Try taking the box store to court for not providing basic fitness.
Isn't that in the shrink-wrap license, though? I know just about every piece of software I've ever used disclaims itself from fitness for a purpose.
Definition of finished?
Might be better to give an example of "not finished" -- I believe the Unreal Tournament 2003 Linux installer had a blatant bug where it would ask for the wrong disc.
So, maybe "finished" as in "at least one actual test by an actual person". Or "contains no game-breaking bugs" -- nothing sucks more than a game which autosaves yours in an unwinnable state. (Jak II on the PS2 did this, I think -- somewhat worse, for a console game.)
Conflicts with #2.
Not really. A game can be playable, and reasonably solid and complete, yet still have bugs which will only be discovered when millions of people hammer it, and still have things to add.
Example: Half-Life 2 was complete. Maybe not at release, but certainly before my example -- Lost Coast. Major engine upgrade (HDR), and a whole level which was cut from the original game (think "deleted scene"). And more recently, various Counter-Strike levels (and probably a fair amount of HL2 itself) have gotten the HDR treatment.
Now, that's more than I think gamers should demand, but I certainly wouldn't expect to have to pay for that upgrade.
A more extreme example: Support new OSes, or open source it. Quake got ported to Windows, at least (as glQuake, if I remember). Doom was never ported by id, but it got old enough that we got the source, and fans have ported it to everything.
I'm not saying it has to be Certified for Vista or whatever, but it shouldn't become abandonware, and I shouldn't have to fire up a 10-year-old computer in order to play it.
How about: Dont include updates that remove features.
Not going to happen. Maybe don't include updates that break features, though...
All fixed by using the ThePirateBay images backed up with the appropriate cracks and servers.
Or by finding companies which actually follow these rules. Stardock is one.
I think that policy is a fine policy, assuming that the copy protection was at least risk-free -- that is, assuming that if you bought the game legitimately, if it didn't work, you could just upgrade with a patch in a month, and the protection is gone.
Well, it's not risk-free.
Some of these CD schemes, in particular, have actually installed drivers which screw up things like DVD burning. Some have installed rootkits. There's really no way for a gamer to know that it's completely gone -- and if there was a bug in it, there's no way to know that we could completely remove it.
Parent has a point, though:
The reason you should remove CD copy protection from your game is that it doesn't work -- at all, ever, the game's cracked before release, and people can make perfect copies.
The second reason is that CD copy protection can be so intrusive as to drive legitimate customers to piracy -- which means that it has to have a significant benefit to justify that risk. It doesn't.
So, if CD copy protection is such a clear net loss, what's the point? Why would you want to only shoot yourself in the foot for a month, instead of, say, not shooting yourself in the fucking foot?
No offense but simply pointing out that you're wrong doesn't count as insulting you...
And I quote:
I guess when id called it Wolf3D they should have consulted you first and called it Wolf2.5D (rolls eyes)
I didn't say I was insulted, I said you were insulting. There's a difference. But here you come again, with another, subtler (barely) attack:
unless you're ego is beyond fragile.
Counterproductive and pointless.
I'm telling you for your own sake, and because I'd rather have a constructive discussion with you than a pissing contest. It doesn't really bother me if you have nothing to add other than insults -- in fact, it's reassuring to know that you actually can't find anything wrong with my argument.
There's a reason I repeated myself 4 times...I was hoping the correct definition of 2.5D would finally sink in with you
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. (Albert Einstein)
And by the way, dimensions don't come by halves. It's a question of made-up semantics. Closest thing to a "correct" definition states:
In early first-person shooters like Doom, one use of the term is to describe the use of 2D character and object sprites in a 3D world. This technology was also implemented with the Virtual Boy game system by Nintendo. It is also used to describe the lack of true so-called "room-over-room" situations.
Pretty much exactly describes both Doom and Duke3D.
In most of these cases no actual property was destroyed. Its all just made up numbers for the value of people's time when they had to track down and stop the attacks, or when they were being inconvienenced.
Well, by the same token, the balance in my bank account is just "made up numbers", too. I see your point, but I wouldn't go so far as to say it's not "real" damage -- true, most of them aren't, but at least one of them really was pulling actual dollars out of actual bank accounts.
As for being "inconvenienced", forget lost productivity -- consider the ones that actually lost data. Lost productivity can't be measured as easily, as there are so many other factors -- everything from sheer laziness to a fire in the office. But lost data is immeasurable in a different sense -- it could very well be irreplaceable.
Now, again, if you delete my novel, that's a huge loss, and I'd send you to jail if I could. But at the end of the day, I'm still alive afterwards. The worst these are is theft and vandalism, not murder -- so, really, not terrorism.
I don't see one fatality because of these "idiots" -- quoted because obviously some amount of intelligence is needed to pull off what they did.
I don't think terrorism should be blown out of proportion, the way it often is in the US, but terrorists actually kill people.
Are you saying that ten million dollars in damage is comparable to killing several thousand people? In other words, that the value of a human life not only can be measured, but that you consider it to be less than a thousand dollars?
If you're going to do that much work, you may as well copy the VIDEO_TS folder entirely, or the disk as an image, and play it with VLC. It just adds another step wherein you have to convince VLC to open the VIDEO_TS folder as a DVD.
But if you do that, VLC will treat it exactly the same as it treats a real DVD. It doesn't always get the menus perfect (often starts from the wrong place in the menu), but they generally work.
In the case of Napster, I can see John Q. Public being fooled. Napster was, after all, what started the whole music piracy thing. There's a certain quality of rebel-ness to it, and the logo is cool, too.
Of course, I get the same feeling you do, since I understand how completely different they are, and how they've really got nothing to do with the original Napster.
