Where is the link that proofs that pseudonyms are allowed? If they really are, Google is doing an insanely horrible job at communicating that.
To quote their policy [google.com], "the name that you commonly go by" (end of first paragraph), hence my referring to it as one's "common name".
"the name that you commonly go by" tells you really absolutely nothing, as it is very open to interpretation. If my Youtube friends know me by bratwurst12396, can I do a G+ account with that name? What if different groups know me under different names, can I have multiple accounts with different names?
The oppression from what? The government? Again not here.
There are plenty of cases where Facebook has been used in legal cases as evidence.
You are judged by what you say and do. If one isn't judged by their actions then by what.
People are also judged by what they are. Some communities might not react all that friendly to gay people, transgender people or numerous other kinds of simply being a little off from whatever the society considers the norm. Such things are a lot harder to keep secret when you have a real name attached to everything you write and make it simply impossible to use Google+ for any kind of honest public chat about those topics.
The crazy thing with all this is that the whole reason why Google+ is interesting in the first place are the circles, the idea that not everybody needs to know everything about you, but that different social circles simply might have different pictures and knowledge of you, yet by forbidding pseudonyms they essentially throw a wrench into that concept, as you can no longer do a clean cut between different circles. You have to publish your real name even to those circles where it has no business, where it might not even be the name under which people know you.
It brings with it restraint and hopefully thoughtfulness to a discourse.
That's an illusion, it will mainly just silence people, make them not voice true viewpoints. It makes the world sure look like a nice tidy place, but simply because everybody that might have a view a little outside the norm won't use Google+ to voice it.
Actually G+ has never required "real names", I used to link their naming policy which requests "common" name
Except for the part where they closed accounts that didn't use a real name and the post you linked contains nothing that argues that real names are no longer required. All it says is that they give you a warning before they close your account and a chance to enter your real name.
And what the hell is a "common name" anyway? I assume that a movie actor can use his stage name and "Charlie Sheen" and go with "Charlie Sheen" instead of "Carlos Irwin Estévez", but it doesn't seem to include Pseudonyms, so no Google+ for DarkFader I guess.
There are places where their isn't freedom of speech but the US, Canada, Europe, and a lot of other nations have that freedom.
Look up England's libel laws, sure you can say what you want, but you can get into a shit load of trouble for doing so. Even in the USA they'll throw you in jail for obscenity. And that's just the law, society itself has its fair share of oppress people as well.
Sorry but it is a good thing only say what you are willing to stand behind.
The problem isn't what you can stand behind, but the oppression you face after you said it.
YouTube as an example of a system that works? Your are just nuts.
Read what I have written again, YouTube is a system that doesn't work, it's one of the worst around, but not because of anonymity, but because the discussion system itself that doesn't allow any good communication. A system makes writing good past hard and crappy ones easy, sure you end up with a lot of the later kind.
The joke is: Requiring a real name won't fix that, it will just lead to the spammers to use a fake real looking name. It's also a "baby with the bathwater situation". A lot of the junk on the Internet isn't caused by being anonymous, but by shitty discussion systems. If you have a system like Youtube, which limit the amount that people can post, doesn't allow links and doesn't allow proper replies and just generally provides shitty readability of comments, then sure, you will end with a lot of non-sense, since quite literally it is impossible to write anything good in that system, as long before you can argue a point you will have run into the character limit. Slashdot on the other side, as threads, anonymity, good readability, doesn't limit post length much and a moderation system that encourages quality, not popularity, in turn the discussions are a hell of a lot better then almost anything else you find on the net.
I would also say that using real names does not reduce the free exchange of ideas.
Real names make the free exchange of ideas completely impossible, it is really as simple as that. If everything you say can be traced back to you and will stay attached to your persona forever you will be extremely careful about what you say and self censor what you say and whom you talk to. Maybe one day we will live in a truly free and tolerant society and hiding behind anonymity will no longer be necessary, but we are lightyears away from that and its doubtful that it will ever happen, as it doesn't seem to be part of human nature.
A good example from the early days was the famous debate between an unknown Finnish student and a very well known and respected professor over monolithic vs micro kernels.
