Seems the trust system is prone to spamming itself. If the RIAA (or anyone for that matter) flood the system with bogus votes, then the "honest" votes will get ruled out.
I haven't read the description closely, but it's hard to see why flooding the system would matter- it isn't majority rule, it's who do you trust and who do they trust. If the RIAA has ten million bogus users, I and a few hundred other people vote thumbs down on them but thumbs up for each other, then we have our little corner where a set of honest opinions exist (although it may take a while to initially connect to that group).
The way you would have to spam the system would be to vote honestly for a time and then switch abruptly, but even then the damage would be quickly mitigated as your credibility disappears.
They're especially cheap when you consider entertainment time per dollar
This sort of comparison has always felt too simplistic for what to me is an apples and oranges thing. Also, $60 is a sizable chunk of money, even if the value per unit-time is potentially high I'm going to think a lot harder about that purchase than for something that is much cheaper and takes less of my time. If I spend $60 I'm going to feel like I have to get all that value out, getting burnt is going to put me off from future games a lot more than seeing a bad movie. Bad games are infinitely worse than bad movies, because with a bad game it usually becomes impossible or difficult to move the game forward to experience all it has to offer, a bad movie I can fast forward until I find something redeemable.
Is anyone else disappointed that the PS3 is becoming less and less of a game machine and turning more and more in to an all-in-wonder-box?
Xbox 360 seems headed the same way. If anyone remembers the set-top box non-events (I'm sure MS was involved with one of them) or the '3D0 is the next VCR like appliance' type marketing from the early-to-mid-90s, it seems like MS and Sony are trying to revive the concept. The reason for the resurrection? HD tvs will make the web more readable than they were on standard definition.
General purpose machines are boring.
The death touch is if they promote the educational potential for their machines, but I haven't heard that one yet.
>> either way wading through this much incoherent text makes my brain feel like mush.
>You must be new here! Welcome!
I was hoping browsing at +3 would protect me from the unwashed masses drooling over their keyboards, but the moderation system has utterly failed me by letting this one post slip past. For shame.
I have a friend, two years out, making $90k per year and over $200k in debt.... who deserves more money: the MD that saves lives or the donut munching cop with an associates degree for the local community college and a mail order bachelors degree?
Okay, Mr. Coward, this page says the average pay of a police officer in the U.S. is $55,613. I'm sure starting pay is less than half than what your friend makes. $90K/year and $200K in debt? Sounds pretty rough, it might be a handful of years from now before he pays that off.
Of course by your standards there shouldn't be any state run medical schools (too socialist for you).
I never implied anything derogatory about socialism. It's just that if you're going to redistribute wealth you have to redistribute it from people who actually have enough to go around.
In my city the Chief of Police makes $151k USD and his lieutenants make at least $110k USD per year. I know primary care medical doctors that don't make that kind of money.
This common argument always ignores the fact that there are way more of the worthy group of people making less money than there are of the the unworthy group of people making more money. If you follow the socialist solution to the presented problem, you could take the richer peoples' money and divided it amongst the poorer, and they would have a tiny pay raise.
I want a 25% tax on idiot congress members. Your tax goes up for every bill you voted for that is later found unconstitutional. The revenue goes to tax breaks for people who voted for the other guy (you can still vote in secret if you don't want the tax break).
If you don't want to have easy access to pornography on-line, you have many ways of putting yourself in a position...
One approach is to literally put yourself in a position where either your house-mates or your nextdoor neighbors can see if you're browsing porn or not- but only if you have enough shame to care whether those people see you looking at porn. Otherwise please stay in your room with the blinds closed and the monitor facing the opposite direction what someone walking in the door will see, and lock your door and turn the music up for christ's sake I don't want to hear what you're doing in there, maybe a single bedroom apartment isn't that unaffordable...
Programming paradigm. It's the most appropriate word to describe the different families of programming styles/languages
If it always comes qualified with 'programming' at the front then it may be okay- also there's a difference between having a word written down and hearing it in speech, something about written words make them more respectable. I would avoid usage of 'paradigm shift', 'different paradigm', or 'new paradigm' at all costs.
