Verizon is making bing the only search site usable by Verizon customers.
Either they messed up on my Curve (because I can search Google just fine from the browser, it's even still the default since I used it last), Microsoft simply paid to have "bing" icon rolled onto my blackberry's app screen, or [citation needed].
Same deal with my Verizon BB Storm v1. The Bing icon appeared once, like Google and Verizon icons have in the past. I swept it aside and haven't heard from it since. In the meantime, my default search provider is still Google, and Bing doesn't even show up as an option.
You are not locked into using Bing. You can still use any search provider from the web browser, but the phone default for/its/ search app is Bing.
I don't even know what is this "search app" that has been supposedly taken over by Bing. I have a Blackberry Storm v1 (stupid early adoption... but that's another story), and a Bing icon appeared once on my phone, which I promptly stuffed into a folder along with the Google Voice and Blackberry Messenger icons that appeared there in the past.
When I go to search the web with the build in browser search, it defaults to Google. My backup choices are Wikipedia, Dictionary.com, and Live Search -- No Bing to be found!
I had the same experience with my Verizon Blackberry Storm. A Bing icon appeared once (like the Facebook icon, the Google Talk icon, and all the other icons that I just ignore and push into an unused folder). I never even clicked it.
The result? Google is still the default search provider, with Wikipedia, Dictionary.com, and "Live Search" as the other options.
Maybe the Storm users were exempt, but this seems like a big deal over pretty much nothing.
On the topic of the Cocktail Party Effect, [...] I haven't the faintest chance of paying attention to more than one conversation at once.
I understand what you are saying, but that is in some ways the exact opposite effect from what I was describing. The Cocktail Party Effect describes the ability of most people to be able to "tune in" to a single conversation at a time in a crowded room full of audio stimuli. From your description, it sounds like you can do this fairly well.
What I was trying to describe, on the other hand, was the opposite. In other words, I hear every conversation around me, yet can focus on none of them. I catch snatches of words from every person around me, but I am unable to simultaneously sort them and filter out all but the chosen conversation due to the speed at which the stimuli are arriving.
High Functioning Autism isn't really a condition that impairs people from doing more complex work.
Indeed. I have done quite a bit of thinking/independent study on this issue, and I think the best way to describe the difference between an "Autistic" brain and a "Neurotypical" brain is by comparing a GPU to a CPU.
A neurotypical or 'normal' brain is incredibly parallel, much like yon super-powered GPU's. This parallelism is what allows the average person to walk, chew gum, carry on a conversation, breathe, and at the same time remember that they left the front door unlocked. Scans of autistic brains, however, show markedly decreased inter-connectivity (and increased inner-connectivity) between the many regions of the brain [Citation 1 and 2]. Therefore, it seems that a brain affected by an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may, in some aspects, resemble the far more serially designed CPU.
[Note: I understand that ASD can manifest itself very severely, extremely limiting the sufferer's interaction with the outside world. I also know that there are other theorized neurological mechanisms at work in ASD. For this though experiment, I want to look at an example HFA versus a comparable IQ neurotypical, to cut down on experimental "noise".]
The popular high-functioning autism (HFA) labels "linear thinking" and "highly logical" can easily be traced back to a more serial brain, but there are plenty of other examples in the autism spectrum syndromes. ASD sufferers are also very vulnerable to sensory over-stimulation--especially from multiple senses simultaneously, as the data simply cannot be processed at the rate that it is arriving. At the same time, someone with ASD may be able to capture many more minor details of a single input (be it visual art, a complex symphony, etc.) than the average person. The focus on depth rather than breadth in a subject of study is a major characteristic of HFA.