How is that a good example? That was just a regular discussion about a technical topic, while it might look a little heated up close, its really completely uncontroversial in the broader social sense, nobody will get mobbed or commit suicide over it, with many other topics, people won't be so lucky.
The problem with that logic is that we are dealing with Google here, they have enormous market power and are shoving their G+ right into every bodies face right on their main search page. So while it is totally optional right now, its a closed beta after all, it could become far less optional in the not so distant future and then we essentially have an email replacement that only allows real names. You really don't want something that could become a central part of the Internet infrastructure be dominated by nanny state policy.
Most people who use social networks use their real name anyway.
Well, if you force them to use their real name, sure, no big surprise that only those are left who use a real name (or a faked real looking one).
Sadly that link doesn't really address the underlying problem, as the problem isn't that they deleted a few real names by accident, but that they require real names in the first place.
How do you come up with that conclusion? That's like a child saying their parents are evil for making them go to bed at a reasonable hour.
Yes, and I am not five anymore, I don't need Google to tell me what to do and how to behave.
If you look at all the other social networks, a lot of griefing and spam comes out of people using fake accounts and psuedonyms.
So what? Filter it out. Trying to solve spam by removing anonymity from the net is among the most retarded things one can do. It sure might make the problem smaller, but it also removes the very reason why the net was interesting in the first place. And anyway, solving spam in a social network is really not that hard, as every social network essentially comes with a build-in web-of-trust, so you just need to throw a bit of math around to find out which accounts are trustworthy and which are not.
I really can't see Google+ replacing Twitter anytime soon, as Google+ has a strict requirement for real names and will even close accounts based on it. Twitter on the other side is fine with pseudonyms and gets used a lot with them, not only from people that want to keep their real names private, but also organizations and companies that use it as their news feed or just from fake personalities for commedy purposes.
Google+ seems to have some plans to allow business use in the future, but right now they doesn't and it's not clear if they only allow that for money or also for the average make-shift organization (i.e. Anonymous, Wikileaks, Free Software stuff, etc.).
As far as I see it, with it's requirement for real names Google has essentially taken a first real step to being evil, while Twitter on the other side seems to be a much more open platform that is used by a lot of people that don't want their real names to be known for one reason or another.
Some comparison screen shots, essentially it performs extremely well on clean high contrast edges, but can lead to ugly blurring when the source image contains heavily aliased areas (i.e. small sub-pixel width lines in the background). There are also some temporal issue, as some of the artifacts it causes get worse when its animated. Overall I'd say its an clear improvement, not perfect, but when you are stuck with 1280x720 on 44" TV you are happy about any anti-aliasing you can get.
A lot of modern Playstation 3 games use that technique as it allows to do something useful with the SPUs, while the GPU is already busy enough rendering the graphics. It also helps with raytracing, as you might need less CPU power to do anti-aliasing this way, then the proper one. When the GPU of course has some free cycles left, there is no reason to not do it there.
Can somebody explain where exactly there is a conflict? Which namespaces are affected? dbus,/usr/bin/*, package names,.desktop files? "System Settings" as a name sounds perfectly fine and it makes perfect sense to name it that way for both environments, because it is a similar tool for the same job. Wouldn't the proper solution for this simply be to name the thing gsystem-setting and the other ksystem-settings and just label the menu entry "System Settings" depending on what DE you are currently running?
Convenient for what exactly? It certainly doesn't make it easier to figure out if a 50MiB file is larger or smaller then a 51000KiB one, with SI units that's trivial. The only area where you gain convenience is in print numbers on RAM or USB sticks, but even there the use is rather limited, as when it actually comes to using those things, you normally don't store stuff on them that fits nicely into the whole 1024 thing and the whole filesystem isn't organized in 1024 steps either, but in 512 or 4096 Bytes or whatever the favorite block size of the day is.
The only reason for 1024 is that people have grown up with it and that's among the worst reason to have to sticking to something.
