...at best, only a few percent faster. True, when you compare one fast sorting algorithm with another fast one you likely won't find much advantage unless you have some special case. However with XML the situation is very different, since XML is slow and not just a little bit. A custom format can easily outperform XML by a factor of 1000% or even 10000% and that can be quite significant.
The problem with S-expressions is that there really isn't one standard for them, but many, everybody does his own thing and so you end up having tiny little differences in what data types they support. Lisp does other stuff then Scheme, Scheme does other stuff then Ron Rivest Internet-Draft and so on. I still prefer it over XML, because its simply enough that you can rather quickly create your own parser and when you limit yourself to a common subset you end up something that you can easily map into native data structures in most scripting languages, since you don't have the XML-mess with Elements vs Attributes. It also is nice to have a real types in the markup language instead of everything just being strings.
Weren't we supposed to be able to build giant domes by now, large enough to enclose entire cities? The biggest dome/hall/hangar should be this, but even that is still far far away from enclosing a whole city, it might work for a single building or two, but thats it. It also might have a hard time dealing with water pressure and really, wouldn't a dome be rather non-cost effective? When you can build such a large structure to withstand a hurrican, why not build the buildings themselves strong enough? Might of course mean you have to stay in your house a day or two till the storm is over, but it should be a hell of a lot more cost effective. So I kind of doubt that we will ever see such huge domes.
Almost every game nowadays has breakable objects. The chunks are generally pre-determined, not generated based on where you hit, but it works. It "works" in the sense that it looks rather ridiculous. You might not notice it in a fast action game, because you are in the next room before the chunks and splinters hit the ground, but for actual interaction with the game world the current stuff is just way to simple. One of the easiest examples is rag-doll animation, which looks nowhere near what a real human would look, its not even close and the reason is simply that accurate simulation would need a bunch more processing power then is available.
But still, the reason cars can't be damages is normally a licensing issue. Licensing is an excuse, not the reason. PC games had car damage since basically forever, it is just Grand Turismo that is waving the "licensor" flag as excuse.
The problem with physics in games currently is that they are mostly for show, not substance. Which is sad, since real physics modeling can increase the immersion and fun in a game a lot. But shooting a grenade into a wall today is still the same thing as doing it in Doom1, which is sad, since Doom1 is 15 years old already.
Today we are simply still at the very beginning of physic development in games. In games today only a very tiny part of the world even reacts to physics and this is something I expect to change in the coming years and having physics acceleration at hand will certainly help.
Correct me if I am wrong, but don't you have to press and hold a button to activate cursor movement? This might not be a issue or even an advantage in presentations, but doesn't sound like a good idea for gaming, where you might need all the fingers you have for changing weapons, firing and such. It also makes lightgun-like aiming impossible, since you always need a cursor. Now the Wiimote isn't perfect either, since it also needs a cursor, but you can move that freely around just by pointing without pressing buttons.
All that said, having to press a button would have advantages, since you could directly control your view in a FPS, instead of having trouble that the Wiimote faces where you have to point outside your view to actually move it, which can be, depending on the game, rather awkward.
No, his point is correct. The animation on screen has very little to do with your actually swing. When you finally throw the ball that has something to do with how you swung, but not the character animation. Which I found incredible confusing at first, till I learned to simply completly ignore it. But even then it doesn't really read all that much from your swing, acceleration and how much slice you want to give the ball from what I could tell, but the direction for example is something you have to change with the dpad before you even start swinging, so you are still rather limited.
It the same with all other Wii Sports titles, Golf for example can be played basically completly blind, all you need to know is how much power you need for a swing, in what direction you swing has nothing to do with how the ball will fly.
1) The sensitivity setting has indeed nothing to do with lack or cursor speed, it changes the contrast/brightness of the IR sensor so that faint IR sources are no longer detected, I am kind of suprised how many Wii fanboys don't have the slightest clue what the setting actually does. That said I find it a bit pointless to complain about lack, yes there is a tiny bit of lack, but unless you are some 120fps FPS pro gamer that really shouldn't matter at all, especially considering that the Wii can't give you 120fps to begin with and that everybody has to work with the same lag. I also think that the lag might in part be a software problem, using Wiimote on the PC I find that it has quite a bit less lag, but then maybe its just me.
