Which game(s) did you play? I tend to follow FPS so I might know who you are:)
Hasn't much of pro gaming tended to stick with old standards though? Pro CS players stuck with 1.6 and didn't move up to Source due to changes in weapon mechanics, Quake 3 players seem to have flirted a bit with Q4 before moving back to Q3 (Quake Live seems to have managed to take over though, by virtue of basically still being Q3, CPMA holdouts aside), Starcraft players stuck with Starcraft even when newer and shinier RTSs came out, and it doesn't look like SC2 is going to be a worthy successor for tournament play (I have read complaints from people who have organized tournaments in the beta that it is far more of a PITA than organizing a tourny for SC1 due to features that blizzard left out of bnet 2.0).
If being a professional gamer were easy, it wouldn't take locking yourself in a room and practicing all day every day to get good enough to be a professional gamer. The highest levels of video gaming are just as competitive as the highest levels of any physical sport you can name. Being good enough to compete at that level is just as rare as being able to hit a major league fastball.
And i you want to to make a moving picture, you're gonna have to settle with even lesser amounts of light per frame/photo per unit area,
Actually, when shooting motion pictures on film, the typical shutter speed is 1/48th of a second to provide proper motion blur, while that shutter speed is considered fairly long by still photography standards. You can get away with shooting movies with a lot less light than a still photographer is going to be able to get away with.
Because an idea is not property, it is an arrangement of neurons in your head. If one person takes a piece of property, he deprives everyone else of the use of that property... However, the same idea can exist simultaneously in every single mind in existence, and no person is deprived of the ability to hold that idea in their head by the fact that someone else is also holding that idea in their head. The natural, default state of an idea is that it is freely available to *everyone*.
However, we recognize that certain people have ideas that most people couldn't have by themselves. In general, these ideas are useful to society, so we want these people to keep having them. In order to free these people from the distraction of having to earn a living by conventional means and allow them to spend all of their time coming up with more of their ideas, we create a mechanism by which people can profit from them... A completely artificial concept of imaginary property. We allow these people to be the only ones who may use their idea for profit for enough time to keep checks in their mailbox till they come up with their next idea. After this time passes, the idea reverts to its default state of being available to everyone.
The reality is, when you come up with a creative work, you do the original work of creating it *once.* Most people have to work continuously to earn a continuous living. What gives a creative person the right to earn a perpetual living off of a single act of creation?
Uhh, because I don't need to charge a board game? And so that if my board game runs out of batteries I still have a usable phone? And because a physical board game can be larger than an iPad so everyone doesn't have to crowd around it? There are countless reasons.
If there's anything that an education will teach you, it's that it's really easy to convince idiots of anything you want them to believe so that you can sell them things.
If they actually found it in the trash (the gggp never states if it was actually found) then you're just copying words off the sheet... I did data entry for a few months, you can just turn off your brain and let your fingers do the thinking.
I did something similar, though it didn't turn out as well for me... I was constantly teased and harassed in elementary and middle school, to the point where I couldn't make friends because honestly believed that anyone making any friendly gesture toward me must have had some ulterior motive, possibly trying to set me up for some kind of embarassment. Yes, it was that bad. Suffice it to say I did not end up a happy well-adjusted human being later in life... If I were the litigious type I could probably be sitting on a fat settlement from the school districts for letting this happen; despite repeatedly pleading with my teachers to do something about it, it was simply not recognized that "mere" verbal harassment could possibly hurt anyone. Anyway, one day in PE I boiled over and brought the padlock that was in my hand down on the head of the guy who was harassing me. Sent him to the hospital for stitches, I was suspended a couple weeks and put on probation through the juvenile court system for a year. When I came back from the suspension, the harassment continued... And I was even teased about the incident itself. Yeeeaahhh..
The problem is that this requires simultaneous cooperation from everybody at once, and you're also relying on application developers to not give themselves more priority than they really need.
You don't need double the data rate for two eyes, all you need to do (and what the 3D bluray standard does) is take a regular old video stream for the left eye (or right eye, doesn't really matter) and encode the difference between the left and right eye into a second stream. This second stream will require FAR less bandwidth than the regular stream since the left and right eye streams are so highly correlated.
Even if you can hear pure sine waves above 22khz, most things that people actually listen to are a complex mess of frequencies. In content that people actually listen to it is difficult to pick up frequencies above even 16 khz or so, even if you can normally hear a dog whistle.
