"And blaming homework for the lack of results of people who _didn't_ do that homework... well, seems to me just bloody stupid."
I think people not wanting to do homework is a bit more complicated then being lazy, I wanted to learn somethings in highschool but some of the classes, materials and teachers were so substandard and out of date I skipped the classes entirely because I knew they were a waste of my time and the publics money. Think UNISYS icons, and basic, and a network of 8088's with TURING programming language which had teachers of which, no one was qualified to teach it so we just ended up dicking around the entire semester and this was in _highschool_. If schools can't afford to keep their curriculum and teachers up to date, then thats a real problem that isn't the student's fault. Schools are better now then when I went to school, but they still have those transitional problems that last a lifetime for the students caught in times of small budgets and lack of quality of teachers and teachig material in their eduction. I was one of the unlucky ones.
Let's face it though education as it is currently practiced is pretty unscientific, we do not really understand how the brain works and how people learn different things make those connections between memory elements that makes them "see" and understand something.
Most importantly making work interesting is difficult unless you really like to grind. Why should people want to be forced to learn ever more increasingly complicated crap that they aren't going to remember the bulk of next year anyway? Once you're out of school, how much do you really remember? I mean truly, without an encyclopedia of math equations or references to look up stuff you've forgotten or simply because there was too much stuff to keep all in your head?
"social intelligence is far more important than iq, and doesn't get the press it deserves.
an average iq kid who has a high social intelligence will go on to make $40 million, and the high iq, low social intelligence asperger type we're talking about here will wind up working for him for $30K/ year."
What a bunch of crap, less then 5% of the world population is that rich, how can you even throw around that kind statement in ignorance? At many companies they make it standard to hire and promote out of their own ranks that understand the technology and what is possible, do you really think someone with a marketing and business degree's can successfully run a tech company without understanding the technology and the limits of it?
Social intelligence is important yes, but it's the skills that the business needs that are most important. People skills is just one factor out of many. Your post is very one dimensional in relation to real people. People aren't this or that, black or white, they are many things at many different times.
"That is, back off of the convoluted plot, the rediculous looking and uninteresting characters, and the complicated and boring skills systems. Instead, bring back the spirit of adventure."
What the hell is "the spirit of adventure?". Leave it to human beings to be nice and vague without thinking something through. For 80-90% of the game you are fighting and collecting goodies and playing mini-games with FMV intermissions along the way. RPG battle systems used to be important until the populace started gorging and whoring itself out for graphics and interactive movies. The fact is the battle system is what you spend the most in usually in an RPG, the games should not be movies, ever. Why do I want to pay $50-60 for uninnovative non-interactive stuff that I just sit there and watch? I couldn't stand FFX because I spent most of the time watching stupid non-interactive cutscenes, with the most unlikable characters imaginable for great lengths of time to the point where I'd just want to shut off the game completely.
Cinematics are nice but they should support a game that is fun to play minus it's story and movie like qualities. When the movie aspect becomes the main part of the "game", it becomes less and less like a game and more and more like a passive movie experience with a "dash" of interactivity.
Diablo and Guild wars is a shining example of good gameplay design, the game is fun to play on its own if you took out the story and FMV elements completely, most final fantay games would not be anywhere as highly rated without those FMV's and story elements because its gameplay has become so poorly thought out.
People complain about the "grind" in RPG's but if you took the grind and mini-games out no one would play the games, why exactly is there any reason to fight anything without a "convoluted" rpg battle system with rewards?
FF9 and FFX were in my opinion the worst final fantasy games to come out in a long time. FF9 butchered and barely had any references to the original final fantasy 1 and it's characters which started the whole series. I think I speak for peopel with Fond memories everywhere that they'd love to see Squares story and graphics capabilities merged with a sequal or remake of the original FF1 because FF1 was so devoid of any story, they add whatever they want to the entire game and no one would care because there wasn't much besides fighting bosses and collecting goodies in FF1.
The series for me reached it's pinnacle in FF2(US), FF3(US) and FF7 and ever since has been sliding down the path of simplifying the game for its rather stupid audience, who goes "Yay graphics!" and then realizes two seconds later that they are bored out of their minds grinding in a badly designed battle system just to get to the next FMV scene.
In my opinion video games are too complicated to patent, and to patent specific implementations of code I think is kind of stupid for a game. It's not what technology your game uses that sells your game, its whether or not the game is entertaining, which has very little to do with the the engineering implementation of your game.
Personally I think game devs and the GDC people would hate most patents simply because it stifles the sharing of ideas and knowledge to make better games because games are so time consuming to make already (3 years) like you want some idiot patenting specific implementations of math equations in a game engine and whatnot.
