This extension seems very cool, and I plan to try it out when I get home. When I first read the summary I thought to myself, "A firefox extension and gmail, how much simpler could it get!" But, unfortunately this is not point & click encryption. It requires an additional external program (GnuPG) to function. Even this small, relatively trivial step is too much for beginning to average computer users. Encrypted email is great and all, but I can only send it to other people with encryption-enabled email clients.
Where is the it-just-works email encrytion for dummies?
I'm going to guess that you don't have children, yet. Try watching a Disney DVD, or other children's DVD. Those are the worst when it comes to unskippable previews.
Windows live will allow PC halo gamers and Xbox halo gamers to compete on the same servers against each other. That will show us which type of controller configuration is best for playing FPS. If PC players dominate the charts, then we'll know that mouse-keyboard is superior, or better FPS players prefer it. If the charts are evenly distributed, then we can say it doesn't matter.
"It's also Murder 2 if you kill someone in the course of committing another crime, such as armed robbery. Say you accidentally drop the gun while you're pulling the robbery, and it goes off and kills somebody. You didn't intend to kill the guy, you didn't pull the trigger, but you did kill him in the course of a robbery, so that's Murder 2."
Thank you for your insightful post. I have to say that this accidental murder during another crime law is just plain stupid. I understand its intent, but it doesn't seem a very good implementation. It puts the bystanders of a robbery at increased risk. If a criminal robs a store, and someone accidentally gets shot while in that store, then a criminal who knows his local laws might as well kill everyone else in the store, too.
DO you use your computer entirely to its capacity? Doesn't matter. Even if you do, you're only in the minority, and since the majority of people with fancy computers don't really need them, we should probably not allow anyone to have them, right? Give it a rest.
Why not? Thats a great idea! We can sell people CPUs that clock themselves down to a lower speed when the extra processing power isn't necessary! In fact we already do that.
Re:Jumpers For Goalposts
on
Just Let Me Play!
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
You are not alone in this. What you are describing is called Auto-Dynamic Difficulty (ADD). Although I suggest searching for "dynamic difficulty", since ADD is likely to get lots of irrelevant results.
Lots of game developers have worked with the feature of dynamic difficulty. Max Payne (released 2001) was the first game that prominently featured dynamic difficulty. Max Payne had enemies that would adjust their aim to be better or worse, depending on your health and hit ratio. If you were able to get through a section of a level without taking many hits, or using many health-kits, you would find less health kits at the next check point, and the enemies would be scoring more powerful blows. The end result was that the game played very smoothly. Both myself (an avid gamer) and my father (a horrible gamer) were able to play through the default setting of Max Payne and say that we enjoyed it.
Racing games have had dynamic difficulty for quite a long time. Ever wonder how enemy cars were always able to catch up to you when you were in first place, but no matter how horrible you played, you could always catch up to them for a great photo finish? Thats the dynamic difficulty in action.
Now, there are some very bad examples of dynamic difficulty, too. In the game Crimson Skies, the player is given the option to skip a scenario entirely after failing it a certain amount of times. Thats probably a nice addition, but its not a very good way of adjusting the difficulty. The player knows that he is unable to leap a hurdle, and the game just lets him skip the hurdle entirely. The player is missing content by skipping the level. Some people may find that eases the frustration of being unable to beat a level, but its a horrible way of making the game "easier". The goal of a game is to enjoy the gameplay, not rush to the end. Skipping levels does help a player get closer to the end, but the missed gameplay can never be made up.
Unfortunately few large developers take ADD implementations to heart. SiN episodes (recently reviewed on/.) features dynamic difficulty in the same fashion that Max Payne did. Oblivion tried a dynamic difficulty feature and failed horribly. The game actually became much more difficult the more you played it. That is a game where I wish I could turn the feature off. Many mods were created to adjust and try to eliminate Oblivion's dynamic difficulty.
The only examples of well-implemented dynamic difficulty that I know of are limited to first person shooters and role playing games. I don't know of any platformer, strategy or action game that provides dynamic difficulty.
Hey that would make a great game. Simulate an amoeba in water that eats food. We can simulate that amoeba's evolution into more and more complex organisms, watching it get bigger and deadlier. Then it can grow into a vertebrate lifeform that walks up onto land and becomes sentient, builds cities, wages war and sends spaceships into outer space!
Spam is an awesome way to transmit important messages to people while keeping your contact list secret. Need to send your GO signal to your neighboring cells? Spam a V14GR4 email to a few thousand recipients, which include your cell buddies.