I have a fairly mild case of Asperger Syndrome (yes, professionally diagnosed... just listen to my point, okay?), so I have a few specific examples... For example, take my earlier walking and talking experiment: If I am carrying on a conversation while walking, I stop moving whenever I need to think about and formulate my next response. I was (unfortunately) well known in high school and college for my all-around clumsiness, and yet I have the fine motor control and "muscle memory" to beat the most tediously annoying NES games or to manipulate and solder miniature surface mount components. Similarly, I am a semi-professional trumpet player, but I cannot grasp the idea of using two hands at once on the piano to play two different rhythms, despite years of trying. I consider myself a fairly skilled driver, and even enjoy singing to the steering wheel... but as soon as I find myself in heavy traffic, I cannot carry a note nor remember the lyrics to anything on the radio. It gets turned off immediately. This also explains why I fail so miserably at the "cocktail party effect", as, from my perspective, I hear everyone in the room at once and there is no hope of picking out a single conversation.
and people with these two conditions are the kinds of people who would can get good educations and be great programmers.
Maybe it even goes back farther... Just a thought: what if our ancestral tribes benefited from having one or two members of the village who were driven to become advance scouts, staying away from the hubbub of a communal life but still sending back vital information and benefiting to the tribe as a whole? Just a thought...
The razor and blades model has also caught on in the field of blood glucose monitors for diabetes sufferers. You can walk into any Walgreen's and find a BG monitor selling for "$80.00 with an $80.00 instant rebate!". In other words, you pay the tax to Walgreen's, and Walgreen's gets a guarantee of $80.00 from the monitor manufacturer.
But when you turn around to purchase company-specific test strips (of which the average Type 1 diabetic uses 6-8 per day) you find that, not only are there no 'generic' options, the test strips are sold in packages of 50-200 and priced at a minimum of $1-$2 per strip. This works out to around $4000 annually; one of the most excessive examples of the "razor and blades" business model that I have ever seen.
What I find very telling and most undermining to this hypothesis is the simple fact that soybeans were not introduced to Europe and the United States until the 18th century, and did not become a significant crop until the 20th. Given that the Voyinch manuscript is thought to be from the 15th - 16th century, the supposed translation--which claims to identify a soia = soybean plant--has quite a bit of explaining to do.
... along the same lines, do you notice any resemblance between the "soybean" illustration in the manuscript and theseactualsoybean roots?
The GP was not referring to the sun going supernova, but rather a thought experiment on gravitation:
...if some as-yet unknown physical process could squeeze [the sun's] entire mass into a 6-km diameter sphere.
Of course, there would be plenty of changes we don't care about for the though experiment--such as the loss of solar wind, the cessation of light and heat (aside from radiation of things falling into the black hole)--but they only serve to cloud the fact that the gravitational field observed by the planets remains unchanged for this new black-hole-sun, as long as the total mass and center of gravity of the sun remains unchanged.
I think you probably meant 1 IU (1 unit). 1 ml (100 IU) would wipe out most horses.
Pedantry fully excused.
I figured the average Slashdot reader would not be familiar with "IU" as a measure of insulin, so I did intend to use 1 ml = 100 IU... though 0.1 ml = 10 IU would probably have the same effect. I *hope* that a pump would be hardwired to not ever dispense 100 IU at once, but your average pump cartridge holds 200-300 IU, so if a hacker or bug managed to flush the thing, you would get the same result. Besides, just 1 IU would cause the onset of hypoglycemia to be gradual enough that it would be easily correctable, and in most cases wouldn't be overly dangerous even if uncorrected.
I have an insulin pump with has a wireless connection to a handheld BG monitor that has some extra features. The selling point is that you can test your BG levels, select some foods from the database in the handheld device, and give yourself a perfectly adjusted insulin dose without having to pull out a pump and mess with it. (They make the handheld look somewhat like a cell phone with the idea that you can conceal the fact that you are using an insulin pump.) Having found these features to be not-all-that-helpful (and having never been in a situation where I have been forced to conceal the fact that I have Type 1 Diabetes--though I can imagine some), I deactivated the wireless features in order to extend battery life.
Thankfully, the pump and handheld go through a secure-seeming peering and handshake process before the handheld can give any instructions to or read any data from the pump. You see, a hacked insulin pump is as deadly as a hacked pacemaker: If you told the thing to give me even an extra 1 ml dose without me knowing it, I'd probably fall begin seizing and fall into in a coma within 20-30 minutes and with very little warning.
