What I fell for was the single server concept. Everyone in the game world is participating in the same experience.
Uhm, wouldn't a multiple-server environment actually be more useful as far as science was concerned? For things like control groups and stuff? We have a "single server concept" in the real world. IMHO, that's why Economics is regarded by some as little more than fortune-telling, because you can hardly isolate a single variable and experiment on it in the real world. If there are multiple well-populated but otherwise identical servers representing the game, you could trivially and with mathematical precision change a certain variable on one server and actually draw conclusions from the developing differences (or lack thereof) with regard to other, unmodified servers that run in parallel.
Obviously the battery will be drained to zero in the blink of an eye, possibly dieing a violent, flaming death if enough energy was stored the moment you switched on the phone. Thankfully, your investigative question posed in TFS alerted their engineers to the problem so they can start working around this problem. Then again, maybe they were already aware of the problem and resorted to the wonderful method of self-regulating systems. The more cell phones burn up, the less dense the network will be. A beatiful design indeed.
Give the parent the benefit of the doubt. In the German translation of "Back to the Future", the device in question was indeed translated as "Flux-Kompensator". Translate that back into English and you get "flux compensator". Just saying.
According to the Great Filter theory, our chances of colonising other worlds before we go extinct would be diminished with every world we discover that contains life forms; and the higher evolved those life forms, the worse for us.
The theory in a nutshell: There are a handful of steps life must go through, to the best of our knowledge, before a rotating disk of star dust can bear intelligent life that colonizes space and thus ensures its survival. The reason why we don't see life everywhere around us is that one of these steps is so improbable or difficult that only very few, if any, aspiring colonizers of space make it past that crucial step and go extinct. The question is, are we, homo sapiens, already beyond this step? If we never find alien life, chances are we have passed this point. For every life form we do discover, the probability that we yet have to reach this point increases.
First of all, 99% of stuff now is also shit, so toss out that argument.
90% of everything is crud, including games in the past.
The packaging was better.
Depends on anyone's taste and strength of nostalgia. I leave it to you to go to any gaming site that has a "the n worst covers of all time". If anything, these bad covers are evenly distributed over the past 20 years.
The manuals were better.
Possibly. My favourite manual of all time is that of Alpha Centauri, which also spans 200+ pages if memory serves. But the trend to the contrary can be explained by several factors.
First, cutting costs. That only directly benefits the developers/publishers, of course. It may serve the gamers by constant pricing, but it's a handwaving argument without hard, unbiased and undisputed numbers.
Second, explicit or implicit in-game tutorials in most modern games reduce the manual's function as a tutorial. They're usually far more informative than any manual could be, and as HL2 demonstrated, can be more fun than other games in total if done right.
Third, the Internet. That's a big one: 3a) Crucial info in the manual can change along with game patches (PC, since recently even consoles) or can just be wrong from the beginning which is nothing unusual at all. No practical way to update that except over the Net. 3b) Game forums. If you ever need help in a particular situation (gameplay or technical), if it's not covered in the manual, you're screwed. In my ca. 13 years of PC gaming I, for one, have not had a single technical problem also covered in or solved by the manual.
The graphics have gotten better, yes. But the story and gameplay suffered along the way, as more time and effort were put into the graphics.
Graphics have always gotten better. There have always been games that broke the current PC hardware, and every console generation has had better graphics than the one before. To a degree, I share the sentiment that "the graphics are good enough" as expressed by some well-known game designers, but it's my firm conviction nevertheless that nothing will stop the advance of graphics and gaming technology in general, short of the invention of the holo deck/direct neural feed or the complete end of digital game development.
It's also my conviction that people will always discuss this very question, just as they discuss whether or not movies/books/music/paintings/whatever have been "better" in the past. And the answer remains the same: As soon as art or other unquantifiable measures of quality (e.g. fun, replayability for games) are involved in significant proportion in a work (where "significant" is itself open to debate), then the discussion basically turns into the question who connects the fondest memories to representatives of a particular era of that art. So don't hold your breath for an authorative answer which era was "best".
Is this just a fancy way of saying "9" or does the submitter simply love the word "over", placing it in grammatically correct but semantically nonsensical positions?
I grew up in the town where the Angel of Death was born and raised. Do we have to drive around in APCs instead of regular cars and sleep in bullet-proof vests? Well, no. So unless you could name a mechanism by which Tacoma makes people dangerous (except that it's a town in the USA), that's not exactly a reasonable argument. I don't question the conclusion of locking the door, but maybe the rationale behind it is more than "we had a couple real bad guys born here". Anecdotal evidence only goes so far.
