In the words of another country's constitution, how does it "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" when the owner of copyright in a work takes the work out of print?
It doesn't. That's why copyrights should expire. One of the overhauls I would like to see in copyright law is some kind of provision about works being taken out of print. Let's say, if a work is out of print for 5 years it automatically enters the public domain unless it is renewed. I haven't thought it through all that deeply but it seems on the surface at least that it might work. This would solve the "abandonware" issue.
Once every possible melody is copyrighted, how can anybody else make money?
Oh, we ran out of melodies a loooong time ago. You just say your work was "inspired" by so-and-so whose parts you're lifting. As long as you're "inspired" by enough different people at the same time it all ends up being original enough that nobody can really complain.
It sounds a little tongue in cheek, but really, there is a lot of truth to it.
You said you thought people had a right to control how their work is distributed and that no-one has a right to profit from someone else's work without compensation.
Well the exact quote would be "should be allowed," not "has a right," but that's all semantics. I'm not a lawyer or debate major so I'm not used to having to phrase everything precisely lest my words be twisted so bear with me a bit. I do mean a temporary granted monopoly, not an unalienable right. I hope you'll see that I'm trying to argue to the spirit of the argument, not the semantics and that you'll do the same.
If things fall into the public domain then others can profit from the work without compensating the creator. So which is it?
If a work is in the public domain, there's not much money to be made off it. Why would someone buy a copy of a public domain work when they can grab it off Project Gutenberg? How many people are getting rich selling copies of Shakespeare and Dickens? This is exactly how it should be IMHO. Shakespeare and Dickens are part of the fabric of our culture and people should be able to have access to them cheaply and easily.
Question though define making money off of your work? If I create a compilation CD and sell that does that count as making money?
Yes. Any time you incorporate my work into a product that you are selling, you're making money off my work.
What if I am a DJ, and the format you distribute your work under isn't compatible with my systems, So I change your copy to MP6 so that it plays better on my system, is this a change? While I am getting paid for your music if we remove your music I am still getting paid.
If you're a DJ the venue you play at is playing an ASCAP fee and I'm getting my cut of that. I really couldn't care less how you get the tunes onto the dance floor as long as ASCAP knows you spun my tune so they can give me my cut.
define distribute as well. is listening to music out loud at a park considered distribution? The music industry thinks so.
I'd chalk that up under fair use.
Would Lord of the Rings, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, have been made if there had been no way to recoup the costs of production? Somebody has to pay for these things to get made, and people generally don't give away millions of dollars without a way to get it back. Without at least a temporary monopoly on their work so they can earn back the cost of making it, it wouldn't get made in the first place, that is how copyright benefits society. Copyright makes it financially viable to make art for society to enjoy.
On the other hand, copyrights need to expire to encourage people to keep creating new works all the time rather than being able to sit back and cash in on one work for the rest of their lives. Copyright expiration benefits society by allowing timeless works that have become part of our culture (i.e. anything that people still remember 20 years later) to enter the public domain.
Ahh, I see where you're getting at. You could have made your position a little more clear.
As a musician who owns a few copyrights of my own, I disagree that copyright shouldn't exist. Someone who creates a work should be allowed to have a say in how it can be distributed, and nobody should be allowed to make money off of somebody else's work without compensating them. I license my work under a Creative Commons license that allows it to be freely distributed, but if someone wants to make money off it they have to make their own licensing deal with me, which would involve compensating me. I believe that this is perfectly fair, and this could only happen with some sort of copyright law in place.
I do agree, however, that copyright law should be significantly overhauled. For starters, durations should be shortened (20 years or less), and copyright ownership should not be transferable.
Pressing a bunch of copies of a CD and selling them/giving them away is a completely different matter than format shifting music for your own personal convenience and not giving anything away except as part of a performance for which you are paying royalties.
You also failed to answer the question I specifically asked. Tell me why, in a fair and just world, should ARIA be allowed to charge extra for the convenience of format shifting when no sales are lost and no person hears the music except the DJ who purchased it and his audience who are covered by the peformance royalty that the DJ is paying. No copyright holder is in any way harmed by allowing DJs for format shift. Charging DJs an extra royalty harms the DJs by forcing them to haul their entire physical CD collection to gigs (and risk them getting lost, stolen, or damaged) instead of a hard drive or compilation CDs.
