So you end up downloading realplayer and theora and win32codecs and don't forget libcaca (for those times when you want to watch a movie in ascii) whether you intend to use them or not. Mind you this is a small fraction of the prereqs for a fully functioning mplayer.
Instead in gentoo I just set a few use flags and if I want it do do mp3 and vorbis and dvds, that's all it will do. If there is some obscure functionality I wasn't aware existed, it will be reflected prominently in the use flags before I install, not only in the app I'm installing but in all the prereqs as well. There is even a doc use flag that determines whether it wastes time downloading and installing manfiles for all these apps.
That is just from a user perspective. From the developer perspective it is a whole different ballgame. I seriously can't imagine going back to the ancient days of binary packages.
I want to thank you for posting that since I don't have any mod points. That finally put together all the pieces that have been eluding me all these years.
I was having this problem too and updated to the latest experimental linux versions. I had thought the problem was persisting but I haven't had a single freezup for weeks, so it must have worked or at least dramatically lowered occurances.
Well, from what I've been reading about blizzcon, it looks like they are giving us a happy medium. You will select missions to get extra money to advance your cause and be better prepared for the next mission. That means you can skip most of the optional ones and I can hit every last one, or even jump to harder ones earlier to keep it interesting. There might even be some randomness for replay value for me, although they haven't really clarified it satisfactorily.
My problem with mods is that they usually just weren't very good. Maybe today people are better prepared to make decent scenarios than they were back in the late 90's. That would be nice, but I still harbor a lack of faith.
Ugh don't even suggest that. I sc isn't as server intensive as wow is. They don't have to deal with persistent inventories and they don't have massive sprawling environments or require constant expensive content updates. If they do that I won't buy. And that is despite the fact that I'm following it very closely right now. I pay enough bills per month as it is.
As for the rest of your note. I'm looking forward to online. Big time. However I will be playing through the single player and the longer it is the happier I will be. I don't care if some missions don't advance the story. I just want to play at least five well thought out, hard missions with my entire tech tree.
But what I would REALLY like to see would be single player with less emphasis on story line so that you can play over and over, like civilization or the total war games. You would pick a planet that has strategic resources, send a subset of your troops there for a turn and try your best to win without taking too many losses. And then you would defend your own planets with troops and static defenses you've stationed there. Now THAT would be fun. It is probably too late in development for such a thing, but I can hope. The pieces are practically already there.
I agree with you on homeworld. Catclysm was absolutely great. Homeworld 2 wasn't bad either. It is too bad the multiplayer was poorly thought out.
The perception problem is not because of the lack of a release date. It is because they announced the game years ago and still haven't delivered.
Blizzard did that once with starcraft and diablo and people bitched and whined and complained the whole time. They settled on keeping games a complete secret until they were within a year of release. Look at starcraft 2, the game was actually playable before anyone had even heard of it. This way they get the hype at the most appropriate time without giving it time to turn sour. Imagine if starcraft 2 had been announced when it was started roughly 2.5 years ago with 1 more year to go.
After I wrote my note I note I read down and noticed a lot of people share your concern. I'll be honest the fx looks like a monstrosity to me. It looks like it requires a lot of awkward bending of a lot of fingers in the same fashion they would be stressed from typing, giving you a double whammy. Also, do you have to move your entire hand sideways or twist it to get side to side movement? That seems like it is defeating the purpose of using a trackball. I like my palm to be planted firmly.
If you've never actually tried a thumb trackball, it is probably not what it seems. The ball itself weighs nothing and requires no pressure whatsoever. Whenever you aren't moving the mouse, you can move your thumb down underneath the ball to rest and you won't risk accidentally moving the pointer either, in that position. As for nicking the ball, that seems like it'd be more common on a larger ball. I've never had it happen before and I have three of them in perfect condition hanging around just in case I lose one.
I've been using logitech trackman marble since I was a pretard (10 years). My first came when my parents bought one of these on a whim for our first computer. I reacted hostile initially because all my experience with trackballs up to that point were crappy wheel based ones.
There are good points and bad points.
Good:
It has always been as accurate as the best mouse, even before mice went optical.
The cord never ever gets in the way of your movement, because it doesn't move.
Doesn't require desk space. My screen is flush with my desk, my keyboard sitting snugly on an open desk drawer.
Bad:
You can't hope to achieve smooth 360+ degree rotation on an fps. You have to move your thumb at some point.
But the main advantage, and the reason why I will never go back to using a normal mouse is that I can place a trackball anywhere. Before I started this note I was reclined all the way back in my chair with my trackball on my chest navigating slashdot in complete comfort. I tend to use it on my knee alot too.
Also another advantage is no one wants to use it. So no one is using my damned computer when I'm not around. Also the ball is perfect for flinging at your coworker.
Speaking of SF2, and this is not exactly on topic, but I found this hilarious sf2 comedy skit the other day and I'm dying to show it to someone who's actually heard of the game.
