I actually *loved* Wind Waker's look. What I didn't like was that it was rushed out the door to meet with the demands of Nintendo's corporate strategy.
Yeah, WW's style was great. It was a nearly perfect rendering of an interactive cartoon. I thought it looked good at first, but when I first saw the Moblins in Ganondorf's castle I was blown away.
Like you, the obvious length-padding the game received due to being rushed is my only major complaint -- but a major one it is. Unlike every other Zelda, I haven't played through it twice simply because I see no need to do the stupid sailing-around-the-world-for-triforce-pieces bit again. Even the ones who made the game have admitted that this was a failure of the game. Frankly, I would have liked WW better if they had just left it as short as it would have been without the padding. I'd rather complain a game was short than long and boring.
I like the look of TWP too, and all I really needed to hear from the reviews was that the game was long and more importantly stuffed with quality gameplay rather than padded just to make it long. The fact that this meant the game was in development for a long time is fine with me. The downside is that while being released for the Wii it is still a two-year-old GC game graphically, the upside is that it's a finished game. That's a worthy tradeoff to me.
Why were the Germans terrified of the Allied tubs?
Think first about why the Allies had bathtubs in the trenches in the first place, before someone decided to start launching them at the enemy lines. It wasn't for bathing, for one thing. For another, remember you couldn't exactly leave the trench and take a stroll in the woods.
I can definitely see being scared of that kind of, ahem, biological weapon. The thing I don't get is what made German bathtubs unsuitable for retaliation? Must have been made of something weaker.
Take the body armor issue... Our troops have some older body armor, and there is a dispute as to which ones to replace.
Well how about we replace the ones that failed their ballistic tests but were purchased and distributed anyway? Oh wait, they were replaced, but only after a FOIA request for the test documents indicated that the secret was soon going to get out.
If some troops would rather have lighter body armor, then fine, give it to them. That armor should also pass the tests that grade of armor is supposed to pass. Maybe overreaction from the press pushed the military to make all soldiers wear the army, well that's bad. But so is giving soldiers armor that is known to be sub-par, in fact in my mind this is much worse because the army doesn't have the excuse of not understanding, and that problem was only corrected by the same press that you blame for the problem of soldiers wearing too much body armor.
By the way, nobody would be complaining about spending some bills on body armor. We've spent how freaking much on this war already? Even the anti-war wouldn't complain about a tiny additional amount going for some actual good. Knowing it was spent on useful items our soldiers can use, like armor, silly string, whatever, rather than another no-bid contract for Halliburton to continue repairing the oil pipelines that get attacked every day, would make me feel great. Nobody was complaining when families of soldiers began fund raisers to buy armor, and if these families thought their children wanted body armor then they probably did want body armor, so I'll say for certain that despite some soldiers not wanting armor, we clearly weren't providing enough to those who do.
Speaking of armor and things I wouldn't mind hearing we'd spent lots of money on, remember the HUMVEE armor fiasco? The one where Rumsfeld said, in his usual exasperated tone, how they couldn't send any more because the manufacturer couldn't make any more and of course they had tried to... then the owner of the manufacturer said that sure they could make more, and his company had never been asked if they could? Well next thing you know, more armor kits are being shipped over. All because of the press.
Of course the press is trying to play 'gotcha'. It's what they think their readers/viewers want. Back when they thought their readers wanted blind support for the President, they happily sucked down whatever load of spooge he delivered unto them. The press sure as hell wasn't "anti-government" then. Fast forward a few years, after it became clear that Democracy wasn't going to spring fully-formed from Rumsfeld's ass (as was the original plan), and the people are a lot more upset and sceptical, and the press, sensing this, responds in their usual sensationalistic fashion.
So while I agree that the press is deeply flawed, I disagree that it is inherently anti-government (I find that completely a-factual), and I do see the "playing gotcha" as having positive results in many cases. If I was going to change it, it would be to simply modulate the "anti-government gotcha-playing" to be merely "government-untrusting due-dilligence-excercising".
I think the GP was refering to the hardware level, not an abstract software layer.