There is plenty of good reason for 1000. Not only is it the proper use of SI units, its also a hell of a lot more convenient to have your file manager display things in steps of 1000 instead of 1024. As the later one makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, your files don't work in 1024 steps and your HDD doesn't either. It just makes live much harder as KiB, GiB and MiB end up behaving like completely different units where you need a conversion factor, not different magnitudes of the same unit where you just have to move the dot.
There are of course some use cases where there 1024 base is more convenient and you are free to use the KiB, GiB, etc. units for that, but for common everyday use it is much better to just stick to the 1000 KB, GB, etc. as that is much easier to handle. Just because people have grown up with 1024 doesn't make it better, its just the worse solution you got used to.
Incompatible formats, lack of portability, lack of rewritability, fragility, and overall inconvenience in terms of storage are what are putting an end to optical media.
The core problem really just comes down to price. Lack of rewritability is a non-issue when discs are cheap. Fragility also not much of an issue if discs are cheap and lack of compatibility would go away if the things would be cheap enough to become standard part on any PC. But as it is right now you have BluRays that are more expensive then DVD+R and more expensive then USB HDD, while providing essentially no real advantage, so no wonder that they haven't taken off.
The only advantage that optical media still has is granularity, you can buy a 2TB HDD for cheap, but you can't buy a 5GB HDD for cheap. HDD costs $30 minimum, which is far away from optical media which goes for like $0.40. I think there would still be some use for optical media when it's big enough and cheap enough. DVD+R really start to show their age and are just not big enough to be practical for many uses, while BluRay provides to few advantages to be worth the upgrade.
A problem with a 2h game is that it would need much simpler mechanics than todays 10h games, as with regular games you have to many buttons and combinations to remember, thus before you grow accustomed to the controls, the game would already be over. Reusing engines and control schemes might however help, I would like to see more companies follow TellTales model: Simple engine that can be reused on different games, instead of reinventing the wheel with every game.
Sure the original game was out in 2007 but the concept was new (AFAIK).
The portal gun was new, the basic concept of portals itself however has been kind of around. Mirrors in old Doom-era FPS where essentially portals. Also Prey had them in 2006 and here is a GDC talk of Peter Molyneux 's "The Room" from 2005, the fun with portals starts at 6:20. And essentially all teleporters in games are just a less graphically fancy version of portals (not all however preserve momentum). The interesting thing with Portal is that it took the core concept and build an all out puzzle game around it, instead of just having it be a random curiosity of the game engine in a normal shooter.
I don't quite see the problem with Doom III. It did actually do a few interesting things beside the graphics. The sentry bots were pretty cool, the highres terminals that you could use directly from FPS viiew are something I still haven't seen replicated anywhere else and it was the first game I can remember that didn't allow shooting civilians by changing your cross-hair into a talk-symbol. Those aside, yeah, the whole flashlight thing was a bit annoying, it did have its fair share of monster closets and running through the same corridors could get a little boring, but that doesn't make it a techdemo.
What good would the reflected glow do? That only tells you that a key got pressed, not which one. The app in question here seems rather trivial, all it does is detect which key was pressed by looking for the blue highlight on the key, it still needs to have a completely free view onto the keyboard to see which key that was and when you have that free a view, you can see the users hand hitting the keys anyway. The only interesting thing seems to be that it is easier to automate the detection of the blue keys then it is detecting if a hand movement was a key-press or not.
It's one of those headlines I think even chinese will doubt.
There is not much to doubt really, unlike the space shuttle, the Shenzhou has an escape system and on the Soyuz, which the Shenzhou design is based on, they actually had to use it when a rocket exploded on the launchpad.
No one is questioning whether or not anything is against the spec, what was questioned is why you cripple technology (through a spec or otherwise) without a good reason,
It's not completely without good reason, it is for example quite nice that I can simply plug any cheap HDMI cabel into a PS3 or Xbox360 instead of having to get a special PS3/Xbox360-HDMI cable with a proprietary multi-format plug at the other end. Other standards like USB also have also seen quite few non-standard plugs over the years, maybe that's something they wanted to avoid. That of course doesn't make their reaction in this case any better, the general idea however that a HDMI device should have a HDMI port and all HDMI cables should plug into that isn't all that bad by itself (of course in practice that is already not true, as there are different HDMI sub-standards and not all HDMI cables support all features).
