Abstinence is the only proven method of not contracting STDs. The only way.
I'm sorry, my friend, but if you're going to slut it up... you're going to pay the price. All the latex and gels in the world won't give you the same protection as abstinence.
The problem is it only works in theory. In reality, on large scales, even kids with abstinence rings end up doing it, and getting pregnant or catching a STD. The reality is, most people just have to get laid, no matter what you say or what they say, they're gonna do it. All you can do is make sure the ones who will do it will do it properly. Pretending that it's as easy as not doing it is sticking your head in the sand. Abstinence alone isn't enough. You also need to be completely reliable, which is foolish to assume from anyone. Or very unattractive.
Keeping your dick in your pants has always been the best way to avoid STDs. Sorry, but that's the way life is.
Yeah, the tiny flaw in that plan is the "keeping your dick in your pants" part. It seems people find it more difficult than it sounds and when they do what they thought they wouldn't do they don't have a clue how to stay as safe as possible.
The problem is that adults forget what it was like being a kid, and try to hoard all the porn for themselves. This is totally misguided, and kids need porn just as much as the rest of us.
But yet more alarmingly, children from unfavoured homes who don't have access to the Internet at home have no means to educate themselves with pornography, causing a dramatic gap in sexual education. Trust me, these days, you don't want to be the only kid on the playground who thinks that "golden showers" have anything to do with Scourge McDuck.
I wonder how he'd go about doing that. Probably the same way they (most of the Republicans) go about protecting children from STDs, by preaching abstinence. Keeping children away from computers would probably work about as well.
That would be ironic if they preached using parental protection software, which by analogy could be compared to using a condom. Cue the "it's not the same thing" replies.
Well, I don't think it's like lucid dreaming at all. If I'm not mistaken, in lucid dreaming you do pretty much anything you like, even if what happens isn't always what you intended in the first place (I used to read some lucid dreaming 'transcripts' out of interest). In what I suggest, you wouldn't be in control of everything, far from that, actually it would pretty much be like it is now, the difference being that you would have an influence on the storyline, not so much control.
And no, the other people have little clue, even if they sound like they do (often the case on Slashdot). It doesn't "stretch far beyond what is available today", it's actually not that hard an algorithm, nothing like what the blithering know-it-alls out here make it out to be. You don't need to simulate every character's synapses, just a few psychological traits, and as other posters have pointed out, it's already been done before (just not with GTA games).
I agree. The story wouldn't necessarily have more point than real people's story, well it would have about as much a point as you would made it have, i.e. you'd need ambitions (in game) to achieve anything meaningful, and even them it probably wouldn't be an award winning storyline, but who knows. I think it's more a matter of gameplay than story telling. If you play games to be told a story, I can't argue with that, even if that's strange to look for stories in games in my opinion. However from a strict gameplay point of view it's interesting for a few reasons. The first reason is that in scripted games, there's little personal implications. You do what you're told to do over and over again everytime until you succeed at each and every single task. But your outcome is guaranteed. The story only occasionally gives you the choice in branching to give you a sensation of freedom, but that's it.
With such a global character simulation, nothing's guaranteed, you don't know how this is gonna end nor even how quickly it's going to end, and your stories will most likely have something in common that your mate's stories won't have because of your whole approach of things. And that's what's exciting. Of course the story on its own wouldn't be more exciting than any other criminal's biography, but it would be however superior for two reasons. It would be your story, based on your merits, on what you accomplished, on your decisions, but also it would make the story be actually reactive to what you do.
Whereas scripted storyline games are like climbing a tree, i.e. you can't affect it much, you can only choose your branches, non-scripted games would be like, a fast growing tree that you would bend around as it grows using all your weight, if that makes any sense.
You're an idiot. Check my first link in my signature, of course I'm a coder. And then you're an idiot for assuming it has to be anything like strong AI. You can just have a basic macroscopic (by that I mean that focuses on large easily observable traits) psychological simulation for each character and let it run based on their situation, what they want to do based on their personality, and the events that subsequently happen. Just because you can't think of a proper algorithm to do that doesn't mean it's impossible, however that fact combined with the fact that you think it's impossible clearly mean that you're not as good at thinking up algorithms as you'd like to think.
You mean you actually played GTA for the story rather than anything else? Let me guess, you buy Playboy to read its articles?
By the way, I don't get the point of your first sentence at all. What I'm talking about is an (essentially) scriptless storyline, in such a game, if you failed at saving Billy, you'd either assume the consequences, or you'd go back to your last save state. I don't see how that would be inferior to being stuck in GTA cause you just can't shoot that speedboat in time and being forced to do the mission over and over again until you decide to either stick to being chased by poor police AIs or succeed.
