If we found a way to turn post-consumer styrofoam into stems cells, while whitening teeth and curing cancer at the same time, the religious groups would still scream about it.
As well they should! Because once you have a way to turn post-consumer styrofoam into stem cells, then all post-consumer styrofoam becomes a potential life and is thus sacred. Every time you threw away a plate at a family BBQ, you'd be destroying thousands if not millions of potential lives! And since styrofoam is made from petrolium products, by taking oil and turning it into gasoline you are destroying still more potential life! Where does it end?!
Well, it sounds like you have a healthy relationship and I'm not about to criticize you for your choices in that regard.
But there's a "logical possibility" that a condom will fail and pregnancy will result that anyone using this method has to take responsibility for. I don't see the fundamental difference, in that you're having sex while taking deliberate steps to make sure it doesn't result in pregnancy. Sounds like sex for the sake of pleasure to me. The rhythm method is birth control, just like a condom is. I appreciate not wanting to not have any barrier between you, so to speak, but if that's the line where morality is drawn then it seems to have moved. Which if that's what you've decided for yourself, then that's fine.
The kicker is when this Catholic philosophy is applied to others. Teaching abstenance to teenagers -- the one method guaranteed to work, and the one method guaranteed not to be used! Which is one thing. Another altogether is what would otherwise be fantastic Church outreach programs in places like Africa. Any method of combating AIDS in Africa which doesn't involve distributing lots and lots of condoms is an ineffective, and dare I say it, insincere method. They're requiring that people adopt their moral code not to save their souls, but to save their lives. And that irks me.
Allow me to use the newly redefined word in a sentence: "We disenfranchised a single cell from the embryo to create a stem cell line that will allow us to grow extra nose tissue for Michael Jackson."
Great. So we've gone from harming the embryo to harming the stem cells we collect from it.:P
I understand the philosophy, but it doesn't hold up. It's a rationalization of the belief that anything done purely for pleasure is sinful. That experiencing pleasure can only be justified if it satisfies some other survival need. I don't buy it. And I certainly don't buy that this is something that has only resulted from technology and is a recent phenomenon.
Human societies have had non-essential-nourishment foods in the form of desserts for millenia. Sure there's a huge range of nutritional value among desserts, but many are not very nutritional at all (long before the invention of sugar substitutes) and were certainly not eaten for their nutritional value. Yet apparently the first time an ancient human hunter-gatherer, having already taken in their daily requirement of calories and proteins and looking at a surplus of food, decided to eat a handfull of berries because it tasted good we became sinners.
Similarly, the 1930s were hardly the beginning of the separation of sex and procreation. Animal skin condoms and other forms of birth control existed for hundreds if not thousands of years before. I'd wager that the desire to separate sex from procreation has existed for as long as humans were aware that one can lead to the other, even if methods to do so didn't exist. Before that, our sex drive was driving us have sex without caring about procreation, so if having sex without intent of reproduction is a sin, then we have always been sinners.
Similarly, the attempt to repeat the pleasure of sex beyond the needs of procreation (birth control, gay lifestyle, etc) has generally bad results - physical, emotional, and spiritual.
Which I don't see as supported at all -- for starters, what physical harm comes from . It has been shown that couples with more active sex lives have healthier relationships. Yet a couple with more children than they can afford is going to be miserable. What is healthier? A couple having sex without producing a child, or a couple having sex producing a child they don't want, and neglecting, abandoning, or just killing it (and don't think for a second that abortion is a modern phenomenon either)?
Is there such a thing as too much sex, as sex that is in fact damaging physically, emotionally, and spiritually? Yes! Same with desserts -- there is such a thing as gluttony! But the mere act of engaging in eating or physical pleasure without survival of the species being the underlying goal is not necessarily in the same category. In fact, I'd say that in every instance in which sex could be considered harmful physically, emotionally, or spiritually, the use or non use of a prophylactic has zero impact whatsoever on that harm -- no, wait, check that, in reality using a prophylactic can prevent physical harm (STDs) and emotional harm (resulting from an unwanted pregnancy). The idea that a committed married couple making love suddenly becomes harmful through use of a condom makes no sense at all.
There's a rational idea in there -- that eating too much of the wrong things is harmful, that entering into sexual relationships irresponsibly can be harmful -- but the extreme thinking that says that any non-nutritional food or sex without making a baby is immoral is actually more detrimental than it is helpful. Like most extreme thinking, it causes the very problems it claims to abhor.
Okay, but I'll be perfectly honest, I just can't believe that God sees blowjobs as a sin.
Ha ha, I remember that show! Vaguely. The only episode that comes to mind is the one where they had to battle the evil remote control air plane with their own remote control air plane. Being a fan of Air Wolf which was also out at the same time I think, I remember thinking this was pretty stupid.
This is about this line from the article, which the OP quoted and said was BS (because it is), emphasis added:
Early this year, Google successfully defended a subpoena from the US Department of Justice to hand over its data in another child porn investigation case.
