Being concerned about side effects isn't the same as saying games are the "devil incarnate".
It is mostly because video games have as much side effects as breathing air, drinking water, and eating food.
Actually... I take that back. Breathing bad air can give you lung cancer. Drinking bad water can give you dysentary. Eating too much food can give you heart disease and possible choking hazard.
So yeah... Video games are safer than most activies in life.
Attacking some one's motive may be under handed, but may be the best way to understand that they may not have the desire to tell both sides of the story... or at least understand they want to convince you and may not show you all the facts needed for you to make a non-biased opinion.
For example, if I received an email with a 100 page PDF explaining how fossil fuel emissions aren't bad for environment and explains them in a reasonable and understandable and logical way I might sway my opinions that I could buy that SUV after all.
But then when I see the From header as "PR_dept@big_oil_company.com", then I realize this information, no matter how well worded, reasonable, scientific, and logical may not have all the facts because creator of the argument has some investment in said topic.
Anyone can make a reasonable and sound argument, but if you also know their motives, you understand what information they are leaving out (or skewing).
Seriously, anyone whos had to walk through a cow pasture knows the dangers of cow paddies.
I'd sure hate to get my golf ball stuck in one.
Re:Would you rather it be QuickTime or WMV?!
on
Tree Climbing Robot
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It would be nice if submitters would warn people when Flash is required so those of us who don't bother with that nonsense wouldn't waste our time.
What the heck do you want it in?
Chances are if it is flash, it is more compatible than Quicktime or WMV. I don't like installing Quicktime on my PC and forget the WMV player on my mac (yeah there is one but it hardly works).
Maybe some obscure codec no one has heard of that requires a download, then?
Seriously what do you use for your videos?
I bet half the people that look at the page do not use that format. Heck... I've got Flash installed on Ubuntu and good luck with WMV files on a Linux box. I've never tried Quicktime, but I'm sure the effort to install it on Ubuntu isn't worth it just to see some video download.
Gold farming. Where people contribute nothing to society. They spend days making gold that consists of ones and zeros when the same thing could be accomplished with a gold += 500000 command. I will never be convinced that gold farming is not completely fucking ridiculous.
Yeah, it felt kind of weird at first when I did it for a few times feeling like I was stealing gas without printing the receipt, but I figure if they were going to accuse me of stealing gas they wouldn't let me pump it without being authorized with my card.
Saves me from having to worrying about forgetting to grab the ticket and maybe save a few trees in the process.
to see how merchants pretty much ignore the signatures on the back of credit cards.
I had a card that I never used outside online purchases. On the back I put the phrase in caps "THIS CARD IS STOLEN!!!"
I went on a trip once and grabbed the card because I was short on cash and forgot that I wrote that. Funny thing was no one bothered to look at the back of the card (granted I only bought plane tickets and a hotel room with it).
Genetically, you are not in any way inferior because you spend your days trying to survive starvation, or flip burgers for minimum-wage at McDonalds.
Right, but given your current income level at McDonalds... Chances are your potential mating partners will be.
That or at least be dog ugly. Your options are kind of limited with a girl when they find out that you've been taking them to McDonalds for your dates only because you were getting an employee discount.
Does not the deliberate creation of a living creature to have a specific disability of some sort seem in some way cruel or inhumane? Or is it just me?
Hrm... Sounds like what real parents do to their children;)
But seriously, many people who actually get the animal instict to reproduce don't really take into account their genetic disabilities or other factors that may impair their children (heart disease, cancer probability, blindness, baldness... or what have you).
I'm not saying people with high genetic disease risk shouldn't be able to have children, but I think many people need to be more responsible or at least have expectations of what could happen if they reproduce based on their genetic family history.
Remember, adoption never hurts and those kids are here and now.
Lastly, its either the mice or us... It may be a bit of Full Metal Alchemist Equivalent Exchange mantra, but sometimes we have to cross a line in order to save human life.
Or rather... Are your family and friends well being more important than pet mice?
