In this case however it's not being used to describe a piece of formal logic, it's being used as a idiom common in English. Like it or not languages are evolved through common usage, not through design, and even though modern English recognizes certain formal rules, idioms, expressions, and colloquialisms are largely exempt from such rules. My usage of the idiom "begs the question" is perfectly valid and is used in this case to mean roughly the same as "raises the question".
If the wind can move these things then whenever you get your 4X4 stuck in the mud just wait a while for the wind to blow it out!
Well, that's a slightly different situation. The conditions here are a very thin layer of mud on top of hard packed dry ground, conditions you'd be hard pressed to get a 4x4 stuck in in the first place. To get a 4x4 stuck you need a relatively deep section of mud as well as a not insignificant portion of the tires to be submerged in it. The conditions out there are closer to those experienced when you hit a patch of oil on a wet road, and as anyone that's done so can tell you, it becomes all too easy to slide your vehicle in those conditions.
As for looking for a big patch of them that might work, but it seems as if they don't all move in exactly the same direction, it's more of a random movement pattern. I believe there's also mountains surrounding this area, so it would be difficult to separate rocks blown to the base of the mountains from those that fell there off the mountains.
It's a QuickTime problem, that can affect you if you use FireFox to browse QuickTime clips with. This does not make it a FireFox problem, just something that FireFox doesn't go out of its way to protect you from. If you download and play those movies you're still vulnerable to the exploit no matter what browser you use, so it's not an issue with any web browser, it's an issue with QuickTime. All the MS fanboys are just using this as an excuse to flame the FireFox fanboys, and then cry foul when people point out that it's not really the browsers fault that another app has a security flaw.
Ok, try this experiment then. Find one of these exploited QuickTime movies, open it in IE and watch it. Then, download and save the file on your computer, and open it using QuickTime (not unlikely, people often download copies of QuickTime movies to watch later). Congratulations, you've not been compromised, all while being "protected" by IE.
Well, I figured it would probably take a year or so of monitoring before you got lucky enough to catch one in the cameras viewing angle, which is why I was thinking webcams that you could just leave there year around. As for stealing it, maybe an enclosure? Plus, I mean, it's a webcam, if someone tries to steal it at least you'll be able to get a recording of them doing it.
Actually, it's caused by the continential tilt. It causes all the loose cannons and nuts and bolts to roll towards California. Well, the nuts at any rate.
Strangely enough, although both of those are hideous and difficult to read (or stomach as in the second one), they don't have that instant migraine inducing behavior of the previous link. Something about the contrast of pink on purple just makes me want to gauge my eyes out, where as the rainbow flashing seizure inducing second link just makes me want to slap the shit out of it's author and make him take remedial web design courses.
This begs the question, why hasn't someone setup a webcam to record these rock movements and solve this thing once and for all? I mean, if they can setup cameras in the arctic circle, death valley shouldn't be that hard to handle.
Ok, I'm sure this is going to earn me a "you must be new here", but did you even read any of the links in the article? Check out the review on the gamers with jobs site, it does a very good job of covering all the good and bad points of the kindle. All in all after reading that I'm sold on it, I plan on getting one when they get back in stock.
Yes, my mistake. After re-reading the gamers with jobs article I see that. However the article does mention that converting the PDF to mobi format was very simple using Mobi Creator. I'm not familiar with the software though, so I can't personally say if it is or isn't, nor do I know if the software is free or not.
One of the reviews I read made an interesting point in that a comparison was made between paper books versus kindle and cds versus ipods. Essentially the argument was, if you're at home you rather read a paper book or listen to a cd, but if you're going somewhere Kindle and an iPod are simpler. Neil Gaimon was complaining that he missed having his trial Kindle when he had to fly somewhere because it limited the books he could bring with him to only a few because of size/weight.
From the various reviews I've read the Kindle may look clumsy and it's not exactly pretty, but apparently it feels very comfortable to hold. As for the whole DRM issue, that only applies to the books you download from amazon. You can connect the device to your computer with a USB cable and it gets recognized as a external HD, then you just copy PDF, txt, doc, or mobi files (as well as mp3 it seems) over to it and you can read them on the go. So, if you want to keep using your DRM free source of e-books you can, you just can't utilize the on the go download feature of the kindle to do so.
