No, the amended proposal is little more than a rewording of the original, it certainly does not contain the explicit exemptions that virtually everyone bar big business was calling for.
Maybe I just cut ID too much slack, but I think you're not giving them enough credit. ID are probably about unique in the software development world that in they never give a release date until they are confident that they can make it and they include additional time in case there are unforseen problems. Yes, sometimes a really immense problem can push the release beyond that, but ID do it the right way - give no release date until a date is fairly certain, add on a safety margin and release when the game is done, even if that is before the advertised release date.
" I wonder how suitable those old password or symbolic systems are for storing progress in a complex game."
Simple - they aren't.
Sure, theoretically you can pack a lot of information into a set of patterns, but have you looked at how big some save games are these days? Running into MBs, or even tens of MB, is not unusual, and fitting that into a password or a pattern would be well-nigh impossible. You could get away with it for simple episodic gameplay where the player's inventory is predetermined at he start of a level and no state information has to be passed between levels, but aribtrary in-game saves with state information for a large environment would be impossible to encode in a viable pattern system.
You're getting the greenhouse effect and ozone depletion mixed up. Global warming is not directly related to the loss of ozone and the loss of ozone does not have that much effect on global warming: one is caused by heat-trapping gasses/increases in solar radiation/whatever pet theory while the other is caused by chlorine and bromine compounds reacting with ozone at high altitude, reducing the amount of free ozone in the atmosphere. One can inflence the other, but ozone depletion, and the corresponding increase in UV exposure on the ground, does not depend on global warming.
Do not make the mistake of confusing ignorance with tactics, or that this is aimed at China. This is aimed squarely at western companies who may be interested in working with or investing in China - the same western companies whose bosses will attach significant weight to anything that issues from the mouth of a well-known CEO.
This isn't an attempt to put china off directly, it's an attempt to put western companies off working with China and lending weight to China's approach (which would surely be disasterous for Intel and Microsoft if it encouraged more countries to implement home-grown hardware and software rather than Wintel supported systems).
Actually, I'm British. But I'm also subject to a conservative opposition (the Tory party), a conservative ruling party (New Labour) and the just about left-wing but still not really taken seriously and not very widespread Liberal Democrats. Yes, the lib dems have just taken a region off Conservative Party 2, but it was close run. The problem is that we basically don't have very much choice here other than conservatives.
combined with my natural cynicism, pessimism and overall dispair at the human race, this does not make for much good feeling towards politics.
The amount of radiation in Galileo's plutonium decay generator is insignificant compared to the radiation the Jovian moons get from Jupiter's magnetosphere and background levels of cosmic rays - it'd be a bit like a needle made of hay in a haystack.
Any bacteria on the craft would probably be killed by the radiation as well, but it isn't really worth taking that chance (life is amazingly tenacious).
But more thanjust the "safety" aspect, there are real reasons why Galileo had to go down - JPL wanted ot use the starfinder camera to observe some rocks near Amalthea that may have been magnetically lifted off the surface of the moon, and they wanted to use it's final minutes to observe parts of the exosphere.
No you don't. Just get loaded up with lots of hardware (get enough hidden packages to get the minigun at some of your houses for example), find yourself somewhere fairly high up but close to a pay and spray and with cars nearby. Proceed to create mayhem then when you look like getting into a situation you can't deal with get into a car, drive into the pay and spray, drive away free man.... (yes, this isn't easy if you get 5 or 6 wanted level stars)
Good point actually, but you've missed one thing about the way these scares work: they are not restricted to a single location. Population pressure, pollution, the seas rising up and killing us all, rains of fire, fish or beadsteads, they all have one common factor: they could happen to anyone, anywhere.
Yes, if a supervolcano did go off then the effects would be widespread, but people don't think that way. Give it a location and people think "oh, I'm nowhere near that, it won't bother me". If you want to scare people then there are a few things you must ensure are part of the equation:
- it must be a subject that few people have a good understanding of. You need to be careful that it isn't too esoteric though, otherwise people just won't get it at all. It needs the right combination of scary complexity, with associated long words and sage nodding of bearded, balding heads but without being overdone.
- it must be hard to prove. Lots of nice uncertainty does wonders for the nerves. It's good if there really is a possibility that it might happen, but it doesn't have to be remotely likely. The general population can't handle probabilities very well, so even if the odds are millions to one you can still make a good scare out of it.
- it must be hard or impossible to pin down to a specfic location. The more nebulous the extent of the threat the better, if people know where a problem is they will get far less jumpy than if t could happen anywhere
Get all three in one package and you have a shure-fire winner.