There is some support for complex numbers at the hardware level. There is nothing much, mostly because as you say a complex number can be represented with two normal floating point numbers, one with an implicit i in front of it. But there is some support for things that are useful for dealing with this represntation of complex numbers, like SSE packed-double instructions which ADD the first double in two xmm registers, and SUB the second double.
On the N64, you could use the analog stick for "look" and the C-buttons for "walk". You can't do that on the Xbox or Gamecube, thus the FPSes suffer.
Are you on crack? Xbox and GC have two analog sticks, and every FPS I played (only Halo on Xbox, several on GC, including Time Splitters which is the spiritual successor to Goldeneye/PD) allowed you to use one of them for movement and the other for aiming, exactly like Goldeneye, only better.
Metroid Prime's controls were odd, yes, but they worked for what the game was. For example, independent aiming wasn't very important when you can lock onto your target.
Re: Think again, fanboi. Real men play PC games.
on
Two Weeks with the Wii
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· Score: 3, Funny
Fuck, I new I screwed it up! I took LSD and run around with armor and weapons while hallucinating that I was sitting on the couch!
IBM isn't in the habit of having redundancy for manufacturing purposes. Using 7 of 8 SPUs is a trick Sony is using to keep their own costs down by skimming the parts IBM won't use, in an effort to make a high-end chip like Cell affordable for a home game system. In a high-end server part, there's no point in using fewer than 8 SPUs because the high margins make the lower yields of 8-working-SPU units acceptable. If IBM was going to define their server as only having 4 SPUs, it'd be because they were actually 8 functional SPUs but IBM was making them redundant, as in having two perform the exact same calculations then comparing the result.
I don't actually know, but I'd be shocked if IBM was using fewer SPUs than the PS3, simply due to the margins IBM gets.
Any actual programmer in the game industry would understand what was meant by "proceduraly generated content" when you refer to it in the context of Will Wright's inspiration, the assembly demo scene, who were the pioneers of using procedures to generate content on the fly because the idea of making the content before hand then stuffing it in 64k is ludicrous.
There is a real and useful distinction between procedurally generated in advance (and almost always hand-tweaked to get exactly what the artist wants) and one generated on the fly. If your whole point is that when describing Spore's procedurally generated content they don't use whatever other qualifying words would make this distinction clear -- when you are already clearly aware of the distinction and its significance -- then you're just being pedantic for the sake of pedantry.
anybody else out there in the game industry? am i out of date with current terminology, are these terms highly relative to the company one works for (i know they are somewhat but this seems to be a bit much), or is something odd going on here?
There is not and has never been an industry standard terminology for development stages. Many companies use a similar terminology of alpha/beta but exactly what degree of functionality or what stage of development these imply varies wildly. So I say just take what Will said as describing how EA and EA alone uses these terms.
Intel puts twice as much L2 cache on their dies as does AMD for their high-end parts. The high-end Intel part has 4MB, the high-end AMD part as 1MB per core for a total of 2M.
Back when Itanium was sporting both impressive SpecFP scores and also gigantic caches, I wondered what would happen if you put a cache that size on a mainstream x86 part -- specfp is really more about cache size and memory bandwidth than it is about the floating point execution units, so I never bought the specfp rating as being due to an inherent advantage of itanium. Well, now we know.
While not very exciting architecturally, big caches are certainly a good way to boost performance. Intel gets those huge caches because of two things: First, they have the fab tech and fab capacity to produce gigantic chips with good yield and still make money. Second, Intel has the smallest cache cell size in the industry. So they are uniquely positioned to put big caches on mainstream parts, and they are taking advantage of it.
Intel, with the C2D, introduced a more aggressive out-of-order memory architecture, basically allowing any memory op, even with an unresolved address, to execute out of order, fixing it up later if there was a problem.
Slight correction on a very fine post: Memory ops that have their address are allowed to go out-of-order even if there are older ops which do not have their address (meaning in the case of an out of order load and a store without its address a possible forwarding case that will have to be fixed once the store gets its address). It doesn't make any sense to have a memory op go without its address, because you couldn't really do anything with it (without something like an address predictor).
