One of the keys to avoiding cheats is that the game must be composed of mostly non-trivial, non-repetitive decisions.
Almost every MMORPG is composed of completely trivial decisions. During a fight, at any given point in time there is a definite "right" decision to make, a definite order in which the character's abilities should be used, and a definite opponent that is optimal to attack. Buttering toast requires more difficult decisions than World of Warcraft has ever presented.
Starsiege: Tribes never had a very successful bot created for it because the game requires the player to make decisions that a bot simply couldn't make quickly or predict accurately. In almost any scenario, there wasn't a dominant choice. You frequently had to choose among a range of equally attractive options, drawing only on past experience, intuitive knowledge of how physics works, and common sense about how people behave.
If it's not spatial it's not 4D
on
Google Earth In 4D
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The idea of time as a 4th dimension has been propagated erroneously. People who have no concept of the significance of a 4th dimension have grabbed hold of this concept and ride it into the ground.
Under the definition that time is a 4th dimension, Guild Wars, Quake, Morrowind, World of Warcraft, Everquest 2... they would all have the appearance of being a 4D games. Heck, checkers would actually be a 4D game.
Furthermore, spatial dimensions are interchangeable. Width/Height/Depth are all the same thing and only have meaning in relation to the others. Time is not interchangeable with the 3 known spatial dimensions. You can't have an object composed of x, y, t and still have the same dimensions as an x, y, z object. (3ft x 3ft x 3s) doesn't mean the same thing as (3ft x 3ft x 3ft)
Things do not sound inherently cooler by calling them 4D. Web 2.0 has brought with it many things, but a 4th dimension is not one of them. I'd rant some more but my 4D microwave has finished cooking my 4D hotpocket, and I need to grab that sucker before the 4th dimension causes it to be misshapen with lost heat!
I think the curriculum for Computer Science is best left being purely academic in nature. Teaching the software development cycle to CS students makes assumptions as to how the knowledge will be used, which I think is a mistake.
Information you learn in college should make few, if any, assumptions about how you intend to apply the knowledge. A course in nuclear engineering should not assume the student is going to be building nuclear weapons, they could just as well be entering the field of energy. It's only important that they understand the general principles, they can gather the skills for the specific application of their knowledge elsewhere.
For the 600th time, another generation has actually discovered sex, drugs, and rock & roll!
People have been crashing on other people's couches since the couch was invented. Of course everything seems so new and exciting when you say "Yes, but now this activity has a web site!"
Networking with other people, socializing, long distance communication, and traveling around like a hobo sleeping wherever someone will let you is not new. The kids who believe web 2 is revolutionary because it fosters socialization are delusional.
Shockingly enough, society had means of coordinating activities before desktop computers. Marker Boards/Cork Boards allowed people to make similar arrangements. You got into town, stopped at the local youth club had a break-dance fight garnering respect from the rival break dance gang so they allowed you to crash on their couch during your journey to find yourself, find love, and gain those amazing teenager insights that will pave the way for you to become an assistant manager at McDonalds in 5 years. But now it's done on computers!
I looked it up in the dictionary but there wasn't a definition of just how accurate that is. I was told to achieve engineering-level accuracy, you really need to eyeball it, because that kind of accuracy is only a stone's throw away from being damn fine precision.
Smart is not defined as "Ones ability to learn how to operate as a system engineer for an operating system." Many smart people don't want to troubleshoot computer issues. They have job functions and hobbies in which computers are tangential. They don't have the time or desire to hammer away at a field which doesn't primarily concern them. For most people, learning how to administrate Linux is like a car dealer spending time in art school to make a sign for his dealership. Smart as he may be, it's not a primary issue, and he'll do just fine buying a ready-made sign.
Linux is a great operating system. My operating system of choice, but I have a degree in software development. The operating system has to just work, and when Linux doesn't work, fixing the problem is not trivial for people who aren't experts.
I'm going to take a 6 month sabbatical to meditate on your words. There's just something deeply compelling about what you have to say that fills me with a sense of longing for a truer understanding of this wacky universe of ours.
See terrorism in a dictionary. Terrorism isn't defined by what was done, it is defined by why it was done. Generally speaking, it has some socio-political motivation.
A bomb at a crappy company isn't terrorism anymore than throwing a can of yeast at someone is a biological attack.
They'll run someone down with a tank, and filter all dissemination of information and make damn sure no one in their country will ever know it happened, but I'm supposed to believe they wouldn't censor the internet?