As these devices become more and more feature-bloated, I expect a greater reliance on wireless communications, and a corresponding increase in security holes.
Even better than the "look and feel" comment, in my opinion, was the statement that Windows 7 is based off of Vista's stability, which is said to be "far more stable" than a Mac:
We've significantly improved the graphical user interface, but it's built on that very stable core Vista technology, which is far more stable than the current Mac platform, for instance.
Basically, what the oddly-informed Microsoft rep is saying is that they took Vista and painted it to look like a Mac.
An impact by an object in this size range [around 10m] would correspond to an impact energy roughly comparable to the Hiroshima bomb, if the object had hit the Earth's surface.
Except that it is highly unlikely that any such asteroid would survive sufficiently intact to impact the earth with its full energy.
A far more likely scenario is that the object would cause an air blast high in the atmosphere and a few small, surviving fragments would pelt the earth here and there. Even a blast equivalent to Little Boy which occurred in the upper atmosphere would be barely noticeable on the ground, thanks to the 1/r^2 effect of a spherical blast, the absorption of energy by the atmosphere, and the increasing density gradient as you get closer to the ground.
If you look hard enough, you'll discover that governments only expand in power and revenue throughout their lifetimes, never reduce.
I can think of only two counterexamples to this, and both, Cincinnatus and George Washington, are singular leaders relinquishing massive powers after the end of a massive conflict.
This hearkens back to the adage that the best rulers are those who reluctantly accept the ruler's staff...
Correction, New Jersey is one of the 10 safest states to drive in when only alcohol-related crashes are considered. It may be a wonderful safe place to drive otherwise, or it may not, but the study doesn't look at that.
From the linked article:
The Coalition to End Needless Death on Our Roadways (END), a physician-led safety advocacy group, looks specifically at those fatal car crashes in which alcohol was involved. On Nov. 30, it put out its annual study on the states where alcohol most frequently played a part in fatal auto accidents. [...] Here's a look at the 10 safest states in reference to alcohol-related car crashes
Look at Mormons. They shun their own family if they don't buy into their crap. Threatening to make you effectively dead to your whole (brainwashed) family - that's not extortion?
Pardon me, but... The hell?
I was friends with a number of Mormons in college, some from part-member families, some whose entire families were members of the church, and some who had left the church while their families remained active in the church. There were some social cliques (probably from the group that moved here together from Utah), but there were also plenty of 'normal' students who worked in labs, played in the bands, or joined fraternities, and were pretty much indistinguishable from the students around them, except for the fact that they refused to get trashed on Friday nights. I got to know the families of a few friends--some of the families were not even members of the church (*gasp*!), but there was certainly no "shunning" going on.
I ended up joining the LDS Church (the Mormons) on my own some time later--though that's another story altogether. My family wasn't happy with the decision at first, but they didn't shun me, and I certainly didn't distance myself from them. Fast forward a year or two, and I am closer to my parents and brothers than I had ever been before. I've never been taught to "shun my own family", even though they take little interest in my beliefs--in fact, the Sunday sermons tend to be lessons that my family is incredibly important, regardless of our differences.
On another note...
Christians used "God" as an excuse to perpetrate some of the worst *atrocities* in history. The Crusades. Manifest Destiny. George Bush. The list goes on.
News flash: People in power will use whatever excuses available to them to increase/consolidate/extend/continue their power. Your examples all come from Western, Christian societies. If you expand your scope, you can find plenty of other examples: Hindu Kali Thuggees, The Samurai culture and Japanese war crime in WWII, or the animosity between rival denominations of Islam based upon succession to Muhammad.
Similarly, I'd like to analyze how far America has come in the last 100 years by starting with MLK Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement.
Seriously, I'm in my mid twenties and reach farther back in gaming history than this guy. I grew up with the original Rogue, text-based dungeons, and the Atari 2600. I even wrote my own text-based space adventure game (complete with a turn-based, text-based battle engine!) as a Christmas gift to my brothers on our IBM PC Jr. in the mid 90's, when Doom and such were first hitting the market.
