That is really bizarre. All they need to do is close one div tag to get a valid page but they haven't done it? That's really weird. Of course, for a long time/. was famous for blocking all attempts to load the page into validator.w3.org at all, so it's nice that they've at least stopped blocking it.
The entire basis for X is not correct. Therefore anything based on that is false and immediately suspect.
That's poor science. The entire basis for the caloric theory of heat is not correct, but we still use the Carnot engine today. Likewise, Newton's theory is not ultimately correct but is useful for approximations. Having a correct underlying theory is not a requirement for science. What is a requirement is usable results. Nothing else. If Feng Shui were tested and gave reliable results, that's all that would matter. Now, I don't believe such tests have been made, and in all likelihood Feng Shui is just a way of taking extra money away from the rich and gullible, but just having a poor basis ultimately is no reason to deny that something can be used pragmatically.
I lived in Japan for two years. I wouldn't mind going back. The stuff about Japan being "crazy" and wacky is crap caused by people believing what they see on TV/YouTube, but Japan is fun, at least if you don't have much responsibility (Ie. You're not Japanese yourself).
Number two on the list is maybe New Zealand. It seems to have a good nature vibe going. (Plus the people speaking English is sometimes nice.)
Radiowaves are big and they go through just about everything. It would look like a bunch of stuff made out of glass with varying degrees of transparency. Metal things would be darker glass, but anything less than one wavelength in size would be fuzzy and impossible to focus on anyway. In the distance, you would see a bunch of different colored lights flashing where ever there's a radio tower or cellphone. (Each different station would be a different color.) At night, you can see flashes in the sky where distant HAM radio stations bounce off the ionosphere. All your household electronics would glow the faintly in the same 60 Hz color, and you could probably make out all your wiring just sitting in one room and looking around, if it weren't for the fact that it all blurs up due to the size of the wavelength.
You're misusing the term "heat death." Heat death does not refer to the destruction of the earth by the sun, it refers to there no longer being useable energy in the universe due to the continued process of entropy. The death of the sun will of course happen long, long, long before the universe becomes so entropic that everything is homogenous and no meaningful sources of energy will be left. The death of the sun is potentially escapable, either by pulling the earth out of the way or (more practically) colonizing other stars. The heat death of the universe however is, as far as we currently know, inescapable.
Hmm, is that so? It sure feels like there are more DS games, or at least it felt that way when I was living in Japan (until this August). Of course, that might explain why the DS is doing incredibly well in Japan and only pretty well in the States: Japanese developers released a bunch of junky DS games (-> big hardware sales) but didn't bother to translate them for the US market (-> medium hardware sales).
If a console has the highest number of exclusive titles, but 90% of them suck, then it doesn't matter.
Um, Playstation much? I mean, I know 1996 was a looong time ago, but to remember how crappy 90% of PS1 games were compared to N64 games, you don't have to think back that far, you can just go to the games section of any pawn shop or thrift store and see rack after rack of games that quite obviously suck so hard you wonder how on earth they were ever produced.
The fact is that in every generation, the machine with the most games wins, period. So near as I can tell, it does not matter much if those games are good or bad. Look at the Game Boy: it bested competitor after competitor on the strength of its library and its battery life, vastly inferior graphics be damned. Similarly, the DS is beating the PSP not just because it has a crazy stylus, but also because the PSP has very few games.
If you want to predict the sales of a console, what matters most is the number of games published for it, nothing else.
Historically, as soon as an area created a culture or civilization worth talking about a great religion sprang up and encouraged the smartest people to become celibate monks or priests. In the West, the Christians told smart people to become priests and monks and fornicate not, and likewise in the East, India was (and still is) covered in celibate holymen of various stripes. Nevertheless, no one would argue that the Europe, India, and China are any dumber than the other areas of the earth where these kinds of practices didn't exist in the past. I think the whole issue is overblown.
Man, I used to watch all those demo videos that came on the Windows 95 CD over and over back when it came out, but it wasn't until I saw it again just now that I noticed something: in the last scene when it says welcome to Windows 95 and has the new-fangled Start button under it to demonstrate the big new idea of the OS, it's a black cursor that comes out to click it! That's right, it's a black cursor, not a white one, so that means the animator must have been thinking about Macs in his head!