"Agreed. I have a bleeding heart like the next guy, but the tenets of evolution confirm that the fittest survive."
The tenets of evolution assure no such thing, if we take it all the way to the cosmological level. When the sun dies or the next cosmic level disaster happens do you really think biological evolution is going to protect anyone from such an impossible to overcome natural evolutionary process that even supersedes biology and even intelligence?
Things are as likely to devolve as evolve. Evolution has no direction, so how can it assure only the fittest survive when it is essentially an inert blind chemical process in a universe of other chemical and physical processes that will just as equally destroy advanced life despite it's own achievements? Even the concept of survival is totally foriegn to most life-forms they are just following their pre-ordained response mechanisms. When your skin or DNA of a plant or animal is damaged by other natural processes and even the sun itself, where's the rule that the current fittest are guaranteed to survive when over 99% of the species that ever lived have been wiped out, who's to say that 100% wont be wiped out completely in a matter of time?
Evolution, that is real evolution, doesn't assure survival of anything at all. It's just a process and that is all.
"but thats taking the butterfly effect a little too literally - maybe."
Evertime you raise someones standard of living (i.e. more material goods) that material has to come from somewhere or something. The more humans there are that all need cell phones, computers, cars, houses, etc, the more resources they displace from their environment, if humans cannot control or limit there breeding there will most likely be wars of untold devestation simply due to humans inability to co-operate and get over their petty acquistion of wealth and other nationalistic policies (i.e. this is "our" nations resources you "so and so's" cant have any) and unite as race.
Humans are the most stupid being on the planet if you really think about it, they have all that brainpower but what do they put it to use for? Take those military budgets and put them to practical humanitarian and real uses like educating the ignorant, protecting the weak, ridding the world of superstition and animal prejudice, etc. Humans no longer have to be slaves to evolutionary process due to their immense brain power.
... It's still highly dubious claim that aspergers "exists" as a genetic trait that could even be tested for at all. You have to remember where these diagonosis are coming from - the "science" of Psychiatry, which not that long ago thought autism was the result of bad parenting.
Also to the ones that would want to "abort" a "potentially" autistic child. Just because you have some form of higher functioning "Autism" doesn't make you unsucessful or a loser.
In society who judges what is success or a person worth? Is it purely economic or capitalistic? I mean come on. The technology exists that these higher funcitoning people would hardly be a burden, some money for some food and a place to live if they can't hold down a job is not a serious burden to anyone in modern society, if you think so then thats fucked up. Just because money says it costs this much, before money, guess where the resources came from? From the earth FOR FREE. So just think about the "costs" associated with someone who can live on their own with modern technology and that cost is negligable.
Compare what countries spend to kill each other with people that are allegedly this heavy social burden on society. Too bad they dont have a genetic test to abort people that will believe in lies (religion) or a test that will abort people that believe in war and exploitation of human beings. The world could do without those people entirely IMHO.
As long as media has to get proper information out to the viewer in its original format, no copy protection will work work 100% you can go ahead and make it a hassle, like the Game companies have on the PC, but in the end does it ever work? Do you think this has stopped bootleg copies of works around the world? No. Companies just need to grin and bear it not develop orewelling technologies. Most sane people know that if they dont pay for music then the people making the music will stop doing so because it is unprofitable, but enough people still buy music that the justification for anti-piracy is stupid. They just want to squeeze more dollars out of the teens from or their parents.
>>>> We don't need to get beyond what human eyes can see.
>> Tell it to the people who insist on a sustained 200fps whilst running their monitors are retracing at 85hz.
Me: It's not about the retrace or pure benchmark "framerate", it's about the framerate spikes that are constantly fluctuating depending on what is happening in the game that occur during playing the game fully loaded with big battles, and beutiful models, textures and environments. In my opinion this is because games, gaming hardware have no "Quality of Service" standards.
Imagine, its similar to when on a network you your ping is low while you're not doing anything besides playing the game, but try to play a game and download a movie off bit-torrent and the data rate and trip time for the games packets suddenly spike skyhigh making your experience from frustrating to bad to unusable. Games have a similar problem where they cannot predict the throughput and amount of data to and from wherever that data is going, and the bottle necks and texture thrashing cause framerate hitches in the game.
Sure you have 100 or 200 fps in a room with no enemies or explosions going on, but then bam, down to 30-50 fps once you get a room full of people and enemies and their projectiles nad special effects animating all at once, all on the same screen in real time. So when you see high FPS scores just remember, It's about a cards ability to handle the immense load of random models and spells, effects, etc of animated (and non-animateD) models, geoemetry and textures during a actions scenes that have a lot going on in them.
