn't the place to look. (Hello, EA sports? Maybe you could stop adding polygons to Shaq's bald pate and make rebounding physically possible one of these years.)
If these latest Nintendo systems get wiped out in the marketplace, we can count on the industry basically being mired in utter mediocrity for a good while. Sony and MS are battling for marketshare and have no love of the games. Nintendo is the indie film circuit next to the Hlooywood studio competition.
paying a little more for Vin Diesel might be worth it
File that among the phrases I never thought I'd see. (Okay, maybe I could see it for Vin -- not for the crap car movie and the stupid James Bond "extreme" knockoff, but for Iron Giant, which he was great for before he made his name. He actually rates as a voice actor, having done legit work there.)
But most celebs who do voice work on games are on the level of Billy Dee Williams, who just wants to collect some spare coin for a cameo as Lando in Jedi Knight II. Gamers really don't care about his voice if the game's any good, and Billy Dee ain't going to go on the tonight show and hawk the fact that his career's so run out by now that he's saying five sentences for the cut scenes in a shooter.
But to get to your larger point -- No, I don't want to eventually have a games industry that's all run by Bruckheimer-style producers who see the value in tradeoffs like the one you suggest. The model that delivers the best games to me is more like Nintendo's Director-as-artist system, which'll get results like Zelda-Windwaker. Where does the money go for games like that? To things like great, seamlessly-done music that genuinely adds to the experience.
Anyone could make a long list of games with celeb voices that are worthless and didn't make any money. It'd be much harder to find games with great original scores that truly bit. The industry has some money, and right now they don't know where to spend it.
I wish people would get the fuck over themselves, and quit competing in the eternal Most Sensitive Being in Known Universe contest.
Way to set the example for this brave new world you're advocating. Trying to live like a decent person and think about others isn't a competition, it's kind of a moral imperative. Little thing called a conscience.
I doubt the man cares whether you're insulted and/or saddened. I wouldn't.
I'm a potential customer. I can hear high-frequency sounds, and so can my two 12-year-olds. You think I'll be telling my kids to go down to this man's store? Not a chance. As a solution, this bites hard, whatever the problem it intended to solve may have been. All it did was escalate the thing it was trying to remedy, in a way that demeaned and repelled people the shop owner was supposedly trying to protect.
But maybe following that mistake would require the shop owner to put himself in his customers' shoes -- just like he plainly couldn't manage with the kids.
Kaleidoscope "skins" were unreal -- take a look
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Greg Landweber ascended to the mother ship? Decent example of Apple taking on someone whose main product Jobs didn't really agree with. Steve-o has never much liked the custom "skins" idea, and basically killed it with OS X.
For those who aren't familiar, the old Kaleidoscope gave you the ability to drop "skins" over the OS 9 finder and OS, to the point where you could go with a complete BeOS or any number of completely outlandish looks and feels.
Half of the results weren't amazingly useful, exactly, but it was so easy to develop a new scheme that you could easily tinker around and produce yout own flavor. The archive of schemes pretty much says it all.
Before all we had to worry about was a bad case of Nintendo thumb. Now what? Carpal tunnel syndrome? Tennis elbow? A sprained shoulder? Will I have to get Tommy John surgury to play MVP 2007??
Gosh, it's a good thing all previous human activity has been limited to a tiny range of motion for our thumbs and forefingers. What would our early ancestors have done if they couldn't kill antelope with their B button? Now that we're really pushing the limits, who knows what kind of muscles we'll develop? Maybe some on our big fat butts, from walking around! The mind boggles.;-)
I do agree, and this would be repetitive motion -- but carpal tunnel syndrome, oddly enough, is a problem associated not with tennis or baseball or other active pursuits. It's skyrocketed with the basically sedentary use of traditional input devices this controller doesn't resemble much. Seems like we're maybe worrying the wrong way around...
Sounds like kind of a baited, made-by-TV reaction you had, but...
About 18 months ago she decided she was going to take responsibility for her own weight.
The Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) M.O. of bowing to "a higher power" has always seemed suspicious to me because of the basic premise you're talking about here. AA as an institution has a strong religious side that would cloud any attempt to take responsibility for oneself. You're supposed to give up a big measure of your self-control to God, basically.
I pick my son up from viola lessons sometimes at the church around the corner, and they hold AA meetings there. The two most apparent traits of those meetings are a) the fact that they're dating grounds on a par with college social events; and b) the strong religious overtones.
If the "spiritual" side becomes nothing more than an outside force to which you're ceding control, it's never been clear to me how that'd be any different than shrugging and saying it was in your genes. If anything they encourage you to admit to yourself that you can't change anything without outside help. Then I suppose God is on your side in your attempt to quit -- though the theology of that doesn't make any more sense than saying your genes have changed their minds and want you to be thin and active now...
If you're already a believer, then these debates are not crucial to you. But let's look at it from the other side. Many people won't listen to you preach about Christ unless you answer their questions about evolution and creation.
You're missing the boat with both me (as a potential convert) and the fundamentalist point of view represented by dogged literalism with respect to Genesis.
