The requirement to have a range of significantly distinct classes in raids, with their own strengths and weaknesses, opens up the possibility of having a rock/paper/scissors arrangement of class superiority in PvP. I'm amazed it wasn't implemented in the first place - it makes much more sense than trying to balance all classes to have the same chance in any given duel.
That way, a player of greater skill will not necessarily beat a player of lower skill if they are "out-classed", as it were. It means that players have to pick their fights wisely, be more opportunistic, be more alert, and maybe go around in pairs or impromptu groups to increase their chance of survival. That would greatly enhance the experience, in my opinion - it would prevent the loss of that feeling of threat and danger when you hit the level/gear cap, and would enhance the in-group/out-group, us & them relationship between the two factions as a result.
That's fine when you only have to deal with party raids, and full party pvp, but when you also have 1v1 pvp, a rocks, paper, scissors design to classes breaks horribly. The only way to balance this is instead of having rocks, paper, and scissor classes, you give each class a set of rocks, papers, and scissor abilities that they then have to use strategically against other classes and their rocks, papers, and scissors. But then, if each of these abilities has to be unique and interesting, and you have a half dozen or more classes with a number of optional skills each, you end up with the same problem of balancing your hundreds of rocks with your papers and scissors.
But in any of those instances, would they arrest the mechanic who did the modifications, or the owner who paid for them and drove the no longer street-legal car out of the shop?
How the hell did that post get to +4? Must be heartless mod night on/.
Did you know that Africa could feed itself, and half the world if they simply stopped fighting. Went to modern farming techniques and stopped fighting? That Zimbabwe was once the breadbasket of Africa and fed nearly the entire sub-content before Mugabe went insane and power hungry. I for one welcome the eradication of diseases that are terrible and crippling.
Perhaps we should just stop all immunizations world wide, and let people drop dead. Well that's fine with me, I'm vaccinated against everything I can be. But tell that to some 4 year old kid who will never walk and live in an iron lung because mommy and daddy had a conscience attack, and refused to give her a polio vaccination.
Adjusted for you. Zimbabwe remained perfectly productive and stable for more than a decade after Mugabe took power. It wasn't till he became paranoid that the problems started.
Well, it may all depend on which particular philosophy you subscribe to, but I offer this definition, based on the assumptions that we are talking about human beings as individualistic, social creatures (i.e. creatures that live in and are dependent on their communities, but also have individual senses of identity, desires, and motivations).
Right and wrong are heuristic models we have constructed as societies to help outline sets of actions that are desirable within the society vs actions that are undesirable within the society. Actions which are usually defined as right are generally ones that have a benefit to the community, or potentially the individual, whereas actions defined as wrong are generally ones that are determined to be detrimental to the community. As a society's understanding or assumptions about what are beneficial and detrimental to the society evolve, certain actions may fall into or out of either of those categories, whereas other actions may always be determined to be detrimental under any circumstances to any society (e.g. unregulated murder within a community is universally considered bad across pretty much all cultures, but government sanctioned capital punishment may be debatable depending on the culture, and killing soldiers on a battlefield in a conflict between two different societies is generally accepted as just the nature of war).
A bit rough and under-explained, but it's a start I think. One could argue whether any of these ideas would apply to artificial intelligences because the same assumptions I outlined earlier may not apply (would an AI have an individualistic sense of identity? Would it have "desires" that might motivate it to act against the best interests of the rest of the society?)
Or perhaps we're getting smarter and smarter, and are more able to recognize different types of more subtle intelligence. Then again, maybe when you were little you just weren't involved in these kinds of conversations?
Why don't you disagree with what I wrote instead of your moronic interpretation of what I wrote?
You say that science "doesn't claim that it has" explained the origin of the universe. That is my exact point. Science and Religion are not "100% incompatible" as the source post of this sub-thread claims.
So your point is that science doesn't explain what it doesn't claim to explain, but that somehow this means that religion automatically does explain it? Citation needed.
The very bedrock of science is nothing but pure faith.
Wrong. The very bedrock of science is that in order for claims to be verifiable, they must be observable and repeatable under controlled conditions so as to eliminate any need for faith.
Science does not preclude this statement:
"In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth."
Science makes no claims on this statement other than that beyond very poorly defined terms (define which god you mean here for a start, and what properties it embodies), that it does not have any testable properties that would allow us to verify or falsify the claim. Beyond that, you have the choice of either believing the statement based on faith alone, choosing not to believe the statement (as in, you neither believe the statement is true or false) due to lack of evidence, or choose to actively disbelieve the statement (as in, you believe the statement is false) presumably based on lack of evidence again. The scientific method in similar circumstances would generally take the second position unless new evidence arises that can be tested.