Kerry could not have done what you suggest because the debate rules that they agreed upon mandated that neither candidate be allowed to direct a question or statement at the other candidate.
"So that is all bullshit. The Alaska officials who refuse to reveal the results do so out of their own motives and not because of some silly contracts.
One can easily figure out what these motives are."
Yes. A desire to keep their own job. I don't believe that the 'officials' that the reporter mentioned in the article are the final say on the matter.
If he has ever received the benefit of modern medicine he should be required to assist.
If he received the benefit of modern medicine then, yes, he should provide compensation for those benefits. Fortunately for him that compensation was probably in the form of money paid by either himself, his insurance carrier or the charity of his regional government health care. He paid for his treatments and is not in debt to society for anything.
"Compare that to a game like City of Heroes where the developers post on a daily basis."
This is a very good sentence because it shows how unimportant the developer response actually is. WoW is the best mmog on the market (numberwise), and their developers don't interact with the community. Therefor we can conclude that public interaction is unnecessary to having a successful mmog. This make perfect sense. Having a good game with entertaining and easily accessible gameplay is more important than having some developers that spend time posting to a forums that only 5-15%(*) of their players actually read.
(*)This data is based on my own games forums viewership.
We're not talking about child development here... we're talking about adults playing games. The first few days you could hang around Pre-Sear and run missions and level up a bit while things are still fairly easy.
When I said crucial first days I was speaking from the position of a game developer. I've been a part of several mmogs over my career. The data is fairly consistant that about a third of the players who try a game (whether they purchased it in the store, or downloaded it for free) will make their decision to stay or leave within the first hour or so. The rate of decay after that depends on variables in the gameplay. But a developer wants to make that beginning experience as high quality as possible, and introduce new players to the friendly community quickly. Its the community that gets players hooked for the long haul, and increases the average account lifespan. Even though Guild Wars doesn't have paid accounts they still want to keep people playing, so that we'll buy their expansions or upgrades or whatever.
You resurrect at a shrine in the same region, nothing is reset. Anything you've killed is dead. You get a temporary penalty to your stats and you go on.
Lets say that I ask you to climb a wall. You try to climb it, but fail and fall down. So I stap a 5lbs weight to you and ask you to try again. That weight isn't going to help. I understand the theory behind the penalty. Tt does what its supposed to do for missions. But its not good for the normal zones.
...and boring as sin! Here is my offtopic rant on GW:
The way that every single zone is an instance is Guild Wars is the worst feature of the game. For the first few days each player will be limited to grouping with 1-3 other people. That means you wont have any contact with more than a tiny, tiny handful of players during those crucial first days. And if you make one mistake during an instanced zone, and wipe out, you have to start back at a town. You can't just run back to your corpse and continue on. If the quest you're trying to complete is 3-4 zones away from a town, that means you have to slog through the same instanced zones, fully repopulated with the same, exact monsters, all over again.
Guild Wars is an interesting concept, and instances have their place within a great game. But an entire game of instances is not good eats.
Although the pvp in guild wars is interesting for awhile, getting to the point where you can create characters capable of winning takes quite a long time of grinding for the skills and runes. This grind is not nearly as interesting or entertaining as WoW or the other mmogs where you can grind with more than just a small handful of people, and a wipeout wont force you to slog through the same 3-7 zones worth of stuff.
That is correct to say that they are not thieves because they do not steal my identity, only copy it. The appropriate term is fraud. The people are using fraudulent information (my identity) to take resources from the Government that is intended for me. Thus they are thieves because they take a finite resource, thus depriving me of it.
They do not steal my identity, but they steal my benefits.
"You can whine all you want, but if they somehow allowed the re-use of the CD-Key, that would allow basically unlimited accounts out of one box."
Negative. If an account key is disassociated with an account, that account is then permanently blocked. Perhaps a single account key could be used to create an unlimited number of accounts, but it could only ever be used to play one at any given time. Thats what the true purpose of the key is for. One box, one account (at a time). Its bogus that account keys are being used to eliminate the first sale doctrine.
Slashdot Mirror
This extension seems very cool, and I plan to try it out when I get home. When I first read the summary I thought to myself, "A firefox extension and gmail, how much simpler could it get!" But, unfortunately this is not point & click encryption. It requires an additional external program (GnuPG) to function. Even this small, relatively trivial step is too much for beginning to average computer users. Encrypted email is great and all, but I can only send it to other people with encryption-enabled email clients.
