The other difference between games and writing and most visual arts is that their requirement of being interactive means that they must primarily entertain. Add to it the high costs of production, and this means that game producers are always going to have to write what their consumers want. Still, even most "artistes" do that, it's just that their audience tends to like being challenged with new ideas, and their primary motive is to communicate, not profit (again, distinguished from the commercial whores)
Funny that you mention Clancy -- he certainly writes better game scripts than books. Or maybe it's because the only real comparison I have to Splinter Cell is Metal Gear Solid (nice games, but the writing makes anything else look good).
The 9th certainly is often at odds with SCOTUS, no doubts about it, and the population has something to do with the case load, but any decent statistician will tell you that not all facts correlate linearly. Get 2 people in a room, and the odds that they share a birthday are 1 in 365. Get 30 people in a room and it's better than even. Big cities mean big litigation.
> Don't mistake the current crop of oil-industry idiots for the majority of Republicans.
Why not? They voted for these people. And when actually faced with the prospect of another Democrat in the white house, especially Hillary, they will again.
> Don't even get me started on why this kind of system is bad - or what happens when two people who use systems like this try to mail each other.
Most C-R systems are pretty good at avoiding jabbering like that. Doesn't stop them from being fundamentally broken though.
But if you get a challenge for a spam that was forged from your address, do the net a favor: jump through the hoop and let the spam through. The user of the C-R system deserves it.
> Yet they take no steps to mitigate that. Even limiting the outbound emails from each account would help
They do that, in fact.
> And having an automated process for reporting and blocking spam from them would pretty much solve the rest of the problem with them.
They have that. Of course it's ignorebots on the abuse@ inbox, but hey, it's automated. As for automated blocking, that's kind of your problem. You can always block their IP addresses.
I don't give a damn about the free email accounts -- they're nuisance traffic, 419 spammers mostly. It's the BILLIONS of spams spewing every single day from the residential blocks of the Comcasts and Oranges and Verizons that are doing real damage to the email and bandwidth infrastructure, and it's THEIR greed, incompetence, and sloth that keep it going every single day.
> I don't see how you can sell your vote in an anonymous election.
And that's why we have secret ballots. Throw in coercion too.
And you can't really verifiably swap votes in such a scheme either -- the voter swap stuff amounted to nothing more than a gentleman's agreement, and I have no doubts that a significant percentage of the participants in the voter swap reneged when they actually got to the booths. I don't imagine the voteswap sites were under any illusions that it would be otherwise.
Nice to know that exercising your goddam freedom of association is legal now... best check with The State first these days to make sure you have any rights before, you know, doing anything at all.
An anonymous source with details on the "puke saber", which incapacitates its victims with displays of color, was quoted, "Our maximum setting is called apache.slashdot.org"
> You should check out the short story the New Rose Hotel, even a pretty decent movie adaptation.
God, I hope it's better than what they did to Johnny Mnemonic... though to be fair, I wasn't that fond of the story eityher. I mentioned "Hinterlands" as an illustrative example of Gibson's writing style, but I should have pointed at "New Rose Hotel" and now that I think of it, "Fragments of a Hologram Rose" (I always get them confused due to them sharing a word). Seriously, folks, go grab Burning Chrome. It's got crap in there (the title story isn't great) but it also has some stuff that's just wonderfully poignant and poetic, including all the before named stories.
> These are corporations *not people*. They show no mercy, and they deserve none.
"They" at Id are less than three dozen people in a privately held company. They seem to be pretty business-savvy, but even so it won't take a really big campaign of unpleasantness to convince them to never do another Linux port again if it means having to deal with a community that gives them that much grief.
> Internet cults like Heaven's Gate? Corporations patenting certain kinds of corn? The RIAA's war on priv^H^H^H^Hpiracy?
Indeed, Gibson really ought to reconsider hanging up his prognosticator cap.
Unless we see a really massive enabling of peoples in other parts of the world, the only prediction I see is Orwell's: "a boot stomping on a human face. Forever."
Cyberpunk may be dead, but it made for such nice RPG's. Gibson's Matrix was far more interesting than the Wachowski Brothers' version. Okay, they weren't entirely representing the same thing, but you get the idea.
Gibson's "impressionistic" style was a great big part of it, a style that sadly waned after the Sprawl trilogy was done. Going back and re-reading it, I'll admit it's a bit trite, but I still prefer it to the godawful style of Asimov's Foundation and Robot wherein he would congratulate himself masurbatorily on every other page about his clever ideas of psychohistory or laws of robotics. And don't get me started on Heinlein's preachy aphorisms.