That isn't fair. Blizzard was being sold off as a package with a lot of other worthless properties. Everyone was interested in blizzard but not in any of those other properties, so it went on for quite awhile. At any moment all of the employees could have woken up and found themselves jobless or outsourced or their current projects scrapped or any number of things. Management wouldn't talk to them about it. They wouldn't give any assurances. So some of them left.
The problem here is that you lack vision. You only see as far as the job. You either have one or you don't. You are either paying for your family to live or you aren't. It doesn't work like that.
If it costs half as much to pick fruit with robots, fruit will be half the price. Now everyone in the country buys fruit for half the price. If these robots spread to other industries you end up with half price cars, half price houses, half price food. Each of these out-of-work workers need only find a job that pays half as much to obtain the same standard of living. His new job probably won't have anything to do with picking fruit. He may repair robots. He may do any number of other professions.
100 years ago something like 70% of everyone was a farmer. You had no choice in the matter. It was what you did. There was no aspiring to anything greater because the we needed the food and someone had to produce it. As mechanization increased now we have what, 10% farming? All those 60% of people lost their jobs and found new ones. Writing newspapers, making movies, building factories, educating, lawyering, designing clothing, inventing, doctoring or whatever they wanted to. The result is that we now live in houses with electricity and air conditioners and type on computers and many of us have the ability to spend over a dozen years learning knowledge instead of breaking our backs digging ditches and dying of highly preventable diseases. To ban technology is to stop the progress of the human race.
I'm taking the time to write this because your viewpoint is horribly damaging to society. While it might be well intentioned, you are actually damaging not only the fruit picker's life and health, but the futures of his children and grand children as well as the futures of everyone else's.
The make-work bias is best illustrated by a story of an economist who visits China under Mao Zedong. He sees hundreds of workers building a dam with shovels. He asks: "Why don't they use a mechanical digger?" "That would put people out of work," replies the foreman. "Oh," says the economist, "I thought you were making a dam. If it's jobs you want, take away their shovels and give them spoons."
Cars destroyed the horse market. Should we have banned cars? Home refrigerators put ice cream trucks out of business. Should we have banned refrigerators? The internet killed encyclopedias and is killing newspapers. Should we have banned the internet? The airplane put personal ocean travel out of business. Should we have banned airplanes?
You need to look closer at what you are saying and realize that the solution you have provided, "ban robots", is not unique and has come up at every stage of human development. What you are really saying is "stop progress." Had progress stopped 500 years ago we would all be plowing farmland with oxen instead of discussing it on slashdot.
I don't have to tell you that robots could be the next big thing. Bigger than cars. Bigger than telecommunication. Bigger even than computers. Robotics has the potential to increase human productivity by such an amount that we cannot even conceive of it now. To willfully prevent people from reaching a greater potential because you feel sorry for some other people? That would be like pulling people out of school. No, you aren't allowed to have an education because you might do the work of several people who don't have an education. It is unconscionable. Exactly what kind of world do you want to live in?
Coming soon to the Nintendo Wii and PlayStation 2: a game that's banned in the U.K and probably won't be sold by major game stores in the U.S. in its current form.
"Manhunt 2," an upcoming action game from "Grand Theft Auto" development house Rockstar Games, has been labeled Adults Only by the Entertainment Software Ratings Board, according to a spokesman from Rockstar Games. Major retailers, including the big game chains, won't sell AO games, effectively guaranteeing the game won't be for sale next month as originally scheduled unless Rockstar changes the content.
Asked whether the studio would delay the game (which is scheduled for a July 10 release), Rockstar spokesman Rodney Walker told MTV News: "That's the last thing we want, but it's too early to say."
Walker provided "Manhunt 2" publisher Take 2 Interactive's statement on the game's rating: "We believe the process of rating video games is to help people make informed entertainment choices and not to limit them. 'Manhunt 2' was created for mature audiences and we strongly believe it should receive an M (Mature) rating, aligning it with similar content created in other forms of media. We are exploring our options with regard to the rating of 'Manhunt 2.' "
This revelation followed news that the British Board of Film Classification -- which rates entertainment, including video games, for the U.K. market -- declared that it had rejected "Manhunt 2," denying it a rating.
Talking to British gaming Web site MCVUK.com, BBFC director David Cooke said the game was rejected because the game "is distinguishable from recent high-end video games by its unremitting bleakness and callousness of tone in an overall game context which constantly encourages visceral killing with exceptionally little alleviation or distancing."
The ESRB did not return an inquiry about the AO rating by press time. But earlier Tuesday (June 19), the organization said in a statement issued to MTV News that a group called the Center for a Commercial-Free Childhood had been pushing for an AO rating. "We have received the letter from CCFC, and while we might take issue with some of the statements made within, we sincerely appreciate their expressed concerns. Our ratings are intended to provide guidance that allows parents to choose games they deem suitable for their children, and that is a responsibility we take extremely seriously."