The core teachings of Christ, or at least those that haven't been perverted by the doctrinal machinations of two millenia of Pharisees, appeal to me. I could not possibly care less for the assertion that, because the Bible has to be the word of God with no allowances for the superficiality of mortal understanding, rabbits chew their cud and people were created as literal dust into which God breathed. That's a beautifully poetic image, the breath of God, but its literal truth doesn't do thing one for me and my attempts to lead a moral life.
Meanwhile the fundamentalist world thinks those things are far more crucial than Christ's teachings about what it means to be a child of God. The reason is simple: they claim to know God absolutely, and to have certain moral authority as a result. To keep their worldly authority, they need to buttress their claim to the Bible's literal truth. They claim God's righteous power, and don't want anyone to question their claim. So they defend frankly idiotic positions through tortuous intellectual constructions, as an act of irrational self-defense.
Fundamentalism is about authority, not about morality. It has jack squat to do with Jesus's teachings; if anything fundamentalists seem to me to worship him as an idol, or as an authority figure who has the power to grant them everlasting life in exchange for worship. They see their own petty authoritarian dreams projected onto Jesus, rather than caring a whit for what the guy stood for... Which coincidentally wasn't anything like what fundamentalism claims in his name.
Jesus would probably scorn his most ardent admirers in today's world. They worship him rather than taking his message into their hearts, and spend their souls on foolish attempts to hold onto their own worldly power. Again -- Pharisees, who think they cross the right ritual Ts and worship the right people, and therefore merit salvation.
Fact checkers cannot cover what is omitted, and much bias is in the wilful omissions.
I'd much rather deal with 'blog who make no pretense. I'll do my own fact checking rather than rely on unseen gnomes to do it to my satisfaction.
We haven't seen the worst abuses of the Blog yet. I wonder if you'll find the lack of pretense heartening then. The political world really only realized their potential with the Dean bubble, and even he wasn't taking advantage of it especially thoughtfully at first -- he just appealed to a certain type of techie and was smart enough to ride the wave for a bit.
A taste of what's to come happened in the Republican primaries in 2000. When McCain threatened Bush in South Carolina, you had folks like the head of Bob Jones U. sending out e-mails implying (quite blatantly) that McCain's adopted child was the result of some sort of Vietnam-era indiscretion; the appeal to racial fears (McCain's child being of "mixed" descent) couldn't have been more apparent. Those e-mails went out right after Bush's visit to Bob Jones, and there's no conclusion you could reach other than that Rove and company encouraged them. (There were no other Republican contenders of note by that point.) But gee, we can't definitively show that Rove and Bush ordered or controlled the point-to-point communications by the head of Bob Jones -- so no improprieties, right?
The Karl Roves of the world are going to be engaged in all-out blog war over the next handful of election cycles. And the difference with a personal blog, even one that has some prominence, is that there's little pressure on them to be accountable for what they say. With a newspaper they could lose circulation, and the publisher faces a variety pressures to moderate extreme positions based on sponsors and so on. Even Fox News wouldn't report that John McCain thing as news -- though the whole "Doesn't Kerry even look a little French?" idiocy was fairly close on a more benign subject.
It comes down to whether you can accurately judge the intentions of the unseen gnome behnid whatever blog you're reading, doesn't it? Either way it's the judgment of the reader that we have to have faith in... and given the state of our voting public's judgment, one can't help but be a little despondent over that. We can't even get half of them to vote at all, and a significant share of the rest are voting either because they think Bush is the Devil or to defend marriage against the onslaught of terrifying gay people who want to become Boy Scout leaders, for crissakes.
My sources at Quark tell me that the next major release of Quark (Quark 7) will be for both PPC and Intel Macs (i.e. fat binaries) as they have switched over to Xcode for development.
Hey, that was "informative"... too late, nobody watching.
(And yeah, I knew the Quark story -- but it does go to the fact that high-end users are not the same as early adopters. Business users aren't the first to adopt a new OS, as the number of people still on W2k attests. The pros want stability, and aren't going to do something like switch from Photoshop or Quark to the competition casually in order to have a shiny new box.)
Criminy yes, what a completely absurd assumption. Let's take a look at the evolutionary advantages conferred on these lab mice by their alteration:
In the experiments, the stathmin-lacking mice wandered out into the centre of an open box, in defiance of the normal mouse instinct to hide along the box's walls to avoid potential predators.
...the mice were exposed to a loud sound followed by a brief electric shock from the floor below them. A day later, normal mice froze when the sound was played again. Stathmin-lacking mice barely reacted to the sound at all.
So they don't avoid predators, and they don't learn from their mistakes. These do not sound like hyperalert mouse "soldiers" whose qualities one would expect to win a war with owls and cats.
The original article, and the researchers quoted in it, talk about potential applications for anxiety disorders. Sounds a lot more reasonable, trying to help people for whom fear is debilitating.
(Our/. poster would probably be among those who think evolution naturally results in more and more extreme traits over time: bigger brains, faster rabbits, stronger people. Fearless, fast-running rabbits run into a clearing and get eaten.)
