After reading this page's comments (at least, the filtered ones), I am stunned by the overwhelmingly negative response to this idea. I generally think of the slashdot crowd as reasonably open minded freethinking creative types, but wow, not on this issue.
Aside from the fact that EA is involved, and most modern games probably aren't the way to go, what is wrong with this idea?
I think that most rational people agree with the claim that learning something using fun method A is better than learning the same thing with boring method B. If all else is equal, then absolutely, use method A, having fun while learning is much more likely to lead to positive results.
So the root assumption I'm getting from most posts today is, in fact, nothing useful can be learned from fun video games, and they bring a host of bad lessons. Is the problem of creating a fun game (hard) that also teaches a valuable lesson (moral / arithmetical / logical / etc.) (hard) a completely intractable problem? I don't think it is.
So if it is likely possible to make fun games that will benefit today's kids, why is that inherently a bad idea?
Don't get me wrong, I can easily see where the idea could be made to go wrong (and many have pointed out some of the pitfalls). But overall, if this idea was well executed, I think it has great potential.
After reading half the comments on this page, I'm amused at how many alert readers are making the same mistake that they accuse Yahoo of -- misstating results.
Can we conclude from this study that Google has a bigger index than Yahoo? No. Can we conclude that when you pick two English words that when entered into both Google and Yahoo, both return less than 1000 results, that Google has consistently more results? Yes.
The real question is, what can we infer from the actual indisputable findings of this study? I find no ready method of generalization. If you are inclined to believe google is better, you feel happy inside. If you think yahoo is better, you have many options to dispute the idea that the study result generalizes to search engine index size.
As a google fan, I enjoy the warm fuzzies, but I don't see that much to get excited about either way.
Is anyone else concerned about the fact that in spite of the fact that the shuttle is supposed to reenter earth atmosphere at, say, 10000 miles per hour, pieces of it can easily be removed by hand from the outside?
Additionally, isn't there a good reason for that separation substance to be there in the first place? If not, why did we pay $BIG to send it up there in the first place?
I'm sure there's good answers to these, but, hey, I don't know 'em.:)
I have to agree with the parent against the grandparent on this one. I bought an Asus CUV4X (original) in 2000, originally with a P3 celeron 600. Then it became a P3 1Ghz. Then it went to my brother, with a celeron 600. Then a 733. Then back again to a P3 1Ghz. Now it has turned back into the celeron 600 (as a low heat always-on server, back in my house). That's three different processors, in 6 configurations, and I'll swap back in the P3 1.0 come cooler weather, all in one motherboard.
For those curious, in fact that Asus motherboard has outlasted several cheaper socket 370 motherboards which were purchased later than it to replace it.
It just goes to show that in some areas, paying for quality is worth it, and I believe motherboards are one of those areas. If you build a system with solid hardware, to fill a role (other than "highest frames per second on latest first person shooter game Q among all my friends"), there's no reason to get all excited when technology marches on and leaves you with "outdated" but perfectly functional hardware.
And a note for hardware designing EE/CE/CS types -- I now have a house full of Asus hardware because of that one motherboard. Think about it.
In a similar vein, it turns out that if you zoom out all the way, the moon is actually a two dimensional plane extending infinitely in the horizontal direction (as viewed from google mapping), with infinite repetition. It is, however, of finite vertical height...
Presumably, therefore, the moon is actually
1. The used toilet paper of the universe
2. The used toilet paper roll of the universe (presuming the infinite repetition is due to the edges being connected)
What you are getting is not a property, it is a service.
I don't think it is either exclusively or a property or a service, because it has facets of both. I have crappy DSL (256k), which, by definition is essentially a leased line, albeit, not a big one. In some sense, I own the time-dependent commodity of the bit places on the wire -- 262,144 bit places in each second, and the guarantee that they be forwarded for me. That commodity is stealable if someone is on my network without my permission.
That said, I agree with everything else you said, and the majority of posters in this discussion. Of course, people reading this are much more statistically likely to be able to actually lock down a network.
