Innumeracy is pretty widespread even among people who, by all rights, should know better. It seems to me that statistics and probability are what give most people the most trouble; my personal experience is that these subjects are often about as intuitive as quantum mechanics--for obvious reasons that shouldn't come as a huge surprise. The book Innumeracy by John Allen Paulos is an interesting look at the subject, but the presentation is a little flawed. While there are in this book many germane examples, it is on average pitched a little high--I've taken calculus, linear algebra, and even some statistics (and did fairly well), but some of his points weren't as obvious to me as he seemed to think them. Still, if nothing else, it's an interesting and fairly quick read.
The type of radiation produced by lasers is purely non-ionizing*, which means that it causes its damage more or less entirely through radiative heating. This means, basically, that it burns through things like one would expect. This laser diode is almost certainly NOT eye-safe by any stretch, but I would venture to guess that you would have to train it on yourself for at least a second or two to cause any burns--that's a GUESS, though, judging from the amount of time it took to light that match. I don't know the temperature at which strike-on-box matches ignite, but if the laser can deposit that much energy in only a second or so it can probably cause a burn if you focused it directly onto skin. I would NOT suggest trying this out.
*High-frequency (ultraviolet, basically) lasers can put out UV radiation, some of which is considered ionizing and poses unique health hazards. If you're talking strictly about ionizing radiation (like what an X-Ray machine puts out), then there is virtually no radiation hazard from just about any laser with which the average person will come into contact. In this case--probably about a 700-800 nm laser diode--"laser radiation" refers to the output of visible and IR light--which is very, very likely to pose a hazard if trained on the eyes (possibly even in an indirect or scattered reflection) or directly onto the skin.
So we have Businessweek's perspective on things, where--in the very first few sentences--the word "sales" sparkles out. Anyone have a little more to add about the technical side of this imaging system?
You know, you have to admit that would be one upside to being furry: it hardens you to just about anything, and it does it quick.
Hm. You know, I thought I'd made a poor choice of words (I should've said "inured" you to anything) but, to judge from most furries I've seen, I was probably right the first time.
It is likely that this has been pointed out already, but the for-pay demo is not new. Back before the Internet--back when the concept of the "demo" was still mostly a benefit of being a PC gamer--there not only existed shareware but actual for-pay demo disks. Shareware is obvious: vend a small portion (up to a quarter) of the actual game for a reduced price--maybe it was free on BBSes, but I think the "masses" (what masses there were) paid for these disks. Shareware was often much more than just the one or two level taste that the modern demo more or less always seems to be--in the case of episodic games, it was usually an entire episode. There did exist, however, for-pay demo disks; I remember a display in a Babbage's that had $5 or $8 demo CDs for some kind of sea combat game. Assumedly, the cost of these demo CDs was to cover the cost of the physical medium and distribution.
With the rise of the Internet, however, I feel PC gamers (at least) have grown to expect that a demo will be released for free. Those magazine demos--again, at least for PC games--were usually quick to show up on the Internet after the release of the magazine. Lately, with the exclusive demos hosted by sites such as fileplanet, we're seeing a trend towards charging money for a demo without necessarily providing a demo that is worth the price. I suppose the bottom line is that if people would like for us to lay down money for a demo and nothing else, at _least_ scale the price to the proportion of content in the demo versus the game. Maybe in the days of limited bandwidth people didn't mind paying for a CD to save themselves the hassle of downloading that huge, 100 Mb demo, but I very much doubt people will be happy paying for nothing more than a demo without any additional content or convenience above the norm.
I'm really, really excited for this game to finally hit the stores, because then people can stop talking about it! I can't find a PC gamer these days with a graphics card made in the last year or so who ISN'T going on about this pretty face with who-knows-what behind it.
I'm sorry, but I'm having trouble thinking of any 40 hour games that EA's published recently. Are they talking about the C&C games, which are primarily played as multiplayer games? Are they talking about the BF series, which are ALSO primarily multiplayer games? The NFS series, maybe, whose protracted length is the result of being able to generate "missions" by drawing lines on a map and recording some voiceovers? The Sims, which was once the poster child for "non-gamer" games?
Maybe there have been some console releases--I don't pay much attention to them nowadays. If someone knows of some long single-player games EA's published recently, please correct me. Or was this nothing but a cut at companies who still try to maintain some semblence of a single-player experience for us "hardcore" gamers?