It is when they cut the actual writings of Shakespeare out of the study *of* Shakespeare's writings that it becomes questionable.
Like I say, I'm not positive that's really happening. Worst I've seen is High School productions of Romeo and Juliet that had pared-down language in the script.
What would you even be teaching, then? The plots? He stole those anyway, and try teaching the "plot" of something like The Tempest sometime. ("Then Jupiter and the other Gods come down, prating about plays and actors for a while... They don't really do anything much...")
At the time of the Intel announcement and just after, it was repeatedly said that the first machines that would get the new chips would be the lower end consumer models. That means the laptops -- a segment Apple's been crippled in to some extent because of the inability to get G5s into the things -- and the minis and iMacs.
High-end users would be slower to adopt anyway. People who use Quark held off on OS X for a long time.
My 12-year-olds are using a textbook for Macbeth right now with the original text on the left and a somewhat modernized rephrasing on the other side. It amounts to annotations on the text, really, and I'm fine with it.
The teacher had them memorize passages this week, actually, and having the "What does that mean again?" version helped my son to keep track of lines.
So: one point for "translations" helping kids understand the text. Not that they're a replacement. I'm not really sure that problem's out there, though. May be just us turning into our "kids nowadays" parents. (The problem with kids nowadays, I'm pretty sure, isn't that they read and enjoy watered-down Shakespeare.)
Nice troll, and good results so far in the modding anyway... The idea is that no one country should have "control over the internet" in ways that don't include oversight by others. "Transparency" is the usual jargon. Nobody, including us, has had it.
I've corresponded with some friends in Ireland and France over this one, and it's not like they haven't ever read the word "Carnivore" in a news item, you know? You'd like my friends to trust us because you wave a flag and think rosy thoughts about how we're founded on principles of liberty, or something? While all three branches of the federal government are in the hands of a party whose authoritarian leanings couldn't be more clear?
...people that the ratings are designed for, i.e. the ones that don't care to look into whether a game is appropriate for their kids or not, aren't looking at the ratings anyway.
At any rate those are the very parents who've responded to this ESRB study. The point is that they're not tuned into what's in the games, so they're supposed to use the ratings as a shortcut.
This story is pretty telling. The "study" method they use is to show a parent a random selection of the "most extreme" moments from a given game, and then ask the parent to rate it her/himself, and then ask the parent to assess the real ESRB rating. It's very much a reacting-to-isolated-moments-out-of-context sort of a process, and meant to provoke a quick reaction rather than a thoughtful position on the games. They're all about that knee-jerk thing:
the ESRB's effectiveness depends largely on how accurately its ratings reflect the attitudes of American parents.
Funny how relativistic that is, isn't it? No absolute truths about what's in a game, to let me make my own parental choice -- just gut-level "attitudes" they need to agree with to be "effective." This is the Family Feud method of ratings, in which information can be true or false or whatever -- just as long as you agree with the most people, you're "effective." If Americans are terrified of civil rights, a game with black characters will become an M in this system.
For me, as a parent, "effective" means something that equips me to make choices. I absolutely need the list of reasons -- the laundry list from the little ratings box thing -- to even get a start on deciding, and even then I'm suspicious. The MPAA ratings for movies are sometimes so surreally idiotic, and things like "Whale Rider" being PG-13 seem to spring from the odd history of that institution so irrationally, that I almost have to have full reviews.
It seems to me that my kid looks at the ratings more than I do. He knows if he asks for a game that's rated M he's probably not going to get it.
You're so right. My 12-year-old kids know which games are rated what. I saw my son reading reviews of "Gun" -- an open-ended western thing that's just out -- and wondered if he wanted it. He dismissed it out of hand as "an M." A couple of reviews on the Web showed me why the rating was there, and because it had to do with brutal violence I'll say no. But he almost takes them more seriously, as a gauge of what I'll accept, than I do.
Of course, this is all pointless conjecture on my part - it may have been a hardware malfunction, for all I know.
You'd sure know more if you went to the (somewhat unclear) article, which would obviate the need for lots of your conjecture.
The main probe has been going on one of its three "stablizing wheels," the other two having failed. There's a sidebar link in the article to an earlier one about those failures. Mission controllers have been burning extra fuel keeping the thing at the right distance from the asteroid, facing the asteroid, and with its solar panels facing the sun; they already had that against them. Then the altimeter data they were getting was bad, they were closer than they thought, because some combination of the laser altimeter (previously untested) and the slope of the asteroid's surface confused the data.
They realized they were within 100 meters and had to send the detach command while the antenna switch was happening. The blackout prevented them from realizing a "keep above minimum altitude" engine thrust had just gone off.
This is much more of a reflection of this model of probe: it's cheaper, it's faster to develop, and there are going to be failures like the Beagle and this.
