I guess that depends on what you're looking for in your TV programming. I never considered Cowboy Bebop to be boring at all. It had character development, great music, interesting storyline, and (in my opinion) just the right amount of action. I don't think action by itself really defines how exciting a series is - consider Dragonball (Z/etc.), where the entire series is "action", but most of the show is actually spent allowing the characters to power up for their next massive, yet remarkably ineffective, attack. (It's sort of like what professional wrestling has become these days. Talking trash has always been a part of pro wrestling, but nowadays that's practically all they ever do.)
However, I do wonder what's going to happen when NGE gets to the last two episodes on CN/AS - I about fell asleep watching those two episodes on DVD, not because they didn't have anything interesting to say, but because what they did say, they kept saying over and over and over again.
(Hopefully that won't be enough of a spoiler to cause problems for anybody who hasn't seen it yet!)
Really, the choice of Christian elements was pretty arbitrary. For the most part, you could have just changed the names of a few things and the Judeo-Christian references would be gone. The few remaining references were mostly crosses and/or crucifixes. That part of the series was hardly profound at all - in fact, it appeared to demonstrate a superficial understanding of Christianity on the part of the writer/director. The only notable part of that storyline is the "Man Trying To Become Like God" theme, which isn't strictly Judeo-Christian.
Admittedly, CN/AS does censor the "Jesus" from "Sweet Zombie Jesus!" in Futurama. But I don't see the imagery in NGE as approaching that level of "blasphemy", simply because the imagery is confusing and really doesn't drive any particular offensive message home.
On the other hand, NGE makes a real impact, as you say, in its representation of mental illness. It examines the sort of mental illness that many Slashdot readers may have - most notably, depression - which has a tremendous internal impact upon the sufferer, while the sufferer's friends and family aren't aware that they need help. For this theme, the writer/director drew on his own experience with mental illness, and included themes related to what he learned during the course of his therapy. (If you like this concept, CN/AS is currently running Paranoia Agent, which shares the theme of mental illness but takes a somewhat more external view compared to the crushing closeness that NGE gets the viewer to its characters.)
Nope, they aired it. Didn't they do a recap of the previous episode in the last ep, meaning the sniper shot was seen in both eps? Could indicate the source of the confusion.
The skew in age distribution is becoming a significant problem in Japan, as many young people are avoiding having children in order to further their career or to just have fun. The abortion rate is also pretty high there. The problem is far worse than the baby boom in the U.S., and it's forecasted to get worse - if the birth rate of 1.3 children per woman continues, the population of Japan will be cut in half by the end of this century.
The problem in Japan, however, isn't anywhere near as bad as it is in parts of Africa where AIDS has decimated the adult population. In those areas, there are tons of children and lots of old people, but not nearly enough working-age adults to sustain the economy and care for the kids and elderly.
There was an interesting Nova episode called "World in the Balance" which aired several months ago in the US. You might not be able to catch another rerun for a while (check your listings, blah blah), but at least there's a transcript available here.
B. Dragonball. It's a great example of everything that sucks about americanized Anime - overlong credits, overlong intro, overlong "NEXT EPISODE!" overlong "IN THE LAST EPISODE!" and shitloads of nothing happening in between. If you're lucky.
But it can take hours of facing off against your opponent, screaming at an ever-increasing pitch, to achieve "a power level I've never seen before!";)
Quite a few good anime series are making it stateside these days, with a lot of those heading right for Cartoon Network/Adult Swim. I don't know why they bothered with S-Cry-ed, but the rest of the shows in their current anime lineup are actually really good, especially Samurai Champloo and Paranoia Agent.
And yes, I mean dubbed and everything. Voice acting in anime has improved *tremendously*, at least for the most popular series. This might be in part because the writing has improved as well. Yeah, you still run into cases where people monotone their lines, which have about three times as many words in the sentence as necessary because a concept takes longer to express in Japanese. But the best shows are so much better than they used to be.
However, the important part is that for some reason Full Metal Alchemist is considered "Adult" material when it is most definitely not.
