The game would NOT be very ballanced, but still fun, and realistic. A newbie faces a randomly spawned enemy of some 60th level? Yay! Run for the city gates and yell for help! That completely generic cave a few paces from the capitol, thousands of players went through, but one bothered to pick up a rock and found a note with a hint for a hidden cave, not really far, but quite well hidden.
I dunno about anybody else, but I play a game for fun, and to escape reality. Also, balance is very important, or most of your player-base will end up leaving the game. Random spawns are also much less realistic than you think. How would a creature of any type end up as strong as a level 60 when surrounded by weak creatures? Think about it- the entire concept of a powerful creature in a fictional world (dragon, lich, whatever you creature may be) is that they have an area that people shy away from. They don't just hang out on the streetcorner, waiting to accost passers-by.
I'm all for randomly generated content, just not random worlds. In fact, I wish the instances in WoW were more like the dungeons of Diablo or the terrain of Diablo II- It's not as much fun when you know exactly where the mob you need to kill is. But as for having a completely random world? Well, once you've generated it, you really can't change it on the fly, so why not just design it to be what you wanted in the fist place? Changing the fabric of the world while people are playing just seems like a bad idea.
Really, random content is where instances could truly shine- once they get a method of generating a decent looking instance in a random manner.
On a different note, you said:
Make a quest that ends up with a single player screwing up some important spell badly (scripted but unexpected) and summoning them. From then on, that single player would gain world's fame.
Hell, no. This is the kind of thing that pissed me off as a D&D gamer, and would continue to piss me off in a MMO game, in which I create my character's story- not the developers. They provide me a world. I provide my story.
I've had Windows Storage Server 2k3 give me some tremendous problems that I'm still trying to track the cause of down.
A client purchased a NAS with Storage Server on it, threw all of their Clarion apps and data on it, as well as all of their Office data (Spreasheets, documents, etc.)
Long story short, a process that ran on an old- Pentium 3- Novell box in 20 minutes was now taking an hour and a half. A two hour data maintenance app was running in...8 hours.
Moved all the data to shared folders on one of the redundant Domain controllers with similar hardware, and it runs faster than the old Novell stuff now.
"[They] first came for the communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't Jewish. Then they came for the trade unionist,and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant, Then they came for the homosexuals, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a homosexual, Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak for me."
--Rev. Martin Niemoeller, German Lutheran Pastor
"I've done nothing wrong, so I have nothing to hide" is the same thing as what Neimoeller was saying. When will people learn that they have to stand up to help each other if they expect anyone to care about them?
Thank you. Nobody seems to realize that you can go to your local emporium de computers and pick up a $350 system that comes with XP Home. Try building a system with XP Home for that price, and see how well it works once you pay for the stand-alone license for XP Home. Just had someone I was helping do that- he spent $199US on XP Home (Non-upgrade). You want XP Pro? It's gonna cost more, yes, and you'll probably pay enough to offset some of that OEM savings- but not if the system is sold with XP Pro by default.
OEM discounts are bringing a LOT of people into the market, because they can afford these entry-level PCs. Many of them even come with 60-day "trials" of Office- sometimes with reduced pricing for "buying" the full version.
People see the PC more and more as an appliance- and are looking at paying appliance prices for something that just works. Not something that they have to build or maintain. They don't want you to put it together for them- they want to plop down the piece of plastic, walk out with a couple boxes, struggle a minute with the cables and connecting periphials (kinda like hookin up a VCR or DVD player, right?) and then sit down to use it. The gratification of a purchase that they can use is a hard thing to compete with, espcially for those that do not have the desire or inclination to tinker with a running system.
I see more systems on a weekly basis where people are limping along running Windows 9x, or even **shudder** ME, because their system works. Sure, it isn't fast, but they don't want that. It's got problems, but most of those are like a pair of shoes that have been worn a lot- they're familiar things that just aren't what they used to be.