Additionally, the scientific method is also pure faith. The faith is that things are repeatable.
This is not faith. If one requires that a phenomenon be repeatable so that it can be observed under controlled conditions before accepting that it could exist or occur, is basically the opposite of faith. This is based on observations thus far that any occurrence in the natural world can be replicated under the right conditions. So of course, you can say that there are phenomenon that, by their very nature, only occur once in the entire universe, and then never repeat. Of course, this is nice speculation, and the claim by definition cannot be tested by science, but then again, if these phenomenon can only occur once without repetition, then they no longer have any bearing on our universe and thus exist outside of any practical application of intellectual persuit. Science is only interested in finding out about things that will have some application to our existence, and events that will never occur again and cannot be proven to ever have occurred before (this condition excludes the big bang) fall outside this category. It helps that so far we have not encountered anything (to the best of our knowledge) that would fall into this category, but I'm sure you'd dispute that point.
Anything that you just have to accept because you cannot apply the scientific method, is an exercise in faith.
Again, this is not faith. The application of the scientific method as a means to determining the fundamental nature of any known aspect of our natural universe has thus far, through countless observations, been demonstrated to be the single best method. This is after science got to questions that for centuries, philosophers, preachers, and mystics had claimed to have the answers to, but have long since been shown to be just flat out wrong about. So this belief is based on countless piles and piles of evidence, built on piles and piles of more evidence. The very fact that you are typing your post at all, and that I am able to see it are yet more testaments to the effectiveness of the scientific method.
When you wrote:
"And no faith is needed, because the four forces exist."
What I like most about Neil DeGrasse Tyson is how he's so deeply passionate about science, the scientific process, and the very philosophy of inquiry into the nature of the universe. He is able to evangelize science, and bring that often overlooked but much needed emotion to the conversation about what could otherwise be very dry and boring subjects.
Now if you can watch this and not be moved in some way, then I'm sorry, but it is my humble opinion that you are broken.
This passion is a quality that almost every good preacher, salesman, or spokesman knows and yet so many science teachers can't seem to figure out: You need to engage your audience passionately, and make them feel the importance of what you're saying, not simply explain it to them.
Sorry, but as you say I must almost completely disagree with your sentiment on scripted events in games. Scripted events are not good example of AI because there is no decision making, which makes them predictable and exploitable. So the only way to scale difficulty in a scripted scenario is to just pump up the AI's accuracy, damage, and health, which are not very interesting. Scripted events work fine for fairly linear narratives and setting up big cinematic set-pieces, but they don't make for interesting gameplay (mind you I did not say they don't make for "fun" gameplay).
The events you describe in AvP are not necessarily examples of scripted scenarios, but sound more like a scripted set of responses to stimuli the player provides (would the AI react differently if you didn't rip off a soldier's head?). The trick for interesting yet realistic decision making is to allow the AI a range of responses that it can make, and then every time you present the same scenario to the computer you may get a different response. So when the AI is actually making decisions, rather than just following a pre-scripted path, this allows the player to make actual decisions in response, rather than just following their own memorized trial-and-error derived path to success.
The key to a good scaling AI doesn't have to be that tricky, it can just be a matter of what range of choices you allow any given AI to make and what sorts of "mistakes" you throw in that pool of choices.
When I face "easy" opponents in an FPS, I want them to use simple tactics (not just be unable to hit the broadside of a barn) like charging forwards blindly, or getting scared easily and retreating or even panicking, and being easily suppressed by heavy fire. When I face more advanced opponents, I want the range of their choices to move up the tactical scale to include flanking maneuvers, suppression fire, use of cover, and tactical retreats. A good mistake for an advanced AI would be to assume you're in the wrong position if you duck out of view and to attack that wrong position vigorously (as opposed to the omniscience a lot of AI's seem to have). They don't have to be any more accurate or need any more bullets to kill than an easy bot, but at least they could present more of a real challenge without artificially increasing their stats. Granted this is harder to do and would require actual programming rather than just increasing a few numbers, but that's the price for good AI in your game.
If you have ever gone to see a doctor who went to public schools growing up, then you have benefited from school taxes. If you live in a neighborhood with other people who have jobs rather than in a street full of vacants full of squaters and crack-houses, then you have benefited from school taxes. If you happen to live in one of those neighborhoods anyway, and have felt the desire to call the police for whatever reason, then you have benefited from taxes.