As a side note, I openly own one of those unprotected access points. Why? Because I was foolish enough to buy an actiontec wireless DSL router, and it magically reconfigures itself every time it gets powercycled -- sometimes it switches on or of WEP, or changes from an accept all to deny all, picks a new channel, or uses or stops using an access list. I've given up reconfiguring the house to match whatever configuration it has *this time*. So if you can connect to it, more power to you.:)
I'm not too surprised. Any good cardplayer holds on to his trump card until 'the opportune moment'. With longhorn's ever retreating arrival date beginning to actually appear on corporate upgrade path horizons, and 64-bit moving from the small-time to the big time, AMD is trying to strike now.
Really, AMD has no choice but to play this now. They provided a bona fide technological coup with their 64 bit extensions, but Intel's market share and AMDs production limitations have kept Intel's predictions accurate -- adoption is slow, mostly just the gamer enthusaists and the server markets are moving 64 bit right now.
But now Intel is threatening to catch up in a serious way with new 64-bit capable processors in full capacity market dump mode. If AMD doesn't firm up its footing, it could lose much of what it has gained.
I'm not a conspiracy theorist (usually), but it wouldn't surprise me if I heard that Microsoft and Intel have quietly agreed to hold off the mass shipping of Longhorn until Intel has staked its claim on the mass 64 bit market. It would strike a serious blow, both morally and at the bottom line, for Intel to remain the de facto chip choice for most of the world at something AMD has innovated and developed and shipped first.
I am sitting in my engineering cubicle, and there are no less than 10 CPUs in my cube engaged in various tasks in various boxen. Three are in-house risc based, one is a C3(!), and the other 6 are all Intel x86 32-bit. AMD is trying to establish itself as a viable corporate desktop / workstation contendor before Longhorn leads the corporate world through their next hardware / OS upgrade cycle, and now is the time to make that move, as I can guarantee that 5 years from now, there will still be 10+ cpus in this cube, the question is, whose?
Well, then, hold on a minute. If we're quoting people who say that this is standard practice in hollywood, shouldn't Peter Jackson have *recognized* that this was going to happen? Are we saying both he and his lawyers who went over the contract were both completely in the dark on this?
I think that what the studios are described as doing is clearly unethical, but at the same time, if you do business with someone you know acts unethically, and you sign a contract that permits them to treat you unethically, don't you at least earn a hefty share of the blame when they in fact do what you expected them to do all along?
I'm not a fully crazed gamer, but I do enjoy playing games a lot, and my hardware isn't that bad. That said, I split my time between development work and gaming, and dual boot (windows being purely for games and finance management).
For a while I tried to be windows free, pure linux, and I even got a cedega subscription. I was disappointed, in that I could only get about 1 title in 10 to actually work, and none without serious UI gotchas, visual artifacts, crashes, etc. This was 6 months ago, and it is possible that things have changed.
So while this is a fine idea, I highly recommend proving it out. I know I am not going to be an early adopter, as I felt like the claims made by cedega were, in my experience, wholly unsubstantiated back then. The idea is great, but the last time I tried it, the technology and stability just weren't there.
I think you raise an interesting point... I wholly agree that piracy in the context above isn't inherently evil, because really (assuming this is intended) the companies are essentially giving away free copies in exchange for something non-money that they desire -- market share.
But that immediately begs the question, how is it that I am to tell between software that I'm *supposed* to pirate as a business tactic, and the software I oughtn't?
By your definition, piracy isn't bad unless the entity whose IP is being passed around wishes it wasn't. I can accept that, but I'm going to need a metric by which to gauge what I can and can't copy, and lacking it, I must necessarily take the right of judging that question to myself.
But then, I have claimed some rights of distribution over some other entity's property, which I believe is explicitly illegal in copyright law. So while I see your point, I see no practical benefit from it.
Though slightly off topic, I'd note that the real estate boom in the US was fueled by the dot com bust -- as the bust occurred, and took significant portions of the economy with it, the Federal Reserve cut interest rates to ridiculously low levels.
With ridiculously low interest rates, the interest payment of a house payment goes down. That means, on a fixed income, one can suddenly afford a larger payment.
With people suddenly able to (1) refinance to extract equity and (2) get more house for the same payment, people looked to upgrade and take advantage of the megalow rates. Supply and demand dictated a price move up, in some markets doubling in the last 5 years.
