So is simply responding to one small section of an argument in an attempt to paint the entire arguement into your own strawmen. Which you've done twice now. Once to the parent and once to me when I pointed it out.
I said nothing about you being mentally defective, only that people who view the world in such a skewed manner as to believe that there are actually folk out there doing nothing but "badness" 100% of the time should consult a mental health professional to discuss the possiblity of them having a persecution complex. The world is seldom as black and white as you painted it.
The Parent post did not indicate anything in regards to "if there are good people, or bad people" but pointed out that being a "bad person" doesn't preclude you from doing the same things that a "good person" does on their off time. Being a "good person" doesn't preclude you from doing things that "bad people" do on their time off.
If you honestly think that the "bad people" out there just sit around being "bad" and thinking up new ways of being "bad", because they are "bad" then you probably want to have a talk with a mental health professional about persecution complexes.
Criminals fall in love, get married, have families, and raise kids. Criminals play video games, read books, play sports. Criminals eat fast food, have gormet dinners in fancy resturants, and cook their own meals. Criminals speed, perpetually drive under the speedlimit, drive SUVs, drive pickups, drive sports cars, drive sedans, and even drive hybrid cars.
In short, "Bad people" are just as likely to be into their geneology as "Good people" are.
Besides, it's not like certian criminal organizations aren't built on the concept that you are "Family".
Swordquest never finished of course. But if you have a hankering for the three comics that did come out (Earth, Fire, and Water), the SwordQuest archive can help (plus they have solutions posted.)
Agreed, the only disappointment that game had for me was that it gave the impression that there was "more" hidden away, which of course wasn't actually there.
My brother and I used to play that game over and over again just looking for easter eggs, sure that the detail that was put into the environments was hiding something. But there wasn't anything actually there.
Other than that, it was a fairly nice racer for people who don't need to feel like they are moving at warp speed all the time.
As long as the computer could never be subverted, that's true. However a Diebold(tm) computer overlord would be the more likely scenario, and we would be back to corrupted humans running the show.
Wait, a Sony higher up spoke about their product and their competitor's product, and it didn't involve an arrogant spiel about how wonderful Sony's attempt was and how the competitor has nothing, is nothing, and will be ground into dust?
People better start looking for survival gear, I feel a second coming drawing near.
The feature in question is a toy being used to entice more people to use Google's services as opposed to other companies.
This is not a NEW development, other companies have been doing similar things and providing them either free or for pay for years now. Many online mapping and real estate companies provide a "Street View" product.
There is absolutely NO incentive for Google to introduce this mythical "Google Cam". Where is the money for running these? Where are the added page views? Do you honestly think Google is marketing to stalkers?
Pull up the NYTimes article and actually look at the image the woman is complaining about. Tell me that if you were not already looking for a cat, you would have noticed it. Then tell me that this isn't simply someone making a tempest in a teapot.
I understand, really I do. Now that Google is no longer purely the "Underdog" it's popular to point out every potential path it can take down the 'Dark Side" as a de facto "they are going to do this next!". We've been burnt in the past, and project our fears of every bad corporation (real or fictional) we've ever read about onto them. But come on, this isn't even remotely the same as Britain's Big Brother system. We are talking about a van that drove through an area one and took pictures of publicly visible objects, not a series of surveillance equipment designed setup to ensure every action you take is recorded for prosperity.
Overly dramatic much? There is more than a small difference between having a static street level view of an area and having constantly monitored live camera's following your every move.
Unless these are 'digitally signed' tags (they aren't), meaning they are impossible to spoof, these watermarks are useless for any serious nefarious anti-user purpose.
There is no way to prove that just because 'files X and Y had tags xxx@nowhere.com' they were owned or shared by 'xxx@nowhere.com'. As(almost) everyone else has pointed out, real pirates will strip out the data or munge it in a way that will make it impossible to prove it was them using that alone.
Regular users will have about the same amount of reason to fear the RIAA as they do now, I.E. little to none if they have compentent legal reprensation. This is just as weak as the "We know it was you because you had this IP once" attack that the RIAA is using right now.
In fact, having watermarking may actually help regular users since if they aren't sharing their files illegally and the RIAA comes knocking with a "We've logged your IP" attack, the user might be able to point to the fact that the tags are theirs as additional defense.
*sigh* tea is enjoyed as you like it, and I'm a little sick of this argument. ...
In conclusion, die.
(Yes I know I need to relax. Shush and leave me to my ranting.)
You know, if you had milk in your tea more often, you wouldn't be so cranky. *ducks*
Give a child a match, he sees for a second. Light a child on fire, he can see for a lifetime. But only if his eyes are open in either case.
