That might give a little bit extra motivation, but at the end of the day, all the recognition in the world doesn't bring you food on the table. The by far biggest problem with Open Source I have seen over the years is simply that a lot of the contributors disappear after a while, not because they don't like doing what they do, but simply because they don't have the time for it any more, as their real job keeps them busy enough.
On top of that clever problem solving is only a small part of real world work. With most normal tasks you know the solution already very well right from the start, it just takes time and effort to implement it. I bet money would have had quite a positive impact when the task would have been to dig a hole and you get money for how deep it was. And back to the clever problem solving: More money might not make the people already on the job solve problems faster, but what about getting the clever people to do the job in the first place? If you pay noticeably less then the competition, then there might be no reason for the clever people to come to you.
And twisting it all back to Open Source, the issue here isn't how large the pay is, but that there is zero pay and that makes quite a huge difference when it comes to all the boring and tedious tasks, as those hardly ever get done properly (user interface stuff, etc.).
Flash games, such as those made by Zynga (think Cafe World and Farmville) are especially heinous in this regard - I've seen 60% CPU usage and 0.5GB RAM sucked up by a single instance of firefox
That's nothing. For shits and giggles pay a visit to the one page version of the HTML5 spec. That page completly blocks Firefox with 100% CPU for over 5 minutes(!) on Intel Core Duo 6300. In this time Firefox becomes completly unresponsive, but it hasn't actually crashed, its just really busy doing the layout.
Back in the 80's, there was an air-combat game. Think it might've been F15-Strike Eagle...which included the concept of random missions in which you were sent out to hit one random air target and one random ground target for each mission.
Back in the 90's there was EF2000, a flight sim that included a dynamic campaign that could simulate a complete war. All missions where automatically generated, but they weren't random, they matched the current state of the war. You could even see friend and foe flying around on their missions, while you are flying around on yours. The world was 'alive' and it was the most friggin amazing thing ever.
Random is boring when it has no logic behind it and thus no story to tell or play. When random on the other side means a dynamic evolving world that itself becomes the storyteller it can be the most fantastic thing ever, because the game will stop feeling like a serious of script triggers and instead feel like a real world. My problem with todays games is that they simply feel like a roller coaster ride, it looks fun and exciting, but if you have played games for a while it all just looks fake.
Simply put: why is it that we assume an "advanced" civilization means that it is militarily advanced and not ethically advanced?
Ethics and morals are in large part based on evolution and survival of your race/group. Thus you get that killing pigs and cows in million is totally ok, while killing even a single human is not (unless its war, then its totally ok to). Next thing is that the more technology advances the more decoupled a race will get from natural evolution. Taken the speed of technological progress into account, you have maybe a 100 year window where you can meet with a race at a similar technical level then we have now, anything past that means either they are far more advanced then you or visa versa, thus given the age of the universe, the chance of meeting a race at a similar technical level is as good as zero.
All that given the chance is that the aliens you meet is some post-singularity super race, that might have long ago moved beyond evolution, morals and all other naturally given things, is pretty damn high. The problem is that there is really nothing to depend on up that point. Maybe they'll value live for some reason, maybe they value it so much that they consider evolution to be a far to slow tool to do the job and instead prefer to speed things up their way. Or maybe they just don't even care, cause their solar powered super brains are entertained much better by a virtual MMORPGs then they are by the real life universe.
Its pretty hard to tell what a race will do once its technology is so far that they are basically decoupled from the natural world. But the chance that they will fit our definition of "good" seem pretty slim to me, not because they are evil, but because these concepts just might have lost meaning for them long ago.
Oh, and I don't think they will go around the universe eating up resources like crazy, chances are they got their solar power, nuclear fusion and recycling figured out so that they don't need to.
IPv6 is incompatible with IPv4, thus you can't just switch users to IPv6 and be done, you still have to drag all the IPv4 baggage with you or large parts of the Internet would be unreachable (i.e. almost all of it). And well, if you have to drag IPv4 with you anyway, why even bother with IPv6? More work while providing no advantage for you and very little advantage for your consumers as nobody else is using IPv6 either.