But now, interest rates are back on the rise, new mortgage payments are going up, and a lot of people with variable rate mortgages are going to be strapped for cash in the coming years. I don't think real estate is a bad investment, but the years of double digit returns in this area are going to be gone for a while. People who have to sell will have more trouble finding buyers, and that's going to drive resell values down, probably holding home values stable.
Just my two cents. I like my house, but I don't plan to buy any others for the next while with my copious disposable income.:)
I wholly agree with you... In fact, I believe that law is simply an expression of the morality of the society that enacted the law. And, as an opponent of adult material, I laud your efforts to user your influence to effect legislation that reflects our shared values.
However, there are also many people who do not share our values, and I believe that they have the same rights to exercise their values (by accepting adult material into their homes) that I claim for myself (by denying the entrance of adult material into my home).
The ACLU only has a leg to stand on in this case because the majority opinion now in the United States is, essentially, 'the right to porn is a liberty claimed by the United States.' If public sentiment was against such a thought, then legislation is the solution -- make it illegal, because that's what this government of the people wants.
However, as long as the point of view we share on this matter is a minority opinion, I feel a need to protect other people's right to choose as much as I expect them to protect mine. Hence, the only solution I see is to get rid of this stopgap legislation. It's not that I disagree with what the legislation was trying to do, but I disagree with how it does it.
I grew up in Salt Lake City, and am (as you may have guessed) not a big fan of pornography. But at the same time, there's a right way to solve this, and a wrong way to solve this.
Legislating that ISPs have the responsibility to provide ways to block a list of offensive websites is a good idea and a bad implementation. That kind of censorship belongs on the consumer, not on the ISP. We might as well expect handgun realtors to provide a list of movies that children shouldn't watch to keep them from becoming violent. Sure, it's something to do about the problem, but it is the wrong thing.
I think the availability to minors of pornography is a huge problem, but there is (or at least there was) a real industry building up out of censorship tools for the internet, which provide the kind of services that this law was supposed to enforce anyway.
So I fail to see the need for such odd legislation. The right of censorship in the home has always been protected as a right of the individual, excepting those 'expressions' which have been defined by society has harmful enough to legislate against (i.e. kiddie porn). But within the bounds of what society has legislated to be acceptable, the right to refuse or accept media still belongs to the end user.
And please, if the problem is that you're trying to protect your children, please notice that it is *your* responsibility to look after and protect your children. Don't leave something so important to anybody else.
I think that's a big shortsighted... I agree that if we let history take a crack at it, that any encryption put together by smart people will eventually be breakable by smart people.
However, most data that I deal with day-to-day is time relevant. Do I care if someone figures out my credit card number on an account I closed 5 years ago? Is it terrible if someone hacks an old email only to find out I was begging a professor for a passing grade in 1997?
Encryption is meant to hide things, and for many things, the need to hide is temporary. If the hidden thing stays hidden as long as it needs to stay hidden, there is nothing wrong with it.
Know the limitations on the technology you use, and know the parties with which you exchange information. Those two rules alone, if followed, will probably provide more than adequate real-world defense. Perfect? No. Good enough. Statistically, yes.
Your common sense seems a little ridiculous. Are we saying that all documents have to be reduced to text before applying our encryption? What about nontextual documents, like, say, process flowcharts, spreadsheets, powerpoint slides, multimedia?
There are a lot of formats out there that allow additions of random undisplayed information, and so I presume that many of these formats are vulnerable to these attacks.
I wonder how long it will take before there are exploits out there that take advantage of these techniques... Of course, I also wonder how many there already are...
Oh well. The key concept behind security is, has been, and always will be trust. You should always ask yourself when you receive something from someone else how much you trust the source, and act accordingly.
Just a few more observations on those lines... AI has this postulate that there is no such thing as bias free learning, which is to say, unless you have feedback from your environment, it is impossible to truly learn anything.
Example: you only learned as a child (maybe an adult, if you're backwards enough:) that touching a hot stove was a bad idea because you got immediate negative feedback; the environment pushed a value into your world percept (the value being, too hot is bad).
Once this is understood, it is easy to see that it is impossible to learn in a vaccuum -- in order to learn, one must be able to make comparisons, and comparisons require an ordering between whatever is being compared, and ultimately those orderings need to be provided by an outside source.