I'm not saying either of these projects are worthy or worthless. But there does seem to be a general pervasive additude in the 'modern' world that just throwing material goods at someone and saying a quaint homily is going to somehow help their situation.
Neither of these products are at all useful in stand alone situation. Children are not born with an instictive knowledge of how to use comptuers, the internet, or English, all of which are items which are pretty much requistes of being able to find a use for these outside of making a few bucks on the black market. They are intended as aids in places where education is already being provided, but the infrastructure doesn't yet have the means to support an actual, formal IT investment.
There are a million other places to spend the money that is going to these products, all of which would have some sort of direct immediate impact on someone's life. But the question is, would they simply enable the people impacted to survive their situation, or would they actually give the means to better it.
But lets not hype these as something more than they are, these aren't going to mean someone not eating because they couldn't look up how to 'farm' on the internet. What they may do, however, is give someone who would have spent the rest of their life on a farm an opportunity to be more than that. Which in turn, provided the area the opportunity to actually grow and better itself as opposed to stagnating.
How, exactly, does software go out with a bang?
Doesn't "bang" imply success, and therefore, not going out?
Think "24"...
"Jack! That Palm will explode in 20 seconds if you can't get Linux booted on it!"
"I'm on it! Quick open another port in the firewall so I can interface directly with the TCP!"
..... BAAAANG!
You do realize that Valve hired both the team that created CS and DOD, and the reason why they sell the both mods now is because they paid hard cash for the mods, right?
If you want to be pissed at Valve about something, please at least pick a topic where Valve isn't one of the leaders of the pack on. I don't know of any other game companies that you can speak of that have sheparded their mod community as much as Valve has.
Get a mountain bike and find a good local trail. That's much more fun, and you'll also meet some cool people. Road bike is fine too, and you'll meet even more people on that. But if you want something more like a video game, offroad is definitely the way to go.
Come on. If I wanted to meet people, I wouldn't be training on my Murder Simulator.
People have worshipped money long before it was even a formalized concept backed by governments. It's not a new god; it's simply the reigning god.
However what is more interesting in the parallel between Google and Congress is how willing people are to attribute voting down one proposal as a complete sell out of principles as opposed to attributing it to a disagreement on how best to achieve a common goal.
[pendantic mode] Actually, while may Christian based churches today operate in that manner, if you study the history of the Roman Catholic church, especially the Reformation period, you'd see they acted just about exactly as the Scientologist do today.
The Church punished people who attempted to bring the Bible to the masses, because that cut into the Church's lucrative business of being the middle-man between God and the rest of us. Prior to the illegal publications of bibles translated into English, only a select few who knew Latin had the access to the biblical texts we take for granted today.
As far as Scientology goes, it's about as corrupt as any religion. The lay person seems about as sincere as any, and the leadership seems just as willing to compromise principles for power. I don't see anything different there than I do for the other main stream religions.[/pendantic mode]
And given we were talking about names, I have absolutely no idea why I typed Sid when I was thinking Will. Though both Sid Meier and Will Wright have a "I'm willing to give alot of leeway due to past results" flag next to their name in my brain.
Black and White had years of hype-machine following it, proclaiming it the best game ever with the best AI, most creative premise, best writing, etc. All the magazines and websites had previews. Then as the months dragged on and it was delayed, the hype started to dissolve. Then when people actually played the game, the hype disappeared... turns out the game was never that great to begin with.
Same thing could happen to Spore. Look at how much hype "The Movies" got before it came out, and what impact has it had on the industry? Next to none. There is a trend that you are missing in the examples you are providing, one that is far more telling as to why those games were well hyped flops and why few people fear the same about Spore.
Hint: The initials P.M. come into play.
I'm not saying Sid's games don't have their faults, and I'm especially starting to feel burned by the combo of "publish and forget" and "one million and one expansion packs!" business strategies that Maxis has adopted under EA. But publishing games while failing to deliver most of what was promised isn't shown as Sid's particular failing if you check his CV.
There is, however, a new plugin which emulates offline message storing by using buddy pounce. I haven't tried it yet, but I would expect that it works just as well outside of the instances where neither of you are online at the same time.
Jumping the shark is a metaphor that was originally used to denote the tipping point at which a TV series is deemed by a viewer to have passed its peak, or has introduced plot twists that are illogical in terms of everything that has preceded them. Once a show has "jumped the shark," the viewer senses a noticeable decline in quality or feels the show has undergone too many changes to retain its original charm. The term has also evolved to describe other areas of pop culture, including movie series, music, acting celebrities, or authors for whom a drastic change was seen as the beginning of the end. These changes are often attempts to attract their fans' waning attention with over-the-top statements or increasingly overt appeals to sex or violence. Some have broadened its use to simply describe any decline in appeal for the subject in question, without requiring a significant "jump the shark" moment.