2) While true, there exist plastic attachment that fix that, but you lose access to way to many buttons to make that useful, beside it would make sword play, golf, tennins, etc. impossible. And anyway, the real problem the Wiimotes has is a very different one: Unlike like a lightgun it doesn't allow you to aim, so you don't actually aim and shoot, you move a cursor over your enemy and shoot then. The Wiimote sensorbar simply has to few dots to let the Wiimote figure out where exactly you are aiming on the screen, so you always have to aim with a cursor. The sad part of this is that this isn't a technical problem of the Wiimote, one can fix it by simply adding another pair of IR dots.
The new device outlined in this article may or may not fix the first problem The device in the article doesn't even have a IR sensor, so you can basically forget it when it comes to aiming at the screen, its for golf, tennis, swords,... only.
I can't understand why Nintendo doesn't create real windows/linux/mac drivers so pc/mac games can also officially use the wiimote.. Nintendo has given up on PC and homecomputers a long long while ago, they do want their own consoles, not develop for somebody else hardware. It would also be stupid to release the only thing that that makes the Wii unique on another platform.
That aside there really isn't a need for an official driver, you already can get drivers for Windows, Mac and Linux, there really isn't much if anything left that isn't known about the Wiimote. People can use it if they want. The problem is non-standard peripheral don't have a chance on the PC, not even joysticks are used these days, everything has to work with mouse and keyboard, so a Wiimote even with official driver wouldn't have a chance. Also keep in mind that the PC doesn't stand next to the 42" Plasma, but in places where there often simply isn't room to swing the Wiimote around wildly. The IR tracking also doesn't really work when you are too close to the sensorbar, so it simply would be very impractical for most users.
The IR sensor has nothing to do with fixing drift and isn't used for calibration on the Wii, it simply adds lightgun-like functionality (albeit only with relative aiming, due to lack of a second sensorbar). Adding gyros to the Wiimote would increase the ability for motion sensing a lot, since they would allow to sense acceleration and orientation independently and thus some simple relative position sensing, which the Wiimote currently can't, but a gyro doesn't replace the IR sensor, it has completly different functionality.
Remember that if you differentiate distance with time, you get velocity; differentiate again, you get acceleration. True in theory, however when you start with inaccurate accelerometer data, it gets even more inaccurate when you integrate it to velocity and when you integrate that again to get position data you are basically left with unusable gibberish. And you also have to keep in mind that the Wiimote is not giving you acceleration in world-space, it gives you accelerations in Wiimote-space, which as soon you as you move it around ends up basically unusable for anything, since you can no longer know which acceleration was caused by movement and which was caused by gravity. Additional gyros would fix that problem, but the Wiimote doesn't have any of them.
The Wiimote is limited to measure acceleration or orientation, but can't not both at the same time, which makes position tracking impossible.
Either the Wii's current motion sensor is flaky It is not really flaky, it is behaving as designed. The issue is simply that an accelerometer can't track the position of the controller. So instead of having 1:1 mapping of your punches, the game uses the way you hold the controller (i.e. its rotation) to figure out what kind of punch you want to make, which can lead to rather awkward behavior.
The Wiimote, like any device that tried to figure out position and velocity from an acceleromete You assume that the Wii games do that, but they don't. There aren't games that care about the Wiimotes position in space, they care about acceleration and orientation and little else. The Wiimote simple doesn't have sensors to give position tracking, for one thing the sensorbar only gives you 2 point positions, from which you can derive distance and rotation relative to the sensorbar, but little else, so it is useless for calibration purpose. But more importantly, trying to track position with an accelerometer alone would never work. An accelerometer could only do that if you hold the controller steady, as soon you rotate it around all the accelerometer data gets messed up with gravity and you can no longer know what is gravity and what is actual movement. It also becomes impossible to properly figure out the orientation of the controller. So any try to get position data would get messed up the very second the user moves the Wiimote, which would make it a very pointless exercise to begin with.
