"You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem." -- Edwards' Law
Not that I've resolved myself to come down on any particular side of any manifestation of the gun ownership issue, but it really doesn't seem like this is going to particularly help. The gun problem in the U.S. is a social problem: Even accounting for differences in guns owned per capita, no other industrialized country has as many gun deaths as the U.S. (About 50% of U.S. households have a firearm, compared to about 30% in Switzerland -- source here.)
I'm not going to pretend like I know all the answers -- why we have so many more gun deaths than other countries, what should be done about it, etc. -- but I'm fairly certain that this is treating the symptoms, not the cause.
I'd be rather surprised if Blade Runner's "hundreds of possible scenarios and plot twists" weren't all hand-coded. Which is fine; there's no reason you can't spend several years hand-coding a huge, elaborate, intricate plot. All I'm saying is that the kind of freedom you're asking for (essentially a semirandom simulation of the real world that is entertaining and not boring or repetetive) still isn't feasible for computers to generate on the fly.
You have to admit games have gotten increasingly mindless over the years, since Ultima 7, etc. We either have boring/slow strategy games on one extreme, or mindless fast fps games on the other.
No, I don't. There have been plenty of compelling games since Ultima 7. And I would list them, except you'll just nitpick about the ones you don't like. You may not have found anything compelling, but lots of other people seem to (I certainly have found plenty of games I wouldn't hesistate to call "compelling"). You're basically just acting like an old fogey ("Bah, everything kids listen to today is noise! Now Lawrence Welk, THAT'S real music!"). I call it Nostalgitis -- you had great experiences with computer games when you were younger, and then you grew up and got jaded like everyone does, except instead of seeing reality (there were just as many shit games back then as there are now), you only remember the good games from your youth, forget about the bad ones, and claim that everything sucks now. People do the exact same thing with books, movies, music, art -- all forms of creative endeavor -- while totally ignoring all the absolute crud that's come out over the years. Yes, even when you were young.
My only complaint is that these same algorithms have not been applied to adventure games.
The reason for that is that "number of outcomes" means something totally different in games like SimCity or chess, and adventure games like (say) Diablo II. Why? Because SimCity and chess don't have plots. There's no story. Any outcome is essentially the same as any other -- either you win or you lose.
You can't randomly generate good stories using algorithms. Computers aren't intelligent enough to do such a thing on their own. (Not yet; possibly not ever, depending who you believe.) Not to mention generating the actual game content to match that plot (video, audio, puzzles, mysteries, other gameplay elements). The closest you can get is having some finite number of elements that the computer randomly selects from; but each element still has to be hand-crafted by a human, and after a couple of play-throughs, you start seeing the same elements over and over again.
Now, such a game would be a truly amazing feat -- revolutionary at the very least. Do you really think that it hasn't happened because no one's had the desire to? Be realistic. The reason it hasn't happened is because it's not possible right now.
I agreed with most of your post, but I wanted to respond to one thing:
The only new questions the internet brings up are questions of jurisdiction. That's all.
They're questions of jurisdiction, sure, but the important questions aren't ones like, "Who has jurisdiction over something written by person A in country B and viewed by person C in country D, where that something is illegal?" The questions are, "What do we do when real-world jurisdictional models don't even remotely apply to the Internet?" No one's even come close to having a real answer to this question, yet -- most of the time, it's devolved to, "If it's viewable where it's illegal, then even if it's not illegal where it was posted from, we have to pressure the foreign government to forcibly take it off the net!"
It would clearly be restrictive if we all needed libel insurance to publish a web page.
Why would we need libel insurance if we're not posting libel? If someone is so lazy that they can't be bothered to check facts before posting them, but is willing to pay for libel insurance, they deserve to get sued.
Even if this is true, they can still get you for trafficking. And if you're uploading it to a free hosting site, well, it had to be on your computer at some point (and they can get you for possession then). Once they suspect you (and, hopefully, get a warrant), they'll start tapping your data lines (or even just break in and install monitoring software), and catch you anyway.
You really think that it's feasible (let alone possible) to write a game that would give you a "nearly unlimted [sic] number of ways" to get off Earth and reach the center of the galaxy? Well, either someone has to code interface, logic, and AI for (at the very least) hundreds of separate mechanisms for doing this, or they have to reimplement reality inside a computer game, so that you have true freedom within the game engine. You really think this is feasible? Then why don't you go ahead and do it, and prove the entire game industry wrong? Go ahead. We're waiting.
The fact that you keep demanding that games do things which aren't feasible indicates that you aren't a programmer... maybe you should learn about the limitations game designers face before snubbing all of their work.
Why is it a shortcoming? XML was designed to be a meta-framework for markup languages. That's all it's designed to do, and that's what it does. It's not a shortcoming if something does what it's designed to do.:)
Yeah, what kind of trade secrets did he leak? "Apple's going to release a new computer, that's going to be shiny and brightly colored and win lots of design awards." I bet nobody saw that one coming!:)
Yeah, they're all the same. Except for the ones with really well-done plot and story (Half-Life), or the ones with way the hell more than 9 weapons, not to mention an incredibly elaborate plot and highly detailed back story (Deus Ex), or the ones that aren't revolutionary but do a very good job with good level design, graphics, and excellent gameplay (Jedi Outcast).
