Almost every RPG book there ever was and will be gets scanned in and put on usenet/irc (see also comics). Can't be much fun playing without a big pile of books though.
Good. Let the only novels be written by people motivated by an urge to tell their story, not the hacks who are in it for the loot. Looked round your local bookstore lately? How many of those novels will stand the test of time? 10%? 1%? Most [novels|CDs|software|TV|whatever] are complete dross and I wish the makers would spend their energies on something more worthwhile. Note, this only sounds elitist if you're a bottom-fed drone with poor taste.
I rarely buy newspapers and never magazines. The adverts annoy me, but hey, I care more about the Guardian being at my newsagent than some website surviving. As for TV, I have a Tivo and the BBC is paid for by license fee, and has no adverts. What did "oh wait...." mean?
True enough though, for a while I couldn't be bothered to filter Google's ads. Nowadays I find RIP and CustomizeGoogle keep the interface nice and clean.
Useful links for those that like to make their own mind up:
And for those that might bleat "without advertising, many sites would fail" I say Good. Let those sites fail. Give me micropayments and an honest relationship.
Software crackers are old hands at tearing out protection. I doubt it'll be long before we're seeing pirated games running on the PSP. And if there were a mechanism for forcing a firmware upgrade, they'll just tear that out too. The only way to deter an army of highly motivated young enthusiasts would be to drop the price way low, but even then, they're doing it for the props.
The clue was in TFA: "Every week in Bad Science we either victimise some barking pseudoscientific quack, or a big science story in a national newspaper."
Also now has a blog, but there's this thing called Google, give it a go, you might like it.
If this was the only article Goldacre had ever published on the subject, you'd have a point. In fact he has a weekly column in the Guardian in which regularly subjects science journalism to exactly the kind of analysis you suggest. Maybe check your eye for planks?
Something along these lines is inevitable. Historically, journals provided certain services to academics that made their lives easier - professional document preparation, distribution, and quality control. To do this they relied on an equal relationship with the community - peer review involves a hell of a lot of work on the part of academics, which is "unpaid" (though certainly part of the job). Technology has completely changed this balance - we can prepare and publish our own documents; we can distribute them amongst our peers for review. The position of journals now is merely brokers of reputation, but we can figure that out for ourselves too. They are basically parasites these days, and while they are fighting all the way, the power does not lie with them. Still, they're being a little more graceful than the entertainment industry, I'm yet to see a scientist sued for distributing pdf's of their work.
Many games provide you with the tools to build new levels and even modify the game out of recognition. I've done a fair amount of work-related coding and mapping using the Unreal engines and it's pretty easy to pick up, with a lot of resources online. Unrealwiki and UDN are good places to start. You don't even need to buy the game, as they have released a free cut down version for exactly your kind of project. This has the advantage of not having tons of someone elses code in it so it's easier to get started.
It would be very difficult to use an fMRI system as a reliable lie detector. These kind of findings tend to come from groups of experimental subjects rather than individuals. Different people can exhibit activations in different places for the same mental processes, and they may not even be using identical neural processes at all. Additionally, the more frontal you go the less well-defined are the theories as to what the cortex is actually doing, and prefrontal cortex is the most high-level of all, being recruited as a kind of supervisory system in many mental processes. If someone accused me of lying on the basis of a pattern of frontal activation, I could claim to have been performing all kinds of mental tasks to increase my cognitive load, and indeed I could do just that to make sure the differences between lie and non-lie scanning epochs were not useful.
But I'm sure someone will get rich off the back of this.
Actually, it's the neuromarketing bullshitters that really piss me off.
Totally useless? Name one major university neuroscience department that doesn't have interests in EEG. It's one of the most widely used techniques we have and it is far from useless.
Watch the misery on the faces of the RIAA as the true market value of A Song emerges through the mechanism of market forces! Sure, there will be a bit of legal manoevering but sooner or later there will be competition. I'm guessing it'll level off at about 10c/tune but that might be a bit high.
Monsanto and co have this flawed business model where they sequence gene X into organism Y and patent the resulting GMO. They do something mean like make it infertile, so they can charge peasant farmers for new seeds every year. As thought they were the only people who could ever muck about with genes! Wonder how long their window of profitability will last before gene splicing machines are available to the peasants.
Imagine the view through my fantasy driving HUD. Some wanker dangerously overtakes me. Do I swear loudly and upset my kids? No, I simply tag him with a big glowing sticker saying "This guy drives like a c*nt"), perhaps adding to the few he already has. He can't get rid of them, they don't belong to him, they are just tracking the [RFID/GPS/?] transciever in his car. He might not care, but he'll find that next time he gets booked by the cops for speeding they are less lenient, or he's not allowed on the toll-road, or his insurance premiums go up.
