Let's take UFO: Enemy Unknown aka X-Com: UFO Defense. You can treat your soldiers as fully expendable throwaway units. Stat growth is irrelevant as they will usually die as rookies anyway. Losing a few soldiers or even a full Skyranger is mainly a financial issue. In this case you won't mind a crushing defeat; you just carry on. As long as you don't run out of money or lose your last base, you're fine.
On the other hand, some people play it more like an RPG. Your soldiers are cherished party members who will, with time, grow into superhuman killing machines. In this case you're more likely to play with relatively small squads of elite soldiers, heavily depending on stat growth in order to increase effectiveness and noting the little quirks each of them seem to have. Losing a soldier is unacceptable, both because a rookie won't be an adequate replacement for a veteran and because you lose the character. (Or you just prefer small teams of elite soldiers over waves and waves of cannon fodder.)
Both play styles are equally correct. They reflect different attitudes and one of these attitudes doesn't mesh up with how the real world works - but video games aren't neccessarily bound by the same conventions as the real world. Just like you could argue that someone who uses the save feature to escape unwanted outcomes is a quitter and thus wrong, you could argue that someone who doesn't hasn't understood the game mechanics, which allow it. In the end both approaches appeal to different people for different reasons and no one is "wrong" in how they play as long as it entertains them.
Gaming 101 - Have fun. Everything else is secondary.
Gaming 102 - Okay, except you shouldn't spoil other people's fun. That's just being a douchebag.
That's what my university diploma thesis will be about: Games without a set plot but instead with a number of randomly generated actors which create an emergent plot. Essentially a bit like a simulated RP server for an MMORPG. The scenarios I'm thinking of are adventures and 4X games but RPGs could work as well.
I call that kind of charater the Bioware woman. Bastila is a great example, as is Aribeth of Neverwinter Nights. In both cases they are staunchly good to the point of annoyance only to immediately succumb to absolute evil near the end of the game, deciding that the big bad's plan of destroying the world is A-okay.
Bioware usually writes damn good characters but they love this kind of character so much that it's becoming a) formulaic and b) hard to take seriously anymore.
Aribeth: "I have joined the bad guys because my lover was wrongfully executed! Oh the sorrow..."
Player: "Well, of course you did."
Aribeth: "...the pain, the-- what?"
Player: "Yeah, you're female, you used to be lawful good and we're in a Bioware game. Of course you'd turn chaotic evil and join the bad guys. I saw this coming since chapter one."
Aribeth: "I will not have you mock my hardship! Die, you--"
Player: "Yeah, whatever. We both know you're just a tiny speed bump between my party of epic-level demigods and the final battle. Your new name is Mid-Boss."
Mid-Boss: "I should've signed up with Nippon Ichi..."
Of course in a Nippon Ichi game she'd face a party of level 9999 demigods.
Unfortunately we have become the world's police. Even the leaked cables confirm that when you look at the requests from the arab world regarding Iran. I'm not comfortable with that, but can't think of a better nation. But I'll agree. Dictators shouldn't be overthrown just because they're dictators.
I think that's one of the reasons why people all over the world complain much more about the USA misbehaving than, for example, Russia misbehaving. The USA have decided that they're the world police now and because nobody is willing to take that away from them that's what they are. No problem so far.
However, most people think that this role comes not just with rights but also with a whole lot of duties. If the USA want to defend democracy, freedom and the like that means they must uphold them everywhere, at any time, including on their own soil and during times of crisis. Someone who insists on bringing freedom and justice to wherever they deem neccessary and at the same time performs acts such as extraordinary rendition and waterboarding is really an insult to the world. That kind of double standard feels rather absolutist and nobody likes absolutism.
If the USA were to admit that they are just one flawed country among many, only special by virtue of having the biggest guns, we could live with them not taking human rights as seriously as they should. It would be sad but not directly our concern. But since the USA like to present themselves as the nation equivalent of Superman we also expect them to behave in a manner consistent with that, including virtually flawless ethics.