One of my favorite stories of Gibson was "Hinterlands", a short story out of Burning Chrome, which had really nothing to do with the tech, but was about the psychological trauma of seeing the wrecks of explorers that came back after having something like a Lovecraftian-horror experience with truly alien intelligences.
Probably the only other author that grabs me with good characters this way is Greg Bear, and he's somewhat uneven -- Darwin's Children just didn't grab me. Maybe it was just too soon after reading Darwin's Radio.
Anyone who feels the same way can feel free to bombard me with suggestions on authors to read next. I'm in a bit of a drought here.
My class, also in 7th grade (85-86) was equally useless until they got around to teaching LOGO. Not much of it mind you, and I can't say it really gave me a great sense of power and enlightenment, but it certainly did give a little push to the direction I eventually took. We also played games, but they were the educational kind. Most of 'em sucked (I must be the only person who always hated Oregon Trail) but there was also Rocky's Boots.
Schools used to have "computer literacy" classes. They're largely redundant now, since the kids are usually more computer literate than anyone who could teach them.
> Certainly an oversight and public humiliation is not in order.
And it's not how the FSF works these days, either. This is just the work of some random screaming smacktard. I suppose we need such RSS's (er, I guess that acronym is taken) to catch the more egregious violators, but I don't guess he wrote to license-violation@fsf.org or anything (first thing you see when you google for "gpl violations")
Slashdot Mirror
The other difference between games and writing and most visual arts is that their requirement of being interactive means that they must primarily entertain. Add to it the high costs of production, and this means that game producers are always going to have to write what their consumers want. Still, even most "artistes" do that, it's just that their audience tends to like being challenged with new ideas, and their primary motive is to communicate, not profit (again, distinguished from the commercial whores)
Funny that you mention Clancy -- he certainly writes better game scripts than books. Or maybe it's because the only real comparison I have to Splinter Cell is Metal Gear Solid (nice games, but the writing makes anything else look good).
Music's been around for a little while. You telling me it doesn't pander?
Hell, commercial art sluts like Thomas Kincaid could be called pandering.
> Hate to say it, but maybe the Janjaweed have a point in Darfur....
How gracious of them. Anyway, they did their bit, now maybe they should go exterminate every last one of themselves.
The 9th certainly is often at odds with SCOTUS, no doubts about it, and the population has something to do with the case load, but any decent statistician will tell you that not all facts correlate linearly. Get 2 people in a room, and the odds that they share a birthday are 1 in 365. Get 30 people in a room and it's better than even. Big cities mean big litigation.
> Don't mistake the current crop of oil-industry idiots for the majority of Republicans.
Why not? They voted for these people. And when actually faced with the prospect of another Democrat in the white house, especially Hillary, they will again.
> Don't even get me started on why this kind of system is bad - or what happens when two people who use systems like this try to mail each other.
Most C-R systems are pretty good at avoiding jabbering like that. Doesn't stop them from being fundamentally broken though.
But if you get a challenge for a spam that was forged from your address, do the net a favor: jump through the hoop and let the spam through. The user of the C-R system deserves it.
> Yet they take no steps to mitigate that. Even limiting the outbound emails from each account would help
They do that, in fact.
> And having an automated process for reporting and blocking spam from them would pretty much solve the rest of the problem with them.
They have that. Of course it's ignorebots on the abuse@ inbox, but hey, it's automated. As for automated blocking, that's kind of your problem. You can always block their IP addresses.
I don't give a damn about the free email accounts -- they're nuisance traffic, 419 spammers mostly. It's the BILLIONS of spams spewing every single day from the residential blocks of the Comcasts and Oranges and Verizons that are doing real damage to the email and bandwidth infrastructure, and it's THEIR greed, incompetence, and sloth that keep it going every single day.
> I don't see how you can sell your vote in an anonymous election.
And that's why we have secret ballots. Throw in coercion too.
And you can't really verifiably swap votes in such a scheme either -- the voter swap stuff amounted to nothing more than a gentleman's agreement, and I have no doubts that a significant percentage of the participants in the voter swap reneged when they actually got to the booths. I don't imagine the voteswap sites were under any illusions that it would be otherwise.
Nice to know that exercising your goddam freedom of association is legal now... best check with The State first these days to make sure you have any rights before, you know, doing anything at all.
> So now we have Debian Iceweasel and Icedove.
One could have forgiven all of this had Debian simply not picked new names that were so blisteringly stupid.
Yes, it's a Matt Groening reference. No, no one gets it.
Didn't Khalid Sheikh Mohammed confess to it too?
This was orchestrated. If Armitage accidentally let it slip, I'm Henry Fucking Kissinger.