If we threw mice in blenders for no good reason at all and tossed the remains into a landfill without any scientific or medical benefits, I'd start to question your ethics, though.
Does it mean I have to look inside my computer box each time I want to know if I've been fragged or not?
And if I don't look... Does that mean my online Counterstrike guy is neither alive nor dead, but stuck in some limbo where he has neither rescued the hostages nor got an Desert Eagle round to the head?
They will not be willingly sent to Apple for some minor publicity and no material, no, they will be auctioned off in some sleazy IRC channel in Russia.
Great idea... I just used my credit card and got this file from @russian_hack3r of IRC which I am willing to paste here to show off my l33t skills:
Contents of OSX_Hack.nfo
Step 1: Make a text file with the name OSX_Hack.nfo Step 2: Copy and paste following the body of this text file into that text file. Step 3: Auction the text file off to some dumbass on IRC that thinks there is profit to be made with an OS X hack. Step 4: ???? Step 5: Profit!
Well, I spent a week in Toronto once. There were seemingly a lot of homeless people sleeping on the sidewalks every night. I'm not sure there is a better social service than making sure they have wireless Internet.
Seriously, Toronto is a Utopia compared to the homeless problem in Detroit. All cities have homeless people... And no amount of social services can solve the problem. Some cities need more social services though.
If anything, a backup server is more expensive than a second hard drive for a RAID system (though it may pay off eventually).
Unless you have hotswap ability, if a hard drive fails, you still have to power it down to remove it. If you have a second server up and running, you won't have any downtime other than changing an IP address.
Sure it might be only 20 minutes to swap hard drives tops, but a server down during business hours is still a pain.
Actually... I think most people's responses to problems are to throw money at it.
Heck, I've seen more than one corporation run into a problem and decide that it would be easier to hire "consultants" to fix the problem than actually do it in-house. This is just human nature, when you have more disposable income than you know what to do with you start to pay other people to do things for you when you could do them for free.
Change your oil? Nah pay the other guy. Do my taxes? Nah pay the accountant. Grow my own food? Um... Errr... Buy the food at the grocery store.
But you get my point, humans will often see problems as "How much money can I throw at it til it goes away?"
The problem with WoW is that it fosters a system where people see value in things as either "How much time must I spend?" vs "How much money must I spend?".
In reality, this isn't breaking the economy. The economy was already broke. You can't recreate a working economic system on a game without a real economic system with supply and demand and limited resources.
If WoW really wanted a realistic economy, they'd make it so you could make animals go extinct from "fur farming" or mining resources go out after a given amount of time and you have to a new location.
Or inflation from the unlimited amount of gold pouring into the world. Seriously, if you can make gold by killing anything than people would be using gold to make houses and chairs out of while every resorted to a barter economy because gold was worthless. Real economies have inflation and wow does not.
However, if you put those features in the game, I bet many people would quit.
So either we put up with the farmers, get rid of the time sinks, or suffer with a real world economy that is unforgiving. That is about our only options.
I believe this will never happen though; there will always be some clue (even if its subconscience) that will tip people off.
We give the human mind more credit than it deserves mostly because we assume that what we see is actually 100% actual light reflected of the objects. The truth is that we simply do not have enough visual cortex synapses (neurons) to see all of the photons/ rays of light being relected into the retina to process 100% accurately.
Or other words... The human mind has to make big assumptions about what it is seeing. This is why optical illusions work on us. But as a benefit it is also why we can look at an abstract peice of art or cartoon and recognize that its a person or an animal even though it is minimal information being reflected into our eyes.
However, we are faced with what they call an Uncanny Valley type of a problem when things seem real, but creepy at the same time. One of the problems I found when doing 3d animation is that it was easy to make a realistic model, but it was almost impossible to get it to sit still right. Humans don't actually sit perfectly still and have ambient moving all the time (breathing, fidgeting, and other things) and the Final Fantasy animation movie sort of rubbed my nerves wrong because they were pretty bad with it.