It's essentially the difference of what the USA say they are like and what they act like that gets to you. (Well, that and the fact that they could at any point decide that you or your country are for some reason of interest to them, which is just scary.)
That depends on what you call a processor. The eyes do a bit of preprocessing - the raw output of the rods and cones isn't fed directly into the optic nerve; intermediate cells inhibit and excite each other, altering the image in-eye. One example of retinal filtering is how Mach bands are created: Lateral inhibition between the cells causes edges to appear more pronounced than they actually are. The brain is not involved.
(Essentially, the more light one cell receives, the more its neighboring cells are inhibited. At an edge between a light and a dark area, a "light" cell close to the edge will receive less inhibition than entirely bright-surrounded cells due to its "dark" neighbors and thus the light side of the edge will be perceived as brighter. Conversely, the "dark" cells closest to the edge will receive stronger inhibition than other "dark" cells due to their "bright" neighbors, causing that side of the edge to appear darker.)
Except that's not what they tried to show. The site demonstrates that when objects are moving relative to your field of view you become less able to discern changes to the objects themselves, whether it's a change in coloration, size or shape. This is not interesting because your peripheral vision is bad - when the objects are stationary it's easy to tell that they are changing - it's interesting because it's a property of human vision that apparently wasn't known yet.
In fact, just try to focus on one of the dots in the videos. Even if you know it's going to move, you know it's going to keep changing color and the dot is in your center of view you still might fall to the illusion (not to mention that other dots nearby also seem to be unchanging even though they're right next to the one you're trying to follow).
It's not about central vs. peripheral sight, it's about how motion and the perception of change interact.
That would be the only sensible implementation but I somehow doubt that a multitouch touchscreen would be cheaper than a keyboard. (Remember that most reasonably fast typists start pressing one key before their finger has fully left the last one. In order to allow anything but the current awkward one-finger pecking you need to be able to handle that appropriately. Also, some applications might require between two and four simultaneous keypresses.)
It's unregonomic, it's expensive and the only advantage is that you can switch the key labels. No, specialized touchscreens aren't going to replace the keyboard anytime soon and onscreen keyboards aren't going to either.
Well, the alternatives are either telling them "ghosts don't exist because everyone knows they don't" or spending ages compiling citations from existing studies in order to make an argument that is actually based on science and not pure opinion. The former is ungrounded in anything and unlikely to convince them and the latter, while based on actual science, sounds like hours of not very exciting work. Or he just leaves them be. (There is also the alternative of not talking to his friends anymore but killing a friendship over a ghost story seems rather antisocial.)
His whole problem is that while the "evience" "gathered" by "ghost experts" is usually hokum, his friends still believe it. He can either leave their trust in that data alone, he can unsuccessfully argue based on "what everyone knows", he can bury them under papers or or he can grab some gear and spend an afternoon playing Ghostbuster while simultaneously having a shot at explaining the "ghost". I think the last option sounds the most fun.
Also, of course, his friends are already convinced that there is a ghost. In their eyes, his claim that there isn't is the extraordinary claim. You can argue that they are delusional but then again so are you - you have a lot of opinions about topics in which you aren't an expert and some of those opinions are wrong. Still, if someone tells you that you are wrong because you are wrong that's unlikely to convince you, as is an argument of "I assert that all scientists in the world believe otherwise". Yes, ghosts seem to be a particularly outrageous example but typically they have as much influence on someone's life as the belief that honey attracts flies.
From the way you write it sounds like you are actually offended by people who believe in ghosts and, by extension, by those who don't aggressively campaign against that belief when it comes up. Not everyone is as zealous about the topic, however, and you'll have to accept that the OP most likely values his social circle more than a life of perfect scientific rigor.
We also need to remember that the finding could be locally significant but globally uninteresting. If the supposed ghost turns out to be, let's say, a piece of malfunctioning electrical equipment everyone forgot about then people in the area are going to be very interested in that finding even if the world of science remains unrocked.
