>and in the other, they take away the rights of businessmen to decide how they compete
The rules are different when you're a monopoly, and the government is the only one who can enforce that. I don't see how this is socialism while crying foul about Microsoft's actions isn't.
I've had Bell ADSL in Toronto for almost 3 years now. Setup was a pain, and I had problems with it about one year later for a few days, but other than that it's been rock solid, and very reliable performance. Not FAST - 128kbps up, 1mbps down - but I know I can get those speeds any time.
Of course... 3 years later, I find myself paying more for less. Speed hasn't increased at all (why would it?), the price has gone up a few dollars, and they've introduced monthly transfer limits - 10GB combined upload/download, with absurd prices for extra bandwidth. What ticks me off is that they still advertise it as "unlimited".
There are other, smaller, local DSL providers - but the speed and prices are comparable.
Maybe this will finally help advance an industry that's been stagnant - from the consumer's point of view - for over 4 years now!
Hehehe... oh I kill myself... I really do... *keeps looking for a way to afford SDSL*
>Unless something really interesting comes up, there should be no +mods, although there will be, because Mods moderate when they agree, not when they think it's important.
I agree! Damn, I wish I had some mod points to mod you up!
True, games that require extra hardware never ever get popular. Like the Playstation DDR that requires the extra mats, or that weird Rez vibrator game. Nope, games like that never make it big... especially not in Japan...
Well, that does sound good to me! I don't really see any downsides to it, although I'm sure people will find something to point out...
I realize it probably won't directly affect the amount of spam I get in my inbox that much; I don't know how much spam originates from Michigan. But it's definitely a step in the right direction!
The entire article is a good read, but I found this particularly interesting:
First, the external tank was designed with a layer of insulation foam that isn't supposed to shed during launch. It was designed to stick to the tank, so if it's not sticking then something isn't working the way it's supposed to be.
Second, the shuttle's heatshield of tiles, RCC panels and thermal blankets were not designed to be damaged in any way for any reason. That's why the orbiter isn't allowed to fly through rain, stay outside when it hails or risk having workers drop tools on it. The tiles are especially fragile.
But for some reason, when foam fell off at launch and damaged tiles, NASA managers didn't seem alarmed. When the shuttle came back and there wasn't significant damage, managers convinced themselves there was no safety of flight issue. After 112 flights in which foam shed 70 times and tiles came back damaged every time, shuttle officials got used to it.
Actually I've wanted to see this in a sports game (preferrably one of the FIFA games rather than an american football game) for at least 5 years now. The technology's been there forever, I'm disappointed that no one's attempted it yet.
There are many difficulties the developer would have to overcome, definitely. Guess what, that's why games cost so much to make. It is entirely possible - not easy, but possible - to make a good 1st person sports game, but it requires some original thinking. If you take one of the standard camera-above-the-field games and simply replace the camera with a first-person view, then obviously you won't have a good game. If you rethink the entire game - frankly, all the FIFA, Madden, NHL games are fundamentally built on the same principles, just different sport - then you can come up with something good.
There are tons of features I can think of to make even a single-player first person sports game work. First of all, switching players in first person would be WAY more confusing; build the game so that you don't have to (aren't allowed?) and can enjoy the game playing as only one player - potential for a true career mode and even a storyline. Naturally, this means that you need to have REALLY good team AI. You need to add cues that exist in real life but you don't need in a 3-rd person view: audio queues of your teammates shouting as they pass, so you know when they're passing to you; a trail behind the ball, so you can estimate its speed and direction better - much harder to do without depth perception, so you need the aid; an estimate of where the ball's gonna land on the field (a glowing circle on the field would do); etc. etc. This is me thinking about the problem for 10 minutes; I'm sure a team of developers planning for a month or two can do better.
You might argue that it wouldn't be as realistic; I think it wouldn't be VISUALLY as realistic, but I think it could be more immersive - and really, more realistic overall - than 3rd person games. And there are different challenges for every sport - football would be doable, I think - the main problem I can think of with soccer is being able to see the ball as you dribble - hockey would be much harder - but I really would say there is a LOT of potential. There's also potential for the development team to screw up every single chance they have to make it work; there's no way of knowing until the finished product.
And..... of course.... I haven't even touched multiplayer, where the real fun would be:)
Your last one is slightly inaccurate. Should read:
- One summary post without reading the posts it's summarizing, the article, or at least the summary of the article, that gets modded up to +5 Funny anyway:p
Thanks for the reply! I have a computer science/engineering background, so a lot of that went over my head, but I think I follow the gist of what you're saying.