I'd like to see an analysis of how games evolved from Hack-style games to Doom and the like. As has been pointed out, the evolution since Doom has been at a much slower and more gradual pace, as opposed to the leaps and bounds when the capabilities of home computers were first being tested. That would be a Slashdot-worthy article... any takers?
As a side note, Rogue was a game where my grandfather, father, and I would compete for the high score list... I can't think of any game since that really had such a cross-generational appeal.
I've been using the BB Storm for the past few months, as well. I love the phone hardware, the browser is quite nice, the e-mail/message access is very convenient, and the apps store is beginning to become something worthwhile, but I despise the Blackberry OS.
The OS seems to have an unusual bug where, about once every 2-3 days, the phone will simply stop receiving new messages until the battery is pulled. There is no warning of this, and you would not know that it is happening unless you check your e-mail account with another method and see the message disparity. There are some memory leaks and javascript bugs [I'll pull out my phone to check the time and see that a null pointer error has been caught, but it won't tell me from where and no apps are running...], but they are of secondary importance to this temporary loss of communication and connectivity.
Has anyone else seen this occur? I talked (conversationally) to a Verizon sales guy who tried to tell me that it was a feature of some sort. The Verizon techs I've talked to have said that it is a known issue and that RIM is working on a fix, but nobody knows when that update will roll out. (The bug has not been fixed in the past few OS updates.)
Reading things like this, I am often reminded of The Game, though the film describes an 'interaction' which is on a totally different level than these e-mails and faux web pages.
... I always wondered what the legal consequences would have been of a Game... er... "gone bad". What protection does the law provide for a person who signs an endless legalese document without reading it, thus opting in to something well over their heads?
It's inconceivable to me that a creation like the transporter wouldn't radically transform human culture and society into something unrecognizable.
Agreed.
If you are interested, check out Larry Niven's A Hole In Space for his look at how the transporter might really change the world (from a late-60's/early 70's perspective, of course).
Slashdot Mirror
Verizon is making bing the only search site usable by Verizon customers.
Either they messed up on my Curve (because I can search Google just fine from the browser, it's even still the default since I used it last), Microsoft simply paid to have "bing" icon rolled onto my blackberry's app screen, or [citation needed].
Same deal with my Verizon BB Storm v1. The Bing icon appeared once, like Google and Verizon icons have in the past. I swept it aside and haven't heard from it since. In the meantime, my default search provider is still Google, and Bing doesn't even show up as an option.
You are not locked into using Bing. You can still use any search provider from the web browser, but the phone default for /its/ search app is Bing.
I don't even know what is this "search app" that has been supposedly taken over by Bing. I have a Blackberry Storm v1 (stupid early adoption... but that's another story), and a Bing icon appeared once on my phone, which I promptly stuffed into a folder along with the Google Voice and Blackberry Messenger icons that appeared there in the past.
When I go to search the web with the build in browser search, it defaults to Google. My backup choices are Wikipedia, Dictionary.com, and Live Search -- No Bing to be found!
I had the same experience with my Verizon Blackberry Storm. A Bing icon appeared once (like the Facebook icon, the Google Talk icon, and all the other icons that I just ignore and push into an unused folder). I never even clicked it.
The result? Google is still the default search provider, with Wikipedia, Dictionary.com, and "Live Search" as the other options.
Maybe the Storm users were exempt, but this seems like a big deal over pretty much nothing.
Obviously, this star system is the setting for Asimov's Nightfall.
(Technically not, as--if you read carefully--it is mentioned that Kalgash is near the galactic core... but it's an interesting thought regardless.)
On the topic of the Cocktail Party Effect, [...] I haven't the faintest chance of paying attention to more than one conversation at once.
I understand what you are saying, but that is in some ways the exact opposite effect from what I was describing. The Cocktail Party Effect describes the ability of most people to be able to "tune in" to a single conversation at a time in a crowded room full of audio stimuli. From your description, it sounds like you can do this fairly well.
What I was trying to describe, on the other hand, was the opposite. In other words, I hear every conversation around me, yet can focus on none of them. I catch snatches of words from every person around me, but I am unable to simultaneously sort them and filter out all but the chosen conversation due to the speed at which the stimuli are arriving.