Where is the it-just-works email encrytion for dummies?
I assumed it meant Slash Dot Summary.
I'm going to guess that you don't have children, yet. Try watching a Disney DVD, or other children's DVD. Those are the worst when it comes to unskippable previews.
Windows live will allow PC halo gamers and Xbox halo gamers to compete on the same servers against each other. That will show us which type of controller configuration is best for playing FPS. If PC players dominate the charts, then we'll know that mouse-keyboard is superior, or better FPS players prefer it. If the charts are evenly distributed, then we can say it doesn't matter.
"It's also Murder 2 if you kill someone in the course of committing another crime, such as armed robbery. Say you accidentally drop the gun while you're pulling the robbery, and it goes off and kills somebody. You didn't intend to kill the guy, you didn't pull the trigger, but you did kill him in the course of a robbery, so that's Murder 2."
Thank you for your insightful post. I have to say that this accidental murder during another crime law is just plain stupid. I understand its intent, but it doesn't seem a very good implementation. It puts the bystanders of a robbery at increased risk. If a criminal robs a store, and someone accidentally gets shot while in that store, then a criminal who knows his local laws might as well kill everyone else in the store, too.
:(
DO you use your computer entirely to its capacity? Doesn't matter. Even if you do, you're only in the minority, and since the majority of people with fancy computers don't really need them, we should probably not allow anyone to have them, right? Give it a rest.
Why not? Thats a great idea! We can sell people CPUs that clock themselves down to a lower speed when the extra processing power isn't necessary! In fact we already do that.
Its hard to imagine a football field trying to give me a wedgie..
That's a spicy meatball!
You are not alone in this. What you are describing is called Auto-Dynamic Difficulty (ADD). Although I suggest searching for "dynamic difficulty", since ADD is likely to get lots of irrelevant results.
/.) features dynamic difficulty in the same fashion that Max Payne did. Oblivion tried a dynamic difficulty feature and failed horribly. The game actually became much more difficult the more you played it. That is a game where I wish I could turn the feature off. Many mods were created to adjust and try to eliminate Oblivion's dynamic difficulty.
Lots of game developers have worked with the feature of dynamic difficulty. Max Payne (released 2001) was the first game that prominently featured dynamic difficulty. Max Payne had enemies that would adjust their aim to be better or worse, depending on your health and hit ratio. If you were able to get through a section of a level without taking many hits, or using many health-kits, you would find less health kits at the next check point, and the enemies would be scoring more powerful blows. The end result was that the game played very smoothly. Both myself (an avid gamer) and my father (a horrible gamer) were able to play through the default setting of Max Payne and say that we enjoyed it.
Racing games have had dynamic difficulty for quite a long time. Ever wonder how enemy cars were always able to catch up to you when you were in first place, but no matter how horrible you played, you could always catch up to them for a great photo finish? Thats the dynamic difficulty in action.
Now, there are some very bad examples of dynamic difficulty, too. In the game Crimson Skies, the player is given the option to skip a scenario entirely after failing it a certain amount of times. Thats probably a nice addition, but its not a very good way of adjusting the difficulty. The player knows that he is unable to leap a hurdle, and the game just lets him skip the hurdle entirely. The player is missing content by skipping the level. Some people may find that eases the frustration of being unable to beat a level, but its a horrible way of making the game "easier". The goal of a game is to enjoy the gameplay, not rush to the end. Skipping levels does help a player get closer to the end, but the missed gameplay can never be made up.
Unfortunately few large developers take ADD implementations to heart. SiN episodes (recently reviewed on
The only examples of well-implemented dynamic difficulty that I know of are limited to first person shooters and role playing games. I don't know of any platformer, strategy or action game that provides dynamic difficulty.
Hey that would make a great game. Simulate an amoeba in water that eats food. We can simulate that amoeba's evolution into more and more complex organisms, watching it get bigger and deadlier. Then it can grow into a vertebrate lifeform that walks up onto land and becomes sentient, builds cities, wages war and sends spaceships into outer space!
Oh wait...
Spam is an awesome way to transmit important messages to people while keeping your contact list secret. Need to send your GO signal to your neighboring cells? Spam a V14GR4 email to a few thousand recipients, which include your cell buddies.
Kerry could not have done what you suggest because the debate rules that they agreed upon mandated that neither candidate be allowed to direct a question or statement at the other candidate.