Every game in a given genre is exactly the same... except for the exceptions, of course.
It was clear that something intended to be in the movie was left out in the first 15 minutes, with Pippin chewing off and spitting the brooch given to him on the ground, for no apparent reason.
I figured it was pretty obvious that he did that to leave a clue for Aragorn and the others to find. Of course, Aragorn had been tracking the band of stinky orcs for days with no real problem, so it's not like Pippin's idea was that useful, but then again, Pippin's a provincial ignoramus -- he probably didn't have any idea how well Aragorn could track them -- and he was scared out of his mind, too, so he may not have been thinking clearly. I don't know whether that happened in the book, though.
<flamebait>they were much more entertaining than the flashy fps-type games of the current generation. i guess the industry is just trying to cater to the short attention span of the current gamers.</flamebait>
I'll bite.
<flameresponse>
You're a fucking idiot. You were nine years old then, and you're just looking at the past through convenient rose-colored glasses. The first games you play are always the best, in your memory, because they are the most mysterious, unknown, freshest, etc. Once you've played 500 other games, you stop seeing major surprises, and from then on, nothing seems to quite meet up to your standard from when you first got into it.
Slashdot Mirror
And then my .ogg was gone. It was a really good .ogg.
...I'd personally rather get mono than use .net.
Oh, that Mono. Nevermind.
Hehe.
:)
Wow, your sig is the first Johnny Clegg quote I've seen... uh... anywhere. Ever. Cool.
Ooh! Does that mean these will be for sale at Spatula City??
"You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem." -- Edwards' Law
Not that I've resolved myself to come down on any particular side of any manifestation of the gun ownership issue, but it really doesn't seem like this is going to particularly help. The gun problem in the U.S. is a social problem: Even accounting for differences in guns owned per capita, no other industrialized country has as many gun deaths as the U.S. (About 50% of U.S. households have a firearm, compared to about 30% in Switzerland -- source here.)
I'm not going to pretend like I know all the answers -- why we have so many more gun deaths than other countries, what should be done about it, etc. -- but I'm fairly certain that this is treating the symptoms, not the cause.
He's not a number. ;)
You can't randomly generate good stories using algorithms. Computers aren't intelligent enough to do such a thing on their own. (Not yet; possibly not ever, depending who you believe.) Not to mention generating the actual game content to match that plot (video, audio, puzzles, mysteries, other gameplay elements). The closest you can get is having some finite number of elements that the computer randomly selects from; but each element still has to be hand-crafted by a human, and after a couple of play-throughs, you start seeing the same elements over and over again.
Now, such a game would be a truly amazing feat -- revolutionary at the very least. Do you really think that it hasn't happened because no one's had the desire to? Be realistic. The reason it hasn't happened is because it's not possible right now.
You really think that it's feasible (let alone possible) to write a game that would give you a "nearly unlimted [sic] number of ways" to get off Earth and reach the center of the galaxy? Well, either someone has to code interface, logic, and AI for (at the very least) hundreds of separate mechanisms for doing this, or they have to reimplement reality inside a computer game, so that you have true freedom within the game engine. You really think this is feasible? Then why don't you go ahead and do it, and prove the entire game industry wrong? Go ahead. We're waiting.
The fact that you keep demanding that games do things which aren't feasible indicates that you aren't a programmer... maybe you should learn about the limitations game designers face before snubbing all of their work.
Why is it a shortcoming? XML was designed to be a meta-framework for markup languages. That's all it's designed to do, and that's what it does. It's not a shortcoming if something does what it's designed to do. :)
Oh, please -- "photoshopping" is a perfectly cromulent word.
Yeah, what kind of trade secrets did he leak? "Apple's going to release a new computer, that's going to be shiny and brightly colored and win lots of design awards." I bet nobody saw that one coming! :)
Yeah, they're all the same. Except for the ones with really well-done plot and story (Half-Life), or the ones with way the hell more than 9 weapons, not to mention an incredibly elaborate plot and highly detailed back story (Deus Ex), or the ones that aren't revolutionary but do a very good job with good level design, graphics, and excellent gameplay (Jedi Outcast).
Every game in a given genre is exactly the same... except for the exceptions, of course.
I like the fact that this article is titled "When Sysadmins Go Bad", as opposed to "If Sysadmins Go Bad".
ALTERNATE JOKE: What do you mean, go bad? I thought Sysadmins were all Chaotic Evil.
<flameresponse>
You're a fucking idiot. You were nine years old then, and you're just looking at the past through convenient rose-colored glasses. The first games you play are always the best, in your memory, because they are the most mysterious, unknown, freshest, etc. Once you've played 500 other games, you stop seeing major surprises, and from then on, nothing seems to quite meet up to your standard from when you first got into it.
</flameresponse>
Glad to oblige :)