Traditional video games were a "get through all the content" type of media, like watching a movie, except more interactive and (sometimes) less linear. Still the idea was to get through the levels, and unless you were obsessive or something, that was pretty much it. Sure, there are puzzle games and such, but that's a different category and isn't what they're talking about when they say sales are down. Most video games were the kind of games where you'd say "have you beat Zelda yet?" like asking "have you seen ET yet?" implying that, when it's over, it's over.
But MMOG's, by relying on human interaction, are more like sports. You don't generally ask someone "have you played tennis yet," meaning "have you grown tired of the sport and will now never play it again?" Sure, if people pick up open-ended human interaction games, they're going to occupy a lot of time that could have been spent on closed-ended media. Note, this isn't new with MMORPG's. I knew hardcore gammers who used to be into beating game after game obsessively, until Quake came out, and then they joined a quake clan and played quake exclusively and obsessively for hours a day for years. Games are turning into things more like sports or communities rather than entertainment, and these are things people tend to stick with, rather than seeing once and being done with.
Everything said in the parent post is dead-on, but I think it sort of dances around the periphery of a more direct answer to this question: it doesn't matter what the momentary resolution of the human eye is, because our eyes don't take "snapshots" of the pictures we see, it's more like they take movies of them.
We stand back and see the whole picture, then we move closer and look around at the detail in a bunch of different areas. With large format photography, you have a big print, and it isn't intended that you only glance at it for a moment from a distance. If that were the intended way to view it, then the question regarding the resolution of the human eye would be valid, and the picture could probably be about one megapixel, (especially if the resolution was concentrated in the center), and if they just flashed it at you, that would be enough. But if you're going to walk up to it and peer around, it's like you're watching a Ken Burns zoom & pan movie of parts of the image, possibly for several minutes and scanning over many parts in high detail, and that single image has to hold all the detail of the movie, and it has to have that detail everywhere, because they don't know where or how much you're going to zoom in.
Again, I entirely agree with the parent post, and it pretty much says the same thing, I just thought this was a different way to put it that might make sense to some people.
I don't know what all the features are that you're looking for, and I don't know if you work on a Mac, or which of the following programs have PC equivalents, but here are some programs which I think are scriptable, template-using, auto-formatting word-processors aimed at managing, editing, and producing books, manuals, and other similar projects:
LaTeX (I'm pretty sure this is available for Linux & Windows too) Mellel, which has some very good reviews Manuscript Which may not be as full-featured.
Wouldn't these cameras they "design" to defeat this system be SLR's? When an SLR isn't taking a picture, the mirror's down and the light bounces up through a prism and into the viewfinder for composing the shot. When you take a picture, the mirror momentarily flips up to reveal the sensor, then flips back down again. Unless their system is really fast (detects the sensor and sends out out the beam in the hundredth of a second or so the mirror's up), it's hard to picture it blocking any SLR.
Once again reaffirming my faith in the cluelessness of moderators. The article is ABOUT THE LOWER COMMISSION ON TRACKS SOLD THROUGH ITUNES. (yes, it's like yelling, that's the point.) RTFA:
"That works out to $0.31 cents per song, instead of the $0.045 on a digital download."
PER SONG
That's the whole point of the story. Whether people buy less music or not because of iTunes is an entirely different story.
In fact, this really reaches a new low, because you don't even need to RTFA article to debunk it, try RTFSOTFP (or Read The First Sentence Of The F*cking Post), where it says:
Weird Al Yankovic recently said he makes far less money when you buy from iTunes
Not "he makes far less money if you don't buy as much music from iTunes," but that if you buy music on iTunes instead of on CD, he makes less money.
We saw french fry vending machines in Spain. They had good fries. They don't keep them hot, they flash fry them right then when you buy 'em. It takes a little while.
Here's someone's photo blog with a picture of one of the machines.
Barcelona also had a gigantic inflatable swarthy Santa Claus with a black beard with his arms stacked high with a giant mounded assortment of raw meats. That has no relevance to this discussion, it's just one of those things that's too weird not to mention when my trip to Spain comes up.