(Personally I do think there'd be a big gain if, before and after missions like this, the code got reviewed. I doubt very much that hackers in Idaho would have foreseen the failed stabilizers, the workaround, the potential for misjudging the altimeter data, and the combination of the blackout and the necessity for the release command. But in terms of intellectual freedom, it'd be a nice statement, and the Post Mortems would sure feature a lot of people asking Feynman-esque questions about icewater and O-rings.)
Cool point about "The Suffering," though I doubt I ever play it. My 12-year-olds are not quite up to shooters yet, and anyway don't have a taste for them.
I wish people paid money for games that had an idea like that, instead of just for dynamic lighting effects and frame rates and so on...
"But this "dress rehearsal" was cut short because mission controllers could not accurately guide the spacecraft using its fuel thrusters - a contingency solution devised following the failure of two of the craft's three stabilising reaction wheels."
This was a series of truly bad rolls of the dice. Two of their three stablizers failed, they had bad altimeter data because "the slope of the asteroid's surface had apparently caused the altimeter to misjudge... estimates of the craft's altitude," and then they got below 100 meters while the antenna switchover was happening. They sent the separate command without realizing the thrusters to maintain minimum altitude had just fired, because of that break in communications. So the article says, though it's not a sterling example of great science writing, I'll give you that.
The "mission officials are saying "Our readiness was not so complete," to their credit, but it's not like they're complete incompetents. More like they're pushing the technology: the altimeter hadn't ever been used before, for the obvious example.
Sort of fits the cheaper/faster model of robotic exploration. You have your hits and your misses. This isn't a Cassini Cadillac of a probe.
Oh, I'll agree that "TV glasses" would bite. If anything they're a good example of how unimaginative the market's been so far. Just looking at that picture of the poor model wearing it on the site gave me a splitting headache.
But your criteria are:
You really need a screen that doesn't block much of your vision, doesn't need to be mounted on your head, and can be moved out of you way instantly.
As big as possible, but it doesn't block your vision? Ain't going to happen in any sort of portable device. That's a huge screen far away, almost by definition.
I'm still not sure portability is a fundamental technology problem that has to wait for (another clumsy example) the window glass that can become an opaque "screen." Seems like a design problem is at least waiting for something more imaginative than visors, tiny screens, and plugs to use the existing TV.
We know that games don't cause crime (people cause crime!) and that they can't affect people's mental state more than a movie or book. (As an aside - anyone ever compare the effect of _Catcher In The Rye_ to Doom?)
So the sketch of a comparison I'm seeing is that "Catcher" would be among the big novels of the breaking wave of paperbacks from the 1950s -- a new pop phenomenon that scared people. It's had a long history of censorship over controversial content, which the people objecting to it say will "promote" various immoral activities. Doom, similarly, was in the breaking wave of a new form of popular entertainment, and is said to "promote" violence.
I can see a couple of pretty obvious distinctions.
One is that, while the pulp paperbacks of Catcher's day could be described as a publishing phenomenon, they wouldn't rate discussion as an entirely new medium with a fundamentally different ability to immerse the poor, easily misled (and condescended to) public. The FPS depended on a completely new technology; certain people fear new technologies instinctively.
Another is that Doom and the FPS genre consists mostly of flat-out action that's nearly always devoid of any real moral content or discussion. You kill 1,000 Zombies to get to a switch, not to decide whether to turn Jim in to the folks of Hannibal; most games don't involve particularly moral choices as part of their canned levels. Catcher in the Rye, on the other hand, was objected to (and these are some censors' own words) for:
'excess vulgar language, sexual scenes, and things concerning moral issues.'
I love that phrasing: "things." For my money, people who'd ban Catcher in the Rye are afraid of even confronting moral choices; they think the book's out of bounds in dealing with them as nakedly as it does. The stereotyped FPS, on the other hand, is an example of the culture those very same people deserve: morally empty trash entertainment that (so they say) desensitizes us to violence. Hey, they don't want us to exercise our consciences, so let's work our trigger fingers.
One of them is morally empty, the other's too full of moral argument. Be interesting to compare the groups that want to ban Doom, Catcher, and pRon... curious overlaps there.
You have sewage on your mind, apparently
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good things like treating sewage, but most of the inventions of the last 100 years have reeked havoc on the environment.
"Reeked" has to do with odor, which suits your sewage theme, but that's the wrong word. "Wrecked" means broken. "Wreaked" is the work you wanted. Pronounced the same, but spelled differently.
Your larger argument is a bit like changing the terms of a formula so one variable either approaches infinity (all the lights on, all SUVS, all the time) or approaches zero (a falsely reductive description of Chinese developments). That's no problem by me; sometimes it's useful to do to check your terms. I'm not sure that argument doesn't amount to a needlessly distracting spat about who has the moral advantage when what we really need is practical mechnisms for exchanging environmental technology, but it's not off limits or anything...
Too bad you can play it for real with any stove or grill for about $10. Stupid.
Lordy. Is it possible for any living, sentient being not to have understood that the "frying bacon" thing was meant as:
a perfectly ridiculous example of how someone could use something like this; and
a playful example of just how hard it would be for gaming hardware to really capture the simplicity of an everyday task?