Dude. In FMA, an alchemist combined his own daughter with an animal to make a chimera, which lived in excruciating pain for several hours until another character used semi-alchemic powers to splatter her guts all over a wall.
...but come on! Why not sue your competitors directly for click-spamming, and put them out of business? Or could it be that your business is going nowhere because you're inept at running it, and you just want a free $5 million so you can close up shop?
Maybe this was a publicity stunt, seeing as how all of the data you plan to present at trial is ostensibly derived from your own product, and you don't expect to win (except by perhaps being bought out by someone).
Or maybe this was a scam from the start, and you don't actually sell anything in the first place.
There's one little snag for those of us who would like to get more than the broadcast channels on our PVR boxen. "5C" copy prevention (so called because five companies worked on it) prevents your untrusted device from communicating over firewire (IEEE-1394) to receive your cable company's digital signal. Each 5C-compliant firewire device must negotiate with the devices they communicate with to ensure that they are operating in a trusted fashion (meaning that the signal that one device sends another must comply with the 5C flag that is specified by the TV network, indicating whether the signal can be copied or not). Compliance is mandated by causing an upstream device not to transmit to noncompliant downstream devices.
The end result is that what the broadcast flag failed to achieve over-the-air is currently a fact of life in the cable arena, due to the puny content distributors pressuring the gigantic electronics manufacturers for some form of DRM, without legislation and without public comment. If you want to record digital media from your cable company at the resolution you receive it at, without going through the "analog hole" to get to it, you'll have to use the cable company's PVR. There's no way that you can trust your cable company not to cave in to the content providers - they can easily make it impossible to do things like watch a show more than once or to skip commercials, essentially rendering the PVR concept pointless.
In my earlier graduate research, I had several instances where the GA would discover physically unrealistic solutions due to bugs or tuning problems in the model. The problem involved the evolution of a neural network to control a hybrid wheeled/legged robot (the legs were mounted similar to the two rear legs on a cricket). In the robot model, we used a spring/damper model to simulate the ground contact of the feet. However, our integration method was sensitive to high-stiffness equations, and ground contact is about as high-stiffness as low-velocity motion gets, so we had to be careful not to set the ground stiffness too high if we expected the model to conserve energy.
Anyway, the GA discovered with one iteration of the model parameters that it could just peg the feet on the ground with the actuators turned on, and the force from the actuators was sufficient to overcome the springs that prevented the legs from hyperextending. (In the physical robot, there are hard stops that prevent this, but modeling a hard stop would involve using high stiffnesses again.) We didn't model "knee" contact with the ground, since that could never happen with the physical robot. So, there it was, a simulated robot with its knees hyperextended and protruding beneath the ground. Its feet were still at ground level, and the whole setup was very high stiffness. So, all it had to do was hold that position, and the jitter from the numerical inaccuracies caused it to accelerate itself forward without actually having to do any walking.
There are other examples of cheating GAs in the literature. One example was (I believe) from Karl Sims's work, where he evolved virtual creatures both in structure and control. The task was to get the virtual creature to achieve as much altitude as possible, given physically realistic physics. However, there was a problem in the physics model, and the GA discovered a cheat. The result was creatures that would beat themselves over the "head" repeatedly, with each smack causing the creature to rise up into the air more and more.
Because that's actually the proper term to use. Sure, automatic adaptation is a goal/hope/dream of some AI researchers, but artificial intelligence is quite a varied field.
I think you get it outside. But that's no good for me, because Amazon.com doesn't carry it. Just as well, because I don't think outside would fit in my apartment anyway.
It's not infrequent for me to be told that Henry Ford was a dunce because the way he designed the automobile prevents it from being used to transport buildings and so it's worthless
You know.... I've never really thought of it that way. Genius!!
Bram Cohen is not guilty. Tim Berners-Lee is not guilty.
But are they prepared to foot the bill to prove that they're not guilty? Are you?