Yeah, but it isn't a patch on the build quality or feel of a Type 5. It just feels like a normal PC keyboard rather than something that could double as an annoying user skull percussion peripheral..
Nah, the best thing to do with violent game articles is blow them up, or riddle them with holes from a minigun, or drive a tank over their screaming bytes.... what're you looking at me like that for?
IME the only people who have problems with age lockouts are the parents who forget how to remove them.:) Kids are smart enough to find out the code sooner or later, usually becuase the parent has scribbled it on the side of a pad so they don't forget it.
Of course, this assumes that the parents even give a damn and, quite frankly, if the parents buy them GTA in the first place and let the kids sit there and play it then they obviously don't care at all.
SDL is nothing more than very basic glue, barely enough to provide a portable framework. It does not provide even a fraction of the features Valve would need to make HL2 portable, and none of the OpenGL implementations on linux support the required pixel shader version.
HL2 is a very different beast to HL1 and even Quake 3 and UT2003, it takes a completely different approach to rendering, and implementing it using the tools available on Linux would be very, very hard.
Nah, more likely they'll get bombarded by information (read "adverts") for western GM crops, western fertilisers, pesticides and so on and told "if you want to improve your farming, you need to use these".
Never underestimate the depths to which western corporations will go in the name of the Gread God Profit.
All the plans I've seen for space elevators involve planting the anchor tower in the oceans - that way you don't have to worry about local populations kicking up a stink about the massive tower and support buildings across the road and, should there be an accident, most of the debirs will end up in the sea or burn up on the way down.
And in that sort of positioning, you can also give the tower and lower reaches some serious firepower to keep unauthorised boats and planes away from it.
From the article: "Microsoft will publish "several" future Epic projects -- as yet unnamed projects -- exclusively for Xbox and Windows." (my emphasis). Not "XBox and PC", which could have given leeway in the OS department. No, this would be an appropriate point to say fare-thee-well to Linux clients of any future Epic games. Dropping linux servers is less likely, though Microsoft would probably pressure Epic to drop them as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Several countries have already passed their implementations of the EUCD - in some cases "soon" was months ago.
No, the amended proposal is little more than a rewording of the original, it certainly does not contain the explicit exemptions that virtually everyone bar big business was calling for.
I'm in.
Maybe I just cut ID too much slack, but I think you're not giving them enough credit. ID are probably about unique in the software development world that in they never give a release date until they are confident that they can make it and they include additional time in case there are unforseen problems. Yes, sometimes a really immense problem can push the release beyond that, but ID do it the right way - give no release date until a date is fairly certain, add on a safety margin and release when the game is done, even if that is before the advertised release date.
ATMS may not be that secure either
Depends how much they try to overlook it.
" I wonder how suitable those old password or symbolic systems are for storing progress in a complex game."
Simple - they aren't.
Sure, theoretically you can pack a lot of information into a set of patterns, but have you looked at how big some save games are these days? Running into MBs, or even tens of MB, is not unusual, and fitting that into a password or a pattern would be well-nigh impossible. You could get away with it for simple episodic gameplay where the player's inventory is predetermined at he start of a level and no state information has to be passed between levels, but aribtrary in-game saves with state information for a large environment would be impossible to encode in a viable pattern system.
You're getting the greenhouse effect and ozone depletion mixed up. Global warming is not directly related to the loss of ozone and the loss of ozone does not have that much effect on global warming: one is caused by heat-trapping gasses/increases in solar radiation/whatever pet theory while the other is caused by chlorine and bromine compounds reacting with ozone at high altitude, reducing the amount of free ozone in the atmosphere. One can inflence the other, but ozone depletion, and the corresponding increase in UV exposure on the ground, does not depend on global warming.
You do know those things aren't worth the bytes they stored in, right?
Do not make the mistake of confusing ignorance with tactics, or that this is aimed at China. This is aimed squarely at western companies who may be interested in working with or investing in China - the same western companies whose bosses will attach significant weight to anything that issues from the mouth of a well-known CEO.
This isn't an attempt to put china off directly, it's an attempt to put western companies off working with China and lending weight to China's approach (which would surely be disasterous for Intel and Microsoft if it encouraged more countries to implement home-grown hardware and software rather than Wintel supported systems).
Actually, I'm British. But I'm also subject to a conservative opposition (the Tory party), a conservative ruling party (New Labour) and the just about left-wing but still not really taken seriously and not very widespread Liberal Democrats. Yes, the lib dems have just taken a region off Conservative Party 2, but it was close run. The problem is that we basically don't have very much choice here other than conservatives.
combined with my natural cynicism, pessimism and overall dispair at the human race, this does not make for much good feeling towards politics.