They want something that they can power on, do whatever, shut down, and not think about- and for them, that's Windows. Something goes wrong? Well, they've got the restore discs, or they pay someone like me to fix it. The only things they care about are:
A) Ease of use. Which means, most likely, password-less logins, if they even see a login screen at all. A web browser that works for what they want it to do- which means no Firefox, because it breaks all of the horribly designed pages that they frequent (Anyone notice you get a "Document contains no data" trying to register a Yahoo! Mail account?) and explaining this to them means nothing. It also means regular MS Office if they need that functionality, because that's what the night class they took used, and it's all they know, and "Don't bother showing me that one, I'll stick with Word, thanks."
and B) Who can fix it? Well, in the case of pre-built PCs, they've got all kinds of options, ranging from the local geek to the store they bought it from to the company that made it in the first place. A system you built for them? Well, what happens if you aren't around to fix it? Or can't?
Face it, until you start seeing systems with other OSes from big-name manufacturers (Dell, HP, Sony) in BB or CrapUSA, or whatever your local jerk-you-around electronics retail outlet is, the public isn't going to want to bother with it- they "don't need that fancy stuff, I just need my e-mail and my {website of choice}." You cannot convince them otherwise, because they don't see it anywhere but where us nerds talk about it- and then what do they see? "Players hacked an XBox to run Linux"?? Hack has a bad connotation to them- they don't understand the difference between hacking and cracking. "Linux involved in IP dispute with SCO"?? "Linux user gets around DRM on copy-protected disc, earns X years in jail for violating DMCA"?
The media knows who pays it for advertising, and it sure isn't open source OSes.
why would people be complaining about it to the degree they are and in the numbers they are?
Because 94.53% (Pulled from OutOfMyAss.com) of the people on MMORPG forums are people who are obsessed with seeing their words on the forum and bitch no matter what happens. For every person they make happy, they piss off someone else.
The people who are happy won't be on the forums bitching, so it skews the numbers: if 123/150 people on a forum, say, are complaining, that looks bad. If 123/12348 people that are actually playing the game are complaining, that's not horrendous. It's not great, but it's not horrible, especially in an environment where people seem to feel the need to "be the best" instead of just enjoying a damn game.
Add all this up with the entitlement that many MMORPG players feel they deserve, and you get a bunch of people bitching about everything, tying up the reps time, and making getting anything accomplished that much more difficult.
That wouldn't stop it from happening at home. Which I think is what the GP was referring to- not them loading it at work, but at home. Odds are good that someone in one of those fields has been infected at home.
That aside, anything that hooks into the internals of an OS without my clear and informed authorization is a problem.
you've got a piece of code in your computer that only gives Sony access. nobody else.
Please tell me you don't really believe that. Considering how many of MS's products have opened backdoors for people, you're going to trust Sony to "do it better" and leave this software completely secure? It might not suddenly allow crackers "on some IRC network" to get in, but it sure opens up a lucrative bit of research for them- finding the security holes in a DRM rootkit that people don't even know is installed.
It's the equivalent to the look of "gods, you're stupid." If you're referring to this:
[winprogger] lol [winprogger]... [winprogger] ok
It translates as: Winprogger laughs, then realizes the guy isn't joking. Gives the slight raised eyebrow, eye-rolled up look of "You're joking, right? Oh god he's not. Where the fuck is the chlorine for the gene pool?" Winprogger says "okay", as a way of saying "this isn't worth my time to argue."
Yes, it's asshole-ish. A lot of people are assholes. Welcome to life. If you have a complaint, take a number. We're currently seeing number 2 still, but there are only 441 231 452 249 321 complaints ahead of yours.
I go to the store for a lot of things. Groceries, clothes- hell, I drive by it for work on a daily basis. I've told store employees that they can follow me if they think I'm shoplifting, as long as they shut the hell up and don't talk to me. I can walk in, grab what I'm looking for, and be checked-out in probably 10 minutes, tops.
If you want to be anti-social, fine, but that doesn't change the fact that the "hassle" of buying it is just a convenient excuse for most.
What I want to know, and the article doesn't say, is whether he was a "distributer" or whether he was just an unlucky sharer that was downloading a movie and got nabbed. If he was seeding the torrent, whatever -- he deserved it, I'd think that it would be "scarier" if he was just a user downloading/uploading by using the seeded torrent.
Note: I'm going to be using "you" to mean "people in general", not "you in particular".