Note that this case happened in the US, not Brazil. THAT case had absolutely nothing to do with child porn. THAT case is what I was talking about. So I'm sorry, but it is you who are mistaken.
Right, that was the case where the Admin. wanted Google to provide them with data they could mine to determine just how much adult porn was on the net that minors could hypothetically gain access to, in order to justify passing net-porn (NOT kiddie porn) legislation in the name of "protecting the children".
That's why Google was able to succesfully refuse the subpoena, because it had fuck-all to do with actual justice.
Well my childhood was suburban, but suburban in Michigan still means there's plenty of deep woods all around. It wasn't one of the woods of my childhood that I got lost in, it was one in another part of the state. I'm glad that never happened to you.
The fact that they were urbanites clearly out of their element only made their fate more obvious, though. in that sense I relished it.:)
Wait. If you've been lost in the woods before, I would expect you to be the very first person to get exasperated at the dumb-ass script of Blair Witch.
I didn't explain enough, it being just a throw away parenthetical. What I meant is that unlike most other horror movies, I've actually felt fear in a similar situation. I've never been stalked by a guy in a hockey mask. I've never had an elevator-load of blood pour down a hallway at me. I have been lost in the woods, and it was scary. So that enabled me to get more immersed in the movie and made it feel more personal, following through into the more supernatural aspects of the movie, and for that reason I think I enjoyed it more.
I mean... if it were yours to do all over again, don't you think you might not have thrown away the map? Once you started feeling like you were getting lost, wouldn't you maybe have tried following the creek bed downstream?
As evidenced by the fact that I'm still here to post on/., I was able to find my way out of the woods. I didn't throw away my map.
Though I might have thrown it away after following the map or the creek and repeatedly coming across the same tree. It was pretty obvious by then that the map was useless because they were in a cursed wood. They were already lost before that one idiot threw out the map, the others were just in denial, so I don't see how that's part of the setup. The setup is that they were in a magic forest from which there was no escape. That's just suspension of disbelief.
Years ago there was the viral marketing about The Blair Witch Project. I wondered what all the buzz was about and saw it. To me it was money down the drain. I didn't care for it and became a bit cynical about film pushed this way. Now if someone I knew who had similar tastes and saw a film and liked it, which I used to do, I'd give it a try.
Well I actually liked Blair Witch a lot, it being one of the only horror movies to ever instill real emotions of fear in me (having been lost in the woods before helped me get into the movie though). Yet I'm still cynical of any attempts to do "viral" marketing or anything of the sort. The reason is because a movie is marketed that way, or any other way, and some other exec says "Huh, they used this marketing technique, and their movie was a success. We should use this technique for our movie, and we will also be successfull." Note the lack of any consideration for the quality of the movies. To them, "grassroots" is just a phenomenon to be exploited for their own benefit. So I never trust them.
Now like you say sometimes I do find people whose opinions I trust. In this sense, I think they made a big mistake by not having pre-screenings for the press. If I had heard the reviews before hand -- which basically say that given B-movie expectations, the film exceeds them -- I may have been more likely to see the movie on opening weekend. "Snakes on a Plane" with Samuel Jackson sounds awesome, but am I going to trust those hollywood fuckers with my $8 based on a name and a star? If pre-release internet buzz had been matched with critical acclaim, then maybe that buzz would have turned into ticket sales like they hoped.
But really this article should be titled "Movie producers shocked to discover that Internet still isn't replacement for real world".
Aww, how tragic. The internet hath failed them! Since it got the number 1 spot, but took in only half as much as they were estimating, I'd say the problem was unrealistic estimates. Okay, so they discovered that internet marketing isn't a way to magically double your take without having any pre-screenings for the press. Big woop. Without the internet hype, the movie might still have the completely boring name Pacific Air Flight 121 or whatever (though S.L.Jackson gets credit for that too), and it wouldn't have the fantastic quote that gives the trailers half their punch.
I think it's funny that in TFA the guy who predicted a $40 million opening weekend and wrote a book about the movie's success before it even opened is now saying "Over-hype was a symptom which is not taken into account". Yeah... I think I see who exactly it was who was suffering from "over-hype".
Yeah, Bushido Blade was great, one of the most "real" feeling combat systems in a fighting game. I particularly liked how you could deliver a non-lethal blow to legs or arms that would leave them crippled. Especially when they could no longer stand, and could only flail about them with their weapon. Putting them out of their misery was so satisfying! Also, due to the lethality of the weapons, it made fights feel very strategic, all about positioning and creating openings. Lots of fun.
That game needed a lot of polish, though. It was a fantastic demonstration of the concept, but felt like it was rushed out the door. I don't know if Bushido Blade 2 fixed the problems or not.
These guys claim to be doing exactly what a layman should do when he thinks he has discovered technology which challenges a fundamental scientific principle.
Invite as many credible scientific experts as you can find to test it and report the results of such testing in peer reviewed scientific publications and on the Internet.