This migration of socket requiring a new CPU and all has bitten me already. My S939 parts barely lived a year (two years given the entire lifetime) and already AMD is requiring me to buy a new motherboard *and* CPU if I wish to upgrade because they're already killing off S939.
Which is funny, because for years this was a commonly cited problem with Intel's platform, while AMD's Socket A was long-lived and stable. One would expect a company to copy their competitor's successes, but to copy their mistakes? I'd wager that this is a temporary glitch in AMD's roadmap and that they are going to try to re-stabilize. I bet they were just flummoxed trying to work out their socket strategy in the face of having to address several markets they weren't serious competitors in prior to K8 and of having to deal with their changing memory interface needs -- Socket 939, for example, only existed because they realized they wanted dual-channel memory in the client space, but the 940-pin Opteron package wouldn't support unbuffered DIMMs. Oops! So 939 was a hack, and I'm not surprised it's short lived, though certainly it sucks for those hoping to upgrade -- a.k.a. the do-it-yourself hobbyists that have been AMD's main supporters since K7. Double oops!
Not really screwed, especially if they fail to catch up but do narrow the gap. AMD has always been behind Intel in terms of process technology. AMD has gotten ahead on some specific process tech, like copper interconnect and SOI, but in terms of overall process shrinkage and quality of process, Intel has always been ahead. AMD has been more behind in the past, but also a lot closer, sometimes only months behind Intel. Basically, they are familiar with this situation.
65nm was a particularly bad node for AMD in terms of Intel's lead. Their plan for 45nm seems to be shaping up better with Fab 36, so I expect them to be closer though probably not caught up.
Do you have any idea what goes on when a prisoner is tortured for information? This weapon system is the Disney-ified G-rated version of even the mildest "information extraction" techniques, divided by a thousand.
Actually I do, and I think you are wrong (especially if I take your "even the mildest" phrase as anything but gross exaggeration for effect). This basically creates the sensation of being burned alive, and burning is one of the most horrible pains one can experience. The physical effect is of a mild burn, but the sensation is of being severely burned. Nobody tested was able to withstand more than 5 seconds of the beam, and these were military tests so your average wimp probably wasn't invited. If 5 seconds is too excruciating for anyone to bear, then what does 30 seconds or a minute feel like?
I'll agree with you on the rape thing... Though it might make more sense to ask the question again after a minute of being under this device's effect.
Ubisoft has thrown their weight behind the Wii, and embraced the much cheaper development costs there. They aren't ignoring the PS3 and 360, but those Wii titles will help cushion their bottom line a bit. EA doesn't seem to have paid as much attention to the Wii when it comes to unique IP.
While I loved some of the last gen's Ubisoft titles (Prince of Persia and Beyond Good and Evil specifically), and I'm certainly happy they are throwing their weight behind Wii in hopes of more like that, I have to say that they're perhaps going a bit too cheap on the development costs. Exhibit A being GT Pro, an extremely shitty-looking GC game that looks like it was first a port from the N64 with Wii support tacked on. Red Steel still looks interesting, but according to the reviews clearly lacks the polish of the best-of-breed Ubisoft games of yesteryear. In the end it looks like Raving Rabbids, the mini-game collection, is the most significant entry into Wii support.
I'm hoping Ubi will start doing better on the Wii, and that Red Steel is mostly an effect of trying to meet the launch date. But so far, not exactly so great.
You wouldn't be wearing the armor unless you anticipated being in a place where the millimeter-wave weapon would be used. You wouldn't anticipate being in such a situation unless you were planning to cause a disruption or asked to join in one.
Yeah, because no experienced protester expects that the police might employ anti-riot weapons even if the situation doesn't warrant it. It's simply inconceivable.
the problem becomes in what situations is force, even if non-lethal used. if we march on washington because we don't like the results of the next election and start getting zapped and tear gased, I don't think that is acceptable. unless of course the protest became a violent mob, which happens so easily these days.