Ah yes, but just wait, when you finally get it, your Wii will turn out to be haunted by giant crabs from historical Japan which you can hit the weak point of for massive damage. Spooooooky.
(I was number 21 of 21 Wiis at my store. My lucky day?)
Thank you! I wish I hadn't used my last mod point this afternoon. I don't know how someone can get to +5 for saying something that anyone with a 9 year memory span can easily contract: Windows 95 didn't come with any web browser, let alone IE freaking 3! To get the first IE, you had to buy the "Plus!" pack. IE 2 was released shortly thereafter. IE 3 was the first decent version of IE and came significantly after Windows 95.
This should all be "no, duh" material, but it looks like you're the only other person aware of it...
Every stoned high school student thinks of a distorted version of the cave analogy because Plato put it into the common stream of Western thought. These kids aren't making it up out the air, they're taking it from the numerous books, movies, TV shows, and other stories that already have the premise of the cave in the back of them when they're made. That said, none of those kids does as good a job of thinking through the consequences of the cave as Plato did, even though Plato came many thousands of years earlier. What's interesting about Gamer Theory is that it's going all the way back to source in order to get its project off on a solid footing.
Game theory is still new, but it's an exciting field. I think they have yet to have their breakout text that puts them on the mainstream academic map, but it's still worth looking at the opening page of "Gam3r 7h30ry":
Suppose there is a business in your neighborhood called The Cave(TM). It offers, for an hourly fee, access to game consoles in a darkened room. Suppose it is part of a chain. The consoles form a local area network, and also link to other such networks elsewhere in the chain. Suppose you are a gamer in The Cave(TM). You test your skills against other gamers. You have played in The Cave(TM) since childhood. Your eyes see only the monitor before you. Your ears hear only through the headphones that encase them. Your hands clutch only the controller with which you blast away at the digital figures who shoot back at you on the screen. Here gamers see the images and hear the sounds and say to each other: "Why, these images are just shadows! These sounds are just echoes! The real world is out there somewhere." The existence of another, more real world of which The Cave(TM) provides mere copies is assumed, but nobody thinks much of it. Yours is the wisdom of Playstation: Live in your world, play in ours.
That's pretty much genius right there. In one stroke, he connected the classic metaphor in the central text of Western thought (the cave in Plato's Republic) to the actual lives of millions of people around the world today. In other words, he showed that what was a philosophical thought experiment is now a concrete reality. My only beef with the text is that I didn't write it...
That said, there's still a lot of work to do to make gaming theory into a solid discipline. Gameology is a good site to go to watch that process in action. What I find most exciting about the potential for the discipline is that gaming makes the process of creating new worlds concrete and observable, which allows us to gain better insight into exactly what happens when we interact with a) the real world b) other mental abstractions.
Famitsu is live blogging it. It's going for ¥25,000 on Dec. 2, over there. I want to doubt it, but it looks like the Seatle/NYTimes article is accurate.
If they switch a Slashdot style system, all you have to do to get mod value is to start your edit with, "Now, I know I'm going to get modded down for this, but..." then continue on to whatever it is you're trying to push. Just mentioning the damage you're doing to your karma is pretty much guaranteed to give you a 5 around here.
Of course, this post is probably going to shoot my karma to hell though.
According to some preliminaryresearch by Aaron Swartz about who write Wikipedia, while it's true that most of the editing is done by regulars of the sort who would have karma, most of the original content is added by people with few other contributions to Wikipedia. The regulars just go back and put everything into Wiki format, add tags, make things follow style guides, etc. Since the real work is done by anonymous people who may never come back to the site, it's important to keep the process as open as possible for people who are still new to Wikipedia.
According to the website of the old CoverFlow.app, they did in fact sell their software to Apple, and that's what's being used in iTunes 7. Good for them. I bet they're glad they didn't end up like Watson or, to a less extent, Konfabulator (though they did manage to get bought out by Yahoo!).
Is this actually a debate? If we think about the definition of a debate, we expect to have two sides making reasoned arguments about a common topic. "Are video games art?" produces two sides that define art how they feel, then point out that under their definition it obviously is/isn't art. Since this activity cannot be classified as reasoned and furthermore the two sides aren't even discussing a common topic since they don't agree on the meaning of the term art, it's safe to say that "Are video games art?" is not a debate at all in the true sense of the word.