Now, I'm not familiar with Chinese copyright law as it stands, but I have a feeling he's guilty either way. If you want to glamorize this and call it "civil disobedience", then be ready to go down for your actions. If not, just admit that as the law stands now, regardless of whether that is morally right or wrong, the action is illegal, and that he is being punished for what he did.
I'm more likely to laugh at every person- downloading, uploading, sharing, seeding, whatever- that gets caught and whines about "their rights" than I am to feel sorry for any of them.
No, I do not buy movies or CDs often- a few here and there, and most likely at a band's show for a CD- but I also don't bother downloading a bunch of stuff and then whining that I got caught. You seem to be in a similar boat to me. If you enjoy it, you buy it when it gets cheaper. Save yourself the money and the hassle of downloading.
And if all of it sucks so much, why do people want it in the first place?
And for another, if you are on the right server, the horde are so outnumbered that they can barely move without getting slaughtered. While you're at it, Pally's aren't overpowered? They're damn near invincible one-on-one, and they don't do two bad when slightly outnumbered either.
Shit. I hate when I forget to switch to plain text when I post. Sorry about that. It should be this:
I don't think you understand his argument. The simple rules of chess are only part of the equation, that amounts to reducing the number of options on any one given turn. Another portion of the equation is the existing "strategy base" available. Go, for instance, has a tremendous number of strategies- much more so than chess. Chess has a decent number of strategies, but in the end it's all about being able to "pick" the right move to match a current situation.
Also, the ability to generate a "look-ahead" for a given move is incredibly important in AI. Let's say that, for instance, we want to us a capture as the end goal for any given move of chess (this sets the "value" of the move to 1.000. Moves without captures start at 0.000). If it takes 20ms to determine if a move results in a capture directly, we can look at 500 moves in one second to determine what moves would give us a score of 1.000. Also, for this example, there are only 4 moves available (restricting our problem set to make the example easier). There is one move that results in a direct capture, but we looked at all 4 first (80ms has passed).
Now, we look at the positioning of all the pieces on the board after that move, calculate moves for the opponent, determine what is a move with as close to a 1.000 as possible, we determine what possible responses are, and before you know it, we've determined that taking that piece will likely result in putting our king in check. If you add complexity to the rules, all that checking takes longer. For a turn-based game like chess, that might not be so bad (waiting 10 to 20 seconds for your opponent to move isn't a big deal), but imagine it in any "real-time" game:
You fire at your opponents light infantry with your machine gun turret. Twenty seconds later, the infantry starts to move towards the treeline, away from the turret, but it's too late. There were too many options for the AI to accurately predict the result of an action.
Once you start adding in "memory" of the results of certain actions (a chess AI that learns that in certain situations, sacrificing a Queen for a lesser piece can be a good thing, for example) and checking the action against this "memory" also adds complexity.
To get back to Go: Simple rules, yes, but the strategy base is so much more complex that it more than makes up for the simple rules in making the game itself incredibly complex to play.
I don't think you understand his argument. The simple rules of chess are only part of the equation, that amounts to reducing the number of options on any one given turn. Another portion of the equation is the existing "strategy base" available. Go, for instance, has a tremendous number of strategies- much more so than chess. Chess has a decent number of strategies, but in the end it's all about being able to "pick" the right move to match a current situation.
Also, the ability to generate a "look-ahead" for a given move is incredibly important in AI. Let's say that, for instance, we want to us a capture as the end goal for any given move of chess (this sets the "value" of the move to 1.000. Moves without captures start at 0.000).
If it takes 20ms to determine if a move results in a capture directly, we can look at 500 moves in one second to determine what moves would give us a score of 1.000. Also, for this example, there are only 4 moves available (restricting our problem set to make the example easier). There is one move that results in a direct capture, but we looked at all 4 first (80ms has passed).
Now, we look at the positioning of all the pieces on the board after that move, calculate moves for the opponent, determine what is a move with as close to a 1.000 as possible, we determine what possible responses are, and before you know it, we've determined that taking that piece will likely result in putting our king in check.
If you add complexity to the rules, all that checking takes longer. For a turn-based game like chess, that might not be so bad (waiting 10 to 20 seconds for your opponent to move isn't a big deal), but imagine it in any "real-time" game. You fire at your opponents light infantry with your machine gun turret. Twenty seconds later, the infantry starts to move towards the treeline, away from the turret, but it's too late. There were too many options for the AI to accurately predict the result of an action.