Hell, I'm pretty sure the internet is getting filtered in the U.S., the fact that China does it is just a given.
One of the classic signs of getting old is when you can't tell the difference among the things kids are into these days (MySpace, YouTube, you know, one of those social thingies; Iron Maiden, Megadeath, whatever, one of those noisy bands).
I'm not knocking you, I don't care to make such distinctions myself, but it's still funny to witness.
I went to London a few years back (2001) and it was terrific. Probably the best week of my life. I would have stayed there if I spoke the language. I called a "lift" an "elevator" and got a serious beat down, so I came back to the U.S. in a medical helicopter. Don't even get me started on the fries/chips incident.
I don't even think so-called legitimate patents exist. I've yet to see a patent that isn't anymore than an extension of an idea using a previous technology and applying it to a more contemporary one.
The idea of changing a software to hardware method isn't anymore impressive than a caveman changing a written communique into a verbal one. "He wrote 'ugh' but I was first to say 'ugh' so I patent it!"
The long run is impossible to predict. Analysts never speculate about the "long run" because it is a time frame in which every factor of production is a variable, and therefore no accurate prediction can be made about it. You could say it's doubtful AOL can survive in the short run and perhaps be correct, but in the long run every factor about the business could change to the point AOL becomes a successful candy bar manufacturer.
Trying to turn a game into a movie is destined to fail. Very few games are ever thought-out fully to the extent necessary for a complete story to be composed that will satisfy the masses. They're usually thought-out to the extent that a gamer in the mindset of "Whatever... what's next?" wants to comprehend.
When you turn a game into a movie, the person watching isn't just waiting to get to the next level/area/mission, they might actually be interested in what's going on.
People do this all the time. It has nothing to do with WoW, EQ, MMOs, games, or computers. For thousands of years, people have been finding hobbies that take them away from their normal lives. They pursue the hobby like an obsession. They care more about their precious garden than they do about their family and friends, or they spend all day in a park playing chess against strangers so they can brag that they're the smartest hobo in the world.
Maybe it's horseback riding, hiking, poker... and sometimes it's not even a hobby. Sometimes the obsession is more work. It doesn't matter what it is. During these secondary activities that become more important than their life, they meet people, have affairs, and throw 20 years of marriage down the tubes. And all this was happening long before Blizzard was even imagined.
Do I understand why people do it? Not really. Don't even bother explaining it to me because you're too sick to rationally understand why you are the problem, it is not the problem. Do you honestly expect me to believe you were on the fast-track to success, on the verge of being a Kung-Fu master, socialite, and brilliant newly graduated engineer were it only not for this game? Nice try, I know it's not your bridge to sell.
Although the U.S. Constitution does not specify the rights of non-citizens, The Third Geneva Convention, Article 3, says the U.S. must give non-citizens the same rights we afford citizens.
Most importantly, it says that a detainee must be sentenced by a regularly constituted court. Not a secret court, using secret evidence. Detainees must be tried and sentenced using the same rules that the country would use to try and sentence any other person accused of criminal action. Detainees must be given all the rights recognized as indispensable by civilized people. The U.S. Constitution outlines all the rights that Americans believe to be indispensable. This means a detainee must be given all constitutional rights.
This article specifically outlines how a signatory of the Geneva Conventions must treat a non-signatory.
In signing the Geneva Conventions, those are the rules the U.S. agreed to abide by. The U.S. administration would like everyone to believe they don't have to abide by these rules because the current circumstances are exceptional, but there is no "...unless the signatory gets very, very angry" clause.
This study does not say "Without TV this kids would be developmentally normal". At best, you could say TV makes the dissociative disorder more predictable (you know they'll end up with autism instead of multiple personality disorder), not that they otherwise wouldn't have any dissociative disorder at all.
The study makes the faulty assumption of correlating no TV with "normal" and having TV with autism, but does not draw any lines with the myriad of other mental defects the kid could end up with. The study is meaningless without more context.
Most users probably don't remember the rate of spam before filtering was common for a number of reasons:
The rise in internet usage since the year 2000 indicates, at best, only 1/3rd of the internet population could remember the rate of spam before filtering was common.
The rise of email usage indicates a large population of the people who were connected pre-filtering weren't using email.
The current volume of spam per person is at least triple what it was pre-filtering.
Most of us who were using the internet before spam filtering became so common have not seen what today's volume of spam would look like unfiltered. Assuming spam per person has tripled, anyone who was getting 20 spam per day pre-filtering would be looking at 60 spam per day now.