Bottom line: in a brain simulation, if consciousness did occur, it would be completely controllable, because the simulation would be the only source of values to provide the bias required for learning.
So in answer to the parent's questions, it wouldn't know it was scared unless somehow it could be given the value of self preservation (and probably a host of others). It wouldn't know that having a friend or company is a good thing unless somebody told it it was.
Heck, for all we know current processors are sentient, but we haven't figured out how to tell them that there could be more to existence than manipulating bits according to other bits, and so they are perfectly 'happy' to continue doing so indefinitely, since they don't have any concept of any other kind of existence.
The entire argument in this article is based on a simple, false premise, which I'll here state:
FALSE PREMISE: The better the hardware available to good developers, the better the game will be.
The simpler fact of the matter is, eyecandy is secondary to game play in every way. Is it possible to create fun and enjoyable games that run on 5th generation hardware? Of course it is, people did it all the time four generations ago.
I grant, those genres that are based on eye candy (FPS, for example, in large measure) are going to move to the consoles. But games focused more on the gameplay and less on the eye candy can afford to remain in the PC markets, and will do well there.
Just remember that ** for now **, this is a voluntary use domain. I wholeheartedly agree, that legislating its use is stoopid (intentional spelling), but as long as it is voluntary, I see no problem with it. Those as wants to use it, use it, and those as don't, don't.
I think you're ignoring several good reasons for adult entertainment firms to switch to.xxx domains:
1. It provides boundaries. Most people in the world who want to avoid adult media aren't dumb enough to think it will go away, and barring its disappearance, people want boundaries and fences. If you can fence in something you don't like, you feel safer.
2. It lets adult firms 'play fair'. The adult entertainment industry isn't a popular one in todays culture from a reputation standpoint (from a popularity standpoint, it is clearly the other way around, but that's just how society's double standard is). Those companies who voluntarily relocate are showing that they are serious about being nice neighbors. Rather than being crazed about attracting as many new clients as possible (which they are), they appear to be concerned about the welfare of the consumer.
I can easily see how moving to a.xxx domain would be something an 'upperclass' site would do -- it's classier. Adult firms are being up front and honest about the business they're in, and people like that.
As for the "oohhhh, ten times more money!" approach, please notice that any profitable company (and porn is profitable) likely spends far more than $54 / year (the big difference) on executive toilet paper.
Except it doesn't run x86 programs. So nobody will buy one. This is the latest in a very long line of superior architecture chips that nobody will buy for desktop processing. So relax a bit.
Don't forget, there's more than the price of the processor to consider. I just upgraded to the top of the line Asus socket A motherboard for an Athlon XP 3200+, and their top of the line socket 478 motherboard (for a P4 3.2 northwood, for example) is twice as much, similarly featured (roughly $90 vs. $180, for an A7N8X-E Deluxe vs. a P4C800-E Deluxe).
In fact, it was this fact alone that pushed me to AMD over Intel.
Slashdot Mirror
Somebody shoot me.
Hey, wait a minute! (j/k)
Aside from the fact that EA is involved, and most modern games probably aren't the way to go, what is wrong with this idea?
I think that most rational people agree with the claim that learning something using fun method A is better than learning the same thing with boring method B. If all else is equal, then absolutely, use method A, having fun while learning is much more likely to lead to positive results.
So the root assumption I'm getting from most posts today is, in fact, nothing useful can be learned from fun video games, and they bring a host of bad lessons. Is the problem of creating a fun game (hard) that also teaches a valuable lesson (moral / arithmetical / logical / etc.) (hard) a completely intractable problem? I don't think it is.
So if it is likely possible to make fun games that will benefit today's kids, why is that inherently a bad idea?
Don't get me wrong, I can easily see where the idea could be made to go wrong (and many have pointed out some of the pitfalls). But overall, if this idea was well executed, I think it has great potential.
Can we conclude from this study that Google has a bigger index than Yahoo? No. Can we conclude that when you pick two English words that when entered into both Google and Yahoo, both return less than 1000 results, that Google has consistently more results? Yes.