Just benchmark some of the most punishing amounts of players on the same screen at once in modern MMO's or the bigger multiplayers games and you start to realize it's about what kind of load the video card can handle and keep things playable for when things get hectic (and the most fun).
"This is the main problem with unions - they treat the job like an entitlement, and many of their positions seem to suggest that they'd rather see the company - and all of the jobs it provides - go down the toilet, rather than prune back staff in areas where they no longer need them."
The problem is not with unions, lets get over that OK. There is a fundamental contradiction about our social orders and economic systems and state of the world that keep these same problems going, ad nauseum into the future. Imagine if there were no other countries to outsource to, no curreny disparity, the world was one nation, where would the corporations run to since they now can't find anyone cheaper through the sheer benefit of a divided world with growing and deflating (devestated) economies with which to exploit workers?
We are unconscious of a lot of this but the state of the world allows for corporations and the elite to play workers of countries off one another, and it is to corporate benefit to war with other countries purposely to deflate their currencies or devestate their economies.
It doesn't take a rocket scientists to add 2 and 2 together to see that the state of the world as it exists is ripe for corporate domination.
Jesus christ man, these are just movies. They aren't religious artifacts or sacred texts. I guess human beings need a replacement mythologies and ways to keep them sane in a hopeless world though since the former were found out to be frauds.
You said: " But back to fat kids. Why do they get fat? Is PE so value-less that the bright kids no longer want to take it. Is PE a time when 50 kids sit around for 10 minutes waiting for the teacher to set up the game, play for 15 minutes, then get 10 minues to go back and change?"
I say:
Kids hate PE for a number of reasons, but many kids in PE are teased and bullied to death and thats why they want out of Phys-Ed in the first place. You got to keep the culture of fucked up and dominant asshole kids in the first place from from picking on those and shunning those less athletically inclined then they are.
... technologically advanced societies. You can design your own diets, control the types of nutrients and quality of foods you ingest to a large extent, etc, etc, that were not nearly as sophisticated or even possible before.
I think people have to realize that intelligence trumps evolution, evolution is a dead end when you can plan out, engineer and enhance organisms by intervening with science and technology.
Trying to apply evolution to us in a biological sense just doesn't work fast enough anymore for our pace of technological advancement.
"... A bit of exercise will improve your overall fitness but it will not help you lose weight much at all."
Sorry I had cut in here, but this statement is UTTER BULLSHIT. Excercise and FOOD INTAKE are the key to losing weight quickly. When you excercise you tone your body and build and maintain muscle, note that the more muscle you build the more energy your body consumes in the process by using our muscles, which increases the amount of calories you burn and makes you both look good and feel better physically.
I can tell you from experience that you can lose weight VERY fast if you cut down to 1500 calories a day and walk for 1.5-2 hours daily 7 days a week, you can loose up to a pound a day @ 3-4 walks taken everday, plus not going over 2000 cals a day on your dietary intake. It's all about managing the amount of matter you stuffing in your face per day per unit of energy you're expending over time. It's a biological law that if you excercise and REDUCE your food intake (eat food with less empty calories) you will lose weight like magic. Most people dont want to take the time to excercise or are too tired/lazy due to other life issues. But really if you want to change your life, you have to change your LIFESTYLE for permanent changes and commit yourself to them.
You can loose a tonne of weight by switching only to water and not drinking your calories, you'll feel way more full and have much more room in eating more solid foods because you haven't wasted it on sugar water (soda, juice, etc) or high fat/high cal drinks like milk (even though it is healthy for you it can still make you fat due to the high cal/fat content).
Jesus christ, if I eat more then 1700 cals a day without exercise I'll gain weight and I'm 5"11, and 195 lbs. I too drink soda's like a dog but I watch my calories very carefully when I'm not excercising, I think there is a genetic component with yours. I could never drink 1000 cals worth of pop and then pile on the food for over 2500 cals a day worth without packing on the pounds.
I believe this is one part of where economics or competition between OS's is deterimental. It's good to have flavors of different OS's for different tasks, but to standardize an OS for general usage (i.e. a platform, say like CD's, DVD, etc) it's better to co-operate then compete.
It would be nice if linux and windows would share their Intellectual property (source code, etc) with one another, I'm sure both would benefit in this regard. This is of course a socailist wet dream but it shows the power of co-operation over sectarian (trade secret) competition.