I find it highly unlikely that the Wii controllers are going to use that information in any meaningful way. All the Wii games that require tilt information (i.e. almost all) use gravity to get it. It is really pretty simple, the Wiimote returns acceleration in X, Y and Z direction, whenever the acceleration is not null it is gravity accelerating the Wiimote. (x,y,z) simply becomes the vector that points down to earth, which allows you to calculate pitch and roll rather easily, but not yaw, Wiimote can't track that. This of course only works as long as you hold the Wiimote still, as soon as you move it around the Wiimote can't really track anything, which is why you see so many waggle in games and no real 1:1 mapping.
what happens if I'm holding the controller (as opposed to dropping it and letting gravity "accelerate" it downward)? When you drop the controller the accelerometer doesn't register any acceleration, its when you hold it still that it does. One of the joys of physics that might not be obvious at first.
the kernel with all its drivers is just a SMALL part of the system True, but you also have to keep in mind that it is a small part of the system because its a monolithic. You wouldn't want to do Gnome-VFS or KDEs KIO in kernelspace in a monolithic kernel, since they might crash quite a lot more then say a ext3 filesystem, they also might depend on a lot of external libraries, which you don't really want in kernel space either. With a microkernel system on the other side all that stuff could be implemented "into" the kernel, with all the benefits from a userspace implementation, but in addition all the benefits of proper integration (i.e. all apps have access to the same filesystem instead of just those that link to libgnome-vfs).
That said, this issue still isn't all that good of an argument for microkernels, since monolithic kernels can just implement a few hooks for userspace programs to offer things like userspace filesystems and in case of Linux they have.
Not mine, but yes. None of them is using the Wiimotes accelerometer, in none of them is the Wiimote in his hands (i.e. zero chance of ever seeing anything like that in an official game). What he does is simply using the Wiimote as camera, then, yes, if you have enough Wiimotes, you can do 3D tracking, just like you could do with an eyeToy camera or a random webcam. The Wiimote adds some convenience for the programmer, since it does the IR point tracking, so one doesn't need to bother with image processing. But since none of the demos that is using the Wiimote as intended, those demos won't help you with real Wii games.
That would only be true if it can pick out the exact position of the dots in the image. Yes, it can, it reports four positions of IR dot in the picture it sees. Go into the Wiis setup and into the sensitivity setting, there you can see what the Wiimote "sees".
This wouldn't be a good idea, since it would allow people to sell their vote for money. The advantage of a simple paper based voting system is that only the voter himself knows what he voted, since there is no receipt and no way for a third party to find out how he voted. With the encryption key you also have the problem that votes become easily trackable unless somebody makes sure that nobody keeps record of encryption-keys -> names.
Acceleration+relative distance=3d position. And you have a little demo app that demonstrates that, right?
Sure, they can't actually tell you how far you are from the screen, Well, that is actually something the Wiimote can tell. The distance between the two IR dots from the sensorbar tells you how far you are away from the screen, at least as long as the player is pointing to the screen.
but they can tell you that you've moved forward or backwards, No, you can't, because you don't hold the Wiimote perfectly steady, as soon as you turn it upside down or rotate it a bit the accelerometer data gets all messed up and you can't really tell anything any more, since you no longer know where the x,y and z axis are and how gravity comes into play.
I would love to be proven wrong, but after having played the horrible mess that the Metroid Prime 3 mini-games where I have some very serious doubt that we will ever see anything even remotely close to 3D position sensing.
This is wrong. It has two independent controls that track 3d-position, not merely motion. The Wiimote doesn't track position, it tracks acceleration in three dimensions and that is very much the same as the PS3 controller does, except the PS3 controller also seems to have a gyro-sensor in addition. The Wiimote of course has a little advantage in the form-factor, you can't really hold the PS3 controller like a golf club, which makes the controller unsuitable for most of the sports games.
Aside from the accelerometer the Wiimote also has a IR sensor for all the pointing stuff, which is very similar to LCD-lightguns, except that those are more precise than the Wiimote and allow exact aiming.
The Wii is an amazing console, and the moment there's a game that makes use of that 3-d info in a meaningful way is the moment I start trying to buy one. Well, that day will never happen, since there is no 3-d position info in the first place. Developers can of course try to interpret the accelerometer data in a meaningful way, maybe combine it with data from the IR sensor, but a look at the games tells that this isn't an easy task and a task that likely never really will be solved in a way that lives up to the early hopes.
IMHO, this is the biggest leap forward that we've had in home electronics since the introduction of CDs. Not really, the Powerglove (and all that other VR stuff) was a much bigger leap, but sadly lacked in precision and games and thus was mostly forgotten.
What's more important to a game than gameplay? The Wii doesn't make gameplay, it are the games that do. The Wii simply gives a game a new controller and nothing more, its up to the game to actually use it properly and when you look back at the gaming history you will find *tons* of highly innovative controllers, even more so then the Wiimote, but none of them ever got games that support them and so ended up collecting dust.