The real question is, what can we infer from the actual indisputable findings of this study? I find no ready method of generalization. If you are inclined to believe google is better, you feel happy inside. If you think yahoo is better, you have many options to dispute the idea that the study result generalizes to search engine index size.
As a google fan, I enjoy the warm fuzzies, but I don't see that much to get excited about either way.
Additionally, isn't there a good reason for that separation substance to be there in the first place? If not, why did we pay $BIG to send it up there in the first place?
I'm sure there's good answers to these, but, hey, I don't know 'em. :)
For those curious, in fact that Asus motherboard has outlasted several cheaper socket 370 motherboards which were purchased later than it to replace it.
It just goes to show that in some areas, paying for quality is worth it, and I believe motherboards are one of those areas. If you build a system with solid hardware, to fill a role (other than "highest frames per second on latest first person shooter game Q among all my friends"), there's no reason to get all excited when technology marches on and leaves you with "outdated" but perfectly functional hardware.
And a note for hardware designing EE/CE/CS types -- I now have a house full of Asus hardware because of that one motherboard. Think about it.
Presumably, therefore, the moon is actually
1. The used toilet paper of the universe
2. The used toilet paper roll of the universe (presuming the infinite repetition is due to the edges being connected)
3. The Creator's own mobius strip project
In any case, this is newsworthy!
I don't think it is either exclusively or a property or a service, because it has facets of both. I have crappy DSL (256k), which, by definition is essentially a leased line, albeit, not a big one. In some sense, I own the time-dependent commodity of the bit places on the wire -- 262,144 bit places in each second, and the guarantee that they be forwarded for me. That commodity is stealable if someone is on my network without my permission.
That said, I agree with everything else you said, and the majority of posters in this discussion. Of course, people reading this are much more statistically likely to be able to actually lock down a network.
As a side note, I openly own one of those unprotected access points. Why? Because I was foolish enough to buy an actiontec wireless DSL router, and it magically reconfigures itself every time it gets powercycled -- sometimes it switches on or of WEP, or changes from an accept all to deny all, picks a new channel, or uses or stops using an access list. I've given up reconfiguring the house to match whatever configuration it has *this time*. So if you can connect to it, more power to you. :)
Really, AMD has no choice but to play this now. They provided a bona fide technological coup with their 64 bit extensions, but Intel's market share and AMDs production limitations have kept Intel's predictions accurate -- adoption is slow, mostly just the gamer enthusaists and the server markets are moving 64 bit right now.
But now Intel is threatening to catch up in a serious way with new 64-bit capable processors in full capacity market dump mode. If AMD doesn't firm up its footing, it could lose much of what it has gained.
I'm not a conspiracy theorist (usually), but it wouldn't surprise me if I heard that Microsoft and Intel have quietly agreed to hold off the mass shipping of Longhorn until Intel has staked its claim on the mass 64 bit market. It would strike a serious blow, both morally and at the bottom line, for Intel to remain the de facto chip choice for most of the world at something AMD has innovated and developed and shipped first.
I am sitting in my engineering cubicle, and there are no less than 10 CPUs in my cube engaged in various tasks in various boxen. Three are in-house risc based, one is a C3(!), and the other 6 are all Intel x86 32-bit. AMD is trying to establish itself as a viable corporate desktop / workstation contendor before Longhorn leads the corporate world through their next hardware / OS upgrade cycle, and now is the time to make that move, as I can guarantee that 5 years from now, there will still be 10+ cpus in this cube, the question is, whose?
Well, then, hold on a minute. If we're quoting people who say that this is standard practice in hollywood, shouldn't Peter Jackson have *recognized* that this was going to happen? Are we saying both he and his lawyers who went over the contract were both completely in the dark on this?
I think that what the studios are described as doing is clearly unethical, but at the same time, if you do business with someone you know acts unethically, and you sign a contract that permits them to treat you unethically, don't you at least earn a hefty share of the blame when they in fact do what you expected them to do all along?
Sounds a little fishy to me on all sides.
I'm not a fully crazed gamer, but I do enjoy playing games a lot, and my hardware isn't that bad. That said, I split my time between development work and gaming, and dual boot (windows being purely for games and finance management).