I hope that makes a little more sense...
High Functioning Autism isn't really a condition that impairs people from doing more complex work.
Indeed. I have done quite a bit of thinking/independent study on this issue, and I think the best way to describe the difference between an "Autistic" brain and a "Neurotypical" brain is by comparing a GPU to a CPU.
A neurotypical or 'normal' brain is incredibly parallel, much like yon super-powered GPU's. This parallelism is what allows the average person to walk, chew gum, carry on a conversation, breathe, and at the same time remember that they left the front door unlocked. Scans of autistic brains, however, show markedly decreased inter-connectivity (and increased inner-connectivity) between the many regions of the brain [Citation 1 and 2]. Therefore, it seems that a brain affected by an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may, in some aspects, resemble the far more serially designed CPU.
[Note: I understand that ASD can manifest itself very severely, extremely limiting the sufferer's interaction with the outside world. I also know that there are other theorized neurological mechanisms at work in ASD. For this though experiment, I want to look at an example HFA versus a comparable IQ neurotypical, to cut down on experimental "noise".]
The popular high-functioning autism (HFA) labels "linear thinking" and "highly logical" can easily be traced back to a more serial brain, but there are plenty of other examples in the autism spectrum syndromes. ASD sufferers are also very vulnerable to sensory over-stimulation--especially from multiple senses simultaneously, as the data simply cannot be processed at the rate that it is arriving. At the same time, someone with ASD may be able to capture many more minor details of a single input (be it visual art, a complex symphony, etc.) than the average person. The focus on depth rather than breadth in a subject of study is a major characteristic of HFA.
I have a fairly mild case of Asperger Syndrome (yes, professionally diagnosed... just listen to my point, okay?), so I have a few specific examples... For example, take my earlier walking and talking experiment: If I am carrying on a conversation while walking, I stop moving whenever I need to think about and formulate my next response. I was (unfortunately) well known in high school and college for my all-around clumsiness, and yet I have the fine motor control and "muscle memory" to beat the most tediously annoying NES games or to manipulate and solder miniature surface mount components. Similarly, I am a semi-professional trumpet player, but I cannot grasp the idea of using two hands at once on the piano to play two different rhythms, despite years of trying. I consider myself a fairly skilled driver, and even enjoy singing to the steering wheel... but as soon as I find myself in heavy traffic, I cannot carry a note nor remember the lyrics to anything on the radio. It gets turned off immediately. This also explains why I fail so miserably at the "cocktail party effect", as, from my perspective, I hear everyone in the room at once and there is no hope of picking out a single conversation.
and people with these two conditions are the kinds of people who would can get good educations and be great programmers.
Maybe it even goes back farther... Just a thought: what if our ancestral tribes benefited from having one or two members of the village who were driven to become advance scouts, staying away from the hubbub of a communal life but still sending back vital information and benefiting to the tribe as a whole? Just a thought...
The razor and blades model has also caught on in the field of blood glucose monitors for diabetes sufferers. You can walk into any Walgreen's and find a BG monitor selling for "$80.00 with an $80.00 instant rebate!". In other words, you pay the tax to Walgreen's, and Walgreen's gets a guarantee of $80.00 from the monitor manufacturer.
But when you turn around to purchase company-specific test strips (of which the average Type 1 diabetic uses 6-8 per day) you find that, not only are there no 'generic' options, the test strips are sold in packages of 50-200 and priced at a minimum of $1-$2 per strip. This works out to around $4000 annually; one of the most excessive examples of the "razor and blades" business model that I have ever seen.
What I find very telling and most undermining to this hypothesis is the simple fact that soybeans were not introduced to Europe and the United States until the 18th century, and did not become a significant crop until the 20th. Given that the Voyinch manuscript is thought to be from the 15th - 16th century, the supposed translation--which claims to identify a soia = soybean plant--has quite a bit of explaining to do.
... along the same lines, do you notice any resemblance between the "soybean" illustration in the manuscript and these actual soybean roots?