You can play it anywhere in and around the house. Mowing the lawn? PSP! Cleaning the pool? PSP! Taking a shower? PSP! The finite possibilities downright scare me.
Where I live, evidence that can be easily manipulated is worthless before court unless collected by an party that's considered impartial, like the police. And even they have been shown to screw up when it comes to examining computers, changing files on the hard drive and rendering the evidence basically useless, therefore casting doubt on the police's general ability to handle computer evidence. Someone care to explain to me how disk content can count as evidence if the prosecutor had write access to it?
That's what you get for watching good old Babylon 5 all week: instead of reading "ancient colisions", reading "ancient civilizations". That would indeed be stuff that matters.
So we basically agree that the science is context, or background. Context (Wiki: "The context of an event, word, paradigm, change or other reality includes the circumstances and conditions which surround it") cannot stand on its own; it always relates to something or it just doesn't make sense to speak of it. Science and technology in SF stories are the backdrop to human action and interaction; stories that focus exclusively on the science/tech side are techno-fetish. That can be fun too (see the stereotypical Hollywood action blockbuster as a related example), but it gets old pretty quickly. As the real-world S&T matures, it obsoletes the SF science. That which remains after the novelty of the S&T has been stripped decides whether or not the story was a good one.
You don't learn Science from an SF book, because you never know (if you're not already educated) what laws the author bent for the sake of the story. If you get hold of a good SF book, it is always about people and their interactions in what-if scenarios, even if the science may be bunk or too far off to be of any value today. The most an SF book can do for science and technology is to spark interest in it. That's not a bad thing at all, however, SF books should be considered an addendum to Ethics or sociology, not science. Considering that, I'd recommend "Never let me go" by Kazuo Isiguro, ISBN 0-571-22414-8
f we ever created a truly sentient robot, it would have to be given rights. That's not debatable.
That's the ideal, but frankly, I don't see that as inevitable or even likely. There most probably are sentient, intelligent, non-human beings today (Great apes, maybe dolphins), but factually they don't have any more rights than other mammals, or birds. So even if those hypothetical sentient robots were - against all odds - considered living beings, they would probably still not have any more rights than Chipanzees have by that time, and very likely they would have less rights, if any.
Until we figure that out, it will be near impossible to tell if a robot is sentient or just really well programmed.
The more profound question is, are you and I and every other human being sentient or are we just really well programmed by our genome?
8 of the first 10 comments made by complete wankers
Then again, considering the target demographic of slashdot and the ratio of literal wankers thereof, that's even below the expected value. That means, we have a mature day today! Don't fret, however, I'm trying hard to correct that.
"Can you please stop shooting missiles at us? I'm getting tired of re-loading the launcher".
Except that shooting smart defensive rockets probably costs anywhere between 1 and 3 orders of magnitude more money than shooting those dumb, yet quite accurate, nearly home-made Hezbollah missiles, not to mention that the defender has to slack off only once to let one slip.
First of all, you can't tell this time (not from TFA at least).
Second, yes they have done that before. But who would expect such a complex system to work on the first attempt? Who in his sane mind would even _try_ to get it all right on the first attempt?
If you have ever written a fairly complex program, i.e. one that provides work for several code monkeys, one that has an actually recognizable and useful architecture, one that does what it's supposed to do, then you know this is the way to go. You test an algorithm in a separate program here, you hard-code an object there. You work step by step, and if you've got the stamina and the skills, you can eventually put the pieces together and call it done. In this case, it looks like the US has both the stamina and the skills to do it.
That being said, while the missile shield will probably be deployed some day, it's an overall bad idea, only serving to bring back the days of the Cold War. Instead of destroying rockets mid-flight, don't give their owner a reason to build and launch them in the first place. But then again, for a multitude of possible reasons, it looks like that's not going to happen anytime soon.
Slashdot Mirror
What I fell for was the single server concept. Everyone in the game world is participating in the same experience.
Uhm, wouldn't a multiple-server environment actually be more useful as far as science was concerned? For things like control groups and stuff? We have a "single server concept" in the real world. IMHO, that's why Economics is regarded by some as little more than fortune-telling, because you can hardly isolate a single variable and experiment on it in the real world. If there are multiple well-populated but otherwise identical servers representing the game, you could trivially and with mathematical precision change a certain variable on one server and actually draw conclusions from the developing differences (or lack thereof) with regard to other, unmodified servers that run in parallel.