For a while I tried to be windows free, pure linux, and I even got a cedega subscription. I was disappointed, in that I could only get about 1 title in 10 to actually work, and none without serious UI gotchas, visual artifacts, crashes, etc. This was 6 months ago, and it is possible that things have changed.
So while this is a fine idea, I highly recommend proving it out. I know I am not going to be an early adopter, as I felt like the claims made by cedega were, in my experience, wholly unsubstantiated back then. The idea is great, but the last time I tried it, the technology and stability just weren't there.
But that immediately begs the question, how is it that I am to tell between software that I'm *supposed* to pirate as a business tactic, and the software I oughtn't?
By your definition, piracy isn't bad unless the entity whose IP is being passed around wishes it wasn't. I can accept that, but I'm going to need a metric by which to gauge what I can and can't copy, and lacking it, I must necessarily take the right of judging that question to myself.
But then, I have claimed some rights of distribution over some other entity's property, which I believe is explicitly illegal in copyright law. So while I see your point, I see no practical benefit from it.
With ridiculously low interest rates, the interest payment of a house payment goes down. That means, on a fixed income, one can suddenly afford a larger payment.
With people suddenly able to (1) refinance to extract equity and (2) get more house for the same payment, people looked to upgrade and take advantage of the megalow rates. Supply and demand dictated a price move up, in some markets doubling in the last 5 years.
But now, interest rates are back on the rise, new mortgage payments are going up, and a lot of people with variable rate mortgages are going to be strapped for cash in the coming years. I don't think real estate is a bad investment, but the years of double digit returns in this area are going to be gone for a while. People who have to sell will have more trouble finding buyers, and that's going to drive resell values down, probably holding home values stable.
Just my two cents. I like my house, but I don't plan to buy any others for the next while with my copious disposable income. :)
I wholly agree with you... In fact, I believe that law is simply an expression of the morality of the society that enacted the law. And, as an opponent of adult material, I laud your efforts to user your influence to effect legislation that reflects our shared values.
However, there are also many people who do not share our values, and I believe that they have the same rights to exercise their values (by accepting adult material into their homes) that I claim for myself (by denying the entrance of adult material into my home).
The ACLU only has a leg to stand on in this case because the majority opinion now in the United States is, essentially, 'the right to porn is a liberty claimed by the United States.' If public sentiment was against such a thought, then legislation is the solution -- make it illegal, because that's what this government of the people wants.
However, as long as the point of view we share on this matter is a minority opinion, I feel a need to protect other people's right to choose as much as I expect them to protect mine. Hence, the only solution I see is to get rid of this stopgap legislation. It's not that I disagree with what the legislation was trying to do, but I disagree with how it does it.
I grew up in Salt Lake City, and am (as you may have guessed) not a big fan of pornography. But at the same time, there's a right way to solve this, and a wrong way to solve this.
Legislating that ISPs have the responsibility to provide ways to block a list of offensive websites is a good idea and a bad implementation. That kind of censorship belongs on the consumer, not on the ISP. We might as well expect handgun realtors to provide a list of movies that children shouldn't watch to keep them from becoming violent. Sure, it's something to do about the problem, but it is the wrong thing.
I think the availability to minors of pornography is a huge problem, but there is (or at least there was) a real industry building up out of censorship tools for the internet, which provide the kind of services that this law was supposed to enforce anyway.
So I fail to see the need for such odd legislation. The right of censorship in the home has always been protected as a right of the individual, excepting those 'expressions' which have been defined by society has harmful enough to legislate against (i.e. kiddie porn). But within the bounds of what society has legislated to be acceptable, the right to refuse or accept media still belongs to the end user.
And please, if the problem is that you're trying to protect your children, please notice that it is *your* responsibility to look after and protect your children. Don't leave something so important to anybody else.
I think that's a big shortsighted... I agree that if we let history take a crack at it, that any encryption put together by smart people will eventually be breakable by smart people.
However, most data that I deal with day-to-day is time relevant. Do I care if someone figures out my credit card number on an account I closed 5 years ago? Is it terrible if someone hacks an old email only to find out I was begging a professor for a passing grade in 1997?
Encryption is meant to hide things, and for many things, the need to hide is temporary. If the hidden thing stays hidden as long as it needs to stay hidden, there is nothing wrong with it.
