Seriously, Futurology is fun to read, but I've yet to see a "Futurologist" do much better than a Sci-fi writer.
Jules Vernes pegged the basic idea or our Space Program (From the Earth to the Moon -- 1865). He predicted submarines as well (20,000 Leagues under the Sea -- 1869). Paris in the 20th Century (1863)sounds to me like a fairly accurate discription of life in any modern city (gas powered automobiles, glass skyscrapers, high speed trains, global communication, and calculators).
Going forward to the twentith century, I can't think of an invention we have today that wasn't at least partially forshadowed by at least one scifi writer.http://www.technovelgy.com/
The secret of predicting anything is to write a lot of predictions.
Doom a Gloomers about the PS3, you're wrong. Sony's arrogant, sure. Sony's PR is equatable to trying to talk kindly about Bill Gates in the 90s. The steps and mistakes they've been making are well documented here on Slashdot, and they are doing a whole lot of sucking. However, here's a revelation for you......the PS3 will still be a major player this coming generation.
You can throw your prophecies of doom left and right, but it's pointless. We may not like Sony and their shenanigans, but barring you personally tracking down and proselytizing every Joe and Jill Gamer it's not going to make a difference. They won't have all this Anti-Sony momentum when they walk into Gamestop, they'll just have money and choices.
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well, ok. So explain to Average Mom why she should shell out $500 for a new ps3 when she could have a used XBOX360 for $300. She doesn't know about Blu-Ray. She couldn't tell you what Blu-Ray *is*. Her TV probably isn't HDMI (unless she's upper-middle class -- Hi-Def is in the thousand dollars range, which is simply too much for many households to spend on luxury items). She doesn't know any of the game franchises. She'll walk in, money in hand, and realise that she can LITERALLY buy BOTH other consoles (New Wii and used XBOX360) PLUS game or two. This is of course provided that PS3's are actually available at launch (which with the low numbers, is practically impossible). I think Sony will be lucky to still be a contender after about mid-2007.
So you're statement that Sony isn't about to collapse is STUPID. Even if Sony hadn't pissed off almost every "hard-core" fan, the price point is so rediculously high that even those who are interested will still wait at least a few years until the price drops. And those are the ones who don't know about DRM and other Sony idiocy.
To my mind, even though I loved my ps2, I don't see ps3 being around for long. It's probably the Dreamcast of this console gen. It's technically superior, and probably the few that buy one are going to like it, but by the end of the cycle, all of about 10 exclusives will have been released for it, and the few that do get one will put it in the closet and spend time playing XBOX360 or Wii.
Actaully, the system is pretty stacked against 3rd parties. First off, it's pretty tough to get into the Pres debates if you're not a Dem or Rep. Greens and Libertarians are on the ballot in all 50 states, yet their candidates for president are shut out from the mainstream campaigning. They can't get into the debates, and other than CSPAN, they don't get coverage for their convention. Heck, they're not covered by the press period. Unless they have a big war-chest, they aren't likely to get adverts in the media. To make a long story short, unless you go looking for third party candidates, chances are pretty good that you'll never have heard of them. And unless a candidate can get his name out there in the minds of voters, he can't win.
A second problem, though I'm not sure that the parties themselves are to blame, is the meme that says voting for a third party is throwing your vote away. Apparently because they can't win.
It's kinda both actually. I like Campy stuff. I loved the olskool Batman for just that reason. It looked absofragginlutly stoopid, and it was funny to see just how many things were re-written to have the word "Bat" in front. Batarang, Batoosie (WTF), Batcomputer, etc, and then the rube-goldberg death methods that the baddies would try to kill batman with. I remember a Barbeque setup (I think it's catwoman), putting them behind a shooting gallery (they were saved by bulletproof shoes), and others I can't think of. Camp is a lot of fun, and frankly I'd rather see another campy TV show than a modern "Sci-fi" that thinks it's the shiznit 'cause they can push polygons and use lots of special effects. That's actually one of the charms of TOS. It was an adventure, yes, but they weren't trying to fool anyone. It wasn't ZOMG cgi. And most of the time, the stories themselves weren't all that deep either. I think I missed the deep hidden message of the Witch Planet, and the Gangsta Planet. There were some that had deeper meanings, but most of the time it's probably no deeper than your average Marvel Comic book.
