While the intended console port was a limiting factor, I think by far the biggest problem was their being made by Cryptic. In fact by the original guys who couldn't even do the maths to see that a "situational" power could be made to stack with itself twice over at level 22, in COH, or produced balance swings so extreme as to go from City Of Blasters (a devices blaster could floor any enemy's accuracy) to City Of Tankers (tanks became basically invulnerable even to hundreds of enemies at a time.) COH has in the meantime been mostly fixed by Positron (in as much as possible without pulling a Sony-style NGE and ripping out the existing game's core), but Statesman and a good chunk of the gang of innumerates responsible for the COH fuckups went on to make CO.
CO suffered from a lot of problems, from a badly thought out game system, to poor graphics, to just plain old barely enough content to even level you up. Cryptic basically aimed at developing it on a shoestring budget, and it really showed. I don't think it would have been a huge success even with a COH-like mouse and keyboard interface.
STO was largely the same deal. It was a game which took one of the biggest franchises in history and... aimed for a 20,000 player base. No, really, the budget was such that it was to be viable even if it failed badly. And as happens when you aim to suck so badly that only the worst fanboys stick with you, it did.
Again the game had plain old too little content, and worse yet, you could miss out on missions by just not being in the right quadrant when you ask, so you could easily end up seemingly with nothing more to do except grind randomly generated and not very interesting "exploration" missions until the next contact wants to talk to you.
To hammer on the impression of too little content, the game launched with exactly two factions, and one of them (the Klingons) didn't even have any content except doing (the STO equivalent of) battlegrounds all the time.
It also generally had plain old too little of everything, including character slots. (Everything more than 3 had to be bought with real cash.)
It also didn't help that the game was more of a merchandising exercise than aiming to tell its own story. You know, like putting Spock's face on a t-shirt, not because it makes it a better t-shirt, but just because lemmings will pay more for that.
And I'm not against a little merchandising for theme and flavour, but in STO it was badly done. The game insisted on shoving it down my throat all the time that this is where Riker used the Briar Patch like Bre'r Rabbit, this is the gang that Picard met on some date, etc. At some point I was afraid I'd one day go to the toilet and the game would inform me that I'm using the same urinal Riker did in some episode;)
In simpler terms, they didn't even remember the "show, don't tell" rule. They had to keep telling me how this connects with some episode or another from the series, and it got repetitive fast.
Etc.
Don't get me wrong, I really wanted to like both games, not the least because I'm kinda fed up with medieval fantasy games. Well, "fed up" is probably too strong a term: I have nothing against them per se, but I've already played plenty and some SF for a change is a nice change. But they both aimed very low
Dunno, it seems to me like when greed is good explanation, that's probably at least a good chunk of the real explanation.
Displays had been sold for an awfully long time by diagonal size, to the point where some people think that a 21" is a 21". In reality at the same diagonal, the closer to square it is, the bigger the surface, and the more wide format it is, the lesser the surface. It's only basic geometry.
For CRTs it didn't make much difference for the total cost, but for flat screen panels it does. Also because less surface means less pixels at the same pixel size, thus less transistors and incidentally less chance for bad pixels too.
So the biggest push for 16/10 displays was from manufacturers who figured they could sell more displays for the same materials, rather than for any real market demand. The market was basically mostly just dumb enough to think they're still getting a 21" so it's not like it's smaller or anything; and hey, it's a little cheaper too.
Now 16/9 happens for largely the same reason.
Mark my words, in a few years you'll see something like 256/81 screens.
If displays had been historically sold by megapixels like the cameras, we'd probably have square ones instead. But the measurement was made for CRTs which don't even really have a native resolution and are more limited by bandwidth instead. So inches was the simplest way to tell Joe Average what he's getting.
TBH, I very much doubt that they had agriculture yet, so that's probably not it. Still, I suppose it's also good for tracking when the next bird migration or whatever happens.
TBH I don't understand what's so incredible. I mean, it's interesting as history information, but it's not like it's some great knowledge. Humans 10,000 years ago were already the modern humans, and probably just as smart as most people here.
As I was saying in another post, there is a very simple way of marking where the sun sets for the solstices, because they're the extreme points left and right. Just moving a stone each evening until you found the rightmost point the sun sets, and a different stone for leftmost, will get you those two points pretty well. The third point is simply the middle of the segment, and something that you can measure even with your feet.
The whole thing is perfectly within the range of things human could figure out 10,000 or even 100,000 years ago.
They don't even have to understand such things as solstice or equinox. Pretty much you just need someone to figure out "hey, didn't the sun set behind the other bush some time ago?" And from there, if you're bored and have a year or two to look where it sets, you can mark pretty well how far north and how far south can the sun set.
I dunno, giving robots Internet access and assuming they achieve sentience and are just like the humans, somehow the image that comes to mind is more along the line of one day finding them browsing for robot porn. And probably half of them will have lost all interest in actually making more robots;)
It's not even really a sundial, as it doesn't actually tell the time. Not the least because it's facing West instead of South. So, you know, it would require a Sun that moves from North to South or viceversa instead of East to West, to tell you the hour.
What it is argued that it does is basically track the two extreme points where the sun sets, and the middle of that interval.