But when you really get down to it - is faith any different than believing in any other supernatural item?
Faith in a very large part is simply what you have been taught, so it is really no more a mental disorder then speaking Chinese is.
An adult who earnestly still believes in Santa is pretty much in the same boat.
The problem with Santa clause is that a lot of claims made about him can easily be falsified. Your average religion can not, it's so vague and metaphorical and open to interpretation that you will have a hard time making any hard claims that you can even test and whenever you actually do test, people just move the goalpost or insert a magical "God did it".
That's not to say that there is some overlap, when you start hearing Jesus, than you have a large chance of a mental disorder, but the average religious guy doesn't have that.
In my day you had a disc, and that was your game. You could play it, lend it to a friend, sell it, turn it into a shuriken (though that was mostly done with AOL cds). I miss that.
And speaking about good old times, I remember a time when some games had a network install option, that would allow you to install a multiplayer-only version of the game and play on up to three computers for multiplayer gameplay over the network.
and what makes you think Microsoft won't adopt this model too?
They are already doing it. To play online, even when the game is new, on Xbox360 you have to pay them $5 a month, while multiplayer on PS3 is free or whatever the cost of the PSN pass is per game when bought used with a used code.
whether I play the game for 2 years, using the services provided, or I play the game for 1 year and someone else plays the game for another extra year?
You wouldn't play the game for two years, but maybe just for a month or two (or at least the average gamer would), then sell it. Thus the publishers would have to pay your server costs and the server costs for the person who you sold it to and then whoever they sold it to when they got bored with it. Thus in the end the server cost multiply due to used sales, while they income from used sales stays zero.
The game has been payed for, and that includes the 'right' to the services for however long I wish
No it doesn't. You buy no right, the publisher is just nice enough to let you play online however long he likes and if he things players had enough he will pull the plug or start with online pass stuff to get his share of the used game sales pot.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry, but that is an outright lie.
Where is the link that proofs that pseudonyms are allowed? If they really are, Google is doing an insanely horrible job at communicating that.
To quote their policy [google.com], "the name that you commonly go by" (end of first paragraph), hence my referring to it as one's "common name".
"the name that you commonly go by" tells you really absolutely nothing, as it is very open to interpretation. If my Youtube friends know me by bratwurst12396, can I do a G+ account with that name? What if different groups know me under different names, can I have multiple accounts with different names?
The oppression from what? The government? Again not here.
There are plenty of cases where Facebook has been used in legal cases as evidence.
You are judged by what you say and do. If one isn't judged by their actions then by what.
People are also judged by what they are. Some communities might not react all that friendly to gay people, transgender people or numerous other kinds of simply being a little off from whatever the society considers the norm. Such things are a lot harder to keep secret when you have a real name attached to everything you write and make it simply impossible to use Google+ for any kind of honest public chat about those topics.
The crazy thing with all this is that the whole reason why Google+ is interesting in the first place are the circles, the idea that not everybody needs to know everything about you, but that different social circles simply might have different pictures and knowledge of you, yet by forbidding pseudonyms they essentially throw a wrench into that concept, as you can no longer do a clean cut between different circles. You have to publish your real name even to those circles where it has no business, where it might not even be the name under which people know you.
It brings with it restraint and hopefully thoughtfulness to a discourse.
That's an illusion, it will mainly just silence people, make them not voice true viewpoints. It makes the world sure look like a nice tidy place, but simply because everybody that might have a view a little outside the norm won't use Google+ to voice it.
Actually G+ has never required "real names", I used to link their naming policy which requests "common" name
Except for the part where they closed accounts that didn't use a real name and the post you linked contains nothing that argues that real names are no longer required. All it says is that they give you a warning before they close your account and a chance to enter your real name.
And what the hell is a "common name" anyway? I assume that a movie actor can use his stage name and "Charlie Sheen" and go with "Charlie Sheen" instead of "Carlos Irwin Estévez", but it doesn't seem to include Pseudonyms, so no Google+ for DarkFader I guess.
There are places where their isn't freedom of speech but the US, Canada, Europe, and a lot of other nations have that freedom.
