Today we build open data portals not because we have a data or public policy literate citizenry, we build them so that citizens may become literate in data, visualization, coding and public policy.
Good luck with that, because the painful truth is that the average pop-media-junky, marketing-spoon-fed citizen is resistant to learning as a general course. I've known so many people - adults, mind you - who honestly believe they simply can't learn new things, especially things of any sort of technical nature, be it computer-related, math-related, or what have you. It makes me sad, but there it is.
Funny thing though, I'm not traveling at the speed of light, so for me the events are not concurrent. Nor, I suspect, are the scientists monitoring Betalgeuse traveling at relativistic speeds. In fact, our reference frames are much more similar to that of Betalgeuse than a photon. But g'head and call me a pedant if it keeps your world from flying apart.
It's like paying for an all you can eat buffet, then taking wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of food out to your car so you can "enjoy it whenever you feel like it". Well done.
I'm sure that somewhere there's an award for Stupidest Analogy Ever.
That sounds a bit ambiguous. Do you mean the original game author released it as PD, or the remake authors? If the former, then the original author can go jump off a cliff. If the latter, then that makes a whole lot more sense.
You emphasized the wrong bits, and therefore seem to have missed the point. Here, allow me...
The authors released the code and graphics as public domain, but the whole game (including SFX) was redistributed without legal permission.
Then the game design / UI is broken. A well designed game wouldn't even _need_ those plugins in the first place.
Devs can't anticipate every conceivable UI tweak that might be desired by various players. Getting into the millions, it's a guarantee there'll be disagreement. There's simply no way the default setup will please everyone, no matter how well-crafted and intuitive it is. Allowing customization is the best way to make everyone happy, or at least as happy as they can be within reason.
It to me even seems to be a bit of blaming the victim for the disease.
Blaming the victim? Well let's see here... To use a much more obvious and practical example, if someone fails to take care of their teeth, and said teeth proceed to rot out of their sockets, is it the "victim's" fault? Yes! Someone sits on their ass and eats junk food for years on end and winds up morbidly obese and possibly acquires heart conditions as a result, should we "blame the victim"? Yes!
Not saying I'm convinced of GP's speculations about mental health affecting cancer onset, but yes, people's actions and behaviors drastically affect their own health and yes, in some cases, it is their own fault.
So let's suppose for the sake of argument that in time research shows a definite causal link between cancer and mental state. That would not be "blaming the victim", it'd be simple cause and effect. Obviously this would be much less obvious an effect than the more commonly known results of not taking care of one's teeth, or not getting proper exercise and eating all the wrong foods, but once the information is known, it'd be up to the individual to do something about the problem as a form of prevention.
For by riding my bicycle, I am now one of the elitist jerks, the holier-than-thou and more self-righteous than the car or bus-bound commuters around me. There, fixed that for ya.:)
If we are allowed to assume that all people are rational actors, then no one would rob him.
Therein lies the principal flaw with your proposal. If you need it explained to you further, then you Just Don't Get It... and you're part of the problem.
...not withstanding, let's look at this from a somewhat calmer perspective. If I'm accused of a crime I didn't commit, and the FBI etc. have access to extensive biometric data beyond mere fingerprints, that info will only solidify my defense all the more. No one set of identifying data is foolproof, but the more convergent sets you have, the greater the likelihood of making a confirming positive (or negative) identification.
Also, the more data investigators have available to compare to mine in my hypothetical example, the less likelihood I'll even have charges brought against me to begin with; they'll know it wasn't me even before it gets to that point, and I'm one more suspect scratched off their list. Frankly, the prospect of NOT having my name dragged through the mud in a jury trial to prove my innocence (which can itself easily ruin lives) is more important to me personally than being "invisible" to the FBI by not being in their database at all. YMMV of course, and reasonably so -- this is just my opinion on the matter.
