"Haha, funny joke. Except in Japanese there is no letter 'L'. The typical speech pattern is to substitute R for L, not the other way around. You can't even get your bigoted jokes right."
or you're trying to portray the realistic environment of a pro sports stadium, real advertising on real billboards is going to be crucial to the atmosphere.
For me, one of the major benefits of playing a sports game on the computer rather than watching it on TV or going to the stadium is that I don't have to put up with the advertisements. I mean, do people really want a realistic environment when they play sports games? How many people stop playing for 3 minutes every so often to go watch an advertisement on youtube? How many people, get up to go to the bathroom and wait at the door for 20 minutes to simulate the line they would stand in at the stadium? How many people order hot dogs and pay the delivery guy an extra $5 to simulate prices at the stadium? If people don't want to have other negatives of the stadium experience, why would anyone expect us to have the advertising of the real stadium? When I finish playing a sports game, I don't go sit in my car for 3 hours to experience a realistic environment of the trip home!
Imagine store shelves and digital distribution filled with collections of user created content where the original publisher/developer has no creative control over the product or royalties on the sales.
Isn't that exactly the kind of innovation that patent law is supposed to encourage and protect? Why would I not want to go to the store and have lots of choices? Isn't this a bit like GM saying no one can sell me dice to hang from my rear-view mirror because it take "create control" of their product away from GM? Or like GM saying all the fuzzy dice sellers have to pay GM royalties?
And what's with the first amendment stuff? I've never understood how an amendment designed to protect words (speech and the press) somehow covers pornography, whether in games or not.
The reason you have so much trouble finding out what candidates stand for is that they know you are more likely to vote against them than for them once you find out. You talk about how valuable it is to hear them speak. All you get from that is their ability to appear reasonable. And if they appear reasonable, aren't they likely to do reasonable things? Like the kinds of things you think are reasonable? But if they actually say what they want to do, they might shatter your illusion by saying they'll do something you don't think is reasonable, and then they will seem insane and not electable compared to their opponents who, by keeping quiet, still appear reasonable to you.
If you weren't nearly certain who you were going to vote for many months ago, you probably haven't been paying enough attention to make an informed decision. The parties in the US are quite different in rhetoric and philosophy. The only thing they seem to agree on is that a lot of money should be spent by the government and that lobbyists should be kept happy.
The differences between the parties change pretty slowly. If you want to make an informed decision in the 2008 election, don't wait until summer 2008 to start getting informed - there won't be enough time. Start paying attention now. Read opinions in newspapers. Watch the argument shows on TV. Get to know the names and views of congressional leaders and Supreme Court judges. Find out what the elected officials are doing and how it tracks with what they promised.
Even if you go read their position papers now, should you believe them? Which parts should you believe? What things do they stand for that actually have a chance of passing, and what do they stand for that is only for show because it will never pass? If you just tuned in now you'll have no clue.
There's a reason campaign commercials are so lame. They're aimed at people who haven't made up their minds yet and those people generally aren't the best informed voters.
There are three ways to authenticate yourself:
* something you are (fingerprints, irises, etc.)
* something you know (passphrase, mother's maiden name, etc.)
* something you have (key, RSA token, access card, etc.)
As many have already pointed out, the best security uses a combination of two of the above. This is so because each one of the above has an inherent weakness.
Where do signaturess fall into your list?
Actually, somthing you know could be considered something you are. In the future, might your identiy be confirmed by a brainscan capable of determining something you know?
And this doesn't speak to the socialization aspect. Half of what is taught in school isn't just the three R's. The other half is how to become a responsible adult functioning in a society where you must interact with others. Sheltering kids from the outside world does not teach them that.
How did people for generations raise kids on farms, isolated from others while doing chores?
The problem with this approach is that you can't look up what you don't know is in the book. You may know enough.NET to do your job, you can code anything you need to, and if you suspect something already exists you can look it up. But what about the code that's been written that you don't know exists? One of the advantages of great experience with a language is that you already know that certain things are available. Another advantage is not having to take time out to read up on something because you haven't used it before. Hand in hand with that is already knowing the quirks and crannies that someone who just skims the documentation may miss or that may not be documented at all.