Know the limitations on the technology you use, and know the parties with which you exchange information. Those two rules alone, if followed, will probably provide more than adequate real-world defense. Perfect? No. Good enough. Statistically, yes.
Your common sense seems a little ridiculous. Are we saying that all documents have to be reduced to text before applying our encryption? What about nontextual documents, like, say, process flowcharts, spreadsheets, powerpoint slides, multimedia?
There are a lot of formats out there that allow additions of random undisplayed information, and so I presume that many of these formats are vulnerable to these attacks.
I wonder how long it will take before there are exploits out there that take advantage of these techniques... Of course, I also wonder how many there already are...
Oh well. The key concept behind security is, has been, and always will be trust. You should always ask yourself when you receive something from someone else how much you trust the source, and act accordingly.
Why ask? It is obviously 42. Somebody should have talked to Him about easily cracked passwords. *prepares to dodge lightning*
Example: you only learned as a child (maybe an adult, if you're backwards enough :) that touching a hot stove was a bad idea because you got immediate negative feedback; the environment pushed a value into your world percept (the value being, too hot is bad).
Once this is understood, it is easy to see that it is impossible to learn in a vaccuum -- in order to learn, one must be able to make comparisons, and comparisons require an ordering between whatever is being compared, and ultimately those orderings need to be provided by an outside source.
Bottom line: in a brain simulation, if consciousness did occur, it would be completely controllable, because the simulation would be the only source of values to provide the bias required for learning.
So in answer to the parent's questions, it wouldn't know it was scared unless somehow it could be given the value of self preservation (and probably a host of others). It wouldn't know that having a friend or company is a good thing unless somebody told it it was.
Heck, for all we know current processors are sentient, but we haven't figured out how to tell them that there could be more to existence than manipulating bits according to other bits, and so they are perfectly 'happy' to continue doing so indefinitely, since they don't have any concept of any other kind of existence.
FALSE PREMISE: The better the hardware available to good developers, the better the game will be.
The simpler fact of the matter is, eyecandy is secondary to game play in every way. Is it possible to create fun and enjoyable games that run on 5th generation hardware? Of course it is, people did it all the time four generations ago.
I grant, those genres that are based on eye candy (FPS, for example, in large measure) are going to move to the consoles. But games focused more on the gameplay and less on the eye candy can afford to remain in the PC markets, and will do well there.
Just remember that ** for now **, this is a voluntary use domain. I wholeheartedly agree, that legislating its use is stoopid (intentional spelling), but as long as it is voluntary, I see no problem with it. Those as wants to use it, use it, and those as don't, don't.
1. It provides boundaries. Most people in the world who want to avoid adult media aren't dumb enough to think it will go away, and barring its disappearance, people want boundaries and fences. If you can fence in something you don't like, you feel safer.
2. It lets adult firms 'play fair'. The adult entertainment industry isn't a popular one in todays culture from a reputation standpoint (from a popularity standpoint, it is clearly the other way around, but that's just how society's double standard is). Those companies who voluntarily relocate are showing that they are serious about being nice neighbors. Rather than being crazed about attracting as many new clients as possible (which they are), they appear to be concerned about the welfare of the consumer.
I can easily see how moving to a .xxx domain would be something an 'upperclass' site would do -- it's classier. Adult firms are being up front and honest about the business they're in, and people like that.
As for the "oohhhh, ten times more money!" approach, please notice that any profitable company (and porn is profitable) likely spends far more than $54 / year (the big difference) on executive toilet paper.
Except it doesn't run x86 programs. So nobody will buy one. This is the latest in a very long line of superior architecture chips that nobody will buy for desktop processing. So relax a bit.
I believe that in this case, it should read "mystical mentor yoda yoda yoda."
**ducks**
Don't forget, there's more than the price of the processor to consider. I just upgraded to the top of the line Asus socket A motherboard for an Athlon XP 3200+, and their top of the line socket 478 motherboard (for a P4 3.2 northwood, for example) is twice as much, similarly featured (roughly $90 vs. $180, for an A7N8X-E Deluxe vs. a P4C800-E Deluxe).
In fact, it was this fact alone that pushed me to AMD over Intel.