But anyway, that's only one aspect of it. Richter is also going after them for forwarding complaints to OIRB's ISP instead of the company directly.
SpamCop does not choose who to forward complaints to. It does provide automated header analysis to determine reasonable spam complaint addresses associated with the origin of the spam. The SpamCop user then chooses where to direct his complaint. SpamCop merely provides a temporary address for that purpose. This prevents spammers from (a) learning that the user's address is "live" (which makes it more valuable on a mailing list), or (b) attempting to discourage complaints by increasing the volume or objectionable nature of the spam directed to that address.
SpamCop does not have the power to "get anybody shut down." They generate temporary email addresses to users who want to complain about unsolicited email and provide automated header analysis to determine addresses to complain to. Anybody who receives such a message can respond to the complainant requesting the email address which received the spam. Note that while the CANSPAM act requires mass mailers to provide an address for removal requests, it does not prohibit spam recipients from complaining about spam if they don't want to divulge their email address to the spammer (thereby confirming it as a "live" spam target).
Reports of the professional accomplishments of heterosexuals only rarely mention their sexual preferences. So emphasizing this fact specifically for a gay man might itself be perceived as evidence of bias. On the other hand, in biographies--where such personal information is generally regarded as relevant--Alan Turing's sexual preference is generally addressed.
The article did not mention whether Nintendo plans to continue to maintain backward compatibility in the GameBoy line. This would be a very strong selling point.
It looks very Nintendo. It sounds like Nintendo has no plans into getting into a computing power/graphics race with Sony, but intends to focus on their dominance in innovative game design. Consider this is the company whose original low-resolution original black&white GameBoy stomped color portable systems into the ground, I wouldn't dismiss it. A Zelda or Metroid game with N64 quality graphics on one screen and a map display on the other would be very appealing.
Have you've ever thought it is the failing of teachers, not of the students or tv producers? If these shows are wrong, prove it to them. Show the students how to questions these things
Which is exactly the point of the article. Instead of bemoaning the fact that students are more interested in a face on Mars than how many Earth's will fit into the Red Spot (who wouldn't be? we just sneer because we already know it's not true), take advantage of that interest in pseudoscience to get students involved with the real thing.
My favorite dramatic convention is the way an image that starts out at about 200x200 pixels can be "enhanced" to high definition in order to read license plates, recognize faces.
Most annoying recent movie moment: Neo, putting on his best Superman impression, snags Trinity moments before she splatters at the base of some huge skyscraper. He's apparently going pretty darn near the speed of sound, intersects her at a 90 degree angle, and never touches the brakes.
There is one small problem with complaining about that scene: Even in the context of the movie, it's not real. It's all a computer simulation, and Neo is able to cheat by modifying the simulation parameters--i.e. the laws of physics--as desired.
The truth is, THERE IS NOT ONE PART ON MOST LAPTOP MOTHERBOARDS YOU THE USER COULD FIX ANYWAY!
The other day I dropped my laptop and the CD drive quit working. I opened it up, found and fixed one jarred-loose motherboard connection, and now it works fine.
Of course, if it was under warranty, I'd almost certainly have just taken it to my dealer for the fix.
If you charge a price equivalent to the value to the "average" honest consumer, you have just eliminated the 49% of your potential market that estimates a price below average, and even MBAs aren't usually dumb enough to throw away half the potential market.
That can readily be dealt with by dropping the price after awhile. The ones in a hurry for the product are typically the ones who place the highest value on it. Those who value it a bit less are willing to wait a while to get the best price.
Applying a little math on the level that most physics undergrads are used to will often reveal several different price points, with about the same predicted total profit. What will happen under real world conditions to these predictions? Some industries have been willing to test these variant price structures.
And indeed, the videogame industry has done so, offering prices for games as low as $10, one fifth of the typical retail price. So it seems likely that their estimate of the optimum price point is probably pretty accurate.