The first "Manhunt," released in 2003, put the player in control of a death-row inmate named James Earl Cash who was forced to commit grisly murders at the behest of a cackling mastermind and snuff-film creator named the Director. Kills could be committed with nail guns and baseball bats. Created by Rockstar North, the team behind the "Grand Theft Auto" console games, "Manhunt" was criticized for its violence but hailed by some game critics for its development of stealth gameplay and innovative use of sound (the Director's voice could be set to only be heard through a headset a gamer wore while playing the game).
For "Manhunt 2," signs pointed to the title being both less and more extreme than the first. Gone from press previews were mentions of snuff films and Directors. Instead, a more traditionally violent video game premise: one man's struggle to stay alive in an insane asylum gone mad. The new game would allow a broader range of weapons, including a phone and a suffocating plastic bag, actions that were glimpsed by MTV News on the PS2 version of the game that was shown at Sony's PlayStation Gamers Day in San Diego in May. While the game caused no furor at that event, such a title was sure to garner attention on the Wii, where its kills are triggered by the system's motion-sensitive controller.
Cooke told MCVUK that the board could see no justification for anyone to play the game: "To issue a certificate to 'Manhunt 2,' on either platform, would involve a range of unjustifiable harm risks, to both adults and minors, within the terms of the Video Recordings Act, and accordingly that its availability, even if statutorily confined to adults, would be unacceptable to the public."
I'm pretty sure the distributor is out of the picture now. If it is AO it cannot be sold in any store which is a member of (BSA?). Whatever it is called. So no gamestop, no best buy, no walmart, no nothing.
If I were them I would just say the hell with it and not even submit GTA or any other game to ESRB. Sell it on their website, on steam-like services and probably on amazon. Rockstar has such a good name now it could probably get by that way now. They would even get to keep all the profits. As a bonus they can now put in anything they want to. No other companies would be able to market a more raw videogame. The only prerequisite is that they make it common knowledge that you cannot get their games in stores.
It wasn't funding issues. There was practically no funding. The people who were working on it did each scene in linear order. The progression in quality throughout the film is them getting better at using blender. It is actually pretty interesting seeing how fast they went from beginner to churning out some effects that were pretty decent, all told.
As far as a tech demo, elephant's dream was a massive success. That clip generated an overwhelmingly positive response, increasing blender's profile and triggering developer interest. It is no surprise that they are doing another.
Texas is in the black. It actually has cities and a decent economy. Virtually every other red state sucks up to 30% more federal money than they contribute. Google it if you don't believe me. I think one of the main factors is lack of major cities. Big empty fields simply can't compete.
As long as 99% of our tax money goes federal, this will continue indefinitely.
I checked this out today. I'd never heard of the game until this article. I'm afraid my computer won't be able to handle it, but I'm still going to check it out.
Additionally, which unit do you produce. Chances are that if your production outstrips your resource gathering you'll end up building only zerglings, as the queue moves faster and takes less resources than a hydra or muta, so this will always be at the head of the queue. If you do a global FIFO queue you get unpredictability in the heat of battle.
That's a good point, I hadn't thought of that. But then is that any worse than it is now? If you don't want to end up in that predicament, you don't have to queue your units that way. As it is now, you are forced into doing it one by one whether you like it or not.
I want the ability to shift+construct a hatchery, and the drone will walk up and wait until you have the resources, then build. When I build my spire, before construction even starts, I want to select it and click an upgrade for each weapon upgrade. That way I know it will get done as soon as possible without me having to think about it anymore. When the hatchery is done, I want to tell it to upgrade itself as soon as the evolution chamber(?) is built. I won't use this queuing for everything but I want to have some way to automate that is controlled directly by me so that I only have to think about it half or less as much.
As for the double clicking, you are probably right. Now that I think about it most of my difficulties in that area usually sprung from the unit limit, and maybe they will be less of an issue. As a zerg player, only being able to select 12 zerglings was a constant irritation.
I'll be looking very much forward to the matchmaking. That should be fun. The agony of random game joining was my least favorite aspect.
As for the things you say won't be in there, good riddance to the lot of them. Damn now I'm getting all excited for something that is at least a year away.
This is not a legitimate complaint. Instead of having one click make a unit in every building, instead you could make it so that each clicks creates a unit in whichever barracks will be available in the least time.
In your example, if you wanted two marines and two ghosts, you'd select two barracks, and click marine, ghost, marine, ghost. The units would be assigned barracks one, then two, then probably one because marines have shorter train times, then possibly one again because maybe it takes longer for one ghost to train than two marines. You shouldn't have to think about such minutia especially when the barracks are smack dab next to each other.
I have to agree with the original poster. I played for awhile and was fairly good. Nonetheless these difficulties in unit training, queuing, and unit selecting were mostly not intended. No one at blizzard said, "Hey, lets substitute in some bad UI design that a more seasoned player can overcome to beat his opponents."