A "ghost" is often like a UFO - it's an occurrence of something that can't be readily explained. With proper equipment one can investigate and find out that the weird voices in the kitchen are actually there because the plumbing is transmitting vibrations from upstairs. Of course one could also investigate and only find that the phenomenon, while observable, is not due to causes X, Y and Z. Or that the phenomenon didn't occur at all.
Either way there is something to be learned and it might just turn out to be useful. Even if it just leads to a call to the plumber.
Maybe he won't but remember that he's going out with his ghost-believing friends in order to take a look. He wants to know what kind of equipment might be of use so that he can reach a useful conclusion.
Just throwing up your arms and complaining about how he has the gall to actually try to gather some data is unproductive no matter what philosophy regarding the matter you subscribe to. If this ghost story he wants to investigate has a mundane cause it probably won't be found by him standing around bare-handed. "Mundane cause" doesn't mean "immediately obvious to the naked eye".
Think about it like this: How could he make a convincing case that the supposed phenomenon is mundane in nature? Most likely he'll need some data as everything else would just be armchair philosophy. What kind of data could be used to construct a convincing proof of mundanity and how can he obtain it?
Hey, let's combine the incessant "OS X App Store = iOS will replace OS X" rumors with Microsoft's ARM support to go the other way, all the way.
Windows supporting ARM obviously means that Microsoft will entirely transition to ARM. Since the iPad is an ARM device that relies entirely on a locked-down app store model, all ARM devices must do so. Therefore, the Windows version after the next one will not support any non-app store software at all and all development will have to be done on Linux as neither Windows nor OS X will support compilers anymore (as those would just allow people to circumvent the app store).
Why do I suddenly have to think of Sunshine? Oh, right. Because it's more of an allegory for how Hollywood trats SF than an actual SF movie.
Warning, spoilers follow.
The first half is actually a fairly decent example of category 2: The premise is a bit silly and the special effects don't make any sense at points but at its heart it's about how incredibly hostile an environment space is both phyically and mentally. The technology we see seems like something a sane engineer could have come up with. You really get the feeling that they listened to their advisors.
Then we enter the second half and Hollywood happens. Yeah, the first mission they sent? They failed because apparently NASA didn't do any psychological screening before selecting their crew and one crewman decided that the dying sun was God and killed everyone. Sure. And everyone from the new crew, including the semi-sentient computer, becomes a drooling idiot so that we can cram more random deaths and pointless action scenes in. (I'm not kidding here, they could've prevented most of the carnage by closing a single door, not to mention the computer informing them of the unknown person entering the ship.) Oh, and let's not forget the detailed shot of the crazy guy getting the skin ripped off his arm. Can't have a science fiction movie about the enormity of space without that.
It's really as if they first produced one half of the movie and then remembered that Hollywood doesn't do "sensible", so they added in heaps of bullshit in order to turn it into a bad slasher movie. (More likely, they decided that a movie without a clear villain character would be too abstract for the audience and since slashers work well without a plot they just put that in as a plot-neutral action part.)
And that's actually the problem with Hollywood SciFi: Hollywood is conservative and intelligent movies don't sell as well as bullshit bonanzas with enough special effects to give Michael Bay a pause. Of course this isn't helped by "smart" movies like the 2002 Solaris remake being giant turds (although in this case it was because the director tried to turn it into a love story). We won't see much good SciFi out of Hollywood simply because stupid movies are known to sell and Hollywood doesn't like risky investments.
You could make the point that copyrights as practiced today are unethical. Effectively-endless copyrights mean that society never gets to freely use any literary or artistic work even though many of these copyrighted works freely use earlier, unprotected works. They also stack the market in favor of big corporations who can afford to license anything they want to use (and swallow any lawsuits from rights owners who don't want to give them a license). Even if copyrights are never extended again, durations close to a century are effectively eternal in some sectors like IT.
Copyrights aren't bad per se but the current implementation is most likely suboptimal for society and can be argued to be unethical on those grounds.