It would be a much deserved wake up call if spam filter companies were to shut down operations for a few days. It's obvious that the bodies overseeing this case think of Spamhaus as little more than a novelty. I think Spamhaus needs to send a crystal clear message, and perhaps the most effective way to do that would be to show the world how green the other side of the fence really is.
I believe the opposite. I think people are an infinite well of potential, their decisions shape their potential. I think whether or not you become a great artist is almost solely a function of how much you choose to dedicate yourself to it. People shape themselves into great things all the time, and things they never actually intended to be nor thought they had any potential for.
I think it's a matter of mental blocks. If a person believes they can't be an artist, then they're not going to put in the necessary effort to make it happen. They won't spend anytime contemplating things like form and composition, not because they inherently lack the capacity to understand it, but because they refuse to. If they lift that mental block and purge the self-defeatist mentality, they can become as great an artists as anyone else, regardless of where their prior talent was.
It really depends on how you define the term "gamer". To many people, a "gamer" isn't just someone who happens to play games at some arbitrary point in their free time, it's someone whose primary hobby is playing games. When they're not working, studying, or otherwise busy, they're reading about games, playing games, or otherwise involved in game-related activities (e.g. posting on game message boards, designing characters, planning on the next game to buy, etc.). I know a lot of women who play games, but I wouldn't call them gamers. Even though they play games, when they're not playing games they don't immerse themselves in game-related activities, they have a distinct separation between game playing and the rest of their life.
Developers all over the world truly believe their greatest gift to mankind is their supreme cleverness. How many hours did Richard Stallman spend devising the phrase "Free software is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of 'free' as in 'free speech,' not as in 'free beer.'"?
What about all the time that was sacrificed to come up with the, extraordinarly clever, recursive acronym GNU (GNU's Not Unix)?
If you rob them of this fundamental joy, what do they really have to live for?
I won't buy cards with Broadcom chips for the same reason until they change their behavior. I already had wireless cards with Broadcom chips (Belkin) in two of my computers when I started using Linux. Getting the cards to work is too much of a hassle.
Well, I have at least 4 abandoned accounts there (lost my password on at least 2, another account became unusable after converting an account to SBC/Yahoo DSL and later switching to another ISP). So Consider I'm only 1 person with at least 5 accounts... and that's probably not entirely unusual. I'd figure 257m translates to 3-4m unique people.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the keys to avoiding cheats is that the game must be composed of mostly non-trivial, non-repetitive decisions.
Almost every MMORPG is composed of completely trivial decisions. During a fight, at any given point in time there is a definite "right" decision to make, a definite order in which the character's abilities should be used, and a definite opponent that is optimal to attack. Buttering toast requires more difficult decisions than World of Warcraft has ever presented.
Starsiege: Tribes never had a very successful bot created for it because the game requires the player to make decisions that a bot simply couldn't make quickly or predict accurately. In almost any scenario, there wasn't a dominant choice. You frequently had to choose among a range of equally attractive options, drawing only on past experience, intuitive knowledge of how physics works, and common sense about how people behave.
The idea of time as a 4th dimension has been propagated erroneously. People who have no concept of the significance of a 4th dimension have grabbed hold of this concept and ride it into the ground.
Under the definition that time is a 4th dimension, Guild Wars, Quake, Morrowind, World of Warcraft, Everquest 2... they would all have the appearance of being a 4D games. Heck, checkers would actually be a 4D game.
Furthermore, spatial dimensions are interchangeable. Width/Height/Depth are all the same thing and only have meaning in relation to the others. Time is not interchangeable with the 3 known spatial dimensions. You can't have an object composed of x, y, t and still have the same dimensions as an x, y, z object. (3ft x 3ft x 3s) doesn't mean the same thing as (3ft x 3ft x 3ft)
Things do not sound inherently cooler by calling them 4D. Web 2.0 has brought with it many things, but a 4th dimension is not one of them. I'd rant some more but my 4D microwave has finished cooking my 4D hotpocket, and I need to grab that sucker before the 4th dimension causes it to be misshapen with lost heat!
I think the curriculum for Computer Science is best left being purely academic in nature. Teaching the software development cycle to CS students makes assumptions as to how the knowledge will be used, which I think is a mistake.
Information you learn in college should make few, if any, assumptions about how you intend to apply the knowledge. A course in nuclear engineering should not assume the student is going to be building nuclear weapons, they could just as well be entering the field of energy. It's only important that they understand the general principles, they can gather the skills for the specific application of their knowledge elsewhere.
For the 600th time, another generation has actually discovered sex, drugs, and rock & roll!