I guess I'm more traditional. Give me a fun story, and I'll watch it. Give me eyecandy and nothing else, I'll go elsewhere.
But the reason that
One of the most annoying things in games right now is the "guess the hidden trick". It could be a boss fight, or a puzzle, or something else similar, but it's the same kind of idea.
Bosses always have a hidden "trick", something that once you learn it, the boss goes from challenging to easy in about 3 seconds. Once you realize that a certain footwork pattern means "Get out of the way uberattack coming", the boss is much easier, because unless you happen to miss the "tell" (to barrow a poker term), you'll never be hit by the attack. Or if the way to survive the ride through the angry marine base is to take out the platforms they stand on, (one puzzle in Oddworld) the level itself becomes pointless -- it's almost impossible to lose.
On the other hand, there are games (I've seen it a few times in sports), where once the AI realizes it's losing, it suddenly gets much better at the game it's playing. In a fighting game, it might gain some new moves or have a move that takes 1/4 of your health etc. That's annoying, 'cause I'm not losing so much because I suck as because the game is cheating.
I don't mind a game that's hard on its own, but I hate games that are difficult for cheap reasons. I hate not being able to defeat a boss because I haven't figured out the "correct" answer yet -- or realized the tell for the special attack. I hate games that cheat me out of a victory by cheating. If the game is hard because the designer thought out the challenge and made it harder be requiring me to be good at the game, rather than good at guessing the solution that the designer had in mind.
Line oriented is probably most basic part of coding. There isn't a program out there that doesn't have an if-then statement or basic arithmetic.
But I think a huge problem with students not knowing how to program is the lack of training in Logic. I remember learning geometry in HS, long before I started hobby programming. You had to know how to prove that one angle was exactly equal to another and show every step. Being able to do things like that is essential in learning to write a program, because you often need to test for a condition that you can't directly measure.
I think you're missing a fundemental point here. The site purports to be giving information on various topics. The Majority, in the case of Wikipedia aren't experts on many topics. Yes they know all the trivia on Geek(tm) TV and Movies (Dr. Who, Babylon 5, DS9), but when it comes to giving information about other things, I'd rather have the minority. The monority may be editing the page on politics because they know what the hell they're talking about.
All the rainbow colored text in the world can't change basic facts. Either Barack Obama was born in Kenya or he wasn't. Either Kerry earned 3 purple hearts or he didn't. I don't think that we should turn wikipedia into a system in which one can have conflicting "facts" side by side.
I can't imagine a system like that would do much good.
Barack Obama was born in [1971/1973/1966] in [Nigeria/Kenya/Zimbabwe]. He was elected to the US Senate in [2001/2003/2006].
We may be entitled to our opinions, but we aren't entitled to our own facts.
I find myself with a sort of love-hate relationship with Trek. It's a pretty well written show, TOS and early TNG being some of the best. But somewhere it stopped being the fun show and started being a "philospohical soap opera in space". Trek at least today is closer to being like grandpa trying to be "cool" and "down with it" but failing.
Give me an adventure in space. Stop taking the thing so seriously. Quit trying to make bullshit technology sound like it was meant to work in the real world. I don't believe that transporters could work any more than I think being bitten by a radioactive spider will make me able to shoot webs. I'm not interested in a crew that can wank on about philosophy or captains chosen for their ability to "look concerned" and quote shakespeare. ST was an adventure show, it may have originally had a bit of philosophical and technological "spice", but it wasn't a deep show, and I wish they'd go back to that style rather than the current "soap opera" thing. I want a soap opera, I'll watch a soap opera.
It's not because of innovation, Blu-Ray or anything else. Most people don't know what DRM is, let alone rootkits, so that's not an issue at all. Blu-ray isn't a factor because frankly, I've only seen 5 or 6 movies even available in Blu-Ray, and that was in the SONY STORE.
What's going to kill ps3 is one single factor. The price. As it stands, and without the probable next-october-price-drop from Xbox, one will be able to buy BOTH a Wii AND a 360 for the price of a ps3. Maybe all the people on budgets will for some mythical, magical reason not notice that little fact. Maybe people on budgets will buy the most expensive thing on the market, even if xbox is pretty well comparable. Or maybe Momma, who knows nothing about consoles will be able to justify spending $200 more on a console because junior wants that one. I mean really, show me a person who doesn't think Sony is DOA, and I'll show you a fanboi. And that's just on price.