But in the case of Real, I really don't see the point. Anyone who would recognize the name would also remember it being nothing but pain. Unless your target market is techno-masochists, this seems like a really dumb idea.
If she could actually remember how to find things in that notebook, be very, very glad. At least that way, you don't have to teach her how to do stuff like that again. And again. And again...
I'm not sure anyone is insisting that burst bandwidth be eliminated, though the thought has crossed my mind.
But there has to be some standard by which we can actually know how much bandwidth is available, per person, if they did decide to run torrents all the time. There has to be some amount that's guaranteed.
Otherwise, ISPs can simply lease one dialup line and resell it as "100 mbit Internet" to as many people as they want.
I noticed that you mention that you live in the United States, and said that the US was-born out of an act of anarchy-... Secondly, if you're talking about the Colonists who promoted The American Revolution, those men and women were not living in anarchy, but were complaining about unjust laws that would not give them representation before governing bodies yet were taxingt them to death.
Put Anarchy on a scale. Zero is complete loyalty to whatever government is in power. 100% is total disregard for any attempt at law and order.
What I encourage is the impulse towards the anarchistic end of the spectrum -- to be willing to question established laws and norms, and be willing to reject them, if they are not useful.
[regarding Punctuated Equilibrium...] And then you said, that's not my claim I merely reject that it's been disproven.
Right.
And again, your claim was that it was impossible -- not that it was unlikely, or that there was no evidence for it.
You have provided quite a lot on the issue that I've ignored, because you seem to be trying to prove one of those two things -- either that it is unlikely, or that there is no evidence for it. You haven't tried to prove that it is impossible, and none of your evidence shows it as "statistically impossible".
Your comment regarding Brigham Young's statements about men on the Moon and God is neither reasonable nor adequate as facts and experience mitigate against the former, and fact and experience mitigate for the latter.
I'll gladly dispute that.
There are millions of us who have put God to the test and find that He is not just a philosophical concept, but though not seen is nonetheless an experiential reality...
Really?
Of the Christians I know, none have ever put God to any kind of test, much less a rigorous scientific one. A few attempt philosophy, and often end up arguing in circles, trying desperately to prove their faith.
None have provided any evidence for the existence of God. Depending on your definition, I can either cast doubt on the nature of your god, or I can make him a logical impossibility. (Simple: Argument from evil...)
Hold on to your hat, I'm going to give you a very few of the citations on the subject:
Use hyperlinks -- I'm not going to my library for this, especially when it seems very likely to be more of the same.
As for the comment on the lottery, that may be 1 in 550 million, the odds may be small, but still attainable. When I talk of statistical impossibility though, I'm lalking about numbers on the orders of 1 to the 40 thousandth power of 10.
The lottery is run, what, once a month? Once a day?
How often is this one tested?
I'm not discounting such things as the dinosaurs existence, just that the evidence does not support the existence of any evidence that they evolved, say from sea creatures, or evolved into mamallian life forms,
From sea creatures has been suggested. But I believe the closest known relatives are birds.
How has the secular humanist teaching influenced thought and practice? Take a good look at Hitler's Germany,
Godwin, that didn't take long.
The creationists always claim they are right. They have to be right, or else their theology is based on sand or a stack of playing cards that will fall down.
I only wish...
No, as has proven time and time again, theology adapts. See: Flat earth vs round, geocentrism vs heleocentrism, etc.
Now, creationists in particular are under the misguided belief that their theology will fall down if the Earth is too old, or if evolution is a fact. If you consider this to be part of their belief system, then yes, it will -- but I don't think most Christians agree.
Would not the worst people then be those that claim to do so only for political expediency?
You'd think so, but not necessarily.
Imagine the perfect candidate. Agrees with all the issues you hold most important. Honest, hardworking, intelligent, and a good judge of character. Has enough money to run an effective campaign, and has a good shot at winning. Fill in whatever qualities you like...
If this person admits that they're an atheist, there are many districts in which they would never be elected, and they'll never be president. Many people, even if they feel he's otherwise the perfect candidate, won't vote for him for that one issue alone.
Given such a candidate, I would rather they pretend to believe, and actually get elected, than have them admit the truth, and pretty much leave politics.
Now... I would much rather it be possible for an atheist to be elected -- or, hell, anyone who doesn't claim to be Christian. But right now, it's not.
The whole problem is that citizens are easily led, especially by unimportant (but sensationalist) issues.
One example: There is a large portion of the US population who will never vote for a black person, no matter how much they agree with his policies and ideals. There's another portion who will vote for him, as a reaction, simply because he's black.
Another: There's quite a lot of women who have been waiting a long time to put a woman in the white house. These are the women who supported Hillary in the Democratic caucuses, simply because she is female. Now that Hillary's out of the picture, a fair number of them might entirely switch parties because Palin is a woman -- she'd be VP, but she's the closest they'll get this election.
(And, hey, McCain's health isn't that great. She's only a heart failure away...)
I think it's a sad trend, as these are even shallower reasons than we had before -- so-called "issues" like gay marriage. (That is, people who are so threatened by homosexuality that they can't stand the thought of someone else being in a same-sex marriage, so they want to outlaw it. And the vocal minority who believes that "God hates fags." In the same vein, there are people who would vote for a candidate simply because they'd allow same-sex marriage.)
So, the problem is that citizens are lazy and easily impressed by big, sensationalist headlines and concepts -- and that they're far too lazy to think for themselves, and actually consider things like economic policy, foreign policy (and, y'know, WAR), and civil rights.
