You can buy a bluetooth wireless mouse and run all over the place with it without worrying about bringing your receiver along. This seems like it's just a really, really nice idea for desktops, where my MX700 needs to be cradled every night and still occasionally runs out of juice at just the wrong time.
And the one lightsaber fight is not like between the most powerful Jedi alive and his Master, but like between people who've never used one before. Obi Wan holds it like he'd hold his... ahem, let's just say now I see why the "I see your schwartz is as big as mine" scene was there in the Spaceballs parody.
I think the typical response to this is that you're seeing a fight between an aging Jedi/Sith that are no longer at the height of their powers. Episodes 1-3 are supposed to be our chance to see "real" Jedi fighting it out.
Of course, it actually just had to do with the difficulties in painting in the lightsaber glow back then; slower swords = easier. But I do agree that most of us see the old movies through rose-tinted glasses. I never saw Indiana Jones as a kid, and to this day I just can't understand what people see in it. Same thing.
You might just be the type that doesn't like MMORPGs. They don't cater to everyone. I had never played one until WoW, and I'm still pretty hooked. If anything, WoW's "doom" is due to how many first-timers it lured in that have discovered MMOs just aren't for them. There's nothing wrong with that, mind you, it's just the way the game goes.
Things do generally get a lot more fun by level 20 when you start playing in groups a lot, find some more online friends, etc., which is the foundation of all the content.
If I could buy non-DRMed MP3s from them for less than ITMS, I'd be all over it.
Basically, they're asking me to pay $15/month for a radio service. The service doesn't really have much to offer that Rhapsody doesn't already provide, and charges their subscribers just as much for a single as iTunes does. I'd still buy individual songs for my iPod off of iTunes for the same price, or just go get the CD if I want the album.
If they'd at least charge their subscribers 75 cents a track, it wouldn't seem like a big screw job.
But here's a highly publicized attempt to do something very expensive and pretty difficult.
Would it have been that hard to say "Here's a tank with 1200 gallons of fuel in it. Let's make sure we put it all in the plane before it takes off"? Rather than just trusting that the little $2 gauge is right?
This kind of stuff happens all the time (i.e. the Genesis' upside-down accelerometer) and it just amazes me.
Any chance it could hit the IRS?/runs off to spend willy-nilly
Re:Somone get these ppl some free software!
on
Given Up to Spyware?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I tried to get my dad to switch to Firefox for months before he recently gave in. His reasoning: "I just don't trust it... They can't be up to any good if they're not asking for anything in return".
He's actually demanding spyware, despite his constant paranoia that the boogeymen are invading his machine. The idea of good, free software is completely foreign to the majority of users (in my experience).
I worked in the spinal inury repair field for a number of years, and I think you've hit the nail right on the head. At least one of the nails.
A while ago, literally about a dozen papers would come out each month professing some miraculous breakthrough in the field. Usually all pretty well done, almost always in big peer-review journals. Very few of these methods have been followed through to clinical trials. The skeptic in me says it's because, as you said, there wasn't always a clear way to profit from it.
My even-more-skeptical side says that a lot of these results get fudged quite a bit because, thanks to recent attention paid to Christopher Reeve/stem cells et al, there's a lot of money floating around and many opportunities for researchers to make a name for themselves. That's why they never pan out -- they don't work.
This isn't to discredit anyone working in academic sciences, almost all of whom are grossly overworked and underpaid. However, the trend in NSF funding in the last five years has been to limit the number of researchers receiving grants, and dole out much larger grants to those few promising studies. It creates very cutthroat competition, forces researchers to overhype their studies, and ultimately causes a lot of scientific dead ends. Worst of all, it gives a lot of false hope to people suffering from a number of injuries/diseases that a cure is just around the corner (as long as you write your congressman to give us more money).
It's really quite sick, and was one of the reasons why I left the field.
Snaring a capsule with a shuttle (what shuttle?), Soyuz, or the ISS remains a very dangerous mission. NASA will be treading lightly as it pertains to ANY missions that could endanger the safety of their astronauts, as another catastrophic loss could shelve the Shuttle program indefinitely.
Like it or not, NASA will not be sending people into harm's way for a while as long as safer alternatives exist.