Its quite a chicken&egg mess, as you only really benefit from IPv6 when everybody is doing it too. And nobody wants to be the first and pay the price. Which is why I would really welcome some government regulation in that area to force ISPs to start offering to IPv6.
All this is academic, though. How many people would *really* be able to tell the difference between a 96dpi and 200dpi display on their desktop
Basically all of them. The difference is extremely noticeable when it comes to fonts and other things that require pixels smaller then what a 96dpi display can produce to render properly. The difference between 200dpi and 600dpi might be a little trickier, as with 200dpi you can already start to render a font that looks like a print font, not like a screen font.
But 96dpi is really extremely low and its a little depressing that computer power has increased by orders of magnitude, while the last big dpi jump was back when things switched from 320x200 to 640x480, everything after that has mostly about larger displays, not higher dpi displays.
The problem is that you only really benefit from more DPI when you have a large DPI increase (say 2x). When you only have a fractional increase you run into all sorts of problems, with fonts for example you end up either having to use one pixel width or two pixels, one might end up being to thin, while the other is to thick. Subpixel rendering can help a good bit with that, but when it comes for example to text embedded in an image on a website you can do anything about it, it will just look like crap at uneven scales and become close to unreadable (especially in Firefox in Linux, which can't even do filtering when scaling images).
For example, would you want a 50" display on your desktop?
Absolutely, lots of people are emulating such a setup with multiple monitors today. A bigger screen is one of the simplest ways to increase productivity, as you spend less time shuffling windows around.
How about a 30" monitor with 200,000,000 pixels
That would be rather ridiculous, but I would very much welcome a display with 300dpi or more, so that one could actually start to have print-quality fonts.
Going much higher than current resolutions would be pretty counterproductive untill all our OSes and applications had completely resolution-independent interfaces, anyway.
Higher resolution would make it much easier to have resolution independed interfaces, as all the ugly scaling artifacts that pop up when you only have a small increase in dpi and thus fractions in scale could be avoided. Stretching 640x480 to 800x600 looks crap, stretching 640x480 to 1280x960 on the other side looks quite fine, as you just need to double the pixels. This is especially important when it comes to fonts, which are just one-pixel width to begin with.
Others prefer for the game portions to be interesting, rather than realistic.
The thing is: "realistic" often results in "interesting". As with real physics you get emergent behaviour and dynamic gameplay situations, while with made up hacks you just sit there and wait for the next script trigger, which is often predictable, completly boring when it comes to replay and insanely immersion breaking. That doesn't mean I want every game to be like Falcon4.0 where you have to read hundreds of pages of manual before you can get anything done, instead you can simply mix realism with accessibility add-ons. Driving games are slowly getting there, they are starting to provide both a reasonable amount of realism while at the same time providing optional breaking assistants, dynamic drive lines or even time-rewind, thus giving you accessibility without turning into a flat arcade game. And also lets not forget that realism can also be abused for fun, Indy500 might have been one of the most realistic racing games of its time, but it was also a hilariously awesome crash simulation. Don't like the drive? Just turn around have and have some fun with the replay feature while you crash into oncoming cars.
The sad part is that the driving genre seems to be the only one which seems to "get it", most other genres out there just ignore reality and turn into a series of script triggers, never willing to actually teach the player something new, instead its just "aim, shoot, rinse and repeat".
The secondary classical channel verifies the integrity of the quantum channel. How are we assured of the integrity of the classical channel?
If you distribute the one time pad securely over the quantum channel and then encrypt the secondary channel with the one time pad, then it is secure. That is the beauty of the one time pad encryption, its very simple but also provable 100% secure.
But in the end it is still snake oil. When was the last time an attack worked on breaking strong encryption? It just doesn't happen, security breaks tend to happen at the weakest links, not the strongest one, and classic encryption is pretty damn strong. Also the range limit of quantum cryptography kind of makes it useless for most cases.
The real issue isn't so much how he defines "art", but how he defines "game":
Santiago might cite an immersive game without points or rules, but I would say then it ceases to be a game and becomes a representation of a story, a novel, a play, dance, a film. Those are things you cannot win; you can only experience them.