It's actually something pretty trivial to do. All you need is about a year and some movable stone. Each evening you stand in the designated spot and see if the sun sets a little to the left or to the right of where you left the marker point yesterday, and yell to some other guys to move it a little if so.
Think of it as the non-computer equivalent of, basically
if (x xMax) xMax = x;
If you have two stones that represent the xMin and xMax and move accordingly over a year, you end up with exactly the two ends of the interval marked. If you want to be sure, you repeat it over a couple more years.
Dude, that's Japan we're talking about. Making it hot there would involve tentacles or invisible penises. Well, with the recent news about invisibly cloaks at least the latter might soon be feasible;)
Nah, if they want to sell hot robots, they should cater to young horny nerds in the west. Some of us would have considered an Asimo with a fleshlight attached to be ultra-hot;)
Well, porn is information. You know, all that stream of ones and zeroes and whatnot? Well, that and without it a bunch of us would have no idea what a naked woman looks like. That's information, right?:p
They're not passing a law, they're making rule of employment. You want a job with us, you don't badmouth us. That's perfectly reasonable, whether a private or public employer. If an employee doesn't like it, they can quit. It's that simple.
So you're telling me that basically if the USSR or China or North Korea had made their censorship be just rules of employment, that would override any freedom of speech concerns? I mean, you couldn't even be employed other than by the state, or as member of some "association" (e.g., a kolkhoz) which was also run by the state and presumably also within its rights to set its membership rules.
It seems to me like forbidding someone from badmouthing the government or its representatives or decision is exactly what freedom of speech was supposed to prevent. Or at least how most of the world understands it.
Actually, I'd say that's entirely the wrong way to go about it.
The thing to remember is that ancient city states didn't work like Mythbusters. They didn't have to rely on just a squad of volunteers focusing one mirror at a time.
A city had tens of thousands of citizen-warriors which normally were eligible to put on armor and go out and form a phalanx. But in a siege, they were pretty much sitting around doing nothing much. Archimedes could have literally tens of thousands of people manning the mirrors, for free.
So the way I'd do it would be basically to get some thousands of people on the walls, and give each a mirror as his siege weapon. So we wouldn't be talking about keeping 100 mirrors on one ship, but literally as many as you can pack on the walls. Thousands.
And since each soldier only has one mirror to operate, full time, they can even track a moving ship.
From there it depends more on how you make them aim it. If they're just aiming a mirror and nobody can tell which spot is theirs, the accuracy is as good as none in a large group. If you have a good system that doesn't depend on guessing which spot moves when you move your window, it turns out that you can be pretty damned accurate.
Fortunately such a system has been shown to exist, and uses only simple geometry known at the time. You just need a flat mirror that's actually mirrored on both sides, and a hole in it. Preferably with a crosshair or some such, but if you're not going for accuracy even just a hole will do. You need it mirrored on both side so you can align it so simultaneously (A) you're seeing the enemy ship in the middle of the hole, and (B) you aligned the image of the spot of light coming through your hole with the hole.
At that point, if you had a perfectly flat mirror, you'd have your beam exactly on the enemy ship. With a more realistic metal surface available at the time, the usefulness would decrease with the distance.
But we're back to the point about having tens of thousands of people soldiers doing it for free. Even if one mirror at 1000 ft does diddly, ten thousand mirrors tracking the ship are a LOT of diddly.
So, yes, if you had a squad pointing 100 mirrors, yeah, at most you'd blind the crew. But if you had 1000 mirrors tracking the exact position of the ship, that would kill.
Especially remembering that in the end igniting wood is just an arbitrary point, but against humans you need far less to be deadly. I mean, sure, you need 300 Celsius or so to ignite wood. But even 100 Celsius will simply boil a human if they stay on that ship long enough, even if it doesn't ignite the wood.
Plus, as the recent pain ray experiments showed, at the point where your pain receptors say "burning", for the vast majority of people no amount of willpower will help. A hard reflex kicks in to get the hell out of its way at all cost. So put a big and hot enough blot of concentrated sunlight on that ship, and those guys could probably swear they're burning alive even if no actual flame happened. And jump into the sea.
Also if it helps, most trireme and quinquereme were not of cataphract (covered) design, or only partially. So when focusing sunlight from high above, a lot of people will be in its way, and, as I was saying, a lot more vulnerable than the wood.
Actually, I'd have to side your mom on this one particular case.
Don't get me wrong, technology is grrrreat for most other things, but I never understood WTH is the advantage of putting a computer on wheels instead of just teleconferencing. Be it for this kid, or that telecommuting guy who guides his "robot" avatar around the office to chat with people. The extra distraction of guiding a wheeled contraption around adds... exactly of value there? So the same people in high school who'd call one names just for having glasses or playing D&D get a chance to do that in front of a wheeled contraption following them around?
If you want him to get some social interaction over a computer screen and guiding one's virtual presence around the place, just get him WoW or whatever. No, I'm not saying it's an all around replacement for everyone, but if one is stuck in a room and must interact over a computer anyway, it beats putting a computer on wheels.