For $400 you can get an Asus EEE and read DRM-free PDF files. Or you can get the Kindle and read DRM-free PDF files. You can also browse blogs and websites, as well as do lookups on wikipedia with the kindle. Plus, unlike the Asus EEE, the Kindle is designed to be easy to hold and operate one handed. Oh, and because it uses the 3G network (no fee, presumably included in cost of the device) you don't need a wireless hotspot, you can read slashdot on the go anywhere you have a cell signal.
They mention directing the ship into areas that provide better conditions. I wonder if this isn't a tradoff between energy efficiency and shipping time. If the ship re-routes from the optimal path in terms of distance to the one that's longer but provides better weather to reduce fuel, that seems to imply that time is a less important factor than cost. Of course in many cases in which you're shipping things by boat it's the case that time really is less important than cost, as if time was more important you'd be shipping by airplane anyway, but it's still interesting to consider the implications here. Maybe you can get a shipping discount on boats that take the most energy optimal path as opposed to those that take the distance optimal one.
Yeah, DMs learn pretty fast after that first time when they're in the middle of something and a player does something they completely didn't expect. Some players actually take fun in watching the DM scramble for his notes and the rule book to see if there's some way he can cobble together some semblance of his original plot after an enterprising character manages to kill of a key NPC.
Player: while the town mayor is giving his intro speech I sneak up behind him and backstab him...
DM: uh... what? WHY?!
Player: I don't like the way he's looking at me, and I'm chaotic neutral.
DM: But... he hasn't finished giving you your quest yet.
Player: so?
A new DM would refuse to let him do it, or let him then panic as the campaign falls apart. A seasoned DM would figure out someway to get the players back to where he wanted them (all while acting cool and collected even though he's panicking inside), and a really really good DM planned for it already.
I've actually done this in the past. We decide we wanted to play around with some of the templates and make a band of misfits so to speak, but part of the challenge is making hybrid characters essentially added 5 "virtual" levels to our characters. In order to pull it off we had to scale a level 4 encounter up to a level 6 (level 1 characters, with 5 extra levels due to the racials from the templates). All in all it went off pretty well until we reached the last encounter of the dungeon. Well, the final encounter we went up against a ghost that kept possessing members of our party, and since none of us had anything that could hurt a ethereal it just slaughtered our entire party. It was an example of a good idea that failed to scale properly. Going up against an actual level 6 party it would be likely they would have some magical equipment that would have been useful, but our group had beginning equipment, and it was only the racials that made us more powerful than normal, so we were ill-equiped for this particular situation even though by our calculated level we should have been able to handle it. That being said in a campaign actually designed around the characters rather then having them shoe-horned into it I'm sure that wouldn't have been a problem.
As for the more realistic weaponry, it's interesting in theory, and maybe in the right game would be fun, but for most games would just really frustrate the players. The problem is that in most current games combat is to important an aspect of the game to make it that deadly. Think about how often in modern RPGs your have fights. Now imagine that every time you got into one of those fights there was at least a 50% chance you were going to die. Players would quickly give up and leave. Not to say that I don't see it having a place, but much like our band of misfits, the game would have to be designed around the mechanic in order for it to be playable. It would be excellent in a game that emphasized more realistic actions for example. Do something like start a shoot-out in the middle of the street and in 10 minutes you've got a van of SWAT coming after you. It would provide more incentive to find alternative ways of accomplishing things, such as talking with NPCs to negotiate what you want rather than just shooting anything in your way. Or perhaps leading you to work more on your stealth skills as opposed to just trying to beef up your armor.
After thinking about this a bit more I think there's as much or more potential in this style of game than in a traditional RPG style (game in this case being computer of video, as opposed to pen and paper). Originally the whole idea behind character progression in pen and paper RPGs was to give the player a constantly moving goal. If you set a fixed point (I.E. you only get say 5 levels) once the player reaches that point that's it, they have very little drive to progress unless you give them some sort of reward, and what good is a reward if they don't really have anything to use it on? Sure they may have some uber sword that one hits everything, but what's the fun in that, and how often can you give them uber-sword++ before they start to wonder how it is that there always seems to be some sword out there just a bit better than the last one you gave them and told them was the greatest sword every made.