It would do much more to advance things on the OS front since OS's are so complex in the first place, to be able to share at least some of the intellectual property for standardization and interoperability, without having to resort to reverse engineering and 'emulation'.
You forget, that those who have the biggest armies can manipulate their creditors through threat of force. This is why the US spends so much on military because it knows if some unknown or fair circumstances causes its economy to decline it's got the army to deter anyone who would collect their debts.
People might hate americans (I'm Canadan) but they are no dummies when it comes to learning from history, especially in a world of hostile and opposing commercial and resource interests of all nations.
You assume that in a truly evolved species the only motive for action is monetary or capitalistic in its motivations. Money is in fact just the "stick and carrot" for an unevolved and unenlightened society that needs the stick and carrot to get anything done. What did people do when they needed food and housing before the invention of money? They did it out of necessity, the same is true for a truly evolved species. There is no need for the stick and carrot when you can see the necessity of innovation.
I'm all for an open information society, but of course the time is not yet ripe. A species that needs to hide from facing the reality of its behavior and the responsibility of posessing and knowing about such knowledge is ultimately immature and irresponsible.
The problem is humanity is too fucking unevolved, ideally we should be living in a completely information open society without capitalists worrying about their "trade secrets", no idea or work is that unique anymore, especially with the think tanks and groups out there specifically dedicated to being patent mills.
But since the means and technology aren't available to replace capitalism and reform human nature yet, which is in desperate need of reform we just have to wait all this bullshit out. Privacy is for the weak, it's for a species that can't face the reality of its own behavior, and cannot deal with information be it personal, business, academic, potentially dangerous (i.e. nuclear power versus building nuclear bombs), etc, in a responsible manner.
I can't wait for genetic engineering and the removal of much evolutionary baggage that comes with fusion if not complete replacement of animal man with better brains and psychological design coupled with enhancement technology. So much of our world is based on the basest of animal instincts and prejudices, our societies reflect this and are barely above the level of barbarism. Our relationships are increasingly totally economic, even our educational systems bow to the money men or the so called "Free market", which ultimately is inherently destructive to families and having children, whose entire lives from birth almost exclusively revolve around serving the economy where freedom of action has a price or market value and those who don't have the money have less freedom then others in areas of education and all other areas of life.
PC gaming can die if publishers abandon the PC gaming market. The high costs of PC gaming and the general frustration with driver setup and whatnot. Then you have super expensive video cards from Nvidia and ATI which are releasedevery year. It is definitely not a very attractive market to develop for as it once was during the Playstation 1 era. Since you're catering to the the richest niche or tech savvy PC gamers who will pirate your game instead of pay for it since they blew all their money on the latest hardware and have barely anything left for games.
"What does this say about how the world is being organized?"
It says capitalism has got to go or the world must unite under a common currency, one or the other. How countries dollar value is determined is sheer BS and allows this economic exploitation in the first place.
Earwig made the most insightful comment, tracking down computer problems is infinitely more complex then most other repair industries, period. Unless you want to reformat, it takes way more time then people are able to pay to fix a lot of computer problems because computer and software complexity are much more complex to repair then any car or house, or plumbing problem. People don't get that computers aren't simple appliances, they require people with insane levels of information akin to "doctors" to track down really complex problems. Computers in closer to human beings in diagnosing the cause of problems because of their complexity.
Prior poster said:"You are being unrealistic because you assume it takes them the same amount of time to learn as you.
My parents have been working at this hard, for months now. But even the simplest aspects of using a computer have escaped them until recently. These people, god bless them, don't understand that a document, a batch file and a program are the same type of thing on the hard drive. It's just a question of the contents and whether the computer tries to run it or not."
Let's face it many adults are stupid and many people don't want to learn how to use computers, I was entirely self-taught and as a non-programmer (before I learned programming) I knew how to use dos like the back of my hand because I persisted and spent the time necessary to learn the foundational concepts of how file systems and programs worked. All it takes is effort and a decent memory, to learn the conventions of the system. Dir / p or dir/s, or dir *.exe (find all files with a.exe extension).
The problem is computers cannot be made simpler to use until processing power increase. Right now we are at the manual use phase, we can't really talk to them or get them to understand our thoughts or conventions.
The people that are smart enough to use programs made for computers, and fix them are not in anyway dumb they are just more persistent and have better memories then other people.
Personally I think it's sheer lazyness, people should learn DOS/command line systems and filesystems first in school, then go to windows because without that basic dos background you don't really "get" how windows works because it's based on the basic filesystem concepts most people learned from the Dos and windows 3.1 days.
Slashdot Mirror
"And blaming homework for the lack of results of people who _didn't_ do that homework... well, seems to me just bloody stupid."