That's how comment folding/hiding can bite you. Without the GGGP you don't know that A = B = 1. For instance, I came here from the RSS feed where the "division by zero" comment is featured but the "1 = 2" comment isn't, making my picture incomplete.
The same can be a result of C2's filtering as "1 = 2" is score 1 while "division by zero" is score 4.
Actually, he essentially sold the full version of the game plus any upgrades he will ever release. You just happen to get access to all pre-release versions, as well. Essentially it's a discounted preorder that automatically enrolls you into the alpha/beta test. (Yes, he did actualy sell the alpha but you still got access to any subsequent release.)
Plus, this kind of model seems to be getting more common these days: You first have people preorder and then use their preorder money to actually develop the product. OpenPandora Ltd. is using the same approach to develop a handheld console - and they can't even deliver prerelease versions. Yet it works.
It's pretty interesting. Essentially you crowdsource for development capital; this allows startups and independent developers to take a shot at developing and releasing a product without having the required funds up front. Of course it puts the risk on the customer but it's interesting nonetheless.
But what if it's not the information trying to escape but organized crime running information abduction and slavery rings? Your information might end up on some run-down sleazy website halfway across the globe having to sell itself to strangers.
"Talkie talkie, ten dollars? Me know you long time."
Which is a nice example of how people tend to ignore even their own knowledge when facing an issue they have decided to be too complex for them.
Yes, if Microsoft endorsed or even allowed that sex game, even if they built some kind of age check into the console, you could bet that there would be an extremely urgent special report on it with a concerned-looking host and an "expert" who demonstrates:
Expert: "Look. You just need a TV set, an XBox and a copy of this sex game." Host: "My kid has two of these things in his room already!" Expert: "And you just take the game out of its case... and insert it into the console. And there it is." Host: "And now there's porn on the XBox?" Expert: "Yes. All it took me was a copy of the game, a button press and a verification of my credit card number." Host: *looking at camera* "There you see it. Any ordinary XBox is just seconds away from subjecting your children to hardcore pornography."
Of course people will just gobble this up, completely ignoring that by the very same procedure the DVD players they have scattered all over the house are also just seconds away from playing porn and that their children would first have to somehow obtain the game in order to play it.
Remember, "family friendly" is strictly binary. Either it's all ages all the time (with all content ranging from E to M being considered kids-friendly, apparently) or it's chock-full of dismemberment porn. There doesn't seem to be a middle ground. Hooray for modern journalism.
That would also require those machines to not have a web browser. The iPhone can't easily be used as a generic mass storage device but there are several apps that temporarily turn it into a WebDAV server. Similar apps might exist for other smartphone OSes. I'm not sure how you'd block that while retaining browsing functionality except through some fancy network setup where computers on the LAN can't see each other
It's considered a staple of decent journalism to give at least a few words of explanation of what you're talking about for the convenience of readers who aren't already familiar with the subject. Even though Slashdot mainly just reports on other people's reports on something, it would behoove the editors to adhere to some minimal standards like making sense to people who don't already know what the article says.
Plus, if you follow your logic through to the end, why would Slashdot tell us what they changed with 1.0? After all I can just search for the Dropbox blog if I care, so the entire summary could be reduced to: "Dropbox has reached version 1.0."
I found it very instructional. I learned that Dropbox gives you auto-rsyncing folders that translate features such as resource forks, ACLs and symlinks transparently across operating systems and filesystems and mirrors everything to unlimited storage on a Dropbox-provided server, all free of charge (they did never mention any limits or prices after all).
To be honest, the unlimited free webspace sounds worth it by itself, although I'd imagine the service to be aggressively ad-supported and I don't know if I'm comfortable with Dropbox going through my documents in order to deliver targeted advertisement.
Slashdot Mirror
It always depends on your play style.
