That is because Valve's games tend to be quite short: you can usually finish them on a single weekend. Still they invest more effort in the earlier levels than in the later ones. If you've done some level design or can just roughly estimate polygon counts on the fly, compare the tram drive at the beginning of Half-Life 1 to the bit just before its end boss fight for example.
It is just common practice. Even Doom 3, which was very good in this department, had less and less cutscenes the further in you got.
When I worked in a games company, I was told matter-of-factly that 80% of games sold are played for less than 30 minutes, and 80% customer satisfaction was alright. By that logic, a lot more effort was put in the first level compared to the last. Playtesters made sure the game was finishable, but everyone involved knew it started to get tedious after the first few hours. I scripted a couple of cutscenes very late in the game that I was told less than a percent of players would ever see. I still did them as best I could, but I wouldn't be surprised if others were less motivated...
I said for crimes of this scale. In German law, sentences for multiple crimes of the same severity don't stack - i.e. for a crime that gets you up to five years in prison, doing it twice will still only get you up to five years in prison.
This is why for some crimes, there are several variants depending on the scale of the crime - possession of five grams of marihuana isn't the same crime as possessing five tons of it. Of course Germany has laws against breach of telecommunication privacy, but the sentences are relatively light and because of the above, multiplying them a hundred thousand times isn't going to do much. So there is a criminal law equivalent to the five grams case, but not to the five tons one.
The company's internal security didn't just track the phone calls between board members and journalists. Obviously, they "had to" check for journalists' number in board members' connection lists. But they also checked for board members' numbers in the connection lists of journalists who wrote particularly much about the company. So hundreds of thousands of connections between journalists and informants, friends etc. were monitored.
I don't think Germany even has laws that are adequate for crimes of this scale. After all, data is knowledge, knowledge is power, power is abusable. More data means more knowledge means more abuse. It is time for lawmakers to react.
"In Hinduism who is the Creator? [1. Vishnu 2. Brahma 3. Siva 4. Ganesha]" is just as bad. Depending on which Hindu tradition you look at, either of the first three could be "true". And there are sure to be a few guys who think number 4 is correct... somewhere in the chaotic bunch of sects commonly and grossly misunderstood to be a monolithic religion called "Hinduism".
This is another example of how good news in the economic field can easily go unchecked because it is beneficial for everyone involved (in the short term) for the world to believe them.
My favorite, and perhaps the most drastic, example is how the US government grossly misrepresents employment stats, the consumer price index, and the GDP. This creates another bubble; not for the New Economy or for the housing market, but for the US as a nation. As long as people keep believing in the "world's strongest economy", investments pay off much as they do in a pyramid scheme - but the point where they won't becomes ever more dangerous the longer the scheme holds.
I for one prefer investments in Europe if only for the seemingly more reliable numbers they have there. Investing in the US is a way too dangerous gamble right now.
You have it completely backwards. The breakdown of barriers, as you call it, means views previously isloated from each other now conflict all the time. This has two effects:
a) you encounter more weird views (including absurd ones, including your vaccination example)
b) views compete much harder.
Seeing how medical information is replacing mumbo-jumbo in Africa, how the Great Firewall of China is crumbling, how the OLPC project injects lots of valuable information into poor regions worldwide, I'm fairly optimistic this has more positive than negative effects.
"In most EU contries you pay by them minute even for local calls."
Not true anymore. In Germany where I live, and in all European countries I have heard of, telcos started to offer flatrates for countrywide landline calls around three years ago. Flatrate deals for inside each mobile network are pretty widespread. Deals that connect you to several, or any, mobile or landline network are starting to pop up.
They're affordable, too (although they wouldn't seem so if you converted them into Dollars at current or near-future rates).
Given their track record, it seems more likely it won't be out before 2011, increasing the impact of the Vista flop. Otherwise, I agree. But it is still a comparatively good move in market that is becoming tougher every year.
This has isn't a specifically pro-Muslim law, it is a pro-Polygamy law. Surprise surprise, Muslims are far from the only group that allow for that. Many traditional African lifestyles have polygamy, Buddhism doesn't prohibit it, China has it (though as concubinates), Mormons would like to, and so on.