For a candidate -- particularly a presidential candidate -- to publically admit that they're an atheist would be political suicide in the US -- there are far too many people who would not vote for an atheist, no matter how many other issues they agree on.
The "separation of church and state" is an utter lie, as far as actual elections are concerned.
If someone thinks that "god" is talking directly to them, then we need to find them a nice little padded room so they can do no harm to themselves nor to others.
You must be new here. And I'm not talking about Slashdot.
We tend to accept quite a lot more in the name of religion than we would otherwise.
Suppose a child refused to let go of his imaginary friend by the time he was in high school -- we'd think it was a bit odd, at best, and probably in need of therapy. But suppose the child claimed the imaginary friend was their "spirit guide" -- we'd probably still think it was weird, but we'd have to ignore it, or be accused of religious persecution.
I could go on. And on.
Point is, it's common, and accepted. Frighteningly so.
If you're comparing two mp3 players of equivalent price, and one says, "20,000 songs!" and another says, "10,000 songs!" which are you going to buy?
The one with more space, measured in bytes, not "songs". But I realize that I'm an exception.
They also hold video--and that eats up your space pretty quickly. They advertise 100 hours of video. That's only 50-60 movies. Lots of people have 50 DVDs in their collections*.
Are you really going to watch those 50 DVDs on your iPod? On a screen smaller than your hand? Maybe it's just me, but I don't see the appeal, and I don't know anyone who puts movies on their iPod -- at least not to play on that iPod.
It's actually quite easy to fill an iPod -- but not with music, and probably not with movies meant to be watched on that screen. Instead, use it as a mass storage device. High quality DVD rips, meant to be watched on another computer -- that could easily be less than 20, or less than 10 if you store the original ISOs.
But I strongly suspect that this is the exception, not the rule. To most people, the iPod is a music player, not a generic media player, and not a portable hard drive.
Regarding your footnote:
* We could start a debate on the DMCA preventing me from ripping my DVDs, but I truly don't believe that that portion of the DMCA would hold up in court on the grounds that it stifles fair use.
"Fair use" is actually not written in the law. Anywhere.
I would hope that it wouldn't hold up, but as it stands, that part of the DMCA does exist, and there's no law which directly contradicts it -- making that act, in fact, illegal.
Or why do you think Medibuntu exists, as a separate project from Ubuntu? Why do you think Ubuntu doesn't include decss, and can only play DVDs if you bought it from Dell (who paid for a license)?
I have a little bit of a problem with your nom de plume, ÃfoeSanity in AnarchyÃf. This is a bit of an oxymoron as Sanity has to be restored by putting down anarchy.
First, Slashdot doesn't support Unicode, unfortunately. I didn't feel like fixing your quote...
Second, you're reading more into it than there is. Warez.com had a slogan of "The Ultimate Sanity in Anarchy." I liked that at the time (I think I was 12), so I took it, figuring what's a pirate going to do about me stealing their slogan? Sue me over abuse of IP?
As you are obviously sane, you bear little if any resemblance to the anarchists I've encountered in my past.
I'm not an anarchist, no. I do, however, often feel as though I'm surrounded by anarchy. That's why it resonates. There's another part, of course:
This is a bit of an oxymoron as Sanity has to be restored by putting down anarchy.
Anarchy also appeals to me as a rebellion against a machine -- if for no other reason than to keep the machine from getting too complacent. I often see myself as the "gadfly" referred to in Dune -- though I can't remember where.
So there is actually some sanity in anarchy -- because if there was never any anarchy, there would only be stagnation. I live in the United States, which was born out of an act of anarchy, which provided the space for sanity to be restored.
Moving on...
I had stated that you'd have to know that Ãfoepunctuated equilibriumÃf cannot possibly work.. You came back with a statement that said, ÃfoeÃfWhy not?Ãf and then answered your own question by quoting me when I said, that Ãfoeobservation has never produced one evidence of it.Ãf
Again: "Evidence of absence..."
That's not my claim. I merely reject that it's been disproven. For example:
In the early years of the 21st century though, with the investigations that we have done of the Moon, the evidence is so significant as to make his pronouncement a statistical improbability, nearly impossible
It's worse than that -- since we don't know how such men could live on the moon, in no atmosphere (or very, very little), there's not much we can say about them at all. They're in the same category as, say, God -- if you don't already believe it to be disproven already, you must be subscribing to a belief of God that is fundamentally un-falsifiable.
And thus, not really worth discussing.
The same holds, by the way, if you're right about your statements regarding evolution.
You asked for a citation regarding the change from one phyla, genus, specie, or whatever to another have always proven detrimental to the life affected. The burden of proof falls on you. Find one evidence that this has not happened.
Sorry, but that's not how it works. Your claim is that they have always proven detrimental.
I would suggest that you retract that in favor of: such changes which we have observed have always proven to be detrimental. Otherwise, you're making quite an extraordinary claim.
Obviously, you neither heard, or understood my following statement.
You're right, I didn't look into it in any depth. I read this far:
even if working changes were successful, the need for sufficient numbers inheriting such changes to produce a viable population is not only unlikely, but a statistical impossibility.
I was a bit lost at this point -- partly as I don't actually know anything about punctuated equilibrium. I was a bit skeptical of your statement of "statistical impossibility", also, and I would have to know quite a lot more to comment.
That is: You winning the lottery is a statistical impossibility. However, someone winning the lottery is a statistical certainty. That analogy is somewhat flawed, but the point is: supposing it's a statisti
If you're pointing out that it's unreasonable to fill 80 gigs with legitimate music, I would disagree. Plenty of people have built up rather large CD collections over the years, and putting all of that on an iPod could be realistic.