I like the idea of the iTunes Music Store, but I'm not going to pay the price of a CD for the same music downloaded. When I buy a CD, I can rip it myself to whatever format I choose, free of DRM, and I still have the CD as a backup, or to re-rip at higher quality as disk space gets cheaper. If the record companies want the consumer to accept DRM, they need to offer some sort of real financial incentive to the consumer.
Bottom line: DRM-encumbered music is worth less than the same music on a CD.
So far, however, Apple's Software Update has always correctly informed me of necessary patches. That's more than I can say for Windows Update. After the latest critical update announcement, I checked our Windows computer, and when it reported no patches, I figured that somebody else had already installed it. So I was dismayed when that machine started showing symptoms of Sasser worm infection. Even then, the first time I ran Windows Update, it claimed the system was fully updated. But when I ran it again, the Critical Update magically appeared.
These prices are being set by the same system that shows managers how to maximize the next quarter's profits and drive the company into the ground two years later.
The way to maximize profit is to charge a price equivalent to the value of the product to the average honest consumer. It is hard to see how a company is going to be driven into the ground by charging a price that a large number of consumers find to be fair. However, it is possible for the entire industry to be driven into the ground by the greed of pirates.
"Games cost too much" is purely a rationalization. If it were truly the case that games were not worth $50, then pirates should be satisfied to rent them. Surely, if a game offers only a few hours of entertainment, then one or two rental periods should be sufficient to exhaust the game's entertainment value. The fact that pirates are insistent on owning the games, and willing to break the law (and take money out of the pockets of the people who create the games that they enjoy) to do it demonstrates that games have a high value even to pirates.
I think that the titles cost way too much and I wonder if they really need to cost that much to recover R&D.
The price of a game has nothing to do with recovery of R&D. Game companies have a responsibility to their investors to charge the profit-maximizing price, as best they can judge it. That means that if the price were reduced, the gain in sales would not offset the reduced per-copy income, and if the price were increased, the increased per-copy income would not offset the loss in sales. Of course, companies that fail to recover R&D rapidly go out of business. But people don't buy games out of charity, to keep the developers employed. What the consumer is willing to pay for a game depends not upon its development cost, but upon its value to the consumer. It is not surprising that honest consumers are willing to pay $50 for a game. Although people often complain that games are too expensive, a good game typically provides on the order of 50 hours of entertainment. At $1/hour, that makes games highly competitive with many other entertainment media. And if you don't think a game will provide enough hours of entertainment to be worth the purchase price, you can always rent it for $5 or so.
Hell, I haven't even backed up the $50 CDs that the damned games come on but I probably should even though I am told on the licensing agreement that I may not do so
Unless you are incredibly abusive of your CDs, it is not cost-effective to back up game disks. They just don't cost enough. Out of hundreds of CDs, I have yet to see a game fail. Even my young nephews have only had one game fail (a friend dropped the disk on the pavement while riding his bike). You'll end up spending more on blanks than you'd spend by simply replacing any disk that you damage.
The history of unmanned space exploration provides little support for the notion that robots can explore another planet as well as men. The Viking Mars lander was preloaded with experiments that were expected to provide a definite answer to the question of whether there is life on Mars. Yet the interpretation of those results is debated to this day. Despite all of the efforts of earthbound scientists to design definitive experiments, the results were ambiguous. And one thing a machine cannot do is design new experiments to clarify ambiguous results--something a human with basic lab equipment could readily do. When dealing with the genuine unknown, it simply is not possible to anticipate all of the possible questions.
Re:OptInBig and anonymized Spamcop complaints
on
Spammer Sues SpamCop
·
· Score: 1
Besides, people already gave us their email address. We aren't strangers. We get their address when they buy something online from us, or explicitly sign up for our materials.
So given your distaste for anonymity, I'm sure that you won't mind revealing the name of the chain that you work for?
Re:OptInBig and anonymized Spamcop complaints
on
Spammer Sues SpamCop
·
· Score: 1
Why should I go through the extra step? Why should I go through the extra step?