They said irony was dead, but I didn't believe it until now. Hopefully you're quoting some incredibly lame pop-cultural thing, like when people laugh in Nelson's voice from the Simpsons or something... Oh, I've got it: you're "doing" Gareth Keenan, from the BBC version of the Office. Please, tell me that's it. Please.
Slashdot Mirror
My own solution was to put the main 'net-enabled computer squarely in the middle of my kitchen-dining area, on the end of the counter there. (Those low-footprint iMac-style designs do have an extremely practical side.)
Also, for what it's worth, computers in the bedroom are about like TVs in the bedroom: kind of a bad idea, parenting wise, and just for anyone. My life is a little better for not having either one of them in the bedroom, leaving alone kids. The TV and the computer are in common areas. Yeah, it means I have to listen to the kids playing their games and whatever. I kind of like the noise.
(Since 1981? You have kids who are at least 24 (assuming they were newborn infants in '81) whose 'net access you're actively needing to control? You'd be able to define conditions on which they can live under your roof by then, and treat them like adults over that.)
Kids over 13 or so can stay home alone. Do we lock up the computer room when the adults are out? Computing to the current generation is as pervasive as book reading was the one before. They will have free access to it whatever we think.
There are ISPs that can help with this. As a parent if you want to control access you can, without involving a totalitarian government approach... Speaking of the pervasive reading problem you're referring to. (Which provoked a quite analogous reaction from frightened parents whose kids read the new dime paperbacks.)
I've stumbled across at least one page in which people's reactions to Eliza's odd phrasings were compiled. Not too many of the IMers recognized that they weren't dealing with a mind on the other end; a healthy share of them kept right on asking whether Eliza was up for something or other. After several exchanges the live person usually just bailed in mild frustration to find someone more cooperative.
Really we're fortunate that virus/trojan writers tend to be just as lazy and marginally competent as the people they dupe. A couple of simple phrases, the suggestion of someone loving the recipient... It's the bare sinews of human nature they're touching on, and not subtle at all. A really resourceful virus author could do far more damage, but the kiddies seem to be content to prey on their peers.
This will happen between the Revolution and the DS, anyway, whether it's the controller or not. Anyone who's activated the "Tingle Tuner" in Zelda -- Windwaker knows Nintendo "cross sells" their products this way.
This sounds like the sort of business M.O. we'd all be cynical about, but by gum it genuinely is fun.
Personally I don't think Nintendo's been any more innovative than anyone else in the colors they use for their AC adapters, either, as long as we're limiting the discussion to score "points."
Yeah, it is kind of hard to say that the software's no different when no games have been announced for the new machine. But apparently you didn't notice that the Revolution controller is something new and completely unlike the "We smooshed existing controllers a little" offerings from Sony and MS? Apparently you didn't notice that, between the DS and the few public features of the Revolution, Nintendo surely is encouraging unique programming styles? There's a whole bevy of interesting games using the DS's stylus control, including surgery titles where you make sutures by zig zagging with it. The Revolution controller's tech demos were more interesting than anything MS has ever done.
You're right that the third party problem is what Nintendo has to get past. But the games you cite as examples of moribund franchises with nothing but re-tweaked graphics are not particularly good examples of that. If you want a mediocre franchise resting on its laurels, Zelda isn't the place to look. (Hello, EA sports? Maybe you could stop adding polygons to Shaq's bald pate and make rebounding physically possible one of these years.)
If these latest Nintendo systems get wiped out in the marketplace, we can count on the industry basically being mired in utter mediocrity for a good while. Sony and MS are battling for marketshare and have no love of the games. Nintendo is the indie film circuit next to the Hlooywood studio competition.
File that among the phrases I never thought I'd see. (Okay, maybe I could see it for Vin -- not for the crap car movie and the stupid James Bond "extreme" knockoff, but for Iron Giant, which he was great for before he made his name. He actually rates as a voice actor, having done legit work there.)
But most celebs who do voice work on games are on the level of Billy Dee Williams, who just wants to collect some spare coin for a cameo as Lando in Jedi Knight II. Gamers really don't care about his voice if the game's any good, and Billy Dee ain't going to go on the tonight show and hawk the fact that his career's so run out by now that he's saying five sentences for the cut scenes in a shooter.
But to get to your larger point -- No, I don't want to eventually have a games industry that's all run by Bruckheimer-style producers who see the value in tradeoffs like the one you suggest. The model that delivers the best games to me is more like Nintendo's Director-as-artist system, which'll get results like Zelda-Windwaker. Where does the money go for games like that? To things like great, seamlessly-done music that genuinely adds to the experience.
Anyone could make a long list of games with celeb voices that are worthless and didn't make any money. It'd be much harder to find games with great original scores that truly bit. The industry has some money, and right now they don't know where to spend it.
Way to set the example for this brave new world you're advocating. Trying to live like a decent person and think about others isn't a competition, it's kind of a moral imperative. Little thing called a conscience.
I doubt the man cares whether you're insulted and/or saddened. I wouldn't.