More specificly it refers to an episode from the latter years of Happy Days, (if you don't remember the show or it's cultural impact when it was running, don't bother reading further). At the end of the episode Fonzie, in his customary leather jacket 'bad boy' attire, dons a pair of water skis and literally performs a jump over a shark. This is seen by many (especially after the term was coined) as the definitive point when the show went from entertaining to just crud.
My family's first computer was a ZX81. My father purchased it 'unassembled' and it actually sat on our kitchen table for six months before he gave in and paid someone to professionally put the computer together.
My father was always trying to turn it into something 'useful' and kept purchasing Spectrum magazines to for code. I remember when he actually tried writing up a report for work and printing it off on the "receipt" thermal printer that went with the computer.
I was always pouring over the THICK manual that came with the computer, and even brought it to school to 'explain' AND and OR conditions in 3rd grade.
My first "cheat code" was hacking a game called "Red Alert" so I would never run out of lives. I wanted to see if the 'map' actually had an end, like the story that came with the game implied. It seemed amazing to me, as previously all I had ever gotten to play with were cartridge games for an Atari 2600, that I was actually 'allowed' to mess with the game like that.
Eventually, my father lost interest in the computer and passed it on to me when he got an Atari ST (Dad didn't have the best of luck when it came to picking computers that would survive in the marketplace).
I can't remember how many days I wasted playing with that thing, making simple XP and gold accumulators/dividers for imaginary D&D sessions, using a basic DB program to create a record for all the lands in my campaign world, trying to type in those effing 100 page programs for games (only to have a typo around line 270 cause it to never run).
Then one day, it just died. I spent a whole month trying the mojo a 6th grader might try to convince the ZX81 to come back to life. I was "good' for a week, I left it unplugged for days, I even pulled apart its shell to see if something had come loose. But it was essentially a door stop.
By then, I had also gotten an Atari ST. Not my dad's this time. My own, it was cheap even since this was near the end of the ST life cycle (STe I think it was), but it wasn't the same. Basic in it was crappy. You could buy 'nice' versions like STOS, basically pimped up version of Basic designed to make small games, but even then it was so much more difficult to get the ST do to anything that amazed me half as much as the ZX did.
If I were a better person, I'd buy one of those kits they still sell to make a ZX81. But like my dad before me, I'm sure it'd just sit on a table for months before I realized that I wasn't going to do anything with it.
I never got to see the Speccy in person. As a kid I was slightly jealous of the computer itself (kid logic) since it had more than the ZX81, but I'm glad to wish it a happy Anniversary all the same. If it was half the machine its ancestor was, it deserves the remembrance.
Slashdot Mirror
Find your local Pot grower and ask them.... Or you could just read up on what is currently used in Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_sunlight
So is simply responding to one small section of an argument in an attempt to paint the entire arguement into your own strawmen. Which you've done twice now. Once to the parent and once to me when I pointed it out.
I said nothing about you being mentally defective, only that people who view the world in such a skewed manner as to believe that there are actually folk out there doing nothing but "badness" 100% of the time should consult a mental health professional to discuss the possiblity of them having a persecution complex. The world is seldom as black and white as you painted it.
You obviously missed the point being made.
The Parent post did not indicate anything in regards to "if there are good people, or bad people" but pointed out that being a "bad person" doesn't preclude you from doing the same things that a "good person" does on their off time. Being a "good person" doesn't preclude you from doing things that "bad people" do on their time off.
If you honestly think that the "bad people" out there just sit around being "bad" and thinking up new ways of being "bad", because they are "bad" then you probably want to have a talk with a mental health professional about persecution complexes.
Criminals fall in love, get married, have families, and raise kids. Criminals play video games, read books, play sports. Criminals eat fast food, have gormet dinners in fancy resturants, and cook their own meals. Criminals speed, perpetually drive under the speedlimit, drive SUVs, drive pickups, drive sports cars, drive sedans, and even drive hybrid cars.
In short, "Bad people" are just as likely to be into their geneology as "Good people" are.
Besides, it's not like certian criminal organizations aren't built on the concept that you are "Family".
Swordquest never finished of course. But if you have a hankering for the three comics that did come out (Earth, Fire, and Water), the SwordQuest archive can help (plus they have solutions posted.)
Agreed, the only disappointment that game had for me was that it gave the impression that there was "more" hidden away, which of course wasn't actually there.
My brother and I used to play that game over and over again just looking for easter eggs, sure that the detail that was put into the environments was hiding something. But there wasn't anything actually there.