It doesn't matter that software like BitTorrent, with substantial non-infringing uses - in the real world, not just hypothetically - isn't being marketed as a tool for copyright infringement. This case gives the ??AA ammunition to use at the start of other court cases levied against software/technology developers, to threaten them into submission before a court even takes a look at those cases.
Yes, there are positives to come out of this case, but I fear that the viewpoint a lot of people will have of the outcome will be negative (as most of Slashdot's posters seem to think), and that this will have a chilling effect on the technology rather than the marketing.
It wasn't really a complaint. The Rome: Total Realism mod for Rome: Total War is a great mod that far surpasses the original game. Far, far surpasses it. So, I'm glad that this sort of modding capacity was included in R:TW. In fact, I wish earlier Civ games were as moddable, especially on their AI - they've all been fairly notable (especially the original Civ) for being difficult opponents simply because they cheat. (Civ 1 would periodically decide, "Hey, I want X advance or Y wonder right now," and then just get it, without having to allocate production or research.)
However, I do wonder whether including modding capability will eventually be a calculated move demanded by publishers trying to push a not-quite-ready game out the door, so that their development houses won't have to put as much effort into fixing issues with crappy balance or AI. That's why I made my comment - while being able to mod a game is generally a good thing, game companies shouldn't take it as license to be sloppy or unsupportive.
This means that Firaxis won't have to put a lot of work into pesky issues like game balance, scenario creation, and AI behavior, because the hordes of mod fans out there will fix all those problems for them.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess that depends on what you're looking for in your TV programming. I never considered Cowboy Bebop to be boring at all. It had character development, great music, interesting storyline, and (in my opinion) just the right amount of action. I don't think action by itself really defines how exciting a series is - consider Dragonball (Z/etc.), where the entire series is "action", but most of the show is actually spent allowing the characters to power up for their next massive, yet remarkably ineffective, attack. (It's sort of like what professional wrestling has become these days. Talking trash has always been a part of pro wrestling, but nowadays that's practically all they ever do.)
However, I do wonder what's going to happen when NGE gets to the last two episodes on CN/AS - I about fell asleep watching those two episodes on DVD, not because they didn't have anything interesting to say, but because what they did say, they kept saying over and over and over again.
(Hopefully that won't be enough of a spoiler to cause problems for anybody who hasn't seen it yet!)
Really, the choice of Christian elements was pretty arbitrary. For the most part, you could have just changed the names of a few things and the Judeo-Christian references would be gone. The few remaining references were mostly crosses and/or crucifixes. That part of the series was hardly profound at all - in fact, it appeared to demonstrate a superficial understanding of Christianity on the part of the writer/director. The only notable part of that storyline is the "Man Trying To Become Like God" theme, which isn't strictly Judeo-Christian.
Admittedly, CN/AS does censor the "Jesus" from "Sweet Zombie Jesus!" in Futurama. But I don't see the imagery in NGE as approaching that level of "blasphemy", simply because the imagery is confusing and really doesn't drive any particular offensive message home.
On the other hand, NGE makes a real impact, as you say, in its representation of mental illness. It examines the sort of mental illness that many Slashdot readers may have - most notably, depression - which has a tremendous internal impact upon the sufferer, while the sufferer's friends and family aren't aware that they need help. For this theme, the writer/director drew on his own experience with mental illness, and included themes related to what he learned during the course of his therapy. (If you like this concept, CN/AS is currently running Paranoia Agent, which shares the theme of mental illness but takes a somewhat more external view compared to the crushing closeness that NGE gets the viewer to its characters.)
Er... Cowboy Bebop?
Nope, they aired it. Didn't they do a recap of the previous episode in the last ep, meaning the sniper shot was seen in both eps? Could indicate the source of the confusion.
The skew in age distribution is becoming a significant problem in Japan, as many young people are avoiding having children in order to further their career or to just have fun. The abortion rate is also pretty high there. The problem is far worse than the baby boom in the U.S., and it's forecasted to get worse - if the birth rate of 1.3 children per woman continues, the population of Japan will be cut in half by the end of this century.
