"...and ours will be 100x bigger and better than the primitive ones built by those english bastards!"
Seriously, what's the point? People have much more accurate ways to construct a calendar nowadays... The original stonehenge was driven by need, and people admire it because it was a hard thing to do given the architectural standards of the time. The new stonehenge is unnecessary and pretty easy to do. Sounds like an unoriginal publicity stunt to me.
everyone looks at the Pyramids and Stonehenge and structures like that (and asks) who built them, why did they build them?
People know why they built them... they're going to look at this one and ask wtf?
Opportunity (level 3 Rover of the Martian Plains; Strength: 20 / Agility: 8 / Endurance: 10 / Intelligence: 2) finds a crater in the ground.
The crater has no distinguishing features!
You...
[x] descend and explore the surroundings
[_] circumvent the crater and continue your previous explorations
You are basked in a strange and comforting light!
+ Strength 1
+ Endurance 30!
+ Agility 2
+ Intelligence 1
You found a new item! Unremarkable Rock of Endurance (+14)
[x] keep
[_] drop
You leave the crater and continue your explorations.
You drive over a rock askew and fall onto your back, unable to right yourself!
> Cast Roll Over (level 2)
You must roll 14 or better to cast this spell.
> 1d36
Opportunity (level 3 Rover of the Martian Plains) has rolled a 08
You continue to lie immobile on your back in the cold Martian evening. Slowly, your batteries lose power and a darkness begins to come over you. As you desperately struggly against the dying of the light, your thoughts go back to your maladjusted childhood...
After only 1 team managed to successfully navigate the course, DARPA has rewritten the rules to let whoever the flyin hell they want to win.
I don't care if it's a good idea to see more entries, it's just not cool to change rules in the middle of the game. If they want more participation, there'll always be time to lower standards later.
The idea of free competition is that products have to fight for consumers by being better, that the one with the most merits will win. If you force someone to carry a competitor's software, then the popularity of the software will rely in part on this rule that you have imposed, instead of on the superior service or extra benefits or whatever that it offers to its customers. Therefore, you have placed a restriction on free competition.
You're punishing MS for stifling competition, but your form of punishment itself stifles competition. That's like if you caught a guy stealing from you, so you make him steal from someone else to to pay back what he owes you.
In the game, you played as a comic facsimile of General George Armstrong Custer, the infamous 19th-century military officer who contributed to a seedier side of American history until he met his (and his entire unit's) death at Little Big Horn in 1876 at the hands of Native Americans. As the game version of Custer, you embarked on little more than a rape romp, as you ran literally across the screen from "enemy" arrows toward a Native American woman strapped to a pole. Once there, Custer would get it on with (or, according to many critics, "rape") the woman for points. Game over.
is for kiddies. Having outgrown all that, what I really need, is a game where I can murder helpless kittens.
Now, I love Ghibli as much as most people, and it's great that more people will be exposed to it, but I'm not looking forward to the consequences this will bring. Imagine what would happen if these movies attain the popularity they deserve in the states. Will hollywood producers say, "we should stop putting out utter shit, and think about ways to improve the quality of our films to match and surpass Ghibli films", or will they say "holy cow, people are into that bug-eyed japanese shit? We better ride this fad out and milk it for all it's worth"? You're going to have an army of clueless directors using "anime-style animation" to tell mediocre stories about uninteresting characters, and they're going to ruin a perfectly good artform.
This guy has the technology to make robots, and the most useful application he could think of was a "dragon" to guard your home? When are they going to come out with things we actually care about, like virtual sex androids? I think there would be a huge market for those babies.
I get the impression that the person who wrote the article is trying to impress the reader with big words, instead of trying to get ideas across in a way that most people can understand. Listen to this:
Materials that exhibit a magnetic response at terahertz (THz) and optical frequencies are rarely found in nature..
Response to what? I don't know if he's shining electromagnetic radiation at those frequencies on the material and somehow gets a magnetic field out of it, or what. (Maybe he's just shaking it that fast?) Or how about this:
The split ring resonators that make up the periodic array were fabricated using a unique self-aligned microfabrication technique called photo-proliferate-process.
What the hell does it tell me to know what the name of the process is? He could just as well have called it "masturbating bear algorithm" and the amount of information that provides to me would have been the same. It would be much more fruitful to, say, include a short description of how they accomplish that.
I thought the ucla website would be more informative, but they just have the exact same article.
Re:Brain as a recording device
on
The Memory Masters
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The brain would make a very poor recording device for several reasons. Firstly, the quality of the information stored isn't very good, and deteriorates with time. Watching a movie that you downloaded from some guy who saw it earlier instead of actually going to the theatres would be like listening to a 24kbps mp3 that someone "shared" with you instead of buying the orginal CD. Secondly, and more importantly, you can sometimes generate false memories. See this article and this article . This is why it's such a bad idea to base a justice system on eye-witnesses. Through the power of suggestion, and your subconscious biases, your memories can be altered.
I don't know where you read that "your brain can recall almost everything." Maybe you were thinking of recognition, not recall. That wouldn't really help someone running a "brain cam" website.
Slashdot Mirror
So these kids will grow up to be dorks just like all the other losers on gameboy, but at least they'll be really, really good at oral sex?
