1. There are no problems moving games between Xboxes.
2. Saves are locked to their associated gamertag.
Yeah, you see that's my problem. Opps I played with the wrong gamertag logged in.
I appreciate the concern for erasing someone else's game, but there should be a mechanism for "Transfer this save file to X gamer profile". However you CAN'T do that for many games.
On my PC, it is as simple as opening my Sister's "My games" folder, and dragging the save file to MY "My games" folder.
The Xbox tells me that such a thing is prohibited. (Mass Effect 2)
I believe the idea of an R18+ rating is that everything which is now considered "Refused Classification" just becomes "R18+"... i.e. it's a lower, not an upper, limit to content
I understand, but isn't it just easier to just get rid of the damned refused classification all together?
Is there such a difference between someone 15+ and 18? Here is my worry:
Right now you have HUGE support because Refused Classification is a HUGE category of things being literally banned.
Let's say you cut that down to 18+ but add a few restrictions onto that, some rather nasty restrictions but less than what exists now.
As a result they will have divided your group into people that were mostly pissed at the old system, but accepting of the new system. But still a large (but now smaller) group of people who are still royally pissed at the still existing censorship.
The opposition has been reduced, and the politicians still get to censor. We know how these things generally operate, and once made 'taboo' things rarely come off the list. Especially when it requires a political vote to remove it from the list. It's easier to ignore it.
So no, you're totally wrong if you think you need to buy content once for each person. One console, one purchase, everyone can use it.
Not quite true, that depends on the game. You probably just haven't run into it yet based on the selection of games you play.
Now, this wasn't with paid content where it causes me the most issues, but with unlocks. My most recent example was a Magic The Gathering game.
My friend and I took turns playing the game at his apartment, and eventually unlocked a great deal of content. Awesome, we got everything working! Let's play head to head.
No such luck I'm afraid. We could play head to head, but each of us had to log in to our unique IDs. The result is that one of us had an AWESOME game to play with everything unlocked, the other ended up with the shit game where everything was still locked. If we both wanted to play against each other we would have to unlock everything on BOTH accounts.
Even if there is some background technical measure to transfer data over, or move gamer profiles (which in many cases there isn't), you shouldn't have to worry about that sort of thing when you just want to play a game.
I don't keep my Xbox hooked up to my network because it is out in my garage where I just want to play a few games and drink a beer. I don't want to have to deal with managing profiles with USB drives or carrying the damned thing in to synch up via the network.
OK, but you have to figure the total cost of travel. For a tourist/business person, the fare includes a night's accommodations. With a plane, you're getting up at 2AM, which means you've paid $150 for a hotel, and another $75 for a limo ride to the airport.
Plus you get 1/2 night's sleep, and you look like shit in the morning. And if you have business to conduct, you're not at your best, having only slept a couple of hours.
Lets say I fly to Tucson (which I did, just last week)
My flight leaves at 8am, so I get up at 5, get to the airport at 6, and I'm on my way. I land in Tucson at 3pm. The ticket cost me $300 or less.
To do that by train would take me several days, and cost more than double than the flight.
I know this because I WANTED to take the train, but in almost every category except legroom the airline wins. And I can handle 5 hours of redued legroom for a much more expensive, and MUCH longer train ride.
I'm not sure how you say that the sleeper is built into the cost of the ticket, here in the states it will double or triple the cost of your ticket to get the sleeper option.
And $75 for a limo ride to the airport? How are you getting to the train station? Except for VERY few people, there isn't a train station or airport within walking distance. Since both require a taxi service, both are equal.
Yes, which is why we want an R18 rating for games, but the government won't do that. That's exactly my point, they decide they will just wield the ban-hammer instead of having an R18 rating that parents would have to be aware of.
An R18 rating isn't a solution, but a means to introduce further censorship. The fact that there is always something 'worse' wouldn't be the point. Right now you have a rating of what T15? That IS your R18 rating. The problem is that your system encourages a level which is banned to everyone.
So you increase the level to R18, what difference would that make. All it would do is give people justification for applying more censorship.