Name the brand of monitor that existed around the same era as DOOM that could actually show 72 full refreshes per second. Daewoo 15" monitor I used in the late 90's, can't recall the exact model number (Google it yourself, I've long since handed that old monitor on to one of my nieces and don't feel like checking). At 640x480 or lower res, it could do 72Hz refresh. Also, you're assuming GP meant monitors at the time Doom was released, which he clearly did NOT specify, so your whole argument on that subject is pointless to begin with (just covering both bases here). And since refresh rates improve dramatically with lower resolutions on ANY monitor, at 320x240 res -- which was customary for Doom and other DOS games of the era -- 72Hz refresh wouldn't be unheard of for the time it was released.
As for some hearing the "warmth" of vinyl vs. CD's, and some not, I'm sure you're aware that humans do not all hear (or see) at exactly the same frequencies. There is some slight difference from one person to another. Yeah, I can believe that one person can hear differences between one format and another.
And for the record, I am one who can see the difference between 60fps and 70sps.
not necessary now, but it is necessary to stop you in your tracks from even going down this road in the first place... My kingdom for a mod point. Well said.
Sorry, I have to disagree here. The "situations you encounter in a fantasy MMORPG" typically involve a great deal of teamwork, everyone working together and contributing their collective skills and natural strengths to achieve a common objective. Even in a typical business, everyone has a 'role' to play, a task to perform for which they (hopefully) have the skill and experience to achieve for the betterment of the team. If everyone on the team knows their job well and works together, and the leader is effective at both managing people and knowing how to best utilize the capabilities of everyone on the team, the results can be spectacular. Similarly, the most effective guild/raid leaders I've worked with in WoW are those who have strong people skills as well as the knowledge and experience to make sure everyone in his team is assigned a task that best suits their strengths, not only of the characters they rolled but the players' strengths as well (not all Hunters are created equal!).
Principals of leadership and teamwork can be applied to a huge variety of situations. A person who is a skilled leader in real life and is adept at handling fast-changing situations and coordinating the abilities of his subordinates to achieve the objective at hand would quite likely excel as a raid leader in a game like WoW, once he/she acclimated to the game's play mechanics. The inverse is also true; a game like WoW can teach many principals of teamwork and leadership, if the player is willing to learn, in a safe environment where severe screw-ups are only a temporary setback to gameplay.
Conversely, those who refuse to work with other players in the (always-voluntary) group situations and are poor team players will find themselves soloing most of the game - as can be expected.
Can MMO's teach concepts of teamwork and leadership that will be useful in other areas of life? Certainly, if one is willing to learn.
My God, how could I forget that one. I should be tarred, feathered, stabbed, shot, dismembered, and then have my Nerd Card revoked. But yeah, I agree 100%... that would be a badass MMO setting! Hell, Brom's artwork alone would make for brilliant inspiration.
Keep in mind that D&D by itself is no more than a (fairly generic) set of gaming rules designed to facilitate roleplay in a variety of fantasy settings; in and of itself it does provide not a specific world setting with its own rich history. Now, if they'd bothered to draw specifically from one of TSR's old settings designed for the D&D game system, eg. Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, etc. (sorry I'm out of touch with the newer settings, if there are any), and adapted a story from one of those fictional worlds, then they probably would've been better served in terms of having rich source material from which to craft a good story/script. Actually, Dragonlance would've provided gobs of story-telling material, but then you're making a movie based on a game setting based on a series of novels, so it'd be better to bypass the game material/mechanics altogether and just draw the script directly from concepts provided in the novels. Making a movie based on D&D is like making a movie based on GURPS or the Hero system; there's no inherent "story" to it (without 'plugging in' a separately purchased expansion set or creating your own world setting), the players are expected to create their own stories (and world) as they play.
Or you could just use your mobile, instead of hunting around for a landline. Who the hell has a landline phone these days anyway? I have a landline, it's part of my phone+DSL package from my phone service provider, and it's the only phone I need. Oh, so sorry I didn't spend the extra money each month on a cell/mobile phone that I neither need nor want, even though YOU think I should. Douchebag.
Sorry, some of us are just not that self-important that we need to be a button away from the latest phone call no matter where we are.
Do you mean that if the US government were, in your opinion, to get so out of control that the only recourse was to overthrow it, do you honestly believe you (and perhaps a few hundred of your buddies) could? You're seriously outmanned and outgunned.