I don't know? A sense of responsibility, maybe? Certainly, when I've heard from somebody who said that he was receiving unwanted email from my location, I've gone to considerable effort to determine whether it was true, and to communicate with the complainant in order to resolve the issue as best as possible. Wouldn't anybody (except a spammer) do the same?
SpamCop doesn't obfuscate the message ("I got spam and it looks like it might have come from you. Here's the evidence."). It merely provides a way of communicating with the complainant without revealing personal information that many people don't care to trust to strangers (especially those suspected of spamming)--namely his email address. When somebody takes the position that they are not interested in hearing about spam from their site unless I bribe them with my private email address, am I unreasonable in assuming that they are a spammer, and that they will put my email address to no good use?
Re:OptInBig and anonymized Spamcop complaints
on
Spammer Sues SpamCop
·
· Score: 1
I run an Abuse mailbox, and I have to agree with Richter on this point. That is why I created an ISP account at Spamcop.net for my networks and my sending domains, and specified that I do not wish to receive anonymized complaints.
So? If you are serious about removing me from your list, send me email through SpamCop asking for my email address. If you are willing to take the 10 seconds required to email me, I'll send you the info. What I won't do is confirm my email address to a likely spammer who is not even willing to invest the minimal effort to respond to a SpamCop complaint.
Is there a Black Hole list of ISP's that do not accept SpamCop's anonymized complaints? It seems to me that refusal to accept such complaints is adequate evidence of intent to spam.
Re:He CAN-SPAM... the law says so!
on
Spammer Sues SpamCop
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Although SpamCop obfuscates the address of complainants so as not to reveal their addresses to a spammer, it is still possible for the recipient of a complaint to communicate with the complainant--SpamCop will forward their response. On the rare occasions in which a SpamCop complaint recipient has responded and requested my email address in order to remove me, I've always responded (on the theory that it is not worth a real human's time to confirm my email address merely for spamming purposes).
Early video games were entirely play-driven, designed according to the model of traditional sports. They were largely repetitive, and the reward to the player was the satisfaction of mastering the game, reinforced by hi-score boards. In a game of this nature, the play itself must be highly absorbing and deep, yet with a smooth learning curve. This is an extremely difficult challenge to the designer. Most games of this era are long-forgotten, but the ones that succeeded remain cult favorites to this day.
As computers improved and memory became cheaper, there was a shift to novelty-driven games, where the reward to the player is seeing something new. Initially, this was new game "boards" offering different modes of play. This relieved some of the burden on the designer. The play itself did not need to be quite so absorbing, because the player would play each level only briefly before moving on to a new one.
However, this is still a very difficult design challenge, because the designer in effect must come up with multiple games. An easier approach was to offer a nugget of "story" as the reward to the player. With games capable of full-motion video, it is possible for the story to be highly absorbing and appealing. Now the story becomes dominant, and the role of the game play is to give the player the impression of being immersed in the story.
Unfortunately, it is not practical to truly make the player a meaningful participant in an absorbing story. To truly participate, the player's decisions must influence the background, but the amount of story that must be generated increases exponentially with each decision point. So the general solution is to force the decisions, or to make them illusory, so that instead of a branching decision tree most of the decisions funnel back into a small number of story channels.
Another problem is that in a suspenseful story, the satisfying "good" outcome is generally rather improbable, which means that few players are likely to see it, unless they play each major decision point over and over. But if you can play over and over until you get it right, there is no real suspense. One way to inject suspense is to organize the game so that the player has something at stake. This can be done by introducing "save points" which are far enough apart that the player has some investment in the outcome of each challenge.
The problem with save points is that it reintroduces the need for the game play itself to be deep and absorbing enough to be rewarding in itself, so that the player does not object to having to replay each sequence multiple times. This is a difficult design challenge, particularly when much of the game's budget is devoted to construction of story and scenery elements. The failure of game play is reflected in the demand of many players for "save anywhere" capability. This largely destroys player investment in the outcome of individual sequences, and makes it trivial for the player to manipulate the game to achieve the "best" outcome.