"Well, it couldn't even make it into an R18 category, so it MUST be horrible stuff that should be banned"
The problem isn't a lack of R18, the problem is that anything not meeting 'standards' is illegal.
Psychopathy is characterised by an abnormal lack of empathy combined with strongly amoral conduct but masked by an ability to appear outwardly normal.
Are computers moral? Can they experience empathy (or rather, as in Asimov's laws, simply are coded to never hurt a human, whether indirectly or not)? How can we tell from the outside if a computer behaves normally or not?
I don't consider computer's lack of empathy to be abnormal. A non-lack of empathy in a computer would be abnormal. There is also no 'outwardly normal appearance that masks the amoral system'. The system is amoral, and that's what we expect.
The question that you are asking is a very difficult philosophical one which cannot be answered with today's information. We don't have enough information on how our own brains work to really define what is 'moral'.
We aren't even close to having to worry about Asimov's laws since to apply Asimov's laws on our robots/computers we would actually ahve to apply them to ourselves. A computer, with today's technology, can do no more than what we program it to do. Any morality exhibited is simply a product of the programmer and not the computer.
It is possible to alter the outcome of a computational process by relying on random number generation as a seed, but any action as an output of that would be no more moral/amoral than the Wheel of Fortune.
To be even more precise, I don't even think the term 'amoral' is even appropriate to apply to computers. To be amoral, almost implies that it is possible for something to be moral or immoral, which computers are not capable of being. While technically accurate, as the state of being neither moral nor immoral, it doesn't have the full weight of meaning which I would apply to something which cannot BE moral or immoral.
Have they tried increasing the system DPI (Control Panel > Display > Settings > Advanced > General > Display > DPI setting)?
It works, except when it doesn't, and when it doesn't you have the option of messing with your resolution, or tweaking each program individually (when they don't support it)
Then you end up with a frankenstein of system settings some of which seem to apply, and then Oh my looks like this program started paying attention to the DPI and is now all wonky.
It's just easier to use a lower resolution even though adjusting the DPI is the 'correct' way to do it.
I don't want all of my devices/games tied to a single account, Hell, I don't want my games tied to ANY account.
I want to be able to plug in my console, put in my game, and play the damned thing. I don't want to run into problems where "Oh crap, I must have started that game while on my sister's account or xbox, looks like all that playtime gets reset if I want to play it on MY account/xbox"
Or maybe that's not the problem, I don't know, because everything gets so freaking out of whack if you don't play the games exactly as you were 'supposed' to play them as defined by the service.
I also love how it used to be that if I bought something and hooked it up to my television that it was a household purchase. Now? Looks like I'd have to buy every item for each person in my family if they want to enjoy the same game that I have.
It's a large, profit-driven, high-margin corporation. You wouldn't tell McDonald's or Coca-Cola what your interests are, where you live, YOUR POLITICAL OPINIONS, who your parents are and who you want to date, would you?
Actually I tell everybody in the world that sort of information. Especially my POLITICAL OPINIONS. I even have a website where the domain includes my actual name. In this website I establish my beliefs, my goals and aspirations, as well as my past activities with respect to different projects.
It's called being a politician.
Now, I am a very vocal advocate of privacy rights, but what you stated isn't so much privacy but bordering on paranoia. And you know what? Good. A little healthy scepticism would do well for this country. But for a good majority of us, our political leanings, opinions, and activities are fairly public to begin with, we just never thought of them as being so.
My main complaint about these services is not that they exist, but that their information collection tends to be opt-out instead of opt-in. That's it.
We take sleepers in Europe whenever we can; they're so much nicer than planes.
In the US our trains are slow, and the sleepers alone cost more than a plane ticket. $400 is not unreasonable for a ticket price for anything approaching an airline-like trip length.
But a flight from Pittsburgh, PA to Denver, CO costs me less than $150 each way and I get there in a few hours. The train ticket would set me back a lot, and take almost as long as driving there.
Cut subsidies for all forms of transportation. Then, tax in proportion to carbon emissions. Trains win in every densely populated region, hands down.