Your argument seems to be based on the "letter of the law." Tell me why that law should be interpreted in that way instead of in a way that allows DJs more convenience without harming copyright holders in any way.
What's wrong with my logic? I'm starting to suspect a troll here but I'll keep going just in case...
A DJ, as part of spinning songs for a crowd, is already paying royalties to ARIA for the right to play those songs in public. I want you to explain to me exactly why he should be required to pay additional royalties on top of what he is already paying for the right to play those songs out of a laptop or off a compilation CD instead of the original CD.
Bear in mind that copyright does not make it illegal to copy *any* music. It only makes it illegal to copy to music that you do not have a license to copy. DJs have that license because they pay royalties.
Because a DJ is ALREADY paying royalties to ARIA for the right to spin those songs at a gig. ARIA is proposing to make DJs pay an *additional* fee on top of what they're already paying in order to format shift their music for convenience (i.e. playing tunes as MP3s out of a laptop, or creating compilation CDs to reduce the number of CDs that need to be taken to a gig).
This is wrong because it makes absolutely no difference to the listeners. They just hear music coming out of the speakers regardless of what format it's in on the DJ's side.
Wait wait wait, how the hell does that work? Let's say a DJ works on a laptop as opposed to spinning vinyl or CDs... He buys a CD, rips it to MP3 and loads it into his software. Even if he's paying ASCAP fees for the use of the music (or whatever the equivalent organization is in Australia), he gets fined $60k unless he pays a SEPARATE fee for the ability to work from MP3s instead of the original CDs? My mind just exploded. As long as he's paying his ASCAP (or whatever) fees, who gives a shit whether he's working off a CD or an MP3?
Fox is 720p, not 480p. And 720p *is* HD, even if it's not the highest resolution standard. In practice the difference is unnoticeable. In fact in my experience 1080i looks worse because there's only 19 mbps available on an OTA channel, and ATSC uses the relatively ancient MPEG2 for coding.
Now this is not in response to the parent but to the topic in general... Cable could offer far more picture quality by simply eliminating their analog lineup and using the bandwidth for digital. Using 256QAM modulation they can fit something like 12 digital standard def or 2 high def channels in the bandwidth that one analog channel used to take up, with excellent quality. Using MPEG-4 instead of MPEG-2 would further increase the number of channels that could be provided with acceptable quality due to more efficient coding.
Hit the nail on the head. I have Comcast's fastest plan in this area and I can only sustain an FTP upload at 50 KB/sec. At 3am. To my own private server. It's ridiculous and unacceptable. If I had ANY alternative I would switch immediately. If having all this extra bandwidth means they can relax their insane throttling I'm all for it as long as they don't try to charge me extra for the privilege. I know for a fact that there's more than enough bandwidth in the pipe. They're just not giving any of it to me.
Exacto-friggin-lutely. I've always liked the Mario Kart approach to game balance. Where Counter-Strike consciously emphasizes the difference in skill between the two teams, Mario Kart tries to minimize it by giving better powerups and more speed to the players in the back of the pack, creating a close and competitive race even between players of different skill levels. This keeps the game fun and exciting for all players instead of simply handing an easy victory to the better player. Lopsided games are *never* fun for anyone involved, you always have the most fun in a game that's so close you don't know who's going to come out the winner. It's a shame that more game designers don't understand this.
Well, money's just one of the many, many, MANY problems I have with Counter-Strike, including the other one you brought up. Yes, you can do a pistol round to save up more money, but the very idea of a counter-terrorism organization sending an operative into a situation with just a pistol and no body armor is ridiculous to me. It wouldn't be as bad if the game had a less realistic tone to it (i.e. TF2), but as it is the bizarre mix of attempted realism (including incredibly annoying things like weapons that can't decide whether they're accurate or not) and blatantly unrealistic elements (such as jumping around a corner and headshotting someone standing halfway across the map) just ruins the game for me. Decide whether you want to be realistic or not and go completely in that direction.
And for the record I hate realism in games. When I play a game I want to have fun, and while dying to a single bullet may be realistic, it reduces firefights to a simple matter of whoever sees the other guy and pulls the trigger first, which really isn't all that fun at all. It's far more interesting to play a character that can take some damage without dying, making firefights last more than just a couple seconds and giving me the ability to turn a bad situation around through superior skill and tactics.