Once you start adding in "memory" of the results of certain actions (a chess AI that learns that in certain situations, sacrificing a Queen for a lesser piece can be a good thing, for example) and checking the action against this "memory" also adds complexity.
To get back to Go: Simple rules, yes, but the strategy base is so much more complex that it more than makes up for the simple rules in making the game itself incredibly complex to play.
I wholeheartedly agree. And it's not a "don't get the Desktop thing"- I hate the desktop. In fact, in the instances where I'm forced to use Windows for whatever reason, I've got the shell replaced so I don't have a desktop. I use Litestep, which allows me to do what I need. And the funny thing is, I can perform tasks much faster than those people who "get" the "Desktop".
I use Winamp on XP for my listening, I use Nero to burn with, and I actually...*gasp*...sort out my downloaded files into a directory on a second partition that exists just for multimedia. This means I lose some integration with the OS because I'm not using "My Music", but I can live with that. What I gain by actively controlling where my files are located is that I can find them quickly without being tied into a particular program interface.
I used my roommate's iTunes a while back to set up a playlist for a party or some such bullshit, and I ended up fighting that interface more than I ever thought possible, just because I wasn't familiar with it. Once I got the basics down, it was pretty intuitive after that, but I couldn't imagine what would happen if they changed the interface and I had to learn it all over again. I'd rather just learn the interface changes between winamp, say, and leave Nero alone than have to learn them both at once because the software changed.
I don't have the numbers immediately at hand, but I would think that the numbers don't support it. They don't have enough users that want 64-bit support to offset the man-hour costs of porting to 64-bit.
It's really not that complicated. The pencil pushers probably killed it straight from the beginning.
Or, perhaps, because he's just posting a message to/., he doesn't give a rat's ass about whether or not a search engine can recognize it, because it's just a quick little blurb and he's not designing a fucking website? Or perhaps this is one of the few places he posts to that actually supports direct HTML coding in the message, and he does it the other way out of habit so he doesn't try posting HTML somewhere else?
Oh, and on the subject of "elitism": Pot, this is kettle. You're black.
Re:Mythbusters is a joke (probably OT)
on
Archimedes Death Ray
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· Score: 5, Informative
I can only assume you were misinformed or made the wrong assumption about the show. Perhaps you are missing out on what Mythbusters is about. It's this funny little thing called "entertainment".
It is not an "Educational" program. It's about 2 guys who used to do FX work for Hollywood using their skills with "getting close" to the right thing trying to see if they can replicate urban legends.
The funny thing is, you probably missed the episodes where they revisit old myths they worked on. If the show receives enough requests from the audience or they decide they didn't do something justice, they give it another go. They did the "chicken gun" myth a couple times because they kept doubting their setup. I didn't get to catch the final conclusion, but I would say that by the time they were done, they had tried everything available to them to see what would happen.
Other examples of where they've done things incredibly right include hanging a pig carcass from a hook on a pivot and shooting it with various guns to prove that no, taking a gunshot does not make you fly back and do cartwheels, and using a ballistics gel dummy (with a pig backbone to simulate the human one) to determine if you could be injured by a ceiling fan (even the high-powered ones didn't do much until they sharpened the blades).
Yes, most people who have shot guns would understand that Hollywood fakes it, but for the average Joe who just watches movies and TV, with no physics background, it was probably something neat to see.
Yes, they blow stuff up. They put a crash test dummy through hell. Yes, they keep fuck-ups on the film, because that makes the show more approachable to the target audience- it isn't a dry, we-just-provide-the-facts-ma'am-only-the-facts show. It is supposed to feel like you and you buddies could be right there with them. You know what, though? It's entertaining. And for a channel that brings us 5 variations on "hey, we're going to destroy a room in your house by letting a half-assed decorator come in and ruin your happiness", it's a damn good show.
Many of their conclusions are valid. They've shown that pissing on the "live" rail of a 3-rail train system will not shock you (urine stream is too fragmented by the time it hits the rail for electricity to travel), exactly how many bug bombs you would have to set off in a room with an ignition source before the gas was concentrated enough to explode, and that you cannot get sucked into the intake on one of those firefighting helicopters while wearing scuba gear, only to be dumped into the fire and die.