Right, especially because using these zappers on a protest is likely to turn the protest violent -- which would then retroactively justify the use of the weapon? How easy it would be to simply claim the protest was violent before you turned on the zappers, even though it was the zappers what caused the violence.
I can't see any reason why within 5 years you won't be able to tell the difference between the real world and a game.
How's this for a reason: Toy Story was released in 1995, and while it looked great it didn't come close to looking like the real world -- in fact, it made it blatantly clear just how far computer rendering was from making a believable human being. Today's gaming hardware couldn't possibly render Toy Story in real-time, and probably won't be able to in five years either. Five more years of development in the film industry brought us Final Fantasy, which still was quite distinguishable from the real world. We still don't have Toy Story, so how long do you think it will be until an affordable home console can render Final Fantasy in real time?
Graphics are getting better and better, and I certainly think there's a point where it is "good enough" to create a wide variety of great-looking and stylish games -- honestly, I wish more games focused on "style" over "realism" in as much as they are exclusive. Yet there is a vast, vast gulf between what we are capable of today and "indistinguishable from real life".
Not to be an ass, but what proof do you have that driving above the speed limit, to match the flow of traffic, is legal?
None, so I could be wrong. Certainly I've never heard of anyone getting a ticket for going the speed limit while everyone else was going faster, but then again I've never heard of anyone getting a ticket for going under the 45 mph minimum. I have heard of people getting out of speeding tickets by saying that they were just matching the flow of traffic, but second hand annecdotes aren't exactly legal arguments.
the part of SCO v IBM about declaring Linux "clean" is a counterclaim by IBM
Good point. It is possible though that as soon as SCO vs IBM is settled, SCO will implode due to not having any revenue that isn't Linux-FUD-lawsuit related. But really, I don't believe the conspiracy theory. I do think it's much more likely that Novell wants to assert their rights.
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I actually *loved* Wind Waker's look. What I didn't like was that it was rushed out the door to meet with the demands of Nintendo's corporate strategy.
Yeah, WW's style was great. It was a nearly perfect rendering of an interactive cartoon. I thought it looked good at first, but when I first saw the Moblins in Ganondorf's castle I was blown away.
Like you, the obvious length-padding the game received due to being rushed is my only major complaint -- but a major one it is. Unlike every other Zelda, I haven't played through it twice simply because I see no need to do the stupid sailing-around-the-world-for-triforce-pieces bit again. Even the ones who made the game have admitted that this was a failure of the game. Frankly, I would have liked WW better if they had just left it as short as it would have been without the padding. I'd rather complain a game was short than long and boring.
I like the look of TWP too, and all I really needed to hear from the reviews was that the game was long and more importantly stuffed with quality gameplay rather than padded just to make it long. The fact that this meant the game was in development for a long time is fine with me. The downside is that while being released for the Wii it is still a two-year-old GC game graphically, the upside is that it's a finished game. That's a worthy tradeoff to me.
Why were the Germans terrified of the Allied tubs?
Think first about why the Allies had bathtubs in the trenches in the first place, before someone decided to start launching them at the enemy lines. It wasn't for bathing, for one thing. For another, remember you couldn't exactly leave the trench and take a stroll in the woods.
I can definitely see being scared of that kind of, ahem, biological weapon. The thing I don't get is what made German bathtubs unsuitable for retaliation? Must have been made of something weaker.
Take the body armor issue... Our troops have some older body armor, and there is a dispute as to which ones to replace.
Well how about we replace the ones that failed their ballistic tests but were purchased and distributed anyway? Oh wait, they were replaced, but only after a FOIA request for the test documents indicated that the secret was soon going to get out.
If some troops would rather have lighter body armor, then fine, give it to them. That armor should also pass the tests that grade of armor is supposed to pass. Maybe overreaction from the press pushed the military to make all soldiers wear the army, well that's bad. But so is giving soldiers armor that is known to be sub-par, in fact in my mind this is much worse because the army doesn't have the excuse of not understanding, and that problem was only corrected by the same press that you blame for the problem of soldiers wearing too much body armor.