All you're saying is that Apple integrated open platforms and standards into their own products. That doesn't make it an open platform. Call me when I can buy a bunch of parts from NewEgg and install MacOS on them without breaking any laws or having to hack anything.
Your idea of what "capitalism" means is rather warped. I suggest re-taking Economics 101, because capitalism does not imply a completely free market, a perfectly informed consumer or any of the other things you seem to think it does. All that capitalism implies is ownership of resources and the ability to trade them. Under this model, people will generally try to end up controlling as much of the resources as possible. Moving over into Game Theory 101, if the expected value of engaging in anti-competitive practices is higher than the expected value of not doing so, then people will tend to engage in anti-competitive practices regardless of whether you think they should or not.
I honestly don't see why having to grind through 80 levels just to try out a different character build that may or may not actually work should be necessary. Giving players the ability to try out a few different builds in a private server can only increase the level of competition, it's not cheating, it's training. Real-life athletes spend countless hours off the field practicing what they do for every hour they spend actually doing it on the field.
That said, I don't really see a market for mass spectator competition with MMO PvP. It's incredibly hard to follow for anyone not familiar with the game. The only thing that's particularly meaningful to a non-player watching a WoW session are the animations showing the characters making attacks and casting spells and the numbers that flash up to show damage, the actual *interesting* parts of the game are hidden behind a wall of dense lingo. I can explain most real-life sports well enough for a layman to be able to understand what they're watching in just a few minutes. I *live* with a bunch of WoW players and I couldn't tell you what's going on in a PvP matchup beyond the most superficial details. If e-Sports are going to take off in any spectator capacity, it's going to be in a game where the basic mechanics are much more visible and intuitive.
PvP in MMOs isn't entirely unskillful, it's just more about what decisions you make with your character build and your choices of character skills to use during the fight than your ability to manipulate the controls. I agree with your basic point that there is a higher skill ceiling inherent in a game which requires practice to master the basic mechanics (I'm a gigantic fan of Quake and would rather watch a duel in there than WoW PvP any day), but basing the skill of a game more around decision-making than physical dexterity doesn't make the game unskillful... I mean, just look at chess.
That said, the fact that 99% of what goes into winning a fight happens in the weeks and months spent leveling your character and gearing him up rather than during the fight itself makes for a terrible game for me. Make a bad choice at level 5 and only realize it when your level 80 isn't as strong as he should be? Too bad, have fun being level 1 again. Haven't spent a million years looking for the +5 Random Drop of Smiting? Too bad, even with an identical build you're still at a disadvantage. If the game allowed you to try out different builds without starting over, or balanced the skill tree so that just about any build had similar potential, and eliminated the artificial scarcity of powerful gear it'd be a much more compelling game to me. Likelihood of that happening? Well, considering that this is Blizzard's entire business model, not very high.
Non-commercial flights have the option of flying under Visual Flight Rules (aka VFR), in which case they are not required to be in radio contact with anybody except while flying in the airspace around towered airports. You can fly through 99% of the country under VFR, and you'll only ever have to key your radio at the start and end of your trip to either talk to a tower or on the traffic advisory frequency at an un-towered airport. Also with ADS-B anyone with a receiver can plug it into their computer and leave it running, record a bunch of flights, and correlate the codes with airplane owners fairly automatically. Much harder to do than with just voice communications. It's akin to the difference between sitting by the side of the road writing down license plate numbers and putting up a camera with OCR software.
IANA Air Traffic Controller, but I am studying to be one.
The radar technology used by air traffic controls is from the 50's.
If by this you mean "the basic technology was invented in the 1950s," then sure. If you know of a better general-purpose way to find out where things are in the sky than to bounce radio waves off of them, I'd like to hear it. That said, the systems which process and display radar data however have received several updates since the 50s.
No GPS...
Are you referring to ADS-B? It's a system which allows planes to broadcast their GPS position back to ATC as part of their transponder echo. It works *in *conjunction* with existing radar technology, not as a replacement. In any case, implementation of ADS-B in the US is already underway and is scheduled to be completed by 2013. The entire east coast, parts of the upper midwest and areas in the northwest are already covered.