ROC used to rule the whole China, mainland and Taiwan combined. They lost the civil war in 1949 and retreated to Taiwan. Neither PRC nor ROC see each other as a ligitimate government of China.
Actually Taiwan does see China as the legitimate government of China, not of Taiwan. Taiwan's "official" position may say differently to avoid war with China, but Taiwan's publicly stated position is that they no longer consider themselves the rulers of China.
At least both constitutions claim largely overlapping territories. It's a stalemale over half a century.
The stalemate has been over for almost 20 years. The Chinese dictators who were ruling Taiwan have died and the country has become a thriving democracy with Taiwanese leaders who have no interest beyond trying to avoid an invasion and trying to persuade other countries to stop allowing China to pressure them into treating Taiwan like an outcast.
Taiwan is a sovereign independent nation with more people than Australia, but it can't get into the UN. And people wonder why Americans have so little respect for the UN.
While your point may well be valid, I felt like being a little bit picky about your example. The last time I was in Taiwan (Taipei -- maybe the more rural areas are different), all the McDonald's I went to had free refills. And I rather abused it, as it is *hot* there in the summer!
That doesn't surprise me. The place is changing very rapidly. Everytime I go there it's different. When I lived there, the McDonald's gave free refills, but it was sort of a secret. My Taiwanese friends were shocked when I went up and asked for a free refill and received it.
But when I was talking about getting as much soda as you want, I meant the places that are self-serve. You can just stand their drinking and refilling. You don't have to wait in line or ask or anything.
There are some things in America that simply won't work in China. One, he claims, is all you can eat restaraunts. People will just move in until you kick them out. When they have a salad bar, people will build 3 foot high salads (Search for it on Flicker--it's a pretty amazing sight to behold).
That's more a matter of wealth than culture. People can only eat so much, and they do have other things to do. Once the novelty and the thrill wear off, people will eat and leave just like in any other wealthy country. I've seen it with Taiwanese people (similar culture, different country) who come to the US. The first time they go to a McDonald's where they can get AS MUCH SODA AS THEY WANT they drink and drink and dring. Next time, it's no big deal and they just get one cup.
With collective bargaining, you certainly have a stronger position because the union bosses know what everyone else is making too. Without the union, you often don't know what those around you earn and whether you are getting fair pay.
On the other hand, unions tend to push too hard so that company's go out of business or prefer to offshore.
What makes this worse is that the companies will then lay off everyone at once rather than laying off a few at a time. If they lay a few off at a time, those few have a decent chance of finding a job in a reasonable time. If everyone goes at once, then everyone is competing against each other for the same jobs at the same time.
The earlier you spot a defect, the cheaper it is to fix.
On the other hand, defects are a lot more expensive to spot earlier in the process. It's much tougher to find a flaw during design than during coding, and tougher to spot a flaw during beta testing than during coding.
Heck, the Department of Defense had to concede of instances of inappropriate actions like a female guard sitting on a detainee's lap and trying to stroke his hair,
Are you nuts announcing that here!? Pretty soon they'll be thousands of slashdotter's fighting US troops in Afghanistan just so they can be sent to Guantanamo!
I guess it shows my age when my first reaction was to notice how close "Wii" is to "WWII", and wonder why a JAPANESE company would want to make allusions to THAT. A few years ago no Japanese company would have gone near that kind of marketing.
When you sign up to do classified work, you have to accept the restrictions that come with it. There are benefits like job security, better pay, and interesting work. But the fact remains that protecting classified work is part of the job.
Reading a report on a train? If you're doing classified work, you have to expect that someone may be after your information. Reading on a train provides an excelling opportunity to read over your shoulder.
After dinner report writing? Safer, but if you do it by habit, someone targetting you will figure it out and find some way to bug your computer.
Yes, the rules cause a productivity drop, but it is an even bigger productivity drop if your work becomes meaningless because it's no longer secret.