But the problem is that in some cases, it does replace "traditional" encyclopedias, news articles, and research in general. People are tending to go to wikipedia and ONLY wikipedia when looking up new information. And most people are reading Wpedia as gospel truth, thus any inaccuracy in Wpedia is going to likely become accepted as truth, whether or not it *is* truth.
It's bad enough, imo when people use a single source, esp. a secondary or teriary source as their only source in a serious report. Worse still is when they trust the accuracy of people who don't leave their names or list credentials, which means that there is no chance of determining whether or not the person behind the page (or in the case of Wpedia) has any actual knowledge of the subject, has an agenda, or is a 12-year old having fun by reversing terms in that math equation.
Wpedia may be OK if you're using it to find related terms so that you can look up articles and technical material in professional journals or even news articles to confirm what Wpedia says. Or if you're looking up something that just doesn't matter much (say Jedi fighting styles for an internet Star Wars debate). But if you're doing something like writing a report (for school or business) or researching because you want to understand an issue, Wpedia isn't a good enough source to be the main source. Most webpages aren't and those that are, in general are the online versions of offline magazines and journals or newspapers.
I guess I'm probably not explaining myself well. What bugs me about Trek is that it's claiming to be a big part of American Culture as well as having Prophet Roddenberry predicting every modern device, if not outright insiring them. It claims cultural iconhood without any proof that any of it was true.
As to the first part Ricky/Lucy vs. Kirk/Uhura, which is the greater blow for equality? Even granting hispanics getting a somewhat better deal than blacks, I would think showing a hispanic married to a white woman (and from everything I saw in Lucy it was pretty much treated as no big deal), eventually having a child, etc. is probably further along the equality path than a "fling" of about 3 minutes of kissing that's forgotten in the next episode. Even granting the difference between hispanics and blacks in the 1950's/1960's it's still not as Paramount wants people to think -- that ST was on the vanguard of civil rights. I'm tired of the claim, as well as some of the other alleged "social justice" things.
But it's a common thing with Trek. Unlike other "culturally impacting" TV/movies, almost all of Trek's claims seem to come years after the fact. With Harry Potter or Da Vinci Code, I can point to news articles and documentaries produced fairly soon after the release: "Does Harry Potter encourage Witchcraft?", "Is there any Truth Behind the Da Vinci Code", "Should Christian Children read Harry Potter?", etc. Each one speculating about the cultural impact of these books. We had news reports of kids standing in line for the the next HP book. That isn't something JK Rowling came up with 5 years after, or even 10 years after. It happened while the HP series was being written. I've never seen the same for Trek, although it seems (almost) to be credited with starting the Hippy movement altogether, as well as the invention of everything up to (and probably soon added to the trek-list) Blu-Rays. Sorry, but no. Roddenberry isn't a prophet, and ST didn't change the world.
Maybe we just disagree on what Cultural Impact is. I think it needs to reach a bit higher to be a cultural impact. Show me a anti-war protester in a Starfleet uni, and I'll believe in St's impact. Until then, I'm not convinced. It's a fictional TV show given far too much credit as a force in America. Other than for the few for whom ST is a Bible or Quran, it's probably less influencial than Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Simpsons.
I agree with the cultural sucess part, but re:ST you're way off.
It's HYPED as cultural success. That isn't the same as BEING a cultural success. The "cultural success" of ST is more a product of nostalgia and media marketing than anything the original Trek did by itself.
Rather trivial example:
Trek is credited with the first interracial kiss. While that's true, and it was probably a fairly big deal at the time, that isn't all it's cracked up to be. First off, that wasn't the first interracial couple. Heck Lucy married Hispanic Ricky in the 1950's and HAD A BABY WITH HIM. That's probably bigger on the "anti-racism" scale than a 2-minute kiss by a captain who's kissed every alien woman within arm's reach. Secondly, at least by my reading of TV ratings, the "interracial kiss" that "made history" wasn't seen by all that many people in the 1960's. In fact in all the re-runs I've seen of TOS, I don't remember ever seeing it. Yet people credit "Der Trek" with helping to end racism, despite the rather obvious facts: Lucy did more, earlier, with a bigger audience. The reason that Trek gets credit is that the marketing machine of Trek trumpets it's hippyness and work toward human progress or whatever.
