1) Your character is not gimped. You don't get certain online only options like shared stashes, guild creation, or the same number of character slots.
2) Not subscribing does absolutely nothing to the single player. A single player game that is good enough on its own to justify the cost of the box. In addition you get free online play even if you never play another dime. I seriously think that if they offered NO free online play, instead saying you can play single player on your own or pay a subscription for online, that there would be less people pissed off.
3) The subscription replaces having to buy expansions every six months or a year. Look at WoW. $15 a month, plus $50 a year for an expansion, plus no single player. And you don't hear anyone bitching about that.
4) You clearly haven't seen the ads. They are far from invasive. You can play through and never even notice that the ads on the subway walls are for real products. They aren't bright neon signs that scream "BUY COKE, MMM COKE." They're dirty worn down subway ads you'd expect to see in a subway. Only they're for actual products. I don't like the precedence either, but it's definitely not a gamebreaker.
The reason you probably never saw the ads is because they're almost impossible to actually see unless you're looking for them. I was playing the beta for several weeks before I realized that the ads on the subway walls were actual ads for real products. They're integrated into the environment and easy to look over.
As for the demo, they really messed up. The beta is less buggy (although still has a couple kinks to work out). They just shouldn't have released the demo at all to be honest.
I agree with what you're saying in general, but I think one thing requires clarification.
Quantum computing will not provide some sort of magical bullet for parallel calculations. Yes, you can do a lot of calculations in parallel, but you can't get the answers because the qubit(s) holding the superposition of all possible outputs decoheres when you measure it into only one possible output. Quantum algorithms that actually do anything interesting are very narrowly focused and rely on complicated things like the quantum fourier transform or manipulating the qubit(s) so that they're more likely to be measured as the answer you want.
It's more like you have a bag of blue and red billiard balls, you pull out two randomly without looking at either ball's color, place each in a box and ship them halfway across the world. The two boxes are opened up and observed, and each time one box contains a red ball the other box will always contain a blue ball.
What's even weirder is that in the quantum mechanical world, it's not that your picking two particles that are either in one state or the other with equal probability and it turns out that you always pick up opposite states. Rather it's that you have two particles that are both in both possible states at the same time. When you measure the particle it collapses into one of the two known states, but up until then it is in a superposition of both. And when you do that to one of the two entangled particles, the other particle will also collapse into one of the two states at the exact same time and you will know exactly which one the other particle will be in based on what state your own particle is in.
We've been able to entangle two particles in close proximity for quite some time now. The problem we've been facing is that as you place more and more particles in close proximity, it gets harder and harder to interact with (i.e. read or modify the state of) a single particle. This means that we're limited to a certain amount of qubits in a quantum calculation when it turns out we need a lot more to do anything interesting. The reason the results in this article are interesting is that they claim to have gotten two particles to interact with each other while separated by a significant distance. This doesn't mean we have fully scalable quantum computers just yet, mind you. There's still many other barriers to overcome (coherence times, error rates), but it's a step in the right direction.
Just like we as consumers can use all sorts of means to circumvent access restrictions that keep us from using the material in a method deemed fair use.
I decided to try NetBeans about a year and a half back. I have a really good feeling about using it, and I'll tell you all about my experiences with it as soon as it finishes loading. XD
Re:Kicking their own asses...
on
SCO Loses
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Could those companies not argue that SCO engaged in fraud by claiming copyright and selling licenses for something they did not technically own? If I claimed that I owned the copyright to Windows and told people they had to give me $100 per copy of windows they used or I would sue them, and people complied, I can't imagine them NOT getting their money back. Now the SCO Unix situation is probably not nearly as clearcut as that, but if indeed the ruling is that SCO does not own the copyright on materials they sold licenses for then it seems pretty open and shut to me.
So true. Not only is Oblivion not what a Fallout game should aspire to be like...it's not what ANY video game should aspire to be like. Unless you like incredibly clunky battle mechanics that ruin any positive aspects the game may have had.
In artificial neural networks, there are structures called auto-associative memory networks. The networks are "trained" on certain patterns, then when it receives one of those patterns as input, it outputs a pattern closer to the pattern it was trained on. If you make it recursive (and your network is good enough), you can take as input a pattern that contains only a fragment of one of the patterns it was trained on and get as output the pattern you trained on. It's quite likely that something like that is going on inside our brains to store memories in some fashion, but on a far more complex scale than we can describe at this point.
Imagine a car driving at towards a ramp with a person standing just beyond it. The car flying over that person's head is like the GPP's post flying over yours.
Unfortunately due to the wonder of the compulsory license, that is not an option unless you individually contact every copyright holder and make a deal. This is because the RIAA (or SoundExchange to be more specific) has been given the (questionablly) legal right to collect royalties on any song played on internet radio if the broadcaster does not already have a deal with the copyright holder. Artists then have to contact SoundExchange and pay them an "administrative" fee to collect the royalties conveniently collected by SoundExchange on their behalf. And because the license is compulsory, artists cannot "opt out." So unfortunately, unless someone bands together a large number of independent musicians into a single organization to deal with copyrights, independent music is not a way to get around this steaming pile of bullshit.
First, the legality depends on the state. In Washington, it is a misdemeanor with a fine between $100 per day of violation. Given the time and effort the writer put in, I think a $100 dollar fine would be worth it to him to trap a spammer. If only it had worked...
You drastically misunderstand what is meant by "lack of empathy." Most people have some degree of empathy. Maybe they won't care about someone they don't know, but when it comes down to their friends and family they care how they are feeling. They care if they are doing well. A person with Asperger's/Autism doesn't just lack empathy for strangers, they lack or have severely dampened empathy for all human beings, including their family and "friends."
Empathy also means much more than a willingness to help others in need. It relates to the ability of a person to understand someone else's state of mind, someone else's feelings or beliefs. It is also closely related to something called theory of mind which is, in short, the ability of a person to recognize that other human beings have their own separate minds.
For someone deriding others for stating their opinions about Autism/Asperger's without sufficient knowledge, you seem to state your own uninformed viewpoint awfully strongly.
If he sued a company under an existing law, and a court later found that a federal law outweighed the state law, how can the person suing possibly be held responsible? How can it be considered his responsibility to know the judgement of the circuit court before he even filed the case in the first place?
I had a lot of difficulty beating him. I managed to get him down to 2 dots by charging in from behind, but the last two were tough as hell. Basically I charged in from behind, then released the mouse button so my dots were beyond his head. Then I tried to snag one of the dots and zip out of there before he could eat part of me. It took me a ton of attempts since you have to try to slip part of your outer ring that isn't lit up by his head, but finally managed to do it. The only problem was...I didn't spawn a new creature and go back to the top level like I did the first time through. I don't know if that was intentional, if I glitched out, or if I missed something but I didn't want to search every inch of the previous levels to find out.
The average maturity of an SB player was far beyond the maturity of a WoW player. You can't imagine the amount of times I wanted to gank someone for being the 4th or 5th person in a day to ask me "cn u rn me thru WC?!?!?!"
WoW's PvP, compared to SB, is like kids playing little green army men versus the real army. It's so dry, sterile, and contrived. Death is meaningless. Losing a BG is meaningless. Gear is everything and can overcome skill and teamwork. A lot of teamwork and organization is required to be the best of the best in WoW. In SB you don't need that organization to be the best. You need that organization just to try and compete. Not to mention, SB has far more variety in its character classes than WoW.
The problem, as many people have already pointed out, is that the UI and bugs just plain sucked. Lag was killer, crashes were common, and the interface just didnt feel natural. That and if you didn't get into a decent guild, then the game did just downright suck ass, and people didnt want to give SB a shot after being ganked for the 50th time trying to solo.
A Zelda, Mario, Metroid, etc incarnation will always sell like hotcakes
That's exactly why they WON'T offer their "masterpiece" games for a discount but will instead distribute them as normal. If they know that a $50 and a $20 price point will sell virtually the same number of games they will price it at $50. Then they can drop it to $20, list it as a "Best Of", and get sales from the people wanting to save money who don't care about getting Zelda or Mario right when it comes out.
Ok, so they're going to limit the analog outputs to 1/4th the normal resolution. And what the hell do they think that's going to solve? Most of the people downloading movies are not overly concerned about the quality. Hell, a lot of copies are made by hand held cameras in movie theaters, with plenty of shaky video and noise disturbances from the crowd. Besides, the vast majority of people aren't going to want to download a 20GB file to watch a movie when they can download a 700MB one.
Slashdot Mirror
What you want to know: Practical limitation is 10M, useless through walls.
Or 82 miles with a pringles can.
1) Your character is not gimped. You don't get certain online only options like shared stashes, guild creation, or the same number of character slots.
2) Not subscribing does absolutely nothing to the single player. A single player game that is good enough on its own to justify the cost of the box. In addition you get free online play even if you never play another dime. I seriously think that if they offered NO free online play, instead saying you can play single player on your own or pay a subscription for online, that there would be less people pissed off.
3) The subscription replaces having to buy expansions every six months or a year. Look at WoW. $15 a month, plus $50 a year for an expansion, plus no single player. And you don't hear anyone bitching about that.
4) You clearly haven't seen the ads. They are far from invasive. You can play through and never even notice that the ads on the subway walls are for real products. They aren't bright neon signs that scream "BUY COKE, MMM COKE." They're dirty worn down subway ads you'd expect to see in a subway. Only they're for actual products. I don't like the precedence either, but it's definitely not a gamebreaker.
The reason you probably never saw the ads is because they're almost impossible to actually see unless you're looking for them. I was playing the beta for several weeks before I realized that the ads on the subway walls were actual ads for real products. They're integrated into the environment and easy to look over.
As for the demo, they really messed up. The beta is less buggy (although still has a couple kinks to work out). They just shouldn't have released the demo at all to be honest.
I agree with what you're saying in general, but I think one thing requires clarification.
Quantum computing will not provide some sort of magical bullet for parallel calculations. Yes, you can do a lot of calculations in parallel, but you can't get the answers because the qubit(s) holding the superposition of all possible outputs decoheres when you measure it into only one possible output. Quantum algorithms that actually do anything interesting are very narrowly focused and rely on complicated things like the quantum fourier transform or manipulating the qubit(s) so that they're more likely to be measured as the answer you want.
It's more like you have a bag of blue and red billiard balls, you pull out two randomly without looking at either ball's color, place each in a box and ship them halfway across the world. The two boxes are opened up and observed, and each time one box contains a red ball the other box will always contain a blue ball.
What's even weirder is that in the quantum mechanical world, it's not that your picking two particles that are either in one state or the other with equal probability and it turns out that you always pick up opposite states. Rather it's that you have two particles that are both in both possible states at the same time. When you measure the particle it collapses into one of the two known states, but up until then it is in a superposition of both. And when you do that to one of the two entangled particles, the other particle will also collapse into one of the two states at the exact same time and you will know exactly which one the other particle will be in based on what state your own particle is in.
We've been able to entangle two particles in close proximity for quite some time now. The problem we've been facing is that as you place more and more particles in close proximity, it gets harder and harder to interact with (i.e. read or modify the state of) a single particle. This means that we're limited to a certain amount of qubits in a quantum calculation when it turns out we need a lot more to do anything interesting. The reason the results in this article are interesting is that they claim to have gotten two particles to interact with each other while separated by a significant distance. This doesn't mean we have fully scalable quantum computers just yet, mind you. There's still many other barriers to overcome (coherence times, error rates), but it's a step in the right direction.
Just like we as consumers can use all sorts of means to circumvent access restrictions that keep us from using the material in a method deemed fair use.
oh wait...
I decided to try NetBeans about a year and a half back. I have a really good feeling about using it, and I'll tell you all about my experiences with it as soon as it finishes loading. XD
Could those companies not argue that SCO engaged in fraud by claiming copyright and selling licenses for something they did not technically own? If I claimed that I owned the copyright to Windows and told people they had to give me $100 per copy of windows they used or I would sue them, and people complied, I can't imagine them NOT getting their money back. Now the SCO Unix situation is probably not nearly as clearcut as that, but if indeed the ruling is that SCO does not own the copyright on materials they sold licenses for then it seems pretty open and shut to me.
So true. Not only is Oblivion not what a Fallout game should aspire to be like...it's not what ANY video game should aspire to be like. Unless you like incredibly clunky battle mechanics that ruin any positive aspects the game may have had.
In artificial neural networks, there are structures called auto-associative memory networks. The networks are "trained" on certain patterns, then when it receives one of those patterns as input, it outputs a pattern closer to the pattern it was trained on. If you make it recursive (and your network is good enough), you can take as input a pattern that contains only a fragment of one of the patterns it was trained on and get as output the pattern you trained on. It's quite likely that something like that is going on inside our brains to store memories in some fashion, but on a far more complex scale than we can describe at this point.
Imagine a car driving at towards a ramp with a person standing just beyond it. The car flying over that person's head is like the GPP's post flying over yours.