In my opinion, polygamy is the next form of un-Christian marriage that is going to be widely legalized in Europe, after the process is pretty much complete for homosexual ones. The process will be sluggish, but IMHO inevitable. There really is no secular reason to prohibit it, anyway.
It probably factors in wire connection only admin interfaces, MAC filters, obscure firmwares or some other hindrances. Even routers where the user never bothered to set a password now sometimes have wireless administration disabled.
Should have RTFA, but the video is slashdotted.
The Wiimote can only track four IR sources at the same time, which seems a fairly arbitrary limitation that should be trivial to lift. With the IR light sources uniquely identified through signals encoded in the light stream, many more could be tracked. Shouldn't Nintendo upgrade the Wiimote quicky to allow for tons of new applications?
Don't mistake me for a troll, but I should think the current work of the administration leads straight into whatever is the equivalent of the Darwin Award for economies. For those not suffering directly, this is a useful lesson.
We already learned we shouldn't let fascists claim power because they're prone to warfare. We learned we shouldn't let communists claim power because they're prone to delusion. Now we learn we shouldn't let fundamentalist christians claim power because they're prone to incompetence. That's not exactly evolution, but it is a learning process.
Huh? You mean on 9/11, 2.5% of fatalities worldwide were due to terrorism? And since then, terrorist deaths have practically flatlined, with rarely more than 0.01%, way behind pulmonary heart diseases, the flu, starvation, war, crime, work accidents, motorvehicle crashes and all sorts of other causes? You mean it doesn't make sense to throw terabucks into the War On Terror when relatively cheap nutrition programmes could save 27000 lives per day?
Germany doesn't have an official religion, but it does offer various benefits for "Anerkannte Religionsgemeinschaften" (accepted religious movements). The most significant ones are that church tax will be collected from members by the state on the behalf of those groups, the state allows (but doesn't necessarily fund) religious education in state schools, and religious employers get various advantages that help them in running hsopitals etc. It is very, very difficult to become an "Anerkannte Religionsgemeinschaft", because you need to demonstrate a large organization built to last, and beneficial effect on both members and the populace. The big Christian churches and the Jews used to be the only ones to have that status, the Jehovah's Witnesses acquired it only recently (first announcement: they aren't going to use those benefits) and the Muslims and Buddhists are currently very busy trying. Scientology will receive those benefits the day hell freezes over - but much larger (and some would say more religious) groups like the Baha'i, Alevites, Mormons and Hindus do without them as well. And as far as the law is concerned, they're not being prosecuted, and neither are Satanists, Yezidis and other groups with sucky PR.
Germany has long been known for its harsh stance towards Scientology, and in many ways that is still true. The Scientologists have a hideous image in the press and in the public opinion. However, the "Verfassungsschutz" (secret service) does not have them under surveillance anymore as investigation did not find them that dangerous - they may still be fraudsters and charge outrageous amounts for outdated psychotherapy, but they're not seriously considered a danger to the state anymore.
Universal health care would be nice but you give people something for free and they abuse it, then it costs everyone a fortune, and it sucks the life out of an economy.
There's this little country where universal health care was invented, and has existed in various forms for more than a century. According to your slogan/hypothesis, it should be handicapped when compared to other countries and since the handicap has persisted for longer than it could for anyone else, the accumulated disadvantage should be enormous. Right?
However, its economy has accelerated ahead of all its neighbors. Although it was devastated in two massive wars, partly annexed and stripped of industrial infrastructure, it just kept growing and is now the third-largest economy in the world. Its name is Germany. Its robust economy disproves your slogan/hypothesis.
You provided more evidence for how right the GP is about the attractiveness of simple theory over complicated reality, especially for tech-minded people who are used to non-chaotic systems. I'm actually not sure whether you did so intentionally or not.
The Dalai Lama has already announced - long before this weeks-ago Chinese ruling - he's not only going to reincarnate outside Tibet, but as a girl, just to bugger the monks.