That's only because ebay has no serious competition in the States. If it did, they'd cut fees back to costs (or lower, to starve the competition). The problem is that ebay is a kind of natural monopoly, since it's only worth listing your auction where people will find it.
Slashdot Mirror
"The only intuitive interface is the nipple. After that it's all learned." Anon
That is really bizarre. All they need to do is close one div tag to get a valid page but they haven't done it? That's really weird. Of course, for a long time /. was famous for blocking all attempts to load the page into validator.w3.org at all, so it's nice that they've at least stopped blocking it.
That's poor science. The entire basis for the caloric theory of heat is not correct, but we still use the Carnot engine today. Likewise, Newton's theory is not ultimately correct but is useful for approximations. Having a correct underlying theory is not a requirement for science. What is a requirement is usable results. Nothing else. If Feng Shui were tested and gave reliable results, that's all that would matter. Now, I don't believe such tests have been made, and in all likelihood Feng Shui is just a way of taking extra money away from the rich and gullible, but just having a poor basis ultimately is no reason to deny that something can be used pragmatically.
Cute girl... Shame she's a robot.
I lived in Japan for two years. I wouldn't mind going back. The stuff about Japan being "crazy" and wacky is crap caused by people believing what they see on TV/YouTube, but Japan is fun, at least if you don't have much responsibility (Ie. You're not Japanese yourself).
Number two on the list is maybe New Zealand. It seems to have a good nature vibe going. (Plus the people speaking English is sometimes nice.)
Radiowaves are big and they go through just about everything. It would look like a bunch of stuff made out of glass with varying degrees of transparency. Metal things would be darker glass, but anything less than one wavelength in size would be fuzzy and impossible to focus on anyway. In the distance, you would see a bunch of different colored lights flashing where ever there's a radio tower or cellphone. (Each different station would be a different color.) At night, you can see flashes in the sky where distant HAM radio stations bounce off the ionosphere. All your household electronics would glow the faintly in the same 60 Hz color, and you could probably make out all your wiring just sitting in one room and looking around, if it weren't for the fact that it all blurs up due to the size of the wavelength.
You're misusing the term "heat death." Heat death does not refer to the destruction of the earth by the sun, it refers to there no longer being useable energy in the universe due to the continued process of entropy. The death of the sun will of course happen long, long, long before the universe becomes so entropic that everything is homogenous and no meaningful sources of energy will be left. The death of the sun is potentially escapable, either by pulling the earth out of the way or (more practically) colonizing other stars. The heat death of the universe however is, as far as we currently know, inescapable.
For a dramatized explanation of this distinction please see Asimov's The Last Question.
Hmm, is that so? It sure feels like there are more DS games, or at least it felt that way when I was living in Japan (until this August). Of course, that might explain why the DS is doing incredibly well in Japan and only pretty well in the States: Japanese developers released a bunch of junky DS games (-> big hardware sales) but didn't bother to translate them for the US market (-> medium hardware sales).
My big complaint is people in herpes commercials are always going on dates!!
There are two possible conclusions from this:
1.) Be careful who you date.
2.) Tired of being single? Get herpes, then you can finally start taking longs walks on the beach!
If a console has the highest number of exclusive titles, but 90% of them suck, then it doesn't matter.
Um, Playstation much? I mean, I know 1996 was a looong time ago, but to remember how crappy 90% of PS1 games were compared to N64 games, you don't have to think back that far, you can just go to the games section of any pawn shop or thrift store and see rack after rack of games that quite obviously suck so hard you wonder how on earth they were ever produced.
The fact is that in every generation, the machine with the most games wins, period. So near as I can tell, it does not matter much if those games are good or bad. Look at the Game Boy: it bested competitor after competitor on the strength of its library and its battery life, vastly inferior graphics be damned. Similarly, the DS is beating the PSP not just because it has a crazy stylus, but also because the PSP has very few games.
If you want to predict the sales of a console, what matters most is the number of games published for it, nothing else.
Historically, as soon as an area created a culture or civilization worth talking about a great religion sprang up and encouraged the smartest people to become celibate monks or priests. In the West, the Christians told smart people to become priests and monks and fornicate not, and likewise in the East, India was (and still is) covered in celibate holymen of various stripes. Nevertheless, no one would argue that the Europe, India, and China are any dumber than the other areas of the earth where these kinds of practices didn't exist in the past. I think the whole issue is overblown.