Yep. That was kinda what I was trying to say. The age of mental masturbation (i.e., snobbery) is what I was saying came later. The age of just masturbation was, of course, with us since the first hominid evolved opposable thumbs;)
Sometimes not even that. I wish I could say that all those sculptures and paintings of naked women were purely for aesthetic appreciation of the human body, but that really wasn't the case. Outside of church frescoes, most paintings fall into one of the categories of immortalizing oneself (portraits) or essentially softcore porn. All that was different is essentially the social contract that it's ok to look at naked women if you pretend it's a representation of Venus;)
The age of masturbating another part of your body, as you aptly put it, only came much later and is largely a recent phenomenon.
Kinda puts it in perspective, I think. I wouldn't be surprised if, assuming one could get cryogenically frozen until the year 3000 like in Futurama, in a future museum one would hear the guide going, "And to the left we have Larry Flint's unnamed recently-discovered masterpiece, which we tentatively call 'Venus with still life up the ass'";)
Hmm? I'm pretty sure that most games had an advantage if you can do at least some of those. Not all games are Grand Theft Auto.
Respect for other people on the road
I don't think any games teach one to respect some NPCs, but there can be as big a penalty as you wish for colliding into them.
Courteous driving
Again, maybe not "courtesy" as such, but you can learn that if you drive all over the place you're going to get rammed.
Attentiveness to road conditions and what others are doing.
Are you kidding? I'd like to know if a game even exists where it's not important to pay attention to what the others are doing. As for road conditions, heh, let's just say that if you think rain or snow are bad, in games like Death Track "road conditions" could include a landmine. Now that's one good reason to keep your eyes on the road.
Doing a defensive driving course that teaches you how long it *actually* takes to stop.
Most racing games have such stuff in the tutorial, if you care to take it. And some don't even let you get to the actual racing until you prove you can stop between two lines. E.g., I still remember getting annoyed at GT2 making me do that again when I got a corrupt savegame on the memory card and had to start again from scratch.
Well, maybe, for some and in some debates, it really is a way to throw some insult before doing the equivalent of slamming the door behind them. Still doesn't exactly say "the great thinker", but ok.
I'm hard pressed to see that in cases where some spelling troll swoops in on someone's first and (at the time) only message in a thread, and with it being not very deep at all in a particular discussion. A talk where the 4th message in the chain is already the spelling-troll post is hardly the kind of discussion that was long or drawn or exhausted the more relevant arguments already.
I doubt it. Those guys rarely seem to have the comprehension skills or interest in even discovering whether they actually agree with an argument or not. Point in case, in this sub-thread we're talking about one who was filing a typo under "terrible grammar", thus proving that he doesn't even know what "grammar" means. All he can do basically is tell if a common 4-letter word is typed right or wrong, i.e., something at the level of a primary school spelling bee. (Ever notice how they never trigger if you mis-spell some 20-letter word like "internationalization"?)
Basically, it looks to me more like spelling-trolling is actually an euphemism for:
"Hi, I'm a waste of sperm and have no other skills than spelling very simple words. Mommy used to praise me when I spelled some word right, or managed to tie my own shoelaces, or not piss myself when asked to introduce myself to one of mommy's friends. But now everyone seems to no longer think those are worth praising and expect me to actually be able to do stuff like logic or math or learn how to use some program or piece of machinery. They keep insisting that at 40 years old I should have achievements more like John who knows how to fix any car they bring to his shop, or Jack who's a renowned surgeon, or Jill who wrote a book about ancient Mesopotamia, and that the only one who can get praised for spelling at the level of an 8 year old is my 8-year old cousin, Susie. And I think it's sooo unfair and wrong that they care about such grown-up stuff more than about just being able to spell.
"I can't understand your actual point or reasoning, and TBH that's not what I came here for anyway. Nothing personal, but I just don't give a damn about that complicated stuff.
"I only came here looking to put someone down for a typo. So let me put you down for this word you mis-spelled, so I can feel smart for knowing how to spell it."
Well, I'm not denying your point 3. On the contrary, I'm just saying that one can accidentally end up being the best by a far margin on a server full of noobs, even while actually not being a particularly good player.
I mean, my experience with CS in ye olde days of it being a new-ish mod for HL1 includes such examples as:
- I start the computer one Saturday morning, log on to the first server on the list sorted by ping (I like it small, obviously) and land on a map where, it turns out, there were two people on the terrorist team happily carrying the bomb and nobody opposing them. But of course, I had no reason to know that, until I take a corner and literally bump into them.
Now I wasn't a great player anyway, and it's early in the morning and I'm just drinking my coffee, so really I was even slower than usual. It took me about a second to start shooting with the crappy TMP, which, frankly is worse reflexes than most complete newbies manage. An even mildly experienced player would have killed me 4 times over in that time.
It's also very much point blank range. When I say we bumped into each other, I really mean it literally. I'm close enough to one of the guys to give him a noogie, had the game allowed that.
Wouldn't you know, both start screaming that I'm cheating and using some kind of aimbot and wall-hack and whatnot. WTF? Why would I need an aimbot or wall hack to shoot someone in the head when I have my barrel pretty much up his nose and there is no wall anywhere near?
Eventually one of them discovers how to kick, and I fly off that server. Good riddance, didn't look like it would have been a good game anyway.
- Another day, another bunch of noobs, I land on a fairly full server, they're playing the, wossname, the map with a warehouse you have to get the hostages out of.