I'll put it this way... If throwing a touchdown pass in a football video game were as difficult as throwing a real touchdown pass against an NFL defense, nobody would want to play it. So why do people insist on realism in shooters?
Anyway, regarding the issue of asymmetrical balance, you would think that somewhere in game design 101 people would learn that when you make a game where the teams have asymmetrical roles, such as offense and defense, you should make sure that the game forces players to assume both roles at various points in the game and determine the winner by comparing how well the teams perform when they switch sides. Think like football, when Team A's offense scores a touchdown against Team B's defense, you don't declare A the winner, you put B on offense and see if they can score against A's defense.
All CS tournaments score matches this way, but in my opinion a mechanic needs to be built into the game itself that will switch the sides every once in a while to make sure pubs are balanced as well. Many many more people play CS in pubs than in tournaments, and I think a game should cater as much as possible to public server play even if it is sometimes played in tournament settings.
Don't get Warsow either. It left in all the movement quirks of the Quake engine that you saw NS players using and even adds a few more, so to be decent you have to spend all your spare time practicing movement skills. A lot of the game too is switching weapons depending on the situation, and because of all the movement the appropriate weapon for the situation can change every couple seconds. The upside is that you can take a lot of damage so there's no real WTF "moments" as much as WTF "spans of several seconds."
It's a very well-designed game, but places too much emphasis on movement skill for it to be really fun for me.
As engy it's pretty easy to keep your back to a wall and keep your eyes peeled. As most other classes you're moving around the map leaving territory behind you that a spy can use to get into your blind spot. The problem is that if you're constantly checking your blind spot, you become more vulnerable to enemies in front of you. It's a no-win situation.
If the sides are asymmetrical, you introduce a mechanic that forces both teams to play each side over the course of a match and whoever performs better over the course of playing both sides is declared the winner. This is basic game design here. If Team A wins as aliens in 8:47 and after switching sides Team B wins in 10:47, that doesn't mean "both teams have won," that means "Team A won faster so they win the match." This is a mechanic that needs to be introduced into the game itself to reinforce this concept.
I played many games over a several days. I almost never saw the humans win unless there was a huge skill stack on the human side. Far more often I saw the aliens win, and occasionally a sudden death which inevitably went to the aliens.
What was the most frustrating for me was not being able to buy upgrades or evolve because I hadn't killed enough people yet. Especially at later stages in the game where practically everybody had evos and upgrades, it was incredibly difficult and frustrating running around as the weakest player in the game trying to kill players far more powerful than me so that I could get the upgrades I needed to be able to take out these powerful players. It's a chicken-and-egg problem. It's the same problem I have with counter-strike, if you're on the losing team with no money, how are you supposed to take out people with body armor and AK-47s when all you have is a pistol? This kind of problem is frustrating and I consider it to be bad game design. I vastly prefer games that level the playing field by giving players equal abilities and not penalizing teams for losing.
My problem with one-hits in general is that if you give someone any way at ALL to create a one-hit opportunity, certain players will spend all of their time figuring out how to abuse it. The spy's invisibility power gives him the ability to run behind a line of rushing players, uncloak and eliminate them all nearly instantly. There's no way to defend against this short of reducing the effectiveness of your rush by having everyone be constantly watching where they came from instead of concentrating on the enemy that they're trying to rush against. A good spy forces a team to be constantly preoccupied with watching their backs, reducing their effectiveness against conventional attacks. A single player simply shouldn't have this kind of power. Removing the spy's invisibility would fix this problem for me. I've never played a game where giving players complete invisibility didn't completely ruin class balance, and giving that player a one-hit kill as well is just blatantly bad game design.
As for the sniper, there are plenty of places where a good sniper can completely shut down an offense without giving them any chance at retaliation. That's the most frustrating part, if it were *possible* to kill the sniper before he got you, I wouldn't have a problem. That's the problem with long-range, highly accurate one-hit kills, there's simply no way to defend against them, because there's no way to get close enough that your own weapons become effective. The most ridiculous example is that even a medic'd heavy with 450 HP gets taken out by a headshot. This shouldn't be possible, a medic is supposed to increase the survivability of the player he's healing, and no other weapon in the game comes even close to doing that kind of damage. My view is that sniper damage should be affected by distance like all of the other weapons in the game, and at most should do 150 when fully-charged, multiplied to 300 for a headshot at *close* range.