And the same can be said of FTL travel -- Trek probably wasn't the first to suggest FTL travel, but since Paramount keeps Trek in sight, it can contend that the only reason anybody's working on FTL travel or any other treknology was of course directly influenced by "The Trek". Same with mp3s. I seriously laughed out loud to hear Shatner take credit -- through his connection to Trek of course -- for mp3s and thus iPods. Not like Apple had anything to do with the iPod.
It's good TV, I'll give it that, but it's not a "cultural phenomenon". That's more due to Paramount always shouting about their "cultural phenomenon". And honestly, I think STAR WARS was the big reason for the first Star Trek movie, not the fans. The show was cancelled, there wasn't a huge fanbase. They saw that STAR WARS, a movie about space was making big money. So like so many other hollywood companies, they cashed in. They made their own space movie, based on an old TV show that was essentially collecting dust in Paramount's basement.
And really, come up with a better "cultural impact" than "Beam me up Scotty". That's actually proof positive that most Americans hadn't ever seen the show, because that line was never said.
I like the shows, I just hate the "cultural impact" arguments that distort history. Star Trek may have a big geek/nerd following, but it was a product of the 1960's and managed to get reborn in the 1980's. It's just a TV show. One that's been made into "culture" by the power of hype to tell people exactly what they remember from the '60's.
Actually, I'm in favor of them playing a few levels. Playing every minute of some games (I think FFXII would take 120 hours to do everything, according to SE) would end up being such a drag on the process that it would either require ESRB to hire hundreds of extra people or make rating a game a much longer process.
I think it would be best if they had to play through three or four levels. One early, one in the middle, and one towards the end. Do that and put the "ESRB scorecard" on the web, and I don't see how you could be surprised by the game's content -- if you're a responsible person doing research on the game before you buy it.
Yeah, I could imagine putting the thing in a smallish computer. That way you could get a sample of something, run it past the chip, and get a readout of what it is. Then you could scan people very efficiently, and find out who's carrying explosives or steroids (I think you's still need blood, unless steroids are capable of becoming airborne), or any number of other things.
yes, but now we seem to be getting to the point where in most entertainment media, truely original ideas have almost no chance of getting through the bean-counters to ever be seen. It ain't just the game industry, it's movies and TV as well. The propblem is that our production values for entertainment is so high that just about any entertainment product MUST gaurentee the producers that it will make millions, because a loss isn't just "oops", it can be bankruptcy, or at least major cutbacks.
to make a long story short, the fastest way to make any form of entertainment get stale and derivitive is to make the cost of failure catastrophic.
It was the COMMONWEALTH, not the Confederacy, unless you mean the alternate universe version where they all started wearing grey and marching up Seminary Ridge.
PS, I loved Andromeda. Earth: Final Conflict was nonsensical though.
Actually, if that were true, it would be in select venues and not universal. Show me a place where people are absolutely free to choose seating AND where the place isn't segragated. I've never seen one, and I don't ever expect to. That isn't just "I don't know black people", if that was the case, then surely the desegragation of US schools and workplaces should have changed the dynamic for a few people. Yet it doesn't. We're still just as segragated as we were in the 1950's, but without the excuse that it was the law at the time.
You can say it ain't racism all you want to, but the fact that it's not changed in 50 years suggests that it's more than just "I don't have black friends".
I don't think that Hollywood is out of ideas. I think it like so many other entertainment businesses are becomming allergic to risk. Part of the reason, esp. with the so-called summer blockbuster, is that it costs TENS OF MILLIONS to make a passable movie. Just getting "name" actors is serveral million a piece. Then you have sets, props, CGI, and marketing. By the time you get through all that, you have to make about $50 million just to break even. That's a lot of friggin popcorn.
So in essence, these companies can't take risks with their blockbuster movies. They have to get a hit, because if they don't the company's out millions of dollars, and quite frankly it would make it hard for the producers and directors responsible to get anyone else to take a risk on them. No company can afford to lose 50 million.
So it adds up to the same old thing. The same old Superman, the same old X-men, the generic romantic comedy, the generic cop movie, the generic action film. Doing otherwise is just too risky, for the producers/directors (a flop at the BO is almost career-ending), to the movie studio (a flop can put them in the red for the rest of the year, or maybe several), etc.