20k songs -- assume a large average of 20 songs per album -- that's still a thousand CDs. Are you saying that people have a thousand CDs? At $15/CD, that's still quite a lot of money spent over the years.
I'm not saying it's impossible -- I'm saying that the sheer demand for these things, and the number of them that are quite full, suggests two things: That people have an enormous appetite for music, and that a large portion -- maybe most -- of these consumers are criminals.
When most of the population is declared a criminal, maybe it's not the people that need to change. Maybe it's the law.
megatextures take more video memory (and less CPU) but ensure the player doesn't see repeating terrain tiles as they run through a level.
As long as you can fill the "level" with enough non-repeating terrain.
In fact, procedural generation is often used to do this. There are things like forest generators -- as in, a program to generate a bunch of trees to fill an area as a forest. Technically, it's procedural generation, but they end up saving those gigabytes worth of forest to disk as part of the level.
Procedural generation takes less video memory and saves money on artist bills at the expense of CPUs, and produces non-repeating terrain and textures in real time.
Well, CPU only has to be spent when actually rendering the procedure to geometry -- or to textures, or whatever. Take the trees above -- an alternative method would be to generate a forest as you move through the world, which would be more like what you describe -- hopefully caching enough to make the game actually playable. Or go download.kkreiger to see a compromise -- the entire game fits in 96k, but takes over a minute to load (generating the map and textures) even on a fast CPU.
Also, it doesn't save money on artist bills, because that money now has to be spent on people who are both artists and mathematical geniuses to come up with those algorithms in the first place -- and then on artists to fine-tune the parameters wherever they're being used.
Procedural generation also has the potential to scale indefinitely, so theoretically (but unlikely) you could get closer and closer to a brick wall without the texture getting blocky and jaggy.
No, very likely it wouldn't get blocky and jaggy. It might, however, start to look weird, depending on how good the procedure was. The only part I'm not sure about is whether it could be done in realtime -- but I think so.
To me, the exciting possibilities of procedural generation are: Larger and less repetitive worlds, smaller disk space for games -- much more exciting when you consider that a game like.kkreiger could be streamable, even over dialup -- and much finer detail.
The reality of Megatexture is basically a way to throw a bunch of designers at a huge area, and have the engine be able to handle what they come up with.
I have no idea how any of the above affect video memory. I would imagine that procedural generation on the CPU would result in just as much video memory being used, and I don't think we have fast enough video cards to do procedural generation on the card.
So... I'm smart enough to click "no", and you're not?
Fine, I'll rephrase that -- I still don't see where anyone is at risk if they simply click "no" to every ActiveX prompt. And that is what I intended to communicate, using the first person as an example.
When I posted the links, I am talking about the actual design itself as being something that cannot be secured.
Unfortunately, you also posted links to long rants without much substance, and I still don't have a simple explanation of why ActiveX is so unsecurable.
You need to educate yourself on Authenticode first before discussing whether ActiveX is insecure by design. I have already posted the links.
You've posted links to quite a long discussion. Educate me, then -- because I still don't see where I'm at risk if I simply click "no" to every ActiveX prompt.
Nevermind that I don't think they are offering that high of quality, if you say 700MB's a video, thats 350-ish movies, a month
Say we do the math with Blu-Ray -- most movies have been single-layer, if I remember. So assuming you take the entire disc, that's 10 movies per month, or 5 if they use the full 50 gigs.
Now, given the realities of the bandwidth available, I think the roughly 4 gig Blu-Ray rips (at 720p) are reasonable quality. So that's a bit better -- around 60, a month, assuming you do nothing else.
The real question is, when the former becomes a reality (as full dvd9 rips are today), will Comcast up their cap (and available bandwidth) in response? Seems more likely they would lower it.
If you think that the asking price to view/read/listen to copyrighted content is too high, then don't pay it and don't view/read/listen to it. But don't try to justify your illegal activities because you're trying to help the industry revise their business model.
It's not about what I think, or what GP thinks. It's about the fundamental reality.
So long as the industry treats piracy as an evil to be fought, they will lose. As soon as they start to treat it as a competitor, they might have a chance -- because believe it or not, it is possible to compete with free. You just have to provide better value.
Pirates are not Robin Hood - They're just people too cheap to pay for what they want and too weak to just go without it.
Apple cites an 80 gig iPod as holding 20,000 songs. At $1/song, that's $20k to fill. That's more than a year's salary, at minimum wage. And they make 160 gig iPods.
So no, it's not that they're cheap. It's that there's more available, more readily, and we have broader musical tastes -- and as a result, the perception of any one song has changed.
Huh? Isn't procedural generation about content, not texturing?
It can be about texturing. Take.kkreiger -- it packs a pretty impressive-looking FPS into 96 kilobytes -- which would seem to be smaller than some textures.
And for that matter, texturing is content. Everything about a game can be procedurally generated -- I'd argue that textures would gain something from that. Raise your hand if you're tired of seeing a brick wall where every fifth brick looks exactly the same -- it's chipped and damaged in exactly the same way.
Now, imagine the brick texture is procedurally generated, for some preset value of how deformed and decrepit it can get.
Anyways, even if they are direct opposites, that doesn't mean both aren't really good, promising technologies.
True. It just seemed odd for them to both be brought up, yet there was no discussion or comparison between them.
Slashdot Mirror
Try taking the box store to court for not providing basic fitness.
Isn't that in the shrink-wrap license, though? I know just about every piece of software I've ever used disclaims itself from fitness for a purpose.
Definition of finished?
Might be better to give an example of "not finished" -- I believe the Unreal Tournament 2003 Linux installer had a blatant bug where it would ask for the wrong disc.