Other than that, it was a fairly nice racer for people who don't need to feel like they are moving at warp speed all the time.
As long as the computer could never be subverted, that's true. However a Diebold(tm) computer overlord would be the more likely scenario, and we would be back to corrupted humans running the show.
Wait, a Sony higher up spoke about their product and their competitor's product, and it didn't involve an arrogant spiel about how wonderful Sony's attempt was and how the competitor has nothing, is nothing, and will be ground into dust?
People better start looking for survival gear, I feel a second coming drawing near.
Pull up the NYTimes article and actually look at the image the woman is complaining about. Tell me that if you were not already looking for a cat, you would have noticed it. Then tell me that this isn't simply someone making a tempest in a teapot.
I understand, really I do. Now that Google is no longer purely the "Underdog" it's popular to point out every potential path it can take down the 'Dark Side" as a de facto "they are going to do this next!". We've been burnt in the past, and project our fears of every bad corporation (real or fictional) we've ever read about onto them. But come on, this isn't even remotely the same as Britain's Big Brother system. We are talking about a van that drove through an area one and took pictures of publicly visible objects, not a series of surveillance equipment designed setup to ensure every action you take is recorded for prosperity.
Overly dramatic much? There is more than a small difference between having a static street level view of an area and having constantly monitored live camera's following your every move.
IBM is the car, and you are trying to steal it when you download GPL'ed software via a P2P system!
Unless these are 'digitally signed' tags (they aren't), meaning they are impossible to spoof, these watermarks are useless for any serious nefarious anti-user purpose.
There is no way to prove that just because 'files X and Y had tags xxx@nowhere.com' they were owned or shared by 'xxx@nowhere.com'. As(almost) everyone else has pointed out, real pirates will strip out the data or munge it in a way that will make it impossible to prove it was them using that alone.
Regular users will have about the same amount of reason to fear the RIAA as they do now, I.E. little to none if they have compentent legal reprensation. This is just as weak as the "We know it was you because you had this IP once" attack that the RIAA is using right now.
In fact, having watermarking may actually help regular users since if they aren't sharing their files illegally and the RIAA comes knocking with a "We've logged your IP" attack, the user might be able to point to the fact that the tags are theirs as additional defense.
You know, if you had milk in your tea more often, you wouldn't be so cranky. *ducks*
Give a child a match, he sees for a second. Light a child on fire, he can see for a lifetime. But only if his eyes are open in either case.
I'm not saying either of these projects are worthy or worthless. But there does seem to be a general pervasive additude in the 'modern' world that just throwing material goods at someone and saying a quaint homily is going to somehow help their situation.
Neither of these products are at all useful in stand alone situation. Children are not born with an instictive knowledge of how to use comptuers, the internet, or English, all of which are items which are pretty much requistes of being able to find a use for these outside of making a few bucks on the black market. They are intended as aids in places where education is already being provided, but the infrastructure doesn't yet have the means to support an actual, formal IT investment.
There are a million other places to spend the money that is going to these products, all of which would have some sort of direct immediate impact on someone's life. But the question is, would they simply enable the people impacted to survive their situation, or would they actually give the means to better it.
But lets not hype these as something more than they are, these aren't going to mean someone not eating because they couldn't look up how to 'farm' on the internet. What they may do, however, is give someone who would have spent the rest of their life on a farm an opportunity to be more than that. Which in turn, provided the area the opportunity to actually grow and better itself as opposed to stagnating.
Think "24"...
"Jack! That Palm will explode in 20 seconds if you can't get Linux booted on it!"
"I'm on it! Quick open another port in the firewall so I can interface directly with the TCP!"
.....
BAAAANG!
You do realize that Valve hired both the team that created CS and DOD, and the reason why they sell the both mods now is because they paid hard cash for the mods, right?
If you want to be pissed at Valve about something, please at least pick a topic where Valve isn't one of the leaders of the pack on. I don't know of any other game companies that you can speak of that have sheparded their mod community as much as Valve has.
Come on. If I wanted to meet people, I wouldn't be training on my Murder Simulator.
People have worshipped money long before it was even a formalized concept backed by governments. It's not a new god; it's simply the reigning god.
However what is more interesting in the parallel between Google and Congress is how willing people are to attribute voting down one proposal as a complete sell out of principles as opposed to attributing it to a disagreement on how best to achieve a common goal.
[pendantic mode]
Actually, while may Christian based churches today operate in that manner, if you study the history of the Roman Catholic church, especially the Reformation period, you'd see they acted just about exactly as the Scientologist do today.