Obviously the battery will be drained to zero in the blink of an eye, possibly dieing a violent, flaming death if enough energy was stored the moment you switched on the phone. Thankfully, your investigative question posed in TFS alerted their engineers to the problem so they can start working around this problem. Then again, maybe they were already aware of the problem and resorted to the wonderful method of self-regulating systems. The more cell phones burn up, the less dense the network will be. A beatiful design indeed.
Give the parent the benefit of the doubt. In the German translation of "Back to the Future", the device in question was indeed translated as "Flux-Kompensator". Translate that back into English and you get "flux compensator". Just saying.
F1RST P0ST!!!
According to the Great Filter theory, our chances of colonising other worlds before we go extinct would be diminished with every world we discover that contains life forms; and the higher evolved those life forms, the worse for us.
The theory in a nutshell: There are a handful of steps life must go through, to the best of our knowledge, before a rotating disk of star dust can bear intelligent life that colonizes space and thus ensures its survival. The reason why we don't see life everywhere around us is that one of these steps is so improbable or difficult that only very few, if any, aspiring colonizers of space make it past that crucial step and go extinct. The question is, are we, homo sapiens, already beyond this step? If we never find alien life, chances are we have passed this point. For every life form we do discover, the probability that we yet have to reach this point increases.
Really? For me, within a couple of frames he bent over.
First of all, 99% of stuff now is also shit, so toss out that argument.
90% of everything is crud, including games in the past.
The packaging was better.
Depends on anyone's taste and strength of nostalgia. I leave it to you to go to any gaming site that has a "the n worst covers of all time". If anything, these bad covers are evenly distributed over the past 20 years.
The manuals were better.
Possibly. My favourite manual of all time is that of Alpha Centauri, which also spans 200+ pages if memory serves. But the trend to the contrary can be explained by several factors.
First, cutting costs. That only directly benefits the developers/publishers, of course. It may serve the gamers by constant pricing, but it's a handwaving argument without hard, unbiased and undisputed numbers.
Second, explicit or implicit in-game tutorials in most modern games reduce the manual's function as a tutorial. They're usually far more informative than any manual could be, and as HL2 demonstrated, can be more fun than other games in total if done right.
Third, the Internet. That's a big one: 3a) Crucial info in the manual can change along with game patches (PC, since recently even consoles) or can just be wrong from the beginning which is nothing unusual at all. No practical way to update that except over the Net. 3b) Game forums. If you ever need help in a particular situation (gameplay or technical), if it's not covered in the manual, you're screwed. In my ca. 13 years of PC gaming I, for one, have not had a single technical problem also covered in or solved by the manual.
The graphics have gotten better, yes. But the story and gameplay suffered along the way, as more time and effort were put into the graphics.
Graphics have always gotten better. There have always been games that broke the current PC hardware, and every console generation has had better graphics than the one before. To a degree, I share the sentiment that "the graphics are good enough" as expressed by some well-known game designers, but it's my firm conviction nevertheless that nothing will stop the advance of graphics and gaming technology in general, short of the invention of the holo deck/direct neural feed or the complete end of digital game development.
It's also my conviction that people will always discuss this very question, just as they discuss whether or not movies/books/music/paintings/whatever have been "better" in the past. And the answer remains the same: As soon as art or other unquantifiable measures of quality (e.g. fun, replayability for games) are involved in significant proportion in a work (where "significant" is itself open to debate), then the discussion basically turns into the question who connects the fondest memories to representatives of a particular era of that art. So don't hold your breath for an authorative answer which era was "best".
Is this just a fancy way of saying "9" or does the submitter simply love the word "over", placing it in grammatically correct but semantically nonsensical positions?
I grew up in the town where the Angel of Death was born and raised. Do we have to drive around in APCs instead of regular cars and sleep in bullet-proof vests? Well, no. So unless you could name a mechanism by which Tacoma makes people dangerous (except that it's a town in the USA), that's not exactly a reasonable argument. I don't question the conclusion of locking the door, but maybe the rationale behind it is more than "we had a couple real bad guys born here". Anecdotal evidence only goes so far.
You can play it anywhere in and around the house. Mowing the lawn? PSP! Cleaning the pool? PSP! Taking a shower? PSP! The finite possibilities downright scare me.