The major concern of ADS-B is that is is susceptible to hacking (you can broadcast your own "phantom" aircraft if you know the standard) and reduces the anonymity of private and business aircraft users (every ADS-B transponder broadcasts a code that uniquely identifies an individual aircraft).
Planes are still tracked by little "physical" slips of paper.
All of the information contained on the flight progress strips is available on the air traffic controller's console, the strips just serve as a backup system in case of radar or computer failure. They're hardly necessary for actual operations. Some centers have computerized the strips but it's actually less efficient. It's easier to look over at the strip bay and mark it up with pencil than to bring up the computerized equivalent and enter data into it. It's the old "NASA Space Pen" vs "Russian Pencil" problem, sometimes low-tech just works better.
Planes still use land based radio towers - waste tons of fuel due to indirect routes.
The airways are based on the locations of radio navigation beacons, but the planes don't use the airways because they need the beacons to navigate, in fact GPS is effective enough that many of the currently existing beacons will not be replaced at the end of their service life. The airways are used to create a more orderly flow of traffic which is easier and safer for controllers to manage. That said, controllers will often allow aircraft to skip segments of their flight plans and fly more direct routes as workload permits.
That all sounds like a bunch of work to prop up a business model that simply doesn't make sense anymore. Different billing for voice and data made sense when voice and data were legitimately different types of data, but here in the magical fantasy future year of 2009, a kilobyte of voice takes exactly the same effort to deliver as a kilobyte of data. Stop overcomplicating your business and just charge me by the fucking kilobyte already.
Heck, I had a TI-89 which could actually *do* algebra and calculus. Solve for any variable, find limits, do derivatives and integrals etc. Of course, it didn't show its work which made it rather less useful on tests and homework, but at least I could start with the answer and try to figure out the process to reach it. =D
I think it's more likely that police don't get into as many accidents because when a cop shows up, all of the attention is on them and everybody around them starts driving veeery carefully to avoid doing something that will get them a ticket. I've seen officers using their in-car laptops in ways that took their attention off the road in the same way that text messaging takes your attention off the road.
Slashdot Mirror
Which game(s) did you play? I tend to follow FPS so I might know who you are :)
Hasn't much of pro gaming tended to stick with old standards though? Pro CS players stuck with 1.6 and didn't move up to Source due to changes in weapon mechanics, Quake 3 players seem to have flirted a bit with Q4 before moving back to Q3 (Quake Live seems to have managed to take over though, by virtue of basically still being Q3, CPMA holdouts aside), Starcraft players stuck with Starcraft even when newer and shinier RTSs came out, and it doesn't look like SC2 is going to be a worthy successor for tournament play (I have read complaints from people who have organized tournaments in the beta that it is far more of a PITA than organizing a tourny for SC1 due to features that blizzard left out of bnet 2.0).
If being a professional gamer were easy, it wouldn't take locking yourself in a room and practicing all day every day to get good enough to be a professional gamer. The highest levels of video gaming are just as competitive as the highest levels of any physical sport you can name. Being good enough to compete at that level is just as rare as being able to hit a major league fastball.
*whoosh*
And i you want to to make a moving picture, you're gonna have to settle with even lesser amounts of light per frame/photo per unit area,
Actually, when shooting motion pictures on film, the typical shutter speed is 1/48th of a second to provide proper motion blur, while that shutter speed is considered fairly long by still photography standards. You can get away with shooting movies with a lot less light than a still photographer is going to be able to get away with.
Because an idea is not property, it is an arrangement of neurons in your head. If one person takes a piece of property, he deprives everyone else of the use of that property... However, the same idea can exist simultaneously in every single mind in existence, and no person is deprived of the ability to hold that idea in their head by the fact that someone else is also holding that idea in their head. The natural, default state of an idea is that it is freely available to *everyone*.
However, we recognize that certain people have ideas that most people couldn't have by themselves. In general, these ideas are useful to society, so we want these people to keep having them. In order to free these people from the distraction of having to earn a living by conventional means and allow them to spend all of their time coming up with more of their ideas, we create a mechanism by which people can profit from them... A completely artificial concept of imaginary property. We allow these people to be the only ones who may use their idea for profit for enough time to keep checks in their mailbox till they come up with their next idea. After this time passes, the idea reverts to its default state of being available to everyone.
The reality is, when you come up with a creative work, you do the original work of creating it *once.* Most people have to work continuously to earn a continuous living. What gives a creative person the right to earn a perpetual living off of a single act of creation?