Well correct, and my idea would make the whole thing cease from being GTA anyways. But I don't think it would remove the story, or make it be all about cops coming after you, it would make the story be generated. Maybe in quality it wouldn't be as good as the professionally written GTA storyline, but in a way that would be *your* storyline, based on everything you did throughout the game. And it's much more about interaction between you and influential characters than 'improved cop AI'.
Who wants to play real life? The same people who don't want to actually live the life (and death) of Tony Montana, Don Corleone or Iceberg Slim? Like, you know, people playing flight simulators cause you don't need lessons and you can crash an airliner into the ground as many times as you like. If a game like GTA was also a sort of criminal social simulator, it would be potentially quite tremendous.
You've got a point but I think you're suggesting an overly simplifying solution. What you suggest would be very rigid, everything would still be scripted, just scripted in a way that would allow for more freedom. What I suggest goes further than that, and brings the whole storyline down to characters with a personality and an initial situation, and the algorithm I was initially talking about.
Basically you'd simulate each character's psychology. I.e., give them a few character traits, and based on their situation, and what they want to achieve based on their personality (i.e. an ambitious character will take risks to get richer and richer, a cowardly character will easily be scared away, a cruel character will love you for killing targets in a vicious way, etc..), and let the simulation do the rest of the job. I think at this point it might give you a game much more different in feel than the GTA series, but it would be unscripted goodness, no one will have decided before hand whether you should become the new Ted Turner or if you should end up broke. However the time spent writing the scenario would be spent testing and fine tuning the simulation and the main characters' personality and situation.
I think you're stretching my suggestion quite a ridiculous bit. I don't think it would take anything even remotely like strong AI. I think it could work by giving a logic to each character, a logic which they would follow based on everything. Surely that would take some CPU power to simulate everybody's logic, but I think the algorithmic challenge resides more in the optimisation of that than in the feasibility.
A 7 year old game making use of very basic AI algorithms doesn't prove any point really.
It's not because a fun aspect of a game is secondary that it shouldn't make it to the game's sequel. Being able to jump off the top of a mountain with a BMX and open your parachute is fun, among a plethora of other things that made GTA San Andreas fun. You'd expect that these fun aspects would be improved on rather than rid of.
IMHO they killed its potential and lifespan by not giving it a level editor. I mean that was a great game, but what are you gonna do now that you know the cake is a lie? Play the same 20 or so levels over and over again? As a built-in level editor would have been just mad!
I never had the chance to play GTA IV yet but from hearing the things that are not present in the new game (i.e. airplanes, parachutes, jetpacks, etc..) and some user comments it seems that Rockstar has unfortunately stopped focusing primarily on 'fun'.
We donâ(TM)t believe in focus testing ideas (itâ(TM)s like asking an audience what album they want to hear â" they donâ(TM)t know until they hear it!)
In art, the offer creates the demand more than the opposite. However if you're a marketing type and you want a sure shot, a product that you're sure people will want, you have to find out what the demand is.
Two different approaches really, an art-oriented risky but genre-defining approach, and a non-innovative but safe approach a couple of trains behind (i.e. the public follows the successful innovator, the EA-like company follows the public).
Of all things, storytelling is one of the areas that in some ways has the furthest to go.
Indeed. Please drop the whole "scripted storyline" concept and make a super fancy algorithm so that the story derives from whatever the player does and whatever happens as a consequence. It would be a tremendous paradigm shift, instead of have a linear story, or a branching storyline in which choices and such make the story branch out, every single of your action would influence more or less the future, and instead of cutting the story into missions in which you just do scripted missions until you succeed at each and every of them, let the player evolve with no safety net.
Therefore not only would you have to make complex decisions, but the way you execute these decisions would be crucial, and you wouldn't know if it was a good idea before you see it works and as long as you're there to see that there were no negative consequences.
Sure, that's a hell of a lot of R&D that would be involved, but that would kick a whole new level of arse!
ntfs-3g worked pretty well for me, except for I/O intensive applications. aMule with all its I/O on a NTFS partition of VMware with all the virtual machine's file on a NTFS partition as well were pretty slow. Actually I think VMware was so slow that 99% of the CPU was actually taken up by ntfs-3g, meaning VMware was crawling.
Slashdot Mirror
Abstinence is the only proven method of not contracting STDs. The only way.
I'm sorry, my friend, but if you're going to slut it up... you're going to pay the price. All the latex and gels in the world won't give you the same protection as abstinence.
The problem is it only works in theory. In reality, on large scales, even kids with abstinence rings end up doing it, and getting pregnant or catching a STD. The reality is, most people just have to get laid, no matter what you say or what they say, they're gonna do it. All you can do is make sure the ones who will do it will do it properly. Pretending that it's as easy as not doing it is sticking your head in the sand. Abstinence alone isn't enough. You also need to be completely reliable, which is foolish to assume from anyone. Or very unattractive.