Modern players who are accustomed to this kind of game tend to be impatient with real challenge. Many current games therefore provide only the illusion of challenge. Game play offers spectacle, but the play itself is designed to be mostly trivially easy, giving the player a feeling of achievement without actually requiring him to master a difficult challenge. The problem for the designer then is that gamers then tend to blast through the game in a few hours and then complain that it is too short. This is dealt with in two ways: one approach is to introduce collection elements, in which the player must accumulate experience or items. This gives the player a feeling of achievement, and makes the player willing to tolerate game play that in itself is easy and repetitive. The other approach is to introduce a few choke points, typically bosses, with a significant play challenge.
Still, once in a while, a game manages to get the combination of elements right. The Max Payne games are a good example. The story pr
I like Salon's approach. If you are not a member, you can get a day's membership by choosing to watch a brief commercial. A site could easily deal with pop-up blockers by presenting a screen inviting the user to request to see the ads. That would make it a requested screen, and the blocker would not trigger. If you don't want to do that, they are free to withhold their content.
On the other hand, I'm not going to futz with my pop-up blocker settings trying to get a site to work. If a site refuses to load, I just figure that it's a buggy site and I never go back.
Likewise, a kid can have half his brain removed in an accident and still be fully functional, fully conscious, and excel academically.
Depends upon which half. The brain is bilaterally symmetric, so it is hardly surprising if one side of the brain is sufficient for consciousness. It's like arguing, "You don't need your arms to play baseball, because a person with one arm can throw a ball." On the other hand, I don't know of anybody without a cerebrum who is fully conscious and excels academically.
It is considered highly dubious that all aspects of consciousness are implied or explainable within current physics.
Even if one accepts this dubious argument, it doesn't necessarily evade their conclusion, which is based upon fundamental thermodynamics of computation, applying even to quantum computation. So any "new physics" would need to be exempt from thermodynamic constraints.
...is that that amount of computation is insufficient to derive a method of changing the behavior of our universe or creating and/or obtaining access to another universe.
Slashdot Mirror
But anyway, that's only one aspect of it. Richter is also going after them for forwarding complaints to OIRB's ISP instead of the company directly.
SpamCop does not choose who to forward complaints to. It does provide automated header analysis to determine reasonable spam complaint addresses associated with the origin of the spam. The SpamCop user then chooses where to direct his complaint. SpamCop merely provides a temporary address for that purpose. This prevents spammers from (a) learning that the user's address is "live" (which makes it more valuable on a mailing list), or (b) attempting to discourage complaints by increasing the volume or objectionable nature of the spam directed to that address.
SpamCop does not have the power to "get anybody shut down." They generate temporary email addresses to users who want to complain about unsolicited email and provide automated header analysis to determine addresses to complain to. Anybody who receives such a message can respond to the complainant requesting the email address which received the spam. Note that while the CANSPAM act requires mass mailers to provide an address for removal requests, it does not prohibit spam recipients from complaining about spam if they don't want to divulge their email address to the spammer (thereby confirming it as a "live" spam target).
Reports of the professional accomplishments of heterosexuals only rarely mention their sexual preferences. So emphasizing this fact specifically for a gay man might itself be perceived as evidence of bias. On the other hand, in biographies--where such personal information is generally regarded as relevant--Alan Turing's sexual preference is generally addressed.
DS has separate slots for current Game Boy Advance cartridges and new, smaller DS game cards
That wasn't the question. By "backwards compatibility" I mean the entire GameBoy line, not merely GBA.
The article did not mention whether Nintendo plans to continue to maintain backward compatibility in the GameBoy line. This would be a very strong selling point.
It looks very Nintendo. It sounds like Nintendo has no plans into getting into a computing power/graphics race with Sony, but intends to focus on their dominance in innovative game design. Consider this is the company whose original low-resolution original black&white GameBoy stomped color portable systems into the ground, I wouldn't dismiss it. A Zelda or Metroid game with N64 quality graphics on one screen and a map display on the other would be very appealing.