As for policing the policy, that should rarely be what causes people to obey the rules. You do need enforcement for a few people, but far better is to create a culture where rules are expected to be followed as a normal part of the workday. The boss, when making a request, understands that it takes longer to accomplish it because of the security rules. The worker accepts the rules no matter how silly they seem because he understands that he doesn't know all the tricks the rules are designed to protect against.
In one of the sequal books, I can't remember which one and I don't have the book to look it up, the answer "Pick a number, any number" is strongly hinted at as the answer.
The life-forms are discussing what the number might be, and the computer is talking in the background trying to be friendly by doing a magic trick or playing a game. One of the life-forms asks what the question is, and the computer interjects with "Pick a number, any number", but the computer is ignored and the life-forms continue with their discussion.
Please do me a favor. Go to your favorite bookstore in Shanghai (where you can supposedly parade around downtown yelling "Down with the Party") and pick up a copy of any book by former President Lee Deng-hui of Taiwan. If you can't find such a book, try going to another book store in Shanghai. If you fail to find any of Lee's books in Shanghai, start working the bookstores in another Chinese city. Please continue this exercise for as long as it takes to find one of Lee's books in China.
Or, as an alternative for disappearing for just as long, walk down a street in Shanghai yelling "Taiwan is a free and independent country!"
I suggest these as better ways to spend your time than making absurd comparisons between the United States and China. Notice, that in trying to make you go away for a long time, I didn't suggest that you walk down a street in New York yelling "America invaded Iraq!" or ask you to go to a book store in New York and look for something by Karl Marx.
Move to a country where you don't understand the language. It doesn't cut out all the ads, but it cuts out a lot of them. And it makes some of the ads more bearable.
3 A form of chess was played in ancient India but the game was developed into the form we know it today in Persia. From there it spread westward to Europe - where it was introduced by the Moors in Spain in the 10th century - and eastward as far as Japan. The word rook comes from the Persian rukh, which means chariot.
That makes sense. The characters used on the corresponding peices in Chinese and Japanese versions of Chess use a character that roughly translates to "vehicle". (My languages skills aren't good enough to say what they exactly translate to.) So from Japan to Persia, a rook is a vehicle. But in Europe and America a rook is a castle. I wonder how that happened.
Israel has, in the past, tried to sell military technology to countries hostile to the United States. In 2000, the US had to make a big stink to stop the sale of Phalcon, an advanced, airborne early-warning system, to China. (This was particularly infuriating in my opinion because it threatened Taiwan, which is in the same boat with Israel as a country with few international friends that has to rely heavily on the US for protection from its neighbor[s] just to maintain its existence. How would Isreal feel if Taiwan were selling advanced weapons to Syria, Iran, or the Palestinians?) http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2003_03/israelexpor ts_mar03.asp And more recently there have been concerns about the sale of drones. http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1505209, 00.html
To my knowledge there has never been a problem with the UAE making such sales.
Furthermore, we have trouble the Israeli spying on the US. Jonathon Pollard was caught and imprisoned for selling information to Israel.
Have there been similar cases with Dubai?
There are other legitimate concerns about Dubai, but given that the sale of Snort involves technology, it can't really be compared to the port operations. I nearly always favor Israel in its dealings with the world, but that doesn't mean I would trust it with all our technology. I would trust it to run a port though.
It reads like a pretty simple statement of how anybody approaching the problem of an in game camera for a game would solve it.
Perhaps it was innovative only because computers generally didn't have the firepower to execute it fast enough to be useful, so no one else bothered to work on it.
Perhaps I should get my patent right now on how to do the math behind implementing in-game stereo vision, and wait for someone much smarter than me to figure out how to make stereo vision conveniently workable on a modern computer.
Or maybe I get my patent for simulating the movement entire ocean in real-time by tracking molecules individually. Sure, we may not have a computer that can handle it now, but we will eventually-and I'll have the patent.