I'm a potential customer. I can hear high-frequency sounds, and so can my two 12-year-olds. You think I'll be telling my kids to go down to this man's store? Not a chance. As a solution, this bites hard, whatever the problem it intended to solve may have been. All it did was escalate the thing it was trying to remedy, in a way that demeaned and repelled people the shop owner was supposedly trying to protect.
But maybe following that mistake would require the shop owner to put himself in his customers' shoes -- just like he plainly couldn't manage with the kids.
For those who aren't familiar, the old Kaleidoscope gave you the ability to drop "skins" over the OS 9 finder and OS, to the point where you could go with a complete BeOS or any number of completely outlandish looks and feels.
Half of the results weren't amazingly useful, exactly, but it was so easy to develop a new scheme that you could easily tinker around and produce yout own flavor. The archive of schemes pretty much says it all.
Gosh, it's a good thing all previous human activity has been limited to a tiny range of motion for our thumbs and forefingers. What would our early ancestors have done if they couldn't kill antelope with their B button? Now that we're really pushing the limits, who knows what kind of muscles we'll develop? Maybe some on our big fat butts, from walking around! The mind boggles. ;-)
I do agree, and this would be repetitive motion -- but carpal tunnel syndrome, oddly enough, is a problem associated not with tennis or baseball or other active pursuits. It's skyrocketed with the basically sedentary use of traditional input devices this controller doesn't resemble much. Seems like we're maybe worrying the wrong way around...
Sounds like kind of a baited, made-by-TV reaction you had, but...
About 18 months ago she decided she was going to take responsibility for her own weight.
The Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) M.O. of bowing to "a higher power" has always seemed suspicious to me because of the basic premise you're talking about here. AA as an institution has a strong religious side that would cloud any attempt to take responsibility for oneself. You're supposed to give up a big measure of your self-control to God, basically.
I pick my son up from viola lessons sometimes at the church around the corner, and they hold AA meetings there. The two most apparent traits of those meetings are a) the fact that they're dating grounds on a par with college social events; and b) the strong religious overtones.
If the "spiritual" side becomes nothing more than an outside force to which you're ceding control, it's never been clear to me how that'd be any different than shrugging and saying it was in your genes. If anything they encourage you to admit to yourself that you can't change anything without outside help. Then I suppose God is on your side in your attempt to quit -- though the theology of that doesn't make any more sense than saying your genes have changed their minds and want you to be thin and active now...
You're missing the boat with both me (as a potential convert) and the fundamentalist point of view represented by dogged literalism with respect to Genesis.
The core teachings of Christ, or at least those that haven't been perverted by the doctrinal machinations of two millenia of Pharisees, appeal to me. I could not possibly care less for the assertion that, because the Bible has to be the word of God with no allowances for the superficiality of mortal understanding, rabbits chew their cud and people were created as literal dust into which God breathed. That's a beautifully poetic image, the breath of God, but its literal truth doesn't do thing one for me and my attempts to lead a moral life.
Meanwhile the fundamentalist world thinks those things are far more crucial than Christ's teachings about what it means to be a child of God. The reason is simple: they claim to know God absolutely, and to have certain moral authority as a result. To keep their worldly authority, they need to buttress their claim to the Bible's literal truth. They claim God's righteous power, and don't want anyone to question their claim. So they defend frankly idiotic positions through tortuous intellectual constructions, as an act of irrational self-defense.
Fundamentalism is about authority, not about morality. It has jack squat to do with Jesus's teachings; if anything fundamentalists seem to me to worship him as an idol, or as an authority figure who has the power to grant them everlasting life in exchange for worship. They see their own petty authoritarian dreams projected onto Jesus, rather than caring a whit for what the guy stood for... Which coincidentally wasn't anything like what fundamentalism claims in his name.
Jesus would probably scorn his most ardent admirers in today's world. They worship him rather than taking his message into their hearts, and spend their souls on foolish attempts to hold onto their own worldly power. Again -- Pharisees, who think they cross the right ritual Ts and worship the right people, and therefore merit salvation.
I'd much rather deal with 'blog who make no pretense. I'll do my own fact checking rather than rely on unseen gnomes to do it to my satisfaction.
We haven't seen the worst abuses of the Blog yet. I wonder if you'll find the lack of pretense heartening then. The political world really only realized their potential with the Dean bubble, and even he wasn't taking advantage of it especially thoughtfully at first -- he just appealed to a certain type of techie and was smart enough to ride the wave for a bit.
A taste of what's to come happened in the Republican primaries in 2000. When McCain threatened Bush in South Carolina, you had folks like the head of Bob Jones U. sending out e-mails implying (quite blatantly) that McCain's adopted child was the result of some sort of Vietnam-era indiscretion; the appeal to racial fears (McCain's child being of "mixed" descent) couldn't have been more apparent. Those e-mails went out right after Bush's visit to Bob Jones, and there's no conclusion you could reach other than that Rove and company encouraged them. (There were no other Republican contenders of note by that point.) But gee, we can't definitively show that Rove and Bush ordered or controlled the point-to-point communications by the head of Bob Jones -- so no improprieties, right?