Slashdot Mirror
I dunno about anybody else, but I play a game for fun, and to escape reality. Also, balance is very important, or most of your player-base will end up leaving the game. Random spawns are also much less realistic than you think. How would a creature of any type end up as strong as a level 60 when surrounded by weak creatures? Think about it- the entire concept of a powerful creature in a fictional world (dragon, lich, whatever you creature may be) is that they have an area that people shy away from. They don't just hang out on the streetcorner, waiting to accost passers-by.
I'm all for randomly generated content, just not random worlds. In fact, I wish the instances in WoW were more like the dungeons of Diablo or the terrain of Diablo II- It's not as much fun when you know exactly where the mob you need to kill is. But as for having a completely random world? Well, once you've generated it, you really can't change it on the fly, so why not just design it to be what you wanted in the fist place? Changing the fabric of the world while people are playing just seems like a bad idea.
Really, random content is where instances could truly shine- once they get a method of generating a decent looking instance in a random manner.
On a different note, you said:
Hell, no. This is the kind of thing that pissed me off as a D&D gamer, and would continue to piss me off in a MMO game, in which I create my character's story- not the developers. They provide me a world. I provide my story.I've had Windows Storage Server 2k3 give me some tremendous problems that I'm still trying to track the cause of down.
A client purchased a NAS with Storage Server on it, threw all of their Clarion apps and data on it, as well as all of their Office data (Spreasheets, documents, etc.)
Long story short, a process that ran on an old- Pentium 3- Novell box in 20 minutes was now taking an hour and a half. A two hour data maintenance app was running in...8 hours.
Moved all the data to shared folders on one of the redundant Domain controllers with similar hardware, and it runs faster than the old Novell stuff now.
"[They] first came for the communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't Jewish.
Then they came for the trade unionist,and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant,
Then they came for the homosexuals, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a homosexual,
Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak for me."
--Rev. Martin Niemoeller, German Lutheran Pastor
"I've done nothing wrong, so I have nothing to hide" is the same thing as what Neimoeller was saying. When will people learn that they have to stand up to help each other if they expect anyone to care about them?
Thank you. Nobody seems to realize that you can go to your local emporium de computers and pick up a $350 system that comes with XP Home. Try building a system with XP Home for that price, and see how well it works once you pay for the stand-alone license for XP Home. Just had someone I was helping do that- he spent $199US on XP Home (Non-upgrade). You want XP Pro? It's gonna cost more, yes, and you'll probably pay enough to offset some of that OEM savings- but not if the system is sold with XP Pro by default.
OEM discounts are bringing a LOT of people into the market, because they can afford these entry-level PCs. Many of them even come with 60-day "trials" of Office- sometimes with reduced pricing for "buying" the full version.
People see the PC more and more as an appliance- and are looking at paying appliance prices for something that just works. Not something that they have to build or maintain. They don't want you to put it together for them- they want to plop down the piece of plastic, walk out with a couple boxes, struggle a minute with the cables and connecting periphials (kinda like hookin up a VCR or DVD player, right?) and then sit down to use it. The gratification of a purchase that they can use is a hard thing to compete with, espcially for those that do not have the desire or inclination to tinker with a running system.
I see more systems on a weekly basis where people are limping along running Windows 9x, or even **shudder** ME, because their system works. Sure, it isn't fast, but they don't want that. It's got problems, but most of those are like a pair of shoes that have been worn a lot- they're familiar things that just aren't what they used to be.
They want something that they can power on, do whatever, shut down, and not think about- and for them, that's Windows. Something goes wrong? Well, they've got the restore discs, or they pay someone like me to fix it. The only things they care about are:
A) Ease of use. Which means, most likely, password-less logins, if they even see a login screen at all. A web browser that works for what they want it to do- which means no Firefox, because it breaks all of the horribly designed pages that they frequent (Anyone notice you get a "Document contains no data" trying to register a Yahoo! Mail account?) and explaining this to them means nothing. It also means regular MS Office if they need that functionality, because that's what the night class they took used, and it's all they know, and "Don't bother showing me that one, I'll stick with Word, thanks."
and B) Who can fix it? Well, in the case of pre-built PCs, they've got all kinds of options, ranging from the local geek to the store they bought it from to the company that made it in the first place. A system you built for them? Well, what happens if you aren't around to fix it? Or can't?