Let's take UFO: Enemy Unknown aka X-Com: UFO Defense. You can treat your soldiers as fully expendable throwaway units. Stat growth is irrelevant as they will usually die as rookies anyway. Losing a few soldiers or even a full Skyranger is mainly a financial issue. In this case you won't mind a crushing defeat; you just carry on. As long as you don't run out of money or lose your last base, you're fine.
On the other hand, some people play it more like an RPG. Your soldiers are cherished party members who will, with time, grow into superhuman killing machines. In this case you're more likely to play with relatively small squads of elite soldiers, heavily depending on stat growth in order to increase effectiveness and noting the little quirks each of them seem to have. Losing a soldier is unacceptable, both because a rookie won't be an adequate replacement for a veteran and because you lose the character. (Or you just prefer small teams of elite soldiers over waves and waves of cannon fodder.)
Both play styles are equally correct. They reflect different attitudes and one of these attitudes doesn't mesh up with how the real world works - but video games aren't neccessarily bound by the same conventions as the real world. Just like you could argue that someone who uses the save feature to escape unwanted outcomes is a quitter and thus wrong, you could argue that someone who doesn't hasn't understood the game mechanics, which allow it. In the end both approaches appeal to different people for different reasons and no one is "wrong" in how they play as long as it entertains them.
Gaming 101 - Have fun. Everything else is secondary.
Gaming 102 - Okay, except you shouldn't spoil other people's fun. That's just being a douchebag.
That's what my university diploma thesis will be about: Games without a set plot but instead with a number of randomly generated actors which create an emergent plot. Essentially a bit like a simulated RP server for an MMORPG. The scenarios I'm thinking of are adventures and 4X games but RPGs could work as well.
Of course I still have to write the damn thing.
I call that kind of charater the Bioware woman. Bastila is a great example, as is Aribeth of Neverwinter Nights. In both cases they are staunchly good to the point of annoyance only to immediately succumb to absolute evil near the end of the game, deciding that the big bad's plan of destroying the world is A-okay.
Bioware usually writes damn good characters but they love this kind of character so much that it's becoming a) formulaic and b) hard to take seriously anymore.
Aribeth: "I have joined the bad guys because my lover was wrongfully executed! Oh the sorrow..."
Player: "Well, of course you did."
Aribeth: "...the pain, the-- what?"
Player: "Yeah, you're female, you used to be lawful good and we're in a Bioware game. Of course you'd turn chaotic evil and join the bad guys. I saw this coming since chapter one."
Aribeth: "I will not have you mock my hardship! Die, you--"
Player: "Yeah, whatever. We both know you're just a tiny speed bump between my party of epic-level demigods and the final battle. Your new name is Mid-Boss."
Mid-Boss: "I should've signed up with Nippon Ichi..."
Of course in a Nippon Ichi game she'd face a party of level 9999 demigods.
I'll wait for the ErgoSlider ^ Core. Better balancing, you know.
Unfortunately we have become the world's police. Even the leaked cables confirm that when you look at the requests from the arab world regarding Iran. I'm not comfortable with that, but can't think of a better nation. But I'll agree. Dictators shouldn't be overthrown just because they're dictators.
I think that's one of the reasons why people all over the world complain much more about the USA misbehaving than, for example, Russia misbehaving. The USA have decided that they're the world police now and because nobody is willing to take that away from them that's what they are. No problem so far.
However, most people think that this role comes not just with rights but also with a whole lot of duties. If the USA want to defend democracy, freedom and the like that means they must uphold them everywhere, at any time, including on their own soil and during times of crisis. Someone who insists on bringing freedom and justice to wherever they deem neccessary and at the same time performs acts such as extraordinary rendition and waterboarding is really an insult to the world. That kind of double standard feels rather absolutist and nobody likes absolutism.
If the USA were to admit that they are just one flawed country among many, only special by virtue of having the biggest guns, we could live with them not taking human rights as seriously as they should. It would be sad but not directly our concern. But since the USA like to present themselves as the nation equivalent of Superman we also expect them to behave in a manner consistent with that, including virtually flawless ethics.