Its not 1980 any more and in many, maybe even most, mainstream video games "points" are a minuscule part of the experience if they exist at all and "winning" today's games is hardly any different then reaching the end of a DVD, you eventual get there, but that's not the reason you play it.
That said, even with his outdated definition of "game" I would disagree with him, as there is certainly some beauty even in games based around "points" and "winnig" that goes beyond just blunt craftmenship. The reason why Tetris or SuperMarioBros are still remembered 25 years later is because they did something far beyond the average forgettable game. Its a different kind of art then your average movies, but art non the less.
Re:BS on 200GB/year for audio
on
Life Recorder
·
· Score: 1
The details don't really matter that much, I think the important point is simply that technology is now not only doable, but also quite cheap. A $100 1TB drive will last you a good year for audio and video recording, a little less if you don't compress much and a good bit more if you compress heavily. Also SDHC cards have enough storage for days or even weeks and hardly cost much any more. Battery life is still a bit of a problem as most device in that range only last for half a day, but things are improving. We are basically at a point where the life recorder goes from neat sci-fi idea, to something you can soon buy for the price of a NintendoDS.
Re:Ever seen a video of a cameraman in a fight?
on
Life Recorder
·
· Score: 1
Use multiple cameras with a large field of view and some motion tracking software to fix up the video later on. The biggest problem is battery life and resolution, as the resolution will go down quite a bit if you want to capture a full 360 degree view.
Anyway, as security device it is indeed snake oil, its much more interesting to capture the important moments in your life that you didn't see coming.
The problem is that Wikipedia accepts only stuff printed on paper as source (its not quite, but close enough), this makes it close to impossible in some regions to write content. Look at homebrew on consoles, you can find tons of information about it out there or just try it yourself, but you hardly find anything about it in the mainstream press or ever the gaming press. The best you can find is some rather useless generic talk that doesn't tell you more then "it exists". The reason for that is simply that the whole mainstream gaming press is simply in the pockets of the game industry, they simply don't want to spoil their connection to the game industry by doing in depth reporting on devices which can be used for piracy.
Another problem is simply that some things are outside the scope of a Wikipedia or non-notable. You can't get an detailed article about a minor character in a game into Wikipedia and neither can you get a complete game walkthrough into Wikipedia.
I find it quite annoying that Wikipedia just blocks this additional content instead of creating infrastructure for more niche kind of knowledge (say when you have "Monkey Island" also allow "Monkey Island/Walkthrough" and other detail information which doesn't need to follow the strict criteria of the main Wikipedia). But well, that's the way it is and thus you get tons of specialized Wikis out there and thus a fragmentation of the infrastructure.
In reality, do you know what's going to happen with the element? In order to make it render properly, people will have to specify a class or style, and fix the rendering using CSS.
article, nav, section, header, footer and friends are about markup, not about rendering. In terms of normal rendering it makes no difference if you use <article> or <div class="article>, in terms of marked it however makes a huge different. One of the core problem for me with the Web today is that there is simply no to tell the browser what is the actual content and what is just a navigation bar. This in turn makes some webpages on some devices pretty much unusable (Wikipedia on a PSP for example). If the navigation and article content would feature proper markup you could have a button in your browser to simply hide the navigation, without the markup the browser has no way to tell where the navigation ends and the content starts.
Now of course in practice things might turn out different, pages might not use proper markup as it would make it to easy to skip advertisements and such, but on the other side you have pages like Wikipedia where it could really be a useful addition.
That said, I am not holding by breath, <link rel="next"> and friends have been in HTML for well over a decade and can be extremely useful in some use cases (having a book in HTML for example), yet proper support in most browsers for them is still missing or at least well enough hidden that a normal end user would never find them.
Even a poorly implemented or incomplete game will garner interest if it is NEW and INTERESTING.
I would say its quite the other way around. A clone of a well loved game will attract lots of attention, because it basically comes with a build in fan base and there will be plenty of fan pages out there that might link your project, thus spreading the word. Doing something completly new on the other side means you have to start from scratch, you don't have places to advertise your game and people will have no idea if your game is even worth a try, after all there are thousands of other free games floating around out there. You will also have a much harder time attracting and coordinating contributors, as its much easier to point to something existing as example how to implement a feature, than trying to explain a vague gameplay concept over the Internet, especially when you don't even know if the thing will actually work out.