I don't.
And, in a few decades, move on to somewhere that is no longer underwater.
...if some as-yet unknown physical process could squeeze [the sun's] entire mass into a 6-km diameter sphere.
Of course, there would be plenty of changes we don't care about for the though experiment--such as the loss of solar wind, the cessation of light and heat (aside from radiation of things falling into the black hole)--but they only serve to cloud the fact that the gravitational field observed by the planets remains unchanged for this new black-hole-sun, as long as the total mass and center of gravity of the sun remains unchanged.
I think you probably meant 1 IU (1 unit). 1 ml (100 IU) would wipe out most horses.
Pedantry fully excused.
I figured the average Slashdot reader would not be familiar with "IU" as a measure of insulin, so I did intend to use 1 ml = 100 IU... though 0.1 ml = 10 IU would probably have the same effect. I *hope* that a pump would be hardwired to not ever dispense 100 IU at once, but your average pump cartridge holds 200-300 IU, so if a hacker or bug managed to flush the thing, you would get the same result. Besides, just 1 IU would cause the onset of hypoglycemia to be gradual enough that it would be easily correctable, and in most cases wouldn't be overly dangerous even if uncorrected.
Agreed.
I have an insulin pump with has a wireless connection to a handheld BG monitor that has some extra features. The selling point is that you can test your BG levels, select some foods from the database in the handheld device, and give yourself a perfectly adjusted insulin dose without having to pull out a pump and mess with it. (They make the handheld look somewhat like a cell phone with the idea that you can conceal the fact that you are using an insulin pump.) Having found these features to be not-all-that-helpful (and having never been in a situation where I have been forced to conceal the fact that I have Type 1 Diabetes--though I can imagine some), I deactivated the wireless features in order to extend battery life.
Thankfully, the pump and handheld go through a secure-seeming peering and handshake process before the handheld can give any instructions to or read any data from the pump. You see, a hacked insulin pump is as deadly as a hacked pacemaker: If you told the thing to give me even an extra 1 ml dose without me knowing it, I'd probably fall begin seizing and fall into in a coma within 20-30 minutes and with very little warning.
As these devices become more and more feature-bloated, I expect a greater reliance on wireless communications, and a corresponding increase in security holes.
We've significantly improved the graphical user interface, but it's built on that very stable core Vista technology, which is far more stable than the current Mac platform, for instance.
Basically, what the oddly-informed Microsoft rep is saying is that they took Vista and painted it to look like a Mac.
...Really?
alias sudo='wouldyoukindly'
It seemed necessary...
An impact by an object in this size range [around 10m] would correspond to an impact energy roughly comparable to the Hiroshima bomb, if the object had hit the Earth's surface.
Except that it is highly unlikely that any such asteroid would survive sufficiently intact to impact the earth with its full energy.
A far more likely scenario is that the object would cause an air blast high in the atmosphere and a few small, surviving fragments would pelt the earth here and there. Even a blast equivalent to Little Boy which occurred in the upper atmosphere would be barely noticeable on the ground, thanks to the 1/r^2 effect of a spherical blast, the absorption of energy by the atmosphere, and the increasing density gradient as you get closer to the ground.
If you look hard enough, you'll discover that governments only expand in power and revenue throughout their lifetimes, never reduce.
I can think of only two counterexamples to this, and both, Cincinnatus and George Washington, are singular leaders relinquishing massive powers after the end of a massive conflict.
This hearkens back to the adage that the best rulers are those who reluctantly accept the ruler's staff...
... so where do we find more of those?
From the linked article:
The Coalition to End Needless Death on Our Roadways (END), a physician-led safety advocacy group, looks specifically at those fatal car crashes in which alcohol was involved. On Nov. 30, it put out its annual study on the states where alcohol most frequently played a part in fatal auto accidents. [...] Here's a look at the 10 safest states in reference to alcohol-related car crashes
Well then, please allow me to be the first to say:
"Heck yeah!"
Look at Mormons. They shun their own family if they don't buy into their crap. Threatening to make you effectively dead to your whole (brainwashed) family - that's not extortion?