I'm guessing there is a lot more room for error/built-in error protection, if you will. Computer code doesn't generally heal itself... Still, my gut instinct is that the more complex cells we try to manipulate, and the more tasks we expect them to perform, the more something is likely to go wrong? Precisely because life is robust and it adapts, it will deal by itself with conditions not foreseen when we "design" it; when computer code hits conditions not expected by the programmer, it generally just grinds to a halt. Life would just "deal with it", even if it's not something that was consciously built in at design time - and the way it deals with it might be perfectly acceptable, even beneficial, for the life form, but not necessarily agree with the goals we had when we built it?
That's a lot of thinking out loud not built on a solid biology/chemistry foundation, so please bear with me:p
Very interesting concept, and amazing possibilities. Of course... this gives a whole new meaning to "debugging your code", or to finding a showstopper. I realize that this is a lot closer to biochemistry than it is to computer science, but nonetheless, using the programming metaphor suggests some worrying possibilities. Mainly, there is no chance for patches and bug fixes; it has to be right - 100% right - the first time. As another poster suggested, on a large scale even 99.9999% right isn't good enough.
How this affects spam was one of the first things I thought about, as well. But from the ruling:
>nor impairs its functioning
I would argue that spam impairs my ability to use my computer - e.g. when 19 out of 20 messages are spam, and I either have to waste time getting to that one message I want to read, or miss it completely. Such an argument is easy to make, and anyone should understand it, even if they're not tech-savvy.
I suppose the difference is between the ex-employee sending one or two emails to each individual, or mailbombing their inboxes with several hundreds or thousands of messages. Which means part of the spam problem is perspective - from my point of view, I am effectively under attack when I receive a few hundred spam emails; from the point of view of each individual spammer, they're only sending me one email, so how can they be blamed for that?
> So don't be surprised if you're in Japan early next year and see people running holding their cellphone/PDA like a gun.
A scary thought, for anyone who has watched Lain. True, the multiplayer game there is about as advanced graphically as Doom, and it's not played on PDAs or cell phones, but the parallels are a bit scary.
99% of the replies so far may as well be modded -1 Redundant.
Do you people honestly think the Honda engineers aren't bright enough to think of the objections people here came up with 5 seconds after reading the article summary and pouncing on the "Post" button?
The article is light on details, but it still makes the point that this is a collision WARNING system. It doesn't seem to be designed to stop the car or brake to avoid collisions; it's a system that fires off a small warning whenever it detects a potentially dangerous situation - say, if you're dozing off in rush hour traffic and you don't notice the car in front of you is stopped, this'll ideally snap you back to attention.
It doesn't seem that it will brake enough to get you rearended; I'm SURE the Honda engineers can come up with a way to tell the difference between a squirrel, a tree, and an SUV; it's not very difficult to tell which way a vehicle is going, so it's easy to make the system ignore cars going past you in the opposite direction, or cars passing by perpendicularly at an intersection. I don't know the reasons behind the 300 feet range (although I'd imagine the range is dynamic and proportional to your vehicle's speed), but without more information I'll have to assume the Honda people did their research and have some rationale.
There, was that so hard? I'm a couch Honda engineer too now!
You could turn a feature off and have it still working (or start working again) without your consent. That sentence seems to imply that you have the right to expect that not to happen, which I thought was one of the main issues with Microsoft bundling unwated features and shoving them down your throat with Service Packs. So if that's the correct interpretation, it seems to me like a Good Thing.
If anything, I'd say that sentence is as far from legalese as anything - it's vague enough that it can be interpreted any number of ways; legalese may be dry and boring, but it at least attempts to be as precise as possible.
Slashdot Mirror
Whoops... so I noticed in other replies right after I posted.
:)
Makes me a bad slashdot poster... but a happy sympatico user
>and in the other, they take away the rights of businessmen to decide how they compete
The rules are different when you're a monopoly, and the government is the only one who can enforce that. I don't see how this is socialism while crying foul about Microsoft's actions isn't.
I've had Bell ADSL in Toronto for almost 3 years now. Setup was a pain, and I had problems with it about one year later for a few days, but other than that it's been rock solid, and very reliable performance. Not FAST - 128kbps up, 1mbps down - but I know I can get those speeds any time.
Of course... 3 years later, I find myself paying more for less. Speed hasn't increased at all (why would it?), the price has gone up a few dollars, and they've introduced monthly transfer limits - 10GB combined upload/download, with absurd prices for extra bandwidth. What ticks me off is that they still advertise it as "unlimited".