Basically, if you interact with anyone else in society, and depend on those interactions for any reason, then you benefit from public education, whether you went to public school yourself or not. The benefits of living in an educated society where all members therein are capable of operating on a certain intellectual level are innumerable, and they are what make the cumulative difference between standard of living today and that of the Dark Ages. You can only conceive of the direct benefits to yourself because small minded people think small.
I see the newfound prominence of loot systems as being a standard progression of the gaming culture as it moves beyond the somewhat antiquated and abstract point-system. Very few games outside puzzle games (especially narrative games) can get away with using abstract points as a compelling measure of performance for players anymore. Tying those rewards to in-game mechanics seems to be a much more fluid and logical approach. It is much more common and intuitive for players to discuss their progress in a game in terms of the accomplishments they've achieved and subsequent loot they've acquired than to simply compare scores.
As both a scientist and a pastafarian, I can say with all confidence that boiling pasta water has a much greater chance of burning when coming into contact with JT's skin than holy water does
Rear projection has already been mentioned as a solution for the shadow casting. Another solution is to point the wiimote directly at your laptop screen and do the 4-point calibration on that, and just use your laptop as a tablet pc hooked up through the projector. Considerably cheaper than an actual tablet pc in both cases.
Some of the most important innovations are not about making something completely novel but about coming up with creative and more efficient ways of using what we already have. If this hack reproduces 75% of the performance of a commercial product at a fraction of the cost, then this is already a more cost-effective solution for simple touch-screen presentation software. It also puts it well within reach of the at-home user and not something that can only even be considered for large corporate presentations. All of a sudden an 8ft sq canvas for digital art is not out of the question, and it's scalable to a simple laptop as a tablet-pc replacement.
And considering the application he offers is free this can only encourage more experimentation that can lead to even more innovative applications of a relatively cheap and abundant product which is (Nintendo sanctioned or not) becoming more and more of a multi-purpose tool.
I think you've missed the point, and if it isn't the point in the article then it is a point that needs to be made nonetheless: It is not that innovation is irrelevant, it is that it is over-estimated and in some ways overrated. In the vast majority of cases of technological advancement we are seeing evolutionary iterations of and novel recombinations of existing technology, creating improved efficiencies within systems and synergies between previously isolated systems. The amount of completely novel technology that gets produced is extremely low, and yet nearly all the attention is paid to the pursuit of "innovation" (which I don't believe is necessarily a bad thing, but it should not be done to the exclusion of all other technological pursuits), when in most cases, the most useful advancements have come from rethinking how we can use or how we can improve what we already have.
Taking your examples, let's call PC's a true innovation (even though they owe greatly to the development of the large mainframe computer systems that preceded them). Laptops were not really innovations in the sense you use it, they were largely iterations of PC's that were re-imagined and re-designed for mobile use. You won't find any tech in a laptop that you won't find in most PC's, but the experience and utility of the device is very different because of the mobility it affords the user. Blackberries and smart phones aren't really so much completely novel tech, so much as combinations of existing communications technology iterated (basically breed a cell phone with a laptop and streamline the tech involved it for use).
For every true innovation, there are generations upon generations of iterations on that innovation that evolve the technology, and it is that iterative process where the bulk of technological advancement is made. True innovations are few and far between, and their importance in providing us with new avenues of progress to pursue is extremely important. However, one must not forget or ignore the importance of the iteration, which often seems to be the case.
To clarify, the terminology may be confusing. I believe innovation can refer to the iterative process of using existing tech to create a novel experience, but I don't believe that is the type of "innovation" that this article is talking about. I may be mistaken but I believe in the context of this article, innovation is referring solely to the development of completely novel technology.
Altruism is most certainly not the exception; it only appears as such on a large scale because of the structure of modern society. The summary doesn't discuss it, but the theory plays along with a lot of well known psychological behaviors that have to do with in-group vs. out-group behavior. The vast majority of people are certainly much more altruistic within communities of peers that they can view in some capacity as in-group, whereas we have evolved to be naturally suspicious and slightly xenophobic of communities we may identify as out-group (only with deliberate and conscious effort do we counteract this natural tendency on a cultural or national level).
The makeup of modern society, especially in urban settings, has heavily favored most people being socially anonymous with the majority of the people they may encounter, and thus viewing the vast majority of a population on an individual level as out-group (less likely to say hi to someone randomly on the street), but most people within the same country (or ethnicity, or religion) as nationally or culturally in-group (e.g. more likely to contribute to national charities supporting Katrina relief, or supporting veterans etc.).