I think people not wanting to do homework is a bit more complicated then being lazy, I wanted to learn somethings in highschool but some of the classes, materials and teachers were so substandard and out of date I skipped the classes entirely because I knew they were a waste of my time and the publics money. Think UNISYS icons, and basic, and a network of 8088's with TURING programming language which had teachers of which, no one was qualified to teach it so we just ended up dicking around the entire semester and this was in _highschool_. If schools can't afford to keep their curriculum and teachers up to date, then thats a real problem that isn't the student's fault. Schools are better now then when I went to school, but they still have those transitional problems that last a lifetime for the students caught in times of small budgets and lack of quality of teachers and teachig material in their eduction. I was one of the unlucky ones.
Let's face it though education as it is currently practiced is pretty unscientific, we do not really understand how the brain works and how people learn different things make those connections between memory elements that makes them "see" and understand something.
Most importantly making work interesting is difficult unless you really like to grind. Why should people want to be forced to learn ever more increasingly complicated crap that they aren't going to remember the bulk of next year anyway? Once you're out of school, how much do you really remember? I mean truly, without an encyclopedia of math equations or references to look up stuff you've forgotten or simply because there was too much stuff to keep all in your head?
"social intelligence is far more important than iq, and doesn't get the press it deserves.
an average iq kid who has a high social intelligence will go on to make $40 million, and the high iq, low social intelligence asperger type we're talking about here will wind up working for him for $30K/ year."
What a bunch of crap, less then 5% of the world population is that rich, how can you even throw around that kind statement in ignorance? At many companies they make it standard to hire and promote out of their own ranks that understand the technology and what is possible, do you really think someone with a marketing and business degree's can successfully run a tech company without understanding the technology and the limits of it?
Social intelligence is important yes, but it's the skills that the business needs that are most important. People skills is just one factor out of many. Your post is very one dimensional in relation to real people. People aren't this or that, black or white, they are many things at many different times.
"That is, back off of the convoluted plot, the rediculous looking and uninteresting characters, and the complicated and boring skills systems. Instead, bring back the spirit of adventure."
What the hell is "the spirit of adventure?". Leave it to human beings to be nice and vague without thinking something through. For 80-90% of the game you are fighting and collecting goodies and playing mini-games with FMV intermissions along the way. RPG battle systems used to be important until the populace started gorging and whoring itself out for graphics and interactive movies. The fact is the battle system is what you spend the most in usually in an RPG, the games should not be movies, ever. Why do I want to pay $50-60 for uninnovative non-interactive stuff that I just sit there and watch? I couldn't stand FFX because I spent most of the time watching stupid non-interactive cutscenes, with the most unlikable characters imaginable for great lengths of time to the point where I'd just want to shut off the game completely.
Cinematics are nice but they should support a game that is fun to play minus it's story and movie like qualities. When the movie aspect becomes the main part of the "game", it becomes less and less like a game and more and more like a passive movie experience with a "dash" of interactivity.
Diablo and Guild wars is a shining example of good gameplay design, the game is fun to play on its own if you took out the story and FMV elements completely, most final fantay games would not be anywhere as highly rated without those FMV's and story elements because its gameplay has become so poorly thought out.
People complain about the "grind" in RPG's but if you took the grind and mini-games out no one would play the games, why exactly is there any reason to fight anything without a "convoluted" rpg battle system with rewards?
FF9 and FFX were in my opinion the worst final fantasy games to come out in a long time. FF9 butchered and barely had any references to the original final fantasy 1 and it's characters which started the whole series. I think I speak for peopel with Fond memories everywhere that they'd love to see Squares story and graphics capabilities merged with a sequal or remake of the original FF1 because FF1 was so devoid of any story, they add whatever they want to the entire game and no one would care because there wasn't much besides fighting bosses and collecting goodies in FF1.
The series for me reached it's pinnacle in FF2(US), FF3(US) and FF7 and ever since has been sliding down the path of simplifying the game for its rather stupid audience, who goes "Yay graphics!" and then realizes two seconds later that they are bored out of their minds grinding in a badly designed battle system just to get to the next FMV scene.
In my opinion video games are too complicated to patent, and to patent specific implementations of code I think is kind of stupid for a game. It's not what technology your game uses that sells your game, its whether or not the game is entertaining, which has very little to do with the the engineering implementation of your game.
Personally I think game devs and the GDC people would hate most patents simply because it stifles the sharing of ideas and knowledge to make better games because games are so time consuming to make already (3 years) like you want some idiot patenting specific implementations of math equations in a game engine and whatnot.