> he did it because his personal politics said the program was bad.
Good thing his personal politics also said that the program was illegal, and also that the NSA isn't the god damned armed forces.
I don't recommend the herring today sir, it's rather red.
> I'm curious how many 360 games are $30
Viva Piñata and Dead Rising.
> The emotion chip was critical, the lack of this feature really makes the 80GB version sub-pa
The 360 gets by just fine with software emulation. And the PS3's software emulation does upscaling, something that the builtin hardware can't do.
The 360's a nice console, just picked one up myself. It really is loud as all hell though.
An anonymous source with details on the "puke saber", which incapacitates its victims with displays of color, was quoted, "Our maximum setting is called apache.slashdot.org"
> The over unity energy technology may be quite possible.
Sure, if you repeal the laws of physics
Tesla was a genius, but he turned into a complete wackjob in his old age.
> You should check out the short story the New Rose Hotel, even a pretty decent movie adaptation.
... though to be fair, I wasn't that fond of the story eityher. I mentioned "Hinterlands" as an illustrative example of Gibson's writing style, but I should have pointed at "New Rose Hotel" and now that I think of it, "Fragments of a Hologram Rose" (I always get them confused due to them sharing a word). Seriously, folks, go grab Burning Chrome. It's got crap in there (the title story isn't great) but it also has some stuff that's just wonderfully poignant and poetic, including all the before named stories.
God, I hope it's better than what they did to Johnny Mnemonic
Yes, and in 50 years, they'll calculate more information than is contained in the universe in less than Planck time.
Moore's "law" as you understand it is already plateauing.
> When you violate the GPL, you immediately lose your license to the GPL'ed code
This is slashdot, son. It's spelled "loose".
> These are corporations *not people*. They show no mercy, and they deserve none.
"They" at Id are less than three dozen people in a privately held company. They seem to be pretty business-savvy, but even so it won't take a really big campaign of unpleasantness to convince them to never do another Linux port again if it means having to deal with a community that gives them that much grief.
> Internet cults like Heaven's Gate? Corporations patenting certain kinds of corn? The RIAA's war on priv^H^H^H^Hpiracy?
Indeed, Gibson really ought to reconsider hanging up his prognosticator cap.
Unless we see a really massive enabling of peoples in other parts of the world, the only prediction I see is Orwell's: "a boot stomping on a human face. Forever."
Cyberpunk may be dead, but it made for such nice RPG's. Gibson's Matrix was far more interesting than the Wachowski Brothers' version. Okay, they weren't entirely representing the same thing, but you get the idea.
Gibson's "impressionistic" style was a great big part of it, a style that sadly waned after the Sprawl trilogy was done. Going back and re-reading it, I'll admit it's a bit trite, but I still prefer it to the godawful style of Asimov's Foundation and Robot wherein he would congratulate himself masurbatorily on every other page about his clever ideas of psychohistory or laws of robotics. And don't get me started on Heinlein's preachy aphorisms.
One of my favorite stories of Gibson was "Hinterlands", a short story out of Burning Chrome, which had really nothing to do with the tech, but was about the psychological trauma of seeing the wrecks of explorers that came back after having something like a Lovecraftian-horror experience with truly alien intelligences.
Probably the only other author that grabs me with good characters this way is Greg Bear, and he's somewhat uneven -- Darwin's Children just didn't grab me. Maybe it was just too soon after reading Darwin's Radio.
Anyone who feels the same way can feel free to bombard me with suggestions on authors to read next. I'm in a bit of a drought here.
My class, also in 7th grade (85-86) was equally useless until they got around to teaching LOGO. Not much of it mind you, and I can't say it really gave me a great sense of power and enlightenment, but it certainly did give a little push to the direction I eventually took. We also played games, but they were the educational kind. Most of 'em sucked (I must be the only person who always hated Oregon Trail) but there was also Rocky's Boots.
Schools used to have "computer literacy" classes. They're largely redundant now, since the kids are usually more computer literate than anyone who could teach them.
Anyway, you get to fund this class.
> Since DOSBox is GPL, Valve is required to release the steam.dll code under the GPL.
Or stop distributing dosbox. You can stop rubbing your hands together with gleeful anticipation now. Licenses have never worked that way.
> Certainly an oversight and public humiliation is not in order.
And it's not how the FSF works these days, either. This is just the work of some random screaming smacktard. I suppose we need such RSS's (er, I guess that acronym is taken) to catch the more egregious violators, but I don't guess he wrote to license-violation@fsf.org or anything (first thing you see when you google for "gpl violations")