Certainly it isn't hard to see the altruistic in-group mentality displayed on an individual level within one's own family or circle of friends. I don't know a single person who wouldn't be willing to accept temporary inconveniences or sacrifices for the benefit of one of their friends or family members. It is people who don't fit that model that I would view as more of the exception. Altruistic behavior is all too common, it just doesn't always get noticed or recognized on a large scale
Basically, humans being communal animals had to live in small groups to survive effectively. Generally in the earliest instances this would be a family of hunter-gatherers, slowly building to a collection of united and distantly related families forming tribes and clans, and eventually small stationary communities (with the advent of crop cultivation and animal domestication). In these small communities, activities that would benefit the survival of the entire community would obviously be advantageous, so altruistic and empathetic behavior is evolutionarily selected for.
Members of a community obviously benefit from interacting with each other cooperatively, but when they encounter another community of individuals to whom they have no particular familial or cultural allegiance, their behavior can be quite different. They could behave cooperatively, and possibly benefit from sharing of resources and information, or they could act hostilely and directly benefit from the immediate acquisition of their resources and territory. Communities that behaved aggressively with their neighbors would obviously have a greater chance of annexing territory and resources and growing in strength (until they came up against another community stronger and better equipped than themselves). So communities generally have different standards for violence perpetrated within a community than for violence perpetrated between one community on another (i.e. murder and theft is wrong, but killing and pillaging is encouraged in war). Communities that believe they are superior and have a right to other societies properties will generally be much more successful at conquering and assimilating other cultures. This explains why humans are generally xenophobic and ethnocentric.
Now within these communities, a certain level of selfish behavior is also afforded, where individuals who are willing to steal from or otherwise exploit their neighbors to better ensure their own survival gain a small advantage within the community. This is only possible so long as the majority of the community remains cohesive and cooperative (otherwise the society breaks down and everyone has to fend for themselves again). So naturally enforced norms against such antisocial behavior also arise naturally, and this sort of behavior can be observed in chimp and gorilla communities today. So there is a competition of empathetic behavior that ensures the survival of the community as a whole, and selfish behavior which aids in the survival of the individual within the community. So of course all humans are selfish to some degree, because being willing to ensure one's own survival is obviously advantageous, but it is generally mainly selfish behavior that comes at the expense of the community or other individuals that is frowned upon. In general, most people are both generous and selfish to varying degrees. The degree to which we may be generous generally depends on how much empathy or allegiance we feel to another individual (we are much more likely to be generous or self-sacrificial for a friend or family member than an acquaintance or stranger).
Eventually, as the communities become more sophisticated in language and ritual, the general empathetic and selfish behaviors become formalized as moral rights and wrongs, or as official rules and laws. But along with this formalization and sophistication comes the clever individual's ability for manipulation. Since human communities are largely dependant on leadership and hierarchical structures, and in many cases it is selfish traits that allow one to assume such high ranking positions, the rules written by such leaders can often tilt the odds in their own favor. Rules can be written in some societies to benefit the opportunistic few, at the expense of the community at large. So rules ensuring dynastic wealth and authority are set in place in many societies.
So from purely biological origins, morality can arise. This is why there is generally universal agreement between different communities on obvious things such as theft and murder. But other more arbitrary rules can arise depending on the specific culture, history, and circumstances of any particular community.
Yes, children may be imitative, but believe it or not, at a very young age they are generally able to distinguish between real world and make-believe. Children can very quickly understand that the things that happen in the magic box with moving pictures in it don't work the same way things outside that magic box do. When you see kids "imitating" the violence they see on TV, very rarely is this accompanied with actual real violence. A child may accidentally strike their friend a bit too hard, but as soon as the crying starts the playing stops and the child understands that something fundamentally different has happened than what they saw on TV. This is usually followed by a lot of consoling and apologizing. Children imitate pretend violence for fun, but it takes some other very serious problems to "turn" a child into something actually violent.
Children are a lot smarter than a lot of adults will generally give them credit for. In fact, most of the parents I've encountered trust their own kids with violent media, and are generally only concerned with keeping sex away from their kids (for some reason). It's other people's children they don't trust, and want some government nanny-state to keep everyone else's kids in line.
And even with that, who is exposing children at such a young age to those levels of violence anyway? What kind of parenting is incapable of keeping a child under the age of 12, let alone 6, away from any material the parent may not want?
Slashdot Mirror
Rock/paper/scissors, anyone?
The requirement to have a range of significantly distinct classes in raids, with their own strengths and weaknesses, opens up the possibility of having a rock/paper/scissors arrangement of class superiority in PvP. I'm amazed it wasn't implemented in the first place - it makes much more sense than trying to balance all classes to have the same chance in any given duel.