"Agreed. I have a bleeding heart like the next guy, but the tenets of evolution confirm that the fittest survive."
The tenets of evolution assure no such thing, if we take it all the way to the cosmological level. When the sun dies or the next cosmic level disaster happens do you really think biological evolution is going to protect anyone from such an impossible to overcome natural evolutionary process that even supersedes biology and even intelligence?
Things are as likely to devolve as evolve. Evolution has no direction, so how can it assure only the fittest survive when it is essentially an inert blind chemical process in a universe of other chemical and physical processes that will just as equally destroy advanced life despite it's own achievements? Even the concept of survival is totally foriegn to most life-forms they are just following their pre-ordained response mechanisms. When your skin or DNA of a plant or animal is damaged by other natural processes and even the sun itself, where's the rule that the current fittest are guaranteed to survive when over 99% of the species that ever lived have been wiped out, who's to say that 100% wont be wiped out completely in a matter of time?
Evolution, that is real evolution, doesn't assure survival of anything at all. It's just a process and that is all.
"but thats taking the butterfly effect a little too literally - maybe."
Evertime you raise someones standard of living (i.e. more material goods) that material has to come from somewhere or something. The more humans there are that all need cell phones, computers, cars, houses, etc, the more resources they displace from their environment, if humans cannot control or limit there breeding there will most likely be wars of untold devestation simply due to humans inability to co-operate and get over their petty acquistion of wealth and other nationalistic policies (i.e. this is "our" nations resources you "so and so's" cant have any) and unite as race.
Humans are the most stupid being on the planet if you really think about it, they have all that brainpower but what do they put it to use for? Take those military budgets and put them to practical humanitarian and real uses like educating the ignorant, protecting the weak, ridding the world of superstition and animal prejudice, etc. Humans no longer have to be slaves to evolutionary process due to their immense brain power.
... It's still highly dubious claim that aspergers "exists" as a genetic trait that could even be tested for at all. You have to remember where these diagonosis are coming from - the "science" of Psychiatry, which not that long ago thought autism was the result of bad parenting.
Also to the ones that would want to "abort" a "potentially" autistic child. Just because you have some form of higher functioning "Autism" doesn't make you unsucessful or a loser.
In society who judges what is success or a person worth? Is it purely economic or capitalistic? I mean come on. The technology exists that these higher funcitoning people would hardly be a burden, some money for some food and a place to live if they can't hold down a job is not a serious burden to anyone in modern society, if you think so then thats fucked up. Just because money says it costs this much, before money, guess where the resources came from? From the earth FOR FREE. So just think about the "costs" associated with someone who can live on their own with modern technology and that cost is negligable.
Compare what countries spend to kill each other with people that are allegedly this heavy social burden on society. Too bad they dont have a genetic test to abort people that will believe in lies (religion) or a test that will abort people that believe in war and exploitation of human beings. The world could do without those people entirely IMHO.
As long as media has to get proper information out to the viewer in its original format, no copy protection will work work 100% you can go ahead and make it a hassle, like the Game companies have on the PC, but in the end does it ever work? Do you think this has stopped bootleg copies of works around the world? No. Companies just need to grin and bear it not develop orewelling technologies. Most sane people know that if they dont pay for music then the people making the music will stop doing so because it is unprofitable, but enough people still buy music that the justification for anti-piracy is stupid. They just want to squeeze more dollars out of the teens from or their parents.
>>>> We don't need to get beyond what human eyes can
see.
>> Tell it to the people who insist on a sustained 200fps whilst running their monitors are
retracing at 85hz.
Me: It's not about the retrace or pure benchmark "framerate", it's about the framerate spikes that are constantly fluctuating depending on what is happening in the game that occur during playing the game fully loaded with big battles, and beutiful models, textures and environments. In my opinion this is because games, gaming hardware have no "Quality of Service" standards.
Imagine, its similar to when on a network you your ping is low while you're not doing anything besides playing the game, but try to play a game and download a movie off bit-torrent and the data rate and trip time for the games packets suddenly spike skyhigh making your experience from frustrating to bad to unusable. Games have a similar problem where they cannot predict the throughput and amount of data to and from wherever that data is going, and the bottle necks and texture thrashing cause framerate hitches in the game.
Sure you have 100 or 200 fps in a room with no enemies or explosions going on, but then bam, down to 30-50 fps once you get a room full of people and enemies and their projectiles nad special effects animating all at once, all on the same screen in real time. So when you see high FPS scores just remember, It's about a cards ability to handle the immense load of random models and spells, effects, etc of animated (and non-animateD) models, geoemetry and textures during a actions scenes that have a lot going on in them.