So after a couple of runs in which it becomes obvious that the whole T team is camping the back door and the air vent, I buy a sniper rifle and go on the bridge in front of the warehouse. Sure enough, half of them are stationary on both sides of the back door, waiting for someone to come through there. I proceed to vent their skulls. Then again next round, since obviously they hadn't learned anything.
It's not even some feat of accuracy and reflexes, since, basically they're sitting ducks and I have a scoped boomstick. I even take my time to aim carefully, because really there's nobody even looking in my direction.
You guessed, it becomes a chorus of "CHEATER!" "USES AIMBOTS!!!" and "WALL-HACK!!" Even after explaining to the idiots how they're visible and stationary and exactly from where, I get kicked off the server anyway. They apparently still didn't get that there _is_ half a map in the other direction, and thought that headshots from nowhere had to come through the back wall.
Good riddance I guess.
- Another day, another map, I notice that a couple of guys are basically camping at windows, but don't even have the good sense to swing to one side when ducking. They just go down and pop up in exactly the same pixel, and almost exactly.centered in the window at that.
In a game which allows shooting through walls, it doesn't take a genius to get the idea to shoot 5 inches below the window's lower edge.
You guessed, soon it's a chorus of accusations of using a wall hack. 'Cause obviously there couldn't possibly be another way to guess where they are behind that wall;)
Nope. Check out the great stand on the Ugra river. They really sat on the opposite banks while Ivan was negotiating for more support with his unruly boyars, while the Mongolians were hoping for some reinforcements that never arrived.
I'm not sure you understand the army. Actually judging by half the answers in the thread, lots of people seem to think it's like in their games.
Some 3-4 hours a day are a lot when you spend 8 hour at your day job, 2 hours commuting so you can live in the right fashionable suburb, and have to balance everything from dealing with the kids to getting the roof fixed in the rest of the time. That's when 3-4 hours a day to spend on gaming starts to be more time than you actually have.
When you're on some military base at the end of nowhere, and you live right there too, all those factors just don't apply. It's not like those guys spend 16 hours a day shooting at the enemy or standing in guard towers, because even all out war doesn't actually work that way. And also because nobody can resist such a program in the long term. Working 16 hour days is fine for a couple of weeks tops, then you start getting tired and making mistakes.
Even when you pulled guard duty, actually it doesn't mean camping at that post all day, but pretty much time slicing if I'm allowed a computer metaphor. You spend your time slice at your post, then have the next two time slices free. Even between sleeping, eating, polishing your boots and whatnot, there's one hell of a lot of time free.
And you're not supposed to check the kids' homework and get the dishwasher fixed and whatnot in that time either.
Playing 3-4 hours a day isn't going to cut down on your time actually doing your duties.
Also not the least because, well, your commanding officer isn't like the kind of permissive mommy who's totally not bothered if you skipped tidying your room to play games and expects the politicians to police her kids. Those guys _are_ those policing you there and seeing to it that you obey your orders to the letter.
Or to give another example of a conflict solved by, shall we say, less than martial means, take an insvasion of Russia by the Mongols, where the armies met on the opposite edges of a river, and with obviously neither having enough superiority to charge across the river. So after shouting various slurs and insults to the other for a couple of days, the Mongols, obviously having lost to the superior cussword vocabulary of the brave defenders from Muskowy, turned tail and went home.
Well, I guess the fact that the Russians had moved some kind of moving fort to threaten their flank may have also played a role, but that's not as funny;)
Well, now that you mention it, ways of solving conflict other than having thousands of people splattering each other's guts all over the landscape, have existed for most of human history. E.g., deciding who's right by single combat is attested from primitive tribes to the late middle ages. And sometimes even there some kind of contest of ability could be substituted for actual combat.
E.g., probably the funniest such case was when, if I remember that legend right, a minor dispute between Moldavia and Wallachia was settled by having one champion of each meet on a bridge on a border and try to best each other in a... wine drinking contest. So after a no doubt epic and thrilling match, eventually one of them slumped under the table and the other's country claimed victory. IIRC the winner got knighted or some such for his victory.
I can't see why we can't do the same with video games:p
1. Ideally you wouldn't do it like that at all, but have enough data transmitted and processed by the server to actually know WTH happened there.
E.g., if you have an MMO and do any money or item transfers in an atomic transaction on the server, then you just eliminated duping. And if you keep a log of who bought or transferred what, and suddenly an item appears that doesn't have such records, then you know some cheat was involved.
2. If someone did go with such statistical methods, they have the added disadvantage that
A) they don't account for flukes. As you probably know, having, say, 55% accuracy only means 55% in the very long run. Getting even 10 or 20 hits in a row is improbable but not impossible. When you have a million players shooting millions of rounds each, and more deaths per minute than at Kursk, one in a million odds will actually happen very often. You'll have several deaths a day which are the 20'th hit without a miss in a row.
B) being "that good" is actually a relative thing.
Someone who thinks they're that good against random newbies in random matches, may be completely pwned when they stumble on a major clan's server. I had exactly that nasty surprise myself in UT. You'd think I'd manage at least one frag there, but it was like skeet shooting with me being the clay pigeon;)
Conversely, someone who isn't even playing that good may stumble upon a bunch of complete noobs, and rake up a ridiculous score by simple virtue that accuracy against stationary targets is really that much better. I've had that kind of experience too.