Man, I used to watch all those demo videos that came on the Windows 95 CD over and over back when it came out, but it wasn't until I saw it again just now that I noticed something: in the last scene when it says welcome to Windows 95 and has the new-fangled Start button under it to demonstrate the big new idea of the OS, it's a black cursor that comes out to click it! That's right, it's a black cursor, not a white one, so that means the animator must have been thinking about Macs in his head!
Oh the ironing!
Ah yes, but just wait, when you finally get it, your Wii will turn out to be haunted by giant crabs from historical Japan which you can hit the weak point of for massive damage. Spooooooky.
(I was number 21 of 21 Wiis at my store. My lucky day?)
Thank you! I wish I hadn't used my last mod point this afternoon. I don't know how someone can get to +5 for saying something that anyone with a 9 year memory span can easily contract: Windows 95 didn't come with any web browser, let alone IE freaking 3! To get the first IE, you had to buy the "Plus!" pack. IE 2 was released shortly thereafter. IE 3 was the first decent version of IE and came significantly after Windows 95.
This should all be "no, duh" material, but it looks like you're the only other person aware of it...
Well played.
Every stoned high school student thinks of a distorted version of the cave analogy because Plato put it into the common stream of Western thought. These kids aren't making it up out the air, they're taking it from the numerous books, movies, TV shows, and other stories that already have the premise of the cave in the back of them when they're made. That said, none of those kids does as good a job of thinking through the consequences of the cave as Plato did, even though Plato came many thousands of years earlier. What's interesting about Gamer Theory is that it's going all the way back to source in order to get its project off on a solid footing.
That's pretty much genius right there. In one stroke, he connected the classic metaphor in the central text of Western thought (the cave in Plato's Republic) to the actual lives of millions of people around the world today. In other words, he showed that what was a philosophical thought experiment is now a concrete reality. My only beef with the text is that I didn't write it...
That said, there's still a lot of work to do to make gaming theory into a solid discipline. Gameology is a good site to go to watch that process in action. What I find most exciting about the potential for the discipline is that gaming makes the process of creating new worlds concrete and observable, which allows us to gain better insight into exactly what happens when we interact with a) the real world b) other mental abstractions.
*Shakes his head*
"Another victim of Reggie's penchant for kicking ass and taking names."
Famitsu is live blogging it. It's going for ¥25,000 on Dec. 2, over there. I want to doubt it, but it looks like the Seatle/NYTimes article is accurate.
If they switch a Slashdot style system, all you have to do to get mod value is to start your edit with, "Now, I know I'm going to get modded down for this, but..." then continue on to whatever it is you're trying to push. Just mentioning the damage you're doing to your karma is pretty much guaranteed to give you a 5 around here.
Of course, this post is probably going to shoot my karma to hell though.
According to some preliminary research by Aaron Swartz about who write Wikipedia, while it's true that most of the editing is done by regulars of the sort who would have karma, most of the original content is added by people with few other contributions to Wikipedia. The regulars just go back and put everything into Wiki format, add tags, make things follow style guides, etc. Since the real work is done by anonymous people who may never come back to the site, it's important to keep the process as open as possible for people who are still new to Wikipedia.
According to the website of the old CoverFlow.app, they did in fact sell their software to Apple, and that's what's being used in iTunes 7. Good for them. I bet they're glad they didn't end up like Watson or, to a less extent, Konfabulator (though they did manage to get bought out by Yahoo!).
Yay, you're back.
Is this actually a debate? If we think about the definition of a debate, we expect to have two sides making reasoned arguments about a common topic. "Are video games art?" produces two sides that define art how they feel, then point out that under their definition it obviously is/isn't art. Since this activity cannot be classified as reasoned and furthermore the two sides aren't even discussing a common topic since they don't agree on the meaning of the term art, it's safe to say that "Are video games art?" is not a debate at all in the true sense of the word.
That's only because ebay has no serious competition in the States. If it did, they'd cut fees back to costs (or lower, to starve the competition). The problem is that ebay is a kind of natural monopoly, since it's only worth listing your auction where people will find it.