Uhh, because I don't need to charge a board game? And so that if my board game runs out of batteries I still have a usable phone? And because a physical board game can be larger than an iPad so everyone doesn't have to crowd around it? There are countless reasons.
If there's anything that an education will teach you, it's that it's really easy to convince idiots of anything you want them to believe so that you can sell them things.
If they actually found it in the trash (the gggp never states if it was actually found) then you're just copying words off the sheet... I did data entry for a few months, you can just turn off your brain and let your fingers do the thinking.
You can do it in 8 hours if you can type 100 words/minute, which isn't a terribly rare skill.
I did something similar, though it didn't turn out as well for me... I was constantly teased and harassed in elementary and middle school, to the point where I couldn't make friends because honestly believed that anyone making any friendly gesture toward me must have had some ulterior motive, possibly trying to set me up for some kind of embarassment. Yes, it was that bad. Suffice it to say I did not end up a happy well-adjusted human being later in life... If I were the litigious type I could probably be sitting on a fat settlement from the school districts for letting this happen; despite repeatedly pleading with my teachers to do something about it, it was simply not recognized that "mere" verbal harassment could possibly hurt anyone. Anyway, one day in PE I boiled over and brought the padlock that was in my hand down on the head of the guy who was harassing me. Sent him to the hospital for stitches, I was suspended a couple weeks and put on probation through the juvenile court system for a year. When I came back from the suspension, the harassment continued... And I was even teased about the incident itself. Yeeeaahhh..
The problem is that this requires simultaneous cooperation from everybody at once, and you're also relying on application developers to not give themselves more priority than they really need.
You don't need double the data rate for two eyes, all you need to do (and what the 3D bluray standard does) is take a regular old video stream for the left eye (or right eye, doesn't really matter) and encode the difference between the left and right eye into a second stream. This second stream will require FAR less bandwidth than the regular stream since the left and right eye streams are so highly correlated.
Even if you can hear pure sine waves above 22khz, most things that people actually listen to are a complex mess of frequencies. In content that people actually listen to it is difficult to pick up frequencies above even 16 khz or so, even if you can normally hear a dog whistle.
All you're saying is that Apple integrated open platforms and standards into their own products. That doesn't make it an open platform. Call me when I can buy a bunch of parts from NewEgg and install MacOS on them without breaking any laws or having to hack anything.
Your idea of what "capitalism" means is rather warped. I suggest re-taking Economics 101, because capitalism does not imply a completely free market, a perfectly informed consumer or any of the other things you seem to think it does. All that capitalism implies is ownership of resources and the ability to trade them. Under this model, people will generally try to end up controlling as much of the resources as possible. Moving over into Game Theory 101, if the expected value of engaging in anti-competitive practices is higher than the expected value of not doing so, then people will tend to engage in anti-competitive practices regardless of whether you think they should or not.
I can't tell if you're agreeing or disagreeing with the grandparent poster...
I honestly don't see why having to grind through 80 levels just to try out a different character build that may or may not actually work should be necessary. Giving players the ability to try out a few different builds in a private server can only increase the level of competition, it's not cheating, it's training. Real-life athletes spend countless hours off the field practicing what they do for every hour they spend actually doing it on the field. That said, I don't really see a market for mass spectator competition with MMO PvP. It's incredibly hard to follow for anyone not familiar with the game. The only thing that's particularly meaningful to a non-player watching a WoW session are the animations showing the characters making attacks and casting spells and the numbers that flash up to show damage, the actual *interesting* parts of the game are hidden behind a wall of dense lingo. I can explain most real-life sports well enough for a layman to be able to understand what they're watching in just a few minutes. I *live* with a bunch of WoW players and I couldn't tell you what's going on in a PvP matchup beyond the most superficial details. If e-Sports are going to take off in any spectator capacity, it's going to be in a game where the basic mechanics are much more visible and intuitive.
PvP in MMOs isn't entirely unskillful, it's just more about what decisions you make with your character build and your choices of character skills to use during the fight than your ability to manipulate the controls. I agree with your basic point that there is a higher skill ceiling inherent in a game which requires practice to master the basic mechanics (I'm a gigantic fan of Quake and would rather watch a duel in there than WoW PvP any day), but basing the skill of a game more around decision-making than physical dexterity doesn't make the game unskillful... I mean, just look at chess.