Look up England's libel laws, sure you can say what you want, but you can get into a shit load of trouble for doing so. Even in the USA they'll throw you in jail for obscenity. And that's just the law, society itself has its fair share of oppress people as well.
Sorry but it is a good thing only say what you are willing to stand behind.
The problem isn't what you can stand behind, but the oppression you face after you said it.
YouTube as an example of a system that works? Your are just nuts.
Read what I have written again, YouTube is a system that doesn't work, it's one of the worst around, but not because of anonymity, but because the discussion system itself that doesn't allow any good communication. A system makes writing good past hard and crappy ones easy, sure you end up with a lot of the later kind.
I also do not see it as being evil, maybe you should read this post http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/07/25/2132238/The-Internets-Age-of-Rage [slashdot.org] it is about how being anonymous inspires people to act in unethical ways.
The joke is: Requiring a real name won't fix that, it will just lead to the spammers to use a fake real looking name. It's also a "baby with the bathwater situation". A lot of the junk on the Internet isn't caused by being anonymous, but by shitty discussion systems. If you have a system like Youtube, which limit the amount that people can post, doesn't allow links and doesn't allow proper replies and just generally provides shitty readability of comments, then sure, you will end with a lot of non-sense, since quite literally it is impossible to write anything good in that system, as long before you can argue a point you will have run into the character limit. Slashdot on the other side, as threads, anonymity, good readability, doesn't limit post length much and a moderation system that encourages quality, not popularity, in turn the discussions are a hell of a lot better then almost anything else you find on the net.
I would also say that using real names does not reduce the free exchange of ideas.
Real names make the free exchange of ideas completely impossible, it is really as simple as that. If everything you say can be traced back to you and will stay attached to your persona forever you will be extremely careful about what you say and self censor what you say and whom you talk to. Maybe one day we will live in a truly free and tolerant society and hiding behind anonymity will no longer be necessary, but we are lightyears away from that and its doubtful that it will ever happen, as it doesn't seem to be part of human nature.
A good example from the early days was the famous debate between an unknown Finnish student and a very well known and respected professor over monolithic vs micro kernels.
How is that a good example? That was just a regular discussion about a technical topic, while it might look a little heated up close, its really completely uncontroversial in the broader social sense, nobody will get mobbed or commit suicide over it, with many other topics, people won't be so lucky.
The problem with that logic is that we are dealing with Google here, they have enormous market power and are shoving their G+ right into every bodies face right on their main search page. So while it is totally optional right now, its a closed beta after all, it could become far less optional in the not so distant future and then we essentially have an email replacement that only allows real names. You really don't want something that could become a central part of the Internet infrastructure be dominated by nanny state policy.
Most people who use social networks use their real name anyway.
Well, if you force them to use their real name, sure, no big surprise that only those are left who use a real name (or a faked real looking one).
Sadly that link doesn't really address the underlying problem, as the problem isn't that they deleted a few real names by accident, but that they require real names in the first place.
How do you come up with that conclusion? That's like a child saying their parents are evil for making them go to bed at a reasonable hour.
Yes, and I am not five anymore, I don't need Google to tell me what to do and how to behave.
If you look at all the other social networks, a lot of griefing and spam comes out of people using fake accounts and psuedonyms.
So what? Filter it out. Trying to solve spam by removing anonymity from the net is among the most retarded things one can do. It sure might make the problem smaller, but it also removes the very reason why the net was interesting in the first place. And anyway, solving spam in a social network is really not that hard, as every social network essentially comes with a build-in web-of-trust, so you just need to throw a bit of math around to find out which accounts are trustworthy and which are not.
I really can't see Google+ replacing Twitter anytime soon, as Google+ has a strict requirement for real names and will even close accounts based on it. Twitter on the other side is fine with pseudonyms and gets used a lot with them, not only from people that want to keep their real names private, but also organizations and companies that use it as their news feed or just from fake personalities for commedy purposes.
Google+ seems to have some plans to allow business use in the future, but right now they doesn't and it's not clear if they only allow that for money or also for the average make-shift organization (i.e. Anonymous, Wikileaks, Free Software stuff, etc.).