By the way, nobody would be complaining about spending some bills on body armor. We've spent how freaking much on this war already? Even the anti-war wouldn't complain about a tiny additional amount going for some actual good. Knowing it was spent on useful items our soldiers can use, like armor, silly string, whatever, rather than another no-bid contract for Halliburton to continue repairing the oil pipelines that get attacked every day, would make me feel great. Nobody was complaining when families of soldiers began fund raisers to buy armor, and if these families thought their children wanted body armor then they probably did want body armor, so I'll say for certain that despite some soldiers not wanting armor, we clearly weren't providing enough to those who do.
Speaking of armor and things I wouldn't mind hearing we'd spent lots of money on, remember the HUMVEE armor fiasco? The one where Rumsfeld said, in his usual exasperated tone, how they couldn't send any more because the manufacturer couldn't make any more and of course they had tried to... then the owner of the manufacturer said that sure they could make more, and his company had never been asked if they could? Well next thing you know, more armor kits are being shipped over. All because of the press.
Of course the press is trying to play 'gotcha'. It's what they think their readers/viewers want. Back when they thought their readers wanted blind support for the President, they happily sucked down whatever load of spooge he delivered unto them. The press sure as hell wasn't "anti-government" then. Fast forward a few years, after it became clear that Democracy wasn't going to spring fully-formed from Rumsfeld's ass (as was the original plan), and the people are a lot more upset and sceptical, and the press, sensing this, responds in their usual sensationalistic fashion.
So while I agree that the press is deeply flawed, I disagree that it is inherently anti-government (I find that completely a-factual), and I do see the "playing gotcha" as having positive results in many cases. If I was going to change it, it would be to simply modulate the "anti-government gotcha-playing" to be merely "government-untrusting due-dilligence-excercising".
I've always wondered why the universe seemed both elegant and confusing.
I think the GP was refering to the hardware level, not an abstract software layer.
There is some support for complex numbers at the hardware level. There is nothing much, mostly because as you say a complex number can be represented with two normal floating point numbers, one with an implicit i in front of it. But there is some support for things that are useful for dealing with this represntation of complex numbers, like SSE packed-double instructions which ADD the first double in two xmm registers, and SUB the second double.
On the N64, you could use the analog stick for "look" and the C-buttons for "walk". You can't do that on the Xbox or Gamecube, thus the FPSes suffer.
Are you on crack? Xbox and GC have two analog sticks, and every FPS I played (only Halo on Xbox, several on GC, including Time Splitters which is the spiritual successor to Goldeneye/PD) allowed you to use one of them for movement and the other for aiming, exactly like Goldeneye, only better.
Metroid Prime's controls were odd, yes, but they worked for what the game was. For example, independent aiming wasn't very important when you can lock onto your target.
Fuck, I new I screwed it up! I took LSD and run around with armor and weapons while hallucinating that I was sitting on the couch!
But haven't you ever heard the saying: "Never bring a knife to a gun fight." ???
The full saying is: "Never bring a knife to a gun fight... bring a katana and wakizashi."
IBM isn't in the habit of having redundancy for manufacturing purposes. Using 7 of 8 SPUs is a trick Sony is using to keep their own costs down by skimming the parts IBM won't use, in an effort to make a high-end chip like Cell affordable for a home game system. In a high-end server part, there's no point in using fewer than 8 SPUs because the high margins make the lower yields of 8-working-SPU units acceptable. If IBM was going to define their server as only having 4 SPUs, it'd be because they were actually 8 functional SPUs but IBM was making them redundant, as in having two perform the exact same calculations then comparing the result.
I don't actually know, but I'd be shocked if IBM was using fewer SPUs than the PS3, simply due to the margins IBM gets.
You know what they say -- you can't teach an old console new tricks, without a mod chip.
Any actual programmer in the game industry would understand what was meant by "proceduraly generated content" when you refer to it in the context of Will Wright's inspiration, the assembly demo scene, who were the pioneers of using procedures to generate content on the fly because the idea of making the content before hand then stuffing it in 64k is ludicrous.