The original solution of course was to make a character progression chart with effectively no upper bound, that way the goal is always just "get better", effectively allowing infinite play time. This is great in a pen and paper setting in which you can always bring in new campaigns and modules and weave them into your existing campaigns, but somewhat less so in a modern game with a fixed storyline (MMOs being the exception to this). In a video game the players goal is always to ultimately finish the game. It doesn't matter if they do it at level 10, or level 60, ultimately they get to the end, the credits roll, and they get to brag how they did it with such and such completion percent or other. Honestly what's the point of the level grind then? Why even bother? Just give them the points, and let them get to the end however they see fit. I think that style of game, maybe with a nice awards system as has become fashionable as of late, would be an excellent design, and provide plenty of incentive to play.
This style of play would be particularly enticing I think on a game with a really strong back story such as Mass Effect. The goal then being to reach the end, and possibly to receive various endings based on player choices throughout the game.
I agree with a lot of your comment, but I think there's potential in the idea of giving a player all their points up front and letting them allocate them however they see fit. The idea there of course is not to make a traditional RPG, but something along the lines of a RPG/Action hybrid. Essentially you have a story (Think God of War, Metroid, or even Mario Galaxy), and many different ways to progress through it (this is the RPG part), but rather than the player spend all their time grinding for XP and scrounging for better equipment they get to experience the story in different ways depending on how they decided to build their character. To a certain extent Bioshock played a lot like that and I think it was one of it's keys to success. Yes you collected new weapons and upgraded your plasmids, but it was the huge diversity in abilities and the options for how to use them all that gave the game depth (the story was only so so, all the real depth came in the choice of play style). Think about it. What if instead of the Mass Effect we were given, you instead started by picking all your abilities ahead of time and some pretty good (although maybe not the best) equipment. You then played through the game using all your unique abilities to solve various problems you ran across. Stuck at a door? If your a demolitions expert, blow the sucker off it's hinges. Special forces? Pick the lock or kick it down. Maybe you're more of a smooth bond type? Go flirt with the secretary and convince her to let you into the room. The point is, the entertainment comes not from tweaking your character into an uber killing machine, but in approaching each problem from the unique perspective of the character you've crafted.
One of the things that's always bugged me about space combat, and that even most sci-fi books fail to address is the physics of space warfair. I read some books in the Night's Dawn series (Peter F. Hamilton) a while back that did a really great job dealing with space combat, even if they blew off a lot of other science in other areas (as well as delving into some serious religious issues, they were major plot points in the later books of the series). I particularly like how he treated energy weapons (ships had ablative layers and would spin going into combat to reduce the amount of time any given point of the hull was exposed to weapon focus), as well as the issues of momentum on passengers and maneuverability of the ships. I think the temptation in games, movies, and books is to just say space combat is like dog fighting with jets only on a black background and with lasers or some other fancy futuristic sounding weapon (maser anyone? And what's with the fascination with gauss rifles? Anyone who knows about electromagnetic weaponry knows a railgun is a much better design). There's lots of potential for some really cool scenes in space combat, but they need to put some more thought into it (and for gods sake, if you want the engines always on zooming around thing at least take the time to come up with some sort of drive system that requires something like that, traditional mass reaction drives SHOULD NOT ALWAYS BE ON!).
The thing that makes a great DM is the ability to improvise in response to the unexpected. You can't improvise in response to the unexpected two years before it happens, write up a detailed response, and burn it to DVD. Yeah, I realize that, but I think a seasoned DM would have a better idea of what could be tossed out by the players in a given instance. At least a good DM would start by looking at the script and going "Ok, if I was the player, where would I try to pull this sucker off the rails?". A game of course is always going to be more constrained than a pen and paper system for just the reason you state, it's all canned responses, no intelligent thought (in the Turing sense of the word) to drive the decisions. Of course, if we ever create a Turing level AI that may change, but until then the system will be defined by its boundaries. That's really the challenge of the game designer, to figure out a consistent and well written way to create boundaries around the entire narrative, which I think is something that the old DMs got better and better at.
What they need to do is hire some of those old school D&D GMs that have been wrangling players for years. If anyone knows how to make a successful campaign that allows people freedom but still keeps the story rolling forward these guys could do it. One thing playing D&D has taught me, is there's no replacement for a great DM, and the DM makes or breaks the game.