That of course doesn't mean that you should do an exact pixel perfect clone, after all why bother when I could play the original in emulation, but there is really nothing wrong with using ideas from an already existing games and adding a bit of your own style on top. The simple truth is that things are not created in a vacuum, they always connect in one way or another to things already out there. Be original when you have a really good idea, but don't try to reinvent the wheel just because you can.
I've never understood this 'my browser is faster than your browser' attention. Most people use their browser over the Internet, with download speeds that make any computer wait.
Just look at Slashdot, every news story that approaches ~1000 comments becomes close to unusable. Rendering this story with ~1600 comments takes 50% CPU (only one core is used) for close to a minute on my Dual Core to display, only a very tiny fraction of that is the actual download. And of course the whole browser gets completly unresponsive whenever you click a reply button and let the dynamic HTML do its magic.
Another thing: Firefox on Linux still lacks basic filtering when scaling images, so zooming into pages always looks like complete crap. And of course not only does it look like crap its also jerky and light years away from the fluidity you get presented on an iPhone or iPad, both having for less available computing power then my PC.
Webpages with a fixed background image also feel a hell of a lot more slugish, then pages with a normal scrolling background.
Now of course, just throwing the GPU at it won't fix all those problems, some issues require proper coding to make use of multi cores and such, but I very much welcome any optimization that I can get in a browser, as browsers really aren't exactly what I would call fast.
Slashdot Mirror
the side who goes to great pains to avoid casualties
Which side would that be? It can be the US since they sure as hell started the whole war to begin with.
That's just integer division, nothing to do with FPU. In Python3 they actually changed this behaviour, so that now floating point is used:
>>> print((1/3)*3)
1.0
A thing that I found a little more surprising in Python is:
>>> -5 / 2
-3
When you come from C you'd expect that to be -2.
That might give a little bit extra motivation, but at the end of the day, all the recognition in the world doesn't bring you food on the table. The by far biggest problem with Open Source I have seen over the years is simply that a lot of the contributors disappear after a while, not because they don't like doing what they do, but simply because they don't have the time for it any more, as their real job keeps them busy enough.
On top of that clever problem solving is only a small part of real world work. With most normal tasks you know the solution already very well right from the start, it just takes time and effort to implement it. I bet money would have had quite a positive impact when the task would have been to dig a hole and you get money for how deep it was. And back to the clever problem solving: More money might not make the people already on the job solve problems faster, but what about getting the clever people to do the job in the first place? If you pay noticeably less then the competition, then there might be no reason for the clever people to come to you.
And twisting it all back to Open Source, the issue here isn't how large the pay is, but that there is zero pay and that makes quite a huge difference when it comes to all the boring and tedious tasks, as those hardly ever get done properly (user interface stuff, etc.).
Flash games, such as those made by Zynga (think Cafe World and Farmville) are especially heinous in this regard - I've seen 60% CPU usage and 0.5GB RAM sucked up by a single instance of firefox
That's nothing. For shits and giggles pay a visit to the one page version of the HTML5 spec. That page completly blocks Firefox with 100% CPU for over 5 minutes(!) on Intel Core Duo 6300. In this time Firefox becomes completly unresponsive, but it hasn't actually crashed, its just really busy doing the layout.
Back in the 80's, there was an air-combat game. Think it might've been F15-Strike Eagle...which included the concept of random missions in which you were sent out to hit one random air target and one random ground target for each mission.
Back in the 90's there was EF2000, a flight sim that included a dynamic campaign that could simulate a complete war. All missions where automatically generated, but they weren't random, they matched the current state of the war. You could even see friend and foe flying around on their missions, while you are flying around on yours. The world was 'alive' and it was the most friggin amazing thing ever.
Random is boring when it has no logic behind it and thus no story to tell or play. When random on the other side means a dynamic evolving world that itself becomes the storyteller it can be the most fantastic thing ever, because the game will stop feeling like a serious of script triggers and instead feel like a real world. My problem with todays games is that they simply feel like a roller coaster ride, it looks fun and exciting, but if you have played games for a while it all just looks fake.