That way, a player of greater skill will not necessarily beat a player of lower skill if they are "out-classed", as it were. It means that players have to pick their fights wisely, be more opportunistic, be more alert, and maybe go around in pairs or impromptu groups to increase their chance of survival. That would greatly enhance the experience, in my opinion - it would prevent the loss of that feeling of threat and danger when you hit the level/gear cap, and would enhance the in-group/out-group, us & them relationship between the two factions as a result.
That's fine when you only have to deal with party raids, and full party pvp, but when you also have 1v1 pvp, a rocks, paper, scissors design to classes breaks horribly. The only way to balance this is instead of having rocks, paper, and scissor classes, you give each class a set of rocks, papers, and scissor abilities that they then have to use strategically against other classes and their rocks, papers, and scissors. But then, if each of these abilities has to be unique and interesting, and you have a half dozen or more classes with a number of optional skills each, you end up with the same problem of balancing your hundreds of rocks with your papers and scissors.
But in any of those instances, would they arrest the mechanic who did the modifications, or the owner who paid for them and drove the no longer street-legal car out of the shop?
How the hell did that post get to +4? Must be heartless mod night on /.
Did you know that Africa could feed itself, and half the world if they simply stopped fighting. Went to modern farming techniques and stopped fighting? That Zimbabwe was once the breadbasket of Africa and fed nearly the entire sub-content before Mugabe went insane and power hungry. I for one welcome the eradication of diseases that are terrible and crippling.
Perhaps we should just stop all immunizations world wide, and let people drop dead. Well that's fine with me, I'm vaccinated against everything I can be. But tell that to some 4 year old kid who will never walk and live in an iron lung because mommy and daddy had a conscience attack, and refused to give her a polio vaccination.
Adjusted for you. Zimbabwe remained perfectly productive and stable for more than a decade after Mugabe took power. It wasn't till he became paranoid that the problems started.
Well, it may all depend on which particular philosophy you subscribe to, but I offer this definition, based on the assumptions that we are talking about human beings as individualistic, social creatures (i.e. creatures that live in and are dependent on their communities, but also have individual senses of identity, desires, and motivations).
Right and wrong are heuristic models we have constructed as societies to help outline sets of actions that are desirable within the society vs actions that are undesirable within the society. Actions which are usually defined as right are generally ones that have a benefit to the community, or potentially the individual, whereas actions defined as wrong are generally ones that are determined to be detrimental to the community. As a society's understanding or assumptions about what are beneficial and detrimental to the society evolve, certain actions may fall into or out of either of those categories, whereas other actions may always be determined to be detrimental under any circumstances to any society (e.g. unregulated murder within a community is universally considered bad across pretty much all cultures, but government sanctioned capital punishment may be debatable depending on the culture, and killing soldiers on a battlefield in a conflict between two different societies is generally accepted as just the nature of war).
A bit rough and under-explained, but it's a start I think. One could argue whether any of these ideas would apply to artificial intelligences because the same assumptions I outlined earlier may not apply (would an AI have an individualistic sense of identity? Would it have "desires" that might motivate it to act against the best interests of the rest of the society?)
Or perhaps we're getting smarter and smarter, and are more able to recognize different types of more subtle intelligence. Then again, maybe when you were little you just weren't involved in these kinds of conversations?
Why don't you disagree with what I wrote instead of your moronic interpretation of what I wrote?
You say that science "doesn't claim that it has" explained the origin of the universe. That is my exact point. Science and Religion are not "100% incompatible" as the source post of this sub-thread claims.
So your point is that science doesn't explain what it doesn't claim to explain, but that somehow this means that religion automatically does explain it? Citation needed.
The very bedrock of science is nothing but pure faith.
Wrong. The very bedrock of science is that in order for claims to be verifiable, they must be observable and repeatable under controlled conditions so as to eliminate any need for faith.
Science does not preclude this statement:
Science makes no claims on this statement other than that beyond very poorly defined terms (define which god you mean here for a start, and what properties it embodies), that it does not have any testable properties that would allow us to verify or falsify the claim. Beyond that, you have the choice of either believing the statement based on faith alone, choosing not to believe the statement (as in, you neither believe the statement is true or false) due to lack of evidence, or choose to actively disbelieve the statement (as in, you believe the statement is false) presumably based on lack of evidence again. The scientific method in similar circumstances would generally take the second position unless new evidence arises that can be tested.
Additionally, the scientific method is also pure faith. The faith is that things are repeatable.