This is your penis *shows tiny pickle*
This is your penis on porn *shows cucumber*
Keeping your dick in your pants has always been the best way to avoid STDs. Sorry, but that's the way life is.
Yeah, the tiny flaw in that plan is the "keeping your dick in your pants" part. It seems people find it more difficult than it sounds and when they do what they thought they wouldn't do they don't have a clue how to stay as safe as possible.
Unlike Mike Huckabee who uses his supporter Chuck Norris to punch the numbers into the calculator.
Trust me, these days, you don't want to be the only kid on the playground who thinks that "golden showers" have anything to do with Scourge McDuck.
Crap, neither do you want to sound like you read a BDSM version of Scrooge McDuck comics.
The problem is that adults forget what it was like being a kid, and try to hoard all the porn for themselves. This is totally misguided, and kids need porn just as much as the rest of us.
But yet more alarmingly, children from unfavoured homes who don't have access to the Internet at home have no means to educate themselves with pornography, causing a dramatic gap in sexual education. Trust me, these days, you don't want to be the only kid on the playground who thinks that "golden showers" have anything to do with Scourge McDuck.
"I was so much more eloquent, well-informed, and wiser than anyone else I knew" ... "With my superior qualities so obvious..."
I knew it from the start! John McCain is a secret elitist!
By the way, too bad he's not quite sooo eloquent anymore. It could have been useful, for stuff like, making people want to vote for him.
I wonder how he'd go about doing that. Probably the same way they (most of the Republicans) go about protecting children from STDs, by preaching abstinence. Keeping children away from computers would probably work about as well.
That would be ironic if they preached using parental protection software, which by analogy could be compared to using a condom. Cue the "it's not the same thing" replies.
Well, I don't think it's like lucid dreaming at all. If I'm not mistaken, in lucid dreaming you do pretty much anything you like, even if what happens isn't always what you intended in the first place (I used to read some lucid dreaming 'transcripts' out of interest). In what I suggest, you wouldn't be in control of everything, far from that, actually it would pretty much be like it is now, the difference being that you would have an influence on the storyline, not so much control.
And no, the other people have little clue, even if they sound like they do (often the case on Slashdot). It doesn't "stretch far beyond what is available today", it's actually not that hard an algorithm, nothing like what the blithering know-it-alls out here make it out to be. You don't need to simulate every character's synapses, just a few psychological traits, and as other posters have pointed out, it's already been done before (just not with GTA games).
I agree. The story wouldn't necessarily have more point than real people's story, well it would have about as much a point as you would made it have, i.e. you'd need ambitions (in game) to achieve anything meaningful, and even them it probably wouldn't be an award winning storyline, but who knows. I think it's more a matter of gameplay than story telling. If you play games to be told a story, I can't argue with that, even if that's strange to look for stories in games in my opinion. However from a strict gameplay point of view it's interesting for a few reasons. The first reason is that in scripted games, there's little personal implications. You do what you're told to do over and over again everytime until you succeed at each and every single task. But your outcome is guaranteed. The story only occasionally gives you the choice in branching to give you a sensation of freedom, but that's it.
With such a global character simulation, nothing's guaranteed, you don't know how this is gonna end nor even how quickly it's going to end, and your stories will most likely have something in common that your mate's stories won't have because of your whole approach of things. And that's what's exciting. Of course the story on its own wouldn't be more exciting than any other criminal's biography, but it would be however superior for two reasons. It would be your story, based on your merits, on what you accomplished, on your decisions, but also it would make the story be actually reactive to what you do.
Whereas scripted storyline games are like climbing a tree, i.e. you can't affect it much, you can only choose your branches, non-scripted games would be like, a fast growing tree that you would bend around as it grows using all your weight, if that makes any sense.
Thank you! At last someone who understood the idea instead of drivelling blithering nonsense about strong AI.
You're an idiot. Check my first link in my signature, of course I'm a coder. And then you're an idiot for assuming it has to be anything like strong AI. You can just have a basic macroscopic (by that I mean that focuses on large easily observable traits) psychological simulation for each character and let it run based on their situation, what they want to do based on their personality, and the events that subsequently happen. Just because you can't think of a proper algorithm to do that doesn't mean it's impossible, however that fact combined with the fact that you think it's impossible clearly mean that you're not as good at thinking up algorithms as you'd like to think.
You mean you actually played GTA for the story rather than anything else? Let me guess, you buy Playboy to read its articles?
By the way, I don't get the point of your first sentence at all. What I'm talking about is an (essentially) scriptless storyline, in such a game, if you failed at saving Billy, you'd either assume the consequences, or you'd go back to your last save state. I don't see how that would be inferior to being stuck in GTA cause you just can't shoot that speedboat in time and being forced to do the mission over and over again until you decide to either stick to being chased by poor police AIs or succeed.