So, maybe "finished" as in "at least one actual test by an actual person". Or "contains no game-breaking bugs" -- nothing sucks more than a game which autosaves yours in an unwinnable state. (Jak II on the PS2 did this, I think -- somewhat worse, for a console game.)
Conflicts with #2.
Not really. A game can be playable, and reasonably solid and complete, yet still have bugs which will only be discovered when millions of people hammer it, and still have things to add.
Example: Half-Life 2 was complete. Maybe not at release, but certainly before my example -- Lost Coast. Major engine upgrade (HDR), and a whole level which was cut from the original game (think "deleted scene"). And more recently, various Counter-Strike levels (and probably a fair amount of HL2 itself) have gotten the HDR treatment.
Now, that's more than I think gamers should demand, but I certainly wouldn't expect to have to pay for that upgrade.
A more extreme example: Support new OSes, or open source it. Quake got ported to Windows, at least (as glQuake, if I remember). Doom was never ported by id, but it got old enough that we got the source, and fans have ported it to everything.
I'm not saying it has to be Certified for Vista or whatever, but it shouldn't become abandonware, and I shouldn't have to fire up a 10-year-old computer in order to play it.
How about: Dont include updates that remove features.
Not going to happen. Maybe don't include updates that break features, though...
All fixed by using the ThePirateBay images backed up with the appropriate cracks and servers.
Or by finding companies which actually follow these rules. Stardock is one.
I think that policy is a fine policy, assuming that the copy protection was at least risk-free -- that is, assuming that if you bought the game legitimately, if it didn't work, you could just upgrade with a patch in a month, and the protection is gone.
Well, it's not risk-free.
Some of these CD schemes, in particular, have actually installed drivers which screw up things like DVD burning. Some have installed rootkits. There's really no way for a gamer to know that it's completely gone -- and if there was a bug in it, there's no way to know that we could completely remove it.
Parent has a point, though:
The reason you should remove CD copy protection from your game is that it doesn't work -- at all, ever, the game's cracked before release, and people can make perfect copies.
The second reason is that CD copy protection can be so intrusive as to drive legitimate customers to piracy -- which means that it has to have a significant benefit to justify that risk. It doesn't.
So, if CD copy protection is such a clear net loss, what's the point? Why would you want to only shoot yourself in the foot for a month, instead of, say, not shooting yourself in the fucking foot?
No offense but simply pointing out that you're wrong doesn't count as insulting you...
And I quote:
I guess when id called it Wolf3D they should have consulted you first and called it Wolf2.5D (rolls eyes)
I didn't say I was insulted, I said you were insulting. There's a difference. But here you come again, with another, subtler (barely) attack:
unless you're ego is beyond fragile.
Counterproductive and pointless.
I'm telling you for your own sake, and because I'd rather have a constructive discussion with you than a pissing contest. It doesn't really bother me if you have nothing to add other than insults -- in fact, it's reassuring to know that you actually can't find anything wrong with my argument.
There's a reason I repeated myself 4 times...I was hoping the correct definition of 2.5D would finally sink in with you
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. (Albert Einstein)
And by the way, dimensions don't come by halves. It's a question of made-up semantics. Closest thing to a "correct" definition states:
In early first-person shooters like Doom, one use of the term is to describe the use of 2D character and object sprites in a 3D world. This technology was also implemented with the Virtual Boy game system by Nintendo. It is also used to describe the lack of true so-called "room-over-room" situations.
Pretty much exactly describes both Doom and Duke3D.
In most of these cases no actual property was destroyed. Its all just made up numbers for the value of people's time when they had to track down and stop the attacks, or when they were being inconvienenced.
Well, by the same token, the balance in my bank account is just "made up numbers", too. I see your point, but I wouldn't go so far as to say it's not "real" damage -- true, most of them aren't, but at least one of them really was pulling actual dollars out of actual bank accounts.
As for being "inconvenienced", forget lost productivity -- consider the ones that actually lost data. Lost productivity can't be measured as easily, as there are so many other factors -- everything from sheer laziness to a fire in the office. But lost data is immeasurable in a different sense -- it could very well be irreplaceable.
Now, again, if you delete my novel, that's a huge loss, and I'd send you to jail if I could. But at the end of the day, I'm still alive afterwards. The worst these are is theft and vandalism, not murder -- so, really, not terrorism.
I don't see one fatality because of these "idiots" -- quoted because obviously some amount of intelligence is needed to pull off what they did.
I don't think terrorism should be blown out of proportion, the way it often is in the US, but terrorists actually kill people.
Are you saying that ten million dollars in damage is comparable to killing several thousand people? In other words, that the value of a human life not only can be measured, but that you consider it to be less than a thousand dollars?
If you're going to do that much work, you may as well copy the VIDEO_TS folder entirely, or the disk as an image, and play it with VLC. It just adds another step wherein you have to convince VLC to open the VIDEO_TS folder as a DVD.
But if you do that, VLC will treat it exactly the same as it treats a real DVD. It doesn't always get the menus perfect (often starts from the wrong place in the menu), but they generally work.
In the case of Napster, I can see John Q. Public being fooled. Napster was, after all, what started the whole music piracy thing. There's a certain quality of rebel-ness to it, and the logo is cool, too.
Of course, I get the same feeling you do, since I understand how completely different they are, and how they've really got nothing to do with the original Napster.
But in the case of Real, I really don't see the point. Anyone who would recognize the name would also remember it being nothing but pain. Unless your target market is techno-masochists, this seems like a really dumb idea.
If she could actually remember how to find things in that notebook, be very, very glad. At least that way, you don't have to teach her how to do stuff like that again. And again. And again...