Is that what you see?
I see them inviting a select group of only 12 hand-picked people -- is that really as many as they can find? -- to a demonstration of uknown preparation.
They're claiming to be challenging a fundamental scientific principle. If anyone, "layman" or not, wants to be taken seriously and have "credible, academic validation" would publish their theories, discoveries, and data so that it could actually be evaluated and much more importantly duplicated by actual academia. Instead they're holding a closed demo that I'm sure will be quite impressive, but won't answer the question of whether their undisclosed miracle of physics works outside of the walls of their office.
They're not being open, they're being coy.
There have been thousands and thousands of claimed perpetual motion and free energy machines, all of them not in any way perpetual or free. The fact is these are doing nothing to make their claims appear more scientifically valid than any others.
You want me to believe that it's possible the 1st Law of Thermodynamics could be wrong or incomplete? Sure, I accept that on principle. You want me to believe that you have shown it to be wrong by building a free energy device, you best show me the schematic.
Content: If they weren't con artists, if this was real science, they'd release the data they claim they have and prove their claims without some stupid "jury".
Why is it all the perpetual energy nuts always start with magnets?
Probably because a permanent magnetic is always emitting a constant field, and nothing you do (passing a coil above it, whatever) will cause the field to fail. So it seems like a natural example of the "infinite". Look, this refrigerator magnet will never fall! So then you just need to come up with some cooky method of extracting energy from this never-ending field and viola! Free energy.
Except the part about what you have to do to extract energy from the field. But hey, don't let the details distract you from the big picture, which is that you should be giving them lots of attention and money.
I am not one of those old gamers ( no idea what Dungeon Master means heh)
A Dungeon Master(DM), or Game Master(GM) in any non-D&D RPG, is the person who is in control of the game world and decides what the outcome of the players' actions are. Even though there are rules in the manuals, fundamentally the Dungeon Master is responsible for evaluating the rules, vetoing the rules where appropriate, and deciding what happens when a player does something not explicitly defined by the rules. To analogize it with computer RPGS, the Dungeon Master -is- the game engine, running in his brain, and you use a verbal interface with him.
Coming from a pen-and-paper background, the implications of having a human run the show are obvious to me, and the ways in which CRPGs fail to live up to the pen-and-paper standard are as well. But let me try to explain exactly how this affects a game of NWN.
In the standard NWN games, when you talk to an NPC you are given a small set of things to say, based on the script the module author created. With a human Dungeon Master, you can say whatever you want to the NPC and the DM will decide how they respond. This allows more immersive role-playing, makes figuring out what an NPC knows both more difficult and more intuitive, and allows you to role-play your character with whatever personality you want (instead of a small smattering of personas that you are given in standard modules).
Or consider game actions and puzzle solutions. Let's say there's a trap impeding your progress, and a level on the other side which is there to temporarily disable the trap so that approved persons can be allowed through. Now the game engine says a rogue can attempt to disable the trap. However let's say you wanted to be clever -- you don't have a rogue, or the trap is too difficult -- and try to hit the level with a rock. Now certainly the module author could have allowed for this possibility, but if they didn't then you couldn't. But with a DM running the game, he could first decide if there are any appropriate rocks around, what the difficuly of hitting the lever is, and whether that would activate it. He would then let you make a to-hit roll, and determine if you succeeded.
Also, the DM can do things like quickly create and modify encounters, either adding monsters if the players are having too easy a time, subtracting them if too hard, or otherwise reacting to player actions.
Lots of things are still controlled by the engine,like combat, and lots of things are fundamentally limited by the engine -- for example, all the terrain and geometry has to be pre-defined. In pen and paper the DM could just make up terrain as he goes, but that just doesn't work in NWN.
I hope that gives you an idea of some of the potential of playing with a DM. Basically it's about a finite game with posibilities limited by whatever the author coded up, and an open-ended game that can develop in new directions as the game goes on.
What if other projects adopt "no military" clauses like we've seen lately? This certainly has to be in the list of risks that the DoD will face.
I doubt it, as that's not a clause of the standard GPL, and a pretty stupid clause to boot. If people want to complain that their screwdriver was eventually used to attach two pieces of a bomb, they should be protesting the decisions that require bombs to be made and used, not refusing to allow their screwdriver to be used in military applications since it's simply untennable. If war is to be waged, war machines will be made, using your code or no. Eliminate the root cause, not innefectually stymie the effect just to have a slightly clearer conscience.
Frankly I think it's dumb. Look at what the NSA has done for open source; the DoD could theoretically provide similar benefits. The DoD will continue to exist. Having the OSS community benefit from DoD development would be a good way for us to directly benefit from their continued existence.
Anyway, other than toolkits and general systems (a Linux based workstation to compile code on, use OpenOffice to write documents, and such) there's not going to be a lot of OSS that will be reusable for the developers since they will be writing software for missile guidance systems and interfacing to hardware not generally available to the public. Some GUI toolkits, maybe, and GCC, of course.