Well correct, and my idea would make the whole thing cease from being GTA anyways. But I don't think it would remove the story, or make it be all about cops coming after you, it would make the story be generated. Maybe in quality it wouldn't be as good as the professionally written GTA storyline, but in a way that would be *your* storyline, based on everything you did throughout the game. And it's much more about interaction between you and influential characters than 'improved cop AI'.
Who wants to play real life? The same people who don't want to actually live the life (and death) of Tony Montana, Don Corleone or Iceberg Slim? Like, you know, people playing flight simulators cause you don't need lessons and you can crash an airliner into the ground as many times as you like. If a game like GTA was also a sort of criminal social simulator, it would be potentially quite tremendous.
You've got a point but I think you're suggesting an overly simplifying solution. What you suggest would be very rigid, everything would still be scripted, just scripted in a way that would allow for more freedom. What I suggest goes further than that, and brings the whole storyline down to characters with a personality and an initial situation, and the algorithm I was initially talking about.
Basically you'd simulate each character's psychology. I.e., give them a few character traits, and based on their situation, and what they want to achieve based on their personality (i.e. an ambitious character will take risks to get richer and richer, a cowardly character will easily be scared away, a cruel character will love you for killing targets in a vicious way, etc..), and let the simulation do the rest of the job. I think at this point it might give you a game much more different in feel than the GTA series, but it would be unscripted goodness, no one will have decided before hand whether you should become the new Ted Turner or if you should end up broke. However the time spent writing the scenario would be spent testing and fine tuning the simulation and the main characters' personality and situation.
I think you're stretching my suggestion quite a ridiculous bit. I don't think it would take anything even remotely like strong AI. I think it could work by giving a logic to each character, a logic which they would follow based on everything. Surely that would take some CPU power to simulate everybody's logic, but I think the algorithmic challenge resides more in the optimisation of that than in the feasibility.
A 7 year old game making use of very basic AI algorithms doesn't prove any point really.
It's not because a fun aspect of a game is secondary that it shouldn't make it to the game's sequel. Being able to jump off the top of a mountain with a BMX and open your parachute is fun, among a plethora of other things that made GTA San Andreas fun. You'd expect that these fun aspects would be improved on rather than rid of.
And it seemed to make that a much better game.
IMHO they killed its potential and lifespan by not giving it a level editor. I mean that was a great game, but what are you gonna do now that you know the cake is a lie? Play the same 20 or so levels over and over again? As a built-in level editor would have been just mad!
I never had the chance to play GTA IV yet but from hearing the things that are not present in the new game (i.e. airplanes, parachutes, jetpacks, etc..) and some user comments it seems that Rockstar has unfortunately stopped focusing primarily on 'fun'.
We donâ(TM)t believe in focus testing ideas (itâ(TM)s like asking an audience what album they want to hear â" they donâ(TM)t know until they hear it!)
In art, the offer creates the demand more than the opposite. However if you're a marketing type and you want a sure shot, a product that you're sure people will want, you have to find out what the demand is.
Two different approaches really, an art-oriented risky but genre-defining approach, and a non-innovative but safe approach a couple of trains behind (i.e. the public follows the successful innovator, the EA-like company follows the public).
Of all things, storytelling is one of the areas that in some ways has the furthest to go.
Indeed. Please drop the whole "scripted storyline" concept and make a super fancy algorithm so that the story derives from whatever the player does and whatever happens as a consequence. It would be a tremendous paradigm shift, instead of have a linear story, or a branching storyline in which choices and such make the story branch out, every single of your action would influence more or less the future, and instead of cutting the story into missions in which you just do scripted missions until you succeed at each and every of them, let the player evolve with no safety net.
Therefore not only would you have to make complex decisions, but the way you execute these decisions would be crucial, and you wouldn't know if it was a good idea before you see it works and as long as you're there to see that there were no negative consequences.
Sure, that's a hell of a lot of R&D that would be involved, but that would kick a whole new level of arse!
You do not "answer" a "craving" you feed it.
...with Brawndo. It's got what chip plants crave!
Whooo! All the spam is gone! Bill Gates was right!! He did it!
Sounds like an appropriate time for him to do a photo op on an aircraft carrier if you ask me!
It really depends on what you call "bad quality".
ntfs-3g worked pretty well for me, except for I/O intensive applications. aMule with all its I/O on a NTFS partition of VMware with all the virtual machine's file on a NTFS partition as well were pretty slow. Actually I think VMware was so slow that 99% of the CPU was actually taken up by ntfs-3g, meaning VMware was crawling.