The simulation is reliant on the server, it's not as simple as an "unlock patch".
While this will of course be used as an excuse for forced obsolescence, the reality is that an unlock patch could of course simply include the server code, perhaps even running it in the same process as the main game.
Oh well. After reading about the always connected requirement, I decided to wait and see rather than preorder. It turned out to be a wise decision.
If you want to play another SimCity game, you're going to have to go to EA.
But why would you? SimCity is a city management game. It has no characters, no plot, no setting, in short no elements whatsoever a competitor couldn't implement. It doesn't even have a specific style or level of detail - the original SimCity is very different from the SimCity 200/3000/4 series, which in turn is completely different from Societies. Is there anything whatsoever a SimCity game can offer that another city manager couldn't, besides the name?
Are there city simulation competitors? Sure, but if they ever get any financial traction at all expect EA to go after them with lawyers akimbo.
There are plenty of competitors, from Tropico to Dwarf Fortress.
Even if they could get away with it, people will just always regard them as a SimCity clone.
People don't regard every RTS as a Dune clone, nor do they regard every FPS as a Doom clone (anymore). You can get out of the shadow if you do things significantly better.
The correct response, I think, is to address these points and make marriage about funding new life. That is, after all, it's social purpose... the human need it meets that justifies its existence.
Humans form pair bonds. Marriage - whether official or common-law - is simply a convenient way for the legal system to model this. That is the purpose of marriage laws and the justification for their existence. The pair bonds themselves are a naturally occurring social phenomenom, not an artificial construct, and as such it's misleading to assign them a purpose, nor do they need to justify their existence.
But even if you were correct, so what? If you want to encourage people having children, pay them child support or something. Don't try to blackmail them with marriage annulment or otherwise messing with them.
There was a time when the creative minds of this country were discredited, blacklisted and even arrested because they were accused of being Communists, Radicals, Social Deviants and Homosexuals. Now the Homosexuals have their turn, and have proven they never really objected to McCarthyism, their righteous self-will knows no bounds, and they will oppress as they were oppressed.
Oh my, that is serious! They even got to the summary, which only talks about comic book fans considering not buying a comic book written by a crazy douchebag and entirely omitted the part about said douchebag being called before the Senate. Oh the humanity!
Yes, lets worry about getting broadband to the impoverished instead of food, clean water, and antibiotics.
You do realize that providing education in impoverished areas is a large and important priority, right? Because that's the only way those areas are ever going to stop being impoverished. Now ask yourself: which is more cost-effective, hauling a few books from one continent to another or setting up a broadband Internet access and letting people browse Wikipedia at their leisure?
Knowledge is power, and Internet is one of the most effective keys to it ever.
Thats almost twice the bandwidth needed for 480p youtube as tested just moments ago using the free educational video made by sixtysymbols on transistors
Bandwidth is pretty much meaningless, because you can simply download the video file using DownloadHelper or something. It's the transfer cap that's the real killer.
It seems to me and I think I have shown it to be true that people are actually crying about the availability of highest quality media, and not so much access.
If the video adds nothing of value, why not read a transcript instead? And if it does, wouldn't you say that you'll lose something if you can't see it clearly?
That these two distinct things get equated is the consequence of people so easily stooping into the realm of intellectual dishonesty in the name of wants instead of needs.
Specifically, the dishonesty lays in pretending that these are different. "Want" is simply something you want for itself, and "need" is something you want because of something else, leading ultimately to some want. Sure, you'll die if you don't get food, but do you need to live or do you merely want to? And if you actually have some goal you need life to accomplish, do you need that to accomplish it or do you merely want to?
All things people desire ultimately go back to "mere" wants, and the only thing left is to reconcile these wants as well as possible.
Unless the thing you are attempting to create requires 1.5 billion dollars in parts. At which point, 1 billion is quite different from 2 billion.
It's impossible to go from $0 to $1 billion unless you get extremely lucky. It's easy to go from $1 billion to $1.5 billion unless you get extremely unlucky. It's called capitalism for a reason.
A lot of people instinctively say they'd take the knock-off because it's free, but if you're a rational actor you should stick with your original choice, because the difference between the knock-off and the premium one, both in terms of costs and benefits, has not changed at all, whatsoever.