Simply put: why is it that we assume an "advanced" civilization means that it is militarily advanced and not ethically advanced?
Ethics and morals are in large part based on evolution and survival of your race/group. Thus you get that killing pigs and cows in million is totally ok, while killing even a single human is not (unless its war, then its totally ok to). Next thing is that the more technology advances the more decoupled a race will get from natural evolution. Taken the speed of technological progress into account, you have maybe a 100 year window where you can meet with a race at a similar technical level then we have now, anything past that means either they are far more advanced then you or visa versa, thus given the age of the universe, the chance of meeting a race at a similar technical level is as good as zero.
All that given the chance is that the aliens you meet is some post-singularity super race, that might have long ago moved beyond evolution, morals and all other naturally given things, is pretty damn high. The problem is that there is really nothing to depend on up that point. Maybe they'll value live for some reason, maybe they value it so much that they consider evolution to be a far to slow tool to do the job and instead prefer to speed things up their way. Or maybe they just don't even care, cause their solar powered super brains are entertained much better by a virtual MMORPGs then they are by the real life universe.
Its pretty hard to tell what a race will do once its technology is so far that they are basically decoupled from the natural world. But the chance that they will fit our definition of "good" seem pretty slim to me, not because they are evil, but because these concepts just might have lost meaning for them long ago.
Oh, and I don't think they will go around the universe eating up resources like crazy, chances are they got their solar power, nuclear fusion and recycling figured out so that they don't need to.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_number_mapping
IPv6 is incompatible with IPv4, thus you can't just switch users to IPv6 and be done, you still have to drag all the IPv4 baggage with you or large parts of the Internet would be unreachable (i.e. almost all of it). And well, if you have to drag IPv4 with you anyway, why even bother with IPv6? More work while providing no advantage for you and very little advantage for your consumers as nobody else is using IPv6 either.
Its quite a chicken&egg mess, as you only really benefit from IPv6 when everybody is doing it too. And nobody wants to be the first and pay the price. Which is why I would really welcome some government regulation in that area to force ISPs to start offering to IPv6.
All this is academic, though. How many people would *really* be able to tell the difference between a 96dpi and 200dpi display on their desktop
Basically all of them. The difference is extremely noticeable when it comes to fonts and other things that require pixels smaller then what a 96dpi display can produce to render properly. The difference between 200dpi and 600dpi might be a little trickier, as with 200dpi you can already start to render a font that looks like a print font, not like a screen font.
But 96dpi is really extremely low and its a little depressing that computer power has increased by orders of magnitude, while the last big dpi jump was back when things switched from 320x200 to 640x480, everything after that has mostly about larger displays, not higher dpi displays.
The problem is that you only really benefit from more DPI when you have a large DPI increase (say 2x). When you only have a fractional increase you run into all sorts of problems, with fonts for example you end up either having to use one pixel width or two pixels, one might end up being to thin, while the other is to thick. Subpixel rendering can help a good bit with that, but when it comes for example to text embedded in an image on a website you can do anything about it, it will just look like crap at uneven scales and become close to unreadable (especially in Firefox in Linux, which can't even do filtering when scaling images).
For example, would you want a 50" display on your desktop?
Absolutely, lots of people are emulating such a setup with multiple monitors today. A bigger screen is one of the simplest ways to increase productivity, as you spend less time shuffling windows around.
How about a 30" monitor with 200,000,000 pixels
That would be rather ridiculous, but I would very much welcome a display with 300dpi or more, so that one could actually start to have print-quality fonts.
Going much higher than current resolutions would be pretty counterproductive untill all our OSes and applications had completely resolution-independent interfaces, anyway.
Higher resolution would make it much easier to have resolution independed interfaces, as all the ugly scaling artifacts that pop up when you only have a small increase in dpi and thus fractions in scale could be avoided. Stretching 640x480 to 800x600 looks crap, stretching 640x480 to 1280x960 on the other side looks quite fine, as you just need to double the pixels. This is especially important when it comes to fonts, which are just one-pixel width to begin with.