I've read a good deal of Sci-Fi. But really, I don't get much into the background of why these things work. I don't care HOW the Dune ships can fold space. It's a cool idea, and it fits the story. I don't even think Herbert bothered to explain why Holtzman Shields only admit slow moving objects, frankly, I think it was just so there cold be sword fights. I don't care why transporters work, nor why replicators work, nor even the warp drive. I've never contemplated the "Kessel Run in X parsecs" thing. That's the background. It isn't the phase modulation on some laser analog that makes sci-fi fun.
Most often good sci-fi presents a modern problem in a different contexy, to give a different angle. Dune dealt with resources controlled by religious fanatics, a substance that could let a person see the future. The early ST dealt with racism, overpopulation, etc. Babylon 5 dealt in politics, especially the rise of the Fascist Clarke presidency.
I think that's part of the problem, most Sci-Fis are at least partially morality plays, and it's hard to do that in your typical MMORPGs. Most of the quests tend toward "mine this ore for Maliki the Metalworker for exp" or "kill 500 Gorgons and bring back the teeth" variety. No heroism. No save the colony. Nothing "moral" really.
Well, I don't know about "miserable enough", but we have a pathological denial of just about everything in from of us. Whites in America aren't racist (or so they say), but go to any public event and you'll find blacks on one side and whites on another. True in High School, true in sporting events, hell movie theaters where you sit in the dark.
Or overpopulation. We in the west have convinced ourselves that the reason that there aren't enough resources is that the poor are having too many babies. That may be partially true, but the biggest reason for the lack of resources has more to do with wheat and other foodstuffs being used to make doggy treats for our overpampered pets while people starve. You know there's a major problem when the people on diets and who insist on nothing but Organic Doggy Treats for lil Frufru have decided that the earth can't feed them.
As far as the environment, it's a mixed bag. We do need to control greenhouse gases, but on the other hand, it seems highly unfair to ban the factory after we've already moved to a post-industrial economy, where we can ban the chemical byproducts of processes we no longer do ourselves.
This is probably the worst time for much of the planet -- because we're not only living like feudal lords, but because we don't live anywhere near the third world, and we just so happen to be in control of most of the major media. We've created a bubble -- one that makes darn sure that we never have our consciences pricked by having to see so much as a picture of a poor person, let alone talk to them. At least when the old feudal lords left the castle to go somewhere, he'd usually have to pass a peasant or two on the roadside, possibly even having a conversation with them. Until we start looking the third worlders in the face and start listening, we may as well be the new Marie Antonettes. But who cares, American Idol is on TeeVee.
Maybe not, but I think it's a start. What I'd like to see (ESRB may even do it) is allow people to see the scorecard the ESRB uses to come up with the rating -- if not the gameplay video.
There are plenty of problems with the "look at the back of the box" or "look at the trailers" solution. Namely, both are ADVERTISING. They aren't representative of the entire game, nor do they even give a representative taste of the story.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIaW5T8R1X4
Or watch this and tell me the proper rating of Xenosaga III. How much violence do you see here? To be honest, there are plenty of game trailers that don't show any gameplay.
The back of the box is the same thing. They might show something, but unless the publishers are selling the game on gore, they aren't going to put a screenshot of an exploding head on the back. What they'll show are features, for the most part, the general setting maybe.
Seeing the ESRB scorecard would give a lot more of a clear picture of what the game is really like in a way that ratings and developer selected screenshots can't do.
I think the best way to go about the Electoral College would be a proportional representation system. The way each state votes in the EC would be determined by the % of people in that state that voted for that candidate.
First off, it would essentially eliminate "flyover country", because getting 51% in a large state (say CA) would no longer mean that you get all the EC votes (in the case of CA, it's 54). instead, you'd get (X/2 + 1) votes (CA would give only 54/2 + 1 or 28 EC votes). In the CA senario, those 28 votes aren't any more valueabe than getting all 32 from TX.