This is not faith. If one requires that a phenomenon be repeatable so that it can be observed under controlled conditions before accepting that it could exist or occur, is basically the opposite of faith. This is based on observations thus far that any occurrence in the natural world can be replicated under the right conditions. So of course, you can say that there are phenomenon that, by their very nature, only occur once in the entire universe, and then never repeat. Of course, this is nice speculation, and the claim by definition cannot be tested by science, but then again, if these phenomenon can only occur once without repetition, then they no longer have any bearing on our universe and thus exist outside of any practical application of intellectual persuit. Science is only interested in finding out about things that will have some application to our existence, and events that will never occur again and cannot be proven to ever have occurred before (this condition excludes the big bang) fall outside this category. It helps that so far we have not encountered anything (to the best of our knowledge) that would fall into this category, but I'm sure you'd dispute that point.
Anything that you just have to accept because you cannot apply the scientific method, is an exercise in faith.
Again, this is not faith. The application of the scientific method as a means to determining the fundamental nature of any known aspect of our natural universe has thus far, through countless observations, been demonstrated to be the single best method. This is after science got to questions that for centuries, philosophers, preachers, and mystics had claimed to have the answers to, but have long since been shown to be just flat out wrong about. So this belief is based on countless piles and piles of evidence, built on piles and piles of more evidence. The very fact that you are typing your post at all, and that I am able to see it are yet more testaments to the effectiveness of the scientific method.
When you wrote:
You may as
What I like most about Neil DeGrasse Tyson is how he's so deeply passionate about science, the scientific process, and the very philosophy of inquiry into the nature of the universe. He is able to evangelize science, and bring that often overlooked but much needed emotion to the conversation about what could otherwise be very dry and boring subjects.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ai-VvboPnA
Now if you can watch this and not be moved in some way, then I'm sorry, but it is my humble opinion that you are broken. This passion is a quality that almost every good preacher, salesman, or spokesman knows and yet so many science teachers can't seem to figure out: You need to engage your audience passionately, and make them feel the importance of what you're saying, not simply explain it to them.
Innovation is actually about as overrated as execution is underrated
He lost.
Everybody lost
Sorry, but as you say I must almost completely disagree with your sentiment on scripted events in games. Scripted events are not good example of AI because there is no decision making, which makes them predictable and exploitable. So the only way to scale difficulty in a scripted scenario is to just pump up the AI's accuracy, damage, and health, which are not very interesting. Scripted events work fine for fairly linear narratives and setting up big cinematic set-pieces, but they don't make for interesting gameplay (mind you I did not say they don't make for "fun" gameplay).
The events you describe in AvP are not necessarily examples of scripted scenarios, but sound more like a scripted set of responses to stimuli the player provides (would the AI react differently if you didn't rip off a soldier's head?). The trick for interesting yet realistic decision making is to allow the AI a range of responses that it can make, and then every time you present the same scenario to the computer you may get a different response. So when the AI is actually making decisions, rather than just following a pre-scripted path, this allows the player to make actual decisions in response, rather than just following their own memorized trial-and-error derived path to success.
The key to a good scaling AI doesn't have to be that tricky, it can just be a matter of what range of choices you allow any given AI to make and what sorts of "mistakes" you throw in that pool of choices.
When I face "easy" opponents in an FPS, I want them to use simple tactics (not just be unable to hit the broadside of a barn) like charging forwards blindly, or getting scared easily and retreating or even panicking, and being easily suppressed by heavy fire. When I face more advanced opponents, I want the range of their choices to move up the tactical scale to include flanking maneuvers, suppression fire, use of cover, and tactical retreats. A good mistake for an advanced AI would be to assume you're in the wrong position if you duck out of view and to attack that wrong position vigorously (as opposed to the omniscience a lot of AI's seem to have). They don't have to be any more accurate or need any more bullets to kill than an easy bot, but at least they could present more of a real challenge without artificially increasing their stats. Granted this is harder to do and would require actual programming rather than just increasing a few numbers, but that's the price for good AI in your game.
If you have ever gone to see a doctor who went to public schools growing up, then you have benefited from school taxes. If you live in a neighborhood with other people who have jobs rather than in a street full of vacants full of squaters and crack-houses, then you have benefited from school taxes. If you happen to live in one of those neighborhoods anyway, and have felt the desire to call the police for whatever reason, then you have benefited from taxes.
Basically, if you interact with anyone else in society, and depend on those interactions for any reason, then you benefit from public education, whether you went to public school yourself or not. The benefits of living in an educated society where all members therein are capable of operating on a certain intellectual level are innumerable, and they are what make the cumulative difference between standard of living today and that of the Dark Ages. You can only conceive of the direct benefits to yourself because small minded people think small.