Computer science curriculum seems to be wasting a lot of bright young potential on buzzwords. Patterns, paradigms, bleh. People somehow manage to get masters degrees in CS from Berkeley without even knowing what "turing complete", "Karnaugh map", "Rice's theorem", "Goedel's completeness theorem", "planar graph", "functional language", "church-turing thesis" are. But you ask them about a singleton, model-view controller or Java's security model in reflection and they're the fucking expert.
Interesting - that you decry the popularity of "buzzwords" with a list of what are, essentially, buzzwords.
A buzzword is a fashionable word for something either very simple, or something very vague and un-concrete. It makes you sound a little smarter initially, because the word is more intelligent and exotic sounding than 'thing' or 'stuff' (or whatever). After everyone starts using it more and more frequently in contradictory or meaningless ways, then it becomes a recognized buzzword and makes you sound less educated for saying it.
I rarely hear theorems used as buzzwords, though there are instances when a science popularizer tries to explain a theorem in a mass-market medium and then everybody who read the back cover of the book or caught 5-minutes of the show on PBS will start using it.
I've never heard Karnaugh Map used by anybody who didn't know what it meant, people discussing design patterns typically have read parts of the book but are most likely applying the pattern where it doesn't belong, and if I ever heard someone use the term paradigm seriously in a technical discussion I'd probably laugh in their face.
A fundamental change will be required to deal with the ever increasing volume of patent applications.
How about charging the patent applicant the amount of money it takes to actually process the patent (or that amount averaged across all applications for that type of patent). Patents in difficult to determine areas (those requiring a great deal of research, skilled interpretation, or lie in a gray area of patentability) would cost more- a simple mechanical device would be pretty cheap, complex electronic circuitry a bit more, and algorithm and software and business patents millions of dollars.
What baffles me is why Hollywood keeps throwing cash at video-game-themed movies. They all stink on ice, and most of them lose money.
What's funny is that we're getting to the point where the games will cost more, get better (voice & motion capture) quality talent, and attract more creative and original people than the movies. The movies are increasingly going to be analogous to movie novelizations and other merchandising- mostly it's just some cheap throwaway entertainment that some niche market will eat up reliably. Hardly anybody complains about crappy movie novelizations ruining the movie or failing to capture this or that major point, soon it will be the same for movies made from games. A complete role-reversal for the way crappy games are made out of sometimes very good films.
Although, the one flaw in that argument is that more people can watch a movie than read a book because reading is slower- games are also much more time-consuming than films so this limits their market penetration. But the play time in games is probably going to fall as expenses rise...
The global criticism around US human rights injustices doesn't even exist on the same scale as the Soviet Union. You would have as much luck comparing Texas executions to the Nazi holocaust.
I hate it when people look to the worst examples in history and say because we're not that bad then we can ignore the faults we do have. Our system works well because when there are problems people react and try to correct them- the system is the people! Sure, we've set up a structure that makes it easier for people to make corrective actions (free speech, equal rights, courts of law, separation of powers, etc.). People who use 'the system works' as an excuse for their apathy are just living high off the hard work and sacrifice of others.
Also, Godwin's law says you've lost the argument by default...
Overall your later points are valid, every empire declines or falls uniquely- the U.S. looks set to go more the way of Rome or Britain than the Soviet Union, but you can't discount something unpredictable happening.
The US political system is so stable that nothing short of a nuclear holocaust could pull it apart
I doubt it. I think there have been many points in U.S. history (the late 60's being the most recent) where had things continued the way they were for much longer, or some other disastrous event had occurred to exacerbate things, then we would have some discontinuities to point to.
I wonder how risky was the cross atlantic sailing were in the mid 1500's. I am sure mortality was a lot higher then 1% then it is with the shuttle program.
Although life was worth less then, at least there was an immediate economic incentive to making such a risky voyage. You could even frame it in terms of thousands of colonists that depend on those ships for trade. The only reason to send people into space currently is to send people into space. I personally think that's a decent reason, but I for my money's worth I'd rather put up a few new space telescope to find nearby planetary systems with or whatever, or send off a few robots to explore Mars or the moons of the gas giants.
The other problem with your argument is that no matter which century you live in, if given the choice between two transportation systems, all other things being about equal you should go with the more reliable one. Russia has a safer system, we should use it until we've built something comparable of our own.