So what countries would be on the list to receive something like this? Presumably there could be a deal worked out with Iran and North Korea, but it seems those cats are already out of the bag. What nations are expected to have burgeoning needs for power in the next few decades?
It seems to me that most countries with booming populations already have the ability to meet their power requirements with their own reactors, or they completely lack a power infrastructure to begin with (i.e. much of Africa).
Like all other hardware, the iPod itself (and other players) will move more toward commodity status, with only the latest whiz-bang 3D-video-surround-sound-and-a-toaster iPods making any real money. Apple obviously wants to lock people into the iTunes store NOW, because in ten years, everyone will own an iPod and the cost of distributing music online will have dropped (as the hardware/pipes required to do so get cheaper). We WILL get to the point where iTunes is the cash cow, not the iPod.
And Apple certainly doesn't want anyone buying music elsewhere, lest they get the idea that music should cost less than 99 cents a track.
Bad idea, in short because you would be unable to collect more energy than you wasted by introducing the extra drag into the car.
Windmils work. Adding windmills to everything does not.
I've generally stuck to RTS games to avoid the time-sink effect of powering up your character in RPGs. Recently though, I tried out the Neverwinter Nights (NWN) single-player campaign and really enjoyed it. For those who haven't played the game, it's your standard D&D RPG that caters to the less hardcore gamer. You can save anywhere, rest and recover anywhere there aren't monsters, and anytime you get into trouble you have a magic item that can teleport you immediately back to the safety of a temple an unlimited number of times. Once there you can rest up, buy/sell items right in the temple, and be teleported right back to where you came from for a small fee.
Although this might sound very un-l33t to a lot of power gamers, its MY choice to do these things, and it saves a hell of a lot of time as opposed to dying, reloading the old save point, and running a whole dungeon over again. If I wanted to impose some arbitrary set of rules where I never teleported out of combat or never rested in the dungeon, I could do that myself to improve my own play experience. But inevitably, all that does is force me to run away and take more of my time to accomplish the same thing (escaping the bad guys).
However, I was so entertained by NWN that I purchased one of its expansions, Shadows of Undrentide (SoU), and have been very disappointed due to the mechanics and level design wasting my time. This expansion was not designed in house by Bioware, the makers of the original, and despite all the nifty new things it added, it's an absolute bore to play because it simply wastes your time doing mundane things. I'll start ranting about it now (it's been bothering me for a while, so bear with it), but if you don't want to read, just mod me "-1 Not Hardcore" and know that simple level design flaws can waste TONS of a casual gamer's time.
To teleport in the original, you click a button to come home, and talk to the guy next to you if you want to go back into the fray. In SoU, your teleport item uses a crystal each time, and its up to you to make more. This requires hunting down a number of common gems, teleporting home, walking upstairs through a level load, walking down the hallway and into a laboratory, opening a crystal making machine, thumbing through your inventory to find and place the gems in it, then taking your crystal back downstairs to be sent back to where you came from. If you run out of crystals or gems to make them, you're SOL because there aren't any more in town. A very common action takes at least ten times as long in SoU as it does in NWN, and accomplishes the exact same thing. Presumably this is because powergamers complained that too many n00bs were relying on their teleport in the original, so now I have to waste a big chunk of my time proving myself to them (in my single player campaign, mind you).
Furthermore, once you're home and stocked full of loot, you probably want to sell the spare stuff off for cash. This requires you to walk out the door (level load), wander all the way across a very long town to the only merchant (level load), sell your stuff, leave the merchant (level load), then wander all the way back home (yes, four level loads ) before you can teleport back into the action. Again, a very common action that takes ten times as long as it should when the designers could've simply placed a merchant or equivalent in your home. Although I hardly noticed these simple luxuries playing the original, I would give anything to just have a damn easily accessible merchant in the expansion.
My understanding is that Bioware wasn't supremely thrilled with some of these things, and released an in-house expansion that fixes some problems (for example, you get to carry a small pixie with you that acts as a portable merchant, selling off all that loot that you earned but just can't carry). I'll have to check that out. In the meantime, I wish game designers would understand that all those really cool cutscenes and interesting hidden levels are nice, but you really have to streamline the basic mechanics and level design of the areas that the player will be spending half his time in before worrying about them, or I have no motivation to waste my time getting to that point.