Will it be different with the Wii? It certainly has the plus of being a first party controller that comes with the console, so most games will use it, but looking at the games I am really not impressed, not even close.
Wii Sports is among the games that use the controller best, but even that basically boils down to timing, not motion detection. It matters when you move the controller, but not much how you move the controller. You can do waggling that has no relation to what your character should do and still bowl strike after strike.
Looking at the other games it gets even worse, since hardly any of them even try use the controller much at all. Mario Galaxy would have worked perfectly with a normal controller, so would PaperMario, so has Zelda:TP, Resident Evil 4 and a bunch of other top rated Wii games.
Even stuff like Metroid Prime 3 doesn't really impress, sure its a nice fun game, but the shooting really isn't all that superior to dual-analog, if you wouldn't have the lock-on it might actually be worse. But the really interesting part are the mini-games, the door opening and stuff, which pretty clearly shows that motion sensing just doesn't work with the Wiimote, there is so little relation between on-screen action and actual motion that it gets ridiculous and this in a first-party show-case title, not in some random third party junk.
In the end I simply don't see much of that 'revolution' in games that the Wii was meant to bring. Sure, its revolutionary in marketing to casual gamers, but in terms of actual games its quite a big disappointment. Maybe the generation after this will implement motion sensing that actually works and then games that actually do something interesting with it, but the Wii simply doesn't do motion sensing half as good as the hype would make you want to believe and it simply shows in the games.
but if you could randomly color simple pictures... How about using complicated pictures instead of simple ones. Take a full 3D scene with multiple randomly positioned objects, then render it from a random viewpoint and present it to the user and ask questions like:
* "Click on the cat that is nearest to the dog"
* "What color does the cat behind the house have"
* "Click on the cat, the dog and then the horse"
* "Click on the gun worn by the guy with the hat"
* "Click on the blue car with its lights on"
* "Click on the cat that is hit by the dogs shadow"
* "Click on the cat and mouse intersect"
Since the generating computer has the whole 3d scene and all object positions he can easily figure out distance and relations of one object to another, but the user only sees the 2D rendering where all that information is lost. Since its all 3D one could freely change color, texture, size and stuff like that. One could also have tons of different object types.
This could be easily brute forced, since the picture size is limited and objects have to be large enough to be recognizable, so hitting the right object by randomness would be possible, but maybe with complicated enough questions or multiple checks in a row one could make it work.
### If all you do is reporting one side of the story you are not a journalist
The problem in this case (and certainly in a lots of others) is that there is no "other side". It was a non-story from the very beginning. The game is rated M, the sex scene is a very tiny part of a very long game and the stuff shown isn't any worse then what you can see on TV all the time and its also optional. The whole thing was completly fabricated and quite simply lie. You can't make "fair and balanced" reporting about how the sky is green when it quite clearly isn't and everybody can verify that by just looking at it. You of course can fabricate a story about it, salt it with a tiny little bit of truth to make it look "fair and balance", but that doesn't change the fact that its simply made up stuff.
Umm, why? How does that promote science and the useful arts? Please, make an argument. Well, duh. If you can get payed for "promoting science and useful arts" (whatever that exactly is), you will be motivated to do more of that, if you can't then you probably won't. If big cooperations are shrewing those who actually produce stuff, then you have a problem in the long run.
How does a "normal job" result in a revenue stream for your heirs after you die? The point here is that the author or his family gets money for the work that was done. A normal job gives you a regular pay check each month, if you die, your heir will get what is left. Writing a book on the other side might not give you a penny until after it is finished and published, if you die before that, your family would never get to see any money from that work, all the work would become worthless.
And also lets not forget that death isn't always random, some people are old, some are ill and some of those still produce plenty of creative work, having copyright expire after their death would give publishers a very good reason to not pay them in their lifetime, since death will make things a lot cheaper.