Just benchmark some of the most punishing amounts of players on the same screen at once in modern MMO's or the bigger multiplayers games and you start to realize it's about what kind of load the video card can handle and keep things playable for when things get hectic (and the most fun).
"This is the main problem with unions - they treat the job like an entitlement, and many of their positions seem to suggest that they'd rather see the company - and all of the jobs it provides - go down the toilet, rather than prune back staff in areas where they no longer need them."
The problem is not with unions, lets get over that OK. There is a fundamental contradiction about our social orders and economic systems and state of the world that keep these same problems going, ad nauseum into the future. Imagine if there were no other countries to outsource to, no curreny disparity, the world was one nation, where would the corporations run to since they now can't find anyone cheaper through the sheer benefit of a divided world with growing and deflating (devestated) economies with which to exploit workers?
We are unconscious of a lot of this but the state of the world allows for corporations and the elite to play workers of countries off one another, and it is to corporate benefit to war with other countries purposely to deflate their currencies or devestate their economies.
It doesn't take a rocket scientists to add 2 and 2 together to see that the state of the world as it exists is ripe for corporate domination.
Jesus christ man, these are just movies. They aren't religious artifacts or sacred texts. I guess human beings need a replacement mythologies and ways to keep them sane in a hopeless world though since the former were found out to be frauds.
You said: " But back to fat kids. Why do they get fat? Is PE so value-less that the bright kids no longer want to take it. Is PE a time when 50 kids sit around for 10 minutes waiting for the teacher to set up the game, play for 15 minutes, then get 10 minues to go back and change?"
I say:
Kids hate PE for a number of reasons, but many kids in PE are teased and bullied to death and thats why they want out of Phys-Ed in the first place. You got to keep the culture of fucked up and dominant asshole kids in the first place from from picking on those and shunning those less athletically inclined then they are.
... technologically advanced societies. You can design your own diets, control the types of nutrients and quality of foods you ingest to a large extent, etc, etc, that were not nearly as sophisticated or even possible before.
I think people have to realize that intelligence trumps evolution, evolution is a dead end when you can plan out, engineer and enhance organisms by intervening with science and technology.
Trying to apply evolution to us in a biological sense just doesn't work fast enough anymore for our pace of technological advancement.
"... A bit of exercise will improve your overall fitness but it will not help you lose weight much at all."
Sorry I had cut in here, but this statement is UTTER BULLSHIT. Excercise and FOOD INTAKE are the key to losing weight quickly. When you excercise you tone your body and build and maintain muscle, note that the more muscle you build the more energy your body consumes in the process by using our muscles, which increases the amount of calories you burn and makes you both look good and feel better physically.
I can tell you from experience that you can lose weight VERY fast if you cut down to 1500 calories a day and walk for 1.5-2 hours daily 7 days a week, you can loose up to a pound a day @ 3-4 walks taken everday, plus not going over 2000 cals a day on your dietary intake. It's all about managing the amount of matter you stuffing in your face per day per unit of energy you're expending over time. It's a biological law that if you excercise and REDUCE your food intake (eat food with less empty calories) you will lose weight like magic. Most people dont want to take the time to excercise or are too tired/lazy due to other life issues. But really if you want to change your life, you have to change your LIFESTYLE for permanent changes and commit yourself to them.
You can loose a tonne of weight by switching only to water and not drinking your calories, you'll feel way more full and have much more room in eating more solid foods because you haven't wasted it on sugar water (soda, juice, etc) or high fat/high cal drinks like milk (even though it is healthy for you it can still make you fat due to the high cal/fat content).
Jesus christ, if I eat more then 1700 cals a day without exercise I'll gain weight and I'm 5"11, and 195 lbs. I too drink soda's like a dog but I watch my calories very carefully when I'm not excercising, I think there is a genetic component with yours. I could never drink 1000 cals worth of pop and then pile on the food for over 2500 cals a day worth without packing on the pounds.
I'd be interested in setting up my own DNS, could you point me to an article setting it up and what I'd need?
I believe this is one part of where economics or competition between OS's is deterimental. It's good to have flavors of different OS's for different tasks, but to standardize an OS for general usage (i.e. a platform, say like CD's, DVD, etc) it's better to co-operate then compete.
It would be nice if linux and windows would share their Intellectual property (source code, etc) with one another, I'm sure both would benefit in this regard. This is of course a socailist wet dream but it shows the power of co-operation over sectarian (trade secret) competition.