The “treat” from Muslim extremists is ridiculously low. Negligible even.
Not when you do high profile mocking of Mohamed. On the other side doctors doing abortions have had their fair share of trouble with christian anti-abortion groups as well.
Others prefer for the game portions to be interesting, rather than realistic.
The thing is: "realistic" often results in "interesting". As with real physics you get emergent behaviour and dynamic gameplay situations, while with made up hacks you just sit there and wait for the next script trigger, which is often predictable, completly boring when it comes to replay and insanely immersion breaking. That doesn't mean I want every game to be like Falcon4.0 where you have to read hundreds of pages of manual before you can get anything done, instead you can simply mix realism with accessibility add-ons. Driving games are slowly getting there, they are starting to provide both a reasonable amount of realism while at the same time providing optional breaking assistants, dynamic drive lines or even time-rewind, thus giving you accessibility without turning into a flat arcade game. And also lets not forget that realism can also be abused for fun, Indy500 might have been one of the most realistic racing games of its time, but it was also a hilariously awesome crash simulation. Don't like the drive? Just turn around have and have some fun with the replay feature while you crash into oncoming cars.
The sad part is that the driving genre seems to be the only one which seems to "get it", most other genres out there just ignore reality and turn into a series of script triggers, never willing to actually teach the player something new, instead its just "aim, shoot, rinse and repeat".
The secondary classical channel verifies the integrity of the quantum channel. How are we assured of the integrity of the classical channel?
If you distribute the one time pad securely over the quantum channel and then encrypt the secondary channel with the one time pad, then it is secure. That is the beauty of the one time pad encryption, its very simple but also provable 100% secure.
But in the end it is still snake oil. When was the last time an attack worked on breaking strong encryption? It just doesn't happen, security breaks tend to happen at the weakest links, not the strongest one, and classic encryption is pretty damn strong. Also the range limit of quantum cryptography kind of makes it useless for most cases.
The real issue isn't so much how he defines "art", but how he defines "game":
Santiago might cite an immersive game without points or rules, but I would say then it ceases to be a game and becomes a representation of a story, a novel, a play, dance, a film. Those are things you cannot win; you can only experience them.
Its not 1980 any more and in many, maybe even most, mainstream video games "points" are a minuscule part of the experience if they exist at all and "winning" today's games is hardly any different then reaching the end of a DVD, you eventual get there, but that's not the reason you play it.
That said, even with his outdated definition of "game" I would disagree with him, as there is certainly some beauty even in games based around "points" and "winnig" that goes beyond just blunt craftmenship. The reason why Tetris or SuperMarioBros are still remembered 25 years later is because they did something far beyond the average forgettable game. Its a different kind of art then your average movies, but art non the less.
The details don't really matter that much, I think the important point is simply that technology is now not only doable, but also quite cheap. A $100 1TB drive will last you a good year for audio and video recording, a little less if you don't compress much and a good bit more if you compress heavily. Also SDHC cards have enough storage for days or even weeks and hardly cost much any more. Battery life is still a bit of a problem as most device in that range only last for half a day, but things are improving. We are basically at a point where the life recorder goes from neat sci-fi idea, to something you can soon buy for the price of a NintendoDS.
Use multiple cameras with a large field of view and some motion tracking software to fix up the video later on. The biggest problem is battery life and resolution, as the resolution will go down quite a bit if you want to capture a full 360 degree view.
Anyway, as security device it is indeed snake oil, its much more interesting to capture the important moments in your life that you didn't see coming.
The problem is that Wikipedia accepts only stuff printed on paper as source (its not quite, but close enough), this makes it close to impossible in some regions to write content. Look at homebrew on consoles, you can find tons of information about it out there or just try it yourself, but you hardly find anything about it in the mainstream press or ever the gaming press. The best you can find is some rather useless generic talk that doesn't tell you more then "it exists". The reason for that is simply that the whole mainstream gaming press is simply in the pockets of the game industry, they simply don't want to spoil their connection to the game industry by doing in depth reporting on devices which can be used for piracy.