Burt would have bought a ton of good publicity for himself, then built a smaller and less capable shuttle, and taken the remainder and retired.
Remember, SpaceShipOne is not orbital capable. It is capable of going straight up, then straight back down. Achieving orbit (and recovering to earth sucessfully) requires 30 - 50 times more energy due to the much higher velocities to get to orbit.
Scaled is said to be working on a orbital vehicle right now. It might take them twenty years, but it will probably be an order of magnitude cheaper than the shuttle and and order of magnitude safer.
They may have hosed the shuttle program as a whole, but the technology involved to make it work is some of the best ever invented.
People used to every day computers (and other consumer tech. that won't kill them if it fails) have the attitude that newer is also better and that complicated means the designers are smart and therefore if the thing works at all it's better than a simpler thing that does the job more reliably.
The best way to apply new technology to space transportation is to used it to make small improvements over known reliable designs, and to increase your understanding of those proven designs: better testing equipment, better simulations, more precise machining, etc. The wrong way is to introduce many new things that are critical parts of the system, like say hypersonic gliding re-entry, reusable rocket engines, 5-way redundant digital computers, and a few others I can't think of, and then make it the only way your nation can get people into space for the next 30 years.
The point is, now that we're looking intensely for problems in this area, we're going to find them.
Right, and a close inspection of a poor design is going to show a lot more serious problems than it would for a good design.
The shuttles are the most complicated pieces of machinery ever built, designed to launch into space with a controlled explosion, and then return to earth.
But history and other countries have shown you can accomplish the same mission with much more simpler and reliable machines, and those are rocket powered too. The shuttle could have been remembered as a great accomplishment if it were just an x-vehicle meant to test out some hypersonic gliding re-entry and reusable engine technologies, but they decided to make it the official U.S. manned space transportation system for 30 years.
I believe it was stated that every mission there was a 1 in 52 chance of critical failure... Let's face it, hurling a chunk of metal into space going in excess of 12,500 MPH isn't ever going to be 100% safe.
It's stupid to say that because you can't have 100% survivability, that any number greater than 90 is acceptable. I would choose something that's 99.9% safe over something 98% safe, and you can achieve 99.9% safety with manned rocketry.
The Russians, for instance- I'm not sure if they've had any fatalities over the past couple decades. Their equipment is not a whole lot more reliable (even 'man-rated' rockets only have something around 99% success rates), but their system is such that the crew can escape and survive the most likely failures- that buys another level of safety.
I thought Australia or another country was trying to sue the DVD consortium through the WTO for the practice [of region-splitting]
Well, they won. DVD players can't be sold legally in Australia without being "modded" to be R0.
Hmm, I know basically nothing about the WTO, but I would have thought winning a case via an international organization like that would mean that and you win it for everyone- all companies in WTO member countries would have to abandon regional encoding.
Splitting the world into isolated markets where you can charge more or less for the same product just doesn't work any more.
It also goes against every principle of Free Trade. I thought Australia or another country was trying to sue the DVD consortium through the WTO for the practice, but I haven't been able to determine what happened to that.
A touch of realism would be nice. I'm getting tired of the enormous adolescent-fantasy boobs everywhere.
The unrealistic proportions I think are so far a function of the how primitive the graphics are- you had to make Lara exaggerated because you only had a handful of polygons to do it with on the PS1.
Or even going back further to low-res 2d graphics, you'd have to do something like this to show a female:
= == = =
And that's way unrealistic. Now, we can have thousands of polygons along with realistic skin tones, hair and clothing physics, eye movement, and everything else that makes a real person attractive to look at- they don't need to hit you over the head with caricatures.
How is it that consentual sex with a *girlfriend* in a game is automatically considered demeaning to women?
Actually in this case it is even more annoying because the female interviewees in the article don't mention the GTA sex mini-game, it's just insinuated that if they did know about it they would be opposed. Reread this portion of bang-up objective journalism from the AP:
Don't even get her started on the thong-bikini babes that the male gunmen win as prizes in "Grand Theft Auto," which was sent to stores with hidden sex scenes left embedded on the discs by programmers.
Slashdot Mirror
Seems the trust system is prone to spamming itself. If the RIAA (or anyone for that matter) flood the system with bogus votes, then the "honest" votes will get ruled out.