Slashdot Mirror
While the intended console port was a limiting factor, I think by far the biggest problem was their being made by Cryptic. In fact by the original guys who couldn't even do the maths to see that a "situational" power could be made to stack with itself twice over at level 22, in COH, or produced balance swings so extreme as to go from City Of Blasters (a devices blaster could floor any enemy's accuracy) to City Of Tankers (tanks became basically invulnerable even to hundreds of enemies at a time.) COH has in the meantime been mostly fixed by Positron (in as much as possible without pulling a Sony-style NGE and ripping out the existing game's core), but Statesman and a good chunk of the gang of innumerates responsible for the COH fuckups went on to make CO.
CO suffered from a lot of problems, from a badly thought out game system, to poor graphics, to just plain old barely enough content to even level you up. Cryptic basically aimed at developing it on a shoestring budget, and it really showed. I don't think it would have been a huge success even with a COH-like mouse and keyboard interface.
STO was largely the same deal. It was a game which took one of the biggest franchises in history and... aimed for a 20,000 player base. No, really, the budget was such that it was to be viable even if it failed badly. And as happens when you aim to suck so badly that only the worst fanboys stick with you, it did.
Again the game had plain old too little content, and worse yet, you could miss out on missions by just not being in the right quadrant when you ask, so you could easily end up seemingly with nothing more to do except grind randomly generated and not very interesting "exploration" missions until the next contact wants to talk to you.
To hammer on the impression of too little content, the game launched with exactly two factions, and one of them (the Klingons) didn't even have any content except doing (the STO equivalent of) battlegrounds all the time.
It also generally had plain old too little of everything, including character slots. (Everything more than 3 had to be bought with real cash.)
It also didn't help that the game was more of a merchandising exercise than aiming to tell its own story. You know, like putting Spock's face on a t-shirt, not because it makes it a better t-shirt, but just because lemmings will pay more for that.
And I'm not against a little merchandising for theme and flavour, but in STO it was badly done. The game insisted on shoving it down my throat all the time that this is where Riker used the Briar Patch like Bre'r Rabbit, this is the gang that Picard met on some date, etc. At some point I was afraid I'd one day go to the toilet and the game would inform me that I'm using the same urinal Riker did in some episode ;)
In simpler terms, they didn't even remember the "show, don't tell" rule. They had to keep telling me how this connects with some episode or another from the series, and it got repetitive fast.
Etc.
Don't get me wrong, I really wanted to like both games, not the least because I'm kinda fed up with medieval fantasy games. Well, "fed up" is probably too strong a term: I have nothing against them per se, but I've already played plenty and some SF for a change is a nice change. But they both aimed very low
Dunno, it seems to me like when greed is good explanation, that's probably at least a good chunk of the real explanation.
Displays had been sold for an awfully long time by diagonal size, to the point where some people think that a 21" is a 21". In reality at the same diagonal, the closer to square it is, the bigger the surface, and the more wide format it is, the lesser the surface. It's only basic geometry.
For CRTs it didn't make much difference for the total cost, but for flat screen panels it does. Also because less surface means less pixels at the same pixel size, thus less transistors and incidentally less chance for bad pixels too.
So the biggest push for 16/10 displays was from manufacturers who figured they could sell more displays for the same materials, rather than for any real market demand. The market was basically mostly just dumb enough to think they're still getting a 21" so it's not like it's smaller or anything; and hey, it's a little cheaper too.
Now 16/9 happens for largely the same reason.
Mark my words, in a few years you'll see something like 256/81 screens.
If displays had been historically sold by megapixels like the cameras, we'd probably have square ones instead. But the measurement was made for CRTs which don't even really have a native resolution and are more limited by bandwidth instead. So inches was the simplest way to tell Joe Average what he's getting.
TBH, I very much doubt that they had agriculture yet, so that's probably not it. Still, I suppose it's also good for tracking when the next bird migration or whatever happens.
Curiosity? They were human after all, and it really isn't much more effort than a couple of minutes a day at sunset.
Some kind of sun cult? It tends to be a major spirit for people.
TBH I don't understand what's so incredible. I mean, it's interesting as history information, but it's not like it's some great knowledge. Humans 10,000 years ago were already the modern humans, and probably just as smart as most people here.
As I was saying in another post, there is a very simple way of marking where the sun sets for the solstices, because they're the extreme points left and right. Just moving a stone each evening until you found the rightmost point the sun sets, and a different stone for leftmost, will get you those two points pretty well. The third point is simply the middle of the segment, and something that you can measure even with your feet.
The whole thing is perfectly within the range of things human could figure out 10,000 or even 100,000 years ago.
They don't even have to understand such things as solstice or equinox. Pretty much you just need someone to figure out "hey, didn't the sun set behind the other bush some time ago?" And from there, if you're bored and have a year or two to look where it sets, you can mark pretty well how far north and how far south can the sun set.
I dunno, giving robots Internet access and assuming they achieve sentience and are just like the humans, somehow the image that comes to mind is more along the line of one day finding them browsing for robot porn. And probably half of them will have lost all interest in actually making more robots ;)
Actually, European, but point taken. I've only seen the sun in the South at noon for as far as I lived, so, yeah, it's a bit of a reflex.