Why the hell can't we just have taxes for the purpose of paying for government? Rather than these "I don't like what you do with your life so I'm going to try to hinder you from doing it through a passive-aggressive tax measure"
When you don't have the Constitutional or popular backing to ban something, Tax it.
Why should everyone subsidize your choice to live in a rural area?
He wasn't talking about subsidizing, he was talking about adding a tax based on Carbon. So places with High Density win out simply because the means of transportation available to them happens to be 'low carbon' but for the people in rural areas, they get stuck with a HIGHER tax.
I said that because I do not have the evidence to show that it is, and therefore I didn't want to say that it was. That does not mean that I said that it wasn't.
Primarily because Slashdot is the type of place that gets bent out of shape if a trivial piece of a statement is even slightly different than what another slashdotter believes as right. It doesn't even have to be wrong, but if it isn't presented in the exact form that they prefer it to be said, they will pull out their inner 'comic book store guy' and 'educate' you.
Sometimes, you can't even avoid it by being careful, as demonstrated here.
I didn't mention how one feels about red. It isn't a feeling. We may attribute feelings TO it, but it itself is not a feeling.
Consider someone with synesthesia. Colors can be associated with tastes, textures, or reversed. Even simple numerals and numbers can have a color. Even if the person is blind, this can occur. They might not be able to describe what they 'observe' as red, but the 'red' is there. It's a product of our brain, an interpretation of the wavelength.
I have told you enough about "red" that you could build a detector that reliably determines what is red - how is that not "explaining red"?
Others in the thread have more accurately described it. What you described was the wavelengths of light that a properly functioning eye determines to be red, not what red actually is.
What you need to know is the rules according to which the brain works. We don't know the complete rules yet, and probably they are quite complex, but the complexity of the rules is largely independent from the number of possible connections between neurons.
Yet those rules are not exactly uniform across individuals, nor is there any guarantee that the rules are less complex than the physical structure of the brain. Bear with me, and consider the game of Cricket.
There are only 22 players (excluding subs), 2 umpires, 2 scorers, a bat, a ball, and the wickets. Now consider the RULES of cricket. Now, I'm not saying it is necessarily true that the 'rules' for the brain are more complex than the brain, but it is possible that it is far more complex than we may ever be able to identically simulate.
You are essentially trying to simulate a system which had billions of years to 'tweak' itself into its current state. The rules could be really freaking screwy simply because certain parts were minimally advantageous at different points in history.
The human brain is the world's most complex Rube Goldberg machine.
And that's not even getting into what a particular person makes of it when the receptors in the eye send along a signal in response to wavelengths of 630-740 nm. You and I might perceive something similar, but Mortimer over there, he hears middle C, while Janet smells roses, and Fergus perceives a distinct lack of green..
My wife has synesthesia, which is a good example to use for this as well. For her, a letter could have a particular color. Not that the letter would be literally that color (for her at least) but that it would have a color association.
Some with more extreme examples could literally 'taste' a texture such as silk causing the brain to register a salty taste. Obviously none of that could be explained by the chemical composition of salt since none of that chemical was involved.
Now that's an interesting and clever way to put it. I'm not truly colorblind and I can see 'red' so I couldn't try this experiment (the afterimages).
You can't even call it the brains reaction to stimulation of specific neurons since, as you mentioned, you can dream 'Red' and not even have those neurons involved.
Slashdot Mirror
1. There are no problems moving games between Xboxes.
2. Saves are locked to their associated gamertag.
Yeah, you see that's my problem. Opps I played with the wrong gamertag logged in.
I appreciate the concern for erasing someone else's game, but there should be a mechanism for "Transfer this save file to X gamer profile". However you CAN'T do that for many games.
On my PC, it is as simple as opening my Sister's "My games" folder, and dragging the save file to MY "My games" folder.
The Xbox tells me that such a thing is prohibited. (Mass Effect 2)
I believe the idea of an R18+ rating is that everything which is now considered "Refused Classification" just becomes "R18+" ... i.e. it's a lower, not an upper, limit to content
I understand, but isn't it just easier to just get rid of the damned refused classification all together?