This is not true. The utility of money is an s-curve, so the difference of utility between $100 and $200 is less than $0 and $100.
Think of this way: there's a huge difference between being broke and owning 1 billion dollars, but no practical difference owning 1 and 2 billion dollars.
and when apple stops making professional desktop units, a lot of people are stuck using their overpriced laptops because our body of work is from OSX and logic.
It is unwise to use closed systems for professional matters precisely for this reason: you're at the mercy of a single manufacturer with them.
And no matter how much Julian Assange argues, you can't really have a world where everything is in the open. There are still files from WWI that are secretive because they contain information that might cause international incidents.
And keeping them secret sends a powerful message: you can do horrible things with no regard to long-term consequences, because those who come after you will keep your secrets safe. Both your reputation and the cause you committed atrocities for are safe no matter what you do, so go ahead and shed more blood, no one will ever know. You are not accountable.
You can have a world where everything is in the open, but the slimy things that live in the dark don't want it, for light would send them scurrying for cover. For everyone else it would be a far better world.
The implication is that if it cannot, then it's really not inherently more reliable than a much simpler machine with no battery at all.
What does "inherent" reliability mean? All machines currently in use require regular maintenance. Checking the status of the battery seems like something that should be part of said maintenance routine.
Also, at least my UPS does self-test the battery periodically, even if the mains power is never interrupted.
Do they pay for the content they download? If not, in 20 years, when those 20 somethings are 40 somethings, who is going to generate the content?
Everyone, if current trends continue. We're already at the point where the best stuff in most franchises are produced by fans, with the "official" content serving mostly as a seed to get things started; and are currently seeing a shift where textual fan-made content is increasingly supplemented by videos, music, etc due to the increasing quality of tools at Joe Average's disposal. Add the entirely original settings (such as Orion's Arm) made possible by the community-building power of the Internet, and it seems likely that in 20 years the so-called Big Content will be both dead and unmourned.
The fact that any Joe can sit down and go to ${site} and be nearly certain that their communication is authenticated and encrypted without the need to understand anything is a remarkable feat of engineering.
It would be if it actually existed. As is, Joe needs to understand that if his browser starts giving security warnings, someone's probably trying to steal his credit card info. Joe also needs to understand that SSL can't protect him if he visits sites through links (because they might direct him to amaz0n.com instead of the real deal) and that if someone wants a key for obscuresite.com, they'll probably get it, whether they have anything to do with that site or not. Finally, Joe needs to understand that if his own machine is compromised (for example, by installing the cute cats screensaver a friend sent him as an email attachment), it's game over already.
So yes, Joe needs to understand what he's doing to use SSL succesfully, the same as in any other activity.
And how long will it be until extremists design and assemble a lethal and unstoppable virus this way and trigger a global epidemic that wipes out humanity in the name of Allah?
Probably forever, because:
Wiping out humanity is the one thing anyone - including the extremists - ought to understand is guaranteed to royally piss off any creator god that might be behind human existence (or any being even remotely interested in humanity, for that matter).
Politically motivated terrorism doesn't exactly have many scenarios where actually ending the world would get you what you want either.
It's pretty hard to imagine that fundamentalists could outsmart biologists who, after all, also have access to this tool to make a cure.
Nice work, Omri; you've just handed them the tools.
On the other hand, idiots who think other people are cartoon supervillains and appeal to that caricature to argue against new tools are certainly capable of killing millions by hindering the War on Disease. You and everyone who modded you up ought to be ashamed of yourselves. You're just as bad as the anti-vaccine people, except you don't even have misfiring parental instincts as an excuse.
Something (a picture, words, etc.) that can cause a rape victim a flashback. The problem is that this could be potentially anything (including, as another poster noted, mentioning rape triggers), so while it might make sense to worry about this is in places like rape victim support groups, it's an odd thing to worry about in a hacker conference.
Also note that this is hardly a concept limited to rape victims, but could potentially extend to anyone who has suffered trauma (traffick accidents, school shootings, suicide of loved ones, war, bullying, disease, etc.), yet I don't see anyone worrying about causing them flashbacks. Thus the more cynical side of me wonders if the concern over "rape triggers" is really driven by concern for others, rather than being yet another tool to justify lording over what they may or may not discuss.