Do you honestly believe that the men and women of the military, who come from those very same civilian families they've sworn to defend, would turn their arms on their own families, friends, and neighbors just because they were ordered to do so? For that matter, their commanding officers would be equally as reluctant, to order their own troops to turn against the citizens they've sworn to protect -- and who are also that CO's fellow countrymen. And consider, if conditions became bad enough that hundreds or even thousands of civilians felt compelled to rise up in arms against the government, it's likely that many within the armed forces would feel the same, for the same reasons. The whole thing might turn into an ugly mess, but it certainly wouldn't be as lopsided as you predict.
If we had antigravity technology, wouldn't we just use THAT to get into space, instead of using it to compensate for an inferior (by comparison) launching system's physical restrictions? Call me crazy, I know... <shrug>
Slashdot Mirror
Today we build open data portals not because we have a data or public policy literate citizenry, we build them so that citizens may become literate in data, visualization, coding and public policy.
Good luck with that, because the painful truth is that the average pop-media-junky, marketing-spoon-fed citizen is resistant to learning as a general course. I've known so many people - adults, mind you - who honestly believe they simply can't learn new things, especially things of any sort of technical nature, be it computer-related, math-related, or what have you. It makes me sad, but there it is.
Technically, those are stuck pixels. Dead pixels are black -- no red, green or blue whatsoever.
Er, sorry... reflex. As you were.
</pedant>
So you're saying you're making a bundle from all the fucking idiots who buy iPads? Cool!
Funny thing though, I'm not traveling at the speed of light, so for me the events are not concurrent. Nor, I suspect, are the scientists monitoring Betalgeuse traveling at relativistic speeds. In fact, our reference frames are much more similar to that of Betalgeuse than a photon. But g'head and call me a pedant if it keeps your world from flying apart.
It's like paying for an all you can eat buffet, then taking wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of food out to your car so you can "enjoy it whenever you feel like it". Well done.
I'm sure that somewhere there's an award for Stupidest Analogy Ever.
That sounds a bit ambiguous. Do you mean the original game author released it as PD, or the remake authors? If the former, then the original author can go jump off a cliff. If the latter, then that makes a whole lot more sense.
You emphasized the wrong bits, and therefore seem to have missed the point. Here, allow me...
The authors released the code and graphics as public domain, but the whole game (including SFX) was redistributed without legal permission.
Now do you understand why there was a problem?
"An unjust law is itself a species of violence. Arrest for its breach is more so"
~some skinny bald pacifist guy...
Point being, of course, that just because something is codified into law, doesn't necessarily make it right.
Then the game design / UI is broken. A well designed game wouldn't even _need_ those plugins in the first place.
Devs can't anticipate every conceivable UI tweak that might be desired by various players. Getting into the millions, it's a guarantee there'll be disagreement. There's simply no way the default setup will please everyone, no matter how well-crafted and intuitive it is. Allowing customization is the best way to make everyone happy, or at least as happy as they can be within reason.
some of us would like to support a business model that gives us what we want without treating us like criminals.
That. Right there. Please mod parent up, totally nailed it.
It to me even seems to be a bit of blaming the victim for the disease.
Blaming the victim? Well let's see here... To use a much more obvious and practical example, if someone fails to take care of their teeth, and said teeth proceed to rot out of their sockets, is it the "victim's" fault? Yes! Someone sits on their ass and eats junk food for years on end and winds up morbidly obese and possibly acquires heart conditions as a result, should we "blame the victim"? Yes!
Not saying I'm convinced of GP's speculations about mental health affecting cancer onset, but yes, people's actions and behaviors drastically affect their own health and yes, in some cases, it is their own fault.
So let's suppose for the sake of argument that in time research shows a definite causal link between cancer and mental state. That would not be "blaming the victim", it'd be simple cause and effect. Obviously this would be much less obvious an effect than the more commonly known results of not taking care of one's teeth, or not getting proper exercise and eating all the wrong foods, but once the information is known, it'd be up to the individual to do something about the problem as a form of prevention.
I hate you, and my newly-dead brain cells hate you.