I haven't read the description closely, but it's hard to see why flooding the system would matter- it isn't majority rule, it's who do you trust and who do they trust. If the RIAA has ten million bogus users, I and a few hundred other people vote thumbs down on them but thumbs up for each other, then we have our little corner where a set of honest opinions exist (although it may take a while to initially connect to that group).
The way you would have to spam the system would be to vote honestly for a time and then switch abruptly, but even then the damage would be quickly mitigated as your credibility disappears.
They're especially cheap when you consider entertainment time per dollar
This sort of comparison has always felt too simplistic for what to me is an apples and oranges thing. Also, $60 is a sizable chunk of money, even if the value per unit-time is potentially high I'm going to think a lot harder about that purchase than for something that is much cheaper and takes less of my time. If I spend $60 I'm going to feel like I have to get all that value out, getting burnt is going to put me off from future games a lot more than seeing a bad movie. Bad games are infinitely worse than bad movies, because with a bad game it usually becomes impossible or difficult to move the game forward to experience all it has to offer, a bad movie I can fast forward until I find something redeemable.
Is anyone else disappointed that the PS3 is becoming less and less of a game machine and turning more and more in to an all-in-wonder-box?
Xbox 360 seems headed the same way. If anyone remembers the set-top box non-events (I'm sure MS was involved with one of them) or the '3D0 is the next VCR like appliance' type marketing from the early-to-mid-90s, it seems like MS and Sony are trying to revive the concept. The reason for the resurrection? HD tvs will make the web more readable than they were on standard definition.
General purpose machines are boring.
The death touch is if they promote the educational potential for their machines, but I haven't heard that one yet.
>> either way wading through this much incoherent text makes my brain feel like mush.
>You must be new here! Welcome!
I was hoping browsing at +3 would protect me from the unwashed masses drooling over their keyboards, but the moderation system has utterly failed me by letting this one post slip past. For shame.
I have a friend, two years out, making $90k per year and over $200k in debt. ... who deserves more money: the MD that saves lives or the donut munching cop with an associates degree for the local community college and a mail order bachelors degree?
Okay, Mr. Coward, this page says the average pay of a police officer in the U.S. is $55,613. I'm sure starting pay is less than half than what your friend makes. $90K/year and $200K in debt? Sounds pretty rough, it might be a handful of years from now before he pays that off.
Of course by your standards there shouldn't be any state run medical schools (too socialist for you).
I never implied anything derogatory about socialism. It's just that if you're going to redistribute wealth you have to redistribute it from people who actually have enough to go around.
In my city the Chief of Police makes $151k USD and his lieutenants make at least $110k USD per year. I know primary care medical doctors that don't make that kind of money.
This common argument always ignores the fact that there are way more of the worthy group of people making less money than there are of the the unworthy group of people making more money. If you follow the socialist solution to the presented problem, you could take the richer peoples' money and divided it amongst the poorer, and they would have a tiny pay raise.
Prior ro that VD killed.
...
...
Now we giggle.
you have to pretty much be TRYING to get AIDS to get it.
I'd love to bang the snot out of every thigh high booted, thong showing, belly button ring wearing cock tease I see on the E train.
Please return to your orgies at your places of worship you Baalist bastards!
I sure hope this is a joke, though either way wading through this much incoherent text makes my brain feel like mush.
It seems odd to have a situation where the IRS decides what is and what isn't pornography.
You will soon be able to detail your vast experience looking at porn in your resume when applying for a job at the IRS.
I want a 25% tax on idiot congress members. Your tax goes up for every bill you voted for that is later found unconstitutional. The revenue goes to tax breaks for people who voted for the other guy (you can still vote in secret if you don't want the tax break).
If you don't want to have easy access to pornography on-line, you have many ways of putting yourself in a position...
One approach is to literally put yourself in a position where either your house-mates or your nextdoor neighbors can see if you're browsing porn or not- but only if you have enough shame to care whether those people see you looking at porn. Otherwise please stay in your room with the blinds closed and the monitor facing the opposite direction what someone walking in the door will see, and lock your door and turn the music up for christ's sake I don't want to hear what you're doing in there, maybe a single bedroom apartment isn't that unaffordable...
you've just taken the small innovative guy out of the market and only rich companies can innovate.