It's not even really a sundial, as it doesn't actually tell the time. Not the least because it's facing West instead of South. So, you know, it would require a Sun that moves from North to South or viceversa instead of East to West, to tell you the hour.
What it is argued that it does is basically track the two extreme points where the sun sets, and the middle of that interval.
It's actually something pretty trivial to do. All you need is about a year and some movable stone. Each evening you stand in the designated spot and see if the sun sets a little to the left or to the right of where you left the marker point yesterday, and yell to some other guys to move it a little if so.
Think of it as the non-computer equivalent of, basically
if (x xMax) xMax = x;
If you have two stones that represent the xMin and xMax and move accordingly over a year, you end up with exactly the two ends of the interval marked. If you want to be sure, you repeat it over a couple more years.
Dude, that's Japan we're talking about. Making it hot there would involve tentacles or invisible penises. Well, with the recent news about invisibly cloaks at least the latter might soon be feasible ;)
Nah, if they want to sell hot robots, they should cater to young horny nerds in the west. Some of us would have considered an Asimo with a fleshlight attached to be ultra-hot ;)
Well, porn is information. You know, all that stream of ones and zeroes and whatnot? Well, that and without it a bunch of us would have no idea what a naked woman looks like. That's information, right? :p
No, I don't mean the Smirnoff joke meme.
So you're telling me that basically if the USSR or China or North Korea had made their censorship be just rules of employment, that would override any freedom of speech concerns? I mean, you couldn't even be employed other than by the state, or as member of some "association" (e.g., a kolkhoz) which was also run by the state and presumably also within its rights to set its membership rules.
It seems to me like forbidding someone from badmouthing the government or its representatives or decision is exactly what freedom of speech was supposed to prevent. Or at least how most of the world understands it.
Actually, I'd say that's entirely the wrong way to go about it.
The thing to remember is that ancient city states didn't work like Mythbusters. They didn't have to rely on just a squad of volunteers focusing one mirror at a time.
A city had tens of thousands of citizen-warriors which normally were eligible to put on armor and go out and form a phalanx. But in a siege, they were pretty much sitting around doing nothing much. Archimedes could have literally tens of thousands of people manning the mirrors, for free.
So the way I'd do it would be basically to get some thousands of people on the walls, and give each a mirror as his siege weapon. So we wouldn't be talking about keeping 100 mirrors on one ship, but literally as many as you can pack on the walls. Thousands.
And since each soldier only has one mirror to operate, full time, they can even track a moving ship.
From there it depends more on how you make them aim it. If they're just aiming a mirror and nobody can tell which spot is theirs, the accuracy is as good as none in a large group. If you have a good system that doesn't depend on guessing which spot moves when you move your window, it turns out that you can be pretty damned accurate.
Fortunately such a system has been shown to exist, and uses only simple geometry known at the time. You just need a flat mirror that's actually mirrored on both sides, and a hole in it. Preferably with a crosshair or some such, but if you're not going for accuracy even just a hole will do. You need it mirrored on both side so you can align it so simultaneously (A) you're seeing the enemy ship in the middle of the hole, and (B) you aligned the image of the spot of light coming through your hole with the hole.
At that point, if you had a perfectly flat mirror, you'd have your beam exactly on the enemy ship. With a more realistic metal surface available at the time, the usefulness would decrease with the distance.
But we're back to the point about having tens of thousands of people soldiers doing it for free. Even if one mirror at 1000 ft does diddly, ten thousand mirrors tracking the ship are a LOT of diddly.
So, yes, if you had a squad pointing 100 mirrors, yeah, at most you'd blind the crew. But if you had 1000 mirrors tracking the exact position of the ship, that would kill.
Especially remembering that in the end igniting wood is just an arbitrary point, but against humans you need far less to be deadly. I mean, sure, you need 300 Celsius or so to ignite wood. But even 100 Celsius will simply boil a human if they stay on that ship long enough, even if it doesn't ignite the wood.
Plus, as the recent pain ray experiments showed, at the point where your pain receptors say "burning", for the vast majority of people no amount of willpower will help. A hard reflex kicks in to get the hell out of its way at all cost. So put a big and hot enough blot of concentrated sunlight on that ship, and those guys could probably swear they're burning alive even if no actual flame happened. And jump into the sea.
Also if it helps, most trireme and quinquereme were not of cataphract (covered) design, or only partially. So when focusing sunlight from high above, a lot of people will be in its way, and, as I was saying, a lot more vulnerable than the wood.
Actually, I'd have to side your mom on this one particular case.
Don't get me wrong, technology is grrrreat for most other things, but I never understood WTH is the advantage of putting a computer on wheels instead of just teleconferencing. Be it for this kid, or that telecommuting guy who guides his "robot" avatar around the office to chat with people. The extra distraction of guiding a wheeled contraption around adds... exactly of value there? So the same people in high school who'd call one names just for having glasses or playing D&D get a chance to do that in front of a wheeled contraption following them around?
If you want him to get some social interaction over a computer screen and guiding one's virtual presence around the place, just get him WoW or whatever. No, I'm not saying it's an all around replacement for everyone, but if one is stuck in a room and must interact over a computer anyway, it beats putting a computer on wheels.