Is there such a difference between someone 15+ and 18? Here is my worry:
Right now you have HUGE support because Refused Classification is a HUGE category of things being literally banned.
Let's say you cut that down to 18+ but add a few restrictions onto that, some rather nasty restrictions but less than what exists now.
As a result they will have divided your group into people that were mostly pissed at the old system, but accepting of the new system. But still a large (but now smaller) group of people who are still royally pissed at the still existing censorship.
The opposition has been reduced, and the politicians still get to censor. We know how these things generally operate, and once made 'taboo' things rarely come off the list. Especially when it requires a political vote to remove it from the list. It's easier to ignore it.
So no, you're totally wrong if you think you need to buy content once for each person. One console, one purchase, everyone can use it.
Not quite true, that depends on the game. You probably just haven't run into it yet based on the selection of games you play.
Now, this wasn't with paid content where it causes me the most issues, but with unlocks. My most recent example was a Magic The Gathering game.
My friend and I took turns playing the game at his apartment, and eventually unlocked a great deal of content. Awesome, we got everything working! Let's play head to head.
No such luck I'm afraid. We could play head to head, but each of us had to log in to our unique IDs. The result is that one of us had an AWESOME game to play with everything unlocked, the other ended up with the shit game where everything was still locked. If we both wanted to play against each other we would have to unlock everything on BOTH accounts.
Even if there is some background technical measure to transfer data over, or move gamer profiles (which in many cases there isn't), you shouldn't have to worry about that sort of thing when you just want to play a game.
I don't keep my Xbox hooked up to my network because it is out in my garage where I just want to play a few games and drink a beer. I don't want to have to deal with managing profiles with USB drives or carrying the damned thing in to synch up via the network.
Orwell got more than a few things wrong too ...
Give it time.
OK, but you have to figure the total cost of travel. For a tourist/business person, the fare includes a night's accommodations. With a plane, you're getting up at 2AM, which means you've paid $150 for a hotel, and another $75 for a limo ride to the airport.
Plus you get 1/2 night's sleep, and you look like shit in the morning. And if you have business to conduct, you're not at your best, having only slept a couple of hours.
Lets say I fly to Tucson (which I did, just last week)
My flight leaves at 8am, so I get up at 5, get to the airport at 6, and I'm on my way. I land in Tucson at 3pm. The ticket cost me $300 or less.
To do that by train would take me several days, and cost more than double than the flight.
I know this because I WANTED to take the train, but in almost every category except legroom the airline wins. And I can handle 5 hours of redued legroom for a much more expensive, and MUCH longer train ride.
I'm not sure how you say that the sleeper is built into the cost of the ticket, here in the states it will double or triple the cost of your ticket to get the sleeper option.
And $75 for a limo ride to the airport? How are you getting to the train station? Except for VERY few people, there isn't a train station or airport within walking distance. Since both require a taxi service, both are equal.
Fuck you seppo!
Oh my, he used rhyming slang, whatever could he mean?
Yes, which is why we want an R18 rating for games, but the government won't do that. That's exactly my point, they decide they will just wield the ban-hammer instead of having an R18 rating that parents would have to be aware of.
An R18 rating isn't a solution, but a means to introduce further censorship. The fact that there is always something 'worse' wouldn't be the point. Right now you have a rating of what T15? That IS your R18 rating. The problem is that your system encourages a level which is banned to everyone.
So you increase the level to R18, what difference would that make. All it would do is give people justification for applying more censorship.
"Well, it couldn't even make it into an R18 category, so it MUST be horrible stuff that should be banned"
The problem isn't a lack of R18, the problem is that anything not meeting 'standards' is illegal.
Psychopathy is characterised by an abnormal lack of empathy combined with strongly amoral conduct but masked by an ability to appear outwardly normal.
Are computers moral? Can they experience empathy (or rather, as in Asimov's laws, simply are coded to never hurt a human, whether indirectly or not)? How can we tell from the outside if a computer behaves normally or not?