But even within states, the same would hold true. You can't just hit NYC and take all of NY, nor LA and get all of California, or even Chicago and get all of Illinois. In the case of Illinios, the southern part of the state is conservative, but IL is never a "red state" precisely because of the extreme "blue state" nature of Chicago. So if you live in Southern Illinois, for all intents and purposes, your presidential vote doesn't matter. How much time do you think Bush and Kerry spent on the issues important to the voters in Edwardsville? How much ad money was spent trying to convince the people of Edwardsville that they caredH^H^H^H^H^gave two shits about them? But with proportionality, Edwardsville would matter, because Chicago isn't 100% of Illinois. At best, Chicago is 22.7% of Illinois' population, a good chunk yes, but it shouldn't be able to choose the president for all of Illinois.
The problem of "winner take all" is that it concentrates power into the hands of densly populated areas, thus creating an "elite" class -- city-folk who by shear numbers get to set the national agenda. That's why farm issues are never discussed, nor are the farmer's concerns over the effects of environmental laws ever an issue. There aren't enough small-town farmers to outweigh the influence of Californian urban environmentalists.
It's lead to some issues. One of them is the issue of prarrie dogs on farmer's ranch lands. A new law prevents a rancher from shooting a prarrie dog. Not sporting, I suppose. The trouble is that the tunnels made by these prarrie dogs injure the farmer's cattle. That lead to a good number of ranchers poisoning the nests before the law took effect, so as not to lose money when the cattle would step on a PD tunnel and break their legs. Nobody asked the ranchers about the effects of the law -- in essence because their numbers were too small and they lived in areas with low electoral counts.
For the same reason that I'm not convinced of any wide-scale colonization of space, flying cars, or some of the other things futurists like to predict.
The thing is that for most people, they don't adopt a new technology just for "newness' sake", but because the benefit of the new device makes the older device look like a pain in the ass by comparison. Computers didn't enter the office because computers were cool, but because they were able to allow on-the-fly editing of text documents and able to calculate payrolls faster than the older methods (typewriters and accountants with calculators or pen and paper).
HD is slow to catch on for the opposite reason -- the value of having marginally better graphics isn't worth getting rid of the old DVD player and TV. DVDs work just fine for most videos. By contrast, the DVD came into wide use fairly quickly -- it was easier to use, didn't wear out from too much use, and allowed film companies to add things like commentaries and deleted scenes and "making of" features in the bonus menu, plus you could skip directly to whatever part of the movie you wanted to see.
So unless "thinking machines" can do a specific task much much better than a human, or a Borg (for want of a better term) can hands-down outperform a human in specific tasks, I don't see such things becoming much more than a curiousity.
The question isn't "can we do it", or even "should we do it", but "what will we need it for". That's how most other new technologies came into common use -- they were superior, in most cases vastly superior -- to whatever they replaced. Not to say we can't actually become a borg tomarrow. I think within 10 years or maybe 15, the technology to turn a human into a cyborg, complete with neural implants will be available. In fact, I'll give you $20 if within 20 years, we can't literally kidnap Patrick Stewart and literally turn him into Locutus. Technology isn't the problem so much as having a reason to do it. I don't think we'll ever have a great need to build super intelligent machines, nor a great need to turn humans into cyborgs. For most applications, what we have now is good enough.
We aren't threatened by psychic phenomena. What I find threatening is the people who use claims of psychic and paranormal are doing so for neferious purposes. They do it for money -- for $15.99 I'll communicate with your just-dead loved one so that he can tell you he's fine. 'Course, it won't be REAL, and it will make me $16 richer. For $75, you can get a device that will allow you to communicate with "aliens", "angels" "dead people", and "william shatner's toupe". It won't REALLY work, but the point is that I made $75 and I did give you a box with wires bent in the form of "mystic symbols" that probably cost me $10 to make.
And then you get into miracles in the realm of organized religion. Lourdes for example. How many people are spending years of their lives around the "holy" fountain, praying for a miracle cure that never comes? In other areas, the same kinds of "miracles" can cause people to join cults or be completely controlled by the "Imam", "Guru", or "Medicine Man" who can produce these miracles. Upend your whole life -- after all "remote viewers" see the end of the world! Kill yourself for Allah, after all Imam Mahasapedajiwan says he actually saw the 1001 virgins -- and they all have breast implants!
Long story short, the problem isn't that psychic phenemena may exist, it's that almost all people using said phenomena are using it as a tool for controlling people or making money. And that is something I'll never give a pass to.
