I don't know where you live, but where I do, bumperless cars would be illegal. Driving around without them would not only endanger yourself, but more importantly all of the other traffic. So, the comparison is actually fair an to the point.
By setting a standard for security and having all (or most; or some with a nice logo) comply, people will be able to buy software with the same sense of security they have when shopping for a car, not worrying about purchasing some murderous deathtrap.
An important point seems to be missed by everyone in all the "1Tb won't run out in a few years", "yes it will", "no it won't" discussions. Given more space, engineers will think of new applications for all that space.
It's not like you were filling up that 20Mb harddrive with text files.
It's not like you were filling up that 1Gb harddrive with black and white bitmaps and low fidelity samples.
And you're not going to fill that 1Tb harddrive with JPGs, movies and MP3.
3D environments (for games or other purposes) will take more and more space, as objects and their textures get more detailed. And that's just an application that's already here. Think of what you can do with all that space and think of something new.
How about CGI-movies with dozens of selectable camera angles? How about we send you all the feeds of a sports event with a direction script and let you mess with it? I'm sure you can do better than I am, just saying there -will- be new ideas. Wilder and more storage hungry than what I'm proposing here and we -will- be needing Pb drives in 10 years.
You say addiction to MMOGs is not different than being addicted to TV, Books, or any other form of entertainment.
To me, that's like saying addiction to nicotine is no different than being being addicted to heroin or any other form of chemical substance.
If you can say what you're saying there and keep a straight face, I'd wager you don't know any of the MMO addicts this article speaks of. If TV and books are cigarettes, MMO's are virtual crack. The main difference being that crack and nicotine are addictive to all of us, while these games apparently require a specific state of mind to get addicted to in the first place.
If I were studying psychology, I'd get on it, because I think it makes for an interesting research topic. I think it may develop into a problem of serious proportions, where you'll see more cases. Just wait for a serious case to sue game corporations for peddling their stuff the way they do and ruining their lives.
What really gets me here is that you seem to think you're actually better than people watching their plasma screens. I don't mind you thinking you're better off doing something else with your time. I can also see how the world would become a better place for you (and possibly a lot of the/. public) if all these people got off their couches and behind a keyboard.
But really, what moral advantage do you have over them? And how exactly would the world become a better place for them? As some other poster already mentioned, these people are actually happy as they are, or at least think they are without ill side effects, which pretty much amounts to the same.
And how about getting off your ass and actually contributing something instead of wasting your time on a forum like/., venting your petty frustration because some manager obviously had the good sense to notice you're just a waste of his corporation's money, his time and frankly: ours.
If you think mmorpg addiction is about people trading TV time for game time, you're sadly mistaken. I've seen people lose interest in their real life friends, letting their diet slip to nacho's and cola and people missing night after night of sleep, only sleeping during "downtime".
Now, being on/., some people may go "what's your point?", but I'm sure parent has retained enough of his sanity to see what I'm on about.
Yes, it is a problem if you trade real life friends for online friends that can just be gone in a blink, whenever the game shuts down. I have many online friends and I would be very sad to lose some, but I still value my real life friends more and for some other reasons.
Any hobby that doesn't enrich your life in any other way than "being fun" or "killing time" isn't worth messing up your personal health for, be it mental or physical. Running a little risk, like when parachute jumping or riding a motorcycle: sure. Missing a meal to play with friends: no problem. But complete disregard for personal hygiene and diet for a game?
Parent and half the other posters goes on about how you can't own the rights to facts. I'm sorry, but does that mean you can only own rights to fantasy, hearsay, opinions and lies? If you collect statistics about a certain event (something many scientists spend their entire careers doing) you have the rights to that data and are allowed to sell them and prevent anyone else from selling them without your permission. Sounds fair to me.
Ofcourse, that doesn't mean however that you own the actual event. But in the case of a baseball league, you could even argue the event itself is owned and as such, any information about it is subject to copyright. This doesn't apply to stuff your government does, since their activities are public in most cases anyway and any information about it would be too. But again, the government could ask a third party to collect statistics, publish those statistics and not have them be public, but copyrighted.
I really don't see why owning the copyright to statistics is wrong. The real question should be: is the MBL allowed to disallow anyone else to collect the same statistics? And do they try to disallow this? And if they do, is it really such a big surprise sport events are owned by corporations instead of the public?