The DoD does a lot more than write code for missles. They crunch masses of data on commercially available parts, and OSS will be very useful for them in that regard. Also, I doubt that the embedded systems for missles are really that exotic -- they may be using hardened versions of microcontrollers, but I doubt they'll be using some completely esoteric ISA that would be difficult to port an OSS real-time OS to.
Plus, how will GPL's clauses about not having to release code for things you do on-site relate to the contractor/subcontractor relationships that are present in DoD projects and if parts are sold to other countries (like selling an F-16 to Israel, for example)?
If they sell it to other countries or give it to contractors, then it's no longer on-site as you've distributed it. In which case, distributing the source would be appropriate. By the same logic that you chose OSS in the first place, your customers, e.g. Israel, would want to be able to view the source code for validation and maintenence purposes.
As a stand-alone single-player or coop-mode CRPG, NWN was okay but not stellar. The original campaign was pretty bad, but the expansions were decent enough. Either way it was just the same old RPG with 3rd edition AD&D rules underneath.
With a Dungeon Master or Dungeon Masters running the show, NWN is simply put the closest thing to table-top real role-playing that you'll get. It's a completely different experience, and it's freaking awesome. With a human being in control of the game, you can use real creativity and ingenuity to solve problems, unlike every other CRPG.
Perfect? By no means, but it's absolutely a major step in the right direction. Judging NWN by anything other than this aspect of the game is to miss out on its truly genre-defining qualities.
Of course the problem with playing NWN as a computer equivalent of a table-top game is that it takes a similar amount of planning, preparation, and organization. Thus a lot haven't experienced the real game and instead criticize it's admittedly lack-luster single player mode.
But what you're missing is that hyperthreading often slows things down, although I honestly have no idea why.
I can't say for certain, but I have some educated guesses. Basically, resource sharing and resource splitting.
Resources like the L1 data cache are shared. If your two threads have working sets that fit in the l1 cache, then a 'traditional' time-slicing approach allows each thread to work entirely out of the cache. If you run them both at the same time, then they share the cache and neither can fit all its data in the l1 and you get l1/l2 cache thrashing so each thread is running substantially slower, less than half the speed so you don't make it up by running two threads. If only one thread is making much use of the cache, though, this is okay.
Other resources are split, like schedulers and load/store queues, so that half is dedicated to one thread and half to the other. This makes dealing with multithreading easier, but it puts a hard limit on the amount of the resource either thread can use. I think this is why for single-threaded benchmarks disabling hyperthreading made it run faster -- the split resources were no longer split, so the single thread got maximum utilization. I think this is something that was improved in later revs of P4, with fewer resources being split instead of shared, because it seems like the penalty for hyperthreading in single-threaded apps went down.
Still, the P4 is a pile of crap... Intel has not only given us two cores finally, but they've also stepped back and used more efficient cores, which is what makes them a credible threat to AMD's expansion.
Good summary. I do find it funny that in order to compete with AMD's six-year-old design, Intel went back to what is at its roots a ten year old design -- and it's working. Heh.
I don't really want to speculate on the effects of the lawsuit. It will in any event be decided by the facts gathered in discovery on past behavior, and even if Intel thinks they may lose it would make sense to continue leveraging their monetary advantage as long as possible.
But I agree that Intel bribes definitely are relevent. Dell has threatened to sell AMD in the past, almost certainly as a way to keep Intel on their toes and giving freely from their coffers. Dell's decision to switch would have to take into account the loss of that money, meaning either there's less of it than before, loss of customer business outweighs that money, or some combination of both.
I like AMD, but Dell could put magic genies in their boxes and I would never buy one.
Well yeah, but that's just common sense. Djinnis sound great, but anyone who has ever read any mythology involving them knows that their wishes always come with unexpected twists and downsides.
For example, you might ask your djinni to compute the turbulence vectors around the air intake of the fighter jet you are designing. And he would instantly do so using single-precision floating point and the wrong rounding mode! Whoa betide those who trust in the djinni!
Companies like Dell don't flip-flop just because the performance advantage has changed, or all the companies that were selling both Intel and AMD would have dropped Intel to only sell AMD, and vice versa, as the competitive advantage changed in previous years.
While AMD's recent performance leadership (and more importantly 64-bit and server infrastructure leadership) have definitely had an impact on Dell's decision, the only thing that really would have made Dell change their tune is customer demand. Dell is selling AMD parts because their customers want it, and they're going to continue to do so as long as their customers want it.
I think what's happened is that AMD has earned respect and is now seen as a true viable second source by even the most conservative of agencies, and given the choice most really would prefer to have a second option -- even if they buy all their computers from Dell.
Slashdot Mirror
Now you're catching on!
If we found a way to turn post-consumer styrofoam into stems cells, while whitening teeth and curing cancer at the same time, the religious groups would still scream about it.