The problem in Japan, however, isn't anywhere near as bad as it is in parts of Africa where AIDS has decimated the adult population. In those areas, there are tons of children and lots of old people, but not nearly enough working-age adults to sustain the economy and care for the kids and elderly.
There was an interesting Nova episode called "World in the Balance" which aired several months ago in the US. You might not be able to catch another rerun for a while (check your listings, blah blah), but at least there's a transcript available here.
Now if they could only make guard robots that look like hot robotic maids...
Prof. Farnsworth: You see, Vergon 6 was once filled with a super-dense substance known as dark matter, each pound of which weighs over 10,000 pounds.
Just so you know, "subaru" is the Japanese name for the star cluster Pleiades.
What, aren't we allowed to state our opinions anymore without having the fear of being haunted by the past?
Of course not, at least not in America. Just ask Robert Byrd and Trent Lott.
B. Dragonball. It's a great example of everything that sucks about americanized Anime - overlong credits, overlong intro, overlong "NEXT EPISODE!" overlong "IN THE LAST EPISODE!" and shitloads of nothing happening in between. If you're lucky.
;)
But it can take hours of facing off against your opponent, screaming at an ever-increasing pitch, to achieve "a power level I've never seen before!"
Quite a few good anime series are making it stateside these days, with a lot of those heading right for Cartoon Network/Adult Swim. I don't know why they bothered with S-Cry-ed, but the rest of the shows in their current anime lineup are actually really good, especially Samurai Champloo and Paranoia Agent.
And yes, I mean dubbed and everything. Voice acting in anime has improved *tremendously*, at least for the most popular series. This might be in part because the writing has improved as well. Yeah, you still run into cases where people monotone their lines, which have about three times as many words in the sentence as necessary because a concept takes longer to express in Japanese. But the best shows are so much better than they used to be.
However, the important part is that for some reason Full Metal Alchemist is considered "Adult" material when it is most definitely not.
Dude. In FMA, an alchemist combined his own daughter with an animal to make a chimera, which lived in excruciating pain for several hours until another character used semi-alchemic powers to splatter her guts all over a wall.
This is not a kids' show.
...but come on! Why not sue your competitors directly for click-spamming, and put them out of business? Or could it be that your business is going nowhere because you're inept at running it, and you just want a free $5 million so you can close up shop?
Maybe this was a publicity stunt, seeing as how all of the data you plan to present at trial is ostensibly derived from your own product, and you don't expect to win (except by perhaps being bought out by someone).
Or maybe this was a scam from the start, and you don't actually sell anything in the first place.
There's one little snag for those of us who would like to get more than the broadcast channels on our PVR boxen. "5C" copy prevention (so called because five companies worked on it) prevents your untrusted device from communicating over firewire (IEEE-1394) to receive your cable company's digital signal. Each 5C-compliant firewire device must negotiate with the devices they communicate with to ensure that they are operating in a trusted fashion (meaning that the signal that one device sends another must comply with the 5C flag that is specified by the TV network, indicating whether the signal can be copied or not). Compliance is mandated by causing an upstream device not to transmit to noncompliant downstream devices.
The end result is that what the broadcast flag failed to achieve over-the-air is currently a fact of life in the cable arena, due to the puny content distributors pressuring the gigantic electronics manufacturers for some form of DRM, without legislation and without public comment. If you want to record digital media from your cable company at the resolution you receive it at, without going through the "analog hole" to get to it, you'll have to use the cable company's PVR. There's no way that you can trust your cable company not to cave in to the content providers - they can easily make it impossible to do things like watch a show more than once or to skip commercials, essentially rendering the PVR concept pointless.
They probably justify ripping off the artists just like the recording industry does - to make up for all of the lost sales due to filesharing.
It's unfortunate that Hollywood is so far away from New York. Otherwise, Eliot Spitzer would be all over the movie studios like white on rice.