Face it, until you start seeing systems with other OSes from big-name manufacturers (Dell, HP, Sony) in BB or CrapUSA, or whatever your local jerk-you-around electronics retail outlet is, the public isn't going to want to bother with it- they "don't need that fancy stuff, I just need my e-mail and my {website of choice}." You cannot convince them otherwise, because they don't see it anywhere but where us nerds talk about it- and then what do they see? "Players hacked an XBox to run Linux"?? Hack has a bad connotation to them- they don't understand the difference between hacking and cracking. "Linux involved in IP dispute with SCO"?? "Linux user gets around DRM on copy-protected disc, earns X years in jail for violating DMCA"?
The media knows who pays it for advertising, and it sure isn't open source OSes.
Because 94.53% (Pulled from OutOfMyAss.com) of the people on MMORPG forums are people who are obsessed with seeing their words on the forum and bitch no matter what happens. For every person they make happy, they piss off someone else.
The people who are happy won't be on the forums bitching, so it skews the numbers: if 123/150 people on a forum, say, are complaining, that looks bad. If 123/12348 people that are actually playing the game are complaining, that's not horrendous. It's not great, but it's not horrible, especially in an environment where people seem to feel the need to "be the best" instead of just enjoying a damn game.
Add all this up with the entitlement that many MMORPG players feel they deserve, and you get a bunch of people bitching about everything, tying up the reps time, and making getting anything accomplished that much more difficult.
After a few seconds, I got a white background to appear. Perhaps a little patience is in order?
That wouldn't stop it from happening at home. Which I think is what the GP was referring to- not them loading it at work, but at home. Odds are good that someone in one of those fields has been infected at home.
Just a question, here...
How the hell do you expect us to design a desktop when users can't agree on what good design consists of?
Winter, for Jedi, and Luke!
You don't perchance work for Sony, do you?
That aside, anything that hooks into the internals of an OS without my clear and informed authorization is a problem.
you've got a piece of code in your computer that only gives Sony access. nobody else.
Please tell me you don't really believe that. Considering how many of MS's products have opened backdoors for people, you're going to trust Sony to "do it better" and leave this software completely secure? It might not suddenly allow crackers "on some IRC network" to get in, but it sure opens up a lucrative bit of research for them- finding the security holes in a DRM rootkit that people don't even know is installed.
Imagine the trouble in fixing that with a patch.
It's the equivalent to the look of "gods, you're stupid." If you're referring to this:
...
[winprogger] lol
[winprogger]
[winprogger] ok
It translates as:
Winprogger laughs, then realizes the guy isn't joking. Gives the slight raised eyebrow, eye-rolled up look of "You're joking, right? Oh god he's not. Where the fuck is the chlorine for the gene pool?" Winprogger says "okay", as a way of saying "this isn't worth my time to argue."
Yes, it's asshole-ish. A lot of people are assholes. Welcome to life. If you have a complaint, take a number. We're currently seeing number 2 still, but there are only 441 231 452 249 321 complaints ahead of yours.
It's also a sad day when some people have no sense of humor. Bet you don't enjoy the Aristocrats joke, either.
I go to the store for a lot of things. Groceries, clothes- hell, I drive by it for work on a daily basis. I've told store employees that they can follow me if they think I'm shoplifting, as long as they shut the hell up and don't talk to me. I can walk in, grab what I'm looking for, and be checked-out in probably 10 minutes, tops.
If you want to be anti-social, fine, but that doesn't change the fact that the "hassle" of buying it is just a convenient excuse for most.
What I want to know, and the article doesn't say, is whether he was a "distributer" or whether he was just an unlucky sharer that was downloading a movie and got nabbed. If he was seeding the torrent, whatever -- he deserved it, I'd think that it would be "scarier" if he was just a user downloading/uploading by using the seeded torrent.
Note: I'm going to be using "you" to mean "people in general", not "you in particular".