But I think CGI artists will overcome this one way or another... They are being paid millions to do so.
Lucas fails to mention what has changed in the viewer or economic system. A relatively short period of time ago, big budget films were often hits. There was a placebo effect, whereby people would have high expectations of a big budget film (despite this often not panning out.... i.e. WaterWorld).. Both the Spiderman and X-Men movies have proved that big-budget films, of late, can score big.
But could you even do Spider Man or X-Men in 1985 with 10 times their budget? The only reason those films worked under their current budgets was CGI.
CGI still costs an arm and a leg, but its not as costly as it was with Terminator 2.
Frankly, CGI will continue to improve until we can't tell a difference between it and real life (I think we have reached that point in some aspects) but will simply drop in price over time.
Eventually, machina-esque movie making will come out of a the box much like Sims Movie Maker program. The price in CGI will go down since all props will have already been rendered and with faster and more powerful cpus the rendering time will be pretty nihl to what you need to do a full length movie now.
Heck, an indie film maker might be able to pull off a movie without a 3d effects or 3d modeler artist if he can buy a "pre-canned" package. After all... Once the human mind can't tell the difference between a live actor and a computer generated one, you don't have to re-create that model over and over again from scratch. Just sell the model and let the indie director style it with a gui interface out of box.
Slashdot Mirror
Being concerned about side effects isn't the same as saying games are the "devil incarnate".
It is mostly because video games have as much side effects as breathing air, drinking water, and eating food.
Actually... I take that back. Breathing bad air can give you lung cancer. Drinking bad water can give you dysentary. Eating too much food can give you heart disease and possible choking hazard.
So yeah... Video games are safer than most activies in life.
Attacking some one's motive may be under handed, but may be the best way to understand that they may not have the desire to tell both sides of the story... or at least understand they want to convince you and may not show you all the facts needed for you to make a non-biased opinion.
For example, if I received an email with a 100 page PDF explaining how fossil fuel emissions aren't bad for environment and explains them in a reasonable and understandable and logical way I might sway my opinions that I could buy that SUV after all.
But then when I see the From header as "PR_dept@big_oil_company.com", then I realize this information, no matter how well worded, reasonable, scientific, and logical may not have all the facts because creator of the argument has some investment in said topic.
Anyone can make a reasonable and sound argument, but if you also know their motives, you understand what information they are leaving out (or skewing).
Destroying life to build and enhance ours.
Sorry, but I don't want to be part of that brave new world.
"If God does not understand what we must do here today... Then he is not God."
Apoligies to the Kingdom of Heaven.
why sign a support contract, when you can pay outrageous emergency contractor fees when something breaks?
Seriously, anyone whos had to walk through a cow pasture knows the dangers of cow paddies.
I'd sure hate to get my golf ball stuck in one.
It would be nice if submitters would warn people when Flash is required so those of us who don't bother with that nonsense wouldn't waste our time.
What the heck do you want it in?
Chances are if it is flash, it is more compatible than Quicktime or WMV. I don't like installing Quicktime on my PC and forget the WMV player on my mac (yeah there is one but it hardly works).
Maybe some obscure codec no one has heard of that requires a download, then?
Seriously what do you use for your videos?
I bet half the people that look at the page do not use that format. Heck... I've got Flash installed on Ubuntu and good luck with WMV files on a Linux box. I've never tried Quicktime, but I'm sure the effort to install it on Ubuntu isn't worth it just to see some video download.
Gold farming. Where people contribute nothing to society. They spend days making gold that consists of ones and zeros when the same thing could be accomplished with a gold += 500000 command. I will never be convinced that gold farming is not completely fucking ridiculous.
Hrm... Sounds awfully like the NY Stock Exchange.
Press "No" ;)
Yeah, it felt kind of weird at first when I did it for a few times feeling like I was stealing gas without printing the receipt, but I figure if they were going to accuse me of stealing gas they wouldn't let me pump it without being authorized with my card.