Don't blame me, someone else did that before I was born.
Programming paradigm. It's the most appropriate word to describe the different families of programming styles/languages
If it always comes qualified with 'programming' at the front then it may be okay- also there's a difference between having a word written down and hearing it in speech, something about written words make them more respectable. I would avoid usage of 'paradigm shift', 'different paradigm', or 'new paradigm' at all costs.
Interesting - that you decry the popularity of "buzzwords" with a list of what are, essentially, buzzwords.
A buzzword is a fashionable word for something either very simple, or something very vague and un-concrete. It makes you sound a little smarter initially, because the word is more intelligent and exotic sounding than 'thing' or 'stuff' (or whatever). After everyone starts using it more and more frequently in contradictory or meaningless ways, then it becomes a recognized buzzword and makes you sound less educated for saying it.
I rarely hear theorems used as buzzwords, though there are instances when a science popularizer tries to explain a theorem in a mass-market medium and then everybody who read the back cover of the book or caught 5-minutes of the show on PBS will start using it.
I've never heard Karnaugh Map used by anybody who didn't know what it meant, people discussing design patterns typically have read parts of the book but are most likely applying the pattern where it doesn't belong, and if I ever heard someone use the term paradigm seriously in a technical discussion I'd probably laugh in their face.
A fundamental change will be required to deal with the ever increasing volume of patent applications.
How about charging the patent applicant the amount of money it takes to actually process the patent (or that amount averaged across all applications for that type of patent). Patents in difficult to determine areas (those requiring a great deal of research, skilled interpretation, or lie in a gray area of patentability) would cost more- a simple mechanical device would be pretty cheap, complex electronic circuitry a bit more, and algorithm and software and business patents millions of dollars.
What baffles me is why Hollywood keeps throwing cash at video-game-themed movies. They all stink on ice, and most of them lose money.
What's funny is that we're getting to the point where the games will cost more, get better (voice & motion capture) quality talent, and attract more creative and original people than the movies. The movies are increasingly going to be analogous to movie novelizations and other merchandising- mostly it's just some cheap throwaway entertainment that some niche market will eat up reliably. Hardly anybody complains about crappy movie novelizations ruining the movie or failing to capture this or that major point, soon it will be the same for movies made from games. A complete role-reversal for the way crappy games are made out of sometimes very good films.
Although, the one flaw in that argument is that more people can watch a movie than read a book because reading is slower- games are also much more time-consuming than films so this limits their market penetration. But the play time in games is probably going to fall as expenses rise...
The global criticism around US human rights injustices doesn't even exist on the same scale as the Soviet Union. You would have as much luck comparing Texas executions to the Nazi holocaust.
I hate it when people look to the worst examples in history and say because we're not that bad then we can ignore the faults we do have. Our system works well because when there are problems people react and try to correct them- the system is the people! Sure, we've set up a structure that makes it easier for people to make corrective actions (free speech, equal rights, courts of law, separation of powers, etc.). People who use 'the system works' as an excuse for their apathy are just living high off the hard work and sacrifice of others.
Also, Godwin's law says you've lost the argument by default...
Overall your later points are valid, every empire declines or falls uniquely- the U.S. looks set to go more the way of Rome or Britain than the Soviet Union, but you can't discount something unpredictable happening.
The US political system is so stable that nothing short of a nuclear holocaust could pull it apart
I doubt it. I think there have been many points in U.S. history (the late 60's being the most recent) where had things continued the way they were for much longer, or some other disastrous event had occurred to exacerbate things, then we would have some discontinuities to point to.
I wonder how risky was the cross atlantic sailing were in the mid 1500's. I am sure mortality was a lot higher then 1% then it is with the shuttle program.
Although life was worth less then, at least there was an immediate economic incentive to making such a risky voyage. You could even frame it in terms of thousands of colonists that depend on those ships for trade. The only reason to send people into space currently is to send people into space. I personally think that's a decent reason, but I for my money's worth I'd rather put up a few new space telescope to find nearby planetary systems with or whatever, or send off a few robots to explore Mars or the moons of the gas giants.