But the law is only partly directed at the Dalai Lama. A whole score of other "Living Buddhas" are believed by Tibetans to be reincarnating, which has important consequences for claims to social influence in that rocky corner of the world. China has long sought to control this, for example with the high-profile abduction of the then 6 years old Panchen Lama whose whereabouts remain unknown.
The News may seem offbeat, but it is actually rather serious for Vajrayana (Tibetan Buddhism) believers. Lamas are regarded to simply live many centuries, with death/reincarnation just a particular step in the way. The Chinese announcement will seem to the believers like the deliberate attempt to end the lives of all remaining leaders of the religion.
Re:Shows the failures of socialism
on
Failing Our Geniuses
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Actually, it is interesting you bring up socialism. Education is one of the very few things that socialist states, especially the Soviet Union and Eastern Germany, did very right. The Finnish education system, known for producing the highest-scoring pupils in the OECD-wide Pisa study, is a carbon copy of the East German system. The Soviet Union had an amazing percentage of university graduates and their number of female highly educated professionals was amazing for the time. Now sure much of their university time was wasted studying Marxism-Leninism, and the many-bedded dorm rooms of the time would seem ghastly today, but they did get the job done. For free, too.
Despite all talk of equality, socialist states spent a lot of time screening for promising students. Guess having a surveillance culture helps with that. Ever wonder why the Soviet Union had so many chess champions? Doping doesn't explain that one, early screening for talents and widespread chess clubs do.
I would have thought it obvious the kill switch is what you use when you want to stop people right behind the bot from grabbing a new high tech machine gun.
As has been observed before, enterprises need warranties and can only get them for relatively current OSs, so they upgrade every so often. Their upgrades then trickle into the mass market. Discontinued warranties are the problem, I believe.
A big vendor that offers, say, Windows 2000 with affordable lifetime warranties might tap into a huge market and seriously slow down the upgrade cycle. I don't see that happening, though.
Slashdot Mirror
That is because Valve's games tend to be quite short: you can usually finish them on a single weekend. Still they invest more effort in the earlier levels than in the later ones. If you've done some level design or can just roughly estimate polygon counts on the fly, compare the tram drive at the beginning of Half-Life 1 to the bit just before its end boss fight for example.
It is just common practice. Even Doom 3, which was very good in this department, had less and less cutscenes the further in you got.
When I worked in a games company, I was told matter-of-factly that 80% of games sold are played for less than 30 minutes, and 80% customer satisfaction was alright. By that logic, a lot more effort was put in the first level compared to the last. Playtesters made sure the game was finishable, but everyone involved knew it started to get tedious after the first few hours. I scripted a couple of cutscenes very late in the game that I was told less than a percent of players would ever see. I still did them as best I could, but I wouldn't be surprised if others were less motivated...
Not that laying all this undersea cabling will do any American any good due to "last mile" crap.
Fixed that for you.
Wiktionary has an entry for it.
I said for crimes of this scale. In German law, sentences for multiple crimes of the same severity don't stack - i.e. for a crime that gets you up to five years in prison, doing it twice will still only get you up to five years in prison.
This is why for some crimes, there are several variants depending on the scale of the crime - possession of five grams of marihuana isn't the same crime as possessing five tons of it. Of course Germany has laws against breach of telecommunication privacy, but the sentences are relatively light and because of the above, multiplying them a hundred thousand times isn't going to do much. So there is a criminal law equivalent to the five grams case, but not to the five tons one.
The company's internal security didn't just track the phone calls between board members and journalists. Obviously, they "had to" check for journalists' number in board members' connection lists. But they also checked for board members' numbers in the connection lists of journalists who wrote particularly much about the company. So hundreds of thousands of connections between journalists and informants, friends etc. were monitored.
I don't think Germany even has laws that are adequate for crimes of this scale. After all, data is knowledge, knowledge is power, power is abusable. More data means more knowledge means more abuse. It is time for lawmakers to react.
"In Hinduism who is the Creator? [1. Vishnu 2. Brahma 3. Siva 4. Ganesha]" is just as bad. Depending on which Hindu tradition you look at, either of the first three could be "true". And there are sure to be a few guys who think number 4 is correct... somewhere in the chaotic bunch of sects commonly and grossly misunderstood to be a monolithic religion called "Hinduism".
This is another example of how good news in the economic field can easily go unchecked because it is beneficial for everyone involved (in the short term) for the world to believe them.
My favorite, and perhaps the most drastic, example is how the US government grossly misrepresents employment stats, the consumer price index, and the GDP. This creates another bubble; not for the New Economy or for the housing market, but for the US as a nation. As long as people keep believing in the "world's strongest economy", investments pay off much as they do in a pyramid scheme - but the point where they won't becomes ever more dangerous the longer the scheme holds.
I for one prefer investments in Europe if only for the seemingly more reliable numbers they have there. Investing in the US is a way too dangerous gamble right now.
You have it completely backwards. The breakdown of barriers, as you call it, means views previously isloated from each other now conflict all the time. This has two effects:
a) you encounter more weird views (including absurd ones, including your vaccination example)
b) views compete much harder.
Seeing how medical information is replacing mumbo-jumbo in Africa, how the Great Firewall of China is crumbling, how the OLPC project injects lots of valuable information into poor regions worldwide, I'm fairly optimistic this has more positive than negative effects.
"In most EU contries you pay by them minute even for local calls."
Not true anymore. In Germany where I live, and in all European countries I have heard of, telcos started to offer flatrates for countrywide landline calls around three years ago. Flatrate deals for inside each mobile network are pretty widespread. Deals that connect you to several, or any, mobile or landline network are starting to pop up.
They're affordable, too (although they wouldn't seem so if you converted them into Dollars at current or near-future rates).
Given their track record, it seems more likely it won't be out before 2011, increasing the impact of the Vista flop. Otherwise, I agree. But it is still a comparatively good move in market that is becoming tougher every year.
This has isn't a specifically pro-Muslim law, it is a pro-Polygamy law. Surprise surprise, Muslims are far from the only group that allow for that. Many traditional African lifestyles have polygamy, Buddhism doesn't prohibit it, China has it (though as concubinates), Mormons would like to, and so on. In my opinion, polygamy is the next form of un-Christian marriage that is going to be widely legalized in Europe, after the process is pretty much complete for homosexual ones. The process will be sluggish, but IMHO inevitable. There really is no secular reason to prohibit it, anyway.
Pharmaceutical data, my ass. We're looking at "Playboy 3D" material here, and a reason to go back to print media for everyone's monkey-stroking needs!
It probably factors in wire connection only admin interfaces, MAC filters, obscure firmwares or some other hindrances. Even routers where the user never bothered to set a password now sometimes have wireless administration disabled. Should have RTFA, but the video is slashdotted.
The Wiimote can only track four IR sources at the same time, which seems a fairly arbitrary limitation that should be trivial to lift. With the IR light sources uniquely identified through signals encoded in the light stream, many more could be tracked. Shouldn't Nintendo upgrade the Wiimote quicky to allow for tons of new applications?
Don't mistake me for a troll, but I should think the current work of the administration leads straight into whatever is the equivalent of the Darwin Award for economies. For those not suffering directly, this is a useful lesson.
We already learned we shouldn't let fascists claim power because they're prone to warfare. We learned we shouldn't let communists claim power because they're prone to delusion. Now we learn we shouldn't let fundamentalist christians claim power because they're prone to incompetence. That's not exactly evolution, but it is a learning process.
Huh? You mean on 9/11, 2.5% of fatalities worldwide were due to terrorism? And since then, terrorist deaths have practically flatlined, with rarely more than 0.01%, way behind pulmonary heart diseases, the flu, starvation, war, crime, work accidents, motorvehicle crashes and all sorts of other causes? You mean it doesn't make sense to throw terabucks into the War On Terror when relatively cheap nutrition programmes could save 27000 lives per day?
What is this, a remaining pocket of common sense?
Why shouldn't citizens have it? The basic idea seems simple enough and a geek with funds should be able to replicate the device.
Of course that'd violate a patent. Duh.
Might this sort of device be outlawed even before it was rolled out, if there was a very-high-profile incident involving it?