I don't go to the movie theater anymore. I can see the movie at home without sitting through 20 minutes of commercials. I know the commercial didn't kill the movies outright but it was one of the 1000 cuts that was killing me slowly. I don't read a newspaper, too much adds and not enough real news. I don't watch broadcast TV much because I don't want to watch commercials. I have HBO and a Playstation. I guess I know what's next to be dropped. Maybe I'll read more books.
Hey you're right! Books don't have ads yet! I think I see an opportunity to make some money!
But you see one of the reasons to play a game is to escape from the things you don't like about the real world - one of those things being advertising.
I lived overseas for a while and had a good time. Upon returning, I realized that one of my favorite things about being overseas was that I couldn't understand the advertising. It was wonderful not being bombarded with thousands of messages everyday that I had to constantly hear/see, process, and decide to ignore.
The same is true for games. Getting away from advertisements to simpler world where I can in fact forget the real world is the whole point. If I'm constantly seeing ads and have to be remembering not to buy that product when I leave the game for the real world, it ruins the experience.
There is a gerat book called "Lies My Teacher Told Me" (I cannot remember the name of the author) that talks about certain documented facts that are never taught in history classes. One is that Columbus knew that there was a new world to the west. He had been to Iceland a few times, and there were still Norsemen in Greenland (who would visit Canada for timber, etc, and had had dealings with the "natives"). On top of this, Columbus had been to "the Gold Coast" of Africa (aka The Slave Coast aka The Ivory Coast) and had met the representatives of the king of Mauritania, if not the king himself, at the time probably the wealthiest man in the world. They had had a few colonies "a few days to the west" in a new land, but they had abandoned them year before, because the locals kept attacking them. So Columbus knew he was sailing to new lands, not India, because he had data from the Norse and the Mauritanians about western lands over the sea.
The evidence you mention doesn't show that Columbus knew there was a "new world" a short distance to the west, only that there was land there. The story I've heard seems more likely. Columbus thought the world was a lot smaller than it really was, and that the northeast coast of America the Vikings had visited was actually Siberia. Everyone (at least sailors and educated people) knew the world was round, but a sailor might be forgiven for mistrusting an ancient Greek who claimed to know how big it was based on academic work. Far better to trust fellow sailors who had actually visited Siberia!
Slashdot Mirror
"Haha, funny joke. Except in Japanese there is no letter 'L'. The typical speech pattern is to substitute R for L, not the other way around. You can't even get your bigoted jokes right."
'bigoted'? How so?
or you're trying to portray the realistic environment of a pro sports stadium, real advertising on real billboards is going to be crucial to the atmosphere.
For me, one of the major benefits of playing a sports game on the computer rather than watching it on TV or going to the stadium is that I don't have to put up with the advertisements. I mean, do people really want a realistic environment when they play sports games? How many people stop playing for 3 minutes every so often to go watch an advertisement on youtube? How many people, get up to go to the bathroom and wait at the door for 20 minutes to simulate the line they would stand in at the stadium? How many people order hot dogs and pay the delivery guy an extra $5 to simulate prices at the stadium? If people don't want to have other negatives of the stadium experience, why would anyone expect us to have the advertising of the real stadium? When I finish playing a sports game, I don't go sit in my car for 3 hours to experience a realistic environment of the trip home!
Imagine store shelves and digital distribution filled with collections of user created content where the original publisher/developer has no creative control over the product or royalties on the sales.
Isn't that exactly the kind of innovation that patent law is supposed to encourage and protect? Why would I not want to go to the store and have lots of choices? Isn't this a bit like GM saying no one can sell me dice to hang from my rear-view mirror because it take "create control" of their product away from GM? Or like GM saying all the fuzzy dice sellers have to pay GM royalties?
And what's with the first amendment stuff? I've never understood how an amendment designed to protect words (speech and the press) somehow covers pornography, whether in games or not.
"Among highly intelligent people almost everyone is atheist."
Nonsense.
How can being highly intelligent correlate to believing a conclusion for which there is almost no evidence and absolutely no strong evidence?