I have Adelphia cable internet with no TV service here in Los Angeles. I assume it works the same way everywhere else. It's not really a very good deal, considering I could add cable TV for maybe another ten bucks a month, but I never watch TV so it doesn't matter.
If I could've purchased SBC DSL for ~$25/mo without a landline (don't have one of those either), I'd have done that in a heartbeat.
The last I heard (and this was months ago), Reznor indeed left the project to work on a new album because the game was taking longer than expected. At the time, word was that none of his work would appear in Doom 3. Don't know if that's changed.
*crosses fingers that he's still in it*
Airlines already treat every laptop coming through the gates like it's packed with C4. Aside from the potentially real risk of someone disguising a bomb in a laptop, the headache of searching hundreds of laptops at the gates is enough to tank this idea.
Slashdot Mirror
You can buy a bluetooth wireless mouse and run all over the place with it without worrying about bringing your receiver along.
This seems like it's just a really, really nice idea for desktops, where my MX700 needs to be cradled every night and still occasionally runs out of juice at just the wrong time.
Some level of fragility is inevitable when you fill buildings up with explosives and make them go 18,000 miles an hour.
Of course, it actually just had to do with the difficulties in painting in the lightsaber glow back then; slower swords = easier. But I do agree that most of us see the old movies through rose-tinted glasses. I never saw Indiana Jones as a kid, and to this day I just can't understand what people see in it. Same thing.
Entropy. Over cosmic scales, clumping together becomes the lower energy state due to gravity's small but extremely wide-ranging effects.
My two-year Verizon lock-in ends in a month.
Cingular, here I come.
Things do generally get a lot more fun by level 20 when you start playing in groups a lot, find some more online friends, etc., which is the foundation of all the content.
You lose your bet by the way.
Maybe all the hackers are just tired of calling their kids because the internet is broken again.
Innovating pays if companies clone your product. Not if they simply steal it and give you the finger.
Basically, they're asking me to pay $15/month for a radio service. The service doesn't really have much to offer that Rhapsody doesn't already provide, and charges their subscribers just as much for a single as iTunes does. I'd still buy individual songs for my iPod off of iTunes for the same price, or just go get the CD if I want the album.
If they'd at least charge their subscribers 75 cents a track, it wouldn't seem like a big screw job.
Bah... now it says it leaked. This makes me look bad!
Would it have been that hard to say "Here's a tank with 1200 gallons of fuel in it. Let's make sure we put it all in the plane before it takes off"? Rather than just trusting that the little $2 gauge is right?
This kind of stuff happens all the time (i.e. the Genesis' upside-down accelerometer) and it just amazes me.
Any chance it could hit the IRS? /runs off to spend willy-nilly
He's actually demanding spyware, despite his constant paranoia that the boogeymen are invading his machine. The idea of good, free software is completely foreign to the majority of users (in my experience).
A while ago, literally about a dozen papers would come out each month professing some miraculous breakthrough in the field. Usually all pretty well done, almost always in big peer-review journals. Very few of these methods have been followed through to clinical trials. The skeptic in me says it's because, as you said, there wasn't always a clear way to profit from it.
My even-more-skeptical side says that a lot of these results get fudged quite a bit because, thanks to recent attention paid to Christopher Reeve/stem cells et al, there's a lot of money floating around and many opportunities for researchers to make a name for themselves. That's why they never pan out -- they don't work.
This isn't to discredit anyone working in academic sciences, almost all of whom are grossly overworked and underpaid. However, the trend in NSF funding in the last five years has been to limit the number of researchers receiving grants, and dole out much larger grants to those few promising studies. It creates very cutthroat competition, forces researchers to overhype their studies, and ultimately causes a lot of scientific dead ends. Worst of all, it gives a lot of false hope to people suffering from a number of injuries/diseases that a cure is just around the corner (as long as you write your congressman to give us more money).
It's really quite sick, and was one of the reasons why I left the field.
Like it or not, NASA will not be sending people into harm's way for a while as long as safer alternatives exist.