The Karl Roves of the world are going to be engaged in all-out blog war over the next handful of election cycles. And the difference with a personal blog, even one that has some prominence, is that there's little pressure on them to be accountable for what they say. With a newspaper they could lose circulation, and the publisher faces a variety pressures to moderate extreme positions based on sponsors and so on. Even Fox News wouldn't report that John McCain thing as news -- though the whole "Doesn't Kerry even look a little French?" idiocy was fairly close on a more benign subject.
It comes down to whether you can accurately judge the intentions of the unseen gnome behnid whatever blog you're reading, doesn't it? Either way it's the judgment of the reader that we have to have faith in... and given the state of our voting public's judgment, one can't help but be a little despondent over that. We can't even get half of them to vote at all, and a significant share of the rest are voting either because they think Bush is the Devil or to defend marriage against the onslaught of terrifying gay people who want to become Boy Scout leaders, for crissakes.
Hey, that was "informative"... too late, nobody watching.
(And yeah, I knew the Quark story -- but it does go to the fact that high-end users are not the same as early adopters. Business users aren't the first to adopt a new OS, as the number of people still on W2k attests. The pros want stability, and aren't going to do something like switch from Photoshop or Quark to the competition casually in order to have a shiny new box.)
So they don't avoid predators, and they don't learn from their mistakes. These do not sound like hyperalert mouse "soldiers" whose qualities one would expect to win a war with owls and cats.
The original article, and the researchers quoted in it, talk about potential applications for anxiety disorders. Sounds a lot more reasonable, trying to help people for whom fear is debilitating.
(Our /. poster would probably be among those who think evolution naturally results in more and more extreme traits over time: bigger brains, faster rabbits, stronger people. Fearless, fast-running rabbits run into a clearing and get eaten.)
Like I say, I'm not positive that's really happening. Worst I've seen is High School productions of Romeo and Juliet that had pared-down language in the script.
What would you even be teaching, then? The plots? He stole those anyway, and try teaching the "plot" of something like The Tempest sometime. ("Then Jupiter and the other Gods come down, prating about plays and actors for a while... They don't really do anything much...")
High-end users would be slower to adopt anyway. People who use Quark held off on OS X for a long time.
The teacher had them memorize passages this week, actually, and having the "What does that mean again?" version helped my son to keep track of lines.
So: one point for "translations" helping kids understand the text. Not that they're a replacement. I'm not really sure that problem's out there, though. May be just us turning into our "kids nowadays" parents. (The problem with kids nowadays, I'm pretty sure, isn't that they read and enjoy watered-down Shakespeare.)
Nice troll, and good results so far in the modding anyway... The idea is that no one country should have "control over the internet" in ways that don't include oversight by others. "Transparency" is the usual jargon. Nobody, including us, has had it.
I've corresponded with some friends in Ireland and France over this one, and it's not like they haven't ever read the word "Carnivore" in a news item, you know? You'd like my friends to trust us because you wave a flag and think rosy thoughts about how we're founded on principles of liberty, or something? While all three branches of the federal government are in the hands of a party whose authoritarian leanings couldn't be more clear?
At any rate those are the very parents who've responded to this ESRB study. The point is that they're not tuned into what's in the games, so they're supposed to use the ratings as a shortcut.
This story is pretty telling. The "study" method they use is to show a parent a random selection of the "most extreme" moments from a given game, and then ask the parent to rate it her/himself, and then ask the parent to assess the real ESRB rating. It's very much a reacting-to-isolated-moments-out-of-context sort of a process, and meant to provoke a quick reaction rather than a thoughtful position on the games. They're all about that knee-jerk thing:
Funny how relativistic that is, isn't it? No absolute truths about what's in a game, to let me make my own parental choice -- just gut-level "attitudes" they need to agree with to be "effective." This is the Family Feud method of ratings, in which information can be true or false or whatever -- just as long as you agree with the most people, you're "effective." If Americans are terrified of civil rights, a game with black characters will become an M in this system.
For me, as a parent, "effective" means something that equips me to make choices. I absolutely need the list of reasons -- the laundry list from the little ratings box thing -- to even get a start on deciding, and even then I'm suspicious. The MPAA ratings for movies are sometimes so surreally idiotic, and things like "Whale Rider" being PG-13 seem to spring from the odd history of that institution so irrationally, that I almost have to have full reviews.
It seems to me that my kid looks at the ratings more than I do. He knows if he asks for a game that's rated M he's probably not going to get it.
You're so right. My 12-year-old kids know which games are rated what. I saw my son reading reviews of "Gun" -- an open-ended western thing that's just out -- and wondered if he wanted it. He dismissed it out of hand as "an M." A couple of reviews on the Web showed me why the rating was there, and because it had to do with brutal violence I'll say no. But he almost takes them more seriously, as a gauge of what I'll accept, than I do.
You'd sure know more if you went to the (somewhat unclear) article, which would obviate the need for lots of your conjecture.