..., surely this is not -news- to the Slashdot readers?
The only solution that works, spam aside
on
Meet The Life Hackers
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Everytime I have a discussion about this with clients, co-workers or business partners, I hear tales of spam filtering, rules wizards, voicemail solutions, etc.
But what everyone seem to be ignoring, is that you can just reply to the communication and let the other party know how you feel about all this unneeded communication.
Get a phone call and think it could have been handled by a mail? Say so. Get private instant messages while you're at work? Tell the sender about your working hours and ask them to ask again later. E-mail that you don't appreciate? Reply and let the sender know you'd rather not be included in their list of 'fun' mailings.
I know it is probably blasphemy on/. to say so, but not every problem needs a technical solution. If you tell the few hundred people that actually send all that junk at you how you feel about it and how you would like to be contacted, the entire problem will soon be reduced to normal proportions.
Ofcourse, this does not take care of spam or commercial mail that you should actually read. Nor does it help when you get a lot of communication from parties you'll only have a single contact with. But I think for the majority of people, the majority of messages is from people they communicate with regularly.
Sometimes, the developers skew too far towards their "work for it" ideal and forget that it's a game that's supposed to be enjoyable.
I guess what you're saying here is that a game is only enjoyable when you're poised to win, or at least able to beat all the players that don't have enough money to buy the advantage you got for your dollars? I'm sure you think monopoly would be more fun if the rules included buying play money for dollars? Or perhaps chess would be more fun if you could pay to get lost pieces back on the board / get a couple of extra queens?
I'm sorry, but you are completely missing the point of games.
Besides it has nothing to do with "working for it". The items are merely a reward in the sense that they usually open up new (harder) parts of the game for you, to keep things interesting. And they serve as a marker on your char to show what you've achieved sofar. I play MMORPGs regularly and I agree with developers that try to limit out of game item trade.
Although our EU overlords may work hard on a worldwide marketing campaign to make it seem otherwise: there's no such thing as "a European" in a cultural sense. Views, both religious and political, differ strongly across national borders. So do the demographic makeups of European countries. Europe is an economic union and a judicial and political one in some ways.
Some European countries would qualify as more religious than the United States, in my experience, take Roman Catholic Italy for instance. While other countries like the Netherlands are counted amongst the most secular nations on the planet.
As "an American", I'd suggest not attributing opions or cultural attributes to "a European", unless you're very sure it actually hold across national borders. It's similar to calling Canadians and Mexicans Americans. I know from experience that isn't taken too well either.
Just thought I'd let you know.
And about Europeans not understanding that someone would call himself a Christian even if he stays out of church: in most European countries, churchgoing has seen a steady decline, while the same amount of people as about 20 years still calls themselves Christian. So, I think that most Europeans can identify perfectly well with that standpoint.
Funny how people seem to focus on the individual to determine traits that improve the chances for survival. Even in nature, this is only part of the equation. But for humans, the traits of the groups you're a part of (family, community, town, country, etc.) take a very large part in your chances for survival. Ask anyone in New Orleans if you don't believe me.
Although heightened intelligence may not improve the chances for survival of the smart individual, it sure raises the chances of the people around this person. Smart people drive the sciences, helping people around them with medicine, engineering and other important stuff to survive.
Initially, it was good to see the number of downloads steadily rise. It inspired confidence in some to jump on the bandwagon and get their own copy, or copies rather, as many have pointed out.
But once a product is established, I think a far better measure of its greatness is the lack of -negative- publicity on it. How many articles from reliable sources have you read that actually say "Firefox is bad" or at least "Firefox is worse than IE/Opera/etc."?
Sure there are some, but Firefox is enjoying an enormous popularity among its users and I have yet to meet someone who tried it and switched back to IE or Opera.
... wondering why everyone is worried about their wives, daughters and mothers? Are all airport employees men? Are men shameless? Are none of the male employees gay? Is everyone avoiding a discussion about the size of the male reproductive organ?
Or does everyone secretly hope that the technology will be realized, given the remote chance that you'll ever get your hands one of the scanners? And are none of you gay (Before someone points out that I am making the same mistakes:p)? I think it is fairly safe to assume that most Slashdot readers are either male or pretending to be, so I expect no trouble there.