Now, I'm not familiar with Chinese copyright law as it stands, but I have a feeling he's guilty either way. If you want to glamorize this and call it "civil disobedience", then be ready to go down for your actions. If not, just admit that as the law stands now, regardless of whether that is morally right or wrong, the action is illegal, and that he is being punished for what he did.
I'm more likely to laugh at every person- downloading, uploading, sharing, seeding, whatever- that gets caught and whines about "their rights" than I am to feel sorry for any of them.
No, I do not buy movies or CDs often- a few here and there, and most likely at a band's show for a CD- but I also don't bother downloading a bunch of stuff and then whining that I got caught. You seem to be in a similar boat to me. If you enjoy it, you buy it when it gets cheaper. Save yourself the money and the hassle of downloading.
And if all of it sucks so much, why do people want it in the first place?
For one, it's "shaman".
And for another, if you are on the right server, the horde are so outnumbered that they can barely move without getting slaughtered. While you're at it, Pally's aren't overpowered? They're damn near invincible one-on-one, and they don't do two bad when slightly outnumbered either.
It all depends on the player.
Shit. I hate when I forget to switch to plain text when I post. Sorry about that. It should be this:
I don't think you understand his argument. The simple rules of chess are only part of the equation, that amounts to reducing the number of options on any one given turn. Another portion of the equation is the existing "strategy base" available. Go, for instance, has a tremendous number of strategies- much more so than chess. Chess has a decent number of strategies, but in the end it's all about being able to "pick" the right move to match a current situation.
Also, the ability to generate a "look-ahead" for a given move is incredibly important in AI. Let's say that, for instance, we want to us a capture as the end goal for any given move of chess (this sets the "value" of the move to 1.000. Moves without captures start at 0.000). If it takes 20ms to determine if a move results in a capture directly, we can look at 500 moves in one second to determine what moves would give us a score of 1.000. Also, for this example, there are only 4 moves available (restricting our problem set to make the example easier). There is one move that results in a direct capture, but we looked at all 4 first (80ms has passed).
Now, we look at the positioning of all the pieces on the board after that move, calculate moves for the opponent, determine what is a move with as close to a 1.000 as possible, we determine what possible responses are, and before you know it, we've determined that taking that piece will likely result in putting our king in check. If you add complexity to the rules, all that checking takes longer. For a turn-based game like chess, that might not be so bad (waiting 10 to 20 seconds for your opponent to move isn't a big deal), but imagine it in any "real-time" game:
You fire at your opponents light infantry with your machine gun turret. Twenty seconds later, the infantry starts to move towards the treeline, away from the turret, but it's too late. There were too many options for the AI to accurately predict the result of an action.
Once you start adding in "memory" of the results of certain actions (a chess AI that learns that in certain situations, sacrificing a Queen for a lesser piece can be a good thing, for example) and checking the action against this "memory" also adds complexity.
To get back to Go: Simple rules, yes, but the strategy base is so much more complex that it more than makes up for the simple rules in making the game itself incredibly complex to play.
I don't think you understand his argument. The simple rules of chess are only part of the equation, that amounts to reducing the number of options on any one given turn. Another portion of the equation is the existing "strategy base" available. Go, for instance, has a tremendous number of strategies- much more so than chess. Chess has a decent number of strategies, but in the end it's all about being able to "pick" the right move to match a current situation. Also, the ability to generate a "look-ahead" for a given move is incredibly important in AI. Let's say that, for instance, we want to us a capture as the end goal for any given move of chess (this sets the "value" of the move to 1.000. Moves without captures start at 0.000). If it takes 20ms to determine if a move results in a capture directly, we can look at 500 moves in one second to determine what moves would give us a score of 1.000. Also, for this example, there are only 4 moves available (restricting our problem set to make the example easier). There is one move that results in a direct capture, but we looked at all 4 first (80ms has passed). Now, we look at the positioning of all the pieces on the board after that move, calculate moves for the opponent, determine what is a move with as close to a 1.000 as possible, we determine what possible responses are, and before you know it, we've determined that taking that piece will likely result in putting our king in check. If you add complexity to the rules, all that checking takes longer. For a turn-based game like chess, that might not be so bad (waiting 10 to 20 seconds for your opponent to move isn't a big deal), but imagine it in any "real-time" game. You fire at your opponents light infantry with your machine gun turret. Twenty seconds later, the infantry starts to move towards the treeline, away from the turret, but it's too late. There were too many options for the AI to accurately predict the result of an action. Once you start adding in "memory" of the results of certain actions (a chess AI that learns that in certain situations, sacrificing a Queen for a lesser piece can be a good thing, for example) and checking the action against this "memory" also adds complexity. To get back to Go: Simple rules, yes, but the strategy base is so much more complex that it more than makes up for the simple rules in making the game itself incredibly complex to play.