In my earlier graduate research, I had several instances where the GA would discover physically unrealistic solutions due to bugs or tuning problems in the model. The problem involved the evolution of a neural network to control a hybrid wheeled/legged robot (the legs were mounted similar to the two rear legs on a cricket). In the robot model, we used a spring/damper model to simulate the ground contact of the feet. However, our integration method was sensitive to high-stiffness equations, and ground contact is about as high-stiffness as low-velocity motion gets, so we had to be careful not to set the ground stiffness too high if we expected the model to conserve energy.
Anyway, the GA discovered with one iteration of the model parameters that it could just peg the feet on the ground with the actuators turned on, and the force from the actuators was sufficient to overcome the springs that prevented the legs from hyperextending. (In the physical robot, there are hard stops that prevent this, but modeling a hard stop would involve using high stiffnesses again.) We didn't model "knee" contact with the ground, since that could never happen with the physical robot. So, there it was, a simulated robot with its knees hyperextended and protruding beneath the ground. Its feet were still at ground level, and the whole setup was very high stiffness. So, all it had to do was hold that position, and the jitter from the numerical inaccuracies caused it to accelerate itself forward without actually having to do any walking.
There are other examples of cheating GAs in the literature. One example was (I believe) from Karl Sims's work, where he evolved virtual creatures both in structure and control. The task was to get the virtual creature to achieve as much altitude as possible, given physically realistic physics. However, there was a problem in the physics model, and the GA discovered a cheat. The result was creatures that would beat themselves over the "head" repeatedly, with each smack causing the creature to rise up into the air more and more.
Why is it that folks throw around "AI"
Because that's actually the proper term to use. Sure, automatic adaptation is a goal/hope/dream of some AI researchers, but artificial intelligence is quite a varied field.
Man with Body: Who's that then?
Corpse Collector: I dunno. Must be Bill Gates.
Man with Body: Why?
Corpse Collector: He hasn't got shit all over him.
Well, in any case, it's fascinating. Thanks for sharing, even if it did stray from the original topic a bit :)
I think you get it outside. But that's no good for me, because Amazon.com doesn't carry it. Just as well, because I don't think outside would fit in my apartment anyway.
It's not infrequent for me to be told that Henry Ford was a dunce because the way he designed the automobile prevents it from being used to transport buildings and so it's worthless
You know.... I've never really thought of it that way. Genius!!
Bram Cohen is not guilty. Tim Berners-Lee is not guilty.
But are they prepared to foot the bill to prove that they're not guilty? Are you?
It doesn't matter that software like BitTorrent, with substantial non-infringing uses - in the real world, not just hypothetically - isn't being marketed as a tool for copyright infringement. This case gives the ??AA ammunition to use at the start of other court cases levied against software/technology developers, to threaten them into submission before a court even takes a look at those cases.
Yes, there are positives to come out of this case, but I fear that the viewpoint a lot of people will have of the outcome will be negative (as most of Slashdot's posters seem to think), and that this will have a chilling effect on the technology rather than the marketing.
It wasn't really a complaint. The Rome: Total Realism mod for Rome: Total War is a great mod that far surpasses the original game. Far, far surpasses it. So, I'm glad that this sort of modding capacity was included in R:TW. In fact, I wish earlier Civ games were as moddable, especially on their AI - they've all been fairly notable (especially the original Civ) for being difficult opponents simply because they cheat. (Civ 1 would periodically decide, "Hey, I want X advance or Y wonder right now," and then just get it, without having to allocate production or research.)
However, I do wonder whether including modding capability will eventually be a calculated move demanded by publishers trying to push a not-quite-ready game out the door, so that their development houses won't have to put as much effort into fixing issues with crappy balance or AI. That's why I made my comment - while being able to mod a game is generally a good thing, game companies shouldn't take it as license to be sloppy or unsupportive.
This means that Firaxis won't have to put a lot of work into pesky issues like game balance, scenario creation, and AI behavior, because the hordes of mod fans out there will fix all those problems for them.
You know, kinda like this.
Wonder if Travelocity keeps their hands clean? I know Orbitz certainly doesn't.
The FDA stated that there was too little gain
Like avoiding death?
with too many adverse side effects.
Like, er, death?