False dichotomy.
I'm not sure anyone is insisting that burst bandwidth be eliminated, though the thought has crossed my mind.
But there has to be some standard by which we can actually know how much bandwidth is available, per person, if they did decide to run torrents all the time. There has to be some amount that's guaranteed.
Otherwise, ISPs can simply lease one dialup line and resell it as "100 mbit Internet" to as many people as they want.
I noticed that you mention that you live in the United States, and said that the US was-born out of an act of anarchy-... Secondly, if you're talking about the Colonists who promoted The American Revolution, those men and women were not living in anarchy, but were complaining about unjust laws that would not give them representation before governing bodies yet were taxingt them to death.
Put Anarchy on a scale. Zero is complete loyalty to whatever government is in power. 100% is total disregard for any attempt at law and order.
What I encourage is the impulse towards the anarchistic end of the spectrum -- to be willing to question established laws and norms, and be willing to reject them, if they are not useful.
[regarding Punctuated Equilibrium...] And then you said, that's not my claim I merely reject that it's been disproven.
Right.
And again, your claim was that it was impossible -- not that it was unlikely, or that there was no evidence for it.
You have provided quite a lot on the issue that I've ignored, because you seem to be trying to prove one of those two things -- either that it is unlikely, or that there is no evidence for it. You haven't tried to prove that it is impossible, and none of your evidence shows it as "statistically impossible".
Your comment regarding Brigham Young's statements about men on the Moon and God is neither reasonable nor adequate as facts and experience mitigate against the former, and fact and experience mitigate for the latter.
I'll gladly dispute that.
There are millions of us who have put God to the test and find that He is not just a philosophical concept, but though not seen is nonetheless an experiential reality...
Really?
Of the Christians I know, none have ever put God to any kind of test, much less a rigorous scientific one. A few attempt philosophy, and often end up arguing in circles, trying desperately to prove their faith.
None have provided any evidence for the existence of God. Depending on your definition, I can either cast doubt on the nature of your god, or I can make him a logical impossibility. (Simple: Argument from evil...)
Hold on to your hat, I'm going to give you a very few of the citations on the subject:
Use hyperlinks -- I'm not going to my library for this, especially when it seems very likely to be more of the same.
As for the comment on the lottery, that may be 1 in 550 million, the odds may be small, but still attainable. When I talk of statistical impossibility though, I'm lalking about numbers on the orders of 1 to the 40 thousandth power of 10.
The lottery is run, what, once a month? Once a day?
How often is this one tested?
I'm not discounting such things as the dinosaurs existence, just that the evidence does not support the existence of any evidence that they evolved, say from sea creatures, or evolved into mamallian life forms,
From sea creatures has been suggested. But I believe the closest known relatives are birds.
How has the secular humanist teaching influenced thought and practice? Take a good look at Hitler's Germany,
Godwin, that didn't take long.
The creationists always claim they are right. They have to be right, or else their theology is based on sand or a stack of playing cards that will fall down.
I only wish...
No, as has proven time and time again, theology adapts. See: Flat earth vs round, geocentrism vs heleocentrism, etc.
Now, creationists in particular are under the misguided belief that their theology will fall down if the Earth is too old, or if evolution is a fact. If you consider this to be part of their belief system, then yes, it will -- but I don't think most Christians agree.
The
Would not the worst people then be those that claim to do so only for political expediency?
You'd think so, but not necessarily.
Imagine the perfect candidate. Agrees with all the issues you hold most important. Honest, hardworking, intelligent, and a good judge of character. Has enough money to run an effective campaign, and has a good shot at winning. Fill in whatever qualities you like...
If this person admits that they're an atheist, there are many districts in which they would never be elected, and they'll never be president. Many people, even if they feel he's otherwise the perfect candidate, won't vote for him for that one issue alone.
Given such a candidate, I would rather they pretend to believe, and actually get elected, than have them admit the truth, and pretty much leave politics.
Now... I would much rather it be possible for an atheist to be elected -- or, hell, anyone who doesn't claim to be Christian. But right now, it's not.
Partially.
The whole problem is that citizens are easily led, especially by unimportant (but sensationalist) issues.
One example: There is a large portion of the US population who will never vote for a black person, no matter how much they agree with his policies and ideals. There's another portion who will vote for him, as a reaction, simply because he's black.
Another: There's quite a lot of women who have been waiting a long time to put a woman in the white house. These are the women who supported Hillary in the Democratic caucuses, simply because she is female. Now that Hillary's out of the picture, a fair number of them might entirely switch parties because Palin is a woman -- she'd be VP, but she's the closest they'll get this election.
(And, hey, McCain's health isn't that great. She's only a heart failure away...)
I think it's a sad trend, as these are even shallower reasons than we had before -- so-called "issues" like gay marriage. (That is, people who are so threatened by homosexuality that they can't stand the thought of someone else being in a same-sex marriage, so they want to outlaw it. And the vocal minority who believes that "God hates fags." In the same vein, there are people who would vote for a candidate simply because they'd allow same-sex marriage.)
So, the problem is that citizens are lazy and easily impressed by big, sensationalist headlines and concepts -- and that they're far too lazy to think for themselves, and actually consider things like economic policy, foreign policy (and, y'know, WAR), and civil rights.
For a candidate -- particularly a presidential candidate -- to publically admit that they're an atheist would be political suicide in the US -- there are far too many people who would not vote for an atheist, no matter how many other issues they agree on.
The "separation of church and state" is an utter lie, as far as actual elections are concerned.
If someone thinks that "god" is talking directly to them, then we need to find them a nice little padded room so they can do no harm to themselves nor to others.