That said, the fact that 99% of what goes into winning a fight happens in the weeks and months spent leveling your character and gearing him up rather than during the fight itself makes for a terrible game for me. Make a bad choice at level 5 and only realize it when your level 80 isn't as strong as he should be? Too bad, have fun being level 1 again. Haven't spent a million years looking for the +5 Random Drop of Smiting? Too bad, even with an identical build you're still at a disadvantage. If the game allowed you to try out different builds without starting over, or balanced the skill tree so that just about any build had similar potential, and eliminated the artificial scarcity of powerful gear it'd be a much more compelling game to me. Likelihood of that happening? Well, considering that this is Blizzard's entire business model, not very high.
Considering that your transmission is going to take a hundred years to get there in the first place, 1 bit per second wouldn't be all that bad.
Non-commercial flights have the option of flying under Visual Flight Rules (aka VFR), in which case they are not required to be in radio contact with anybody except while flying in the airspace around towered airports. You can fly through 99% of the country under VFR, and you'll only ever have to key your radio at the start and end of your trip to either talk to a tower or on the traffic advisory frequency at an un-towered airport. Also with ADS-B anyone with a receiver can plug it into their computer and leave it running, record a bunch of flights, and correlate the codes with airplane owners fairly automatically. Much harder to do than with just voice communications. It's akin to the difference between sitting by the side of the road writing down license plate numbers and putting up a camera with OCR software.
IANA Air Traffic Controller, but I am studying to be one.
The radar technology used by air traffic controls is from the 50's.
If by this you mean "the basic technology was invented in the 1950s," then sure. If you know of a better general-purpose way to find out where things are in the sky than to bounce radio waves off of them, I'd like to hear it. That said, the systems which process and display radar data however have received several updates since the 50s.
No GPS...
Are you referring to ADS-B? It's a system which allows planes to broadcast their GPS position back to ATC as part of their transponder echo. It works *in *conjunction* with existing radar technology, not as a replacement. In any case, implementation of ADS-B in the US is already underway and is scheduled to be completed by 2013. The entire east coast, parts of the upper midwest and areas in the northwest are already covered.
The major concern of ADS-B is that is is susceptible to hacking (you can broadcast your own "phantom" aircraft if you know the standard) and reduces the anonymity of private and business aircraft users (every ADS-B transponder broadcasts a code that uniquely identifies an individual aircraft).
Planes are still tracked by little "physical" slips of paper.
All of the information contained on the flight progress strips is available on the air traffic controller's console, the strips just serve as a backup system in case of radar or computer failure. They're hardly necessary for actual operations. Some centers have computerized the strips but it's actually less efficient. It's easier to look over at the strip bay and mark it up with pencil than to bring up the computerized equivalent and enter data into it. It's the old "NASA Space Pen" vs "Russian Pencil" problem, sometimes low-tech just works better.
Planes still use land based radio towers - waste tons of fuel due to indirect routes.
The airways are based on the locations of radio navigation beacons, but the planes don't use the airways because they need the beacons to navigate, in fact GPS is effective enough that many of the currently existing beacons will not be replaced at the end of their service life. The airways are used to create a more orderly flow of traffic which is easier and safer for controllers to manage. That said, controllers will often allow aircraft to skip segments of their flight plans and fly more direct routes as workload permits.
That all sounds like a bunch of work to prop up a business model that simply doesn't make sense anymore. Different billing for voice and data made sense when voice and data were legitimately different types of data, but here in the magical fantasy future year of 2009, a kilobyte of voice takes exactly the same effort to deliver as a kilobyte of data. Stop overcomplicating your business and just charge me by the fucking kilobyte already.
Heck, I had a TI-89 which could actually *do* algebra and calculus. Solve for any variable, find limits, do derivatives and integrals etc. Of course, it didn't show its work which made it rather less useful on tests and homework, but at least I could start with the answer and try to figure out the process to reach it. =D
You think you're the first to discover this? I was doing it 10 years ago and it wasn't even new then.
I think it's more likely that police don't get into as many accidents because when a cop shows up, all of the attention is on them and everybody around them starts driving veeery carefully to avoid doing something that will get them a ticket. I've seen officers using their in-car laptops in ways that took their attention off the road in the same way that text messaging takes your attention off the road.