The main probe has been going on one of its three "stablizing wheels," the other two having failed. There's a sidebar link in the article to an earlier one about those failures. Mission controllers have been burning extra fuel keeping the thing at the right distance from the asteroid, facing the asteroid, and with its solar panels facing the sun; they already had that against them. Then the altimeter data they were getting was bad, they were closer than they thought, because some combination of the laser altimeter (previously untested) and the slope of the asteroid's surface confused the data.
They realized they were within 100 meters and had to send the detach command while the antenna switch was happening. The blackout prevented them from realizing a "keep above minimum altitude" engine thrust had just gone off.
This is much more of a reflection of this model of probe: it's cheaper, it's faster to develop, and there are going to be failures like the Beagle and this.
(Personally I do think there'd be a big gain if, before and after missions like this, the code got reviewed. I doubt very much that hackers in Idaho would have foreseen the failed stabilizers, the workaround, the potential for misjudging the altimeter data, and the combination of the blackout and the necessity for the release command. But in terms of intellectual freedom, it'd be a nice statement, and the Post Mortems would sure feature a lot of people asking Feynman-esque questions about icewater and O-rings.)
I wish people paid money for games that had an idea like that, instead of just for dynamic lighting effects and frame rates and so on...
This was a series of truly bad rolls of the dice. Two of their three stablizers failed, they had bad altimeter data because "the slope of the asteroid's surface had apparently caused the altimeter to misjudge... estimates of the craft's altitude," and then they got below 100 meters while the antenna switchover was happening. They sent the separate command without realizing the thrusters to maintain minimum altitude had just fired, because of that break in communications. So the article says, though it's not a sterling example of great science writing, I'll give you that.
The "mission officials are saying "Our readiness was not so complete," to their credit, but it's not like they're complete incompetents. More like they're pushing the technology: the altimeter hadn't ever been used before, for the obvious example.
Sort of fits the cheaper/faster model of robotic exploration. You have your hits and your misses. This isn't a Cassini Cadillac of a probe.
But your criteria are:
As big as possible, but it doesn't block your vision? Ain't going to happen in any sort of portable device. That's a huge screen far away, almost by definition.
I'm still not sure portability is a fundamental technology problem that has to wait for (another clumsy example) the window glass that can become an opaque "screen." Seems like a design problem is at least waiting for something more imaginative than visors, tiny screens, and plugs to use the existing TV.
So the sketch of a comparison I'm seeing is that "Catcher" would be among the big novels of the breaking wave of paperbacks from the 1950s -- a new pop phenomenon that scared people. It's had a long history of censorship over controversial content, which the people objecting to it say will "promote" various immoral activities. Doom, similarly, was in the breaking wave of a new form of popular entertainment, and is said to "promote" violence.
I can see a couple of pretty obvious distinctions.
One is that, while the pulp paperbacks of Catcher's day could be described as a publishing phenomenon, they wouldn't rate discussion as an entirely new medium with a fundamentally different ability to immerse the poor, easily misled (and condescended to) public. The FPS depended on a completely new technology; certain people fear new technologies instinctively.
Another is that Doom and the FPS genre consists mostly of flat-out action that's nearly always devoid of any real moral content or discussion. You kill 1,000 Zombies to get to a switch, not to decide whether to turn Jim in to the folks of Hannibal; most games don't involve particularly moral choices as part of their canned levels. Catcher in the Rye, on the other hand, was objected to (and these are some censors' own words) for:
I love that phrasing: "things." For my money, people who'd ban Catcher in the Rye are afraid of even confronting moral choices; they think the book's out of bounds in dealing with them as nakedly as it does. The stereotyped FPS, on the other hand, is an example of the culture those very same people deserve: morally empty trash entertainment that (so they say) desensitizes us to violence. Hey, they don't want us to exercise our consciences, so let's work our trigger fingers.
One of them is morally empty, the other's too full of moral argument. Be interesting to compare the groups that want to ban Doom, Catcher, and pRon... curious overlaps there.
"Reeked" has to do with odor, which suits your sewage theme, but that's the wrong word. "Wrecked" means broken. "Wreaked" is the work you wanted. Pronounced the same, but spelled differently.
Your larger argument is a bit like changing the terms of a formula so one variable either approaches infinity (all the lights on, all SUVS, all the time) or approaches zero (a falsely reductive description of Chinese developments). That's no problem by me; sometimes it's useful to do to check your terms. I'm not sure that argument doesn't amount to a needlessly distracting spat about who has the moral advantage when what we really need is practical mechnisms for exchanging environmental technology, but it's not off limits or anything...
Lordy. Is it possible for any living, sentient being not to have understood that the "frying bacon" thing was meant as:
They said irony was dead, but I didn't believe it until now. Hopefully you're quoting some incredibly lame pop-cultural thing, like when people laugh in Nelson's voice from the Simpsons or something... Oh, I've got it: you're "doing" Gareth Keenan, from the BBC version of the Office. Please, tell me that's it. Please.