These tricks you've learned are crutches. You are apparently good at using crutches. You like them because you are better at using crutches than the average player, but don't think for a minute that these crutches are part of the game or that they enhance game play in the least.
I would like to see resources stay unused until unit starts building. Ability to make command centers rally their scvs on resources instead of sitting there. To select multiple buildings at once and hotkey them and use them to train. To be able to queue future commands on units that are in the process of building something. To research upgrades one after another in order. To allow infinite unit selection (already done). To queue units that aren't yet available while an advanced structure is building or upgrading. An easier way to select similar units that are mixed in a big blob of different units. A defend as well as a follow command. None of these is game breaking, but they allow you to get the base building done and forget about it for a couple minutes to manage combat or expansion.
I do not want scripting capability that some people are stupidly advocating. Anything that could be done in the background besides simple key rearrangement would be detrimental to barrier to entry and professional play. I also don't want it to start anticipating things like building overlords when it thinks you need them.
No. Just because you live in an air conditioned apartment doesn't mean you're evolving less. If you are less able to handle cold than an ancestor then you've evolved. Your genes are now different than they used to be which is what they are measuring here.
What about the fact that chimps have a shorter generation gap? If monkeys are advancing generation to generation in in just a few years time while we are waiting upwards of 15 years before our first offspring, it shouldn't be any surprise that humans aren't evolving as quickly.
Surely the scientists took that into account, but the article never mentioned it.
Ok, but how far would the space shuttle have gotten without writing. It is just that we read something and we decide that it is probably true, and that is the temporary thought we need to come to a conclusion. And we write down that conclusion for others to read, so that they don't have to prove it themselves.
I think maybe my use of the worth faith is the problem here. I should have used something else like maybe confidence. You have confidence that scientific principal works based on observation and past experience. You have no confidence that religion works based on observation. No bad connotations.
It occured to me that what I was describing is kind of like fuzzy logic. I really think the high level constructs we imagine in our head are just compositions of thousands or hundreds of thousands of smaller bits of logic with various weights. Maybe that is what a neuron is -- just a very small fuzzy logic gate. That religion happens to be springing from scientifically unsound bits of logic makes no difference to how the whole system actually goes about learning.
I wish I had the lifetime necessary to work on the AI puzzle.
I know how science works. The topic is AI, and your brain does not work the way science does. In fact I would wager that the reason AI has not progressed very far is due to the fact that smart people like to think their brains are basing conclusions on fact. So they try to make machines that make decisions based on provable facts and find that they can't do it.
A brain can't know anything more than it can sense or infer from those senses and past knowledge. So the vast majority of your store of knowledge, particularly academic knowledge, has been told to you, and you took it at face value.
Not at all. The academic knowledge I accept came through the filter of the scientific method. I know the scientific method works, and I know why. I know the scientific community uses this method to the exclusion of all else, and so I can rationally and with a fair amount of certainty accept that such knowledge has a truth value corresponding to...
You have faith that what these people are telling you is the truth as far as they know, and faith that they have done the correct experimentation. But you didn't derive it yourself... you are only listening to what others are telling you and deciding that what they are telling you now doesn't contradict what they've told you before, at least not irreconcilably so.
You occasionally experiment to confirm a belief but that is usually expensive and you don't do it very often. In the past you have experimented and found that was contained in a textbook was correct in that instance, and so now your faith in textbooks is greater than it was. It could be said that you have a certain amount of faith in the concept of science and a certain lack of faith in religion.
Let me give an example. You can perform the math that proves that 3307 is a prime number. Once you've done this math you now have a very strong belief that 3307 is prime. You don't perform the calculations every time you think about this number, you just know that it is prime because you have a fleeting memory of having proved it once, and you have a high amount of faith that things you've proved tend to be correct.
If you were bad at math, maybe your faith in that fact would not be so strong and if someone who told you differently you might be inclined to believe them instead.
So what I was trying to get across in my last post was not that religion is right and science is wrong. Fuck no. I'm as much an atheist as you. What I'm trying to get across is that his belief in religion is based in the same logic as your belief in science. He's simply working off a slightly different set of stimuli (namely the people around him). You implied that he is defective for believing in religion, and that he should be malleable enough to be swayed. But if he were, then you would by extension be just as easily swayed away toward religion because your faith probably isn't really held any more deeply than his.
Slashdot Mirror
I apologize as I've never used apt. But I imagine if you type apt-get mplayer I assume you'll get something like this:
media-libs/libcaca-0.99_beta11
media-libs/libmad-0.15.1b-r2
media-sound/alsa-headers-1.0.14_rc2 2,467 kB
sys-apps/help2man-1.36.4
media-libs/libogg-1.1.3 395 kB
media-libs/win32codecs-20061022-r1
media-video/realplayer-10.0.8-r1
media-libs/alsa-lib-1.0.14_rc2
media-libs/libtheora-1.0_alpha6-r1
media-video/mplayer-1.0.20070622-r1
So you end up downloading realplayer and theora and win32codecs and don't forget libcaca (for those times when you want to watch a movie in ascii) whether you intend to use them or not. Mind you this is a small fraction of the prereqs for a fully functioning mplayer.