It would be like blaming the shop keeper who pays off the local mafia to keep himself safe, or blaming the more sinister man who bribes them to kill a competitor. These actions are an effect of the violence that infests such a community, not the cause. To understand the world, one must call things by their proper name; the actor responsible for waving guns around, terrorizing innocent people is the one responsible for the evil.
Or you could go one step further and ask yourself: just why are mafiosos allowed to walk free and threaten innocent people? Why are they not dragged into court to receive their just reward? Could it perhaps be that the people who call for weakening the state also bear some responsibility for the entirely foreseeable results of such weakening, such as the rule of law being replaced by rule of the mightiest?
Nature abhors a vacuum. A power vacuum will always be filled. And most candidates for filling it have nothing stopping them from becoming tyrants; in fact modern democratic states are pretty much the only thing that do. This is something various types of libertarians and randroids seem to have a hard time understanding.
Why does it need to think at all? It's applying rules, not creating them.
Early AI researchers made just this mistake: they thought that stuff that's hard for humans is hard, period, and the things like walking and object recognition are simple. They're not, they're simply handled outside conscious thought so they seem simple. So it's esy to say a robot doesn't need to think, just apply rules, but before it can do so it needs to interpret the situation, and that requires very advanced AI.
"Sir, my scans have detected unauthorized weapons. Please put them down or I will apply force."
Recognizing a weapon requires thinking. Recognizing when one has been "put down" requires thinking. Recognizing whether the one carrying it is reaching for it to shoot or to put it down requires thinking.
Also, if the robot is incapable of learning (creating new rules), it's only a matter of time before someone figures out how to smuggle weapons past it, and do so succesfully every time from then on.
Then again, I ask myself what some jihadist might do, if given half the chance... .....
Take the Soviet Union's place at American Boogeyman #1, which is pretty darn impressive accomplishment on their side and just plain sad on America's.
You are worrying about a bunch of third-world priests and their followers building a high-tech weapon the American Army - or any first-world country - can't out-high-tech. And it got modded +5 Interesting. Come on.
Robots have no emotion, no bias. Imagine deploying a few hundred (or thousand) semi-autonomous robotic peacekeepers into a conflict zone. They maintain the peace 24/7, they never tire, they are alert and objective in their duties.
An autonomous robot needs to form a model of what's happening around it, use that to figure out what its possible long- and short-term actions will be, and finally decide how desirable various outcomes are relative to each other. All of these steps are prone to bias, especially since whoever designed the robot and its initial database is going to have their own biases.
Also, a robot acting in real life cannot carefully think everything through. There's simply not enough time for that. This necessiates some kind of emotion-analogy to provide context for reflex and simple actions, just like it does on living beings.
Look at Iraq and Afghanistan! $1 trillion and thousands of allied casualties. Deploy a robot army and watch the costs come down. No need for living quarters, no need of food or water, logistics becomes cheaper in every aspect.
So there will be a lot more "interventions", since the cost (to you) is lower. I think that's part of what worries the the HRW.
Perhaps the simplest example where that assumption fails is when representing a free text document as a bag of words, which is a standard representation for information retrieval applications (eg the google web index). In this case, the natural data representation is infinite dimensional, ie there can be abitrarily many attributes in a document. In such applications, even defining meaningful schemas as done in RDBMS's is impossible.
Document ID, word number, word. There's no reason why you'd need to represent a single document in a single row. In fact you'd probably not want to, because this structure allows for easier subexpression searching.
It might not be the most space efficient representation, but that's usually not the most important factor when using databases, especially when storing text files.
I don't really have the time to adequately screen 300 resumes
No one does. There's simply too much job churn for HR to do its job well, thus it turns into meaningless voodoo like checking whether someone guessed what the hiring manager likes to hear or what he considers "realistic" salary for a given position. And of course job churn is a self-reinforcing vicious circle, as the very fact that any particular job application is unlikely to result in a job offer (or even an interview) means you're best off putting out as many of them as you can, further overloading the HR and resulting in even more voodoo.
Slashdot Mirror
While this will of course be used as an excuse for forced obsolescence, the reality is that an unlock patch could of course simply include the server code, perhaps even running it in the same process as the main game.