It's essentially the difference of what the USA say they are like and what they act like that gets to you. (Well, that and the fact that they could at any point decide that you or your country are for some reason of interest to them, which is just scary.)
That depends on what you call a processor. The eyes do a bit of preprocessing - the raw output of the rods and cones isn't fed directly into the optic nerve; intermediate cells inhibit and excite each other, altering the image in-eye. One example of retinal filtering is how Mach bands are created: Lateral inhibition between the cells causes edges to appear more pronounced than they actually are. The brain is not involved.
(Essentially, the more light one cell receives, the more its neighboring cells are inhibited. At an edge between a light and a dark area, a "light" cell close to the edge will receive less inhibition than entirely bright-surrounded cells due to its "dark" neighbors and thus the light side of the edge will be perceived as brighter. Conversely, the "dark" cells closest to the edge will receive stronger inhibition than other "dark" cells due to their "bright" neighbors, causing that side of the edge to appear darker.)
Except that's not what they tried to show. The site demonstrates that when objects are moving relative to your field of view you become less able to discern changes to the objects themselves, whether it's a change in coloration, size or shape. This is not interesting because your peripheral vision is bad - when the objects are stationary it's easy to tell that they are changing - it's interesting because it's a property of human vision that apparently wasn't known yet.
In fact, just try to focus on one of the dots in the videos. Even if you know it's going to move, you know it's going to keep changing color and the dot is in your center of view you still might fall to the illusion (not to mention that other dots nearby also seem to be unchanging even though they're right next to the one you're trying to follow).
It's not about central vs. peripheral sight, it's about how motion and the perception of change interact.
That would be the only sensible implementation but I somehow doubt that a multitouch touchscreen would be cheaper than a keyboard. (Remember that most reasonably fast typists start pressing one key before their finger has fully left the last one. In order to allow anything but the current awkward one-finger pecking you need to be able to handle that appropriately. Also, some applications might require between two and four simultaneous keypresses.)
It's unregonomic, it's expensive and the only advantage is that you can switch the key labels. No, specialized touchscreens aren't going to replace the keyboard anytime soon and onscreen keyboards aren't going to either.
Well, the alternatives are either telling them "ghosts don't exist because everyone knows they don't" or spending ages compiling citations from existing studies in order to make an argument that is actually based on science and not pure opinion. The former is ungrounded in anything and unlikely to convince them and the latter, while based on actual science, sounds like hours of not very exciting work. Or he just leaves them be. (There is also the alternative of not talking to his friends anymore but killing a friendship over a ghost story seems rather antisocial.)
His whole problem is that while the "evience" "gathered" by "ghost experts" is usually hokum, his friends still believe it. He can either leave their trust in that data alone, he can unsuccessfully argue based on "what everyone knows", he can bury them under papers or or he can grab some gear and spend an afternoon playing Ghostbuster while simultaneously having a shot at explaining the "ghost". I think the last option sounds the most fun.
Also, of course, his friends are already convinced that there is a ghost. In their eyes, his claim that there isn't is the extraordinary claim. You can argue that they are delusional but then again so are you - you have a lot of opinions about topics in which you aren't an expert and some of those opinions are wrong. Still, if someone tells you that you are wrong because you are wrong that's unlikely to convince you, as is an argument of "I assert that all scientists in the world believe otherwise". Yes, ghosts seem to be a particularly outrageous example but typically they have as much influence on someone's life as the belief that honey attracts flies.
From the way you write it sounds like you are actually offended by people who believe in ghosts and, by extension, by those who don't aggressively campaign against that belief when it comes up. Not everyone is as zealous about the topic, however, and you'll have to accept that the OP most likely values his social circle more than a life of perfect scientific rigor.
We also need to remember that the finding could be locally significant but globally uninteresting. If the supposed ghost turns out to be, let's say, a piece of malfunctioning electrical equipment everyone forgot about then people in the area are going to be very interested in that finding even if the world of science remains unrocked.
