While this is cool in one way - it will encourage game makers to put great music into their games - it also gives bigger publishers another advantage.
There was a time when you just needed an idea and programming skills to make a game. Now you need lots of specialists to make all the sounds and graphics competitive, or your gameplay will never see the light of day.
Soon, companies may say, "that's a great game idea, but can we make money from the soundtrack spinoff?" Hiring a top-notch composer will be another must-have in the large budget.
You can't use it to "print" a hamburger unless you use hamburger "ink." This thing takes cells as its raw material and basically layers them to make the tissue you want - they used the example of stacking donuts of cells, which grow together into a continuous blood vessel.
This only works because the cells are alive and can start functioning together. So you can't use it to make a wooden 2x4 or a beef patty or a sharktooth necklace or whatever. The bits wouldn't stick to each other because they wouldn't grow together if they're dead.
...God gives us the clever property of having always existed and very nice things that solve the issue in the Argument of First Cause. Not nicely, mind you, because there IS no way to solve that issue nicely (Where did GOD come from? etc).
Or you can rephrase that, "where did the energy for the Big Bang come from?"
This question ("Where did God come from") is out of the realm of science, obviously, but I look at it this way: time itself is a property of the created universe. Therefore, if God created the universe, there is no such thing as "before" God. He is not on the timeline; he drew the timeline. He is the fundamental fact of the universe.
If you don't believe that, fine, but it's a question of faith, not science. And if you don't answer the question with "God," you still don't have a neat way of saying what caused the events that brought the laws of our universe into being, or how events can happen without space-time.
In other news, historians have discovered that both Einstein and Darwin favored the Non-simultaneous Leg Insertion method for putting on their pants - much like you and I.
Yes, another phone that will do everything but make you a sandwich.
Before we start adding laser pointers and vacuum attachments, let's think about what a phone SHOULD do.
A good phone should:
1) Let me group my contacts and, for example, direct business calls to voicemail when I get off work
2) Be able to ring for more than one phone number
3) Have a "sleep" setting to tell callers that I'm likely in bed, but if it's an emergency, press one and it will ring; otherwise get voice mail
4) Allow me to press a button and send complete contact info to the person on the other end of the line, so they don't have to manually enter my name
5) Have quick web access to a LOCAL PHONE BOOK. This is WAY more obvious on a PHONE than say, browsing for ringback tones and wallpapers and crap.
Etc etc. I wish I could sit down with the phone makers and say, "look, this thing is a PHONE. It's for communication. What features does a PHONE need?" The first person to say "a video camera" would get whacked with a rolled-up newspaper.
Slashdotters seem to think video games have no effect on people. Thompson sees them as horrible killer-trainers. Personally, I fall somewhere in between.
I love playing Halo. It's exciting and fun, and the "violence" is pretty mild. I have played Unreal Tournament and GTA (older versions), but gave them up because to me, they were too sadistic. They didn't make me want to kill people, but they made me a little more inclined to be a jerk.
It's the same with TV. If I watch a show like "The Shield" or some pissy reality show where everybody hates each other, I get a little bit into that angry, "screw you" mentality.
Think about your personality and attitude. Me, I'm very laid back, because my dad is laid back. I like goofy jokes because my dad does, and my friends growing up did too. (I also watched Monty Python.) I can see how these influences shaped the way I am.
Most of us spend several hours a day using some kind of media - music, TV, internet, video games, etc. Just like the people we're around, these virtual friends DO shape our mentality, somewhat.
I will never be a homocidal maniac, regardless of what I watch or play. But I do know that seeing examples of people who laugh, who love and forgive each other - whether those are real people or on TV - makes it easier for me to do the same. Exposing myself to hours of anger and selfishness makes me likely to replay those thoughts and words. Just because I'm an adult doesn't mean that everything is equally good for me.
Now there is for the first time a technical conversion of the "Alfven waves", which could introduce "a new era in the area of the propulsion technologies in the universe", so grass-sourly.
No. It costs a lot of money to go to space. If tourists who can't afford it still get to go, that means someone else is paying their way. Why should I buy your ticket?
Things cost money. It's not elitist to sell an expensive item for a high price; it's realistic. What's elitist is to refuse to sell to someone who has the money just because they don't meet your standard.
Tickets to space
on
Space Tourism?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Should paying people have a real scientific background or is money simply enough?
That should be up to whoever is behind the trip. Maybe if the tourists are completely useless, they'll have to pay more to make up for their dead weight. But we're not talking about buying your way into heaven or something. Sure, traveling to the moon was a big step for mankind, and it takes on mythic, almost religious significance for us for someone to go into space. But bottom line, it's just a new place we can go.
