Since everything happening inside a game of, say, CS is already digital, you would have a lot more options to present useful data. Want to know how fast the one guy shot the other while they were meeting at a corner? Take the frame the first pixel appeared in the winner's viewport and subtract it from the frame he pressed the fire button from or the frame the loser's HP reached zero. Want to know at which distance the encounter happened? No more funny perspective math and guesstimates, just simple Euclidian geometry.
But maybe the problem is that western mainstream's recognition of gaming culture is, as of yet, less mature than a public CS server. As long as certain elements of society succeed in connecting violent games with the rise of the Antichrist or whatever, digital gaming will never be treated as a serious sport and thus never receive coverage worthy of a serious sport.
Yeah, even if it were true, would you (or the 16-year-old you) really say, "Yes, in 2006 I plan to spend significantly more time gaming than I did in 2006!"?
No. Unless your system clock and/or logic circuits were broken.
I mean, if we ever got there and searched for native life forms, these findings would just add another factor of uncertainty. Say we send up robots or even taikonauts (probably won't be astronauts any way), and they really do find DNA/RNA-based life (except lawyers, as someone else suggested). How would one tell a archaebacterium which hitch-hiked the vessel from an archaebacterium that hitch-hiked an asteroid boulder from a bacterium that has been created there?
Ugh. You are aware that the possible answers to the question are not all mutually exlusive? A person can have more than one of these reasons to not get broadband.
Had the question been more ambigous, like, "Which of these sentences is correct?" without defining what "correct" meant, then you would have a point; but it hasn't and you don't (yet). The candidates were given a clearly defined problem "Which of these sentences is gramatically correct", where the researchers' goal was to find out who becomes distracted by something unrelated to the experiment. The silliness of the sentence was probabl just one of many ways how they could've done it.
Your point might still be valid, but it is a different question which was not the subject of the experiment. It might well be worth looking into, but without such a new experiment, one can't safely conclude what you suggested.
No shock at all. However, if what the guy said about how few time he spent playing and how it helped him getting his work done was true, then the lesson to be learned here is that companies sholdn't be so short-sighted about what their employees do on comany time and resources. If the company's net gain in productivity is non-negative when people do non-work-related stuff, then by all means, let them do it and let them do it as long as they want. Do I have to say "Google" to get across the point?
Sure you can fire someone because you caught him playing Solitaire for 5 minutes. But if those 5 minutes helped this guy getting an additional 30 minutes of work done, work that he wouldn't have done without the short distraction, then it's just plain stupid to fire him.
I know you were kidding, but let me just point out that the "grey goo by accident" concept is outdated and not very probable. In fact, its "inventor", Eric Drexler, wrote a paper why his earlier warnings in Engines of Creation will not apply. Basically, the argument is that in nanofactories, the assemblers are not floating freely, but are tied up in rigid and designed patterns to make assembly most efficient. Because such a fixed design is more efficient then self-organising floating assemblers, there is no economic incentive to do floating assemblers and thus no danger of grea goo by accident. Intent might be another story of course.
It is very possible that desktop manufacturing will - in the beginning at least - cause the same problems as P2P downloading does today, including so-called "pirating" of designs, because all atomically precise blueprints can be shared just like an.mp3 file today. The only difference will be the dimensions: While P2P "only" affected the music, software and movie industry, desktop manufacturing will affect almost every branch of industry that produces physical products. I think the results of this cannot be underestimated. It will bring the equivalent of free/open source to the physical world and thus to everyone who can download it, and there will be editors to modify them at one's discretion. Just like today, there will be broad attempts to vilify the free alternatives, but just like in software today, people will not be willing to pay for a spoon design if there's a perfectly working spoon design available (and with less bugs at that:) any more than they would pay money to get a calculator program.
Add to that the possibility of desktop feedstock refining: just throw in the old stuff to break it down and get something new out of its atoms, and you get a veritable revolution at your hands.
The alternatives are clear: Designs are restricted at the manufacturer's will, programing the nanofactory is illegal under the DMCA, and feedstock is sold by the hp principle: give away the factory, earn money through the proprietary feedstock cartridges. Pay for every time you assemble a product, even if you paid for its design already. DRM galore.
You can't obtain ambergris by catching a whale and ripping him open? It's the only way, if you rule out extremely rare chance finds like the one in the article.
Well, I think the reason for why the trade is initially forbidden should be clear, so I didn't mention it (and by the way, you also subtly changed the subject from outlawing exceptions to outlawing the trade at all): to outlaw the market for resources that are for the most part won by decimating an endangered species. However, if you allow exceptions to this law, like, say, selling ivory that was seized, then it would have several negative effects: First of all, to even allow this exception, the law has to be written accordingly. It will get more complicated, will leave room for abuse ("look, I found this bloody ivory tusk in the savanna, wanna buy?"), and to keep the abuse of the exception rule in check, additional enforcement (inspectors, paperwork, etc.) is required, which will cost more than simply outlawing every trade. Secondly, if the government allows such trade or even participates actively in it, this will have negative impact in terms of prevention. Protecting the whales is also about showing you're serious about it.