Either the "highly intelligent people" aren't highly intelligent, or you're getting atheism confused with agnosticism.
The reason you have so much trouble finding out what candidates stand for is that they know you are more likely to vote against them than for them once you find out. You talk about how valuable it is to hear them speak. All you get from that is their ability to appear reasonable. And if they appear reasonable, aren't they likely to do reasonable things? Like the kinds of things you think are reasonable? But if they actually say what they want to do, they might shatter your illusion by saying they'll do something you don't think is reasonable, and then they will seem insane and not electable compared to their opponents who, by keeping quiet, still appear reasonable to you.
If you weren't nearly certain who you were going to vote for many months ago, you probably haven't been paying enough attention to make an informed decision. The parties in the US are quite different in rhetoric and philosophy. The only thing they seem to agree on is that a lot of money should be spent by the government and that lobbyists should be kept happy.
The differences between the parties change pretty slowly. If you want to make an informed decision in the 2008 election, don't wait until summer 2008 to start getting informed - there won't be enough time. Start paying attention now. Read opinions in newspapers. Watch the argument shows on TV. Get to know the names and views of congressional leaders and Supreme Court judges. Find out what the elected officials are doing and how it tracks with what they promised.
Even if you go read their position papers now, should you believe them? Which parts should you believe? What things do they stand for that actually have a chance of passing, and what do they stand for that is only for show because it will never pass? If you just tuned in now you'll have no clue.
There's a reason campaign commercials are so lame. They're aimed at people who haven't made up their minds yet and those people generally aren't the best informed voters.
There are three ways to authenticate yourself:
* something you are (fingerprints, irises, etc.) * something you know (passphrase, mother's maiden name, etc.) * something you have (key, RSA token, access card, etc.)
As many have already pointed out, the best security uses a combination of two of the above. This is so because each one of the above has an inherent weakness.
Where do signaturess fall into your list?
Actually, somthing you know could be considered something you are. In the future, might your identiy be confirmed by a brainscan capable of determining something you know?
And this doesn't speak to the socialization aspect. Half of what is taught in school isn't just the three R's. The other half is how to become a responsible adult functioning in a society where you must interact with others. Sheltering kids from the outside world does not teach them that. How did people for generations raise kids on farms, isolated from others while doing chores?
The problem with this approach is that you can't look up what you don't know is in the book. You may know enough .NET to do your job, you can code anything you need to, and if you suspect something already exists you can look it up. But what about the code that's been written that you don't know exists? One of the advantages of great experience with a language is that you already know that certain things are available. Another advantage is not having to take time out to read up on something because you haven't used it before. Hand in hand with that is already knowing the quirks and crannies that someone who just skims the documentation may miss or that may not be documented at all.
ROC used to rule the whole China, mainland and Taiwan combined. They lost the civil war in 1949 and retreated to Taiwan. Neither PRC nor ROC see each other as a ligitimate government of China.
Actually Taiwan does see China as the legitimate government of China, not of Taiwan. Taiwan's "official" position may say differently to avoid war with China, but Taiwan's publicly stated position is that they no longer consider themselves the rulers of China.
At least both constitutions claim largely overlapping territories. It's a stalemale over half a century.
The stalemate has been over for almost 20 years. The Chinese dictators who were ruling Taiwan have died and the country has become a thriving democracy with Taiwanese leaders who have no interest beyond trying to avoid an invasion and trying to persuade other countries to stop allowing China to pressure them into treating Taiwan like an outcast.
Taiwan is a sovereign independent nation with more people than Australia, but it can't get into the UN. And people wonder why Americans have so little respect for the UN.
While your point may well be valid, I felt like being a little bit picky about your example. The last time I was in Taiwan (Taipei -- maybe the more rural areas are different), all the McDonald's I went to had free refills. And I rather abused it, as it is *hot* there in the summer!
That doesn't surprise me. The place is changing very rapidly. Everytime I go there it's different. When I lived there, the McDonald's gave free refills, but it was sort of a secret. My Taiwanese friends were shocked when I went up and asked for a free refill and received it.