I played Tremulous briefly a while back... The game balance is absolutely terrible. The alien team is clearly far more powerful than the human team, especially at higher levels of evolution (the most powerful alien can do devastating hit-and-run attacks that kill even the most powerful humans and doesn't give a team of even coordinated humans enough time to kill it), and the evolution model itself suffers from a problem going back to what I consider the single worst piece of game design ever, Counter-Strike. Namely, the catch-22 that forms if one team dominates early in the game. The winning team manages to acquire powerful upgrades, and the losing team cannot build up enough resources to purchase upgrades themselves. If a member of the losing team somehow manages to acquire an upgrade, it is quickly lost because he dies at the hands of the vastly more powerful enemy team, which manages to hold onto their upgrades by virtue of being unkillable while in possession of their powerful upgrades.
Warsow has very good balance being a deathmatch game, and I love the fact that there are no clearly dominant weapons in the game (I consider one-hit kills to be the epitome of bad and lazy game design), but the resulting game requires so much skill to play and I don't have enough spare time to get good enough where playing it would be enjoyable.
Team Fortress 2 is the best multiplayer game I have ever played, despite balance problems introduced by sniper headshots and the spy backstab.
It doesn't need to be all that accurate at detecting altitude because airplanes already have transponders in them which transmit the aircraft's altimeter reading (based on air pressure) whenever they receive a radar ping. How do you think controllers are getting altitude data on planes right now? Radar certainly can't see the plane's altitude by itself.
Yeah, and the Bayer-patterned sensors that this thread is about would *totally* work for any of those applications. Unless astrophotographers started using point-and-shoots when I wasn't looking, the cameras that these chips will be used in will be aimed at consumers taking snapshots.
Only low-end consumer gear doesn't put an IR filter in front of the sensor. Since the goal of a camera is to faithfully reproduce the color in the scene as visible to the human eye, not putting an IR filter in defeats that purpose.
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In the words of another country's constitution, how does it "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" when the owner of copyright in a work takes the work out of print?
It doesn't. That's why copyrights should expire. One of the overhauls I would like to see in copyright law is some kind of provision about works being taken out of print. Let's say, if a work is out of print for 5 years it automatically enters the public domain unless it is renewed. I haven't thought it through all that deeply but it seems on the surface at least that it might work. This would solve the "abandonware" issue.
Once every possible melody is copyrighted, how can anybody else make money?
Oh, we ran out of melodies a loooong time ago. You just say your work was "inspired" by so-and-so whose parts you're lifting. As long as you're "inspired" by enough different people at the same time it all ends up being original enough that nobody can really complain.
It sounds a little tongue in cheek, but really, there is a lot of truth to it.
You said you thought people had a right to control how their work is distributed and that no-one has a right to profit from someone else's work without compensation.
Well the exact quote would be "should be allowed," not "has a right," but that's all semantics. I'm not a lawyer or debate major so I'm not used to having to phrase everything precisely lest my words be twisted so bear with me a bit. I do mean a temporary granted monopoly, not an unalienable right. I hope you'll see that I'm trying to argue to the spirit of the argument, not the semantics and that you'll do the same.
If things fall into the public domain then others can profit from the work without compensating the creator. So which is it? If a work is in the public domain, there's not much money to be made off it. Why would someone buy a copy of a public domain work when they can grab it off Project Gutenberg? How many people are getting rich selling copies of Shakespeare and Dickens? This is exactly how it should be IMHO. Shakespeare and Dickens are part of the fabric of our culture and people should be able to have access to them cheaply and easily.
According to my research the same law that made it legal to buy MP3s online also made it legal to format shift for personal use.
Question though define making money off of your work? If I create a compilation CD and sell that does that count as making money? Yes. Any time you incorporate my work into a product that you are selling, you're making money off my work. What if I am a DJ, and the format you distribute your work under isn't compatible with my systems, So I change your copy to MP6 so that it plays better on my system, is this a change? While I am getting paid for your music if we remove your music I am still getting paid. If you're a DJ the venue you play at is playing an ASCAP fee and I'm getting my cut of that. I really couldn't care less how you get the tunes onto the dance floor as long as ASCAP knows you spun my tune so they can give me my cut. define distribute as well. is listening to music out loud at a park considered distribution? The music industry thinks so. I'd chalk that up under fair use.