For the same reason African states don't trade in elephant ivory they seized from poachers, or Western states don't trade in illegal drugs: The trade with it such items is forbidden, and any contract involving a forbidden trade is void.
But still not bad for a random walk on the beach. An article I read states that the material is worth around 17 Euro/gramm. The lump was around 15 Kg, which made the couple a smooth 240.000 Euros.
As usual, the problem lies in drawing the line between activity and non-activity.
For example, Chess is no sport by this definition or my understanding, because in theory, you can play it by telling someone else to move your pieces and still it would be solely your game, your effort, because Chess is ALL about thinking (plus psychological warfare). But while moving the mouse or pressing buttons/keys isn't in the same league as football or weightlifting, it is physical movement that cannot be delegated and is essential to the gamer's performance in a match. Furthermore, the reflexes a 3D-gamer must have to be a pro can compare to the best of traditional athletes.
I believe, to determine whether or not physical activity is necessary for a certain game (so it can be counted as a sport or not), it should simply be determined if the required body movements can be delegated to another person and it would still count as 100% your own effort. The physical coordination and the reflexes are a big part of pro-gaming and can never be delegated, with the possible exception of turn-based games, which are a different story indeed.
And what do you think will happen when the Nintendo Revolution controller is released into the wild? Can swinging and shaking a physical controller to control a video game not be sport?
Gaming is very big in S-Korea, and has been at least since Starcraft came out. There is a huge industry with idols, fans, groupies, big sponsors, big money, regular TV shows, heck, even their own TV channel. THAT's what I call Mainstream. No problem with TFA, but don't give the impression that the US went there first.
So you are saying every commercially successful sport out there is NOT about the sportsman/woman and his/her experience? I'm a hardcore gamer myself (in terms of hours spent), and I very much enjoy watching pros duke it out in a game I enjoy playing myself. And even recorded speedruns etc. of a single-player game can be very entertaining. By every definition, PC/console gaming can be a sport like any other.
FTA: "Microsoft, which gathers evidence by collecting spam in special "trap" e-mail accounts, has filed more than 100 lawsuits against alleged spammers and reached settlements worth about $10 million."
Sounds clever to me:
step 1: market an OS to the point where it is a de facto desktop monopoly
step 2: combine clueless users and OS security flaws with unwillingness or inability to fix the OS problems
step 3: watch bot nets grow
step 4: sue spammers and settle for $$
step 5: Profit!
Yeah I know, 10 Megadollar is a drop in the bucket for Microsoft, but Microsoft should be held responsible for its share of the blame as well, and they sure as hell shouldn't profit off of it. As usual, the customer is the only one who has nothing to gain from the problem or its solution.
People buy them because they are expensive because people believe they are rare because everyone who makes money with jewelery diamond makes people believe diamonds are rare. The diamond business is ruled by what might be the most perfect monopoly in the world. I recommend this older Wired article: The new Diamond Age about two companies that employ two different processes to bypass the natural creation of diamond, taking a mighty piss at DeBeer's legs while they're at it.
I smell a Soviet Russia joke somewhere, but maybe it's just my brain tumor again, playing tricks on my smelling center. No, that's something else than my smelly center.
The old fallacy. Should I be allowed to and not be punished for yelling "FIRE!!" in a crowded cinema? If not, then you have the old problem where to draw the line, because then you have to draw it somewhere. The USA might have drawn it closer towards total freedom, but the recent years have not really reinforced this image, to put it mildly. Also I don't get the logic of saying once the government can do that, it can stop people from saying anything. A lot more is required for tyranny. A strong, overly patriotic feeling. Willingness of random strangers, neighbours, and relatives to tip off the authorities. Basically a police state indisguise, with broad public support. I, for one, am confident to say that this is not going to happen anytime soon in Germany.
Slashdot Mirror
Since everything happening inside a game of, say, CS is already digital, you would have a lot more options to present useful data. Want to know how fast the one guy shot the other while they were meeting at a corner? Take the frame the first pixel appeared in the winner's viewport and subtract it from the frame he pressed the fire button from or the frame the loser's HP reached zero. Want to know at which distance the encounter happened? No more funny perspective math and guesstimates, just simple Euclidian geometry.
But maybe the problem is that western mainstream's recognition of gaming culture is, as of yet, less mature than a public CS server. As long as certain elements of society succeed in connecting violent games with the rise of the Antichrist or whatever, digital gaming will never be treated as a serious sport and thus never receive coverage worthy of a serious sport.