Saves me from having to worrying about forgetting to grab the ticket and maybe save a few trees in the process.
to see how merchants pretty much ignore the signatures on the back of credit cards.
I had a card that I never used outside online purchases. On the back I put the phrase in caps "THIS CARD IS STOLEN!!!"
I went on a trip once and grabbed the card because I was short on cash and forgot that I wrote that. Funny thing was no one bothered to look at the back of the card (granted I only bought plane tickets and a hotel room with it).
Genetically, you are not in any way inferior because you spend your days trying to survive starvation, or flip burgers for minimum-wage at McDonalds.
Right, but given your current income level at McDonalds... Chances are your potential mating partners will be.
That or at least be dog ugly. Your options are kind of limited with a girl when they find out that you've been taking them to McDonalds for your dates only because you were getting an employee discount.
Does not the deliberate creation of a living creature to have a specific disability of some sort seem in some way cruel or inhumane? Or is it just me?
;)
Hrm... Sounds like what real parents do to their children
But seriously, many people who actually get the animal instict to reproduce don't really take into account their genetic disabilities or other factors that may impair their children (heart disease, cancer probability, blindness, baldness... or what have you).
I'm not saying people with high genetic disease risk shouldn't be able to have children, but I think many people need to be more responsible or at least have expectations of what could happen if they reproduce based on their genetic family history.
Remember, adoption never hurts and those kids are here and now.
Lastly, its either the mice or us... It may be a bit of Full Metal Alchemist Equivalent Exchange mantra, but sometimes we have to cross a line in order to save human life.
Or rather... Are your family and friends well being more important than pet mice?
If we threw mice in blenders for no good reason at all and tossed the remains into a landfill without any scientific or medical benefits, I'd start to question your ethics, though.
Golly... If my calculations are correct, Microsoft will have patented every idea possible by the year 2030.
On the bright side, all possible ideas will be public domain by 2047.
If he has half a brain, the controlling computer is not his, and it's sitting in some country ending in -stan.
Or he lives in one of the two countries that name ends in "Korea".
Hint: Its not the nice one.
If football is indeed the american soccer I am willing to bet a shit load of cash that more families own a football then a ping pong table.
;)
You've got it wrong. We americans pay people millions of dollars to people to play football for us and we watch them from our couches.
Would you really think we'd own things that require us to go outside and maybe run around a little?
But seriously... It must have been years since I've played a pick up game of any sport. Maybe computers and video games are bad for you.
Does it mean I have to look inside my computer box each time I want to know if I've been fragged or not?
And if I don't look... Does that mean my online Counterstrike guy is neither alive nor dead, but stuck in some limbo where he has neither rescued the hostages nor got an Desert Eagle round to the head?
I don't know about this service...
Yes it can! It's easy! Just move the new version to the trash, then put the old version in its place. Voila! You're now running an old version.
Where does OS X keep the old version pray tell?
Or has it not been over writing my older version the entire time I've been going through upgrades.
I'd be sympathetic too if I found a few extra dollars deposited into my bank account... *coughs* Ahem.
Since when did any "IT Professional" ever consider purchasing a fucking AlienWare machine? A laptop that has "a little alien head on the back"?
;)
Well... Maybe the guys who work at SETI
Great idea... I just used my credit card and got this file from @russian_hack3r of IRC which I am willing to paste here to show off my l33t skills:
Contents of OSX_Hack.nfo
Oh wait a minute....
Well, I spent a week in Toronto once. There were seemingly a lot of homeless people sleeping on the sidewalks every night. I'm not sure there is a better social service than making sure they have wireless Internet.
Seriously, Toronto is a Utopia compared to the homeless problem in Detroit. All cities have homeless people... And no amount of social services can solve the problem. Some cities need more social services though.
If anything, a backup server is more expensive than a second hard drive for a RAID system (though it may pay off eventually).