A "ghost" is often like a UFO - it's an occurrence of something that can't be readily explained. With proper equipment one can investigate and find out that the weird voices in the kitchen are actually there because the plumbing is transmitting vibrations from upstairs. Of course one could also investigate and only find that the phenomenon, while observable, is not due to causes X, Y and Z. Or that the phenomenon didn't occur at all.
Either way there is something to be learned and it might just turn out to be useful. Even if it just leads to a call to the plumber.
Maybe he won't but remember that he's going out with his ghost-believing friends in order to take a look. He wants to know what kind of equipment might be of use so that he can reach a useful conclusion.
Just throwing up your arms and complaining about how he has the gall to actually try to gather some data is unproductive no matter what philosophy regarding the matter you subscribe to. If this ghost story he wants to investigate has a mundane cause it probably won't be found by him standing around bare-handed. "Mundane cause" doesn't mean "immediately obvious to the naked eye".
Think about it like this: How could he make a convincing case that the supposed phenomenon is mundane in nature? Most likely he'll need some data as everything else would just be armchair philosophy. What kind of data could be used to construct a convincing proof of mundanity and how can he obtain it?
Hey, let's combine the incessant "OS X App Store = iOS will replace OS X" rumors with Microsoft's ARM support to go the other way, all the way.
Windows supporting ARM obviously means that Microsoft will entirely transition to ARM. Since the iPad is an ARM device that relies entirely on a locked-down app store model, all ARM devices must do so. Therefore, the Windows version after the next one will not support any non-app store software at all and all development will have to be done on Linux as neither Windows nor OS X will support compilers anymore (as those would just allow people to circumvent the app store).
Why do I suddenly have to think of Sunshine? Oh, right. Because it's more of an allegory for how Hollywood trats SF than an actual SF movie.
Warning, spoilers follow.
The first half is actually a fairly decent example of category 2: The premise is a bit silly and the special effects don't make any sense at points but at its heart it's about how incredibly hostile an environment space is both phyically and mentally. The technology we see seems like something a sane engineer could have come up with. You really get the feeling that they listened to their advisors.
Then we enter the second half and Hollywood happens. Yeah, the first mission they sent? They failed because apparently NASA didn't do any psychological screening before selecting their crew and one crewman decided that the dying sun was God and killed everyone. Sure. And everyone from the new crew, including the semi-sentient computer, becomes a drooling idiot so that we can cram more random deaths and pointless action scenes in. (I'm not kidding here, they could've prevented most of the carnage by closing a single door, not to mention the computer informing them of the unknown person entering the ship.) Oh, and let's not forget the detailed shot of the crazy guy getting the skin ripped off his arm. Can't have a science fiction movie about the enormity of space without that.
It's really as if they first produced one half of the movie and then remembered that Hollywood doesn't do "sensible", so they added in heaps of bullshit in order to turn it into a bad slasher movie. (More likely, they decided that a movie without a clear villain character would be too abstract for the audience and since slashers work well without a plot they just put that in as a plot-neutral action part.)
And that's actually the problem with Hollywood SciFi: Hollywood is conservative and intelligent movies don't sell as well as bullshit bonanzas with enough special effects to give Michael Bay a pause. Of course this isn't helped by "smart" movies like the 2002 Solaris remake being giant turds (although in this case it was because the director tried to turn it into a love story). We won't see much good SciFi out of Hollywood simply because stupid movies are known to sell and Hollywood doesn't like risky investments.
You could make the point that copyrights as practiced today are unethical. Effectively-endless copyrights mean that society never gets to freely use any literary or artistic work even though many of these copyrighted works freely use earlier, unprotected works. They also stack the market in favor of big corporations who can afford to license anything they want to use (and swallow any lawsuits from rights owners who don't want to give them a license). Even if copyrights are never extended again, durations close to a century are effectively eternal in some sectors like IT.
Copyrights aren't bad per se but the current implementation is most likely suboptimal for society and can be argued to be unethical on those grounds.
Of course it is. Remember, sunburn is caused by ultraviolet radiation from space.