There is a real and useful distinction between procedurally generated in advance (and almost always hand-tweaked to get exactly what the artist wants) and one generated on the fly. If your whole point is that when describing Spore's procedurally generated content they don't use whatever other qualifying words would make this distinction clear -- when you are already clearly aware of the distinction and its significance -- then you're just being pedantic for the sake of pedantry.
anybody else out there in the game industry? am i out of date with current terminology, are these terms highly relative to the company one works for (i know they are somewhat but this seems to be a bit much), or is something odd going on here?
There is not and has never been an industry standard terminology for development stages. Many companies use a similar terminology of alpha/beta but exactly what degree of functionality or what stage of development these imply varies wildly. So I say just take what Will said as describing how EA and EA alone uses these terms.
Hehe, nice, but in this case yes it does mean what I think it means. It isn't true that it is inconceivable; that was of course sarcasm.
Intel puts twice as much L2 cache on their dies as does AMD for their high-end parts. The high-end Intel part has 4MB, the high-end AMD part as 1MB per core for a total of 2M.
Back when Itanium was sporting both impressive SpecFP scores and also gigantic caches, I wondered what would happen if you put a cache that size on a mainstream x86 part -- specfp is really more about cache size and memory bandwidth than it is about the floating point execution units, so I never bought the specfp rating as being due to an inherent advantage of itanium. Well, now we know.
While not very exciting architecturally, big caches are certainly a good way to boost performance. Intel gets those huge caches because of two things: First, they have the fab tech and fab capacity to produce gigantic chips with good yield and still make money. Second, Intel has the smallest cache cell size in the industry. So they are uniquely positioned to put big caches on mainstream parts, and they are taking advantage of it.
Intel, with the C2D, introduced a more aggressive out-of-order memory architecture, basically allowing any memory op, even with an unresolved address, to execute out of order, fixing it up later if there was a problem.
Slight correction on a very fine post: Memory ops that have their address are allowed to go out-of-order even if there are older ops which do not have their address (meaning in the case of an out of order load and a store without its address a possible forwarding case that will have to be fixed once the store gets its address). It doesn't make any sense to have a memory op go without its address, because you couldn't really do anything with it (without something like an address predictor).
This migration of socket requiring a new CPU and all has bitten me already. My S939 parts barely lived a year (two years given the entire lifetime) and already AMD is requiring me to buy a new motherboard *and* CPU if I wish to upgrade because they're already killing off S939.
Which is funny, because for years this was a commonly cited problem with Intel's platform, while AMD's Socket A was long-lived and stable. One would expect a company to copy their competitor's successes, but to copy their mistakes? I'd wager that this is a temporary glitch in AMD's roadmap and that they are going to try to re-stabilize. I bet they were just flummoxed trying to work out their socket strategy in the face of having to address several markets they weren't serious competitors in prior to K8 and of having to deal with their changing memory interface needs -- Socket 939, for example, only existed because they realized they wanted dual-channel memory in the client space, but the 940-pin Opteron package wouldn't support unbuffered DIMMs. Oops! So 939 was a hack, and I'm not surprised it's short lived, though certainly it sucks for those hoping to upgrade -- a.k.a. the do-it-yourself hobbyists that have been AMD's main supporters since K7. Double oops!
"Next up, I'm going for inm chips."
Feh, those are imaginary.
Not really screwed, especially if they fail to catch up but do narrow the gap. AMD has always been behind Intel in terms of process technology. AMD has gotten ahead on some specific process tech, like copper interconnect and SOI, but in terms of overall process shrinkage and quality of process, Intel has always been ahead. AMD has been more behind in the past, but also a lot closer, sometimes only months behind Intel. Basically, they are familiar with this situation.
65nm was a particularly bad node for AMD in terms of Intel's lead. Their plan for 45nm seems to be shaping up better with Fab 36, so I expect them to be closer though probably not caught up.
Do you have any idea what goes on when a prisoner is tortured for information? This weapon system is the Disney-ified G-rated version of even the mildest "information extraction" techniques, divided by a thousand.