1) Is Aero relevant to Vista's inner workings, i.e. is it a real limitation to its functionality if missing? If yes, how severe a limitation?
2) How does Aero differ from numerous attempts at 3D desktops that are already out there? Why will users really miss it?
3) What are the chances that Aero will stay off-limits to "pirates" for any extended period of time?
Yeah, even if it were true, would you (or the 16-year-old you) really say, "Yes, in 2006 I plan to spend significantly more time gaming than I did in 2006!"?
No. Unless your system clock and/or logic circuits were broken.
Bethesda Nightmare Scenario #2:
T + 9:29:30: "Done!"
Morrowind 5 segment Speedrun in 00:07:30, and that for a game which you can play for days and weeks without ever touching a story quest.
I mean, if we ever got there and searched for native life forms, these findings would just add another factor of uncertainty. Say we send up robots or even taikonauts (probably won't be astronauts any way), and they really do find DNA/RNA-based life (except lawyers, as someone else suggested). How would one tell a archaebacterium which hitch-hiked the vessel from an archaebacterium that hitch-hiked an asteroid boulder from a bacterium that has been created there?
Ugh. You are aware that the possible answers to the question are not all mutually exlusive? A person can have more than one of these reasons to not get broadband.
And the number one Gaming Scandal of all time...
But this is the L-shaped Tetris block. Good God. It's undefeated.
The L-Shaped Block is the Most Feared
Had the question been more ambigous, like, "Which of these sentences is correct?" without defining what "correct" meant, then you would have a point; but it hasn't and you don't (yet). The candidates were given a clearly defined problem "Which of these sentences is gramatically correct", where the researchers' goal was to find out who becomes distracted by something unrelated to the experiment. The silliness of the sentence was probabl just one of many ways how they could've done it.
Your point might still be valid, but it is a different question which was not the subject of the experiment. It might well be worth looking into, but without such a new experiment, one can't safely conclude what you suggested.
No shock at all. However, if what the guy said about how few time he spent playing and how it helped him getting his work done was true, then the lesson to be learned here is that companies sholdn't be so short-sighted about what their employees do on comany time and resources. If the company's net gain in productivity is non-negative when people do non-work-related stuff, then by all means, let them do it and let them do it as long as they want. Do I have to say "Google" to get across the point?
Sure you can fire someone because you caught him playing Solitaire for 5 minutes. But if those 5 minutes helped this guy getting an additional 30 minutes of work done, work that he wouldn't have done without the short distraction, then it's just plain stupid to fire him.
I know you were kidding, but let me just point out that the "grey goo by accident" concept is outdated and not very probable. In fact, its "inventor", Eric Drexler, wrote a paper why his earlier warnings in Engines of Creation will not apply. Basically, the argument is that in nanofactories, the assemblers are not floating freely, but are tied up in rigid and designed patterns to make assembly most efficient. Because such a fixed design is more efficient then self-organising floating assemblers, there is no economic incentive to do floating assemblers and thus no danger of grea goo by accident. Intent might be another story of course.
It is very possible that desktop manufacturing will - in the beginning at least - cause the same problems as P2P downloading does today, including so-called "pirating" of designs, because all atomically precise blueprints can be shared just like an .mp3 file today. The only difference will be the dimensions: While P2P "only" affected the music, software and movie industry, desktop manufacturing will affect almost every branch of industry that produces physical products. I think the results of this cannot be underestimated. It will bring the equivalent of free/open source to the physical world and thus to everyone who can download it, and there will be editors to modify them at one's discretion. Just like today, there will be broad attempts to vilify the free alternatives, but just like in software today, people will not be willing to pay for a spoon design if there's a perfectly working spoon design available (and with less bugs at that :) any more than they would pay money to get a calculator program.
Add to that the possibility of desktop feedstock refining: just throw in the old stuff to break it down and get something new out of its atoms, and you get a veritable revolution at your hands.
The alternatives are clear: Designs are restricted at the manufacturer's will, programing the nanofactory is illegal under the DMCA, and feedstock is sold by the hp principle: give away the factory, earn money through the proprietary feedstock cartridges. Pay for every time you assemble a product, even if you paid for its design already. DRM galore.
Which is it going to be?
You can't obtain ambergris by catching a whale and ripping him open? It's the only way, if you rule out extremely rare chance finds like the one in the article.
Well, I think the reason for why the trade is initially forbidden should be clear, so I didn't mention it (and by the way, you also subtly changed the subject from outlawing exceptions to outlawing the trade at all): to outlaw the market for resources that are for the most part won by decimating an endangered species. However, if you allow exceptions to this law, like, say, selling ivory that was seized, then it would have several negative effects: First of all, to even allow this exception, the law has to be written accordingly. It will get more complicated, will leave room for abuse ("look, I found this bloody ivory tusk in the savanna, wanna buy?"), and to keep the abuse of the exception rule in check, additional enforcement (inspectors, paperwork, etc.) is required, which will cost more than simply outlawing every trade. Secondly, if the government allows such trade or even participates actively in it, this will have negative impact in terms of prevention. Protecting the whales is also about showing you're serious about it.