Have you've ever thought it is the failing of teachers, not of the students or tv producers? If these shows are wrong, prove it to them. Show the students how to questions these things
Which is exactly the point of the article. Instead of bemoaning the fact that students are more interested in a face on Mars than how many Earth's will fit into the Red Spot (who wouldn't be? we just sneer because we already know it's not true), take advantage of that interest in pseudoscience to get students involved with the real thing.
My favorite dramatic convention is the way an image that starts out at about 200x200 pixels can be "enhanced" to high definition in order to read license plates, recognize faces.
Most annoying recent movie moment: Neo, putting on his best Superman impression, snags Trinity moments before she splatters at the base of some huge skyscraper. He's apparently going pretty darn near the speed of sound, intersects her at a 90 degree angle, and never touches the brakes.
There is one small problem with complaining about that scene: Even in the context of the movie, it's not real. It's all a computer simulation, and Neo is able to cheat by modifying the simulation parameters--i.e. the laws of physics--as desired.
The truth is, THERE IS NOT ONE PART ON MOST LAPTOP MOTHERBOARDS YOU THE USER COULD FIX ANYWAY!
The other day I dropped my laptop and the CD drive quit working. I opened it up, found and fixed one jarred-loose motherboard connection, and now it works fine.
Of course, if it was under warranty, I'd almost certainly have just taken it to my dealer for the fix.
If you charge a price equivalent to the value to the "average" honest consumer, you have just eliminated the 49% of your potential market that estimates a price below average, and even MBAs aren't usually dumb enough to throw away half the potential market.
That can readily be dealt with by dropping the price after awhile. The ones in a hurry for the product are typically the ones who place the highest value on it. Those who value it a bit less are willing to wait a while to get the best price.
Applying a little math on the level that most physics undergrads are used to will often reveal several different price points, with about the same predicted total profit. What will happen under real world conditions to these predictions? Some industries have been willing to test these variant price structures.
And indeed, the videogame industry has done so, offering prices for games as low as $10, one fifth of the typical retail price. So it seems likely that their estimate of the optimum price point is probably pretty accurate.
I like the idea of the iTunes Music Store, but I'm not going to pay the price of a CD for the same music downloaded. When I buy a CD, I can rip it myself to whatever format I choose, free of DRM, and I still have the CD as a backup, or to re-rip at higher quality as disk space gets cheaper. If the record companies want the consumer to accept DRM, they need to offer some sort of real financial incentive to the consumer.
Bottom line: DRM-encumbered music is worth less than the same music on a CD.
So far, however, Apple's Software Update has always correctly informed me of necessary patches. That's more than I can say for Windows Update. After the latest critical update announcement, I checked our Windows computer, and when it reported no patches, I figured that somebody else had already installed it. So I was dismayed when that machine started showing symptoms of Sasser worm infection. Even then, the first time I ran Windows Update, it claimed the system was fully updated. But when I ran it again, the Critical Update magically appeared.
These prices are being set by the same system that shows managers how to maximize the next quarter's profits and drive the company into the ground two years later.
The way to maximize profit is to charge a price equivalent to the value of the product to the average honest consumer. It is hard to see how a company is going to be driven into the ground by charging a price that a large number of consumers find to be fair. However, it is possible for the entire industry to be driven into the ground by the greed of pirates.
"Games cost too much" is purely a rationalization. If it were truly the case that games were not worth $50, then pirates should be satisfied to rent them. Surely, if a game offers only a few hours of entertainment, then one or two rental periods should be sufficient to exhaust the game's entertainment value. The fact that pirates are insistent on owning the games, and willing to break the law (and take money out of the pockets of the people who create the games that they enjoy) to do it demonstrates that games have a high value even to pirates.
I think that the titles cost way too much and I wonder if they really need to cost that much to recover R&D.