People have been crashing on other people's couches since the couch was invented. Of course everything seems so new and exciting when you say "Yes, but now this activity has a web site!"
Networking with other people, socializing, long distance communication, and traveling around like a hobo sleeping wherever someone will let you is not new. The kids who believe web 2 is revolutionary because it fosters socialization are delusional.
Shockingly enough, society had means of coordinating activities before desktop computers. Marker Boards/Cork Boards allowed people to make similar arrangements. You got into town, stopped at the local youth club had a break-dance fight garnering respect from the rival break dance gang so they allowed you to crash on their couch during your journey to find yourself, find love, and gain those amazing teenager insights that will pave the way for you to become an assistant manager at McDonalds in 5 years. But now it's done on computers!
I looked it up in the dictionary but there wasn't a definition of just how accurate that is. I was told to achieve engineering-level accuracy, you really need to eyeball it, because that kind of accuracy is only a stone's throw away from being damn fine precision.
Smart is not defined as "Ones ability to learn how to operate as a system engineer for an operating system." Many smart people don't want to troubleshoot computer issues. They have job functions and hobbies in which computers are tangential. They don't have the time or desire to hammer away at a field which doesn't primarily concern them. For most people, learning how to administrate Linux is like a car dealer spending time in art school to make a sign for his dealership. Smart as he may be, it's not a primary issue, and he'll do just fine buying a ready-made sign.
Linux is a great operating system. My operating system of choice, but I have a degree in software development. The operating system has to just work, and when Linux doesn't work, fixing the problem is not trivial for people who aren't experts.I'm going to take a 6 month sabbatical to meditate on your words. There's just something deeply compelling about what you have to say that fills me with a sense of longing for a truer understanding of this wacky universe of ours.
Thank you fellow scholar. You have changed me.
See terrorism in a dictionary. Terrorism isn't defined by what was done, it is defined by why it was done. Generally speaking, it has some socio-political motivation.
A bomb at a crappy company isn't terrorism anymore than throwing a can of yeast at someone is a biological attack.
They'll run someone down with a tank, and filter all dissemination of information and make damn sure no one in their country will ever know it happened, but I'm supposed to believe they wouldn't censor the internet?
Hell, I'm pretty sure the internet is getting filtered in the U.S., the fact that China does it is just a given.
One of the classic signs of getting old is when you can't tell the difference among the things kids are into these days (MySpace, YouTube, you know, one of those social thingies; Iron Maiden, Megadeath, whatever, one of those noisy bands).
I'm not knocking you, I don't care to make such distinctions myself, but it's still funny to witness.
...it was more or less accepted...
That's where.I went to London a few years back (2001) and it was terrific. Probably the best week of my life. I would have stayed there if I spoke the language. I called a "lift" an "elevator" and got a serious beat down, so I came back to the U.S. in a medical helicopter. Don't even get me started on the fries/chips incident.
I don't even think so-called legitimate patents exist. I've yet to see a patent that isn't anymore than an extension of an idea using a previous technology and applying it to a more contemporary one.
The idea of changing a software to hardware method isn't anymore impressive than a caveman changing a written communique into a verbal one. "He wrote 'ugh' but I was first to say 'ugh' so I patent it!"
The long run is impossible to predict. Analysts never speculate about the "long run" because it is a time frame in which every factor of production is a variable, and therefore no accurate prediction can be made about it. You could say it's doubtful AOL can survive in the short run and perhaps be correct, but in the long run every factor about the business could change to the point AOL becomes a successful candy bar manufacturer.
Trying to turn a game into a movie is destined to fail. Very few games are ever thought-out fully to the extent necessary for a complete story to be composed that will satisfy the masses. They're usually thought-out to the extent that a gamer in the mindset of "Whatever... what's next?" wants to comprehend.
When you turn a game into a movie, the person watching isn't just waiting to get to the next level/area/mission, they might actually be interested in what's going on.
People do this all the time. It has nothing to do with WoW, EQ, MMOs, games, or computers. For thousands of years, people have been finding hobbies that take them away from their normal lives. They pursue the hobby like an obsession. They care more about their precious garden than they do about their family and friends, or they spend all day in a park playing chess against strangers so they can brag that they're the smartest hobo in the world.
Maybe it's horseback riding, hiking, poker... and sometimes it's not even a hobby. Sometimes the obsession is more work. It doesn't matter what it is. During these secondary activities that become more important than their life, they meet people, have affairs, and throw 20 years of marriage down the tubes. And all this was happening long before Blizzard was even imagined.