Nice of Google to keep adding nice features for citizens of the USA (and possibly Canada or thereabouts, though I did not check). But Google is starting to get more and more cluttered for those of us who use it daily and don't have the good fortune to live in the USA. (I'll stay in the Netherlands thank you very much, in case some smartass was thinking to suggest I move)
Also, the movies offered on Google seem to be big Hollywood productions, none of the more obscure stuff, so one has to wonder who is paying for this service? Now, I know it's not at all easy for your average American to go and see the latest European or Asian flics (not to mention Indian, Chinese or African, to name but three other large movie-producing countries) anyway, but shouldn't a service like this help that aspect even more than just become another outlet for Hollywood advertising?
This new feature smells a bit off to me and my "cool"-ranking for Google just dropped another point.
Personally, I'd say nothing that cannot appreciate art can create art. Which is exactly what seperates the Mondriaans of this world from kids with a ruler and some colored markers.
It's a definition that allows for a broad definition of art and also tells you something about the difference of opinion when assigning value to art.
Using this definition, I'd say the pictures created by a computer at this moment in time are not art, since there are no computers that can appreciate it, not can the system itself do that. Once we consider automated system as our equals, at least in this respect, a computer -could- create art.
Now, if someone wants to claim he considers this computer to be his equal in art appreciation and then goes on to claim that must mean the computer has created art, she's right. But only to the computer and that person. Only if a creator of art becomes accepted as an equal in art appreciation in a larger group, will people accept the creator as an artist in general.
Hope this helps, greetings,
Grismar.
Tell the whole world you will be releasing updates every 2nd Tuesday of the month and take a guess what day malware writers will pick to release their little pets?
It only seems to hold as long as the controller/owner of the system succeeds in keeping porn or other aggressively commercial media out of its systems.
When that happens, popular keywords will soon start referring to porn and such media and the designers will need to think of other ways to determine relevancy of terms/keywords/tags to an object.
The article is interesting and relevant to any "unspoiled" community tag-database. But imo, it has little value when talking about systems that have been open for some time to the commercial scum, that seems to succeed in filling every nook and cranny of the internet.
Not if your pet happens to be a prize winning Siamese or poodle. There's money to be made just showing off these critters, and though you'll still have to raise them properly, I bet you'd have a good chance at winning some more prizes with it...
Heck, you might even be able to sell a few clones abroad, if your pet is a real looker. It might take generations of breeding to surpass your specimen, its 'siblings' could dominate the scene for quite a while.
Thinking some more about it, better take care nobody steals a sample of your pet at a contest, or it might be competing with the clone in a few years...
... are distributed by BitTorrent, as well as through traditional downloads. The problem of people downloading old patches after they've expired (as with World of Warcraft) does not apply.
The EVE patches are incremental and applying an old patch just requires you to get the next one too. (they keep a full line available)
The Bittorrent was a great help during their recent release of a major update (over 100 MB download) which tenthousands of players tried to download within a few days.
It's not the leaky piece of meat you rinse under the shower to prevent nasty smells that has rights; it's the person that is you! Nor will it be the computer that has rights, but the person calling out from inside whatever hardware it resides.
I don't care if they genetically modify dolphins to be able to communicate with us, build a supercomputer that passes the Turing test or aliens land and take over the White House.
In all of those cases, mankind will have to take a new look at things and decide wether what is talking back deserves any rights. And seeing that it took the white man long enough to get to that point with his black fellow human, I think 'computers' have a long way to go before being freed from slavery...
If the US openly state that they have controls to shut down both GPS and Galileo, won't that make the services less interesting for time-critical services (like ambulances and firemen) to use?
I mean, won't designers of systems for that type of services go: "But what if the GPS or Galileo is shut down? Then we need an alternative! Might as well not bother with GPS or Galileo and spend our money/time designing the alternative..."
This would be a waste of a perfectly good system, in my opinion, but an understandable design decision for any designer who needs to be sure her design will work.
There has never been doubt in my mind that for simple military reasons the US have had measures to shutdown the service. But the fact that they're openly advertising it seems to indicate to me that they will not hesitate to actually use those measures whenever they think it might help in the way of "preventing terrorists from using it". Nevermind the arguments by others in this thread for why that's fairly useless to begin with.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know where you live, but where I do, bumperless cars would be illegal. Driving around without them would not only endanger yourself, but more importantly all of the other traffic. So, the comparison is actually fair an to the point.