When I read the headline, I thought they'd be coming out with vending machines buy songs for your ipod. Just plug it into the vending machine and browse the iTunes music store and buy music for cash or on a card right there at the machine. Then it would transfer back to your computer too when you next dock.
Individual music tracks strike me as the sort of impulse buy and at the right price where they might be a good thing to sell from vending machines. Especially in bars and clubs and at concerts and other venues where someone might hear a song they like, and could go buy it right there.
They could put combo juke box/iTunes vending machines in bars where you can pay to listen to and/or buy tracks. Maybe you'd get a free play on the Jukebox whenever you buy a track for $1.
It would take some modification to the iPod software to support this, of course. But it might be a good way to increase music sales. And it might help further the iPod's market share benefits.
Although these microscopic organisms are remarkably efficient at producing energy, they don't make enough of it
There's something wrong with this sentence. It sounds like they're saying that the bacteria perform an efficient conversion of the sugar energy into electrical energy, but that the problem is that bacteria can't be scaled effectively to produce significant amounts of power.
There's a problem with the idea that bacteria don't scale. Bacteria are well known for their exponential growth curves. Give me a sufficently large petri dish with medium and a starter batch of bacteria, and I'll solve your scaling dilemma.
If they are truly efficient, then there's no problem with bacteria not making enough power, as making more bacteria is trivial. However, I don't think it's likely they really are efficient. It seems highly unlikely bacteria would waste much energy on producing unused electricity, one might expect them, like most living things, to use most of their available energy growing, respirating, reproducing, and anything else that generally falls under the category of "surviving." Sure enough, later in the article comes:
Gardner's team aims to harness the genetic control system to engineer bacteria that can produce energy more efficiently.
Which makes me think that the problem with the current bacteria is efficiency, not scalability, as the first sentence implies. Perhaps by "efficient" he means that they don't produce a lot of waste heat or something, but for generating electricity, the definition of efficiency should be what percent of the energy they take in they put back out as electricity.
I agree entirely. Doctors over prescribe antibiotics all the time, and it's needlessly breeding super-bugs for no reason. I haven't been to the doctor lately, but it used to be that anytime I went, if I even had the sniffles, they'd hand me a prescription for antibiotics, whether or not I needed it. I'm even allergic to some antibiotics (and by allergic, I don't mean I sneeze, I mean I get covered in golf-ball-sized hives that close off my throat, I go into anaphylactic shock, and I probably die if I don't get a steroid injection), and when I was at the doctor's for something completely different, he noticed I had the sniffles and, without asking about it, handed me a prescription for ampicillin, which it said all over my chart would probably kill me.
I was recently visiting a friend and noticed he had a bottle of ciprofloxacin on his kitchen counter, so I asked what he was on it for. Acne! His doctor gave him ciprofloxacin for acne.
Doctors prescribe antibiotics left and right when they aren't needed and without regard for the consequences, short term or long term. It's quite possible that sooner or later one of these resistant superbugs is going to cause a whole lot of trouble.
What the &@#%^#? Don't they teach doctors about breeding drug resistance? It's a stereotype that med students only care about what's going to be on the test, whether or not it's important to practicing medicine and saving patient's lives. Well, med schools need to be sure that the topic of breeding drug resistance is on the test.
Ah, yes, I see you're right. I thought he'd said he was against any human chimaeras, but he did just say he was against human-animal chimeras:
Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research, human cloning in all its forms, creating or implanting embryos for experiments, creating human-animal hybrids, and buying, selling or patenting human embryos.
So it's just diabetics who need insulin and anyone with a disease they need to make an animal model to research who needs to be scared. But so far, the proposals don't ban human/plant chimeras, so using science to help starving third world children with plant chimeras is morally safe, while using animal chimeras to help people with diabetes or downs syndrome is immoral.