Oh well. After reading about the always connected requirement, I decided to wait and see rather than preorder. It turned out to be a wise decision.
But why would you? SimCity is a city management game. It has no characters, no plot, no setting, in short no elements whatsoever a competitor couldn't implement. It doesn't even have a specific style or level of detail - the original SimCity is very different from the SimCity 200/3000/4 series, which in turn is completely different from Societies. Is there anything whatsoever a SimCity game can offer that another city manager couldn't, besides the name?
There are plenty of competitors, from Tropico to Dwarf Fortress.
People don't regard every RTS as a Dune clone, nor do they regard every FPS as a Doom clone (anymore). You can get out of the shadow if you do things significantly better.
Humans form pair bonds. Marriage - whether official or common-law - is simply a convenient way for the legal system to model this. That is the purpose of marriage laws and the justification for their existence. The pair bonds themselves are a naturally occurring social phenomenom, not an artificial construct, and as such it's misleading to assign them a purpose, nor do they need to justify their existence.
But even if you were correct, so what? If you want to encourage people having children, pay them child support or something. Don't try to blackmail them with marriage annulment or otherwise messing with them.
Oh my, that is serious! They even got to the summary, which only talks about comic book fans considering not buying a comic book written by a crazy douchebag and entirely omitted the part about said douchebag being called before the Senate. Oh the humanity!
Which is why the traditional approach to dealing with reattlesnakes has been to simply shoot them.
You do realize that providing education in impoverished areas is a large and important priority, right? Because that's the only way those areas are ever going to stop being impoverished. Now ask yourself: which is more cost-effective, hauling a few books from one continent to another or setting up a broadband Internet access and letting people browse Wikipedia at their leisure?
Knowledge is power, and Internet is one of the most effective keys to it ever.
Bandwidth is pretty much meaningless, because you can simply download the video file using DownloadHelper or something. It's the transfer cap that's the real killer.
If the video adds nothing of value, why not read a transcript instead? And if it does, wouldn't you say that you'll lose something if you can't see it clearly?
Specifically, the dishonesty lays in pretending that these are different. "Want" is simply something you want for itself, and "need" is something you want because of something else, leading ultimately to some want. Sure, you'll die if you don't get food, but do you need to live or do you merely want to? And if you actually have some goal you need life to accomplish, do you need that to accomplish it or do you merely want to?
All things people desire ultimately go back to "mere" wants, and the only thing left is to reconcile these wants as well as possible.
It's impossible to go from $0 to $1 billion unless you get extremely lucky. It's easy to go from $1 billion to $1.5 billion unless you get extremely unlucky. It's called capitalism for a reason.
This is not true. The utility of money is an s-curve, so the difference of utility between $100 and $200 is less than $0 and $100.
Think of this way: there's a huge difference between being broke and owning 1 billion dollars, but no practical difference owning 1 and 2 billion dollars.
No matter how much you white knight a company, it will never reward you with an orgy of sweet capital gains love. Sorry.
It is unwise to use closed systems for professional matters precisely for this reason: you're at the mercy of a single manufacturer with them.
Well, if you want reliability they're hard to beat.
And keeping them secret sends a powerful message: you can do horrible things with no regard to long-term consequences, because those who come after you will keep your secrets safe. Both your reputation and the cause you committed atrocities for are safe no matter what you do, so go ahead and shed more blood, no one will ever know. You are not accountable.
You can have a world where everything is in the open, but the slimy things that live in the dark don't want it, for light would send them scurrying for cover. For everyone else it would be a far better world.
What does "inherent" reliability mean? All machines currently in use require regular maintenance. Checking the status of the battery seems like something that should be part of said maintenance routine.
Also, at least my UPS does self-test the battery periodically, even if the mains power is never interrupted.
Everyone, if current trends continue. We're already at the point where the best stuff in most franchises are produced by fans, with the "official" content serving mostly as a seed to get things started; and are currently seeing a shift where textual fan-made content is increasingly supplemented by videos, music, etc due to the increasing quality of tools at Joe Average's disposal. Add the entirely original settings (such as Orion's Arm) made possible by the community-building power of the Internet, and it seems likely that in 20 years the so-called Big Content will be both dead and unmourned.