If you've got a rocket and I've got a sack of cash, why shouldn't we be able to make an arrangement? You can't do your science without funding anyway. There's no need to be elitist.
...but that's okay because the victims are different from us.
Ha! Give me a break. Now Mario promotes racism?
And the fact that "people empathize with the victims in GTA" hardly makes the player go, "Gee, violence really is bad." If anything, it tells you that other people's remorse is just part of your fun.
I'm not trying to establish cause and effect, but let's not be ridiculous. It's much easier to draw a "moral" from a game that simulates real crimes in a real city than one with a a leaping Italian plumber in a pastel fantasy world. I've personally played GTA, then later caught myself wanting to swerve erratically on a real road. I've never had Mario give me stompin' fever.
Selling porn to children is something most of us agree is Bad. But porn could be as hard to define as video-game violence. The famous quote is "I know it when I see it."
Violence is hard to define, if you're trying to separate the "squashing goombas flat in Mario" type from the "setting people on fire and laughing at their cries for help" type. It's going to take some subjective words like "sadistic" and "intentionally causing suffering."
But if it's hard to define legally, I don't think it's that hard for most people to see that Mario and GTA are totally different things in the hands of a little kid. The question is: can we make it legally clear?
You're missing my point. I'm not saying "golly, isn't 60 GB enough?" I'm asking whether anyone thinks we'll ever reach a stopping point. Like maybe when you can fit a lifetime worth of virtual reality simulations in a device the size of a grain of rice. Will we still want more?
Will there come a point when, for the average person, there's no point in building faster microprocessors or bigger hard drives?
So they're moving toward an 80 GB model. Scaling up their estimations, that would hold 20,000 songs.
How much is enough? Will there come a point when we say, "I don't NEED more storage on this device?" For example, with music, if you can store more songs than you'd ever have time to listen to, you're done.
Sure, video would up the limit considerably. And maybe someday video will give way to virtual reality. I just wonder sometimes where it will end. Or maybe it will plateau out - like cars, for example. The model T was slower than today's cars, but at this point we're not trying to make cars faster. They're fast enough already, and can be improved in other ways. Will technology see an end to the "more and faster" stage? What does the Slashdot community think?
and mesh them with this new invention to get a many-armed robot that hears a sniper shot being fired, catches the bullet before it hits a soldier, and chases down the sniper.
Hmmm... Well, on the one hand, it takes precise timing and an intuitive understanding of physics to keep the sack in the air. On the other hand, if you do it right, it looks a lot like a dance.:)
Sounds like a fun book! But my point is it takes more than knowledge for civilization to work - it takes workers and infastructure.
Without an infastructure, you have to devote all your energy to survival. Edison was able to concentrate on the light bulb because somebody else had built his house, somebody else farmed wheat and baked his bread, somebody else had birthed and raised and taught him, etc.
I just think it's easy to become arrogant when you say, "I know how stuff works and these idiots around me don't." We all need each other, regardless of who knows what.
Geeks as gods? That was the writer's fantasy. The fact is that we all have to choose a line of work, and that means we have specialized knowledge. Even the best engineer is useless without construction workers.
In primitive societies, one person might be able to know everything the civilization knows. Now it's impossible. If a modern geek were dropped off naked on an island and told to start over, he'd never get to the point of smelting iron in one lifetime. The microprocessor would be a long time coming.
Geeks are important, but what about the factory workers who make your gadgets? What about the teachers who help the next generation learn to read? What about the farmers who grow your food? Technology isn't the point of life, and it can't exist without lots of "non-technical" support. The fact that someone doesn't know how their gadgets work doesn't mean they don't know something crucial for your continued happiness.
I once witnessed a labor strike of garbage workers. Believe me, it's a good lesson in whose services we can't live without.
When you've got tons of units to deal with, it's great to be able to give long-range commands, like "all the tanks in this square, go over there. You three workers, built a railroad to this point."
But what's frustrating is how my units do idiotic things. Like blunder into enemy territory instead of choosing a longer, safer path. I have to micromanage them to prevent that (especially if the borders change while they're en route).
I'd like to be able to give more specific orders, like "sail to this point but don't leave the coast," or "explore until you find a city," or "attack unless you face a unit more advanced than you." Basically the way a general would tell his underlings what to do, then trust their judgement.
"I have yet to hear of embryonic stem cells ever working in a situation like this."
I'm no authority, but according to this site, treatments for 65 disorders have been created from adult stem cells, while none have yet been made from embryonic stem cells.