The Church punished people who attempted to bring the Bible to the masses, because that cut into the Church's lucrative business of being the middle-man between God and the rest of us. Prior to the illegal publications of bibles translated into English, only a select few who knew Latin had the access to the biblical texts we take for granted today.
As far as Scientology goes, it's about as corrupt as any religion. The lay person seems about as sincere as any, and the leadership seems just as willing to compromise principles for power. I don't see anything different there than I do for the other main stream religions.[/pendantic mode]
And given we were talking about names, I have absolutely no idea why I typed Sid when I was thinking Will. Though both Sid Meier and Will Wright have a "I'm willing to give alot of leeway due to past results" flag next to their name in my brain.
There is a trend that you are missing in the examples you are providing, one that is far more telling as to why those games were well hyped flops and why few people fear the same about Spore.
Hint: The initials P.M. come into play.
I'm not saying Sid's games don't have their faults, and I'm especially starting to feel burned by the combo of "publish and forget" and "one million and one expansion packs!" business strategies that Maxis has adopted under EA. But publishing games while failing to deliver most of what was promised isn't shown as Sid's particular failing if you check his CV.
There is, however, a new plugin which emulates offline message storing by using buddy pounce. I haven't tried it yet, but I would expect that it works just as well outside of the instances where neither of you are online at the same time.
Do I really need to state the obvious?
Jumping the shark is a metaphor that was originally used to denote the tipping point at which a TV series is deemed by a viewer to have passed its peak, or has introduced plot twists that are illogical in terms of everything that has preceded them. Once a show has "jumped the shark," the viewer senses a noticeable decline in quality or feels the show has undergone too many changes to retain its original charm. The term has also evolved to describe other areas of pop culture, including movie series, music, acting celebrities, or authors for whom a drastic change was seen as the beginning of the end. These changes are often attempts to attract their fans' waning attention with over-the-top statements or increasingly overt appeals to sex or violence. Some have broadened its use to simply describe any decline in appeal for the subject in question, without requiring a significant "jump the shark" moment.
More specificly it refers to an episode from the latter years of Happy Days, (if you don't remember the show or it's cultural impact when it was running, don't bother reading further). At the end of the episode Fonzie, in his customary leather jacket 'bad boy' attire, dons a pair of water skis and literally performs a jump over a shark. This is seen by many (especially after the term was coined) as the definitive point when the show went from entertaining to just crud.
My family's first computer was a ZX81. My father purchased it 'unassembled' and it actually sat on our kitchen table for six months before he gave in and paid someone to professionally put the computer together.
My father was always trying to turn it into something 'useful' and kept purchasing Spectrum magazines to for code. I remember when he actually tried writing up a report for work and printing it off on the "receipt" thermal printer that went with the computer.
I was always pouring over the THICK manual that came with the computer, and even brought it to school to 'explain' AND and OR conditions in 3rd grade.
My first "cheat code" was hacking a game called "Red Alert" so I would never run out of lives. I wanted to see if the 'map' actually had an end, like the story that came with the game implied. It seemed amazing to me, as previously all I had ever gotten to play with were cartridge games for an Atari 2600, that I was actually 'allowed' to mess with the game like that.
Eventually, my father lost interest in the computer and passed it on to me when he got an Atari ST (Dad didn't have the best of luck when it came to picking computers that would survive in the marketplace).
I can't remember how many days I wasted playing with that thing, making simple XP and gold accumulators/dividers for imaginary D&D sessions, using a basic DB program to create a record for all the lands in my campaign world, trying to type in those effing 100 page programs for games (only to have a typo around line 270 cause it to never run).
Then one day, it just died. I spent a whole month trying the mojo a 6th grader might try to convince the ZX81 to come back to life. I was "good' for a week, I left it unplugged for days, I even pulled apart its shell to see if something had come loose. But it was essentially a door stop.
By then, I had also gotten an Atari ST. Not my dad's this time. My own, it was cheap even since this was near the end of the ST life cycle (STe I think it was), but it wasn't the same. Basic in it was crappy. You could buy 'nice' versions like STOS, basically pimped up version of Basic designed to make small games, but even then it was so much more difficult to get the ST do to anything that amazed me half as much as the ZX did.
If I were a better person, I'd buy one of those kits they still sell to make a ZX81. But like my dad before me, I'm sure it'd just sit on a table for months before I realized that I wasn't going to do anything with it.
I never got to see the Speccy in person. As a kid I was slightly jealous of the computer itself (kid logic) since it had more than the ZX81, but I'm glad to wish it a happy Anniversary all the same. If it was half the machine its ancestor was, it deserves the remembrance.
LONG LIVE THE ZX SPECTRUM! LONG LIVE SPECCY!