No but Male Pattern Baldness Pills are.
"Further, you have to ask, what does Skype get out of all this?"
Intel's marketing muscle.
"So that is all bullshit. The Alaska officials who refuse to reveal the results do so out of their own motives and not because of some silly contracts. One can easily figure out what these motives are."
Yes. A desire to keep their own job. I don't believe that the 'officials' that the reporter mentioned in the article are the final say on the matter.
How can you leave out the classic: I wanna cast.. MAGIC MISSILE!
:)
If he has ever received the benefit of modern medicine he should be required to assist.
If he received the benefit of modern medicine then, yes, he should provide compensation for those benefits. Fortunately for him that compensation was probably in the form of money paid by either himself, his insurance carrier or the charity of his regional government health care. He paid for his treatments and is not in debt to society for anything.
"Compare that to a game like City of Heroes where the developers post on a daily basis."
:)
This is a very good sentence because it shows how unimportant the developer response actually is. WoW is the best mmog on the market (numberwise), and their developers don't interact with the community. Therefor we can conclude that public interaction is unnecessary to having a successful mmog. This make perfect sense. Having a good game with entertaining and easily accessible gameplay is more important than having some developers that spend time posting to a forums that only 5-15%(*) of their players actually read.
(*)This data is based on my own games forums viewership.
3. Uphold Medicare/Medicaid and Social Security.
No, no. Schwarzeneggar is a rebuplican.
We're not talking about child development here... we're talking about adults playing games. The first few days you could hang around Pre-Sear and run missions and level up a bit while things are still fairly easy.
When I said crucial first days I was speaking from the position of a game developer. I've been a part of several mmogs over my career. The data is fairly consistant that about a third of the players who try a game (whether they purchased it in the store, or downloaded it for free) will make their decision to stay or leave within the first hour or so. The rate of decay after that depends on variables in the gameplay. But a developer wants to make that beginning experience as high quality as possible, and introduce new players to the friendly community quickly. Its the community that gets players hooked for the long haul, and increases the average account lifespan. Even though Guild Wars doesn't have paid accounts they still want to keep people playing, so that we'll buy their expansions or upgrades or whatever.
You resurrect at a shrine in the same region, nothing is reset. Anything you've killed is dead. You get a temporary penalty to your stats and you go on.
Lets say that I ask you to climb a wall. You try to climb it, but fail and fall down. So I stap a 5lbs weight to you and ask you to try again. That weight isn't going to help. I understand the theory behind the penalty. Tt does what its supposed to do for missions. But its not good for the normal zones.
:(
...and boring as sin! Here is my offtopic rant on GW:
:(
The way that every single zone is an instance is Guild Wars is the worst feature of the game. For the first few days each player will be limited to grouping with 1-3 other people. That means you wont have any contact with more than a tiny, tiny handful of players during those crucial first days. And if you make one mistake during an instanced zone, and wipe out, you have to start back at a town. You can't just run back to your corpse and continue on. If the quest you're trying to complete is 3-4 zones away from a town, that means you have to slog through the same instanced zones, fully repopulated with the same, exact monsters, all over again.
Guild Wars is an interesting concept, and instances have their place within a great game. But an entire game of instances is not good eats.
Although the pvp in guild wars is interesting for awhile, getting to the point where you can create characters capable of winning takes quite a long time of grinding for the skills and runes. This grind is not nearly as interesting or entertaining as WoW or the other mmogs where you can grind with more than just a small handful of people, and a wipeout wont force you to slog through the same 3-7 zones worth of stuff.
I mean, really.... you don't hear many cancer victims blaming Satan for their illness
Thats because you have to be dead to be considered a victim of cancer.
:)
That is correct to say that they are not thieves because they do not steal my identity, only copy it. The appropriate term is fraud. The people are using fraudulent information (my identity) to take resources from the Government that is intended for me. Thus they are thieves because they take a finite resource, thus depriving me of it.
They do not steal my identity, but they steal my benefits.
I'm showing my niavete here, but.. whats the first one?
"You can whine all you want, but if they somehow allowed the re-use of the CD-Key, that would allow basically unlimited accounts out of one box."
Negative. If an account key is disassociated with an account, that account is then permanently blocked. Perhaps a single account key could be used to create an unlimited number of accounts, but it could only ever be used to play one at any given time. Thats what the true purpose of the key is for. One box, one account (at a time). Its bogus that account keys are being used to eliminate the first sale doctrine.