Yep. That was kinda what I was trying to say. The age of mental masturbation (i.e., snobbery) is what I was saying came later. The age of just masturbation was, of course, with us since the first hominid evolved opposable thumbs ;)
I'm waiting for Google Brothel ;)
Sometimes not even that. I wish I could say that all those sculptures and paintings of naked women were purely for aesthetic appreciation of the human body, but that really wasn't the case. Outside of church frescoes, most paintings fall into one of the categories of immortalizing oneself (portraits) or essentially softcore porn. All that was different is essentially the social contract that it's ok to look at naked women if you pretend it's a representation of Venus ;)
The age of masturbating another part of your body, as you aptly put it, only came much later and is largely a recent phenomenon.
Kinda puts it in perspective, I think. I wouldn't be surprised if, assuming one could get cryogenically frozen until the year 3000 like in Futurama, in a future museum one would hear the guide going, "And to the left we have Larry Flint's unnamed recently-discovered masterpiece, which we tentatively call 'Venus with still life up the ass'" ;)
Hmm? I'm pretty sure that most games had an advantage if you can do at least some of those. Not all games are Grand Theft Auto.
I don't think any games teach one to respect some NPCs, but there can be as big a penalty as you wish for colliding into them.
Again, maybe not "courtesy" as such, but you can learn that if you drive all over the place you're going to get rammed.
Are you kidding? I'd like to know if a game even exists where it's not important to pay attention to what the others are doing. As for road conditions, heh, let's just say that if you think rain or snow are bad, in games like Death Track "road conditions" could include a landmine. Now that's one good reason to keep your eyes on the road.
Most racing games have such stuff in the tutorial, if you care to take it. And some don't even let you get to the actual racing until you prove you can stop between two lines. E.g., I still remember getting annoyed at GT2 making me do that again when I got a corrupt savegame on the memory card and had to start again from scratch.
Well, maybe, for some and in some debates, it really is a way to throw some insult before doing the equivalent of slamming the door behind them. Still doesn't exactly say "the great thinker", but ok.
I'm hard pressed to see that in cases where some spelling troll swoops in on someone's first and (at the time) only message in a thread, and with it being not very deep at all in a particular discussion. A talk where the 4th message in the chain is already the spelling-troll post is hardly the kind of discussion that was long or drawn or exhausted the more relevant arguments already.
I doubt it. Those guys rarely seem to have the comprehension skills or interest in even discovering whether they actually agree with an argument or not. Point in case, in this sub-thread we're talking about one who was filing a typo under "terrible grammar", thus proving that he doesn't even know what "grammar" means. All he can do basically is tell if a common 4-letter word is typed right or wrong, i.e., something at the level of a primary school spelling bee. (Ever notice how they never trigger if you mis-spell some 20-letter word like "internationalization"?)
Basically, it looks to me more like spelling-trolling is actually an euphemism for:
"Hi, I'm a waste of sperm and have no other skills than spelling very simple words. Mommy used to praise me when I spelled some word right, or managed to tie my own shoelaces, or not piss myself when asked to introduce myself to one of mommy's friends. But now everyone seems to no longer think those are worth praising and expect me to actually be able to do stuff like logic or math or learn how to use some program or piece of machinery. They keep insisting that at 40 years old I should have achievements more like John who knows how to fix any car they bring to his shop, or Jack who's a renowned surgeon, or Jill who wrote a book about ancient Mesopotamia, and that the only one who can get praised for spelling at the level of an 8 year old is my 8-year old cousin, Susie. And I think it's sooo unfair and wrong that they care about such grown-up stuff more than about just being able to spell.
"I can't understand your actual point or reasoning, and TBH that's not what I came here for anyway. Nothing personal, but I just don't give a damn about that complicated stuff.
"I only came here looking to put someone down for a typo. So let me put you down for this word you mis-spelled, so I can feel smart for knowing how to spell it."
Well, I'm not denying your point 3. On the contrary, I'm just saying that one can accidentally end up being the best by a far margin on a server full of noobs, even while actually not being a particularly good player.
I mean, my experience with CS in ye olde days of it being a new-ish mod for HL1 includes such examples as:
- I start the computer one Saturday morning, log on to the first server on the list sorted by ping (I like it small, obviously) and land on a map where, it turns out, there were two people on the terrorist team happily carrying the bomb and nobody opposing them. But of course, I had no reason to know that, until I take a corner and literally bump into them.
Now I wasn't a great player anyway, and it's early in the morning and I'm just drinking my coffee, so really I was even slower than usual. It took me about a second to start shooting with the crappy TMP, which, frankly is worse reflexes than most complete newbies manage. An even mildly experienced player would have killed me 4 times over in that time.
It's also very much point blank range. When I say we bumped into each other, I really mean it literally. I'm close enough to one of the guys to give him a noogie, had the game allowed that.
Wouldn't you know, both start screaming that I'm cheating and using some kind of aimbot and wall-hack and whatnot. WTF? Why would I need an aimbot or wall hack to shoot someone in the head when I have my barrel pretty much up his nose and there is no wall anywhere near?
Eventually one of them discovers how to kick, and I fly off that server. Good riddance, didn't look like it would have been a good game anyway.
- Another day, another bunch of noobs, I land on a fairly full server, they're playing the, wossname, the map with a warehouse you have to get the hostages out of.