Would Lord of the Rings, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, have been made if there had been no way to recoup the costs of production? Somebody has to pay for these things to get made, and people generally don't give away millions of dollars without a way to get it back. Without at least a temporary monopoly on their work so they can earn back the cost of making it, it wouldn't get made in the first place, that is how copyright benefits society. Copyright makes it financially viable to make art for society to enjoy.
On the other hand, copyrights need to expire to encourage people to keep creating new works all the time rather than being able to sit back and cash in on one work for the rest of their lives. Copyright expiration benefits society by allowing timeless works that have become part of our culture (i.e. anything that people still remember 20 years later) to enter the public domain.
Ahh, I see where you're getting at. You could have made your position a little more clear. As a musician who owns a few copyrights of my own, I disagree that copyright shouldn't exist. Someone who creates a work should be allowed to have a say in how it can be distributed, and nobody should be allowed to make money off of somebody else's work without compensating them. I license my work under a Creative Commons license that allows it to be freely distributed, but if someone wants to make money off it they have to make their own licensing deal with me, which would involve compensating me. I believe that this is perfectly fair, and this could only happen with some sort of copyright law in place.
I do agree, however, that copyright law should be significantly overhauled. For starters, durations should be shortened (20 years or less), and copyright ownership should not be transferable.
Pressing a bunch of copies of a CD and selling them/giving them away is a completely different matter than format shifting music for your own personal convenience and not giving anything away except as part of a performance for which you are paying royalties.
You also failed to answer the question I specifically asked. Tell me why, in a fair and just world, should ARIA be allowed to charge extra for the convenience of format shifting when no sales are lost and no person hears the music except the DJ who purchased it and his audience who are covered by the peformance royalty that the DJ is paying. No copyright holder is in any way harmed by allowing DJs for format shift. Charging DJs an extra royalty harms the DJs by forcing them to haul their entire physical CD collection to gigs (and risk them getting lost, stolen, or damaged) instead of a hard drive or compilation CDs.
Your argument seems to be based on the "letter of the law." Tell me why that law should be interpreted in that way instead of in a way that allows DJs more convenience without harming copyright holders in any way.
What's wrong with my logic? I'm starting to suspect a troll here but I'll keep going just in case...
A DJ, as part of spinning songs for a crowd, is already paying royalties to ARIA for the right to play those songs in public. I want you to explain to me exactly why he should be required to pay additional royalties on top of what he is already paying for the right to play those songs out of a laptop or off a compilation CD instead of the original CD.
Bear in mind that copyright does not make it illegal to copy *any* music. It only makes it illegal to copy to music that you do not have a license to copy. DJs have that license because they pay royalties.
Because a DJ is ALREADY paying royalties to ARIA for the right to spin those songs at a gig. ARIA is proposing to make DJs pay an *additional* fee on top of what they're already paying in order to format shift their music for convenience (i.e. playing tunes as MP3s out of a laptop, or creating compilation CDs to reduce the number of CDs that need to be taken to a gig). This is wrong because it makes absolutely no difference to the listeners. They just hear music coming out of the speakers regardless of what format it's in on the DJ's side.
Wait wait wait, how the hell does that work? Let's say a DJ works on a laptop as opposed to spinning vinyl or CDs... He buys a CD, rips it to MP3 and loads it into his software. Even if he's paying ASCAP fees for the use of the music (or whatever the equivalent organization is in Australia), he gets fined $60k unless he pays a SEPARATE fee for the ability to work from MP3s instead of the original CDs? My mind just exploded. As long as he's paying his ASCAP (or whatever) fees, who gives a shit whether he's working off a CD or an MP3?
Fox is 720p, not 480p. And 720p *is* HD, even if it's not the highest resolution standard. In practice the difference is unnoticeable. In fact in my experience 1080i looks worse because there's only 19 mbps available on an OTA channel, and ATSC uses the relatively ancient MPEG2 for coding.
Now this is not in response to the parent but to the topic in general... Cable could offer far more picture quality by simply eliminating their analog lineup and using the bandwidth for digital. Using 256QAM modulation they can fit something like 12 digital standard def or 2 high def channels in the bandwidth that one analog channel used to take up, with excellent quality. Using MPEG-4 instead of MPEG-2 would further increase the number of channels that could be provided with acceptable quality due to more efficient coding.