The price of a game has nothing to do with recovery of R&D. Game companies have a responsibility to their investors to charge the profit-maximizing price, as best they can judge it. That means that if the price were reduced, the gain in sales would not offset the reduced per-copy income, and if the price were increased, the increased per-copy income would not offset the loss in sales. Of course, companies that fail to recover R&D rapidly go out of business. But people don't buy games out of charity, to keep the developers employed. What the consumer is willing to pay for a game depends not upon its development cost, but upon its value to the consumer. It is not surprising that honest consumers are willing to pay $50 for a game. Although people often complain that games are too expensive, a good game typically provides on the order of 50 hours of entertainment. At $1/hour, that makes games highly competitive with many other entertainment media. And if you don't think a game will provide enough hours of entertainment to be worth the purchase price, you can always rent it for $5 or so.
Hell, I haven't even backed up the $50 CDs that the damned games come on but I probably should even though I am told on the licensing agreement that I may not do so
Unless you are incredibly abusive of your CDs, it is not cost-effective to back up game disks. They just don't cost enough. Out of hundreds of CDs, I have yet to see a game fail. Even my young nephews have only had one game fail (a friend dropped the disk on the pavement while riding his bike). You'll end up spending more on blanks than you'd spend by simply replacing any disk that you damage.
The history of unmanned space exploration provides little support for the notion that robots can explore another planet as well as men. The Viking Mars lander was preloaded with experiments that were expected to provide a definite answer to the question of whether there is life on Mars. Yet the interpretation of those results is debated to this day. Despite all of the efforts of earthbound scientists to design definitive experiments, the results were ambiguous. And one thing a machine cannot do is design new experiments to clarify ambiguous results--something a human with basic lab equipment could readily do. When dealing with the genuine unknown, it simply is not possible to anticipate all of the possible questions.
Besides, people already gave us their email address. We aren't strangers. We get their address when they buy something online from us, or explicitly sign up for our materials.
So given your distaste for anonymity, I'm sure that you won't mind revealing the name of the chain that you work for?
Why should I go through the extra step? Why should I go through the extra step?
I don't know? A sense of responsibility, maybe? Certainly, when I've heard from somebody who said that he was receiving unwanted email from my location, I've gone to considerable effort to determine whether it was true, and to communicate with the complainant in order to resolve the issue as best as possible. Wouldn't anybody (except a spammer) do the same?
SpamCop doesn't obfuscate the message ("I got spam and it looks like it might have come from you. Here's the evidence."). It merely provides a way of communicating with the complainant without revealing personal information that many people don't care to trust to strangers (especially those suspected of spamming)--namely his email address. When somebody takes the position that they are not interested in hearing about spam from their site unless I bribe them with my private email address, am I unreasonable in assuming that they are a spammer, and that they will put my email address to no good use?
I run an Abuse mailbox, and I have to agree with Richter on this point. That is why I created an ISP account at Spamcop.net for my networks and my sending domains, and specified that I do not wish to receive anonymized complaints.
So? If you are serious about removing me from your list, send me email through SpamCop asking for my email address. If you are willing to take the 10 seconds required to email me, I'll send you the info. What I won't do is confirm my email address to a likely spammer who is not even willing to invest the minimal effort to respond to a SpamCop complaint.
Is there a Black Hole list of ISP's that do not accept SpamCop's anonymized complaints? It seems to me that refusal to accept such complaints is adequate evidence of intent to spam.
Although SpamCop obfuscates the address of complainants so as not to reveal their addresses to a spammer, it is still possible for the recipient of a complaint to communicate with the complainant--SpamCop will forward their response. On the rare occasions in which a SpamCop complaint recipient has responded and requested my email address in order to remove me, I've always responded (on the theory that it is not worth a real human's time to confirm my email address merely for spamming purposes).