As well they should! Because once you have a way to turn post-consumer styrofoam into stem cells, then all post-consumer styrofoam becomes a potential life and is thus sacred. Every time you threw away a plate at a family BBQ, you'd be destroying thousands if not millions of potential lives! And since styrofoam is made from petrolium products, by taking oil and turning it into gasoline you are destroying still more potential life! Where does it end?!
Well, it sounds like you have a healthy relationship and I'm not about to criticize you for your choices in that regard.
But there's a "logical possibility" that a condom will fail and pregnancy will result that anyone using this method has to take responsibility for. I don't see the fundamental difference, in that you're having sex while taking deliberate steps to make sure it doesn't result in pregnancy. Sounds like sex for the sake of pleasure to me. The rhythm method is birth control, just like a condom is. I appreciate not wanting to not have any barrier between you, so to speak, but if that's the line where morality is drawn then it seems to have moved. Which if that's what you've decided for yourself, then that's fine.
The kicker is when this Catholic philosophy is applied to others. Teaching abstenance to teenagers -- the one method guaranteed to work, and the one method guaranteed not to be used! Which is one thing. Another altogether is what would otherwise be fantastic Church outreach programs in places like Africa. Any method of combating AIDS in Africa which doesn't involve distributing lots and lots of condoms is an ineffective, and dare I say it, insincere method. They're requiring that people adopt their moral code not to save their souls, but to save their lives. And that irks me.
Allow me to use the newly redefined word in a sentence: "We disenfranchised a single cell from the embryo to create a stem cell line that will allow us to grow extra nose tissue for Michael Jackson."
:P
Great. So we've gone from harming the embryo to harming the stem cells we collect from it.
I understand the philosophy, but it doesn't hold up. It's a rationalization of the belief that anything done purely for pleasure is sinful. That experiencing pleasure can only be justified if it satisfies some other survival need. I don't buy it. And I certainly don't buy that this is something that has only resulted from technology and is a recent phenomenon.
Human societies have had non-essential-nourishment foods in the form of desserts for millenia. Sure there's a huge range of nutritional value among desserts, but many are not very nutritional at all (long before the invention of sugar substitutes) and were certainly not eaten for their nutritional value. Yet apparently the first time an ancient human hunter-gatherer, having already taken in their daily requirement of calories and proteins and looking at a surplus of food, decided to eat a handfull of berries because it tasted good we became sinners.
Similarly, the 1930s were hardly the beginning of the separation of sex and procreation. Animal skin condoms and other forms of birth control existed for hundreds if not thousands of years before. I'd wager that the desire to separate sex from procreation has existed for as long as humans were aware that one can lead to the other, even if methods to do so didn't exist. Before that, our sex drive was driving us have sex without caring about procreation, so if having sex without intent of reproduction is a sin, then we have always been sinners.
Similarly, the attempt to repeat the pleasure of sex beyond the needs of procreation (birth control, gay lifestyle, etc) has generally bad results - physical, emotional, and spiritual.
Which I don't see as supported at all -- for starters, what physical harm comes from . It has been shown that couples with more active sex lives have healthier relationships. Yet a couple with more children than they can afford is going to be miserable. What is healthier? A couple having sex without producing a child, or a couple having sex producing a child they don't want, and neglecting, abandoning, or just killing it (and don't think for a second that abortion is a modern phenomenon either)?
Is there such a thing as too much sex, as sex that is in fact damaging physically, emotionally, and spiritually? Yes! Same with desserts -- there is such a thing as gluttony! But the mere act of engaging in eating or physical pleasure without survival of the species being the underlying goal is not necessarily in the same category. In fact, I'd say that in every instance in which sex could be considered harmful physically, emotionally, or spiritually, the use or non use of a prophylactic has zero impact whatsoever on that harm -- no, wait, check that, in reality using a prophylactic can prevent physical harm (STDs) and emotional harm (resulting from an unwanted pregnancy). The idea that a committed married couple making love suddenly becomes harmful through use of a condom makes no sense at all.
There's a rational idea in there -- that eating too much of the wrong things is harmful, that entering into sexual relationships irresponsibly can be harmful -- but the extreme thinking that says that any non-nutritional food or sex without making a baby is immoral is actually more detrimental than it is helpful. Like most extreme thinking, it causes the very problems it claims to abhor.
Okay, but I'll be perfectly honest, I just can't believe that God sees blowjobs as a sin.
Ha ha, I remember that show! Vaguely. The only episode that comes to mind is the one where they had to battle the evil remote control air plane with their own remote control air plane. Being a fan of Air Wolf which was also out at the same time I think, I remember thinking this was pretty stupid.
This is about this line from the article, which the OP quoted and said was BS (because it is), emphasis added:
Early this year, Google successfully defended a subpoena from the US Department of Justice to hand over its data in another child porn investigation case.
Note that this case happened in the US, not Brazil. THAT case had absolutely nothing to do with child porn. THAT case is what I was talking about. So I'm sorry, but it is you who are mistaken.