Hit the nail on the head. I have Comcast's fastest plan in this area and I can only sustain an FTP upload at 50 KB/sec. At 3am. To my own private server. It's ridiculous and unacceptable. If I had ANY alternative I would switch immediately. If having all this extra bandwidth means they can relax their insane throttling I'm all for it as long as they don't try to charge me extra for the privilege. I know for a fact that there's more than enough bandwidth in the pipe. They're just not giving any of it to me.
Exacto-friggin-lutely. I've always liked the Mario Kart approach to game balance. Where Counter-Strike consciously emphasizes the difference in skill between the two teams, Mario Kart tries to minimize it by giving better powerups and more speed to the players in the back of the pack, creating a close and competitive race even between players of different skill levels. This keeps the game fun and exciting for all players instead of simply handing an easy victory to the better player. Lopsided games are *never* fun for anyone involved, you always have the most fun in a game that's so close you don't know who's going to come out the winner. It's a shame that more game designers don't understand this.
How is it offtopic? I'm discussing the games linked in the article. Metamods had better catch this.
Well, money's just one of the many, many, MANY problems I have with Counter-Strike, including the other one you brought up. Yes, you can do a pistol round to save up more money, but the very idea of a counter-terrorism organization sending an operative into a situation with just a pistol and no body armor is ridiculous to me. It wouldn't be as bad if the game had a less realistic tone to it (i.e. TF2), but as it is the bizarre mix of attempted realism (including incredibly annoying things like weapons that can't decide whether they're accurate or not) and blatantly unrealistic elements (such as jumping around a corner and headshotting someone standing halfway across the map) just ruins the game for me. Decide whether you want to be realistic or not and go completely in that direction.
And for the record I hate realism in games. When I play a game I want to have fun, and while dying to a single bullet may be realistic, it reduces firefights to a simple matter of whoever sees the other guy and pulls the trigger first, which really isn't all that fun at all. It's far more interesting to play a character that can take some damage without dying, making firefights last more than just a couple seconds and giving me the ability to turn a bad situation around through superior skill and tactics.
I'll put it this way... If throwing a touchdown pass in a football video game were as difficult as throwing a real touchdown pass against an NFL defense, nobody would want to play it. So why do people insist on realism in shooters?
Anyway, regarding the issue of asymmetrical balance, you would think that somewhere in game design 101 people would learn that when you make a game where the teams have asymmetrical roles, such as offense and defense, you should make sure that the game forces players to assume both roles at various points in the game and determine the winner by comparing how well the teams perform when they switch sides. Think like football, when Team A's offense scores a touchdown against Team B's defense, you don't declare A the winner, you put B on offense and see if they can score against A's defense.
All CS tournaments score matches this way, but in my opinion a mechanic needs to be built into the game itself that will switch the sides every once in a while to make sure pubs are balanced as well. Many many more people play CS in pubs than in tournaments, and I think a game should cater as much as possible to public server play even if it is sometimes played in tournament settings.
Don't get Warsow either. It left in all the movement quirks of the Quake engine that you saw NS players using and even adds a few more, so to be decent you have to spend all your spare time practicing movement skills. A lot of the game too is switching weapons depending on the situation, and because of all the movement the appropriate weapon for the situation can change every couple seconds. The upside is that you can take a lot of damage so there's no real WTF "moments" as much as WTF "spans of several seconds." It's a very well-designed game, but places too much emphasis on movement skill for it to be really fun for me.
As engy it's pretty easy to keep your back to a wall and keep your eyes peeled. As most other classes you're moving around the map leaving territory behind you that a spy can use to get into your blind spot. The problem is that if you're constantly checking your blind spot, you become more vulnerable to enemies in front of you. It's a no-win situation.
If the sides are asymmetrical, you introduce a mechanic that forces both teams to play each side over the course of a match and whoever performs better over the course of playing both sides is declared the winner. This is basic game design here. If Team A wins as aliens in 8:47 and after switching sides Team B wins in 10:47, that doesn't mean "both teams have won," that means "Team A won faster so they win the match." This is a mechanic that needs to be introduced into the game itself to reinforce this concept.