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...at best, only a few percent faster. True, when you compare one fast sorting algorithm with another fast one you likely won't find much advantage unless you have some special case. However with XML the situation is very different, since XML is slow and not just a little bit. A custom format can easily outperform XML by a factor of 1000% or even 10000% and that can be quite significant.The problem with S-expressions is that there really isn't one standard for them, but many, everybody does his own thing and so you end up having tiny little differences in what data types they support. Lisp does other stuff then Scheme, Scheme does other stuff then Ron Rivest Internet-Draft and so on. I still prefer it over XML, because its simply enough that you can rather quickly create your own parser and when you limit yourself to a common subset you end up something that you can easily map into native data structures in most scripting languages, since you don't have the XML-mess with Elements vs Attributes. It also is nice to have a real types in the markup language instead of everything just being strings.
The problem with physics in games currently is that they are mostly for show, not substance. Which is sad, since real physics modeling can increase the immersion and fun in a game a lot. But shooting a grenade into a wall today is still the same thing as doing it in Doom1, which is sad, since Doom1 is 15 years old already.
Today we are simply still at the very beginning of physic development in games. In games today only a very tiny part of the world even reacts to physics and this is something I expect to change in the coming years and having physics acceleration at hand will certainly help.
Correct me if I am wrong, but don't you have to press and hold a button to activate cursor movement? This might not be a issue or even an advantage in presentations, but doesn't sound like a good idea for gaming, where you might need all the fingers you have for changing weapons, firing and such. It also makes lightgun-like aiming impossible, since you always need a cursor. Now the Wiimote isn't perfect either, since it also needs a cursor, but you can move that freely around just by pointing without pressing buttons.
All that said, having to press a button would have advantages, since you could directly control your view in a FPS, instead of having trouble that the Wiimote faces where you have to point outside your view to actually move it, which can be, depending on the game, rather awkward.
No, his point is correct. The animation on screen has very little to do with your actually swing. When you finally throw the ball that has something to do with how you swung, but not the character animation. Which I found incredible confusing at first, till I learned to simply completly ignore it. But even then it doesn't really read all that much from your swing, acceleration and how much slice you want to give the ball from what I could tell, but the direction for example is something you have to change with the dpad before you even start swinging, so you are still rather limited.
It the same with all other Wii Sports titles, Golf for example can be played basically completly blind, all you need to know is how much power you need for a swing, in what direction you swing has nothing to do with how the ball will fly.
2) While true, there exist plastic attachment that fix that, but you lose access to way to many buttons to make that useful, beside it would make sword play, golf, tennins, etc. impossible. And anyway, the real problem the Wiimotes has is a very different one: Unlike like a lightgun it doesn't allow you to aim, so you don't actually aim and shoot, you move a cursor over your enemy and shoot then. The Wiimote sensorbar simply has to few dots to let the Wiimote figure out where exactly you are aiming on the screen, so you always have to aim with a cursor. The sad part of this is that this isn't a technical problem of the Wiimote, one can fix it by simply adding another pair of IR dots. The new device outlined in this article may or may not fix the first problem The device in the article doesn't even have a IR sensor, so you can basically forget it when it comes to aiming at the screen, its for golf, tennis, swords,
That aside there really isn't a need for an official driver, you already can get drivers for Windows, Mac and Linux, there really isn't much if anything left that isn't known about the Wiimote. People can use it if they want. The problem is non-standard peripheral don't have a chance on the PC, not even joysticks are used these days, everything has to work with mouse and keyboard, so a Wiimote even with official driver wouldn't have a chance. Also keep in mind that the PC doesn't stand next to the 42" Plasma, but in places where there often simply isn't room to swing the Wiimote around wildly. The IR tracking also doesn't really work when you are too close to the sensorbar, so it simply would be very impractical for most users.
The IR has nothing to do with calibration, it is used to give you a tiny mouse cursor on the screen and little else.
The IR sensor has nothing to do with fixing drift and isn't used for calibration on the Wii, it simply adds lightgun-like functionality (albeit only with relative aiming, due to lack of a second sensorbar). Adding gyros to the Wiimote would increase the ability for motion sensing a lot, since they would allow to sense acceleration and orientation independently and thus some simple relative position sensing, which the Wiimote currently can't, but a gyro doesn't replace the IR sensor, it has completly different functionality.
The Wiimote is limited to measure acceleration or orientation, but can't not both at the same time, which makes position tracking impossible.
We have trademark laws, we have copyright laws, we have laws that deal with telemarketing, why not have laws that deal with domain grabbing?
That said, this issue still isn't all that good of an argument for microkernels, since monolithic kernels can just implement a few hooks for userspace programs to offer things like userspace filesystems and in case of Linux they have.