I see the newfound prominence of loot systems as being a standard progression of the gaming culture as it moves beyond the somewhat antiquated and abstract point-system. Very few games outside puzzle games (especially narrative games) can get away with using abstract points as a compelling measure of performance for players anymore. Tying those rewards to in-game mechanics seems to be a much more fluid and logical approach. It is much more common and intuitive for players to discuss their progress in a game in terms of the accomplishments they've achieved and subsequent loot they've acquired than to simply compare scores.
As both a scientist and a pastafarian, I can say with all confidence that boiling pasta water has a much greater chance of burning when coming into contact with JT's skin than holy water does
Rear projection has already been mentioned as a solution for the shadow casting. Another solution is to point the wiimote directly at your laptop screen and do the 4-point calibration on that, and just use your laptop as a tablet pc hooked up through the projector. Considerably cheaper than an actual tablet pc in both cases.
Some of the most important innovations are not about making something completely novel but about coming up with creative and more efficient ways of using what we already have. If this hack reproduces 75% of the performance of a commercial product at a fraction of the cost, then this is already a more cost-effective solution for simple touch-screen presentation software. It also puts it well within reach of the at-home user and not something that can only even be considered for large corporate presentations. All of a sudden an 8ft sq canvas for digital art is not out of the question, and it's scalable to a simple laptop as a tablet-pc replacement.
And considering the application he offers is free this can only encourage more experimentation that can lead to even more innovative applications of a relatively cheap and abundant product which is (Nintendo sanctioned or not) becoming more and more of a multi-purpose tool.
I think you've missed the point, and if it isn't the point in the article then it is a point that needs to be made nonetheless: It is not that innovation is irrelevant, it is that it is over-estimated and in some ways overrated. In the vast majority of cases of technological advancement we are seeing evolutionary iterations of and novel recombinations of existing technology, creating improved efficiencies within systems and synergies between previously isolated systems. The amount of completely novel technology that gets produced is extremely low, and yet nearly all the attention is paid to the pursuit of "innovation" (which I don't believe is necessarily a bad thing, but it should not be done to the exclusion of all other technological pursuits), when in most cases, the most useful advancements have come from rethinking how we can use or how we can improve what we already have.
Taking your examples, let's call PC's a true innovation (even though they owe greatly to the development of the large mainframe computer systems that preceded them). Laptops were not really innovations in the sense you use it, they were largely iterations of PC's that were re-imagined and re-designed for mobile use. You won't find any tech in a laptop that you won't find in most PC's, but the experience and utility of the device is very different because of the mobility it affords the user. Blackberries and smart phones aren't really so much completely novel tech, so much as combinations of existing communications technology iterated (basically breed a cell phone with a laptop and streamline the tech involved it for use).
For every true innovation, there are generations upon generations of iterations on that innovation that evolve the technology, and it is that iterative process where the bulk of technological advancement is made. True innovations are few and far between, and their importance in providing us with new avenues of progress to pursue is extremely important. However, one must not forget or ignore the importance of the iteration, which often seems to be the case.
To clarify, the terminology may be confusing. I believe innovation can refer to the iterative process of using existing tech to create a novel experience, but I don't believe that is the type of "innovation" that this article is talking about. I may be mistaken but I believe in the context of this article, innovation is referring solely to the development of completely novel technology.
Altruism is most certainly not the exception; it only appears as such on a large scale because of the structure of modern society. The summary doesn't discuss it, but the theory plays along with a lot of well known psychological behaviors that have to do with in-group vs. out-group behavior. The vast majority of people are certainly much more altruistic within communities of peers that they can view in some capacity as in-group, whereas we have evolved to be naturally suspicious and slightly xenophobic of communities we may identify as out-group (only with deliberate and conscious effort do we counteract this natural tendency on a cultural or national level).
The makeup of modern society, especially in urban settings, has heavily favored most people being socially anonymous with the majority of the people they may encounter, and thus viewing the vast majority of a population on an individual level as out-group (less likely to say hi to someone randomly on the street), but most people within the same country (or ethnicity, or religion) as nationally or culturally in-group (e.g. more likely to contribute to national charities supporting Katrina relief, or supporting veterans etc.).