Unless you have hotswap ability, if a hard drive fails, you still have to power it down to remove it. If you have a second server up and running, you won't have any downtime other than changing an IP address.
Sure it might be only 20 minutes to swap hard drives tops, but a server down during business hours is still a pain.
But hasn't Sun been doing this with Solaris for at least 3 years?
Yes, but do you want to sell your children and a kidney for a Solaris server?
Actually... I think most people's responses to problems are to throw money at it.
Heck, I've seen more than one corporation run into a problem and decide that it would be easier to hire "consultants" to fix the problem than actually do it in-house. This is just human nature, when you have more disposable income than you know what to do with you start to pay other people to do things for you when you could do them for free.
Change your oil? Nah pay the other guy.
Do my taxes? Nah pay the accountant.
Grow my own food? Um... Errr... Buy the food at the grocery store.
But you get my point, humans will often see problems as "How much money can I throw at it til it goes away?"
The problem with WoW is that it fosters a system where people see value in things as either "How much time must I spend?" vs "How much money must I spend?".
In reality, this isn't breaking the economy. The economy was already broke. You can't recreate a working economic system on a game without a real economic system with supply and demand and limited resources.
If WoW really wanted a realistic economy, they'd make it so you could make animals go extinct from "fur farming" or mining resources go out after a given amount of time and you have to a new location.
Or inflation from the unlimited amount of gold pouring into the world. Seriously, if you can make gold by killing anything than people would be using gold to make houses and chairs out of while every resorted to a barter economy because gold was worthless. Real economies have inflation and wow does not.
However, if you put those features in the game, I bet many people would quit.
So either we put up with the farmers, get rid of the time sinks, or suffer with a real world economy that is unforgiving. That is about our only options.
I believe this will never happen though; there will always be some clue (even if its subconscience) that will tip people off.
We give the human mind more credit than it deserves mostly because we assume that what we see is actually 100% actual light reflected of the objects. The truth is that we simply do not have enough visual cortex synapses (neurons) to see all of the photons/ rays of light being relected into the retina to process 100% accurately.
Or other words... The human mind has to make big assumptions about what it is seeing. This is why optical illusions work on us. But as a benefit it is also why we can look at an abstract peice of art or cartoon and recognize that its a person or an animal even though it is minimal information being reflected into our eyes.
However, we are faced with what they call an Uncanny Valley type of a problem when things seem real, but creepy at the same time. One of the problems I found when doing 3d animation is that it was easy to make a realistic model, but it was almost impossible to get it to sit still right. Humans don't actually sit perfectly still and have ambient moving all the time (breathing, fidgeting, and other things) and the Final Fantasy animation movie sort of rubbed my nerves wrong because they were pretty bad with it.
But I think CGI artists will overcome this one way or another... They are being paid millions to do so.
Lucas fails to mention what has changed in the viewer or economic system. A relatively short period of time ago, big budget films were often hits. There was a placebo effect, whereby people would have high expectations of a big budget film (despite this often not panning out.... i.e. WaterWorld).. Both the Spiderman and X-Men movies have proved that big-budget films, of late, can score big.
But could you even do Spider Man or X-Men in 1985 with 10 times their budget? The only reason those films worked under their current budgets was CGI.
CGI still costs an arm and a leg, but its not as costly as it was with Terminator 2.
Frankly, CGI will continue to improve until we can't tell a difference between it and real life (I think we have reached that point in some aspects) but will simply drop in price over time.
Eventually, machina-esque movie making will come out of a the box much like Sims Movie Maker program. The price in CGI will go down since all props will have already been rendered and with faster and more powerful cpus the rendering time will be pretty nihl to what you need to do a full length movie now.
Heck, an indie film maker might be able to pull off a movie without a 3d effects or 3d modeler artist if he can buy a "pre-canned" package. After all... Once the human mind can't tell the difference between a live actor and a computer generated one, you don't have to re-create that model over and over again from scratch. Just sell the model and let the indie director style it with a gui interface out of box.