Where I live, evidence that can be easily manipulated is worthless before court unless collected by an party that's considered impartial, like the police. And even they have been shown to screw up when it comes to examining computers, changing files on the hard drive and rendering the evidence basically useless, therefore casting doubt on the police's general ability to handle computer evidence. Someone care to explain to me how disk content can count as evidence if the prosecutor had write access to it?
Yeah, I agree that "Turok: Intelligent Design" should get equal shelf space. Evolution is just a theory!
That's what you get for watching good old Babylon 5 all week: instead of reading "ancient colisions", reading "ancient civilizations". That would indeed be stuff that matters.
I'm interested in the scientific context
So we basically agree that the science is context, or background. Context (Wiki: "The context of an event, word, paradigm, change or other reality includes the circumstances and conditions which surround it") cannot stand on its own; it always relates to something or it just doesn't make sense to speak of it. Science and technology in SF stories are the backdrop to human action and interaction; stories that focus exclusively on the science/tech side are techno-fetish. That can be fun too (see the stereotypical Hollywood action blockbuster as a related example), but it gets old pretty quickly.
As the real-world S&T matures, it obsoletes the SF science. That which remains after the novelty of the S&T has been stripped decides whether or not the story was a good one.
You don't learn Science from an SF book, because you never know (if you're not already educated) what laws the author bent for the sake of the story. If you get hold of a good SF book, it is always about people and their interactions in what-if scenarios, even if the science may be bunk or too far off to be of any value today. The most an SF book can do for science and technology is to spark interest in it. That's not a bad thing at all, however, SF books should be considered an addendum to Ethics or sociology, not science. Considering that, I'd recommend "Never let me go" by Kazuo Isiguro, ISBN 0-571-22414-8
Wow. If I shall ever see something more politically correct than this statement, I can die happy.
Good to see that Rumsfeld has found a new job that lets him exercise his poetic skills.
f we ever created a truly sentient robot, it would have to be given rights. That's not debatable.
That's the ideal, but frankly, I don't see that as inevitable or even likely. There most probably are sentient, intelligent, non-human beings today (Great apes, maybe dolphins), but factually they don't have any more rights than other mammals, or birds. So even if those hypothetical sentient robots were - against all odds - considered living beings, they would probably still not have any more rights than Chipanzees have by that time, and very likely they would have less rights, if any.
Until we figure that out, it will be near impossible to tell if a robot is sentient or just really well programmed.
The more profound question is, are you and I and every other human being sentient or are we just really well programmed by our genome?
then Internet killed the video star. Then Greed killed the Internet radio star and pissed on all of their graves.
Lost Garden: Nintendo's Genre Innovation Strategy
Tycho of Penny Arcade called it the "probably the most interesting article I've ever read.". That article is longer than TFA, but definitely worth reading and digesting.
8 of the first 10 comments made by complete wankers
Then again, considering the target demographic of slashdot and the ratio of literal wankers thereof, that's even below the expected value. That means, we have a mature day today! Don't fret, however, I'm trying hard to correct that.
"Can you please stop shooting missiles at us? I'm getting tired of re-loading the launcher".
Except that shooting smart defensive rockets probably costs anywhere between 1 and 3 orders of magnitude more money than shooting those dumb, yet quite accurate, nearly home-made Hezbollah missiles, not to mention that the defender has to slack off only once to let one slip.
First of all, you can't tell this time (not from TFA at least).
Second, yes they have done that before. But who would expect such a complex system to work on the first attempt? Who in his sane mind would even _try_ to get it all right on the first attempt?
If you have ever written a fairly complex program, i.e. one that provides work for several code monkeys, one that has an actually recognizable and useful architecture, one that does what it's supposed to do, then you know this is the way to go. You test an algorithm in a separate program here, you hard-code an object there. You work step by step, and if you've got the stamina and the skills, you can eventually put the pieces together and call it done. In this case, it looks like the US has both the stamina and the skills to do it.
That being said, while the missile shield will probably be deployed some day, it's an overall bad idea, only serving to bring back the days of the Cold War. Instead of destroying rockets mid-flight, don't give their owner a reason to build and launch them in the first place. But then again, for a multitude of possible reasons, it looks like that's not going to happen anytime soon.
That's ok, 1 == 5 for sufficiently large values of 1.
Yeah, considering the USA is in a constant state of war, that would even make sense.