But when I was talking about getting as much soda as you want, I meant the places that are self-serve. You can just stand their drinking and refilling. You don't have to wait in line or ask or anything.
There are some things in America that simply won't work in China. One, he claims, is all you can eat restaraunts. People will just move in until you kick them out. When they have a salad bar, people will build 3 foot high salads (Search for it on Flicker--it's a pretty amazing sight to behold).
That's more a matter of wealth than culture. People can only eat so much, and they do have other things to do. Once the novelty and the thrill wear off, people will eat and leave just like in any other wealthy country. I've seen it with Taiwanese people (similar culture, different country) who come to the US. The first time they go to a McDonald's where they can get AS MUCH SODA AS THEY WANT they drink and drink and dring. Next time, it's no big deal and they just get one cup.
With collective bargaining, you certainly have a stronger position because the union bosses know what everyone else is making too. Without the union, you often don't know what those around you earn and whether you are getting fair pay.
On the other hand, unions tend to push too hard so that company's go out of business or prefer to offshore.
What makes this worse is that the companies will then lay off everyone at once rather than laying off a few at a time. If they lay a few off at a time, those few have a decent chance of finding a job in a reasonable time. If everyone goes at once, then everyone is competing against each other for the same jobs at the same time.
The earlier you spot a defect, the cheaper it is to fix.
On the other hand, defects are a lot more expensive to spot earlier in the process. It's much tougher to find a flaw during design than during coding, and tougher to spot a flaw during beta testing than during coding.
Heck, the Department of Defense had to concede of instances of inappropriate actions like a female guard sitting on a detainee's lap and trying to stroke his hair,
Are you nuts announcing that here!? Pretty soon they'll be thousands of slashdotter's fighting US troops in Afghanistan just so they can be sent to Guantanamo!
I guess it shows my age when my first reaction was to notice how close "Wii" is to "WWII", and wonder why a JAPANESE company would want to make allusions to THAT. A few years ago no Japanese company would have gone near that kind of marketing.
Reading a report on a train? If you're doing classified work, you have to expect that someone may be after your information. Reading on a train provides an excelling opportunity to read over your shoulder.
After dinner report writing? Safer, but if you do it by habit, someone targetting you will figure it out and find some way to bug your computer.
Yes, the rules cause a productivity drop, but it is an even bigger productivity drop if your work becomes meaningless because it's no longer secret.
As for policing the policy, that should rarely be what causes people to obey the rules. You do need enforcement for a few people, but far better is to create a culture where rules are expected to be followed as a normal part of the workday. The boss, when making a request, understands that it takes longer to accomplish it because of the security rules. The worker accepts the rules no matter how silly they seem because he understands that he doesn't know all the tricks the rules are designed to protect against.
In one of the sequal books, I can't remember which one and I don't have the book to look it up, the answer "Pick a number, any number" is strongly hinted at as the answer.
The life-forms are discussing what the number might be, and the computer is talking in the background trying to be friendly by doing a magic trick or playing a game. One of the life-forms asks what the question is, and the computer interjects with "Pick a number, any number", but the computer is ignored and the life-forms continue with their discussion.
Please do me a favor. Go to your favorite bookstore in Shanghai (where you can supposedly parade around downtown yelling "Down with the Party") and pick up a copy of any book by former President Lee Deng-hui of Taiwan. If you can't find such a book, try going to another book store in Shanghai. If you fail to find any of Lee's books in Shanghai, start working the bookstores in another Chinese city. Please continue this exercise for as long as it takes to find one of Lee's books in China.
Or, as an alternative for disappearing for just as long, walk down a street in Shanghai yelling "Taiwan is a free and independent country!"
I suggest these as better ways to spend your time than making absurd comparisons between the United States and China. Notice, that in trying to make you go away for a long time, I didn't suggest that you walk down a street in New York yelling "America invaded Iraq!" or ask you to go to a book store in New York and look for something by Karl Marx.