By setting a standard for security and having all (or most; or some with a nice logo) comply, people will be able to buy software with the same sense of security they have when shopping for a car, not worrying about purchasing some murderous deathtrap.
An important point seems to be missed by everyone in all the "1Tb won't run out in a few years", "yes it will", "no it won't" discussions. Given more space, engineers will think of new applications for all that space.
It's not like you were filling up that 20Mb harddrive with text files.
It's not like you were filling up that 1Gb harddrive with black and white bitmaps and low fidelity samples.
And you're not going to fill that 1Tb harddrive with JPGs, movies and MP3.
3D environments (for games or other purposes) will take more and more space, as objects and their textures get more detailed. And that's just an application that's already here. Think of what you can do with all that space and think of something new.
How about CGI-movies with dozens of selectable camera angles? How about we send you all the feeds of a sports event with a direction script and let you mess with it? I'm sure you can do better than I am, just saying there -will- be new ideas. Wilder and more storage hungry than what I'm proposing here and we -will- be needing Pb drives in 10 years.
You say addiction to MMOGs is not different than being addicted to TV, Books, or any other form of entertainment.
To me, that's like saying addiction to nicotine is no different than being being addicted to heroin or any other form of chemical substance.
If you can say what you're saying there and keep a straight face, I'd wager you don't know any of the MMO addicts this article speaks of. If TV and books are cigarettes, MMO's are virtual crack. The main difference being that crack and nicotine are addictive to all of us, while these games apparently require a specific state of mind to get addicted to in the first place.
If I were studying psychology, I'd get on it, because I think it makes for an interesting research topic. I think it may develop into a problem of serious proportions, where you'll see more cases. Just wait for a serious case to sue game corporations for peddling their stuff the way they do and ruining their lives.
What really gets me here is that you seem to think you're actually better than people watching their plasma screens. I don't mind you thinking you're better off doing something else with your time. I can also see how the world would become a better place for you (and possibly a lot of the /. public) if all these people got off their couches and behind a keyboard.
/., venting your petty frustration because some manager obviously had the good sense to notice you're just a waste of his corporation's money, his time and frankly: ours.
But really, what moral advantage do you have over them? And how exactly would the world become a better place for them? As some other poster already mentioned, these people are actually happy as they are, or at least think they are without ill side effects, which pretty much amounts to the same.
And how about getting off your ass and actually contributing something instead of wasting your time on a forum like
If you think mmorpg addiction is about people trading TV time for game time, you're sadly mistaken. I've seen people lose interest in their real life friends, letting their diet slip to nacho's and cola and people missing night after night of sleep, only sleeping during "downtime".
/., some people may go "what's your point?", but I'm sure parent has retained enough of his sanity to see what I'm on about.
Now, being on
Yes, it is a problem if you trade real life friends for online friends that can just be gone in a blink, whenever the game shuts down. I have many online friends and I would be very sad to lose some, but I still value my real life friends more and for some other reasons.
Any hobby that doesn't enrich your life in any other way than "being fun" or "killing time" isn't worth messing up your personal health for, be it mental or physical. Running a little risk, like when parachute jumping or riding a motorcycle: sure. Missing a meal to play with friends: no problem. But complete disregard for personal hygiene and diet for a game?
Parent and half the other posters goes on about how you can't own the rights to facts. I'm sorry, but does that mean you can only own rights to fantasy, hearsay, opinions and lies? If you collect statistics about a certain event (something many scientists spend their entire careers doing) you have the rights to that data and are allowed to sell them and prevent anyone else from selling them without your permission. Sounds fair to me.
Ofcourse, that doesn't mean however that you own the actual event. But in the case of a baseball league, you could even argue the event itself is owned and as such, any information about it is subject to copyright. This doesn't apply to stuff your government does, since their activities are public in most cases anyway and any information about it would be too. But again, the government could ask a third party to collect statistics, publish those statistics and not have them be public, but copyrighted.
I really don't see why owning the copyright to statistics is wrong. The real question should be: is the MBL allowed to disallow anyone else to collect the same statistics? And do they try to disallow this? And if they do, is it really such a big surprise sport events are owned by corporations instead of the public?