I don't think that means that nothing good can ever come of embryonic stem cell research, but it grieves me to think that embryos will be created with the intent of destroying them, all for the potential of making life nicer for the rest of us.
The tone of the public debate makes it sound like it's "science vs. pro-lifers." But in fact, it's "pro-lifers vs. a particular technique of science which hasn't yet shown to be useful anyway, and which has a proven, non-objectionable alternative."
Civilization makes you balance lots of elements - money, food, technology, military strategy, etc - in order to succeed. Yet games are inherently simpler than real life, and wouldn't be fun if they weren't.
How do you decide when you've made it complex enough? Also, how much should players be able to sidestep elements they don't want to deal with? For instance, Civ III allowed you to delegate what a city builds to a city manager. Personally, I would love to delegate economic management to someone, even if I had to "pay" that person a salary. What do you think of allowing players to remove some of the elements of complexity like that?
Cops already have investigative noses - attached to dogs. The way a cop explained it to me (I was a reporter, not a criminal), if he does a traffic stop, his dog can sniff all around the outside of the car without violating anybody's privacy.
If the dog signals that it smells drugs, that gives him probable cause for a search inside the car.
If that's the way the law works now, I don't see why it would change if the sniffer is mechanical.
In theory, you're right, but people aren't logical. When you go to buy a blender, if one blender costs $50 and one costs $20, you're going to assume the $50 one is better. You'd be right a lot of the time.
I've done some indy music and sold a few songs through iPod, and I like the fact that my songs cost the same as anybody else's. It says that my music is as valuable as anybody's. If they charge more for popular music, I think it would be more likely to hurt my sales than the sales of popular artists, because subconsiously people will say "oh, that's cheap because it's low-quality." Impressions like that can carry over even after people hear it - the same way that people will swear that identical cereals from different-looking boxes taste different.
I'm happy to GIVE my music away if people will listen to it, because that's what I'm after - not money. But a price is, for most of us, a subtle clue to quality. All other things being equal, sometimes we WANT to pay more for something.
Slashdot Mirror
While this is cool in one way - it will encourage game makers to put great music into their games - it also gives bigger publishers another advantage.
There was a time when you just needed an idea and programming skills to make a game. Now you need lots of specialists to make all the sounds and graphics competitive, or your gameplay will never see the light of day.
Soon, companies may say, "that's a great game idea, but can we make money from the soundtrack spinoff?" Hiring a top-notch composer will be another must-have in the large budget.
You can't use it to "print" a hamburger unless you use hamburger "ink." This thing takes cells as its raw material and basically layers them to make the tissue you want - they used the example of stacking donuts of cells, which grow together into a continuous blood vessel.
This only works because the cells are alive and can start functioning together. So you can't use it to make a wooden 2x4 or a beef patty or a sharktooth necklace or whatever. The bits wouldn't stick to each other because they wouldn't grow together if they're dead.
...God gives us the clever property of having always existed and very nice things that solve the issue in the Argument of First Cause. Not nicely, mind you, because there IS no way to solve that issue nicely (Where did GOD come from? etc).
Or you can rephrase that, "where did the energy for the Big Bang come from?"
This question ("Where did God come from") is out of the realm of science, obviously, but I look at it this way: time itself is a property of the created universe. Therefore, if God created the universe, there is no such thing as "before" God. He is not on the timeline; he drew the timeline. He is the fundamental fact of the universe.
If you don't believe that, fine, but it's a question of faith, not science. And if you don't answer the question with "God," you still don't have a neat way of saying what caused the events that brought the laws of our universe into being, or how events can happen without space-time.
In other news, historians have discovered that both Einstein and Darwin favored the Non-simultaneous Leg Insertion method for putting on their pants - much like you and I.
Yes, another phone that will do everything but make you a sandwich.
Before we start adding laser pointers and vacuum attachments, let's think about what a phone SHOULD do.
A good phone should:
1) Let me group my contacts and, for example, direct business calls to voicemail when I get off work
2) Be able to ring for more than one phone number
3) Have a "sleep" setting to tell callers that I'm likely in bed, but if it's an emergency, press one and it will ring; otherwise get voice mail
4) Allow me to press a button and send complete contact info to the person on the other end of the line, so they don't have to manually enter my name
5) Have quick web access to a LOCAL PHONE BOOK. This is WAY more obvious on a PHONE than say, browsing for ringback tones and wallpapers and crap.
Etc etc. I wish I could sit down with the phone makers and say, "look, this thing is a PHONE. It's for communication. What features does a PHONE need?" The first person to say "a video camera" would get whacked with a rolled-up newspaper.
My first question when I started using Wikipedia was, "How is this funded?"