"...and ours will be 100x bigger and better than the primitive ones built by those english bastards!"
Seriously, what's the point? People have much more accurate ways to construct a calendar nowadays... The original stonehenge was driven by need, and people admire it because it was a hard thing to do given the architectural standards of the time. The new stonehenge is unnecessary and pretty easy to do. Sounds like an unoriginal publicity stunt to me.
everyone looks at the Pyramids and Stonehenge and structures like that (and asks) who built them, why did they build them?
People know why they built them... they're going to look at this one and ask wtf?
Opportunity (level 3 Rover of the Martian Plains; Strength: 20 / Agility: 8 / Endurance: 10 / Intelligence: 2) finds a crater in the ground.
The crater has no distinguishing features!
You...
[x] descend and explore the surroundings
[_] circumvent the crater and continue your previous explorations
You are basked in a strange and comforting light!
+ Strength 1
+ Endurance 30!
+ Agility 2
+ Intelligence 1
You found a new item! Unremarkable Rock of Endurance (+14)
[x] keep
[_] drop
You leave the crater and continue your explorations.
You drive over a rock askew and fall onto your back, unable to right yourself!
> Cast Roll Over (level 2)
You must roll 14 or better to cast this spell.
> 1d36
Opportunity (level 3 Rover of the Martian Plains) has rolled a 08
You continue to lie immobile on your back in the cold Martian evening. Slowly, your batteries lose power and a darkness begins to come over you. As you desperately struggly against the dying of the light, your thoughts go back to your maladjusted childhood...
After only 1 team managed to successfully navigate the course, DARPA has rewritten the rules to let whoever the flyin hell they want to win.
I don't care if it's a good idea to see more entries, it's just not cool to change rules in the middle of the game. If they want more participation, there'll always be time to lower standards later.
The idea of free competition is that products have to fight for consumers by being better, that the one with the most merits will win. If you force someone to carry a competitor's software, then the popularity of the software will rely in part on this rule that you have imposed, instead of on the superior service or extra benefits or whatever that it offers to its customers. Therefore, you have placed a restriction on free competition.
You're punishing MS for stifling competition, but your form of punishment itself stifles competition. That's like if you caught a guy stealing from you, so you make him steal from someone else to to pay back what he owes you.
I mean, really. Lame stuff like
In the game, you played as a comic facsimile of General George Armstrong Custer, the infamous 19th-century military officer who contributed to a seedier side of American history until he met his (and his entire unit's) death at Little Big Horn in 1876 at the hands of Native Americans. As the game version of Custer, you embarked on little more than a rape romp, as you ran literally across the screen from "enemy" arrows toward a Native American woman strapped to a pole. Once there, Custer would get it on with (or, according to many critics, "rape") the woman for points. Game over.
is for kiddies. Having outgrown all that, what I really need, is a game where I can murder helpless kittens.
Now, I love Ghibli as much as most people, and it's great that more people will be exposed to it, but I'm not looking forward to the consequences this will bring. Imagine what would happen if these movies attain the popularity they deserve in the states. Will hollywood producers say, "we should stop putting out utter shit, and think about ways to improve the quality of our films to match and surpass Ghibli films", or will they say "holy cow, people are into that bug-eyed japanese shit? We better ride this fad out and milk it for all it's worth"? You're going to have an army of clueless directors using "anime-style animation" to tell mediocre stories about uninteresting characters, and they're going to ruin a perfectly good artform.
So, first he calles it micro - soft, and now he's calling it long - horn?
micro. soft.
long. horn.
I think that makes my phallic implications painfully obvious. My work here is done.
This guy has the technology to make robots, and the most useful application he could think of was a "dragon" to guard your home? When are they going to come out with things we actually care about, like virtual sex androids? I think there would be a huge market for those babies.
I get the impression that the person who wrote the article is trying to impress the reader with big words, instead of trying to get ideas across in a way that most people can understand. Listen to this:
Materials that exhibit a magnetic response at terahertz (THz) and optical frequencies are rarely found in nature..
Response to what? I don't know if he's shining electromagnetic radiation at those frequencies on the material and somehow gets a magnetic field out of it, or what. (Maybe he's just shaking it that fast?) Or how about this:
The split ring resonators that make up the periodic array were fabricated using a unique self-aligned microfabrication technique called photo-proliferate-process.
What the hell does it tell me to know what the name of the process is? He could just as well have called it "masturbating bear algorithm" and the amount of information that provides to me would have been the same. It would be much more fruitful to, say, include a short description of how they accomplish that.
I thought the ucla website would be more informative, but they just have the exact same article.
The brain would make a very poor recording device for several reasons. Firstly, the quality of the information stored isn't very good, and deteriorates with time. Watching a movie that you downloaded from some guy who saw it earlier instead of actually going to the theatres would be like listening to a 24kbps mp3 that someone "shared" with you instead of buying the orginal CD. Secondly, and more importantly, you can sometimes generate false memories. See this article and this article . This is why it's such a bad idea to base a justice system on eye-witnesses. Through the power of suggestion, and your subconscious biases, your memories can be altered. I don't know where you read that "your brain can recall almost everything." Maybe you were thinking of recognition, not recall. That wouldn't really help someone running a "brain cam" website.