Early video games were entirely play-driven, designed according to the model of traditional sports. They were largely repetitive, and the reward to the player was the satisfaction of mastering the game, reinforced by hi-score boards. In a game of this nature, the play itself must be highly absorbing and deep, yet with a smooth learning curve. This is an extremely difficult challenge to the designer. Most games of this era are long-forgotten, but the ones that succeeded remain cult favorites to this day.
As computers improved and memory became cheaper, there was a shift to novelty-driven games, where the reward to the player is seeing something new. Initially, this was new game "boards" offering different modes of play. This relieved some of the burden on the designer. The play itself did not need to be quite so absorbing, because the player would play each level only briefly before moving on to a new one.
However, this is still a very difficult design challenge, because the designer in effect must come up with multiple games. An easier approach was to offer a nugget of "story" as the reward to the player. With games capable of full-motion video, it is possible for the story to be highly absorbing and appealing. Now the story becomes dominant, and the role of the game play is to give the player the impression of being immersed in the story.
Unfortunately, it is not practical to truly make the player a meaningful participant in an absorbing story. To truly participate, the player's decisions must influence the background, but the amount of story that must be generated increases exponentially with each decision point. So the general solution is to force the decisions, or to make them illusory, so that instead of a branching decision tree most of the decisions funnel back into a small number of story channels.
Another problem is that in a suspenseful story, the satisfying "good" outcome is generally rather improbable, which means that few players are likely to see it, unless they play each major decision point over and over. But if you can play over and over until you get it right, there is no real suspense. One way to inject suspense is to organize the game so that the player has something at stake. This can be done by introducing "save points" which are far enough apart that the player has some investment in the outcome of each challenge.
The problem with save points is that it reintroduces the need for the game play itself to be deep and absorbing enough to be rewarding in itself, so that the player does not object to having to replay each sequence multiple times. This is a difficult design challenge, particularly when much of the game's budget is devoted to construction of story and scenery elements. The failure of game play is reflected in the demand of many players for "save anywhere" capability. This largely destroys player investment in the outcome of individual sequences, and makes it trivial for the player to manipulate the game to achieve the "best" outcome.
Modern players who are accustomed to this kind of game tend to be impatient with real challenge. Many current games therefore provide only the illusion of challenge. Game play offers spectacle, but the play itself is designed to be mostly trivially easy, giving the player a feeling of achievement without actually requiring him to master a difficult challenge. The problem for the designer then is that gamers then tend to blast through the game in a few hours and then complain that it is too short. This is dealt with in two ways: one approach is to introduce collection elements, in which the player must accumulate experience or items. This gives the player a feeling of achievement, and makes the player willing to tolerate game play that in itself is easy and repetitive. The other approach is to introduce a few choke points, typically bosses, with a significant play challenge.
Still, once in a while, a game manages to get the combination of elements right. The Max Payne games are a good example. The story pr
I like Salon's approach. If you are not a member, you can get a day's membership by choosing to watch a brief commercial. A site could easily deal with pop-up blockers by presenting a screen inviting the user to request to see the ads. That would make it a requested screen, and the blocker would not trigger. If you don't want to do that, they are free to withhold their content.
On the other hand, I'm not going to futz with my pop-up blocker settings trying to get a site to work. If a site refuses to load, I just figure that it's a buggy site and I never go back.
Likewise, a kid can have half his brain removed in an accident and still be fully functional, fully conscious, and excel academically.
Depends upon which half. The brain is bilaterally symmetric, so it is hardly surprising if one side of the brain is sufficient for consciousness. It's like arguing, "You don't need your arms to play baseball, because a person with one arm can throw a ball." On the other hand, I don't know of anybody without a cerebrum who is fully conscious and excels academically.
It is considered highly dubious that all aspects of consciousness are implied or explainable within current physics.
Even if one accepts this dubious argument, it doesn't necessarily evade their conclusion, which is based upon fundamental thermodynamics of computation, applying even to quantum computation. So any "new physics" would need to be exempt from thermodynamic constraints.
...is that that amount of computation is insufficient to derive a method of changing the behavior of our universe or creating and/or obtaining access to another universe.