..., surely this is not -news- to the Slashdot readers?
Everytime I have a discussion about this with clients, co-workers or business partners, I hear tales of spam filtering, rules wizards, voicemail solutions, etc.
But what everyone seem to be ignoring, is that you can just reply to the communication and let the other party know how you feel about all this unneeded communication.
Get a phone call and think it could have been handled by a mail? Say so. Get private instant messages while you're at work? Tell the sender about your working hours and ask them to ask again later. E-mail that you don't appreciate? Reply and let the sender know you'd rather not be included in their list of 'fun' mailings.
I know it is probably blasphemy on /. to say so, but not every problem needs a technical solution. If you tell the few hundred people that actually send all that junk at you how you feel about it and how you would like to be contacted, the entire problem will soon be reduced to normal proportions.
Ofcourse, this does not take care of spam or commercial mail that you should actually read. Nor does it help when you get a lot of communication from parties you'll only have a single contact with. But I think for the majority of people, the majority of messages is from people they communicate with regularly.
I guess what you're saying here is that a game is only enjoyable when you're poised to win, or at least able to beat all the players that don't have enough money to buy the advantage you got for your dollars? I'm sure you think monopoly would be more fun if the rules included buying play money for dollars? Or perhaps chess would be more fun if you could pay to get lost pieces back on the board / get a couple of extra queens?
I'm sorry, but you are completely missing the point of games.
Besides it has nothing to do with "working for it". The items are merely a reward in the sense that they usually open up new (harder) parts of the game for you, to keep things interesting. And they serve as a marker on your char to show what you've achieved sofar. I play MMORPGs regularly and I agree with developers that try to limit out of game item trade.
Although our EU overlords may work hard on a worldwide marketing campaign to make it seem otherwise: there's no such thing as "a European" in a cultural sense. Views, both religious and political, differ strongly across national borders. So do the demographic makeups of European countries. Europe is an economic union and a judicial and political one in some ways.
Some European countries would qualify as more religious than the United States, in my experience, take Roman Catholic Italy for instance. While other countries like the Netherlands are counted amongst the most secular nations on the planet.
As "an American", I'd suggest not attributing opions or cultural attributes to "a European", unless you're very sure it actually hold across national borders. It's similar to calling Canadians and Mexicans Americans. I know from experience that isn't taken too well either.
Just thought I'd let you know.
And about Europeans not understanding that someone would call himself a Christian even if he stays out of church: in most European countries, churchgoing has seen a steady decline, while the same amount of people as about 20 years still calls themselves Christian. So, I think that most Europeans can identify perfectly well with that standpoint.
Funny how people seem to focus on the individual to determine traits that improve the chances for survival. Even in nature, this is only part of the equation. But for humans, the traits of the groups you're a part of (family, community, town, country, etc.) take a very large part in your chances for survival. Ask anyone in New Orleans if you don't believe me.
Although heightened intelligence may not improve the chances for survival of the smart individual, it sure raises the chances of the people around this person. Smart people drive the sciences, helping people around them with medicine, engineering and other important stuff to survive.
Initially, it was good to see the number of downloads steadily rise. It inspired confidence in some to jump on the bandwagon and get their own copy, or copies rather, as many have pointed out.
But once a product is established, I think a far better measure of its greatness is the lack of -negative- publicity on it. How many articles from reliable sources have you read that actually say "Firefox is bad" or at least "Firefox is worse than IE/Opera/etc."?
Sure there are some, but Firefox is enjoying an enormous popularity among its users and I have yet to meet someone who tried it and switched back to IE or Opera.
The term IQ means close to nothing when applied to the Creator, since he would be a population of 1; his IQ would default to 100, by definition.
And if this has you wondering wether that means you are smarter than that supposed Creator, read a little more about IQ.
... wondering why everyone is worried about their wives, daughters and mothers? Are all airport employees men? Are men shameless? Are none of the male employees gay? Is everyone avoiding a discussion about the size of the male reproductive organ?
:p)? I think it is fairly safe to assume that most Slashdot readers are either male or pretending to be, so I expect no trouble there.