I played many games over a several days. I almost never saw the humans win unless there was a huge skill stack on the human side. Far more often I saw the aliens win, and occasionally a sudden death which inevitably went to the aliens.
What was the most frustrating for me was not being able to buy upgrades or evolve because I hadn't killed enough people yet. Especially at later stages in the game where practically everybody had evos and upgrades, it was incredibly difficult and frustrating running around as the weakest player in the game trying to kill players far more powerful than me so that I could get the upgrades I needed to be able to take out these powerful players. It's a chicken-and-egg problem. It's the same problem I have with counter-strike, if you're on the losing team with no money, how are you supposed to take out people with body armor and AK-47s when all you have is a pistol? This kind of problem is frustrating and I consider it to be bad game design. I vastly prefer games that level the playing field by giving players equal abilities and not penalizing teams for losing.
My problem with one-hits in general is that if you give someone any way at ALL to create a one-hit opportunity, certain players will spend all of their time figuring out how to abuse it. The spy's invisibility power gives him the ability to run behind a line of rushing players, uncloak and eliminate them all nearly instantly. There's no way to defend against this short of reducing the effectiveness of your rush by having everyone be constantly watching where they came from instead of concentrating on the enemy that they're trying to rush against. A good spy forces a team to be constantly preoccupied with watching their backs, reducing their effectiveness against conventional attacks. A single player simply shouldn't have this kind of power. Removing the spy's invisibility would fix this problem for me. I've never played a game where giving players complete invisibility didn't completely ruin class balance, and giving that player a one-hit kill as well is just blatantly bad game design. As for the sniper, there are plenty of places where a good sniper can completely shut down an offense without giving them any chance at retaliation. That's the most frustrating part, if it were *possible* to kill the sniper before he got you, I wouldn't have a problem. That's the problem with long-range, highly accurate one-hit kills, there's simply no way to defend against them, because there's no way to get close enough that your own weapons become effective. The most ridiculous example is that even a medic'd heavy with 450 HP gets taken out by a headshot. This shouldn't be possible, a medic is supposed to increase the survivability of the player he's healing, and no other weapon in the game comes even close to doing that kind of damage. My view is that sniper damage should be affected by distance like all of the other weapons in the game, and at most should do 150 when fully-charged, multiplied to 300 for a headshot at *close* range.
I played Tremulous briefly a while back... The game balance is absolutely terrible. The alien team is clearly far more powerful than the human team, especially at higher levels of evolution (the most powerful alien can do devastating hit-and-run attacks that kill even the most powerful humans and doesn't give a team of even coordinated humans enough time to kill it), and the evolution model itself suffers from a problem going back to what I consider the single worst piece of game design ever, Counter-Strike. Namely, the catch-22 that forms if one team dominates early in the game. The winning team manages to acquire powerful upgrades, and the losing team cannot build up enough resources to purchase upgrades themselves. If a member of the losing team somehow manages to acquire an upgrade, it is quickly lost because he dies at the hands of the vastly more powerful enemy team, which manages to hold onto their upgrades by virtue of being unkillable while in possession of their powerful upgrades.
Warsow has very good balance being a deathmatch game, and I love the fact that there are no clearly dominant weapons in the game (I consider one-hit kills to be the epitome of bad and lazy game design), but the resulting game requires so much skill to play and I don't have enough spare time to get good enough where playing it would be enjoyable.
Team Fortress 2 is the best multiplayer game I have ever played, despite balance problems introduced by sniper headshots and the spy backstab.
It doesn't need to be all that accurate at detecting altitude because airplanes already have transponders in them which transmit the aircraft's altimeter reading (based on air pressure) whenever they receive a radar ping. How do you think controllers are getting altitude data on planes right now? Radar certainly can't see the plane's altitude by itself.
Yeah, and the Bayer-patterned sensors that this thread is about would *totally* work for any of those applications. Unless astrophotographers started using point-and-shoots when I wasn't looking, the cameras that these chips will be used in will be aimed at consumers taking snapshots.
Only low-end consumer gear doesn't put an IR filter in front of the sensor. Since the goal of a camera is to faithfully reproduce the color in the scene as visible to the human eye, not putting an IR filter in defeats that purpose.
How is this different than 3D using polarized light and special glasses that has been around for years?