Answer: donations. Since I have never given any money, I'd have no problem accepting ads.
I hope that the people who are complaining the loudest have given the most. Otherwise, they're mad because they can't get something for nothing.
Sure, it's compact, but ten to one the crash rating sucks.
Slashdotters seem to think video games have no effect on people. Thompson sees them as horrible killer-trainers. Personally, I fall somewhere in between.
I love playing Halo. It's exciting and fun, and the "violence" is pretty mild. I have played Unreal Tournament and GTA (older versions), but gave them up because to me, they were too sadistic. They didn't make me want to kill people, but they made me a little more inclined to be a jerk.
It's the same with TV. If I watch a show like "The Shield" or some pissy reality show where everybody hates each other, I get a little bit into that angry, "screw you" mentality.
Think about your personality and attitude. Me, I'm very laid back, because my dad is laid back. I like goofy jokes because my dad does, and my friends growing up did too. (I also watched Monty Python.) I can see how these influences shaped the way I am.
Most of us spend several hours a day using some kind of media - music, TV, internet, video games, etc. Just like the people we're around, these virtual friends DO shape our mentality, somewhat.
I will never be a homocidal maniac, regardless of what I watch or play. But I do know that seeing examples of people who laugh, who love and forgive each other - whether those are real people or on TV - makes it easier for me to do the same. Exposing myself to hours of anger and selfishness makes me likely to replay those thoughts and words. Just because I'm an adult doesn't mean that everything is equally good for me.
Does anybody else see that?
Now there is for the first time a technical conversion of the "Alfven waves", which could introduce "a new era in the area of the propulsion technologies in the universe", so grass-sourly.
Beautiful.
Cannot believe I the good use ability of this ingine. Change to better all space travel it will.
No. It costs a lot of money to go to space. If tourists who can't afford it still get to go, that means someone else is paying their way. Why should I buy your ticket?
Things cost money. It's not elitist to sell an expensive item for a high price; it's realistic. What's elitist is to refuse to sell to someone who has the money just because they don't meet your standard.
Should paying people have a real scientific background or is money simply enough?
That should be up to whoever is behind the trip. Maybe if the tourists are completely useless, they'll have to pay more to make up for their dead weight. But we're not talking about buying your way into heaven or something. Sure, traveling to the moon was a big step for mankind, and it takes on mythic, almost religious significance for us for someone to go into space. But bottom line, it's just a new place we can go.
If you've got a rocket and I've got a sack of cash, why shouldn't we be able to make an arrangement? You can't do your science without funding anyway. There's no need to be elitist.
...but that's okay because the victims are different from us.
Ha! Give me a break. Now Mario promotes racism?
And the fact that "people empathize with the victims in GTA" hardly makes the player go, "Gee, violence really is bad." If anything, it tells you that other people's remorse is just part of your fun.
I'm not trying to establish cause and effect, but let's not be ridiculous. It's much easier to draw a "moral" from a game that simulates real crimes in a real city than one with a a leaping Italian plumber in a pastel fantasy world. I've personally played GTA, then later caught myself wanting to swerve erratically on a real road. I've never had Mario give me stompin' fever.
Selling porn to children is something most of us agree is Bad. But porn could be as hard to define as video-game violence. The famous quote is "I know it when I see it."
Violence is hard to define, if you're trying to separate the "squashing goombas flat in Mario" type from the "setting people on fire and laughing at their cries for help" type. It's going to take some subjective words like "sadistic" and "intentionally causing suffering."
But if it's hard to define legally, I don't think it's that hard for most people to see that Mario and GTA are totally different things in the hands of a little kid. The question is: can we make it legally clear?
You're missing my point. I'm not saying "golly, isn't 60 GB enough?" I'm asking whether anyone thinks we'll ever reach a stopping point. Like maybe when you can fit a lifetime worth of virtual reality simulations in a device the size of a grain of rice. Will we still want more?
Will there come a point when, for the average person, there's no point in building faster microprocessors or bigger hard drives?
So they're moving toward an 80 GB model. Scaling up their estimations, that would hold 20,000 songs.
How much is enough? Will there come a point when we say, "I don't NEED more storage on this device?" For example, with music, if you can store more songs than you'd ever have time to listen to, you're done.
Sure, video would up the limit considerably. And maybe someday video will give way to virtual reality. I just wonder sometimes where it will end. Or maybe it will plateau out - like cars, for example. The model T was slower than today's cars, but at this point we're not trying to make cars faster. They're fast enough already, and can be improved in other ways. Will technology see an end to the "more and faster" stage? What does the Slashdot community think?
let's soup up the Japanese robot that can catch softballs at 180 miles per hour...