Instead in gentoo I just set a few use flags and if I want it do do mp3 and vorbis and dvds, that's all it will do. If there is some obscure functionality I wasn't aware existed, it will be reflected prominently in the use flags before I install, not only in the app I'm installing but in all the prereqs as well. There is even a doc use flag that determines whether it wastes time downloading and installing manfiles for all these apps.
That is just from a user perspective. From the developer perspective it is a whole different ballgame. I seriously can't imagine going back to the ancient days of binary packages.
I want to thank you for posting that since I don't have any mod points. That finally put together all the pieces that have been eluding me all these years.
I was having this problem too and updated to the latest experimental linux versions. I had thought the problem was persisting but I haven't had a single freezup for weeks, so it must have worked or at least dramatically lowered occurances.
Well, from what I've been reading about blizzcon, it looks like they are giving us a happy medium. You will select missions to get extra money to advance your cause and be better prepared for the next mission. That means you can skip most of the optional ones and I can hit every last one, or even jump to harder ones earlier to keep it interesting. There might even be some randomness for replay value for me, although they haven't really clarified it satisfactorily.
My problem with mods is that they usually just weren't very good. Maybe today people are better prepared to make decent scenarios than they were back in the late 90's. That would be nice, but I still harbor a lack of faith.
unless they charge money for online gaming...
Ugh don't even suggest that. I sc isn't as server intensive as wow is. They don't have to deal with persistent inventories and they don't have massive sprawling environments or require constant expensive content updates. If they do that I won't buy. And that is despite the fact that I'm following it very closely right now. I pay enough bills per month as it is.
As for the rest of your note. I'm looking forward to online. Big time. However I will be playing through the single player and the longer it is the happier I will be. I don't care if some missions don't advance the story. I just want to play at least five well thought out, hard missions with my entire tech tree.
But what I would REALLY like to see would be single player with less emphasis on story line so that you can play over and over, like civilization or the total war games. You would pick a planet that has strategic resources, send a subset of your troops there for a turn and try your best to win without taking too many losses. And then you would defend your own planets with troops and static defenses you've stationed there. Now THAT would be fun. It is probably too late in development for such a thing, but I can hope. The pieces are practically already there.
I agree with you on homeworld. Catclysm was absolutely great. Homeworld 2 wasn't bad either. It is too bad the multiplayer was poorly thought out.
Yeah, but no one here has a life so they aren't in any danger. /ducks
The perception problem is not because of the lack of a release date. It is because they announced the game years ago and still haven't delivered.
Blizzard did that once with starcraft and diablo and people bitched and whined and complained the whole time. They settled on keeping games a complete secret until they were within a year of release. Look at starcraft 2, the game was actually playable before anyone had even heard of it. This way they get the hype at the most appropriate time without giving it time to turn sour. Imagine if starcraft 2 had been announced when it was started roughly 2.5 years ago with 1 more year to go.
After I wrote my note I note I read down and noticed a lot of people share your concern. I'll be honest the fx looks like a monstrosity to me. It looks like it requires a lot of awkward bending of a lot of fingers in the same fashion they would be stressed from typing, giving you a double whammy. Also, do you have to move your entire hand sideways or twist it to get side to side movement? That seems like it is defeating the purpose of using a trackball. I like my palm to be planted firmly.
If you've never actually tried a thumb trackball, it is probably not what it seems. The ball itself weighs nothing and requires no pressure whatsoever. Whenever you aren't moving the mouse, you can move your thumb down underneath the ball to rest and you won't risk accidentally moving the pointer either, in that position. As for nicking the ball, that seems like it'd be more common on a larger ball. I've never had it happen before and I have three of them in perfect condition hanging around just in case I lose one.
I've been using logitech trackman marble since I was a pretard (10 years). My first came when my parents bought one of these on a whim for our first computer. I reacted hostile initially because all my experience with trackballs up to that point were crappy wheel based ones.
There are good points and bad points.
Good:
It has always been as accurate as the best mouse, even before mice went optical.
The cord never ever gets in the way of your movement, because it doesn't move.
Doesn't require desk space. My screen is flush with my desk, my keyboard sitting snugly on an open desk drawer.
Bad:
You can't hope to achieve smooth 360+ degree rotation on an fps. You have to move your thumb at some point.
But the main advantage, and the reason why I will never go back to using a normal mouse is that I can place a trackball anywhere. Before I started this note I was reclined all the way back in my chair with my trackball on my chest navigating slashdot in complete comfort. I tend to use it on my knee alot too.