Do I understand why people do it? Not really. Don't even bother explaining it to me because you're too sick to rationally understand why you are the problem, it is not the problem. Do you honestly expect me to believe you were on the fast-track to success, on the verge of being a Kung-Fu master, socialite, and brilliant newly graduated engineer were it only not for this game? Nice try, I know it's not your bridge to sell.
You are partially correct.
Although the U.S. Constitution does not specify the rights of non-citizens, The Third Geneva Convention, Article 3, says the U.S. must give non-citizens the same rights we afford citizens.
Most importantly, it says that a detainee must be sentenced by a regularly constituted court. Not a secret court, using secret evidence. Detainees must be tried and sentenced using the same rules that the country would use to try and sentence any other person accused of criminal action. Detainees must be given all the rights recognized as indispensable by civilized people. The U.S. Constitution outlines all the rights that Americans believe to be indispensable. This means a detainee must be given all constitutional rights.
This article specifically outlines how a signatory of the Geneva Conventions must treat a non-signatory.
In signing the Geneva Conventions, those are the rules the U.S. agreed to abide by. The U.S. administration would like everyone to believe they don't have to abide by these rules because the current circumstances are exceptional, but there is no "...unless the signatory gets very, very angry" clause.
This study does not say "Without TV this kids would be developmentally normal". At best, you could say TV makes the dissociative disorder more predictable (you know they'll end up with autism instead of multiple personality disorder), not that they otherwise wouldn't have any dissociative disorder at all.
The study makes the faulty assumption of correlating no TV with "normal" and having TV with autism, but does not draw any lines with the myriad of other mental defects the kid could end up with. The study is meaningless without more context.
Most users probably don't remember the rate of spam before filtering was common for a number of reasons:
Most of us who were using the internet before spam filtering became so common have not seen what today's volume of spam would look like unfiltered. Assuming spam per person has tripled, anyone who was getting 20 spam per day pre-filtering would be looking at 60 spam per day now.
It would be a much deserved wake up call if spam filter companies were to shut down operations for a few days. It's obvious that the bodies overseeing this case think of Spamhaus as little more than a novelty. I think Spamhaus needs to send a crystal clear message, and perhaps the most effective way to do that would be to show the world how green the other side of the fence really is.
I believe the opposite. I think people are an infinite well of potential, their decisions shape their potential. I think whether or not you become a great artist is almost solely a function of how much you choose to dedicate yourself to it. People shape themselves into great things all the time, and things they never actually intended to be nor thought they had any potential for.
I think it's a matter of mental blocks. If a person believes they can't be an artist, then they're not going to put in the necessary effort to make it happen. They won't spend anytime contemplating things like form and composition, not because they inherently lack the capacity to understand it, but because they refuse to. If they lift that mental block and purge the self-defeatist mentality, they can become as great an artists as anyone else, regardless of where their prior talent was.
It really depends on how you define the term "gamer". To many people, a "gamer" isn't just someone who happens to play games at some arbitrary point in their free time, it's someone whose primary hobby is playing games. When they're not working, studying, or otherwise busy, they're reading about games, playing games, or otherwise involved in game-related activities (e.g. posting on game message boards, designing characters, planning on the next game to buy, etc.). I know a lot of women who play games, but I wouldn't call them gamers. Even though they play games, when they're not playing games they don't immerse themselves in game-related activities, they have a distinct separation between game playing and the rest of their life.
Developers all over the world truly believe their greatest gift to mankind is their supreme cleverness. How many hours did Richard Stallman spend devising the phrase "Free software is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of 'free' as in 'free speech,' not as in 'free beer.'"?
What about all the time that was sacrificed to come up with the, extraordinarly clever, recursive acronym GNU (GNU's Not Unix)?
If you rob them of this fundamental joy, what do they really have to live for?
"So its a ray?"
"Yes."
"That causes instant death?"
"Yes."
"Then why don't you just CALL it a DEATH RAY?"
~Eureka
I won't buy cards with Broadcom chips for the same reason until they change their behavior. I already had wireless cards with Broadcom chips (Belkin) in two of my computers when I started using Linux. Getting the cards to work is too much of a hassle.
Well, I have at least 4 abandoned accounts there (lost my password on at least 2, another account became unusable after converting an account to SBC/Yahoo DSL and later switching to another ISP). So Consider I'm only 1 person with at least 5 accounts... and that's probably not entirely unusual. I'd figure 257m translates to 3-4m unique people.