DRM could be made to work. M$ learned a lot from the XBox fiasco, the industry could put (digital) piracy out of the reach of almost everyone. But they'd need to compromise our hardware. Now suppose they could force every piece of new hardware to be DRM compliant, and that it was strong DRM. It will take many years after that for all the older tech to wear out, and if they don't want to lose their market, they still have to be able to sell to people with old kit during that period. Eventually though, kit like we have now will wear out, and people might forget that their stuff used to be much more useful. At that point, maybe 10 or 20 years from now, when CDs are dead media anyway, the RIAA can sit back and relax. They'd like it sooner, but they can wait.
1. Don't listen to the people telling you to get a gun. They are clearly dumb anyway as they should have noticed you live in London and that would mean you would have to hook up with much badder people that street muggers to even get one. But mainly because the best thing to do if you get mugged is hand it over and get over it. A few bits of kit are not worth physical injury, or even worth the trouble of hurting someone else. If you can afford an ipod you can afford a decent insurance policy that would cover it, so just consider the cost of that as peace of mind.
2. Carry your kit in a crappy bag.
3. Walk around gesticulating wildly to the halucinations and shouting nonsense words.
Outlook does a lot of things well - Contacts, Mail, Calendar, ToDo, Notes - and it integrates well with the desktop. It's a bit of a killer app for MS Office because it puts together most people's PIM needs in one place. The Mozilla approach of Browser + Mail might work for some but it makes no sense at all to me. I want an Outlook replacement, one which uses open file formats and isn't bloated. One that runs nice and quickly. It seems like a lot of people do. Thunderbird developers, please take note.
There's a common thread running through all Stephenson's books, a fascination with the history of information and how processing it has affected the development of human society and culture, from prehistory to the imaginable future. This is why he appeals so much to many geeks. Since Snowcrash, his breakthrough novel, he's been piecing together a remarkable perpective on the very essence of what makes humans special. The extent to which it is sometimes hard going just reflects what a difficult task it is, but the exploration is far-reaching and important. To those who couldn't hack Quicksilver, I say keep at it and instead of thinking of it as an entertainment, use it as a bunch of bookmarks to stuff that you should really know about.
Slashdot Mirror
The D20 system is already online, it's open source:
http://www.d20srd.org/
Almost every RPG book there ever was and will be gets scanned in and put on usenet/irc (see also comics). Can't be much fun playing without a big pile of books though.
Good. Let the only novels be written by people motivated by an urge to tell their story, not the hacks who are in it for the loot. Looked round your local bookstore lately? How many of those novels will stand the test of time? 10%? 1%? Most [novels|CDs|software|TV|whatever] are complete dross and I wish the makers would spend their energies on something more worthwhile. Note, this only sounds elitist if you're a bottom-fed drone with poor taste.
I rarely buy newspapers and never magazines. The adverts annoy me, but hey, I care more about the Guardian being at my newsagent than some website surviving. As for TV, I have a Tivo and the BBC is paid for by license fee, and has no adverts. What did "oh wait...." mean?
Are there adverts on the internet then? WTF...
True enough though, for a while I couldn't be bothered to filter Google's ads. Nowadays I find RIP and CustomizeGoogle keep the interface nice and clean.
Useful links for those that like to make their own mind up:
http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/
http://www.customizegoogle.com/
http://rip.mozdev.org/index.html
http://adblock.mozdev.org/
http://www.pierceive.com/
And for those that might bleat "without advertising, many sites would fail" I say Good. Let those sites fail. Give me micropayments and an honest relationship.
Software crackers are old hands at tearing out protection. I doubt it'll be long before we're seeing pirated games running on the PSP. And if there were a mechanism for forcing a firmware upgrade, they'll just tear that out too. The only way to deter an army of highly motivated young enthusiasts would be to drop the price way low, but even then, they're doing it for the props.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/badscience/
The clue was in TFA: "Every week in Bad Science we either victimise some barking pseudoscientific quack, or a big science story in a national newspaper."
Also now has a blog, but there's this thing called Google, give it a go, you might like it.
If this was the only article Goldacre had ever published on the subject, you'd have a point. In fact he has a weekly column in the Guardian in which regularly subjects science journalism to exactly the kind of analysis you suggest. Maybe check your eye for planks?
Something along these lines is inevitable. Historically, journals provided certain services to academics that made their lives easier - professional document preparation, distribution, and quality control. To do this they relied on an equal relationship with the community - peer review involves a hell of a lot of work on the part of academics, which is "unpaid" (though certainly part of the job). Technology has completely changed this balance - we can prepare and publish our own documents; we can distribute them amongst our peers for review. The position of journals now is merely brokers of reputation, but we can figure that out for ourselves too. They are basically parasites these days, and while they are fighting all the way, the power does not lie with them. Still, they're being a little more graceful than the entertainment industry, I'm yet to see a scientist sued for distributing pdf's of their work.
They are going to produce a web-based browser.