Regardless, as others have pointed out this is a money-grab. EA wouldn't have lasted this long if they weren't able to follow the curves of the industry and appeal directly to whatever audience is willing to give them the most money.
Folks, let's please adopt a universal rule for the public Men's room: leave the seat UP.
Leaving the seat down is a dangerous position for the seat. This is due mostly to those who think that they can pee through the seat's opening with perfect accuracy without regard to being impaired or urethrally compromised. Secondarily, your more vigarous toilets sometimes suffer from "splash up" onto the seat, which is under the control of no man. The only disadvantage I can see to the "seat up" position is that it might deter the lazy from flushing.
Mods have always been important for at least the FPS scene. Quake wouldn't have been the game that it was if ten-thousand little crappy mods hadn't been made by ten-thousand little neophyte programmers cutting their teeth on it. Counterstrike's first incarnation, as far as I can tell, was the "Navy Seals" mod for Quake; Counterstrike itself originated as a HL mod, of course.
But the phrase "user-created content" for some reason doesn't make me picture in my mind mods. It makes me think of "games" like Second Life. Only the highest-order mods--separate games--ever significantly change the fundamental engine upon which a game is built. Would all the Quake skins that every Quake clan made be considered "user-generated content"? The maps they made? What about the mods for mods? The models and sounds for those mods?
I think, frankly, that user-generated content has _always_ been key for FPSes, at least.
Was that more the fault of the guy who put up the signs, the people who became terrified of them, the officials who ordered the response, or the governmental folks who can't let this thing alone?
Besides, isn't wasting government resources precisely what government does best?
It matters for the fans of the Fallout series because we get to see what kind of game Fallout 3 was shaping up to be. Soon enough, we'll see what Fallout 3 _will_ be, and I have a gut feeling that lots of people are going to be disappointed when they compare the two.
Perhaps you missed a comma, or perhaps you've invented the most thankless job ever: sitting on top of the elevator as it gently rises and falls, waiting to dive underneath it to save some hapless licensed elevator inspector who happens to slip and fall below.
Fusion power has _always_ been 20 years off. This isn't some 1984 groupthink bullcrap: it really is just always 20 years out of our reach by general consensus.
Yeah, except that people have to purchase NWN, and I don't want to reshape my non-DND campaign around DND spells and classes and stuff if we did decide to put in some actual RP gameplay. From what I can tell, the scripting and modeling tools that SL uses should be much simpler than trying to make models and stuff to import into NWN, too.
This is a great idea. Hopefully someday something like this will lead to a free (or at least low-cost), user-generated, small-scale MUD for use by us small-time friends-only PnP-type role-players. It wouldn't need to be much more than a sort of visual IRC that can be run on a private server so that "spectators" don't drop by.
(Have a sort of RPGMaker-like toolkit for making custom effects and stuff would be nice, but I'm not holding out _that_ much hope.)
Let's assume humans are bad and have always been bad. In fact, let's assume they are maximally bad and will never get worse or better. Animals don't change, so let's look at the things that humans have made. That's technology. Technology enables humans to do things. If humans are maximally bad, then they will make maximally bad use of technology. There's a lot more bad you can do with a handgun, a vehicle, or the Internet than with a stone tablet, an ox, or a knife. Therefore our situation will continue to worsen as we develop new technology.
You can't reasonably stop technology, nor would you really want to--technology itself does some good because people, while bad, are not maximally bad. The solution is, thus, to work on the people aspect of things.
I'm confused. What puts the federal government above legislating morals and ethics? Is it because they supposedly represent too large of a cross section (despite pretty much everyone in Congress coming from a different part of a different state)?
You know, people always talk about MSN being one of the top web site in the world. I was given a bit of pause when I realized that IE's default start page is MSN, and that--at this university at least--very few people seem to bother changing it. I, for one, don't, and so every time I log into any public computer on campus and start up IE, it goes straight to msn.com. How many IE users out there in the world just don't bother to change their start page and just use whatever comes up by default?
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, if you get your Centurions movie, why can't I get my M.A.S.K. movie?
Innumeracy is pretty widespread even among people who, by all rights, should know better. It seems to me that statistics and probability are what give most people the most trouble; my personal experience is that these subjects are often about as intuitive as quantum mechanics--for obvious reasons that shouldn't come as a huge surprise. The book Innumeracy by John Allen Paulos is an interesting look at the subject, but the presentation is a little flawed. While there are in this book many germane examples, it is on average pitched a little high--I've taken calculus, linear algebra, and even some statistics (and did fairly well), but some of his points weren't as obvious to me as he seemed to think them. Still, if nothing else, it's an interesting and fairly quick read.
The type of radiation produced by lasers is purely non-ionizing*, which means that it causes its damage more or less entirely through radiative heating. This means, basically, that it burns through things like one would expect. This laser diode is almost certainly NOT eye-safe by any stretch, but I would venture to guess that you would have to train it on yourself for at least a second or two to cause any burns--that's a GUESS, though, judging from the amount of time it took to light that match. I don't know the temperature at which strike-on-box matches ignite, but if the laser can deposit that much energy in only a second or so it can probably cause a burn if you focused it directly onto skin. I would NOT suggest trying this out.
*High-frequency (ultraviolet, basically) lasers can put out UV radiation, some of which is considered ionizing and poses unique health hazards. If you're talking strictly about ionizing radiation (like what an X-Ray machine puts out), then there is virtually no radiation hazard from just about any laser with which the average person will come into contact. In this case--probably about a 700-800 nm laser diode--"laser radiation" refers to the output of visible and IR light--which is very, very likely to pose a hazard if trained on the eyes (possibly even in an indirect or scattered reflection) or directly onto the skin.
So we have Businessweek's perspective on things, where--in the very first few sentences--the word "sales" sparkles out. Anyone have a little more to add about the technical side of this imaging system?
You know, you have to admit that would be one upside to being furry: it hardens you to just about anything, and it does it quick.
Hm. You know, I thought I'd made a poor choice of words (I should've said "inured" you to anything) but, to judge from most furries I've seen, I was probably right the first time.
It is likely that this has been pointed out already, but the for-pay demo is not new. Back before the Internet--back when the concept of the "demo" was still mostly a benefit of being a PC gamer--there not only existed shareware but actual for-pay demo disks. Shareware is obvious: vend a small portion (up to a quarter) of the actual game for a reduced price--maybe it was free on BBSes, but I think the "masses" (what masses there were) paid for these disks. Shareware was often much more than just the one or two level taste that the modern demo more or less always seems to be--in the case of episodic games, it was usually an entire episode. There did exist, however, for-pay demo disks; I remember a display in a Babbage's that had $5 or $8 demo CDs for some kind of sea combat game. Assumedly, the cost of these demo CDs was to cover the cost of the physical medium and distribution.
With the rise of the Internet, however, I feel PC gamers (at least) have grown to expect that a demo will be released for free. Those magazine demos--again, at least for PC games--were usually quick to show up on the Internet after the release of the magazine. Lately, with the exclusive demos hosted by sites such as fileplanet, we're seeing a trend towards charging money for a demo without necessarily providing a demo that is worth the price. I suppose the bottom line is that if people would like for us to lay down money for a demo and nothing else, at _least_ scale the price to the proportion of content in the demo versus the game. Maybe in the days of limited bandwidth people didn't mind paying for a CD to save themselves the hassle of downloading that huge, 100 Mb demo, but I very much doubt people will be happy paying for nothing more than a demo without any additional content or convenience above the norm.
Maybe independent game stores allow you to rent for that price, but game rentals at Blockbuster run about $8 these days.
I'm really, really excited for this game to finally hit the stores, because then people can stop talking about it! I can't find a PC gamer these days with a graphics card made in the last year or so who ISN'T going on about this pretty face with who-knows-what behind it.
I'm sorry, but I'm having trouble thinking of any 40 hour games that EA's published recently. Are they talking about the C&C games, which are primarily played as multiplayer games? Are they talking about the BF series, which are ALSO primarily multiplayer games? The NFS series, maybe, whose protracted length is the result of being able to generate "missions" by drawing lines on a map and recording some voiceovers? The Sims, which was once the poster child for "non-gamer" games?
Maybe there have been some console releases--I don't pay much attention to them nowadays. If someone knows of some long single-player games EA's published recently, please correct me. Or was this nothing but a cut at companies who still try to maintain some semblence of a single-player experience for us "hardcore" gamers?
Regardless, as others have pointed out this is a money-grab. EA wouldn't have lasted this long if they weren't able to follow the curves of the industry and appeal directly to whatever audience is willing to give them the most money.
There's plenty of free energy out there. The problem is coaxing thermodynamics to let us have it.