The other problem with your argument is that no matter which century you live in, if given the choice between two transportation systems, all other things being about equal you should go with the more reliable one. Russia has a safer system, we should use it until we've built something comparable of our own.
Burt would have bought a ton of good publicity for himself, then built a smaller and less capable shuttle, and taken the remainder and retired.
Remember, SpaceShipOne is not orbital capable. It is capable of going straight up, then straight back down. Achieving orbit (and recovering to earth sucessfully) requires 30 - 50 times more energy due to the much higher velocities to get to orbit.
Scaled is said to be working on a orbital vehicle right now. It might take them twenty years, but it will probably be an order of magnitude cheaper than the shuttle and and order of magnitude safer.
They may have hosed the shuttle program as a whole, but the technology involved to make it work is some of the best ever invented.
People used to every day computers (and other consumer tech. that won't kill them if it fails) have the attitude that newer is also better and that complicated means the designers are smart and therefore if the thing works at all it's better than a simpler thing that does the job more reliably.
The best way to apply new technology to space transportation is to used it to make small improvements over known reliable designs, and to increase your understanding of those proven designs: better testing equipment, better simulations, more precise machining, etc. The wrong way is to introduce many new things that are critical parts of the system, like say hypersonic gliding re-entry, reusable rocket engines, 5-way redundant digital computers, and a few others I can't think of, and then make it the only way your nation can get people into space for the next 30 years.
The point is, now that we're looking intensely for problems in this area, we're going to find them.
Right, and a close inspection of a poor design is going to show a lot more serious problems than it would for a good design.
The shuttles are the most complicated pieces of machinery ever built, designed to launch into space with a controlled explosion, and then return to earth.
But history and other countries have shown you can accomplish the same mission with much more simpler and reliable machines, and those are rocket powered too. The shuttle could have been remembered as a great accomplishment if it were just an x-vehicle meant to test out some hypersonic gliding re-entry and reusable engine technologies, but they decided to make it the official U.S. manned space transportation system for 30 years.
I believe it was stated that every mission there was a 1 in 52 chance of critical failure... Let's face it, hurling a chunk of metal into space going in excess of 12,500 MPH isn't ever going to be 100% safe.
It's stupid to say that because you can't have 100% survivability, that any number greater than 90 is acceptable. I would choose something that's 99.9% safe over something 98% safe, and you can achieve 99.9% safety with manned rocketry.
The Russians, for instance- I'm not sure if they've had any fatalities over the past couple decades. Their equipment is not a whole lot more reliable (even 'man-rated' rockets only have something around 99% success rates), but their system is such that the crew can escape and survive the most likely failures- that buys another level of safety.
I thought Australia or another country was trying to sue the DVD consortium through the WTO for the practice [of region-splitting]
Well, they won. DVD players can't be sold legally in Australia without being "modded" to be R0.
Hmm, I know basically nothing about the WTO, but I would have thought winning a case via an international organization like that would mean that and you win it for everyone- all companies in WTO member countries would have to abandon regional encoding.
This is just another election ploy by the house to get votes from the "conservative" and "religious" demographics.
This isn't a ploy, this is democracy in action. If the video game playing demographic doesn't bother to vote, they are going to get stepped on.
Splitting the world into isolated markets where you can charge more or less for the same product just doesn't work any more.
It also goes against every principle of Free Trade. I thought Australia or another country was trying to sue the DVD consortium through the WTO for the practice, but I haven't been able to determine what happened to that.
A touch of realism would be nice. I'm getting tired of the enormous adolescent-fantasy boobs everywhere.
The unrealistic proportions I think are so far a function of the how primitive the graphics are- you had to make Lara exaggerated because you only had a handful of polygons to do it with on the PS1.
Or even going back further to low-res 2d graphics, you'd have to do something like this to show a female:
=
==
=
=
And that's way unrealistic. Now, we can have thousands of polygons along with realistic skin tones, hair and clothing physics, eye movement, and everything else that makes a real person attractive to look at- they don't need to hit you over the head with caricatures.
Actually in this case it is even more annoying because the female interviewees in the article don't mention the GTA sex mini-game, it's just insinuated that if they did know about it they would be opposed. Reread this portion of bang-up objective journalism from the AP: