My opinion isn't indicative of your average gamer. I bought an Xbox just to see the Halo 2 phenomena. I learned that voice chat lets you know you're playing with 12 year olds who get mad whether they win or lose. I learned that Halo 2 had no depth besides a couple insta-kill moves. I had my fun with it though. I won't buy a next gen system until I find a game that breaks ground with online play because that's all I like.
50k/sec upload suuuuuuuucks. At least make it 128k/sec like other broadband. The reason I care is that I'm making a P2P video game, and I have to go with the slowest upload for broadband: Comcast's 50k/sec upload. If it went to 128k/sec upload, my game could support 2.5x as many players!
Environmentalists: Do they make sense anymore
on
Floating Wind Turbines
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· Score: 4, Insightful
When I was young, I was all for conserving ecosystems and saving animals. I was also smart enough to know that man needs to live too. Sure, we may need wood, but we need to replenish the forest. We may want fish, but we can't over fish or we collapse the ecosystem.
So to me I thought you had to strike a balance.
As I got older, I never lost the care for the balance of the environment.
Now it seems like each environmentalist has some different idea of what is good for the environment. These ideas go from tame, to extreme. Many environmentalists would value animals over people. This is where I differ from hardcore environmentalists.
I think man still has to live, and if man is forced to live in impoverished conditions that he has a bigger impact on the environment than a man who is well off. Poor people are the ones driven to poach and over fish. Large businesses may all seem bad to an environmentalist, but at least they have to listen to regulations or the punishment is worse for their bottom line if they get caught doing illegal things. Poor people are more inclined to strip away their entire rain forest for a cheap buck than someone who has enough.
I can't blame a person who is just out for survival doing their thing. So to me, the environmental situation is at an impass with environmentalists all having the same motive: to save nature, but all having differing opinions on how or what to stand up against. It seems like they're almost wack jobs as they stand against everything and everything they see as a perceived threat to the environment.
To me: If you empower men with an average impact to the environment, then you are really doing the environment justice. Completely stripping down a forest is awful. Replanting baby trees is still bad because the animals that lived under the trees can't survive anymore unless your goal is just to make the land a tree farm. Yet if you want to strip out trees without hurting the environment, you can always take some trees out of each forest without leaving a noticible impact on the environment.
Now the whole reason I bring this up is that I want to consider myself an environmentalist, but they don't have a unified voice. Each one has a differing opinion, and most of them are too passionate to have a meaningful discussion as to why other people's views may be right.
For example, I support the idea of supercharging the nation's energy infrastructure. I think that if we provide much more energy to the power grid it would be an environmental boon. My reasoning is that you can switch from expensive gasoline to inexpensive hydrogen in your cars, and basically drive wherever you want, lowering the prices on everything(exactly in the opposite way that inflation is hitting us because gasoline is going up). Basically if we supercharge the nation's powergrid, we would have necessity on other things lessened.
How do we super charge the power grid? To begin with, we open a load of nuclear reactors to begin with. A lot of people knee jerk at the idea of nuclear reactors! So to have a meaningful discussion, they would have to not be an environmental zealot that doesn't have a closed idea. Nuclear reactors have come a way since the first ones were created. They still have some of the same problems such as needing a place to dump the waste. I'm not suggesting something radically new in the ways of solving nuclear generator problems, but what I am proposing is that the solution for environmental empowerment comes with some other problems that can be solved.
I consider myself an environmentalist, but I know how to weigh in the human factor. Most environmentalists will balk if they see *any* problem with a plan. I'm sorry, but I consider these people unreasonable when they go so far as to say that solar and wind farms hurt the environment. I'm not lying when I say that many have hidden political agendas that they use environmentalist FUD as a tool, but don't give a damn about the environment themselves. Not all environmentalist
Peter Gibbons: Well, I generally come in at least fifteen minutes late, ah, I use the side door - that way Lumbergh can't see me, heh - after that I sorta space out for an hour.
Bob Porter: Da-uh? Space out?
Peter Gibbons: Yeah, I just stare at my desk, but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch too, I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.
10$- You can sing happy birthday to your kid.
20$- You can buy the CD of the latest boy band singing it.
50$- You can buy tickets to the Happy Birthday concert so your kid can hear it live to all the kids that had a birthday that year.
My virtual self would be contemplating my thoughts and actions on it's virtual self causing the entire simulation to hit an infinate spawning of threads... And lets hope I don't think if I am actually a virtual node in a computer.
The short of it is that you need to do is put a lot of electrical energy into water and you get hydrogen. Electricity can't run a car because you can't just have an extension cord dragging out the back. Hydrogen is a portable form of energy that a car can run on. The fact that it takes more energy to produce than gasoline is irrelevant.
I remember trying to make a MMORPG before UO came out, and I was using quick basic. Yes it is impossible to make a MMORPG in quick basic unless you have a hack to do winsock, yet it is possible to make a huge RPG because you can store info on the harddrive and use it like virtual memory:)
Anyway when you're new to coding, you don't like to see stuff like division errors. You get so trained to thinking the computer is right that you feel you screwed up. Anyway I created a hack to make the division come out right when I learned that the chip itself was flawed... I was also relieved because I thought I was coding wrong.
Why must we use the word 'pimp' all the time to mean 'dress up'.
Because pop culture slang gets worse and worse. Believe it or not, there was a time when people didn't curse like sailors in their casual talking. You can thank MTV and rappers for putting pimp in your slang dictionary. I like to use the words 'decking out' instead of pimp because it's old school, and I don't attribute anything positive to pimps.
That being said, decking out your XP machine is like decking out a Geo metro.
If you update every 50 ms, then you're only off by a single frame in a 32 FPS system. That is something that is negligable. Also, stop to think about how MMOG fighters will be different than traditional arcade fighters. Your special moves will be drained via a stamina bar instead of you having to do complex motions. And short windups for moves could be in place to account for allowing your opponent a little time to block. I mean, imagine your worst case scenario: Killer Instinct. If someone crouch blocked, only a jump kick or a hammer fist would penetrate it. The hammer fist had like a 1 second windup. People still enjoyed that game while it was out. I mean you have a vast array of options available to you in order to account for 50ms ping delay.
I have a multifaceted toolset to deal with cheaters. First off, I don't want to be a target, but I will be, so I have many things to deal with hackers.
I am using the server you mentioned. It only keeps information for logon + save characters and telling which other players are in the zone you're entering.
Now that we have some broadband penetration, at the theoretical level of networking that thousands of players to play at once if you can get over the video card and memory bottlenecks caused by thousands of players. P2P is a good solution, but even at the client-server model you can stop the number of connections being n^2. Here's the good part: if you're running a mostly melee video game: you don't have to update people that are far from you as often. You update the closest 4 people at 50 ms increments, and then as you go outwards, you send packets less frequently. It turns out that a melee game like a Tekken MMOG can easily have 1000 combatants on the field at once. It takes a little bit more work to get the next 9000 combatants, but theoretically it is possible with P2P melee games.
I could just see how bad it'd be for the US if in the next 10 years:
Belgium develops more efficient batteries allowing the electric car to be feasable.
Zimbabwe makes a working robotic car.
China manufacturing makes solar panels 1000% more cost effective.
Spain manufactures warp drive.
And finally Brazil comes up with a cure for cancer and AIDS that are in the same pill.
What would us poor American's do? Oh yeah, we'd buy or steal the technology like every other nation does which is especially easy now with the internet.
No, I'd say the biggest threat to America comes from it's looming economic crisis coming from transition from gas to alternative fuels. If gas hits $5 or $6 a gallon, inflation may be too high for low income people to buy food and gasoline. A similar threat is losing jobs to overseas.
Slashdot Mirror
My opinion isn't indicative of your average gamer. I bought an Xbox just to see the Halo 2 phenomena. I learned that voice chat lets you know you're playing with 12 year olds who get mad whether they win or lose. I learned that Halo 2 had no depth besides a couple insta-kill moves. I had my fun with it though. I won't buy a next gen system until I find a game that breaks ground with online play because that's all I like.
50k/sec upload suuuuuuuucks. At least make it 128k/sec like other broadband. The reason I care is that I'm making a P2P video game, and I have to go with the slowest upload for broadband: Comcast's 50k/sec upload. If it went to 128k/sec upload, my game could support 2.5x as many players!
When I was young, I was all for conserving ecosystems and saving animals. I was also smart enough to know that man needs to live too. Sure, we may need wood, but we need to replenish the forest. We may want fish, but we can't over fish or we collapse the ecosystem. So to me I thought you had to strike a balance. As I got older, I never lost the care for the balance of the environment.
Now it seems like each environmentalist has some different idea of what is good for the environment. These ideas go from tame, to extreme. Many environmentalists would value animals over people. This is where I differ from hardcore environmentalists.
I think man still has to live, and if man is forced to live in impoverished conditions that he has a bigger impact on the environment than a man who is well off. Poor people are the ones driven to poach and over fish. Large businesses may all seem bad to an environmentalist, but at least they have to listen to regulations or the punishment is worse for their bottom line if they get caught doing illegal things. Poor people are more inclined to strip away their entire rain forest for a cheap buck than someone who has enough.
I can't blame a person who is just out for survival doing their thing. So to me, the environmental situation is at an impass with environmentalists all having the same motive: to save nature, but all having differing opinions on how or what to stand up against. It seems like they're almost wack jobs as they stand against everything and everything they see as a perceived threat to the environment.
To me: If you empower men with an average impact to the environment, then you are really doing the environment justice. Completely stripping down a forest is awful. Replanting baby trees is still bad because the animals that lived under the trees can't survive anymore unless your goal is just to make the land a tree farm. Yet if you want to strip out trees without hurting the environment, you can always take some trees out of each forest without leaving a noticible impact on the environment.
Now the whole reason I bring this up is that I want to consider myself an environmentalist, but they don't have a unified voice. Each one has a differing opinion, and most of them are too passionate to have a meaningful discussion as to why other people's views may be right.
For example, I support the idea of supercharging the nation's energy infrastructure. I think that if we provide much more energy to the power grid it would be an environmental boon. My reasoning is that you can switch from expensive gasoline to inexpensive hydrogen in your cars, and basically drive wherever you want, lowering the prices on everything(exactly in the opposite way that inflation is hitting us because gasoline is going up). Basically if we supercharge the nation's powergrid, we would have necessity on other things lessened.
How do we super charge the power grid? To begin with, we open a load of nuclear reactors to begin with. A lot of people knee jerk at the idea of nuclear reactors! So to have a meaningful discussion, they would have to not be an environmental zealot that doesn't have a closed idea. Nuclear reactors have come a way since the first ones were created. They still have some of the same problems such as needing a place to dump the waste. I'm not suggesting something radically new in the ways of solving nuclear generator problems, but what I am proposing is that the solution for environmental empowerment comes with some other problems that can be solved.
I consider myself an environmentalist, but I know how to weigh in the human factor. Most environmentalists will balk if they see *any* problem with a plan. I'm sorry, but I consider these people unreasonable when they go so far as to say that solar and wind farms hurt the environment. I'm not lying when I say that many have hidden political agendas that they use environmentalist FUD as a tool, but don't give a damn about the environment themselves. Not all environmentalist
Peter Gibbons: Well, I generally come in at least fifteen minutes late, ah, I use the side door - that way Lumbergh can't see me, heh - after that I sorta space out for an hour.
Bob Porter: Da-uh? Space out?
Peter Gibbons: Yeah, I just stare at my desk, but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch too, I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.
He got promoted to manager off this.
10$- You can sing happy birthday to your kid. 20$- You can buy the CD of the latest boy band singing it. 50$- You can buy tickets to the Happy Birthday concert so your kid can hear it live to all the kids that had a birthday that year.
Sorry. I'm completely incompatible with you. I play Angband. We come from different worlds.
I thought that exact same thing. Maybe I suffer from Slashdot groupthink.
Dying once isn't such a big of deal. It's that second death you need to watch out for.
Maybe they can tout the closed source system as: Yes, one man can make a difference*.
*Must be a Diebold programmer to qualify.
My virtual self would be contemplating my thoughts and actions on it's virtual self causing the entire simulation to hit an infinate spawning of threads... And lets hope I don't think if I am actually a virtual node in a computer.
I'm sure there's been Polish Slashdotters here before you.
Ya really. Who can forget Poland.
Apple. I thought the only reason people used those was because they gave them away free to schools.
The short of it is that you need to do is put a lot of electrical energy into water and you get hydrogen. Electricity can't run a car because you can't just have an extension cord dragging out the back. Hydrogen is a portable form of energy that a car can run on. The fact that it takes more energy to produce than gasoline is irrelevant.
I remember trying to make a MMORPG before UO came out, and I was using quick basic. Yes it is impossible to make a MMORPG in quick basic unless you have a hack to do winsock, yet it is possible to make a huge RPG because you can store info on the harddrive and use it like virtual memory :)
Anyway when you're new to coding, you don't like to see stuff like division errors. You get so trained to thinking the computer is right that you feel you screwed up. Anyway I created a hack to make the division come out right when I learned that the chip itself was flawed... I was also relieved because I thought I was coding wrong.
Creationism isn't science because you can't replicate it in a laboratory.
Its a trip when you're casually scrolling along and you think to yourself the exact same thing you just scroll over.
This is like lowering the speed limit to try and stop drag racing.
I know what you mean. It's not like people will stop drag racing. They'll just be doing it slower.
I can't wait to do tax write offs for giving gold out to newbies.
Why must we use the word 'pimp' all the time to mean 'dress up'.
Because pop culture slang gets worse and worse. Believe it or not, there was a time when people didn't curse like sailors in their casual talking. You can thank MTV and rappers for putting pimp in your slang dictionary. I like to use the words 'decking out' instead of pimp because it's old school, and I don't attribute anything positive to pimps.
That being said, decking out your XP machine is like decking out a Geo metro.
Due to the earth being warmer, people may be getting smaller brains over time.
If you update every 50 ms, then you're only off by a single frame in a 32 FPS system. That is something that is negligable. Also, stop to think about how MMOG fighters will be different than traditional arcade fighters. Your special moves will be drained via a stamina bar instead of you having to do complex motions. And short windups for moves could be in place to account for allowing your opponent a little time to block. I mean, imagine your worst case scenario: Killer Instinct. If someone crouch blocked, only a jump kick or a hammer fist would penetrate it. The hammer fist had like a 1 second windup. People still enjoyed that game while it was out. I mean you have a vast array of options available to you in order to account for 50ms ping delay.
Right on man.
I have a multifaceted toolset to deal with cheaters. First off, I don't want to be a target, but I will be, so I have many things to deal with hackers.
I am using the server you mentioned. It only keeps information for logon + save characters and telling which other players are in the zone you're entering.
If you want to see the MMOG I'm working on, its RoamingDragon.com
Now that we have some broadband penetration, at the theoretical level of networking that thousands of players to play at once if you can get over the video card and memory bottlenecks caused by thousands of players. P2P is a good solution, but even at the client-server model you can stop the number of connections being n^2. Here's the good part: if you're running a mostly melee video game: you don't have to update people that are far from you as often. You update the closest 4 people at 50 ms increments, and then as you go outwards, you send packets less frequently. It turns out that a melee game like a Tekken MMOG can easily have 1000 combatants on the field at once. It takes a little bit more work to get the next 9000 combatants, but theoretically it is possible with P2P melee games.
Heck, I wouldn't be surpised if we've had a few ants on the space station by now.
One thing is for certain: there is no stopping them; the ants will soon be here.
I could just see how bad it'd be for the US if in the next 10 years:
Belgium develops more efficient batteries allowing the electric car to be feasable.
Zimbabwe makes a working robotic car.
China manufacturing makes solar panels 1000% more cost effective.
Spain manufactures warp drive.
And finally Brazil comes up with a cure for cancer and AIDS that are in the same pill.
What would us poor American's do? Oh yeah, we'd buy or steal the technology like every other nation does which is especially easy now with the internet.
No, I'd say the biggest threat to America comes from it's looming economic crisis coming from transition from gas to alternative fuels. If gas hits $5 or $6 a gallon, inflation may be too high for low income people to buy food and gasoline. A similar threat is losing jobs to overseas.