I don't consider computer's lack of empathy to be abnormal. A non-lack of empathy in a computer would be abnormal. There is also no 'outwardly normal appearance that masks the amoral system'. The system is amoral, and that's what we expect.
The question that you are asking is a very difficult philosophical one which cannot be answered with today's information. We don't have enough information on how our own brains work to really define what is 'moral'.
We aren't even close to having to worry about Asimov's laws since to apply Asimov's laws on our robots/computers we would actually ahve to apply them to ourselves. A computer, with today's technology, can do no more than what we program it to do. Any morality exhibited is simply a product of the programmer and not the computer.
It is possible to alter the outcome of a computational process by relying on random number generation as a seed, but any action as an output of that would be no more moral/amoral than the Wheel of Fortune.
To be even more precise, I don't even think the term 'amoral' is even appropriate to apply to computers. To be amoral, almost implies that it is possible for something to be moral or immoral, which computers are not capable of being. While technically accurate, as the state of being neither moral nor immoral, it doesn't have the full weight of meaning which I would apply to something which cannot BE moral or immoral.
Have they tried increasing the system DPI (Control Panel > Display > Settings > Advanced > General > Display > DPI setting)?
It works, except when it doesn't, and when it doesn't you have the option of messing with your resolution, or tweaking each program individually (when they don't support it)
Then you end up with a frankenstein of system settings some of which seem to apply, and then Oh my looks like this program started paying attention to the DPI and is now all wonky.
It's just easier to use a lower resolution even though adjusting the DPI is the 'correct' way to do it.
Registering * Signing In to get Bonus Content is *not* the same a having to do so just to play the game.
My game won't play unless I'm logged in because I made the mistake of trying to, you know, get the rest of my game that I bought working.
Now my save game will say "You must log in to the servers in order to load this game"
"You are offline, loading the game anyway, 'cause we love you like that" screen.
Yeah, glad that works for you.
For me it's almost always. You are offline, something you did we didn't like so we are treating your game as online only, fuck you.
And it ALWAYS happens when I'm waiting at the airport and just want to play a few offline, single player games.
Try using your Xbox gamer tag account then
I don't want all of my devices/games tied to a single account, Hell, I don't want my games tied to ANY account.
I want to be able to plug in my console, put in my game, and play the damned thing. I don't want to run into problems where "Oh crap, I must have started that game while on my sister's account or xbox, looks like all that playtime gets reset if I want to play it on MY account/xbox"
Or maybe that's not the problem, I don't know, because everything gets so freaking out of whack if you don't play the games exactly as you were 'supposed' to play them as defined by the service.
I also love how it used to be that if I bought something and hooked it up to my television that it was a household purchase. Now? Looks like I'd have to buy every item for each person in my family if they want to enjoy the same game that I have.
It's a large, profit-driven, high-margin corporation. You wouldn't tell McDonald's or Coca-Cola what your interests are, where you live, YOUR POLITICAL OPINIONS, who your parents are and who you want to date, would you?
Actually I tell everybody in the world that sort of information. Especially my POLITICAL OPINIONS. I even have a website where the domain includes my actual name. In this website I establish my beliefs, my goals and aspirations, as well as my past activities with respect to different projects.
It's called being a politician.
Now, I am a very vocal advocate of privacy rights, but what you stated isn't so much privacy but bordering on paranoia. And you know what? Good. A little healthy scepticism would do well for this country. But for a good majority of us, our political leanings, opinions, and activities are fairly public to begin with, we just never thought of them as being so.
My main complaint about these services is not that they exist, but that their information collection tends to be opt-out instead of opt-in. That's it.
eminent domain
Without a doubt. A true highspeed dedicated track along the North East would be the quintessential perfect example for use of eminent domain.
We take sleepers in Europe whenever we can; they're so much nicer than planes.
In the US our trains are slow, and the sleepers alone cost more than a plane ticket. $400 is not unreasonable for a ticket price for anything approaching an airline-like trip length.
But a flight from Pittsburgh, PA to Denver, CO costs me less than $150 each way and I get there in a few hours. The train ticket would set me back a lot, and take almost as long as driving there.