Anyway, while you're right that I was mistaken in thinking that Bush included plant/animal chimeras in his list of things to ban, I don't see how it's a straw-man argument. Being mistaken about what someone said isn't setting up an argument with the intention that it is easier to defeat then the real argument, letting it fail, and then falsely attributing it to them. For one thing, it's no easier to attack plant/human hybrids than animal/human hybrids. Heck, plant/human hybrids are new, where animal/human hybrids have been used in research for years and have already saved countless lives. You don't set up a straw-man argument by making a harder argument to win and then attributing it to your opponent, you set up an easier argument to win and attributing it to your opponent. Second, I didn't even attribute an argument to him, just a statement. You can't "defeat" a statement, this was just a factual mistake, not an a falsely ascribed argument. Furthermore, you're assuming tone here. I didn't look up exactly what he said until after your reply- my original post did not attribute this statement to him, it asked the question: was this his statement? So perhaps it would have been better to just answer my question, rather than acusing me of using illegitimate rhetorical tactics to falsify his claims.
"Allowing them to just grow rice that can save lives (children die of dehydration there) is pretty worthwhile."
I would think that creating a strain of rice that helps save the lives of the third world poor, particularly saving children from dying from dysentery, would be considered a pretty moral undertaking.
But isn't this precisely what Bush proposed banning outright in his last State Of The Union address? Human chimeras? That's what this rice is, right, a human/rice chimera. It's a weird world to me where the religious think that scientists developing new grains to save the lives of the poor is morally reprehensible and should be banned.
I have a perfectly ordinary chunk of limestone rock.
No one, not now, not ever, will be able to hack it to run Linux. Or run any piece of software code at all. I declare it "unhackable." At least for software hacks.
I get the impression that anyone can still communicate securely by using GPG. But it there a convenient way to communicate covertly?
Certainly not by conventional phone. I wonder if Iridium surrenders their records? What about emails to webmail accounts that are sent and accessed by computers behind anonymizers? Would these work, and/or what else would?
In other news, The RIAA has found that college campuses are a haven for a vast means of information data sharing, often illegal, called "sneakernet."
This devious networking scheme has been known to move data as fast as 10 GB/second (over very short distances), is known to deal heavily in stolen content, and is extremely hard to detect, measure, or stop.
To help protect revenues from this threat, the RIAA is proposing legislation forcing universities to shut down these networks. Proposed measures include mandatory personal searches every time a student enters or leaves any room on campus, including their dorm rooms, issuing RFID's that must be worn at all times and will be used to track all student's locations at all times, and restricting and tracking sales of blank storage media including CD-R's, DVD-R's, USB-keys, external hard drives, ZIP disks, tape backups, and 3.5" floppy disks (a less popular medium sometimes used to pirate copyrighted text files).
The NOVA made it look like they have a company that makes stereo speakers (probably not a lot of crossover applications to autonomous robotics), and it did make it look like they did this on their own, not that they were paying others to help out. It did look like one of them was devoting most of his time to this project, not to work. And they're probably still well off, but still, compared to Stanford or CMU, with millions in funding, and as many as a hundred nearly full-time people working on the project at CMU, etc, they are two self-funded amateurs working from home.
Slashdot Mirror
Traditional video games were a "get through all the content" type of media, like watching a movie, except more interactive and (sometimes) less linear. Still the idea was to get through the levels, and unless you were obsessive or something, that was pretty much it. Sure, there are puzzle games and such, but that's a different category and isn't what they're talking about when they say sales are down. Most video games were the kind of games where you'd say "have you beat Zelda yet?" like asking "have you seen ET yet?" implying that, when it's over, it's over.
But MMOG's, by relying on human interaction, are more like sports. You don't generally ask someone "have you played tennis yet," meaning "have you grown tired of the sport and will now never play it again?" Sure, if people pick up open-ended human interaction games, they're going to occupy a lot of time that could have been spent on closed-ended media. Note, this isn't new with MMORPG's. I knew hardcore gammers who used to be into beating game after game obsessively, until Quake came out, and then they joined a quake clan and played quake exclusively and obsessively for hours a day for years. Games are turning into things more like sports or communities rather than entertainment, and these are things people tend to stick with, rather than seeing once and being done with.
Great, now when MS makes programming mistakes, one of these will knock someone's head off.
Then why didn't they wait until Aperture was ready?
Everything said in the parent post is dead-on, but I think it sort of dances around the periphery of a more direct answer to this question: it doesn't matter what the momentary resolution of the human eye is, because our eyes don't take "snapshots" of the pictures we see, it's more like they take movies of them.