It would do much more to advance things on the OS front since OS's are so complex in the first place, to be able to share at least some of the intellectual property for standardization and interoperability, without having to resort to reverse engineering and 'emulation'.
You forget, that those who have the biggest armies can manipulate their creditors through threat of force. This is why the US spends so much on military because it knows if some unknown or fair circumstances causes its economy to decline it's got the army to deter anyone who would collect their debts.
People might hate americans (I'm Canadan) but they are no dummies when it comes to learning from history, especially in a world of hostile and opposing commercial and resource interests of all nations.
You assume that in a truly evolved species the only motive for action is monetary or capitalistic in its motivations. Money is in fact just the "stick and carrot" for an unevolved and unenlightened society that needs the stick and carrot to get anything done. What did people do when they needed food and housing before the invention of money? They did it out of necessity, the same is true for a truly evolved species. There is no need for the stick and carrot when you can see the necessity of innovation.
I'm all for an open information society, but of course the time is not yet ripe. A species that needs to hide from facing the reality of its behavior and the responsibility of posessing and knowing about such knowledge is ultimately immature and irresponsible.
The problem is humanity is too fucking unevolved, ideally we should be living in a completely information open society without capitalists worrying about their "trade secrets", no idea or work is that unique anymore, especially with the think tanks and groups out there specifically dedicated to being patent mills.
But since the means and technology aren't available to replace capitalism and reform human nature yet, which is in desperate need of reform we just have to wait all this bullshit out. Privacy is for the weak, it's for a species that can't face the reality of its own behavior, and cannot deal with information be it personal, business, academic, potentially dangerous (i.e. nuclear power versus building nuclear bombs), etc, in a responsible manner.
I can't wait for genetic engineering and the removal of much evolutionary baggage that comes with fusion if not complete replacement of animal man with better brains and psychological design coupled with enhancement technology. So much of our world is based on the basest of animal instincts and prejudices, our societies reflect this and are barely above the level of barbarism. Our relationships are increasingly totally economic, even our educational systems bow to the money men or the so called "Free market", which ultimately is inherently destructive to families and having children, whose entire lives from birth almost exclusively revolve around serving the economy where freedom of action has a price or market value and those who don't have the money have less freedom then others in areas of education and all other areas of life.
How about co-operation? After all competition can't exist if people aren't co-operating now can they?
PC gaming can die if publishers abandon the PC gaming market. The high costs of PC gaming and the general frustration with driver setup and whatnot. Then you have super expensive video cards from Nvidia and ATI which are releasedevery year. It is definitely not a very attractive market to develop for as it once was during the Playstation 1 era. Since you're catering to the the richest niche or tech savvy PC gamers who will pirate your game instead of pay for it since they blew all their money on the latest hardware and have barely anything left for games.
"What does this say about how the world is being organized?"
It says capitalism has got to go or the world must unite under a common currency, one or the other. How countries dollar value is determined is sheer BS and allows this economic exploitation in the first place.
Earwig made the most insightful comment, tracking down computer problems is infinitely more complex then most other repair industries, period. Unless you want to reformat, it takes way more time then people are able to pay to fix a lot of computer problems because computer and software complexity are much more complex to repair then any car or house, or plumbing problem. People don't get that computers aren't simple appliances, they require people with insane levels of information akin to "doctors" to track down really complex problems. Computers in closer to human beings in diagnosing the cause of problems because of their complexity.
Prior poster said:"You are being unrealistic because you assume it takes them the same amount of time to learn as you.
/s, or dir *.exe (find all files with a .exe extension).
My parents have been working at this hard, for months now. But even the simplest aspects of using a computer have escaped them until recently. These people, god bless them, don't understand that a document, a batch file and a program are the same type of thing on the hard drive. It's just a question of the contents and whether the computer tries to run it or not."
Let's face it many adults are stupid and many people don't want to learn how to use computers, I was entirely self-taught and as a non-programmer (before I learned programming) I knew how to use dos like the back of my hand because I persisted and spent the time necessary to learn the foundational concepts of how file systems and programs worked. All it takes is effort and a decent memory, to learn the conventions of the system. Dir / p or dir
The problem is computers cannot be made simpler to use until processing power increase. Right now we are at the manual use phase, we can't really talk to them or get them to understand our thoughts or conventions.
The people that are smart enough to use programs made for computers, and fix them are not in anyway dumb they are just more persistent and have better memories then other people.
Personally I think it's sheer lazyness, people should learn DOS/command line systems and filesystems first in school, then go to windows because without that basic dos background you don't really "get" how windows works because it's based on the basic filesystem concepts most people learned from the Dos and windows 3.1 days.