So what countries would be on the list to receive something like this? Presumably there could be a deal worked out with Iran and North Korea, but it seems those cats are already out of the bag. What nations are expected to have burgeoning needs for power in the next few decades? It seems to me that most countries with booming populations already have the ability to meet their power requirements with their own reactors, or they completely lack a power infrastructure to begin with (i.e. much of Africa).
No shame in that. ;-)
And Apple certainly doesn't want anyone buying music elsewhere, lest they get the idea that music should cost less than 99 cents a track.
P.S. - "Jobs Cave" = teh funny.
Bad idea, in short because you would be unable to collect more energy than you wasted by introducing the extra drag into the car. Windmils work. Adding windmills to everything does not.
Although this might sound very un-l33t to a lot of power gamers, its MY choice to do these things, and it saves a hell of a lot of time as opposed to dying, reloading the old save point, and running a whole dungeon over again. If I wanted to impose some arbitrary set of rules where I never teleported out of combat or never rested in the dungeon, I could do that myself to improve my own play experience. But inevitably, all that does is force me to run away and take more of my time to accomplish the same thing (escaping the bad guys).
However, I was so entertained by NWN that I purchased one of its expansions, Shadows of Undrentide (SoU), and have been very disappointed due to the mechanics and level design wasting my time. This expansion was not designed in house by Bioware, the makers of the original, and despite all the nifty new things it added, it's an absolute bore to play because it simply wastes your time doing mundane things. I'll start ranting about it now (it's been bothering me for a while, so bear with it), but if you don't want to read, just mod me "-1 Not Hardcore" and know that simple level design flaws can waste TONS of a casual gamer's time.
To teleport in the original, you click a button to come home, and talk to the guy next to you if you want to go back into the fray. In SoU, your teleport item uses a crystal each time, and its up to you to make more. This requires hunting down a number of common gems, teleporting home, walking upstairs through a level load, walking down the hallway and into a laboratory, opening a crystal making machine, thumbing through your inventory to find and place the gems in it, then taking your crystal back downstairs to be sent back to where you came from. If you run out of crystals or gems to make them, you're SOL because there aren't any more in town. A very common action takes at least ten times as long in SoU as it does in NWN, and accomplishes the exact same thing. Presumably this is because powergamers complained that too many n00bs were relying on their teleport in the original, so now I have to waste a big chunk of my time proving myself to them (in my single player campaign, mind you).
Furthermore, once you're home and stocked full of loot, you probably want to sell the spare stuff off for cash. This requires you to walk out the door (level load), wander all the way across a very long town to the only merchant (level load), sell your stuff, leave the merchant (level load), then wander all the way back home (yes, four level loads ) before you can teleport back into the action. Again, a very common action that takes ten times as long as it should when the designers could've simply placed a merchant or equivalent in your home. Although I hardly noticed these simple luxuries playing the original, I would give anything to just have a damn easily accessible merchant in the expansion.
My understanding is that Bioware wasn't supremely thrilled with some of these things, and released an in-house expansion that fixes some problems (for example, you get to carry a small pixie with you that acts as a portable merchant, selling off all that loot that you earned but just can't carry). I'll have to check that out. In the meantime, I wish game designers would understand that all those really cool cutscenes and interesting hidden levels are nice, but you really have to streamline the basic mechanics and level design of the areas that the player will be spending half his time in before worrying about them, or I have no motivation to waste my time getting to that point.
I have Adelphia cable internet with no TV service here in Los Angeles. I assume it works the same way everywhere else. It's not really a very good deal, considering I could add cable TV for maybe another ten bucks a month, but I never watch TV so it doesn't matter. If I could've purchased SBC DSL for ~$25/mo without a landline (don't have one of those either), I'd have done that in a heartbeat.
The last I heard (and this was months ago), Reznor indeed left the project to work on a new album because the game was taking longer than expected. At the time, word was that none of his work would appear in Doom 3. Don't know if that's changed. *crosses fingers that he's still in it*
Airlines already treat every laptop coming through the gates like it's packed with C4. Aside from the potentially real risk of someone disguising a bomb in a laptop, the headache of searching hundreds of laptops at the gates is enough to tank this idea.