Right, that was the case where the Admin. wanted Google to provide them with data they could mine to determine just how much adult porn was on the net that minors could hypothetically gain access to, in order to justify passing net-porn (NOT kiddie porn) legislation in the name of "protecting the children".
That's why Google was able to succesfully refuse the subpoena, because it had fuck-all to do with actual justice.
Well my childhood was suburban, but suburban in Michigan still means there's plenty of deep woods all around. It wasn't one of the woods of my childhood that I got lost in, it was one in another part of the state. I'm glad that never happened to you.
:)
The fact that they were urbanites clearly out of their element only made their fate more obvious, though. in that sense I relished it.
Wait. If you've been lost in the woods before, I would expect you to be the very first person to get exasperated at the dumb-ass script of Blair Witch.
... if it were yours to do all over again, don't you think you might not have thrown away the map? Once you started feeling like you were getting lost, wouldn't you maybe have tried following the creek bed downstream?
/., I was able to find my way out of the woods. I didn't throw away my map.
I didn't explain enough, it being just a throw away parenthetical. What I meant is that unlike most other horror movies, I've actually felt fear in a similar situation. I've never been stalked by a guy in a hockey mask. I've never had an elevator-load of blood pour down a hallway at me. I have been lost in the woods, and it was scary. So that enabled me to get more immersed in the movie and made it feel more personal, following through into the more supernatural aspects of the movie, and for that reason I think I enjoyed it more.
I mean
As evidenced by the fact that I'm still here to post on
Though I might have thrown it away after following the map or the creek and repeatedly coming across the same tree. It was pretty obvious by then that the map was useless because they were in a cursed wood. They were already lost before that one idiot threw out the map, the others were just in denial, so I don't see how that's part of the setup. The setup is that they were in a magic forest from which there was no escape. That's just suspension of disbelief.
Years ago there was the viral marketing about The Blair Witch Project. I wondered what all the buzz was about and saw it. To me it was money down the drain. I didn't care for it and became a bit cynical about film pushed this way. Now if someone I knew who had similar tastes and saw a film and liked it, which I used to do, I'd give it a try.
Well I actually liked Blair Witch a lot, it being one of the only horror movies to ever instill real emotions of fear in me (having been lost in the woods before helped me get into the movie though). Yet I'm still cynical of any attempts to do "viral" marketing or anything of the sort. The reason is because a movie is marketed that way, or any other way, and some other exec says "Huh, they used this marketing technique, and their movie was a success. We should use this technique for our movie, and we will also be successfull." Note the lack of any consideration for the quality of the movies. To them, "grassroots" is just a phenomenon to be exploited for their own benefit. So I never trust them.
Now like you say sometimes I do find people whose opinions I trust. In this sense, I think they made a big mistake by not having pre-screenings for the press. If I had heard the reviews before hand -- which basically say that given B-movie expectations, the film exceeds them -- I may have been more likely to see the movie on opening weekend. "Snakes on a Plane" with Samuel Jackson sounds awesome, but am I going to trust those hollywood fuckers with my $8 based on a name and a star? If pre-release internet buzz had been matched with critical acclaim, then maybe that buzz would have turned into ticket sales like they hoped.
But really this article should be titled "Movie producers shocked to discover that Internet still isn't replacement for real world".
Aww, how tragic. The internet hath failed them! Since it got the number 1 spot, but took in only half as much as they were estimating, I'd say the problem was unrealistic estimates. Okay, so they discovered that internet marketing isn't a way to magically double your take without having any pre-screenings for the press. Big woop. Without the internet hype, the movie might still have the completely boring name Pacific Air Flight 121 or whatever (though S.L.Jackson gets credit for that too), and it wouldn't have the fantastic quote that gives the trailers half their punch.
I think it's funny that in TFA the guy who predicted a $40 million opening weekend and wrote a book about the movie's success before it even opened is now saying "Over-hype was a symptom which is not taken into account". Yeah... I think I see who exactly it was who was suffering from "over-hype".
Yeah, Bushido Blade was great, one of the most "real" feeling combat systems in a fighting game. I particularly liked how you could deliver a non-lethal blow to legs or arms that would leave them crippled. Especially when they could no longer stand, and could only flail about them with their weapon. Putting them out of their misery was so satisfying! Also, due to the lethality of the weapons, it made fights feel very strategic, all about positioning and creating openings. Lots of fun.
That game needed a lot of polish, though. It was a fantastic demonstration of the concept, but felt like it was rushed out the door. I don't know if Bushido Blade 2 fixed the problems or not.
I don't see why the credulity.
These guys claim to be doing exactly what a layman should do when he thinks he has discovered technology which challenges a fundamental scientific principle.
Invite as many credible scientific experts as you can find to test it and report the results of such testing in peer reviewed scientific publications and on the Internet.
Is that what you see?