Many games provide you with the tools to build new levels and even modify the game out of recognition. I've done a fair amount of work-related coding and mapping using the Unreal engines and it's pretty easy to pick up, with a lot of resources online. Unrealwiki and UDN are good places to start. You don't even need to buy the game, as they have released a free cut down version for exactly your kind of project. This has the advantage of not having tons of someone elses code in it so it's easier to get started.
Good luck, I'm sure you'll have a lot of fun.
to the day when I can dispense with this puny human body. And stop getting colds.
It would be very difficult to use an fMRI system as a reliable lie detector. These kind of findings tend to come from groups of experimental subjects rather than individuals. Different people can exhibit activations in different places for the same mental processes, and they may not even be using identical neural processes at all. Additionally, the more frontal you go the less well-defined are the theories as to what the cortex is actually doing, and prefrontal cortex is the most high-level of all, being recruited as a kind of supervisory system in many mental processes. If someone accused me of lying on the basis of a pattern of frontal activation, I could claim to have been performing all kinds of mental tasks to increase my cognitive load, and indeed I could do just that to make sure the differences between lie and non-lie scanning epochs were not useful.
But I'm sure someone will get rich off the back of this.
Actually, it's the neuromarketing bullshitters that really piss me off.
Great. Now I need a firewall on my Ipod to stop fifteen RealNetworks processes calling home every time I use it.
Totally useless? Name one major university neuroscience department that doesn't have interests in EEG. It's one of the most widely used techniques we have and it is far from useless.
Watch the misery on the faces of the RIAA as the true market value of A Song emerges through the mechanism of market forces! Sure, there will be a bit of legal manoevering but sooner or later there will be competition. I'm guessing it'll level off at about 10c/tune but that might be a bit high.
Isn't it about hardware mediated DRM?
First Apple release a new ipod, now an article about a laptop with a different kind of hinge. It's all happening at once, I can't keep up.
...but his webserver is now knackered!
Monsanto and co have this flawed business model where they sequence gene X into organism Y and patent the resulting GMO. They do something mean like make it infertile, so they can charge peasant farmers for new seeds every year. As thought they were the only people who could ever muck about with genes! Wonder how long their window of profitability will last before gene splicing machines are available to the peasants.
Imagine the view through my fantasy driving HUD. Some wanker dangerously overtakes me. Do I swear loudly and upset my kids? No, I simply tag him with a big glowing sticker saying "This guy drives like a c*nt"), perhaps adding to the few he already has. He can't get rid of them, they don't belong to him, they are just tracking the [RFID/GPS/?] transciever in his car. He might not care, but he'll find that next time he gets booked by the cops for speeding they are less lenient, or he's not allowed on the toll-road, or his insurance premiums go up.
Bring it on.
DRM could be made to work. M$ learned a lot from the XBox fiasco, the industry could put (digital) piracy out of the reach of almost everyone. But they'd need to compromise our hardware. Now suppose they could force every piece of new hardware to be DRM compliant, and that it was strong DRM. It will take many years after that for all the older tech to wear out, and if they don't want to lose their market, they still have to be able to sell to people with old kit during that period. Eventually though, kit like we have now will wear out, and people might forget that their stuff used to be much more useful. At that point, maybe 10 or 20 years from now, when CDs are dead media anyway, the RIAA can sit back and relax. They'd like it sooner, but they can wait.
1. Don't listen to the people telling you to get a gun. They are clearly dumb anyway as they should have noticed you live in London and that would mean you would have to hook up with much badder people that street muggers to even get one. But mainly because the best thing to do if you get mugged is hand it over and get over it. A few bits of kit are not worth physical injury, or even worth the trouble of hurting someone else. If you can afford an ipod you can afford a decent insurance policy that would cover it, so just consider the cost of that as peace of mind.
2. Carry your kit in a crappy bag.
3. Walk around gesticulating wildly to the halucinations and shouting nonsense words.
4. Stay out of Hackney.
Now I know why my wounds keep getting infected!
What crap.
Outlook does a lot of things well - Contacts, Mail, Calendar, ToDo, Notes - and it integrates well with the desktop. It's a bit of a killer app for MS Office because it puts together most people's PIM needs in one place. The Mozilla approach of Browser + Mail might work for some but it makes no sense at all to me. I want an Outlook replacement, one which uses open file formats and isn't bloated. One that runs nice and quickly. It seems like a lot of people do. Thunderbird developers, please take note.
There's a common thread running through all Stephenson's books, a fascination with the history of information and how processing it has affected the development of human society and culture, from prehistory to the imaginable future. This is why he appeals so much to many geeks. Since Snowcrash, his breakthrough novel, he's been piecing together a remarkable perpective on the very essence of what makes humans special. The extent to which it is sometimes hard going just reflects what a difficult task it is, but the exploration is far-reaching and important. To those who couldn't hack Quicksilver, I say keep at it and instead of thinking of it as an entertainment, use it as a bunch of bookmarks to stuff that you should really know about.