Move to a country where you don't understand the language. It doesn't cut out all the ads, but it cuts out a lot of them. And it makes some of the ads more bearable.
3 A form of chess was played in ancient India but the game was developed into the form we know it today in Persia. From there it spread westward to Europe - where it was introduced by the Moors in Spain in the 10th century - and eastward as far as Japan. The word rook comes from the Persian rukh, which means chariot.
That makes sense. The characters used on the corresponding peices in Chinese and Japanese versions of Chess use a character that roughly translates to "vehicle". (My languages skills aren't good enough to say what they exactly translate to.) So from Japan to Persia, a rook is a vehicle. But in Europe and America a rook is a castle. I wonder how that happened.
To my knowledge there has never been a problem with the UAE making such sales.
Furthermore, we have trouble the Israeli spying on the US. Jonathon Pollard was caught and imprisoned for selling information to Israel.
Have there been similar cases with Dubai?
There are other legitimate concerns about Dubai, but given that the sale of Snort involves technology, it can't really be compared to the port operations. I nearly always favor Israel in its dealings with the world, but that doesn't mean I would trust it with all our technology. I would trust it to run a port though.
It reads like a pretty simple statement of how anybody approaching the problem of an in game camera for a game would solve it. Perhaps it was innovative only because computers generally didn't have the firepower to execute it fast enough to be useful, so no one else bothered to work on it. Perhaps I should get my patent right now on how to do the math behind implementing in-game stereo vision, and wait for someone much smarter than me to figure out how to make stereo vision conveniently workable on a modern computer. Or maybe I get my patent for simulating the movement entire ocean in real-time by tracking molecules individually. Sure, we may not have a computer that can handle it now, but we will eventually-and I'll have the patent.
I don't go to the movie theater anymore. I can see the movie at home without sitting through 20 minutes of commercials. I know the commercial didn't kill the movies outright but it was one of the 1000 cuts that was killing me slowly. I don't read a newspaper, too much adds and not enough real news. I don't watch broadcast TV much because I don't want to watch commercials. I have HBO and a Playstation. I guess I know what's next to be dropped. Maybe I'll read more books.
Hey you're right! Books don't have ads yet! I think I see an opportunity to make some money!
But you see one of the reasons to play a game is to escape from the things you don't like about the real world - one of those things being advertising.
I lived overseas for a while and had a good time. Upon returning, I realized that one of my favorite things about being overseas was that I couldn't understand the advertising. It was wonderful not being bombarded with thousands of messages everyday that I had to constantly hear/see, process, and decide to ignore.
The same is true for games. Getting away from advertisements to simpler world where I can in fact forget the real world is the whole point. If I'm constantly seeing ads and have to be remembering not to buy that product when I leave the game for the real world, it ruins the experience.
There is a gerat book called "Lies My Teacher Told Me" (I cannot remember the name of the author) that talks about certain documented facts that are never taught in history classes. One is that Columbus knew that there was a new world to the west. He had been to Iceland a few times, and there were still Norsemen in Greenland (who would visit Canada for timber, etc, and had had dealings with the "natives"). On top of this, Columbus had been to "the Gold Coast" of Africa (aka The Slave Coast aka The Ivory Coast) and had met the representatives of the king of Mauritania, if not the king himself, at the time probably the wealthiest man in the world. They had had a few colonies "a few days to the west" in a new land, but they had abandoned them year before, because the locals kept attacking them. So Columbus knew he was sailing to new lands, not India, because he had data from the Norse and the Mauritanians about western lands over the sea.
The evidence you mention doesn't show that Columbus knew there was a "new world" a short distance to the west, only that there was land there. The story I've heard seems more likely. Columbus thought the world was a lot smaller than it really was, and that the northeast coast of America the Vikings had visited was actually Siberia. Everyone (at least sailors and educated people) knew the world was round, but a sailor might be forgiven for mistrusting an ancient Greek who claimed to know how big it was based on academic work. Far better to trust fellow sailors who had actually visited Siberia!