You must be new here. And I'm not talking about Slashdot.
We tend to accept quite a lot more in the name of religion than we would otherwise.
Suppose a child refused to let go of his imaginary friend by the time he was in high school -- we'd think it was a bit odd, at best, and probably in need of therapy. But suppose the child claimed the imaginary friend was their "spirit guide" -- we'd probably still think it was weird, but we'd have to ignore it, or be accused of religious persecution.
I could go on. And on.
Point is, it's common, and accepted. Frighteningly so.
If you're comparing two mp3 players of equivalent price, and one says, "20,000 songs!" and another says, "10,000 songs!" which are you going to buy?
The one with more space, measured in bytes, not "songs". But I realize that I'm an exception.
They also hold video--and that eats up your space pretty quickly. They advertise 100 hours of video. That's only 50-60 movies. Lots of people have 50 DVDs in their collections*.
Are you really going to watch those 50 DVDs on your iPod? On a screen smaller than your hand? Maybe it's just me, but I don't see the appeal, and I don't know anyone who puts movies on their iPod -- at least not to play on that iPod.
It's actually quite easy to fill an iPod -- but not with music, and probably not with movies meant to be watched on that screen. Instead, use it as a mass storage device. High quality DVD rips, meant to be watched on another computer -- that could easily be less than 20, or less than 10 if you store the original ISOs.
But I strongly suspect that this is the exception, not the rule. To most people, the iPod is a music player, not a generic media player, and not a portable hard drive.
Regarding your footnote:
* We could start a debate on the DMCA preventing me from ripping my DVDs, but I truly don't believe that that portion of the DMCA would hold up in court on the grounds that it stifles fair use.
"Fair use" is actually not written in the law. Anywhere.
I would hope that it wouldn't hold up, but as it stands, that part of the DMCA does exist, and there's no law which directly contradicts it -- making that act, in fact, illegal.
Or why do you think Medibuntu exists, as a separate project from Ubuntu? Why do you think Ubuntu doesn't include decss, and can only play DVDs if you bought it from Dell (who paid for a license)?
I have a little bit of a problem with your nom de plume, ÃfoeSanity in AnarchyÃf. This is a bit of an oxymoron as Sanity has to be restored by putting down anarchy.
First, Slashdot doesn't support Unicode, unfortunately. I didn't feel like fixing your quote...
Second, you're reading more into it than there is. Warez.com had a slogan of "The Ultimate Sanity in Anarchy." I liked that at the time (I think I was 12), so I took it, figuring what's a pirate going to do about me stealing their slogan? Sue me over abuse of IP?
As you are obviously sane, you bear little if any resemblance to the anarchists I've encountered in my past.
I'm not an anarchist, no. I do, however, often feel as though I'm surrounded by anarchy. That's why it resonates. There's another part, of course:
This is a bit of an oxymoron as Sanity has to be restored by putting down anarchy.
Anarchy also appeals to me as a rebellion against a machine -- if for no other reason than to keep the machine from getting too complacent. I often see myself as the "gadfly" referred to in Dune -- though I can't remember where.
So there is actually some sanity in anarchy -- because if there was never any anarchy, there would only be stagnation. I live in the United States, which was born out of an act of anarchy, which provided the space for sanity to be restored.
Moving on...
I had stated that you'd have to know that Ãfoepunctuated equilibriumÃf cannot possibly work.. You came back with a statement that said, ÃfoeÃfWhy not?Ãf and then answered your own question by quoting me when I said, that Ãfoeobservation has never produced one evidence of it.Ãf
Again: "Evidence of absence..."
That's not my claim. I merely reject that it's been disproven. For example:
In the early years of the 21st century though, with the investigations that we have done of the Moon, the evidence is so significant as to make his pronouncement a statistical improbability, nearly impossible
It's worse than that -- since we don't know how such men could live on the moon, in no atmosphere (or very, very little), there's not much we can say about them at all. They're in the same category as, say, God -- if you don't already believe it to be disproven already, you must be subscribing to a belief of God that is fundamentally un-falsifiable.
And thus, not really worth discussing.
The same holds, by the way, if you're right about your statements regarding evolution.
You asked for a citation regarding the change from one phyla, genus, specie, or whatever to another have always proven detrimental to the life affected. The burden of proof falls on you. Find one evidence that this has not happened.
Sorry, but that's not how it works. Your claim is that they have always proven detrimental.
I would suggest that you retract that in favor of: such changes which we have observed have always proven to be detrimental. Otherwise, you're making quite an extraordinary claim.
Obviously, you neither heard, or understood my following statement.
You're right, I didn't look into it in any depth. I read this far:
even if working changes were successful, the need for sufficient numbers inheriting such changes to produce a viable population is not only unlikely, but a statistical impossibility.
I was a bit lost at this point -- partly as I don't actually know anything about punctuated equilibrium. I was a bit skeptical of your statement of "statistical impossibility", also, and I would have to know quite a lot more to comment.
That is: You winning the lottery is a statistical impossibility. However, someone winning the lottery is a statistical certainty. That analogy is somewhat flawed, but the point is: supposing it's a statisti
I never said it was worth the money, just that is has more value.
Well, "worth the money" is how I am comparing the two. And that's what you did say:
You can't really compare the two anymore than you can compare TV with a DVR with on-demand...
If you're pointing out that it's unreasonable to fill 80 gigs with legitimate music, I would disagree. Plenty of people have built up rather large CD collections over the years, and putting all of that on an iPod could be realistic.
20k songs -- assume a large average of 20 songs per album -- that's still a thousand CDs. Are you saying that people have a thousand CDs? At $15/CD, that's still quite a lot of money spent over the years.