Also another advantage is no one wants to use it. So no one is using my damned computer when I'm not around. Also the ball is perfect for flinging at your coworker.
As a major contributor to JewLinux, you'll be hearing from our lawyers.
Speaking of SF2, and this is not exactly on topic, but I found this hilarious sf2 comedy skit the other day and I'm dying to show it to someone who's actually heard of the game.
x isq_hadoken-street-fighter-2-live
http://www.dailymotion.com/elephantlarry/video/x1
Some of the other vids that guy did are good too.
That isn't fair. Blizzard was being sold off as a package with a lot of other worthless properties. Everyone was interested in blizzard but not in any of those other properties, so it went on for quite awhile. At any moment all of the employees could have woken up and found themselves jobless or outsourced or their current projects scrapped or any number of things. Management wouldn't talk to them about it. They wouldn't give any assurances. So some of them left.
The problem here is that you lack vision. You only see as far as the job. You either have one or you don't. You are either paying for your family to live or you aren't. It doesn't work like that.
If it costs half as much to pick fruit with robots, fruit will be half the price. Now everyone in the country buys fruit for half the price. If these robots spread to other industries you end up with half price cars, half price houses, half price food. Each of these out-of-work workers need only find a job that pays half as much to obtain the same standard of living. His new job probably won't have anything to do with picking fruit. He may repair robots. He may do any number of other professions.
100 years ago something like 70% of everyone was a farmer. You had no choice in the matter. It was what you did. There was no aspiring to anything greater because the we needed the food and someone had to produce it. As mechanization increased now we have what, 10% farming? All those 60% of people lost their jobs and found new ones. Writing newspapers, making movies, building factories, educating, lawyering, designing clothing, inventing, doctoring or whatever they wanted to. The result is that we now live in houses with electricity and air conditioners and type on computers and many of us have the ability to spend over a dozen years learning knowledge instead of breaking our backs digging ditches and dying of highly preventable diseases. To ban technology is to stop the progress of the human race.
I'm taking the time to write this because your viewpoint is horribly damaging to society. While it might be well intentioned, you are actually damaging not only the fruit picker's life and health, but the futures of his children and grand children as well as the futures of everyone else's.
The make-work bias is best illustrated by a story of an economist who visits China under Mao Zedong. He sees hundreds of workers building a dam with shovels. He asks: "Why don't they use a mechanical digger?" "That would put people out of work," replies the foreman. "Oh," says the economist, "I thought you were making a dam. If it's jobs you want, take away their shovels and give them spoons."
Cars destroyed the horse market. Should we have banned cars?
Home refrigerators put ice cream trucks out of business. Should we have banned refrigerators?
The internet killed encyclopedias and is killing newspapers. Should we have banned the internet?
The airplane put personal ocean travel out of business. Should we have banned airplanes?
You need to look closer at what you are saying and realize that the solution you have provided, "ban robots", is not unique and has come up at every stage of human development. What you are really saying is "stop progress." Had progress stopped 500 years ago we would all be plowing farmland with oxen instead of discussing it on slashdot.
I don't have to tell you that robots could be the next big thing. Bigger than cars. Bigger than telecommunication. Bigger even than computers. Robotics has the potential to increase human productivity by such an amount that we cannot even conceive of it now. To willfully prevent people from reaching a greater potential because you feel sorry for some other people? That would be like pulling people out of school. No, you aren't allowed to have an education because you might do the work of several people who don't have an education. It is unconscionable. Exactly what kind of world do you want to live in?
Coming soon to the Nintendo Wii and PlayStation 2: a game that's banned in the U.K and probably won't be sold by major game stores in the U.S. in its current form.
"Manhunt 2," an upcoming action game from "Grand Theft Auto" development house Rockstar Games, has been labeled Adults Only by the Entertainment Software Ratings Board, according to a spokesman from Rockstar Games. Major retailers, including the big game chains, won't sell AO games, effectively guaranteeing the game won't be for sale next month as originally scheduled unless Rockstar changes the content.
Asked whether the studio would delay the game (which is scheduled for a July 10 release), Rockstar spokesman Rodney Walker told MTV News: "That's the last thing we want, but it's too early to say."
Walker provided "Manhunt 2" publisher Take 2 Interactive's statement on the game's rating: "We believe the process of rating video games is to help people make informed entertainment choices and not to limit them. 'Manhunt 2' was created for mature audiences and we strongly believe it should receive an M (Mature) rating, aligning it with similar content created in other forms of media. We are exploring our options with regard to the rating of 'Manhunt 2.' "
This revelation followed news that the British Board of Film Classification -- which rates entertainment, including video games, for the U.K. market -- declared that it had rejected "Manhunt 2," denying it a rating.
Talking to British gaming Web site MCVUK.com, BBFC director David Cooke said the game was rejected because the game "is distinguishable from recent high-end video games by its unremitting bleakness and callousness of tone in an overall game context which constantly encourages visceral killing with exceptionally little alleviation or distancing."