I see them inviting a select group of only 12 hand-picked people -- is that really as many as they can find? -- to a demonstration of uknown preparation.
They're claiming to be challenging a fundamental scientific principle. If anyone, "layman" or not, wants to be taken seriously and have "credible, academic validation" would publish their theories, discoveries, and data so that it could actually be evaluated and much more importantly duplicated by actual academia. Instead they're holding a closed demo that I'm sure will be quite impressive, but won't answer the question of whether their undisclosed miracle of physics works outside of the walls of their office.
They're not being open, they're being coy.
There have been thousands and thousands of claimed perpetual motion and free energy machines, all of them not in any way perpetual or free. The fact is these are doing nothing to make their claims appear more scientifically valid than any others.
You want me to believe that it's possible the 1st Law of Thermodynamics could be wrong or incomplete? Sure, I accept that on principle.
You want me to believe that you have shown it to be wrong by building a free energy device, you best show me the schematic.
Not that I saw any real content to your post.
Content: If they weren't con artists, if this was real science, they'd release the data they claim they have and prove their claims without some stupid "jury".
But they are, and it isn't, so they don't.
The trick is that you should have a doctor-verified vision disability to warrant the most expensive product - not just a don't-wanna-learn disability.
You're discriminating against the motivationally challenged!
Why is it all the perpetual energy nuts always start with magnets?
Probably because a permanent magnetic is always emitting a constant field, and nothing you do (passing a coil above it, whatever) will cause the field to fail. So it seems like a natural example of the "infinite". Look, this refrigerator magnet will never fall! So then you just need to come up with some cooky method of extracting energy from this never-ending field and viola! Free energy.
Except the part about what you have to do to extract energy from the field. But hey, don't let the details distract you from the big picture, which is that you should be giving them lots of attention and money.
I am not one of those old gamers ( no idea what Dungeon Master means heh)
,like combat, and lots of things are fundamentally limited by the engine -- for example, all the terrain and geometry has to be pre-defined. In pen and paper the DM could just make up terrain as he goes, but that just doesn't work in NWN.
A Dungeon Master(DM), or Game Master(GM) in any non-D&D RPG, is the person who is in control of the game world and decides what the outcome of the players' actions are. Even though there are rules in the manuals, fundamentally the Dungeon Master is responsible for evaluating the rules, vetoing the rules where appropriate, and deciding what happens when a player does something not explicitly defined by the rules. To analogize it with computer RPGS, the Dungeon Master -is- the game engine, running in his brain, and you use a verbal interface with him.
Coming from a pen-and-paper background, the implications of having a human run the show are obvious to me, and the ways in which CRPGs fail to live up to the pen-and-paper standard are as well. But let me try to explain exactly how this affects a game of NWN.
In the standard NWN games, when you talk to an NPC you are given a small set of things to say, based on the script the module author created. With a human Dungeon Master, you can say whatever you want to the NPC and the DM will decide how they respond. This allows more immersive role-playing, makes figuring out what an NPC knows both more difficult and more intuitive, and allows you to role-play your character with whatever personality you want (instead of a small smattering of personas that you are given in standard modules).
Or consider game actions and puzzle solutions. Let's say there's a trap impeding your progress, and a level on the other side which is there to temporarily disable the trap so that approved persons can be allowed through. Now the game engine says a rogue can attempt to disable the trap. However let's say you wanted to be clever -- you don't have a rogue, or the trap is too difficult -- and try to hit the level with a rock. Now certainly the module author could have allowed for this possibility, but if they didn't then you couldn't. But with a DM running the game, he could first decide if there are any appropriate rocks around, what the difficuly of hitting the lever is, and whether that would activate it. He would then let you make a to-hit roll, and determine if you succeeded.
Also, the DM can do things like quickly create and modify encounters, either adding monsters if the players are having too easy a time, subtracting them if too hard, or otherwise reacting to player actions.
Lots of things are still controlled by the engine
I hope that gives you an idea of some of the potential of playing with a DM. Basically it's about a finite game with posibilities limited by whatever the author coded up, and an open-ended game that can develop in new directions as the game goes on.
What if other projects adopt "no military" clauses like we've seen lately? This certainly has to be in the list of risks that the DoD will face.
I doubt it, as that's not a clause of the standard GPL, and a pretty stupid clause to boot. If people want to complain that their screwdriver was eventually used to attach two pieces of a bomb, they should be protesting the decisions that require bombs to be made and used, not refusing to allow their screwdriver to be used in military applications since it's simply untennable. If war is to be waged, war machines will be made, using your code or no. Eliminate the root cause, not innefectually stymie the effect just to have a slightly clearer conscience.
Frankly I think it's dumb. Look at what the NSA has done for open source; the DoD could theoretically provide similar benefits. The DoD will continue to exist. Having the OSS community benefit from DoD development would be a good way for us to directly benefit from their continued existence.