Certainly it isn't hard to see the altruistic in-group mentality displayed on an individual level within one's own family or circle of friends. I don't know a single person who wouldn't be willing to accept temporary inconveniences or sacrifices for the benefit of one of their friends or family members. It is people who don't fit that model that I would view as more of the exception. Altruistic behavior is all too common, it just doesn't always get noticed or recognized on a large scale
Not quite what you're looking for, but this is pretty close to a practical powerglove solution:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=BS_87WoJ0j8
I suppose it's not worth pointing out that that handheld is currently outselling all other consoles on the market too.
If you're leaning in to kiss your honey on a tv screen, I think you have more serious problems than just your eyes.
Basically, humans being communal animals had to live in small groups to survive effectively. Generally in the earliest instances this would be a family of hunter-gatherers, slowly building to a collection of united and distantly related families forming tribes and clans, and eventually small stationary communities (with the advent of crop cultivation and animal domestication). In these small communities, activities that would benefit the survival of the entire community would obviously be advantageous, so altruistic and empathetic behavior is evolutionarily selected for.
Members of a community obviously benefit from interacting with each other cooperatively, but when they encounter another community of individuals to whom they have no particular familial or cultural allegiance, their behavior can be quite different. They could behave cooperatively, and possibly benefit from sharing of resources and information, or they could act hostilely and directly benefit from the immediate acquisition of their resources and territory. Communities that behaved aggressively with their neighbors would obviously have a greater chance of annexing territory and resources and growing in strength (until they came up against another community stronger and better equipped than themselves). So communities generally have different standards for violence perpetrated within a community than for violence perpetrated between one community on another (i.e. murder and theft is wrong, but killing and pillaging is encouraged in war). Communities that believe they are superior and have a right to other societies properties will generally be much more successful at conquering and assimilating other cultures. This explains why humans are generally xenophobic and ethnocentric.
Now within these communities, a certain level of selfish behavior is also afforded, where individuals who are willing to steal from or otherwise exploit their neighbors to better ensure their own survival gain a small advantage within the community. This is only possible so long as the majority of the community remains cohesive and cooperative (otherwise the society breaks down and everyone has to fend for themselves again). So naturally enforced norms against such antisocial behavior also arise naturally, and this sort of behavior can be observed in chimp and gorilla communities today. So there is a competition of empathetic behavior that ensures the survival of the community as a whole, and selfish behavior which aids in the survival of the individual within the community. So of course all humans are selfish to some degree, because being willing to ensure one's own survival is obviously advantageous, but it is generally mainly selfish behavior that comes at the expense of the community or other individuals that is frowned upon. In general, most people are both generous and selfish to varying degrees. The degree to which we may be generous generally depends on how much empathy or allegiance we feel to another individual (we are much more likely to be generous or self-sacrificial for a friend or family member than an acquaintance or stranger).
Eventually, as the communities become more sophisticated in language and ritual, the general empathetic and selfish behaviors become formalized as moral rights and wrongs, or as official rules and laws. But along with this formalization and sophistication comes the clever individual's ability for manipulation. Since human communities are largely dependant on leadership and hierarchical structures, and in many cases it is selfish traits that allow one to assume such high ranking positions, the rules written by such leaders can often tilt the odds in their own favor. Rules can be written in some societies to benefit the opportunistic few, at the expense of the community at large. So rules ensuring dynastic wealth and authority are set in place in many societies.
So from purely biological origins, morality can arise. This is why there is generally universal agreement between different communities on obvious things such as theft and murder. But other more arbitrary rules can arise depending on the specific culture, history, and circumstances of any particular community.
Don't worry. If they did add a touchscreen then you could play all the ports of fantastic DS games on your new PS Lite.
Yes, children may be imitative, but believe it or not, at a very young age they are generally able to distinguish between real world and make-believe. Children can very quickly understand that the things that happen in the magic box with moving pictures in it don't work the same way things outside that magic box do. When you see kids "imitating" the violence they see on TV, very rarely is this accompanied with actual real violence. A child may accidentally strike their friend a bit too hard, but as soon as the crying starts the playing stops and the child understands that something fundamentally different has happened than what they saw on TV. This is usually followed by a lot of consoling and apologizing. Children imitate pretend violence for fun, but it takes some other very serious problems to "turn" a child into something actually violent.
Children are a lot smarter than a lot of adults will generally give them credit for. In fact, most of the parents I've encountered trust their own kids with violent media, and are generally only concerned with keeping sex away from their kids (for some reason). It's other people's children they don't trust, and want some government nanny-state to keep everyone else's kids in line.
And even with that, who is exposing children at such a young age to those levels of violence anyway? What kind of parenting is incapable of keeping a child under the age of 12, let alone 6, away from any material the parent may not want?