Or does everyone secretly hope that the technology will be realized, given the remote chance that you'll ever get your hands one of the scanners? And are none of you gay (Before someone points out that I am making the same mistakes
Nice of Google to keep adding nice features for citizens of the USA (and possibly Canada or thereabouts, though I did not check). But Google is starting to get more and more cluttered for those of us who use it daily and don't have the good fortune to live in the USA. (I'll stay in the Netherlands thank you very much, in case some smartass was thinking to suggest I move)
Also, the movies offered on Google seem to be big Hollywood productions, none of the more obscure stuff, so one has to wonder who is paying for this service? Now, I know it's not at all easy for your average American to go and see the latest European or Asian flics (not to mention Indian, Chinese or African, to name but three other large movie-producing countries) anyway, but shouldn't a service like this help that aspect even more than just become another outlet for Hollywood advertising?
This new feature smells a bit off to me and my "cool"-ranking for Google just dropped another point.
Personally, I'd say nothing that cannot appreciate art can create art. Which is exactly what seperates the Mondriaans of this world from kids with a ruler and some colored markers. It's a definition that allows for a broad definition of art and also tells you something about the difference of opinion when assigning value to art. Using this definition, I'd say the pictures created by a computer at this moment in time are not art, since there are no computers that can appreciate it, not can the system itself do that. Once we consider automated system as our equals, at least in this respect, a computer -could- create art. Now, if someone wants to claim he considers this computer to be his equal in art appreciation and then goes on to claim that must mean the computer has created art, she's right. But only to the computer and that person. Only if a creator of art becomes accepted as an equal in art appreciation in a larger group, will people accept the creator as an artist in general. Hope this helps, greetings, Grismar.
Tell the whole world you will be releasing updates every 2nd Tuesday of the month and take a guess what day malware writers will pick to release their little pets?
It only seems to hold as long as the controller/owner of the system succeeds in keeping porn or other aggressively commercial media out of its systems.
When that happens, popular keywords will soon start referring to porn and such media and the designers will need to think of other ways to determine relevancy of terms/keywords/tags to an object.
The article is interesting and relevant to any "unspoiled" community tag-database. But imo, it has little value when talking about systems that have been open for some time to the commercial scum, that seems to succeed in filling every nook and cranny of the internet.
Not if your pet happens to be a prize winning Siamese or poodle. There's money to be made just showing off these critters, and though you'll still have to raise them properly, I bet you'd have a good chance at winning some more prizes with it...
Heck, you might even be able to sell a few clones abroad, if your pet is a real looker. It might take generations of breeding to surpass your specimen, its 'siblings' could dominate the scene for quite a while.
Thinking some more about it, better take care nobody steals a sample of your pet at a contest, or it might be competing with the clone in a few years...
... are distributed by BitTorrent, as well as through traditional downloads. The problem of people downloading old patches after they've expired (as with World of Warcraft) does not apply. The EVE patches are incremental and applying an old patch just requires you to get the next one too. (they keep a full line available) The Bittorrent was a great help during their recent release of a major update (over 100 MB download) which tenthousands of players tried to download within a few days.
It's not the leaky piece of meat you rinse under the shower to prevent nasty smells that has rights; it's the person that is you! Nor will it be the computer that has rights, but the person calling out from inside whatever hardware it resides.
I don't care if they genetically modify dolphins to be able to communicate with us, build a supercomputer that passes the Turing test or aliens land and take over the White House.
In all of those cases, mankind will have to take a new look at things and decide wether what is talking back deserves any rights. And seeing that it took the white man long enough to get to that point with his black fellow human, I think 'computers' have a long way to go before being freed from slavery...
If the US openly state that they have controls to shut down both GPS and Galileo, won't that make the services less interesting for time-critical services (like ambulances and firemen) to use?
I mean, won't designers of systems for that type of services go: "But what if the GPS or Galileo is shut down? Then we need an alternative! Might as well not bother with GPS or Galileo and spend our money/time designing the alternative..."
This would be a waste of a perfectly good system, in my opinion, but an understandable design decision for any designer who needs to be sure her design will work.
There has never been doubt in my mind that for simple military reasons the US have had measures to shutdown the service. But the fact that they're openly advertising it seems to indicate to me that they will not hesitate to actually use those measures whenever they think it might help in the way of "preventing terrorists from using it". Nevermind the arguments by others in this thread for why that's fairly useless to begin with.