Actually I do, and I think you are wrong (especially if I take your "even the mildest" phrase as anything but gross exaggeration for effect). This basically creates the sensation of being burned alive, and burning is one of the most horrible pains one can experience. The physical effect is of a mild burn, but the sensation is of being severely burned. Nobody tested was able to withstand more than 5 seconds of the beam, and these were military tests so your average wimp probably wasn't invited. If 5 seconds is too excruciating for anyone to bear, then what does 30 seconds or a minute feel like?
I'll agree with you on the rape thing... Though it might make more sense to ask the question again after a minute of being under this device's effect.
Ubisoft has thrown their weight behind the Wii, and embraced the much cheaper development costs there. They aren't ignoring the PS3 and 360, but those Wii titles will help cushion their bottom line a bit. EA doesn't seem to have paid as much attention to the Wii when it comes to unique IP.
While I loved some of the last gen's Ubisoft titles (Prince of Persia and Beyond Good and Evil specifically), and I'm certainly happy they are throwing their weight behind Wii in hopes of more like that, I have to say that they're perhaps going a bit too cheap on the development costs. Exhibit A being GT Pro, an extremely shitty-looking GC game that looks like it was first a port from the N64 with Wii support tacked on. Red Steel still looks interesting, but according to the reviews clearly lacks the polish of the best-of-breed Ubisoft games of yesteryear. In the end it looks like Raving Rabbids, the mini-game collection, is the most significant entry into Wii support.
I'm hoping Ubi will start doing better on the Wii, and that Red Steel is mostly an effect of trying to meet the launch date. But so far, not exactly so great.
You wouldn't be wearing the armor unless you anticipated being in a place where the millimeter-wave weapon would be used. You wouldn't anticipate being in such a situation unless you were planning to cause a disruption or asked to join in one.
Yeah, because no experienced protester expects that the police might employ anti-riot weapons even if the situation doesn't warrant it. It's simply inconceivable.
*rolls eyes*
the problem becomes in what situations is force, even if non-lethal used. if we march on washington because we don't like the results of the next election and start getting zapped and tear gased, I don't think that is acceptable. unless of course the protest became a violent mob, which happens so easily these days.
Right, especially because using these zappers on a protest is likely to turn the protest violent -- which would then retroactively justify the use of the weapon? How easy it would be to simply claim the protest was violent before you turned on the zappers, even though it was the zappers what caused the violence.
I can't see any reason why within 5 years you won't be able to tell the difference between the real world and a game.
How's this for a reason: Toy Story was released in 1995, and while it looked great it didn't come close to looking like the real world -- in fact, it made it blatantly clear just how far computer rendering was from making a believable human being. Today's gaming hardware couldn't possibly render Toy Story in real-time, and probably won't be able to in five years either. Five more years of development in the film industry brought us Final Fantasy, which still was quite distinguishable from the real world. We still don't have Toy Story, so how long do you think it will be until an affordable home console can render Final Fantasy in real time?
Graphics are getting better and better, and I certainly think there's a point where it is "good enough" to create a wide variety of great-looking and stylish games -- honestly, I wish more games focused on "style" over "realism" in as much as they are exclusive. Yet there is a vast, vast gulf between what we are capable of today and "indistinguishable from real life".
Not to be an ass, but what proof do you have that driving above the speed limit, to match the flow of traffic, is legal?
None, so I could be wrong. Certainly I've never heard of anyone getting a ticket for going the speed limit while everyone else was going faster, but then again I've never heard of anyone getting a ticket for going under the 45 mph minimum. I have heard of people getting out of speeding tickets by saying that they were just matching the flow of traffic, but second hand annecdotes aren't exactly legal arguments.
Actually, I was just thinking of something as simple as front brake lights.
the part of SCO v IBM about declaring Linux "clean" is a counterclaim by IBM
Good point. It is possible though that as soon as SCO vs IBM is settled, SCO will implode due to not having any revenue that isn't Linux-FUD-lawsuit related. But really, I don't believe the conspiracy theory. I do think it's much more likely that Novell wants to assert their rights.