The ESRB did not return an inquiry about the AO rating by press time. But earlier Tuesday (June 19), the organization said in a statement issued to MTV News that a group called the Center for a Commercial-Free Childhood had been pushing for an AO rating. "We have received the letter from CCFC, and while we might take issue with some of the statements made within, we sincerely appreciate their expressed concerns. Our ratings are intended to provide guidance that allows parents to choose games they deem suitable for their children, and that is a responsibility we take extremely seriously."
The first "Manhunt," released in 2003, put the player in control of a death-row inmate named James Earl Cash who was forced to commit grisly murders at the behest of a cackling mastermind and snuff-film creator named the Director. Kills could be committed with nail guns and baseball bats. Created by Rockstar North, the team behind the "Grand Theft Auto" console games, "Manhunt" was criticized for its violence but hailed by some game critics for its development of stealth gameplay and innovative use of sound (the Director's voice could be set to only be heard through a headset a gamer wore while playing the game).
For "Manhunt 2," signs pointed to the title being both less and more extreme than the first. Gone from press previews were mentions of snuff films and Directors. Instead, a more traditionally violent video game premise: one man's struggle to stay alive in an insane asylum gone mad. The new game would allow a broader range of weapons, including a phone and a suffocating plastic bag, actions that were glimpsed by MTV News on the PS2 version of the game that was shown at Sony's PlayStation Gamers Day in San Diego in May. While the game caused no furor at that event, such a title was sure to garner attention on the Wii, where its kills are triggered by the system's motion-sensitive controller.
Cooke told MCVUK that the board could see no justification for anyone to play the game: "To issue a certificate to 'Manhunt 2,' on either platform, would involve a range of unjustifiable harm risks, to both adults and minors, within the terms of the Video Recordings Act, and accordingly that its availability, even if statutorily confined to adults, would be unacceptable to the public."
I'm pretty sure the distributor is out of the picture now. If it is AO it cannot be sold in any store which is a member of (BSA?). Whatever it is called. So no gamestop, no best buy, no walmart, no nothing.
If I were them I would just say the hell with it and not even submit GTA or any other game to ESRB. Sell it on their website, on steam-like services and probably on amazon. Rockstar has such a good name now it could probably get by that way now. They would even get to keep all the profits. As a bonus they can now put in anything they want to. No other companies would be able to market a more raw videogame. The only prerequisite is that they make it common knowledge that you cannot get their games in stores.
It wasn't funding issues. There was practically no funding. The people who were working on it did each scene in linear order. The progression in quality throughout the film is them getting better at using blender. It is actually pretty interesting seeing how fast they went from beginner to churning out some effects that were pretty decent, all told.
As far as a tech demo, elephant's dream was a massive success. That clip generated an overwhelmingly positive response, increasing blender's profile and triggering developer interest. It is no surprise that they are doing another.
Texas is in the black. It actually has cities and a decent economy. Virtually every other red state sucks up to 30% more federal money than they contribute. Google it if you don't believe me. I think one of the main factors is lack of major cities. Big empty fields simply can't compete.
As long as 99% of our tax money goes federal, this will continue indefinitely.
I checked this out today. I'd never heard of the game until this article. I'm afraid my computer won't be able to handle it, but I'm still going to check it out.
Additionally, which unit do you produce. Chances are that if your production outstrips your resource gathering you'll end up building only zerglings, as the queue moves faster and takes less resources than a hydra or muta, so this will always be at the head of the queue. If you do a global FIFO queue you get unpredictability in the heat of battle.
That's a good point, I hadn't thought of that. But then is that any worse than it is now? If you don't want to end up in that predicament, you don't have to queue your units that way. As it is now, you are forced into doing it one by one whether you like it or not.
I want the ability to shift+construct a hatchery, and the drone will walk up and wait until you have the resources, then build. When I build my spire, before construction even starts, I want to select it and click an upgrade for each weapon upgrade. That way I know it will get done as soon as possible without me having to think about it anymore. When the hatchery is done, I want to tell it to upgrade itself as soon as the evolution chamber(?) is built. I won't use this queuing for everything but I want to have some way to automate that is controlled directly by me so that I only have to think about it half or less as much.
As for the double clicking, you are probably right. Now that I think about it most of my difficulties in that area usually sprung from the unit limit, and maybe they will be less of an issue. As a zerg player, only being able to select 12 zerglings was a constant irritation.
I'll be looking very much forward to the matchmaking. That should be fun. The agony of random game joining was my least favorite aspect.
As for the things you say won't be in there, good riddance to the lot of them. Damn now I'm getting all excited for something that is at least a year away.
This is not a legitimate complaint. Instead of having one click make a unit in every building, instead you could make it so that each clicks creates a unit in whichever barracks will be available in the least time.