Anyway, other than toolkits and general systems (a Linux based workstation to compile code on, use OpenOffice to write documents, and such) there's not going to be a lot of OSS that will be reusable for the developers since they will be writing software for missile guidance systems and interfacing to hardware not generally available to the public. Some GUI toolkits, maybe, and GCC, of course.
The DoD does a lot more than write code for missles. They crunch masses of data on commercially available parts, and OSS will be very useful for them in that regard. Also, I doubt that the embedded systems for missles are really that exotic -- they may be using hardened versions of microcontrollers, but I doubt they'll be using some completely esoteric ISA that would be difficult to port an OSS real-time OS to.
Plus, how will GPL's clauses about not having to release code for things you do on-site relate to the contractor/subcontractor relationships that are present in DoD projects and if parts are sold to other countries (like selling an F-16 to Israel, for example)?
If they sell it to other countries or give it to contractors, then it's no longer on-site as you've distributed it. In which case, distributing the source would be appropriate. By the same logic that you chose OSS in the first place, your customers, e.g. Israel, would want to be able to view the source code for validation and maintenence purposes.
if you didn't play it with a Dungeon Master.
As a stand-alone single-player or coop-mode CRPG, NWN was okay but not stellar. The original campaign was pretty bad, but the expansions were decent enough. Either way it was just the same old RPG with 3rd edition AD&D rules underneath.
With a Dungeon Master or Dungeon Masters running the show, NWN is simply put the closest thing to table-top real role-playing that you'll get. It's a completely different experience, and it's freaking awesome. With a human being in control of the game, you can use real creativity and ingenuity to solve problems, unlike every other CRPG.
Perfect? By no means, but it's absolutely a major step in the right direction. Judging NWN by anything other than this aspect of the game is to miss out on its truly genre-defining qualities.
Of course the problem with playing NWN as a computer equivalent of a table-top game is that it takes a similar amount of planning, preparation, and organization. Thus a lot haven't experienced the real game and instead criticize it's admittedly lack-luster single player mode.
But what you're missing is that hyperthreading often slows things down, although I honestly have no idea why.
I can't say for certain, but I have some educated guesses. Basically, resource sharing and resource splitting.
Resources like the L1 data cache are shared. If your two threads have working sets that fit in the l1 cache, then a 'traditional' time-slicing approach allows each thread to work entirely out of the cache. If you run them both at the same time, then they share the cache and neither can fit all its data in the l1 and you get l1/l2 cache thrashing so each thread is running substantially slower, less than half the speed so you don't make it up by running two threads. If only one thread is making much use of the cache, though, this is okay.
Other resources are split, like schedulers and load/store queues, so that half is dedicated to one thread and half to the other. This makes dealing with multithreading easier, but it puts a hard limit on the amount of the resource either thread can use. I think this is why for single-threaded benchmarks disabling hyperthreading made it run faster -- the split resources were no longer split, so the single thread got maximum utilization. I think this is something that was improved in later revs of P4, with fewer resources being split instead of shared, because it seems like the penalty for hyperthreading in single-threaded apps went down.
Still, the P4 is a pile of crap... Intel has not only given us two cores finally, but they've also stepped back and used more efficient cores, which is what makes them a credible threat to AMD's expansion.
Good summary. I do find it funny that in order to compete with AMD's six-year-old design, Intel went back to what is at its roots a ten year old design -- and it's working. Heh.
I don't really want to speculate on the effects of the lawsuit. It will in any event be decided by the facts gathered in discovery on past behavior, and even if Intel thinks they may lose it would make sense to continue leveraging their monetary advantage as long as possible.
But I agree that Intel bribes definitely are relevent. Dell has threatened to sell AMD in the past, almost certainly as a way to keep Intel on their toes and giving freely from their coffers. Dell's decision to switch would have to take into account the loss of that money, meaning either there's less of it than before, loss of customer business outweighs that money, or some combination of both.
I like AMD, but Dell could put magic genies in their boxes and I would never buy one.
Well yeah, but that's just common sense. Djinnis sound great, but anyone who has ever read any mythology involving them knows that their wishes always come with unexpected twists and downsides.
For example, you might ask your djinni to compute the turbulence vectors around the air intake of the fighter jet you are designing. And he would instantly do so using single-precision floating point and the wrong rounding mode! Whoa betide those who trust in the djinni!
Companies like Dell don't flip-flop just because the performance advantage has changed, or all the companies that were selling both Intel and AMD would have dropped Intel to only sell AMD, and vice versa, as the competitive advantage changed in previous years.
While AMD's recent performance leadership (and more importantly 64-bit and server infrastructure leadership) have definitely had an impact on Dell's decision, the only thing that really would have made Dell change their tune is customer demand. Dell is selling AMD parts because their customers want it, and they're going to continue to do so as long as their customers want it.
I think what's happened is that AMD has earned respect and is now seen as a true viable second source by even the most conservative of agencies, and given the choice most really would prefer to have a second option -- even if they buy all their computers from Dell.
Same way they do in the lab: glass.