This wouldn't be a good idea, since it would allow people to sell their vote for money. The advantage of a simple paper based voting system is that only the voter himself knows what he voted, since there is no receipt and no way for a third party to find out how he voted. With the encryption key you also have the problem that votes become easily trackable unless somebody makes sure that nobody keeps record of encryption-keys -> names.
I would love to be proven wrong, but after having played the horrible mess that the Metroid Prime 3 mini-games where I have some very serious doubt that we will ever see anything even remotely close to 3D position sensing.
Aside from the accelerometer the Wiimote also has a IR sensor for all the pointing stuff, which is very similar to LCD-lightguns, except that those are more precise than the Wiimote and allow exact aiming. The Wii is an amazing console, and the moment there's a game that makes use of that 3-d info in a meaningful way is the moment I start trying to buy one. Well, that day will never happen, since there is no 3-d position info in the first place. Developers can of course try to interpret the accelerometer data in a meaningful way, maybe combine it with data from the IR sensor, but a look at the games tells that this isn't an easy task and a task that likely never really will be solved in a way that lives up to the early hopes. IMHO, this is the biggest leap forward that we've had in home electronics since the introduction of CDs. Not really, the Powerglove (and all that other VR stuff) was a much bigger leap, but sadly lacked in precision and games and thus was mostly forgotten.
Will it be different with the Wii? It certainly has the plus of being a first party controller that comes with the console, so most games will use it, but looking at the games I am really not impressed, not even close.
Wii Sports is among the games that use the controller best, but even that basically boils down to timing, not motion detection. It matters when you move the controller, but not much how you move the controller. You can do waggling that has no relation to what your character should do and still bowl strike after strike.
Looking at the other games it gets even worse, since hardly any of them even try use the controller much at all. Mario Galaxy would have worked perfectly with a normal controller, so would PaperMario, so has Zelda:TP, Resident Evil 4 and a bunch of other top rated Wii games.
Even stuff like Metroid Prime 3 doesn't really impress, sure its a nice fun game, but the shooting really isn't all that superior to dual-analog, if you wouldn't have the lock-on it might actually be worse. But the really interesting part are the mini-games, the door opening and stuff, which pretty clearly shows that motion sensing just doesn't work with the Wiimote, there is so little relation between on-screen action and actual motion that it gets ridiculous and this in a first-party show-case title, not in some random third party junk.
In the end I simply don't see much of that 'revolution' in games that the Wii was meant to bring. Sure, its revolutionary in marketing to casual gamers, but in terms of actual games its quite a big disappointment. Maybe the generation after this will implement motion sensing that actually works and then games that actually do something interesting with it, but the Wii simply doesn't do motion sensing half as good as the hype would make you want to believe and it simply shows in the games.
* "Click on the cat that is nearest to the dog"
* "What color does the cat behind the house have"
* "Click on the cat, the dog and then the horse"
* "Click on the gun worn by the guy with the hat"
* "Click on the blue car with its lights on"
* "Click on the cat that is hit by the dogs shadow"
* "Click on the cat and mouse intersect"
Since the generating computer has the whole 3d scene and all object positions he can easily figure out distance and relations of one object to another, but the user only sees the 2D rendering where all that information is lost. Since its all 3D one could freely change color, texture, size and stuff like that. One could also have tons of different object types.
This could be easily brute forced, since the picture size is limited and objects have to be large enough to be recognizable, so hitting the right object by randomness would be possible, but maybe with complicated enough questions or multiple checks in a row one could make it work.
### If all you do is reporting one side of the story you are not a journalist
The problem in this case (and certainly in a lots of others) is that there is no "other side". It was a non-story from the very beginning. The game is rated M, the sex scene is a very tiny part of a very long game and the stuff shown isn't any worse then what you can see on TV all the time and its also optional. The whole thing was completly fabricated and quite simply lie. You can't make "fair and balanced" reporting about how the sky is green when it quite clearly isn't and everybody can verify that by just looking at it. You of course can fabricate a story about it, salt it with a tiny little bit of truth to make it look "fair and balance", but that doesn't change the fact that its simply made up stuff.
And also lets not forget that death isn't always random, some people are old, some are ill and some of those still produce plenty of creative work, having copyright expire after their death would give publishers a very good reason to not pay them in their lifetime, since death will make things a lot cheaper.