WHAT THE HELL FOR? Thanks to vista most off the shelf computers have at least 2 GB of ram. Let the desktop rock. If I want moving background of poledancer going off behind my transparent windows, why not? I got the memory and CPU to let it run.
And there's nothing wrong with that if it's what you want, but some of us would like to use those resources on our applications instead of our window manager. It's always a good idea to be able to scale those sorts of things back so that when you really want to get some serious work done you don't have to fight with the eye candy over cpu cycles.
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In this case however it's not being used to describe a piece of formal logic, it's being used as a idiom common in English. Like it or not languages are evolved through common usage, not through design, and even though modern English recognizes certain formal rules, idioms, expressions, and colloquialisms are largely exempt from such rules. My usage of the idiom "begs the question" is perfectly valid and is used in this case to mean roughly the same as "raises the question".
Dear AC: http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/begged+the+question STFU.
Well, that's a slightly different situation. The conditions here are a very thin layer of mud on top of hard packed dry ground, conditions you'd be hard pressed to get a 4x4 stuck in in the first place. To get a 4x4 stuck you need a relatively deep section of mud as well as a not insignificant portion of the tires to be submerged in it. The conditions out there are closer to those experienced when you hit a patch of oil on a wet road, and as anyone that's done so can tell you, it becomes all too easy to slide your vehicle in those conditions.
As for looking for a big patch of them that might work, but it seems as if they don't all move in exactly the same direction, it's more of a random movement pattern. I believe there's also mountains surrounding this area, so it would be difficult to separate rocks blown to the base of the mountains from those that fell there off the mountains.
It's a QuickTime problem, that can affect you if you use FireFox to browse QuickTime clips with. This does not make it a FireFox problem, just something that FireFox doesn't go out of its way to protect you from. If you download and play those movies you're still vulnerable to the exploit no matter what browser you use, so it's not an issue with any web browser, it's an issue with QuickTime. All the MS fanboys are just using this as an excuse to flame the FireFox fanboys, and then cry foul when people point out that it's not really the browsers fault that another app has a security flaw.
Ok, try this experiment then. Find one of these exploited QuickTime movies, open it in IE and watch it. Then, download and save the file on your computer, and open it using QuickTime (not unlikely, people often download copies of QuickTime movies to watch later). Congratulations, you've not been compromised, all while being "protected" by IE.
Well, I figured it would probably take a year or so of monitoring before you got lucky enough to catch one in the cameras viewing angle, which is why I was thinking webcams that you could just leave there year around. As for stealing it, maybe an enclosure? Plus, I mean, it's a webcam, if someone tries to steal it at least you'll be able to get a recording of them doing it.
Strangely enough, although both of those are hideous and difficult to read (or stomach as in the second one), they don't have that instant migraine inducing behavior of the previous link. Something about the contrast of pink on purple just makes me want to gauge my eyes out, where as the rainbow flashing seizure inducing second link just makes me want to slap the shit out of it's author and make him take remedial web design courses.
GAH! MY EYES!!! Put a warning on that link, geez.
This begs the question, why hasn't someone setup a webcam to record these rock movements and solve this thing once and for all? I mean, if they can setup cameras in the arctic circle, death valley shouldn't be that hard to handle.
Ok, I'm sure this is going to earn me a "you must be new here", but did you even read any of the links in the article? Check out the review on the gamers with jobs site, it does a very good job of covering all the good and bad points of the kindle. All in all after reading that I'm sold on it, I plan on getting one when they get back in stock.
Yes, my mistake. After re-reading the gamers with jobs article I see that. However the article does mention that converting the PDF to mobi format was very simple using Mobi Creator. I'm not familiar with the software though, so I can't personally say if it is or isn't, nor do I know if the software is free or not.
One of the reviews I read made an interesting point in that a comparison was made between paper books versus kindle and cds versus ipods. Essentially the argument was, if you're at home you rather read a paper book or listen to a cd, but if you're going somewhere Kindle and an iPod are simpler. Neil Gaimon was complaining that he missed having his trial Kindle when he had to fly somewhere because it limited the books he could bring with him to only a few because of size/weight.