Little Billy learns today the valuable lesson that you are ultimately beyond reproach assuming your friends are sufficiently powerful.
(I guess it just really goes to show that you can parade out this argument for any old thing.)
I lived for a long while just south of Washington, and I honestly have no idea where Bladensburg, MD is.
Looks like (thanks Google) it's somewhere between College Park and Washington itself. Whatever, 7-11 and Fox!
Folks, let's please adopt a universal rule for the public Men's room: leave the seat UP.
Leaving the seat down is a dangerous position for the seat. This is due mostly to those who think that they can pee through the seat's opening with perfect accuracy without regard to being impaired or urethrally compromised. Secondarily, your more vigarous toilets sometimes suffer from "splash up" onto the seat, which is under the control of no man. The only disadvantage I can see to the "seat up" position is that it might deter the lazy from flushing.
Mods have always been important for at least the FPS scene. Quake wouldn't have been the game that it was if ten-thousand little crappy mods hadn't been made by ten-thousand little neophyte programmers cutting their teeth on it. Counterstrike's first incarnation, as far as I can tell, was the "Navy Seals" mod for Quake; Counterstrike itself originated as a HL mod, of course.
But the phrase "user-created content" for some reason doesn't make me picture in my mind mods. It makes me think of "games" like Second Life. Only the highest-order mods--separate games--ever significantly change the fundamental engine upon which a game is built. Would all the Quake skins that every Quake clan made be considered "user-generated content"? The maps they made? What about the mods for mods? The models and sounds for those mods?
I think, frankly, that user-generated content has _always_ been key for FPSes, at least.
Was that more the fault of the guy who put up the signs, the people who became terrified of them, the officials who ordered the response, or the governmental folks who can't let this thing alone?
Besides, isn't wasting government resources precisely what government does best?
It matters for the fans of the Fallout series because we get to see what kind of game Fallout 3 was shaping up to be. Soon enough, we'll see what Fallout 3 _will_ be, and I have a gut feeling that lots of people are going to be disappointed when they compare the two.
Wouldn't it be a case of everybody profiting? Sadly, a lot of people out there probably do think that's the same as nobody profiting.
Perhaps you missed a comma, or perhaps you've invented the most thankless job ever: sitting on top of the elevator as it gently rises and falls, waiting to dive underneath it to save some hapless licensed elevator inspector who happens to slip and fall below.
Fusion power has _always_ been 20 years off. This isn't some 1984 groupthink bullcrap: it really is just always 20 years out of our reach by general consensus.
A 4 amino acid protein? Where I come from, we'd call that a peptide.
Yeah, except that people have to purchase NWN, and I don't want to reshape my non-DND campaign around DND spells and classes and stuff if we did decide to put in some actual RP gameplay. From what I can tell, the scripting and modeling tools that SL uses should be much simpler than trying to make models and stuff to import into NWN, too.
This is a great idea. Hopefully someday something like this will lead to a free (or at least low-cost), user-generated, small-scale MUD for use by us small-time friends-only PnP-type role-players. It wouldn't need to be much more than a sort of visual IRC that can be run on a private server so that "spectators" don't drop by.
(Have a sort of RPGMaker-like toolkit for making custom effects and stuff would be nice, but I'm not holding out _that_ much hope.)
Let's assume humans are bad and have always been bad. In fact, let's assume they are maximally bad and will never get worse or better. Animals don't change, so let's look at the things that humans have made. That's technology. Technology enables humans to do things. If humans are maximally bad, then they will make maximally bad use of technology. There's a lot more bad you can do with a handgun, a vehicle, or the Internet than with a stone tablet, an ox, or a knife. Therefore our situation will continue to worsen as we develop new technology.
You can't reasonably stop technology, nor would you really want to--technology itself does some good because people, while bad, are not maximally bad. The solution is, thus, to work on the people aspect of things.
I'm confused. What puts the federal government above legislating morals and ethics? Is it because they supposedly represent too large of a cross section (despite pretty much everyone in Congress coming from a different part of a different state)?
You know, people always talk about MSN being one of the top web site in the world. I was given a bit of pause when I realized that IE's default start page is MSN, and that--at this university at least--very few people seem to bother changing it. I, for one, don't, and so every time I log into any public computer on campus and start up IE, it goes straight to msn.com. How many IE users out there in the world just don't bother to change their start page and just use whatever comes up by default?