I'm assuming that's just a registry hack then. Anyone know what key it is?
I use Winamp on XP for my listening, I use Nero to burn with, and I actually...*gasp*...sort out my downloaded files into a directory on a second partition that exists just for multimedia. This means I lose some integration with the OS because I'm not using "My Music", but I can live with that. What I gain by actively controlling where my files are located is that I can find them quickly without being tied into a particular program interface.
I used my roommate's iTunes a while back to set up a playlist for a party or some such bullshit, and I ended up fighting that interface more than I ever thought possible, just because I wasn't familiar with it. Once I got the basics down, it was pretty intuitive after that, but I couldn't imagine what would happen if they changed the interface and I had to learn it all over again. I'd rather just learn the interface changes between winamp, say, and leave Nero alone than have to learn them both at once because the software changed.
Ummmm... because they don't care?
I don't have the numbers immediately at hand, but I would think that the numbers don't support it. They don't have enough users that want 64-bit support to offset the man-hour costs of porting to 64-bit.
It's really not that complicated. The pencil pushers probably killed it straight from the beginning.
Components... American components, Russian Components, ALL MADE IN TAIWAN!
Re-wrote your firewall ruleset? Even for a beta, there is no excuse for that.
What about patching? Does it re-write the ruleset every time you apply a patch?
Or, perhaps, because he's just posting a message to /., he doesn't give a rat's ass about whether or not a search engine can recognize it, because it's just a quick little blurb and he's not designing a fucking website? Or perhaps this is one of the few places he posts to that actually supports direct HTML coding in the message, and he does it the other way out of habit so he doesn't try posting HTML somewhere else?
Oh, and on the subject of "elitism": Pot, this is kettle. You're black.
Don't you mean on their homepage?
I can only assume you were misinformed or made the wrong assumption about the show. Perhaps you are missing out on what Mythbusters is about. It's this funny little thing called "entertainment".
It is not an "Educational" program. It's about 2 guys who used to do FX work for Hollywood using their skills with "getting close" to the right thing trying to see if they can replicate urban legends.
The funny thing is, you probably missed the episodes where they revisit old myths they worked on. If the show receives enough requests from the audience or they decide they didn't do something justice, they give it another go. They did the "chicken gun" myth a couple times because they kept doubting their setup. I didn't get to catch the final conclusion, but I would say that by the time they were done, they had tried everything available to them to see what would happen.
Other examples of where they've done things incredibly right include hanging a pig carcass from a hook on a pivot and shooting it with various guns to prove that no, taking a gunshot does not make you fly back and do cartwheels, and using a ballistics gel dummy (with a pig backbone to simulate the human one) to determine if you could be injured by a ceiling fan (even the high-powered ones didn't do much until they sharpened the blades).
Yes, most people who have shot guns would understand that Hollywood fakes it, but for the average Joe who just watches movies and TV, with no physics background, it was probably something neat to see.
Yes, they blow stuff up. They put a crash test dummy through hell. Yes, they keep fuck-ups on the film, because that makes the show more approachable to the target audience- it isn't a dry, we-just-provide-the-facts-ma'am-only-the-facts show. It is supposed to feel like you and you buddies could be right there with them. You know what, though? It's entertaining. And for a channel that brings us 5 variations on "hey, we're going to destroy a room in your house by letting a half-assed decorator come in and ruin your happiness", it's a damn good show.
Many of their conclusions are valid. They've shown that pissing on the "live" rail of a 3-rail train system will not shock you (urine stream is too fragmented by the time it hits the rail for electricity to travel), exactly how many bug bombs you would have to set off in a room with an ignition source before the gas was concentrated enough to explode, and that you cannot get sucked into the intake on one of those firefighting helicopters while wearing scuba gear, only to be dumped into the fire and die.