In your example, if you wanted two marines and two ghosts, you'd select two barracks, and click marine, ghost, marine, ghost. The units would be assigned barracks one, then two, then probably one because marines have shorter train times, then possibly one again because maybe it takes longer for one ghost to train than two marines. You shouldn't have to think about such minutia especially when the barracks are smack dab next to each other.
I can't think of any downside to this.
I have to agree with the original poster. I played for awhile and was fairly good. Nonetheless these difficulties in unit training, queuing, and unit selecting were mostly not intended. No one at blizzard said, "Hey, lets substitute in some bad UI design that a more seasoned player can overcome to beat his opponents."
These tricks you've learned are crutches. You are apparently good at using crutches. You like them because you are better at using crutches than the average player, but don't think for a minute that these crutches are part of the game or that they enhance game play in the least.
I would like to see resources stay unused until unit starts building. Ability to make command centers rally their scvs on resources instead of sitting there. To select multiple buildings at once and hotkey them and use them to train. To be able to queue future commands on units that are in the process of building something. To research upgrades one after another in order. To allow infinite unit selection (already done). To queue units that aren't yet available while an advanced structure is building or upgrading. An easier way to select similar units that are mixed in a big blob of different units. A defend as well as a follow command. None of these is game breaking, but they allow you to get the base building done and forget about it for a couple minutes to manage combat or expansion.
I do not want scripting capability that some people are stupidly advocating. Anything that could be done in the background besides simple key rearrangement would be detrimental to barrier to entry and professional play. I also don't want it to start anticipating things like building overlords when it thinks you need them.
No. Just because you live in an air conditioned apartment doesn't mean you're evolving less. If you are less able to handle cold than an ancestor then you've evolved. Your genes are now different than they used to be which is what they are measuring here.
What about the fact that chimps have a shorter generation gap? If monkeys are advancing generation to generation in in just a few years time while we are waiting upwards of 15 years before our first offspring, it shouldn't be any surprise that humans aren't evolving as quickly.
Surely the scientists took that into account, but the article never mentioned it.
Ok, but how far would the space shuttle have gotten without writing. It is just that we read something and we decide that it is probably true, and that is the temporary thought we need to come to a conclusion. And we write down that conclusion for others to read, so that they don't have to prove it themselves.
I think maybe my use of the worth faith is the problem here. I should have used something else like maybe confidence. You have confidence that scientific principal works based on observation and past experience. You have no confidence that religion works based on observation. No bad connotations.
It occured to me that what I was describing is kind of like fuzzy logic. I really think the high level constructs we imagine in our head are just compositions of thousands or hundreds of thousands of smaller bits of logic with various weights. Maybe that is what a neuron is -- just a very small fuzzy logic gate. That religion happens to be springing from scientifically unsound bits of logic makes no difference to how the whole system actually goes about learning.
I wish I had the lifetime necessary to work on the AI puzzle.
You misunderstood my post.
I know how science works. The topic is AI, and your brain does not work the way science does. In fact I would wager that the reason AI has not progressed very far is due to the fact that smart people like to think their brains are basing conclusions on fact. So they try to make machines that make decisions based on provable facts and find that they can't do it.
A brain can't know anything more than it can sense or infer from those senses and past knowledge. So the vast majority of your store of knowledge, particularly academic knowledge, has been told to you, and you took it at face value.
Not at all. The academic knowledge I accept came through the filter of the scientific method. I know the scientific method works, and I know why. I know the scientific community uses this method to the exclusion of all else, and so I can rationally and with a fair amount of certainty accept that such knowledge has a truth value corresponding to...
You have faith that what these people are telling you is the truth as far as they know, and faith that they have done the correct experimentation. But you didn't derive it yourself... you are only listening to what others are telling you and deciding that what they are telling you now doesn't contradict what they've told you before, at least not irreconcilably so.
You occasionally experiment to confirm a belief but that is usually expensive and you don't do it very often. In the past you have experimented and found that was contained in a textbook was correct in that instance, and so now your faith in textbooks is greater than it was. It could be said that you have a certain amount of faith in the concept of science and a certain lack of faith in religion.
Let me give an example. You can perform the math that proves that 3307 is a prime number. Once you've done this math you now have a very strong belief that 3307 is prime. You don't perform the calculations every time you think about this number, you just know that it is prime because you have a fleeting memory of having proved it once, and you have a high amount of faith that things you've proved tend to be correct.
If you were bad at math, maybe your faith in that fact would not be so strong and if someone who told you differently you might be inclined to believe them instead.
So what I was trying to get across in my last post was not that religion is right and science is wrong. Fuck no. I'm as much an atheist as you. What I'm trying to get across is that his belief in religion is based in the same logic as your belief in science. He's simply working off a slightly different set of stimuli (namely the people around him). You implied that he is defective for believing in religion, and that he should be malleable enough to be swayed. But if he were, then you would by extension be just as easily swayed away toward religion because your faith probably isn't really held any more deeply than his.