So after a couple of runs in which it becomes obvious that the whole T team is camping the back door and the air vent, I buy a sniper rifle and go on the bridge in front of the warehouse. Sure enough, half of them are stationary on both sides of the back door, waiting for someone to come through there. I proceed to vent their skulls. Then again next round, since obviously they hadn't learned anything.
It's not even some feat of accuracy and reflexes, since, basically they're sitting ducks and I have a scoped boomstick. I even take my time to aim carefully, because really there's nobody even looking in my direction.
You guessed, it becomes a chorus of "CHEATER!" "USES AIMBOTS!!!" and "WALL-HACK!!" Even after explaining to the idiots how they're visible and stationary and exactly from where, I get kicked off the server anyway. They apparently still didn't get that there _is_ half a map in the other direction, and thought that headshots from nowhere had to come through the back wall.
Good riddance I guess.
- Another day, another map, I notice that a couple of guys are basically camping at windows, but don't even have the good sense to swing to one side when ducking. They just go down and pop up in exactly the same pixel, and almost exactly.centered in the window at that.
In a game which allows shooting through walls, it doesn't take a genius to get the idea to shoot 5 inches below the window's lower edge.
You guessed, soon it's a chorus of accusations of using a wall hack. 'Cause obviously there couldn't possibly be another way to guess where they are behind that wall ;)
Nope. Check out the great stand on the Ugra river. They really sat on the opposite banks while Ivan was negotiating for more support with his unruly boyars, while the Mongolians were hoping for some reinforcements that never arrived.
I'm not sure you understand the army. Actually judging by half the answers in the thread, lots of people seem to think it's like in their games.
Some 3-4 hours a day are a lot when you spend 8 hour at your day job, 2 hours commuting so you can live in the right fashionable suburb, and have to balance everything from dealing with the kids to getting the roof fixed in the rest of the time. That's when 3-4 hours a day to spend on gaming starts to be more time than you actually have.
When you're on some military base at the end of nowhere, and you live right there too, all those factors just don't apply. It's not like those guys spend 16 hours a day shooting at the enemy or standing in guard towers, because even all out war doesn't actually work that way. And also because nobody can resist such a program in the long term. Working 16 hour days is fine for a couple of weeks tops, then you start getting tired and making mistakes.
Even when you pulled guard duty, actually it doesn't mean camping at that post all day, but pretty much time slicing if I'm allowed a computer metaphor. You spend your time slice at your post, then have the next two time slices free. Even between sleeping, eating, polishing your boots and whatnot, there's one hell of a lot of time free.
And you're not supposed to check the kids' homework and get the dishwasher fixed and whatnot in that time either.
Playing 3-4 hours a day isn't going to cut down on your time actually doing your duties.
Also not the least because, well, your commanding officer isn't like the kind of permissive mommy who's totally not bothered if you skipped tidying your room to play games and expects the politicians to police her kids. Those guys _are_ those policing you there and seeing to it that you obey your orders to the letter.
Or to give another example of a conflict solved by, shall we say, less than martial means, take an insvasion of Russia by the Mongols, where the armies met on the opposite edges of a river, and with obviously neither having enough superiority to charge across the river. So after shouting various slurs and insults to the other for a couple of days, the Mongols, obviously having lost to the superior cussword vocabulary of the brave defenders from Muskowy, turned tail and went home.
Well, I guess the fact that the Russians had moved some kind of moving fort to threaten their flank may have also played a role, but that's not as funny ;)
Well, now that you mention it, ways of solving conflict other than having thousands of people splattering each other's guts all over the landscape, have existed for most of human history. E.g., deciding who's right by single combat is attested from primitive tribes to the late middle ages. And sometimes even there some kind of contest of ability could be substituted for actual combat.
E.g., probably the funniest such case was when, if I remember that legend right, a minor dispute between Moldavia and Wallachia was settled by having one champion of each meet on a bridge on a border and try to best each other in a... wine drinking contest. So after a no doubt epic and thrilling match, eventually one of them slumped under the table and the other's country claimed victory. IIRC the winner got knighted or some such for his victory.
I can't see why we can't do the same with video games :p
1. Ideally you wouldn't do it like that at all, but have enough data transmitted and processed by the server to actually know WTH happened there.
E.g., if you have an MMO and do any money or item transfers in an atomic transaction on the server, then you just eliminated duping. And if you keep a log of who bought or transferred what, and suddenly an item appears that doesn't have such records, then you know some cheat was involved.
2. If someone did go with such statistical methods, they have the added disadvantage that
A) they don't account for flukes. As you probably know, having, say, 55% accuracy only means 55% in the very long run. Getting even 10 or 20 hits in a row is improbable but not impossible. When you have a million players shooting millions of rounds each, and more deaths per minute than at Kursk, one in a million odds will actually happen very often. You'll have several deaths a day which are the 20'th hit without a miss in a row.
B) being "that good" is actually a relative thing.
Someone who thinks they're that good against random newbies in random matches, may be completely pwned when they stumble on a major clan's server. I had exactly that nasty surprise myself in UT. You'd think I'd manage at least one frag there, but it was like skeet shooting with me being the clay pigeon ;)
Conversely, someone who isn't even playing that good may stumble upon a bunch of complete noobs, and rake up a ridiculous score by simple virtue that accuracy against stationary targets is really that much better. I've had that kind of experience too.