Germany doesn't have an official religion, but it does offer various benefits for "Anerkannte Religionsgemeinschaften" (accepted religious movements). The most significant ones are that church tax will be collected from members by the state on the behalf of those groups, the state allows (but doesn't necessarily fund) religious education in state schools, and religious employers get various advantages that help them in running hsopitals etc. It is very, very difficult to become an "Anerkannte Religionsgemeinschaft", because you need to demonstrate a large organization built to last, and beneficial effect on both members and the populace. The big Christian churches and the Jews used to be the only ones to have that status, the Jehovah's Witnesses acquired it only recently (first announcement: they aren't going to use those benefits) and the Muslims and Buddhists are currently very busy trying. Scientology will receive those benefits the day hell freezes over - but much larger (and some would say more religious) groups like the Baha'i, Alevites, Mormons and Hindus do without them as well. And as far as the law is concerned, they're not being prosecuted, and neither are Satanists, Yezidis and other groups with sucky PR.
Germany has long been known for its harsh stance towards Scientology, and in many ways that is still true. The Scientologists have a hideous image in the press and in the public opinion. However, the "Verfassungsschutz" (secret service) does not have them under surveillance anymore as investigation did not find them that dangerous - they may still be fraudsters and charge outrageous amounts for outdated psychotherapy, but they're not seriously considered a danger to the state anymore.
Universal health care would be nice but you give people something for free and they abuse it, then it costs everyone a fortune, and it sucks the life out of an economy.
There's this little country where universal health care was invented, and has existed in various forms for more than a century. According to your slogan/hypothesis, it should be handicapped when compared to other countries and since the handicap has persisted for longer than it could for anyone else, the accumulated disadvantage should be enormous. Right?
However, its economy has accelerated ahead of all its neighbors. Although it was devastated in two massive wars, partly annexed and stripped of industrial infrastructure, it just kept growing and is now the third-largest economy in the world. Its name is Germany. Its robust economy disproves your slogan/hypothesis.
You provided more evidence for how right the GP is about the attractiveness of simple theory over complicated reality, especially for tech-minded people who are used to non-chaotic systems. I'm actually not sure whether you did so intentionally or not.
The Dalai Lama has already announced - long before this weeks-ago Chinese ruling - he's not only going to reincarnate outside Tibet, but as a girl, just to bugger the monks.
But the law is only partly directed at the Dalai Lama. A whole score of other "Living Buddhas" are believed by Tibetans to be reincarnating, which has important consequences for claims to social influence in that rocky corner of the world. China has long sought to control this, for example with the high-profile abduction of the then 6 years old Panchen Lama whose whereabouts remain unknown.
The News may seem offbeat, but it is actually rather serious for Vajrayana (Tibetan Buddhism) believers. Lamas are regarded to simply live many centuries, with death/reincarnation just a particular step in the way. The Chinese announcement will seem to the believers like the deliberate attempt to end the lives of all remaining leaders of the religion.
Actually, it is interesting you bring up socialism. Education is one of the very few things that socialist states, especially the Soviet Union and Eastern Germany, did very right. The Finnish education system, known for producing the highest-scoring pupils in the OECD-wide Pisa study, is a carbon copy of the East German system. The Soviet Union had an amazing percentage of university graduates and their number of female highly educated professionals was amazing for the time. Now sure much of their university time was wasted studying Marxism-Leninism, and the many-bedded dorm rooms of the time would seem ghastly today, but they did get the job done. For free, too.
Despite all talk of equality, socialist states spent a lot of time screening for promising students. Guess having a surveillance culture helps with that. Ever wonder why the Soviet Union had so many chess champions? Doping doesn't explain that one, early screening for talents and widespread chess clubs do.
...furniture stores report chair shortages all over Washington State.
I would have thought it obvious the kill switch is what you use when you want to stop people right behind the bot from grabbing a new high tech machine gun.
As has been observed before, enterprises need warranties and can only get them for relatively current OSs, so they upgrade every so often. Their upgrades then trickle into the mass market. Discontinued warranties are the problem, I believe.
A big vendor that offers, say, Windows 2000 with affordable lifetime warranties might tap into a huge market and seriously slow down the upgrade cycle. I don't see that happening, though.