From the various reviews I've read the Kindle may look clumsy and it's not exactly pretty, but apparently it feels very comfortable to hold. As for the whole DRM issue, that only applies to the books you download from amazon. You can connect the device to your computer with a USB cable and it gets recognized as a external HD, then you just copy PDF, txt, doc, or mobi files (as well as mp3 it seems) over to it and you can read them on the go. So, if you want to keep using your DRM free source of e-books you can, you just can't utilize the on the go download feature of the kindle to do so.
They mention directing the ship into areas that provide better conditions. I wonder if this isn't a tradoff between energy efficiency and shipping time. If the ship re-routes from the optimal path in terms of distance to the one that's longer but provides better weather to reduce fuel, that seems to imply that time is a less important factor than cost. Of course in many cases in which you're shipping things by boat it's the case that time really is less important than cost, as if time was more important you'd be shipping by airplane anyway, but it's still interesting to consider the implications here. Maybe you can get a shipping discount on boats that take the most energy optimal path as opposed to those that take the distance optimal one.
DM: uh... what? WHY?!
Player: I don't like the way he's looking at me, and I'm chaotic neutral.
DM: But... he hasn't finished giving you your quest yet.
Player: so?
A new DM would refuse to let him do it, or let him then panic as the campaign falls apart. A seasoned DM would figure out someway to get the players back to where he wanted them (all while acting cool and collected even though he's panicking inside), and a really really good DM planned for it already.
For a good laugh as well as a great illustration of this check out this comic, and the following one
I've actually done this in the past. We decide we wanted to play around with some of the templates and make a band of misfits so to speak, but part of the challenge is making hybrid characters essentially added 5 "virtual" levels to our characters. In order to pull it off we had to scale a level 4 encounter up to a level 6 (level 1 characters, with 5 extra levels due to the racials from the templates). All in all it went off pretty well until we reached the last encounter of the dungeon. Well, the final encounter we went up against a ghost that kept possessing members of our party, and since none of us had anything that could hurt a ethereal it just slaughtered our entire party. It was an example of a good idea that failed to scale properly. Going up against an actual level 6 party it would be likely they would have some magical equipment that would have been useful, but our group had beginning equipment, and it was only the racials that made us more powerful than normal, so we were ill-equiped for this particular situation even though by our calculated level we should have been able to handle it. That being said in a campaign actually designed around the characters rather then having them shoe-horned into it I'm sure that wouldn't have been a problem.
As for the more realistic weaponry, it's interesting in theory, and maybe in the right game would be fun, but for most games would just really frustrate the players. The problem is that in most current games combat is to important an aspect of the game to make it that deadly. Think about how often in modern RPGs your have fights. Now imagine that every time you got into one of those fights there was at least a 50% chance you were going to die. Players would quickly give up and leave. Not to say that I don't see it having a place, but much like our band of misfits, the game would have to be designed around the mechanic in order for it to be playable. It would be excellent in a game that emphasized more realistic actions for example. Do something like start a shoot-out in the middle of the street and in 10 minutes you've got a van of SWAT coming after you. It would provide more incentive to find alternative ways of accomplishing things, such as talking with NPCs to negotiate what you want rather than just shooting anything in your way. Or perhaps leading you to work more on your stealth skills as opposed to just trying to beef up your armor.
After thinking about this a bit more I think there's as much or more potential in this style of game than in a traditional RPG style (game in this case being computer of video, as opposed to pen and paper). Originally the whole idea behind character progression in pen and paper RPGs was to give the player a constantly moving goal. If you set a fixed point (I.E. you only get say 5 levels) once the player reaches that point that's it, they have very little drive to progress unless you give them some sort of reward, and what good is a reward if they don't really have anything to use it on? Sure they may have some uber sword that one hits everything, but what's the fun in that, and how often can you give them uber-sword++ before they start to wonder how it is that there always seems to be some sword out there just a bit better than the last one you gave them and told them was the greatest sword every made.