There are other, smaller, local DSL providers - but the speed and prices are comparable.
Maybe this will finally help advance an industry that's been stagnant - from the consumer's point of view - for over 4 years now!
Hehehe... oh I kill myself... I really do...
*keeps looking for a way to afford SDSL*
Ahh, but then people would try to make wisecracks about 70's designers, and/or complain about writing 970's instead of 1970's or just 70's...
:)
Damned if you do, damned if you don't
>Unless something really interesting comes up, there should be no +mods, although there will be, because Mods moderate when they agree, not when they think it's important.
I agree! Damn, I wish I had some mod points to mod you up!
True, games that require extra hardware never ever get popular. Like the Playstation DDR that requires the extra mats, or that weird Rez vibrator game. Nope, games like that never make it big... especially not in Japan...
>Basically, we are going to listen to some sloberring acne-infested college boy tell us about copyright law?
Wait... *checks URL* This IS Slashdot, right?
*confused*
I thought that's how things always are around here...
Well, that does sound good to me! I don't really see any downsides to it, although I'm sure people will find something to point out...
I realize it probably won't directly affect the amount of spam I get in my inbox that much; I don't know how much spam originates from Michigan. But it's definitely a step in the right direction!
Almost at the bottom of the comments list, and the parent is the first sensible post I've read.
...that HAS to be the nerdiest post I've ever read on Slashdot!
:)
And that's quite an accomplishment, sir
Besides, didn't they run a similar simulation something like a month ago? Is this just really old news of the same test, or a new test entirely?
Perhaps a more interesting article is the following from space.com.
Top Ten: Questions and Answers About the Columbia Board Report
The entire article is a good read, but I found this particularly interesting:
First, the external tank was designed with a layer of insulation foam that isn't supposed to shed during launch. It was designed to stick to the tank, so if it's not sticking then something isn't working the way it's supposed to be.
Second, the shuttle's heatshield of tiles, RCC panels and thermal blankets were not designed to be damaged in any way for any reason. That's why the orbiter isn't allowed to fly through rain, stay outside when it hails or risk having workers drop tools on it. The tiles are especially fragile.
But for some reason, when foam fell off at launch and damaged tiles, NASA managers didn't seem alarmed. When the shuttle came back and there wasn't significant damage, managers convinced themselves there was no safety of flight issue. After 112 flights in which foam shed 70 times and tiles came back damaged every time, shuttle officials got used to it.
Actually I've wanted to see this in a sports game (preferrably one of the FIFA games rather than an american football game) for at least 5 years now. The technology's been there forever, I'm disappointed that no one's attempted it yet.
:)
There are many difficulties the developer would have to overcome, definitely. Guess what, that's why games cost so much to make. It is entirely possible - not easy, but possible - to make a good 1st person sports game, but it requires some original thinking. If you take one of the standard camera-above-the-field games and simply replace the camera with a first-person view, then obviously you won't have a good game. If you rethink the entire game - frankly, all the FIFA, Madden, NHL games are fundamentally built on the same principles, just different sport - then you can come up with something good.
There are tons of features I can think of to make even a single-player first person sports game work. First of all, switching players in first person would be WAY more confusing; build the game so that you don't have to (aren't allowed?) and can enjoy the game playing as only one player - potential for a true career mode and even a storyline. Naturally, this means that you need to have REALLY good team AI. You need to add cues that exist in real life but you don't need in a 3-rd person view: audio queues of your teammates shouting as they pass, so you know when they're passing to you; a trail behind the ball, so you can estimate its speed and direction better - much harder to do without depth perception, so you need the aid; an estimate of where the ball's gonna land on the field (a glowing circle on the field would do); etc. etc. This is me thinking about the problem for 10 minutes; I'm sure a team of developers planning for a month or two can do better.
You might argue that it wouldn't be as realistic; I think it wouldn't be VISUALLY as realistic, but I think it could be more immersive - and really, more realistic overall - than 3rd person games. And there are different challenges for every sport - football would be doable, I think - the main problem I can think of with soccer is being able to see the ball as you dribble - hockey would be much harder - but I really would say there is a LOT of potential. There's also potential for the development team to screw up every single chance they have to make it work; there's no way of knowing until the finished product.
And..... of course.... I haven't even touched multiplayer, where the real fun would be
Your last one is slightly inaccurate. Should read:
:p
- One summary post without reading the posts it's summarizing, the article, or at least the summary of the article, that gets modded up to +5 Funny anyway
Allegation is a powerful tool... I would love to see this performed against the RIAA's and MPAA's own people.