Another problem is simply that some things are outside the scope of a Wikipedia or non-notable. You can't get an detailed article about a minor character in a game into Wikipedia and neither can you get a complete game walkthrough into Wikipedia.
I find it quite annoying that Wikipedia just blocks this additional content instead of creating infrastructure for more niche kind of knowledge (say when you have "Monkey Island" also allow "Monkey Island/Walkthrough" and other detail information which doesn't need to follow the strict criteria of the main Wikipedia). But well, that's the way it is and thus you get tons of specialized Wikis out there and thus a fragmentation of the infrastructure.
In reality, do you know what's going to happen with the element? In order to make it render properly, people will have to specify a class or style, and fix the rendering using CSS.
article, nav, section, header, footer and friends are about markup, not about rendering. In terms of normal rendering it makes no difference if you use <article> or <div class="article>, in terms of marked it however makes a huge different. One of the core problem for me with the Web today is that there is simply no to tell the browser what is the actual content and what is just a navigation bar. This in turn makes some webpages on some devices pretty much unusable (Wikipedia on a PSP for example). If the navigation and article content would feature proper markup you could have a button in your browser to simply hide the navigation, without the markup the browser has no way to tell where the navigation ends and the content starts.
Now of course in practice things might turn out different, pages might not use proper markup as it would make it to easy to skip advertisements and such, but on the other side you have pages like Wikipedia where it could really be a useful addition.
That said, I am not holding by breath, <link rel="next"> and friends have been in HTML for well over a decade and can be extremely useful in some use cases (having a book in HTML for example), yet proper support in most browsers for them is still missing or at least well enough hidden that a normal end user would never find them.
Even a poorly implemented or incomplete game will garner interest if it is NEW and INTERESTING.
I would say its quite the other way around. A clone of a well loved game will attract lots of attention, because it basically comes with a build in fan base and there will be plenty of fan pages out there that might link your project, thus spreading the word. Doing something completly new on the other side means you have to start from scratch, you don't have places to advertise your game and people will have no idea if your game is even worth a try, after all there are thousands of other free games floating around out there. You will also have a much harder time attracting and coordinating contributors, as its much easier to point to something existing as example how to implement a feature, than trying to explain a vague gameplay concept over the Internet, especially when you don't even know if the thing will actually work out.
That of course doesn't mean that you should do an exact pixel perfect clone, after all why bother when I could play the original in emulation, but there is really nothing wrong with using ideas from an already existing games and adding a bit of your own style on top. The simple truth is that things are not created in a vacuum, they always connect in one way or another to things already out there. Be original when you have a really good idea, but don't try to reinvent the wheel just because you can.
I've never understood this 'my browser is faster than your browser' attention. Most people use their browser over the Internet, with download speeds that make any computer wait.
Just look at Slashdot, every news story that approaches ~1000 comments becomes close to unusable. Rendering this story with ~1600 comments takes 50% CPU (only one core is used) for close to a minute on my Dual Core to display, only a very tiny fraction of that is the actual download. And of course the whole browser gets completly unresponsive whenever you click a reply button and let the dynamic HTML do its magic.
Another thing: Firefox on Linux still lacks basic filtering when scaling images, so zooming into pages always looks like complete crap. And of course not only does it look like crap its also jerky and light years away from the fluidity you get presented on an iPhone or iPad, both having for less available computing power then my PC.
Webpages with a fixed background image also feel a hell of a lot more slugish, then pages with a normal scrolling background.
Now of course, just throwing the GPU at it won't fix all those problems, some issues require proper coding to make use of multi cores and such, but I very much welcome any optimization that I can get in a browser, as browsers really aren't exactly what I would call fast.
If you were put in that situation what would you do?
Not join a military that is randomly invading foreign countries.
I'd open fire considering I saw 2 people with weapons in the middle of a war torn city.
Which is for all we know perfectly legal in Iraq.
One of which can take my helicopter down.
Nope, RPG range: 1000 meter, Distance to Apache: 1600 meter
Then how do you explain the van incident?
but to call this an unprovoked slaughter of a bunch on innocent civilians, as some have, is simply wrong.
Only when you ignore the van incident.