/ 08/0411205&tid=216&tid=126
/ 08/0411205&tid=216&tid=126
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08
and combine it with the multi-legged all-terrain Korean combat-bot...
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08
and mesh them with this new invention to get a many-armed robot that hears a sniper shot being fired, catches the bullet before it hits a soldier, and chases down the sniper.
Hmmm... Well, on the one hand, it takes precise timing and an intuitive understanding of physics to keep the sack in the air. On the other hand, if you do it right, it looks a lot like a dance. :)
Sounds like a fun book! But my point is it takes more than knowledge for civilization to work - it takes workers and infastructure.
Without an infastructure, you have to devote all your energy to survival. Edison was able to concentrate on the light bulb because somebody else had built his house, somebody else farmed wheat and baked his bread, somebody else had birthed and raised and taught him, etc.
I just think it's easy to become arrogant when you say, "I know how stuff works and these idiots around me don't." We all need each other, regardless of who knows what.
Geeks as gods? That was the writer's fantasy. The fact is that we all have to choose a line of work, and that means we have specialized knowledge. Even the best engineer is useless without construction workers.
In primitive societies, one person might be able to know everything the civilization knows. Now it's impossible. If a modern geek were dropped off naked on an island and told to start over, he'd never get to the point of smelting iron in one lifetime. The microprocessor would be a long time coming.
Geeks are important, but what about the factory workers who make your gadgets? What about the teachers who help the next generation learn to read? What about the farmers who grow your food? Technology isn't the point of life, and it can't exist without lots of "non-technical" support. The fact that someone doesn't know how their gadgets work doesn't mean they don't know something crucial for your continued happiness.
I once witnessed a labor strike of garbage workers. Believe me, it's a good lesson in whose services we can't live without.
When you've got tons of units to deal with, it's great to be able to give long-range commands, like "all the tanks in this square, go over there. You three workers, built a railroad to this point."
But what's frustrating is how my units do idiotic things. Like blunder into enemy territory instead of choosing a longer, safer path. I have to micromanage them to prevent that (especially if the borders change while they're en route).
I'd like to be able to give more specific orders, like "sail to this point but don't leave the coast," or "explore until you find a city," or "attack unless you face a unit more advanced than you." Basically the way a general would tell his underlings what to do, then trust their judgement.
Any chance of seeing that in the new game?
"I have yet to hear of embryonic stem cells ever working in a situation like this."
h tm
I'm no authority, but according to this site, treatments for 65 disorders have been created from adult stem cells, while none have yet been made from embryonic stem cells.
http://www.stemcellresearch.org/facts/treatments.
I don't think that means that nothing good can ever come of embryonic stem cell research, but it grieves me to think that embryos will be created with the intent of destroying them, all for the potential of making life nicer for the rest of us.
The tone of the public debate makes it sound like it's "science vs. pro-lifers." But in fact, it's "pro-lifers vs. a particular technique of science which hasn't yet shown to be useful anyway, and which has a proven, non-objectionable alternative."
Civilization makes you balance lots of elements - money, food, technology, military strategy, etc - in order to succeed. Yet games are inherently simpler than real life, and wouldn't be fun if they weren't.
How do you decide when you've made it complex enough? Also, how much should players be able to sidestep elements they don't want to deal with? For instance, Civ III allowed you to delegate what a city builds to a city manager. Personally, I would love to delegate economic management to someone, even if I had to "pay" that person a salary. What do you think of allowing players to remove some of the elements of complexity like that?
Cops already have investigative noses - attached to dogs. The way a cop explained it to me (I was a reporter, not a criminal), if he does a traffic stop, his dog can sniff all around the outside of the car without violating anybody's privacy.
If the dog signals that it smells drugs, that gives him probable cause for a search inside the car.
If that's the way the law works now, I don't see why it would change if the sniffer is mechanical.
In theory, you're right, but people aren't logical. When you go to buy a blender, if one blender costs $50 and one costs $20, you're going to assume the $50 one is better. You'd be right a lot of the time.
I've done some indy music and sold a few songs through iPod, and I like the fact that my songs cost the same as anybody else's. It says that my music is as valuable as anybody's. If they charge more for popular music, I think it would be more likely to hurt my sales than the sales of popular artists, because subconsiously people will say "oh, that's cheap because it's low-quality." Impressions like that can carry over even after people hear it - the same way that people will swear that identical cereals from different-looking boxes taste different.
I'm happy to GIVE my music away if people will listen to it, because that's what I'm after - not money. But a price is, for most of us, a subtle clue to quality. All other things being equal, sometimes we WANT to pay more for something.