Cut subsidies for all forms of transportation. Then, tax in proportion to carbon emissions. Trains win in every densely populated region, hands down.
Why the hell can't we just have taxes for the purpose of paying for government? Rather than these "I don't like what you do with your life so I'm going to try to hinder you from doing it through a passive-aggressive tax measure"
When you don't have the Constitutional or popular backing to ban something, Tax it.
What happens when your van breaks down for good in 10-20 years?
What happens when you have to repair the rails or replace the ties?
Why should everyone subsidize your choice to live in a rural area?
He wasn't talking about subsidizing, he was talking about adding a tax based on Carbon. So places with High Density win out simply because the means of transportation available to them happens to be 'low carbon' but for the people in rural areas, they get stuck with a HIGHER tax.
Increased taxes is NOT subsidization.
And how exactly do you know that?
I said that because I do not have the evidence to show that it is, and therefore I didn't want to say that it was. That does not mean that I said that it wasn't.
Primarily because Slashdot is the type of place that gets bent out of shape if a trivial piece of a statement is even slightly different than what another slashdotter believes as right. It doesn't even have to be wrong, but if it isn't presented in the exact form that they prefer it to be said, they will pull out their inner 'comic book store guy' and 'educate' you.
Sometimes, you can't even avoid it by being careful, as demonstrated here.
How one feels about red is something different.
I didn't mention how one feels about red. It isn't a feeling. We may attribute feelings TO it, but it itself is not a feeling.
Consider someone with synesthesia. Colors can be associated with tastes, textures, or reversed. Even simple numerals and numbers can have a color. Even if the person is blind, this can occur. They might not be able to describe what they 'observe' as red, but the 'red' is there. It's a product of our brain, an interpretation of the wavelength.
I have told you enough about "red" that you could build a detector that reliably determines what is red - how is that not "explaining red"?
Others in the thread have more accurately described it. What you described was the wavelengths of light that a properly functioning eye determines to be red, not what red actually is.
And where exactly do you contradict anything I said?
Why did I have to contradict you? Couldn't I have taken your point and run with it a bit further?
It may turn out that they are dead simple, or that they are painfully complex. We don't know it. We can only make wild guesses.
No, they are pretty much painfully complex.
Is that a better contradiction? ;)
What you need to know is the rules according to which the brain works. We don't know the complete rules yet, and probably they are quite complex, but the complexity of the rules is largely independent from the number of possible connections between neurons.
Yet those rules are not exactly uniform across individuals, nor is there any guarantee that the rules are less complex than the physical structure of the brain. Bear with me, and consider the game of Cricket.
There are only 22 players (excluding subs), 2 umpires, 2 scorers, a bat, a ball, and the wickets. Now consider the RULES of cricket. Now, I'm not saying it is necessarily true that the 'rules' for the brain are more complex than the brain, but it is possible that it is far more complex than we may ever be able to identically simulate.
You are essentially trying to simulate a system which had billions of years to 'tweak' itself into its current state. The rules could be really freaking screwy simply because certain parts were minimally advantageous at different points in history.
The human brain is the world's most complex Rube Goldberg machine.
And that's not even getting into what a particular person makes of it when the receptors in the eye send along a signal in response to wavelengths of 630-740 nm. You and I might perceive something similar, but Mortimer over there, he hears middle C, while Janet smells roses, and Fergus perceives a distinct lack of green..
My wife has synesthesia, which is a good example to use for this as well. For her, a letter could have a particular color. Not that the letter would be literally that color (for her at least) but that it would have a color association.
Some with more extreme examples could literally 'taste' a texture such as silk causing the brain to register a salty taste. Obviously none of that could be explained by the chemical composition of salt since none of that chemical was involved.
Now that's an interesting and clever way to put it. I'm not truly colorblind and I can see 'red' so I couldn't try this experiment (the afterimages).
You can't even call it the brains reaction to stimulation of specific neurons since, as you mentioned, you can dream 'Red' and not even have those neurons involved.