The only difference being that, of course, the **AA would immediately file a defamation suit or the like...
With only 5 posts, I had a feeling that link might show up... as the 2nd post though - wow :) Good job!
Thanks for the reply! I have a computer science/engineering background, so a lot of that went over my head, but I think I follow the gist of what you're saying.
:p
I'm guessing there is a lot more room for error/built-in error protection, if you will. Computer code doesn't generally heal itself... Still, my gut instinct is that the more complex cells we try to manipulate, and the more tasks we expect them to perform, the more something is likely to go wrong? Precisely because life is robust and it adapts, it will deal by itself with conditions not foreseen when we "design" it; when computer code hits conditions not expected by the programmer, it generally just grinds to a halt. Life would just "deal with it", even if it's not something that was consciously built in at design time - and the way it deals with it might be perfectly acceptable, even beneficial, for the life form, but not necessarily agree with the goals we had when we built it?
That's a lot of thinking out loud not built on a solid biology/chemistry foundation, so please bear with me
"The Arecibo Observatory is gearing up to map the universe soon"
Heh... why does that sentence make me think of a lazy teenager?
"Clean your room!"
"Moooooom, I said I'll do it soooon!!!"
"Map the universe!"
"I'll do it tomorrow!!!"
Very interesting concept, and amazing possibilities. Of course... this gives a whole new meaning to "debugging your code", or to finding a showstopper. I realize that this is a lot closer to biochemistry than it is to computer science, but nonetheless, using the programming metaphor suggests some worrying possibilities. Mainly, there is no chance for patches and bug fixes; it has to be right - 100% right - the first time. As another poster suggested, on a large scale even 99.9999% right isn't good enough.
How this affects spam was one of the first things I thought about, as well. But from the ruling:
>nor impairs its functioning
I would argue that spam impairs my ability to use my computer - e.g. when 19 out of 20 messages are spam, and I either have to waste time getting to that one message I want to read, or miss it completely. Such an argument is easy to make, and anyone should understand it, even if they're not tech-savvy.
I suppose the difference is between the ex-employee sending one or two emails to each individual, or mailbombing their inboxes with several hundreds or thousands of messages. Which means part of the spam problem is perspective - from my point of view, I am effectively under attack when I receive a few hundred spam emails; from the point of view of each individual spammer, they're only sending me one email, so how can they be blamed for that?
Idle musings on a Monday afternoon.
> So don't be surprised if you're in Japan early next year and see people running holding their cellphone/PDA like a gun.
A scary thought, for anyone who has watched Lain. True, the multiplayer game there is about as advanced graphically as Doom, and it's not played on PDAs or cell phones, but the parallels are a bit scary.
I still don't get it... vaginas don't have teeth!
99% of the replies so far may as well be modded -1 Redundant.
Do you people honestly think the Honda engineers aren't bright enough to think of the objections people here came up with 5 seconds after reading the article summary and pouncing on the "Post" button?
The article is light on details, but it still makes the point that this is a collision WARNING system. It doesn't seem to be designed to stop the car or brake to avoid collisions; it's a system that fires off a small warning whenever it detects a potentially dangerous situation - say, if you're dozing off in rush hour traffic and you don't notice the car in front of you is stopped, this'll ideally snap you back to attention.
It doesn't seem that it will brake enough to get you rearended; I'm SURE the Honda engineers can come up with a way to tell the difference between a squirrel, a tree, and an SUV; it's not very difficult to tell which way a vehicle is going, so it's easy to make the system ignore cars going past you in the opposite direction, or cars passing by perpendicularly at an intersection. I don't know the reasons behind the 300 feet range (although I'd imagine the range is dynamic and proportional to your vehicle's speed), but without more information I'll have to assume the Honda people did their research and have some rationale.
There, was that so hard? I'm a couch Honda engineer too now!
+1 Informative?
*chuckle*
Bad mods, no donut.
Err...
You could turn a feature off and have it still working (or start working again) without your consent. That sentence seems to imply that you have the right to expect that not to happen, which I thought was one of the main issues with Microsoft bundling unwated features and shoving them down your throat with Service Packs. So if that's the correct interpretation, it seems to me like a Good Thing.
If anything, I'd say that sentence is as far from legalese as anything - it's vague enough that it can be interpreted any number of ways; legalese may be dry and boring, but it at least attempts to be as precise as possible.
No, but there's no such thing as a Grendel cluster...
Well, okay, a quick web search does return hits for Grendel clusters...
There IS such a thing as reading too much into a joke. *L*