We stand back and see the whole picture, then we move closer and look around at the detail in a bunch of different areas. With large format photography, you have a big print, and it isn't intended that you only glance at it for a moment from a distance. If that were the intended way to view it, then the question regarding the resolution of the human eye would be valid, and the picture could probably be about one megapixel, (especially if the resolution was concentrated in the center), and if they just flashed it at you, that would be enough. But if you're going to walk up to it and peer around, it's like you're watching a Ken Burns zoom & pan movie of parts of the image, possibly for several minutes and scanning over many parts in high detail, and that single image has to hold all the detail of the movie, and it has to have that detail everywhere, because they don't know where or how much you're going to zoom in.
Again, I entirely agree with the parent post, and it pretty much says the same thing, I just thought this was a different way to put it that might make sense to some people.
LaTeX (I'm pretty sure this is available for Linux & Windows too)
Mellel, which has some very good reviews
Manuscript
Which may not be as full-featured.
At least it might be informative to others who didn't RTFA?
Wouldn't these cameras they "design" to defeat this system be SLR's? When an SLR isn't taking a picture, the mirror's down and the light bounces up through a prism and into the viewfinder for composing the shot. When you take a picture, the mirror momentarily flips up to reveal the sensor, then flips back down again. Unless their system is really fast (detects the sensor and sends out out the beam in the hundredth of a second or so the mirror's up), it's hard to picture it blocking any SLR.
"That works out to $0.31 cents per song, instead of the $0.045 on a digital download."
PER SONG
That's the whole point of the story. Whether people buy less music or not because of iTunes is an entirely different story.
In fact, this really reaches a new low, because you don't even need to RTFA article to debunk it, try RTFSOTFP (or Read The First Sentence Of The F*cking Post), where it says:
Weird Al Yankovic recently said he makes far less money when you buy from iTunes
Not "he makes far less money if you don't buy as much music from iTunes," but that if you buy music on iTunes instead of on CD, he makes less money.
Here's someone's photo blog with a picture of one of the machines.
Barcelona also had a gigantic inflatable swarthy Santa Claus with a black beard with his arms stacked high with a giant mounded assortment of raw meats. That has no relevance to this discussion, it's just one of those things that's too weird not to mention when my trip to Spain comes up.
Individual music tracks strike me as the sort of impulse buy and at the right price where they might be a good thing to sell from vending machines. Especially in bars and clubs and at concerts and other venues where someone might hear a song they like, and could go buy it right there.
They could put combo juke box/iTunes vending machines in bars where you can pay to listen to and/or buy tracks. Maybe you'd get a free play on the Jukebox whenever you buy a track for $1.
It would take some modification to the iPod software to support this, of course. But it might be a good way to increase music sales. And it might help further the iPod's market share benefits.
Mu
There's something wrong with this sentence. It sounds like they're saying that the bacteria perform an efficient conversion of the sugar energy into electrical energy, but that the problem is that bacteria can't be scaled effectively to produce significant amounts of power.
There's a problem with the idea that bacteria don't scale. Bacteria are well known for their exponential growth curves. Give me a sufficently large petri dish with medium and a starter batch of bacteria, and I'll solve your scaling dilemma.
If they are truly efficient, then there's no problem with bacteria not making enough power, as making more bacteria is trivial. However, I don't think it's likely they really are efficient. It seems highly unlikely bacteria would waste much energy on producing unused electricity, one might expect them, like most living things, to use most of their available energy growing, respirating, reproducing, and anything else that generally falls under the category of "surviving." Sure enough, later in the article comes:
Gardner's team aims to harness the genetic control system to engineer bacteria that can produce energy more efficiently.
Which makes me think that the problem with the current bacteria is efficiency, not scalability, as the first sentence implies. Perhaps by "efficient" he means that they don't produce a lot of waste heat or something, but for generating electricity, the definition of efficiency should be what percent of the energy they take in they put back out as electricity.
No one tell the computers, or they won't have any reason to keep us alive after they take over.
Plus the bacteria won't need an elaborate VR to keep them occupied while generating electricity.
It helps to have a link with the suggestion someone go read something.