I'm not saying it's impossible -- I'm saying that the sheer demand for these things, and the number of them that are quite full, suggests two things: That people have an enormous appetite for music, and that a large portion -- maybe most -- of these consumers are criminals.
When most of the population is declared a criminal, maybe it's not the people that need to change. Maybe it's the law.
megatextures take more video memory (and less CPU) but ensure the player doesn't see repeating terrain tiles as they run through a level.
As long as you can fill the "level" with enough non-repeating terrain.
In fact, procedural generation is often used to do this. There are things like forest generators -- as in, a program to generate a bunch of trees to fill an area as a forest. Technically, it's procedural generation, but they end up saving those gigabytes worth of forest to disk as part of the level.
Procedural generation takes less video memory and saves money on artist bills at the expense of CPUs, and produces non-repeating terrain and textures in real time.
Well, CPU only has to be spent when actually rendering the procedure to geometry -- or to textures, or whatever. Take the trees above -- an alternative method would be to generate a forest as you move through the world, which would be more like what you describe -- hopefully caching enough to make the game actually playable. Or go download .kkreiger to see a compromise -- the entire game fits in 96k, but takes over a minute to load (generating the map and textures) even on a fast CPU.
Also, it doesn't save money on artist bills, because that money now has to be spent on people who are both artists and mathematical geniuses to come up with those algorithms in the first place -- and then on artists to fine-tune the parameters wherever they're being used.
Procedural generation also has the potential to scale indefinitely, so theoretically (but unlikely) you could get closer and closer to a brick wall without the texture getting blocky and jaggy.
No, very likely it wouldn't get blocky and jaggy. It might, however, start to look weird, depending on how good the procedure was. The only part I'm not sure about is whether it could be done in realtime -- but I think so.
To me, the exciting possibilities of procedural generation are: Larger and less repetitive worlds, smaller disk space for games -- much more exciting when you consider that a game like .kkreiger could be streamable, even over dialup -- and much finer detail.
The reality of Megatexture is basically a way to throw a bunch of designers at a huge area, and have the engine be able to handle what they come up with.
I have no idea how any of the above affect video memory. I would imagine that procedural generation on the CPU would result in just as much video memory being used, and I don't think we have fast enough video cards to do procedural generation on the card.
Good for you. But who's talking about you?
So... I'm smart enough to click "no", and you're not?
Fine, I'll rephrase that -- I still don't see where anyone is at risk if they simply click "no" to every ActiveX prompt. And that is what I intended to communicate, using the first person as an example.
When I posted the links, I am talking about the actual design itself as being something that cannot be secured.
Unfortunately, you also posted links to long rants without much substance, and I still don't have a simple explanation of why ActiveX is so unsecurable.
You need to educate yourself on Authenticode first before discussing whether ActiveX is insecure by design. I have already posted the links.
You've posted links to quite a long discussion. Educate me, then -- because I still don't see where I'm at risk if I simply click "no" to every ActiveX prompt.
Nevermind that I don't think they are offering that high of quality, if you say 700MB's a video, thats 350-ish movies, a month
Say we do the math with Blu-Ray -- most movies have been single-layer, if I remember. So assuming you take the entire disc, that's 10 movies per month, or 5 if they use the full 50 gigs.
Now, given the realities of the bandwidth available, I think the roughly 4 gig Blu-Ray rips (at 720p) are reasonable quality. So that's a bit better -- around 60, a month, assuming you do nothing else.
The real question is, when the former becomes a reality (as full dvd9 rips are today), will Comcast up their cap (and available bandwidth) in response? Seems more likely they would lower it.
Torrents take time. On-demand video does not.
Torrents, I can save, copy to a laptop (or a portable device), etc. DRM'd video, I can't.
And are you saying the on-demand-ness of it is worth $15/movie and DRM?
If you think that the asking price to view/read/listen to copyrighted content is too high, then don't pay it and don't view/read/listen to it. But don't try to justify your illegal activities because you're trying to help the industry revise their business model.
It's not about what I think, or what GP thinks. It's about the fundamental reality.
So long as the industry treats piracy as an evil to be fought, they will lose. As soon as they start to treat it as a competitor, they might have a chance -- because believe it or not, it is possible to compete with free. You just have to provide better value.
Pirates are not Robin Hood - They're just people too cheap to pay for what they want and too weak to just go without it.
Apple cites an 80 gig iPod as holding 20,000 songs. At $1/song, that's $20k to fill. That's more than a year's salary, at minimum wage. And they make 160 gig iPods.
So no, it's not that they're cheap. It's that there's more available, more readily, and we have broader musical tastes -- and as a result, the perception of any one song has changed.
The DMCA copy protection provisions don't apply to items with negligible security
Citation needed -- because I was under the impression that they do.
and format shifting isn't a form of distribution anyways.
It's not the distribution -- not the copying itself that's illegal. It's the the act of cracking the DRM that's illegal.
Huh? Isn't procedural generation about content, not texturing?
It can be about texturing. Take .kkreiger -- it packs a pretty impressive-looking FPS into 96 kilobytes -- which would seem to be smaller than some textures.
And for that matter, texturing is content. Everything about a game can be procedurally generated -- I'd argue that textures would gain something from that. Raise your hand if you're tired of seeing a brick wall where every fifth brick looks exactly the same -- it's chipped and damaged in exactly the same way.
Now, imagine the brick texture is procedurally generated, for some preset value of how deformed and decrepit it can get.
Anyways, even if they are direct opposites, that doesn't mean both aren't really good, promising technologies.
True. It just seemed odd for them to both be brought up, yet there was no discussion or comparison between them.