It would be if it actually existed. As is, Joe needs to understand that if his browser starts giving security warnings, someone's probably trying to steal his credit card info. Joe also needs to understand that SSL can't protect him if he visits sites through links (because they might direct him to amaz0n.com instead of the real deal) and that if someone wants a key for obscuresite.com, they'll probably get it, whether they have anything to do with that site or not. Finally, Joe needs to understand that if his own machine is compromised (for example, by installing the cute cats screensaver a friend sent him as an email attachment), it's game over already.
So yes, Joe needs to understand what he's doing to use SSL succesfully, the same as in any other activity.
Probably forever, because:
On the other hand, idiots who think other people are cartoon supervillains and appeal to that caricature to argue against new tools are certainly capable of killing millions by hindering the War on Disease. You and everyone who modded you up ought to be ashamed of yourselves. You're just as bad as the anti-vaccine people, except you don't even have misfiring parental instincts as an excuse.
Something (a picture, words, etc.) that can cause a rape victim a flashback. The problem is that this could be potentially anything (including, as another poster noted, mentioning rape triggers), so while it might make sense to worry about this is in places like rape victim support groups, it's an odd thing to worry about in a hacker conference.
Also note that this is hardly a concept limited to rape victims, but could potentially extend to anyone who has suffered trauma (traffick accidents, school shootings, suicide of loved ones, war, bullying, disease, etc.), yet I don't see anyone worrying about causing them flashbacks. Thus the more cynical side of me wonders if the concern over "rape triggers" is really driven by concern for others, rather than being yet another tool to justify lording over what they may or may not discuss.
Or you could go one step further and ask yourself: just why are mafiosos allowed to walk free and threaten innocent people? Why are they not dragged into court to receive their just reward? Could it perhaps be that the people who call for weakening the state also bear some responsibility for the entirely foreseeable results of such weakening, such as the rule of law being replaced by rule of the mightiest?
Nature abhors a vacuum. A power vacuum will always be filled. And most candidates for filling it have nothing stopping them from becoming tyrants; in fact modern democratic states are pretty much the only thing that do. This is something various types of libertarians and randroids seem to have a hard time understanding.
Early AI researchers made just this mistake: they thought that stuff that's hard for humans is hard, period, and the things like walking and object recognition are simple. They're not, they're simply handled outside conscious thought so they seem simple. So it's esy to say a robot doesn't need to think, just apply rules, but before it can do so it needs to interpret the situation, and that requires very advanced AI.
Recognizing a weapon requires thinking. Recognizing when one has been "put down" requires thinking. Recognizing whether the one carrying it is reaching for it to shoot or to put it down requires thinking.
Also, if the robot is incapable of learning (creating new rules), it's only a matter of time before someone figures out how to smuggle weapons past it, and do so succesfully every time from then on.
Take the Soviet Union's place at American Boogeyman #1, which is pretty darn impressive accomplishment on their side and just plain sad on America's.
You are worrying about a bunch of third-world priests and their followers building a high-tech weapon the American Army - or any first-world country - can't out-high-tech. And it got modded +5 Interesting. Come on.
An autonomous robot needs to form a model of what's happening around it, use that to figure out what its possible long- and short-term actions will be, and finally decide how desirable various outcomes are relative to each other. All of these steps are prone to bias, especially since whoever designed the robot and its initial database is going to have their own biases.
Also, a robot acting in real life cannot carefully think everything through. There's simply not enough time for that. This necessiates some kind of emotion-analogy to provide context for reflex and simple actions, just like it does on living beings.
So there will be a lot more "interventions", since the cost (to you) is lower. I think that's part of what worries the the HRW.
Document ID, word number, word. There's no reason why you'd need to represent a single document in a single row. In fact you'd probably not want to, because this structure allows for easier subexpression searching.
It might not be the most space efficient representation, but that's usually not the most important factor when using databases, especially when storing text files.
No one does. There's simply too much job churn for HR to do its job well, thus it turns into meaningless voodoo like checking whether someone guessed what the hiring manager likes to hear or what he considers "realistic" salary for a given position. And of course job churn is a self-reinforcing vicious circle, as the very fact that any particular job application is unlikely to result in a job offer (or even an interview) means you're best off putting out as many of them as you can, further overloading the HR and resulting in even more voodoo.