"Now, if we could only rid ourselves of those bloody conservatives..."
- epitaph on the grave of the human race.
The amount of radiation in Galileo's plutonium decay generator is insignificant compared to the radiation the Jovian moons get from Jupiter's magnetosphere and background levels of cosmic rays - it'd be a bit like a needle made of hay in a haystack.
Any bacteria on the craft would probably be killed by the radiation as well, but it isn't really worth taking that chance (life is amazingly tenacious).
But more thanjust the "safety" aspect, there are real reasons why Galileo had to go down - JPL wanted ot use the starfinder camera to observe some rocks near Amalthea that may have been magnetically lifted off the surface of the moon, and they wanted to use it's final minutes to observe parts of the exosphere.
No you don't. Just get loaded up with lots of hardware (get enough hidden packages to get the minigun at some of your houses for example), find yourself somewhere fairly high up but close to a pay and spray and with cars nearby. Proceed to create mayhem then when you look like getting into a situation you can't deal with get into a car, drive into the pay and spray, drive away free man.... (yes, this isn't easy if you get 5 or 6 wanted level stars)
Good point actually, but you've missed one thing about the way these scares work: they are not restricted to a single location. Population pressure, pollution, the seas rising up and killing us all, rains of fire, fish or beadsteads, they all have one common factor: they could happen to anyone, anywhere.
Yes, if a supervolcano did go off then the effects would be widespread, but people don't think that way. Give it a location and people think "oh, I'm nowhere near that, it won't bother me". If you want to scare people then there are a few things you must ensure are part of the equation:
- it must be a subject that few people have a good understanding of. You need to be careful that it isn't too esoteric though, otherwise people just won't get it at all. It needs the right combination of scary complexity, with associated long words and sage nodding of bearded, balding heads but without being overdone.
- it must be hard to prove. Lots of nice uncertainty does wonders for the nerves. It's good if there really is a possibility that it might happen, but it doesn't have to be remotely likely. The general population can't handle probabilities very well, so even if the odds are millions to one you can still make a good scare out of it.
- it must be hard or impossible to pin down to a specfic location. The more nebulous the extent of the threat the better, if people know where a problem is they will get far less jumpy than if t could happen anywhere
Get all three in one package and you have a shure-fire winner.
Yeah, but it isn't a patch on the build quality or feel of a Type 5. It just feels like a normal PC keyboard rather than something that could double as an annoying user skull percussion peripheral..
Nah, the best thing to do with violent game articles is blow them up, or riddle them with holes from a minigun, or drive a tank over their screaming bytes.. .. what're you looking at me like that for?
Oh indubitably sir, we attempt to excell at our eccentric ways whenever possibly. Anything else.. well, it wouldn't be British, would it?
IME the only people who have problems with age lockouts are the parents who forget how to remove them. :) Kids are smart enough to find out the code sooner or later, usually becuase the parent has scribbled it on the side of a pad so they don't forget it.
Of course, this assumes that the parents even give a damn and, quite frankly, if the parents buy them GTA in the first place and let the kids sit there and play it then they obviously don't care at all.
SDL is nothing more than very basic glue, barely enough to provide a portable framework. It does not provide even a fraction of the features Valve would need to make HL2 portable, and none of the OpenGL implementations on linux support the required pixel shader version.
HL2 is a very different beast to HL1 and even Quake 3 and UT2003, it takes a completely different approach to rendering, and implementing it using the tools available on Linux would be very, very hard.
Unless the results indicate that the moon is actually a hollow sphere inhabited by brain-devouring alients, probably not.
Nah, more likely they'll get bombarded by information (read "adverts") for western GM crops, western fertilisers, pesticides and so on and told "if you want to improve your farming, you need to use these".
Never underestimate the depths to which western corporations will go in the name of the Gread God Profit.
All the plans I've seen for space elevators involve planting the anchor tower in the oceans - that way you don't have to worry about local populations kicking up a stink about the massive tower and support buildings across the road and, should there be an accident, most of the debirs will end up in the sea or burn up on the way down.
And in that sort of positioning, you can also give the tower and lower reaches some serious firepower to keep unauthorised boats and planes away from it.
From the article: "Microsoft will publish "several" future Epic projects -- as yet unnamed projects -- exclusively for Xbox and Windows ." (my emphasis). Not "XBox and PC", which could have given leeway in the OS department. No, this would be an appropriate point to say fare-thee-well to Linux clients of any future Epic games. Dropping linux servers is less likely, though Microsoft would probably pressure Epic to drop them as well.
Who said anything about hosts? Just rewrite it in your iptables rules to an unroutable IP.