That's how comment folding/hiding can bite you. Without the GGGP you don't know that A = B = 1. For instance, I came here from the RSS feed where the "division by zero" comment is featured but the "1 = 2" comment isn't, making my picture incomplete.
The same can be a result of C2's filtering as "1 = 2" is score 1 while "division by zero" is score 4.
Actually, he essentially sold the full version of the game plus any upgrades he will ever release. You just happen to get access to all pre-release versions, as well. Essentially it's a discounted preorder that automatically enrolls you into the alpha/beta test. (Yes, he did actualy sell the alpha but you still got access to any subsequent release.)
Plus, this kind of model seems to be getting more common these days: You first have people preorder and then use their preorder money to actually develop the product. OpenPandora Ltd. is using the same approach to develop a handheld console - and they can't even deliver prerelease versions. Yet it works.
It's pretty interesting. Essentially you crowdsource for development capital; this allows startups and independent developers to take a shot at developing and releasing a product without having the required funds up front. Of course it puts the risk on the customer but it's interesting nonetheless.
But what if it's not the information trying to escape but organized crime running information abduction and slavery rings? Your information might end up on some run-down sleazy website halfway across the globe having to sell itself to strangers.
"Talkie talkie, ten dollars? Me know you long time."
Won't somebody think of the information?
Do you work for Setec Astronomy?
Which is a nice example of how people tend to ignore even their own knowledge when facing an issue they have decided to be too complex for them.
Yes, if Microsoft endorsed or even allowed that sex game, even if they built some kind of age check into the console, you could bet that there would be an extremely urgent special report on it with a concerned-looking host and an "expert" who demonstrates:
Expert: "Look. You just need a TV set, an XBox and a copy of this sex game."
Host: "My kid has two of these things in his room already!"
Expert: "And you just take the game out of its case... and insert it into the console. And there it is."
Host: "And now there's porn on the XBox?"
Expert: "Yes. All it took me was a copy of the game, a button press and a verification of my credit card number."
Host: *looking at camera* "There you see it. Any ordinary XBox is just seconds away from subjecting your children to hardcore pornography."
Of course people will just gobble this up, completely ignoring that by the very same procedure the DVD players they have scattered all over the house are also just seconds away from playing porn and that their children would first have to somehow obtain the game in order to play it.
Remember, "family friendly" is strictly binary. Either it's all ages all the time (with all content ranging from E to M being considered kids-friendly, apparently) or it's chock-full of dismemberment porn. There doesn't seem to be a middle ground. Hooray for modern journalism.
That would also require those machines to not have a web browser. The iPhone can't easily be used as a generic mass storage device but there are several apps that temporarily turn it into a WebDAV server. Similar apps might exist for other smartphone OSes. I'm not sure how you'd block that while retaining browsing functionality except through some fancy network setup where computers on the LAN can't see each other
There is no unlimited webspace either but that's what I would have taken from the video if I didn't have a propri knowledge to the contrary.
Touché. Well played, sir.
It's considered a staple of decent journalism to give at least a few words of explanation of what you're talking about for the convenience of readers who aren't already familiar with the subject. Even though Slashdot mainly just reports on other people's reports on something, it would behoove the editors to adhere to some minimal standards like making sense to people who don't already know what the article says.
Plus, if you follow your logic through to the end, why would Slashdot tell us what they changed with 1.0? After all I can just search for the Dropbox blog if I care, so the entire summary could be reduced to: "Dropbox has reached version 1.0."
I found it very instructional. I learned that Dropbox gives you auto-rsyncing folders that translate features such as resource forks, ACLs and symlinks transparently across operating systems and filesystems and mirrors everything to unlimited storage on a Dropbox-provided server, all free of charge (they did never mention any limits or prices after all).
To be honest, the unlimited free webspace sounds worth it by itself, although I'd imagine the service to be aggressively ad-supported and I don't know if I'm comfortable with Dropbox going through my documents in order to deliver targeted advertisement.