As far as I see it, with it's requirement for real names Google has essentially taken a first real step to being evil, while Twitter on the other side seems to be a much more open platform that is used by a lot of people that don't want their real names to be known for one reason or another.
Some comparison screen shots, essentially it performs extremely well on clean high contrast edges, but can lead to ugly blurring when the source image contains heavily aliased areas (i.e. small sub-pixel width lines in the background). There are also some temporal issue, as some of the artifacts it causes get worse when its animated. Overall I'd say its an clear improvement, not perfect, but when you are stuck with 1280x720 on 44" TV you are happy about any anti-aliasing you can get.
why not leave it on the GPU?
A lot of modern Playstation 3 games use that technique as it allows to do something useful with the SPUs, while the GPU is already busy enough rendering the graphics. It also helps with raytracing, as you might need less CPU power to do anti-aliasing this way, then the proper one. When the GPU of course has some free cycles left, there is no reason to not do it there.
Can somebody explain where exactly there is a conflict? Which namespaces are affected? dbus, /usr/bin/*, package names, .desktop files? "System Settings" as a name sounds perfectly fine and it makes perfect sense to name it that way for both environments, because it is a similar tool for the same job. Wouldn't the proper solution for this simply be to name the thing gsystem-setting and the other ksystem-settings and just label the menu entry "System Settings" depending on what DE you are currently running?
Calling it a kilobyte is convenient and simple.
Convenient for what exactly? It certainly doesn't make it easier to figure out if a 50MiB file is larger or smaller then a 51000KiB one, with SI units that's trivial. The only area where you gain convenience is in print numbers on RAM or USB sticks, but even there the use is rather limited, as when it actually comes to using those things, you normally don't store stuff on them that fits nicely into the whole 1024 thing and the whole filesystem isn't organized in 1024 steps either, but in 512 or 4096 Bytes or whatever the favorite block size of the day is.
The only reason for 1024 is that people have grown up with it and that's among the worst reason to have to sticking to something.
There was absolutely no other reason for it.
There is plenty of good reason for 1000. Not only is it the proper use of SI units, its also a hell of a lot more convenient to have your file manager display things in steps of 1000 instead of 1024. As the later one makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, your files don't work in 1024 steps and your HDD doesn't either. It just makes live much harder as KiB, GiB and MiB end up behaving like completely different units where you need a conversion factor, not different magnitudes of the same unit where you just have to move the dot.
There are of course some use cases where there 1024 base is more convenient and you are free to use the KiB, GiB, etc. units for that, but for common everyday use it is much better to just stick to the 1000 KB, GB, etc. as that is much easier to handle. Just because people have grown up with 1024 doesn't make it better, its just the worse solution you got used to.
Incompatible formats, lack of portability, lack of rewritability, fragility, and overall inconvenience in terms of storage are what are putting an end to optical media.
The core problem really just comes down to price. Lack of rewritability is a non-issue when discs are cheap. Fragility also not much of an issue if discs are cheap and lack of compatibility would go away if the things would be cheap enough to become standard part on any PC. But as it is right now you have BluRays that are more expensive then DVD+R and more expensive then USB HDD, while providing essentially no real advantage, so no wonder that they haven't taken off.
The only advantage that optical media still has is granularity, you can buy a 2TB HDD for cheap, but you can't buy a 5GB HDD for cheap. HDD costs $30 minimum, which is far away from optical media which goes for like $0.40. I think there would still be some use for optical media when it's big enough and cheap enough. DVD+R really start to show their age and are just not big enough to be practical for many uses, while BluRay provides to few advantages to be worth the upgrade.
A problem with a 2h game is that it would need much simpler mechanics than todays 10h games, as with regular games you have to many buttons and combinations to remember, thus before you grow accustomed to the controls, the game would already be over. Reusing engines and control schemes might however help, I would like to see more companies follow TellTales model: Simple engine that can be reused on different games, instead of reinventing the wheel with every game.
Sure the original game was out in 2007 but the concept was new (AFAIK).