I was recently visiting a friend and noticed he had a bottle of ciprofloxacin on his kitchen counter, so I asked what he was on it for. Acne! His doctor gave him ciprofloxacin for acne.
Doctors prescribe antibiotics left and right when they aren't needed and without regard for the consequences, short term or long term. It's quite possible that sooner or later one of these resistant superbugs is going to cause a whole lot of trouble.
What the &@#%^#? Don't they teach doctors about breeding drug resistance? It's a stereotype that med students only care about what's going to be on the test, whether or not it's important to practicing medicine and saving patient's lives. Well, med schools need to be sure that the topic of breeding drug resistance is on the test.
So who would win, Game Developer Ninjas, Game Developer Pirates, Game Developer Robots, or Game Developer Monkeys?
Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research, human cloning in all its forms, creating or implanting embryos for experiments, creating human-animal hybrids, and buying, selling or patenting human embryos.
So it's just diabetics who need insulin and anyone with a disease they need to make an animal model to research who needs to be scared. But so far, the proposals don't ban human/plant chimeras, so using science to help starving third world children with plant chimeras is morally safe, while using animal chimeras to help people with diabetes or downs syndrome is immoral.
Anyway, while you're right that I was mistaken in thinking that Bush included plant/animal chimeras in his list of things to ban, I don't see how it's a straw-man argument. Being mistaken about what someone said isn't setting up an argument with the intention that it is easier to defeat then the real argument, letting it fail, and then falsely attributing it to them. For one thing, it's no easier to attack plant/human hybrids than animal/human hybrids. Heck, plant/human hybrids are new, where animal/human hybrids have been used in research for years and have already saved countless lives. You don't set up a straw-man argument by making a harder argument to win and then attributing it to your opponent, you set up an easier argument to win and attributing it to your opponent. Second, I didn't even attribute an argument to him, just a statement. You can't "defeat" a statement, this was just a factual mistake, not an a falsely ascribed argument. Furthermore, you're assuming tone here. I didn't look up exactly what he said until after your reply- my original post did not attribute this statement to him, it asked the question: was this his statement? So perhaps it would have been better to just answer my question, rather than acusing me of using illegitimate rhetorical tactics to falsify his claims.
Mod chipping is a hardware hack. I said software hack.
I would think that creating a strain of rice that helps save the lives of the third world poor, particularly saving children from dying from dysentery, would be considered a pretty moral undertaking.
But isn't this precisely what Bush proposed banning outright in his last State Of The Union address? Human chimeras? That's what this rice is, right, a human/rice chimera. It's a weird world to me where the religious think that scientists developing new grains to save the lives of the poor is morally reprehensible and should be banned.
I have a perfectly ordinary chunk of limestone rock.
No one, not now, not ever, will be able to hack it to run Linux. Or run any piece of software code at all. I declare it "unhackable." At least for software hacks.
Or if you don't want to pay the money, why not request that Netflix carry it. Or your local library.
Certainly not by conventional phone. I wonder if Iridium surrenders their records? What about emails to webmail accounts that are sent and accessed by computers behind anonymizers? Would these work, and/or what else would?
I doubt the patrol cars would be very close on his tail.
This devious networking scheme has been known to move data as fast as 10 GB/second (over very short distances), is known to deal heavily in stolen content, and is extremely hard to detect, measure, or stop.
To help protect revenues from this threat, the RIAA is proposing legislation forcing universities to shut down these networks. Proposed measures include mandatory personal searches every time a student enters or leaves any room on campus, including their dorm rooms, issuing RFID's that must be worn at all times and will be used to track all student's locations at all times, and restricting and tracking sales of blank storage media including CD-R's, DVD-R's, USB-keys, external hard drives, ZIP disks, tape backups, and 3.5" floppy disks (a less popular medium sometimes used to pirate copyrighted text files).
The NOVA made it look like they have a company that makes stereo speakers (probably not a lot of crossover applications to autonomous robotics), and it did make it look like they did this on their own, not that they were paying others to help out. It did look like one of them was devoting most of his time to this project, not to work. And they're probably still well off, but still, compared to Stanford or CMU, with millions in funding, and as many as a hundred nearly full-time people working on the project at CMU, etc, they are two self-funded amateurs working from home.