Pardon me, but... The hell?
I was friends with a number of Mormons in college, some from part-member families, some whose entire families were members of the church, and some who had left the church while their families remained active in the church. There were some social cliques (probably from the group that moved here together from Utah), but there were also plenty of 'normal' students who worked in labs, played in the bands, or joined fraternities, and were pretty much indistinguishable from the students around them, except for the fact that they refused to get trashed on Friday nights. I got to know the families of a few friends--some of the families were not even members of the church (*gasp*!), but there was certainly no "shunning" going on.
I ended up joining the LDS Church (the Mormons) on my own some time later--though that's another story altogether. My family wasn't happy with the decision at first, but they didn't shun me, and I certainly didn't distance myself from them. Fast forward a year or two, and I am closer to my parents and brothers than I had ever been before. I've never been taught to "shun my own family", even though they take little interest in my beliefs--in fact, the Sunday sermons tend to be lessons that my family is incredibly important, regardless of our differences.
On another note...
Christians used "God" as an excuse to perpetrate some of the worst *atrocities* in history. The Crusades. Manifest Destiny. George Bush. The list goes on.
News flash: People in power will use whatever excuses available to them to increase/consolidate/extend/continue their power. Your examples all come from Western, Christian societies. If you expand your scope, you can find plenty of other examples: Hindu Kali Thuggees, The Samurai culture and Japanese war crime in WWII, or the animosity between rival denominations of Islam based upon succession to Muhammad.
Oh... not that kind of 4X? In that case, I'll pass.
Similarly, I'd like to analyze how far America has come in the last 100 years by starting with MLK Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement.
Seriously, I'm in my mid twenties and reach farther back in gaming history than this guy. I grew up with the original Rogue, text-based dungeons, and the Atari 2600. I even wrote my own text-based space adventure game (complete with a turn-based, text-based battle engine!) as a Christmas gift to my brothers on our IBM PC Jr. in the mid 90's, when Doom and such were first hitting the market.
I'd like to see an analysis of how games evolved from Hack-style games to Doom and the like. As has been pointed out, the evolution since Doom has been at a much slower and more gradual pace, as opposed to the leaps and bounds when the capabilities of home computers were first being tested. That would be a Slashdot-worthy article... any takers?
As a side note, Rogue was a game where my grandfather, father, and I would compete for the high score list... I can't think of any game since that really had such a cross-generational appeal.
I've been using the BB Storm for the past few months, as well. I love the phone hardware, the browser is quite nice, the e-mail/message access is very convenient, and the apps store is beginning to become something worthwhile, but I despise the Blackberry OS.
The OS seems to have an unusual bug where, about once every 2-3 days, the phone will simply stop receiving new messages until the battery is pulled. There is no warning of this, and you would not know that it is happening unless you check your e-mail account with another method and see the message disparity. There are some memory leaks and javascript bugs [I'll pull out my phone to check the time and see that a null pointer error has been caught, but it won't tell me from where and no apps are running...], but they are of secondary importance to this temporary loss of communication and connectivity.
Has anyone else seen this occur? I talked (conversationally) to a Verizon sales guy who tried to tell me that it was a feature of some sort. The Verizon techs I've talked to have said that it is a known issue and that RIM is working on a fix, but nobody knows when that update will roll out. (The bug has not been fixed in the past few OS updates.)
Reading things like this, I am often reminded of The Game, though the film describes an 'interaction' which is on a totally different level than these e-mails and faux web pages.
... er... "gone bad". What protection does the law provide for a person who signs an endless legalese document without reading it, thus opting in to something well over their heads?
... I always wondered what the legal consequences would have been of a Game
It's inconceivable to me that a creation like the transporter wouldn't radically transform human culture and society into something unrecognizable.
Agreed.
If you are interested, check out Larry Niven's A Hole In Space for his look at how the transporter might really change the world (from a late-60's/early 70's perspective, of course).
Ooh... I think I missed that one!
Has it been published in any of Larry Niven's short story compilations? I don't think I've seen it before, but I would certainly like to.