The portal gun was new, the basic concept of portals itself however has been kind of around. Mirrors in old Doom-era FPS where essentially portals. Also Prey had them in 2006 and here is a GDC talk of Peter Molyneux 's "The Room" from 2005, the fun with portals starts at 6:20. And essentially all teleporters in games are just a less graphically fancy version of portals (not all however preserve momentum). The interesting thing with Portal is that it took the core concept and build an all out puzzle game around it, instead of just having it be a random curiosity of the game engine in a normal shooter.
I don't quite see the problem with Doom III. It did actually do a few interesting things beside the graphics. The sentry bots were pretty cool, the highres terminals that you could use directly from FPS viiew are something I still haven't seen replicated anywhere else and it was the first game I can remember that didn't allow shooting civilians by changing your cross-hair into a talk-symbol. Those aside, yeah, the whole flashlight thing was a bit annoying, it did have its fair share of monster closets and running through the same corridors could get a little boring, but that doesn't make it a techdemo.
What good would the reflected glow do? That only tells you that a key got pressed, not which one. The app in question here seems rather trivial, all it does is detect which key was pressed by looking for the blue highlight on the key, it still needs to have a completely free view onto the keyboard to see which key that was and when you have that free a view, you can see the users hand hitting the keys anyway. The only interesting thing seems to be that it is easier to automate the detection of the blue keys then it is detecting if a hand movement was a key-press or not.
It's one of those headlines I think even chinese will doubt.
There is not much to doubt really, unlike the space shuttle, the Shenzhou has an escape system and on the Soyuz, which the Shenzhou design is based on, they actually had to use it when a rocket exploded on the launchpad.
No one is questioning whether or not anything is against the spec, what was questioned is why you cripple technology (through a spec or otherwise) without a good reason,
It's not completely without good reason, it is for example quite nice that I can simply plug any cheap HDMI cabel into a PS3 or Xbox360 instead of having to get a special PS3/Xbox360-HDMI cable with a proprietary multi-format plug at the other end. Other standards like USB also have also seen quite few non-standard plugs over the years, maybe that's something they wanted to avoid. That of course doesn't make their reaction in this case any better, the general idea however that a HDMI device should have a HDMI port and all HDMI cables should plug into that isn't all that bad by itself (of course in practice that is already not true, as there are different HDMI sub-standards and not all HDMI cables support all features).
But when you really get down to it - is faith any different than believing in any other supernatural item?
Faith in a very large part is simply what you have been taught, so it is really no more a mental disorder then speaking Chinese is.
An adult who earnestly still believes in Santa is pretty much in the same boat.
The problem with Santa clause is that a lot of claims made about him can easily be falsified. Your average religion can not, it's so vague and metaphorical and open to interpretation that you will have a hard time making any hard claims that you can even test and whenever you actually do test, people just move the goalpost or insert a magical "God did it".
That's not to say that there is some overlap, when you start hearing Jesus, than you have a large chance of a mental disorder, but the average religious guy doesn't have that.
In my day you had a disc, and that was your game. You could play it, lend it to a friend, sell it, turn it into a shuriken (though that was mostly done with AOL cds). I miss that.
And speaking about good old times, I remember a time when some games had a network install option, that would allow you to install a multiplayer-only version of the game and play on up to three computers for multiplayer gameplay over the network.
and what makes you think Microsoft won't adopt this model too?
They are already doing it. To play online, even when the game is new, on Xbox360 you have to pay them $5 a month, while multiplayer on PS3 is free or whatever the cost of the PSN pass is per game when bought used with a used code.
whether I play the game for 2 years, using the services provided, or I play the game for 1 year and someone else plays the game for another extra year?
You wouldn't play the game for two years, but maybe just for a month or two (or at least the average gamer would), then sell it. Thus the publishers would have to pay your server costs and the server costs for the person who you sold it to and then whoever they sold it to when they got bored with it. Thus in the end the server cost multiply due to used sales, while they income from used sales stays zero.
The game has been payed for, and that includes the 'right' to the services for however long I wish
No it doesn't. You buy no right, the publisher is just nice enough to let you play online however long he likes and if he things players had enough he will pull the plug or start with online pass stuff to get his share of the used game sales pot.