The original solution of course was to make a character progression chart with effectively no upper bound, that way the goal is always just "get better", effectively allowing infinite play time. This is great in a pen and paper setting in which you can always bring in new campaigns and modules and weave them into your existing campaigns, but somewhat less so in a modern game with a fixed storyline (MMOs being the exception to this). In a video game the players goal is always to ultimately finish the game. It doesn't matter if they do it at level 10, or level 60, ultimately they get to the end, the credits roll, and they get to brag how they did it with such and such completion percent or other. Honestly what's the point of the level grind then? Why even bother? Just give them the points, and let them get to the end however they see fit. I think that style of game, maybe with a nice awards system as has become fashionable as of late, would be an excellent design, and provide plenty of incentive to play.
This style of play would be particularly enticing I think on a game with a really strong back story such as Mass Effect. The goal then being to reach the end, and possibly to receive various endings based on player choices throughout the game.
I agree with a lot of your comment, but I think there's potential in the idea of giving a player all their points up front and letting them allocate them however they see fit. The idea there of course is not to make a traditional RPG, but something along the lines of a RPG/Action hybrid. Essentially you have a story (Think God of War, Metroid, or even Mario Galaxy), and many different ways to progress through it (this is the RPG part), but rather than the player spend all their time grinding for XP and scrounging for better equipment they get to experience the story in different ways depending on how they decided to build their character. To a certain extent Bioshock played a lot like that and I think it was one of it's keys to success. Yes you collected new weapons and upgraded your plasmids, but it was the huge diversity in abilities and the options for how to use them all that gave the game depth (the story was only so so, all the real depth came in the choice of play style). Think about it. What if instead of the Mass Effect we were given, you instead started by picking all your abilities ahead of time and some pretty good (although maybe not the best) equipment. You then played through the game using all your unique abilities to solve various problems you ran across. Stuck at a door? If your a demolitions expert, blow the sucker off it's hinges. Special forces? Pick the lock or kick it down. Maybe you're more of a smooth bond type? Go flirt with the secretary and convince her to let you into the room. The point is, the entertainment comes not from tweaking your character into an uber killing machine, but in approaching each problem from the unique perspective of the character you've crafted.
One of the things that's always bugged me about space combat, and that even most sci-fi books fail to address is the physics of space warfair. I read some books in the Night's Dawn series (Peter F. Hamilton) a while back that did a really great job dealing with space combat, even if they blew off a lot of other science in other areas (as well as delving into some serious religious issues, they were major plot points in the later books of the series). I particularly like how he treated energy weapons (ships had ablative layers and would spin going into combat to reduce the amount of time any given point of the hull was exposed to weapon focus), as well as the issues of momentum on passengers and maneuverability of the ships. I think the temptation in games, movies, and books is to just say space combat is like dog fighting with jets only on a black background and with lasers or some other fancy futuristic sounding weapon (maser anyone? And what's with the fascination with gauss rifles? Anyone who knows about electromagnetic weaponry knows a railgun is a much better design). There's lots of potential for some really cool scenes in space combat, but they need to put some more thought into it (and for gods sake, if you want the engines always on zooming around thing at least take the time to come up with some sort of drive system that requires something like that, traditional mass reaction drives SHOULD NOT ALWAYS BE ON!).
The thing that makes a great DM is the ability to improvise in response to the unexpected. You can't improvise in response to the unexpected two years before it happens, write up a detailed response, and burn it to DVD. Yeah, I realize that, but I think a seasoned DM would have a better idea of what could be tossed out by the players in a given instance. At least a good DM would start by looking at the script and going "Ok, if I was the player, where would I try to pull this sucker off the rails?". A game of course is always going to be more constrained than a pen and paper system for just the reason you state, it's all canned responses, no intelligent thought (in the Turing sense of the word) to drive the decisions. Of course, if we ever create a Turing level AI that may change, but until then the system will be defined by its boundaries. That's really the challenge of the game designer, to figure out a consistent and well written way to create boundaries around the entire narrative, which I think is something that the old DMs got better and better at.
What they need to do is hire some of those old school D&D GMs that have been wrangling players for years. If anyone knows how to make a successful campaign that allows people freedom but still keeps the story rolling forward these guys could do it. One thing playing D&D has taught me, is there's no replacement for a great DM, and the DM makes or breaks the game.
And there's nothing wrong with that if it's what you want, but some of us would like to use those resources on our applications instead of our window manager. It's always a good idea to be able to scale those sorts of things back so that when you really want to get some serious work done you don't have to fight with the eye candy over cpu cycles.