Unfortunately due to the wonder of the compulsory license, that is not an option unless you individually contact every copyright holder and make a deal. This is because the RIAA (or SoundExchange to be more specific) has been given the (questionablly) legal right to collect royalties on any song played on internet radio if the broadcaster does not already have a deal with the copyright holder. Artists then have to contact SoundExchange and pay them an "administrative" fee to collect the royalties conveniently collected by SoundExchange on their behalf. And because the license is compulsory, artists cannot "opt out." So unfortunately, unless someone bands together a large number of independent musicians into a single organization to deal with copyrights, independent music is not a way to get around this steaming pile of bullshit.
First, the legality depends on the state. In Washington, it is a misdemeanor with a fine between $100 per day of violation. Given the time and effort the writer put in, I think a $100 dollar fine would be worth it to him to trap a spammer. If only it had worked...
You drastically misunderstand what is meant by "lack of empathy." Most people have some degree of empathy. Maybe they won't care about someone they don't know, but when it comes down to their friends and family they care how they are feeling. They care if they are doing well. A person with Asperger's/Autism doesn't just lack empathy for strangers, they lack or have severely dampened empathy for all human beings, including their family and "friends." Empathy also means much more than a willingness to help others in need. It relates to the ability of a person to understand someone else's state of mind, someone else's feelings or beliefs. It is also closely related to something called theory of mind which is, in short, the ability of a person to recognize that other human beings have their own separate minds. For someone deriding others for stating their opinions about Autism/Asperger's without sufficient knowledge, you seem to state your own uninformed viewpoint awfully strongly.
Christianity is not a religion.
There is a larger disparity of beliefs within Christianity as there is between Christian and non-Christian religions.
If he sued a company under an existing law, and a court later found that a federal law outweighed the state law, how can the person suing possibly be held responsible? How can it be considered his responsibility to know the judgement of the circuit court before he even filed the case in the first place?
I had a lot of difficulty beating him. I managed to get him down to 2 dots by charging in from behind, but the last two were tough as hell. Basically I charged in from behind, then released the mouse button so my dots were beyond his head. Then I tried to snag one of the dots and zip out of there before he could eat part of me. It took me a ton of attempts since you have to try to slip part of your outer ring that isn't lit up by his head, but finally managed to do it. The only problem was...I didn't spawn a new creature and go back to the top level like I did the first time through. I don't know if that was intentional, if I glitched out, or if I missed something but I didn't want to search every inch of the previous levels to find out.
This post gets my vote for the "Most fitting poster name" of the year award.
The average maturity of an SB player was far beyond the maturity of a WoW player. You can't imagine the amount of times I wanted to gank someone for being the 4th or 5th person in a day to ask me "cn u rn me thru WC?!?!?!"
WoW's PvP, compared to SB, is like kids playing little green army men versus the real army. It's so dry, sterile, and contrived. Death is meaningless. Losing a BG is meaningless. Gear is everything and can overcome skill and teamwork. A lot of teamwork and organization is required to be the best of the best in WoW. In SB you don't need that organization to be the best. You need that organization just to try and compete. Not to mention, SB has far more variety in its character classes than WoW.
The problem, as many people have already pointed out, is that the UI and bugs just plain sucked. Lag was killer, crashes were common, and the interface just didnt feel natural. That and if you didn't get into a decent guild, then the game did just downright suck ass, and people didnt want to give SB a shot after being ganked for the 50th time trying to solo.
A Zelda, Mario, Metroid, etc incarnation will always sell like hotcakes
That's exactly why they WON'T offer their "masterpiece" games for a discount but will instead distribute them as normal. If they know that a $50 and a $20 price point will sell virtually the same number of games they will price it at $50. Then they can drop it to $20, list it as a "Best Of", and get sales from the people wanting to save money who don't care about getting Zelda or Mario right when it comes out.
If only someone had MacGuyver's cell phone number....
Ok, so they're going to limit the analog outputs to 1/4th the normal resolution. And what the hell do they think that's going to solve? Most of the people downloading movies are not overly concerned about the quality. Hell, a lot of copies are made by hand held cameras in movie theaters, with plenty of shaky video and noise disturbances from the crowd. Besides, the vast majority of people aren't going to want to download a 20GB file to watch a movie when they can download a 700MB one.
Congratulations, you have prevented nothing.
Thise word..."Free Software"...I do not think it means what you think it means.
Well you see, this patent meets the USPTO criteria for innovation:
old/obvious idea + internets = innovation!
I think they just see something about "teh intarweb" and rubberstamp 'em.