For the same reason African states don't trade in elephant ivory they seized from poachers, or Western states don't trade in illegal drugs: The trade with it such items is forbidden, and any contract involving a forbidden trade is void.
Meet The Monkey Sphere
In short, the Monkey Sphere is the very reason why they take it from the people they don't know, instead of who they know and care about.
But still not bad for a random walk on the beach. An article I read states that the material is worth around 17 Euro/gramm. The lump was around 15 Kg, which made the couple a smooth 240.000 Euros.
'Google's product development pipeline runs at such a fast rate that it's very difficult for any company, Microsoft or Yahoo! to catch up.'
To me this looks like a pretty clear confession of having smaller balls. Erhm. A smaller pipeline. NO NO NO, not that, you know what I mean.
As usual, the problem lies in drawing the line between activity and non-activity.
For example, Chess is no sport by this definition or my understanding, because in theory, you can play it by telling someone else to move your pieces and still it would be solely your game, your effort, because Chess is ALL about thinking (plus psychological warfare).
But while moving the mouse or pressing buttons/keys isn't in the same league as football or weightlifting, it is physical movement that cannot be delegated and is essential to the gamer's performance in a match. Furthermore, the reflexes a 3D-gamer must have to be a pro can compare to the best of traditional athletes.
I believe, to determine whether or not physical activity is necessary for a certain game (so it can be counted as a sport or not), it should simply be determined if the required body movements can be delegated to another person and it would still count as 100% your own effort.
The physical coordination and the reflexes are a big part of pro-gaming and can never be delegated, with the possible exception of turn-based games, which are a different story indeed.
And what do you think will happen when the Nintendo Revolution controller is released into the wild? Can swinging and shaking a physical controller to control a video game not be sport?
Gaming is very big in S-Korea, and has been at least since Starcraft came out. There is a huge industry with idols, fans, groupies, big sponsors, big money, regular TV shows, heck, even their own TV channel. THAT's what I call Mainstream. No problem with TFA, but don't give the impression that the US went there first.
So you are saying every commercially successful sport out there is NOT about the sportsman/woman and his/her experience? I'm a hardcore gamer myself (in terms of hours spent), and I very much enjoy watching pros duke it out in a game I enjoy playing myself. And even recorded speedruns etc. of a single-player game can be very entertaining. By every definition, PC/console gaming can be a sport like any other.
FTA: "Microsoft, which gathers evidence by collecting spam in special "trap" e-mail accounts, has filed more than 100 lawsuits against alleged spammers and reached settlements worth about $10 million."
Sounds clever to me:
step 1: market an OS to the point where it is a de facto desktop monopoly
step 2: combine clueless users and OS security flaws with unwillingness or inability to fix the OS problems
step 3: watch bot nets grow
step 4: sue spammers and settle for $$
step 5: Profit!
Yeah I know, 10 Megadollar is a drop in the bucket for Microsoft, but Microsoft should be held responsible for its share of the blame as well, and they sure as hell shouldn't profit off of it. As usual, the customer is the only one who has nothing to gain from the problem or its solution.
People buy them because they are expensive.
People buy them because they are expensive because people believe they are rare because everyone who makes money with jewelery diamond makes people believe diamonds are rare. The diamond business is ruled by what might be the most perfect monopoly in the world. I recommend this older Wired article: The new Diamond Age about two companies that employ two different processes to bypass the natural creation of diamond, taking a mighty piss at DeBeer's legs while they're at it.
Recently, in England, they cut down a 340 yr old oak tree to make wine barrels.
It should be pointed out that the tree stood in France, which had the inevitable consequence of it being cut down in France, not England. FTA:
The 120-ft Morat tree was planted in about 1665 in the Forêt de Tronçais, on the edge of the Massif Central, in the reign of Louis XIV.
Interesting story nonetheless.
I smell a Soviet Russia joke somewhere, but maybe it's just my brain tumor again, playing tricks on my smelling center. No, that's something else than my smelly center.
The old fallacy. Should I be allowed to and not be punished for yelling "FIRE!!" in a crowded cinema? If not, then you have the old problem where to draw the line, because then you have to draw it somewhere. The USA might have drawn it closer towards total freedom, but the recent years have not really reinforced this image, to put it mildly. Also I don't get the logic of saying once the government can do that, it can stop people from saying anything. A lot more is required for tyranny. A strong, overly patriotic feeling. Willingness of random strangers, neighbours, and relatives to tip off the authorities. Basically a police state indisguise, with broad public support. I, for one, am confident to say that this is not going to happen anytime soon in Germany.