...not withstanding, let's look at this from a somewhat calmer perspective. If I'm accused of a crime I didn't commit, and the FBI etc. have access to extensive biometric data beyond mere fingerprints, that info will only solidify my defense all the more. No one set of identifying data is foolproof, but the more convergent sets you have, the greater the likelihood of making a confirming positive (or negative) identification.
Also, the more data investigators have available to compare to mine in my hypothetical example, the less likelihood I'll even have charges brought against me to begin with; they'll know it wasn't me even before it gets to that point, and I'm one more suspect scratched off their list. Frankly, the prospect of NOT having my name dragged through the mud in a jury trial to prove my innocence (which can itself easily ruin lives) is more important to me personally than being "invisible" to the FBI by not being in their database at all. YMMV of course, and reasonably so -- this is just my opinion on the matter.
As for some hearing the "warmth" of vinyl vs. CD's, and some not, I'm sure you're aware that humans do not all hear (or see) at exactly the same frequencies. There is some slight difference from one person to another. Yeah, I can believe that one person can hear differences between one format and another.
And for the record, I am one who can see the difference between 60fps and 70sps.
Damn, that was fast.
Hey now, we can't be making references on /. to Voyager episodes that didn't suck... it's against orthodoxy.
Sorry, I have to disagree here. The "situations you encounter in a fantasy MMORPG" typically involve a great deal of teamwork, everyone working together and contributing their collective skills and natural strengths to achieve a common objective. Even in a typical business, everyone has a 'role' to play, a task to perform for which they (hopefully) have the skill and experience to achieve for the betterment of the team. If everyone on the team knows their job well and works together, and the leader is effective at both managing people and knowing how to best utilize the capabilities of everyone on the team, the results can be spectacular. Similarly, the most effective guild/raid leaders I've worked with in WoW are those who have strong people skills as well as the knowledge and experience to make sure everyone in his team is assigned a task that best suits their strengths, not only of the characters they rolled but the players' strengths as well (not all Hunters are created equal!).
Principals of leadership and teamwork can be applied to a huge variety of situations. A person who is a skilled leader in real life and is adept at handling fast-changing situations and coordinating the abilities of his subordinates to achieve the objective at hand would quite likely excel as a raid leader in a game like WoW, once he/she acclimated to the game's play mechanics. The inverse is also true; a game like WoW can teach many principals of teamwork and leadership, if the player is willing to learn, in a safe environment where severe screw-ups are only a temporary setback to gameplay.
Conversely, those who refuse to work with other players in the (always-voluntary) group situations and are poor team players will find themselves soloing most of the game - as can be expected.
Can MMO's teach concepts of teamwork and leadership that will be useful in other areas of life? Certainly, if one is willing to learn.
My God, how could I forget that one. I should be tarred, feathered, stabbed, shot, dismembered, and then have my Nerd Card revoked. But yeah, I agree 100%... that would be a badass MMO setting! Hell, Brom's artwork alone would make for brilliant inspiration.
Keep in mind that D&D by itself is no more than a (fairly generic) set of gaming rules designed to facilitate roleplay in a variety of fantasy settings; in and of itself it does provide not a specific world setting with its own rich history. Now, if they'd bothered to draw specifically from one of TSR's old settings designed for the D&D game system, eg. Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, etc. (sorry I'm out of touch with the newer settings, if there are any), and adapted a story from one of those fictional worlds, then they probably would've been better served in terms of having rich source material from which to craft a good story/script. Actually, Dragonlance would've provided gobs of story-telling material, but then you're making a movie based on a game setting based on a series of novels, so it'd be better to bypass the game material/mechanics altogether and just draw the script directly from concepts provided in the novels. Making a movie based on D&D is like making a movie based on GURPS or the Hero system; there's no inherent "story" to it (without 'plugging in' a separately purchased expansion set or creating your own world setting), the players are expected to create their own stories (and world) as they play.
Sorry, some of us are just not that self-important that we need to be a button away from the latest phone call no matter where we are.
If we had antigravity technology, wouldn't we just use THAT to get into space, instead of using it to compensate for an inferior (by comparison) launching system's physical restrictions? Call me crazy, I know... <shrug>