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Jules Vernes pegged the basic idea or our Space Program (From the Earth to the Moon -- 1865). He predicted submarines as well (20,000 Leagues under the Sea -- 1869). Paris in the 20th Century (1863)sounds to me like a fairly accurate discription of life in any modern city (gas powered automobiles, glass skyscrapers, high speed trains, global communication, and calculators).
Going forward to the twentith century, I can't think of an invention we have today that wasn't at least partially forshadowed by at least one scifi writer.http://www.technovelgy.com/
The secret of predicting anything is to write a lot of predictions.
Doom a Gloomers about the PS3, you're wrong. Sony's arrogant, sure. Sony's PR is equatable to trying to talk kindly about Bill Gates in the 90s. The steps and mistakes they've been making are well documented here on Slashdot, and they are doing a whole lot of sucking. However, here's a revelation for you... ...the PS3 will still be a major player this coming generation.
You can throw your prophecies of doom left and right, but it's pointless. We may not like Sony and their shenanigans, but barring you personally tracking down and proselytizing every Joe and Jill Gamer it's not going to make a difference. They won't have all this Anti-Sony momentum when they walk into Gamestop, they'll just have money and choices.
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well, ok. So explain to Average Mom why she should shell out $500 for a new ps3 when she could have a used XBOX360 for $300. She doesn't know about Blu-Ray. She couldn't tell you what Blu-Ray *is*. Her TV probably isn't HDMI (unless she's upper-middle class -- Hi-Def is in the thousand dollars range, which is simply too much for many households to spend on luxury items). She doesn't know any of the game franchises. She'll walk in, money in hand, and realise that she can LITERALLY buy BOTH other consoles (New Wii and used XBOX360) PLUS game or two. This is of course provided that PS3's are actually available at launch (which with the low numbers, is practically impossible). I think Sony will be lucky to still be a contender after about mid-2007.
So you're statement that Sony isn't about to collapse is STUPID. Even if Sony hadn't pissed off almost every "hard-core" fan, the price point is so rediculously high that even those who are interested will still wait at least a few years until the price drops. And those are the ones who don't know about DRM and other Sony idiocy.
To my mind, even though I loved my ps2, I don't see ps3 being around for long. It's probably the Dreamcast of this console gen. It's technically superior, and probably the few that buy one are going to like it, but by the end of the cycle, all of about 10 exclusives will have been released for it, and the few that do get one will put it in the closet and spend time playing XBOX360 or Wii.
A second problem, though I'm not sure that the parties themselves are to blame, is the meme that says voting for a third party is throwing your vote away. Apparently because they can't win.
I guess I'm more traditional. Give me a fun story, and I'll watch it. Give me eyecandy and nothing else, I'll go elsewhere. But the reason that
Bosses always have a hidden "trick", something that once you learn it, the boss goes from challenging to easy in about 3 seconds. Once you realize that a certain footwork pattern means "Get out of the way uberattack coming", the boss is much easier, because unless you happen to miss the "tell" (to barrow a poker term), you'll never be hit by the attack. Or if the way to survive the ride through the angry marine base is to take out the platforms they stand on, (one puzzle in Oddworld) the level itself becomes pointless -- it's almost impossible to lose.
On the other hand, there are games (I've seen it a few times in sports), where once the AI realizes it's losing, it suddenly gets much better at the game it's playing. In a fighting game, it might gain some new moves or have a move that takes 1/4 of your health etc. That's annoying, 'cause I'm not losing so much because I suck as because the game is cheating.
I don't mind a game that's hard on its own, but I hate games that are difficult for cheap reasons. I hate not being able to defeat a boss because I haven't figured out the "correct" answer yet -- or realized the tell for the special attack. I hate games that cheat me out of a victory by cheating. If the game is hard because the designer thought out the challenge and made it harder be requiring me to be good at the game, rather than good at guessing the solution that the designer had in mind.
But I think a huge problem with students not knowing how to program is the lack of training in Logic. I remember learning geometry in HS, long before I started hobby programming. You had to know how to prove that one angle was exactly equal to another and show every step. Being able to do things like that is essential in learning to write a program, because you often need to test for a condition that you can't directly measure.
All the rainbow colored text in the world can't change basic facts. Either Barack Obama was born in Kenya or he wasn't. Either Kerry earned 3 purple hearts or he didn't. I don't think that we should turn wikipedia into a system in which one can have conflicting "facts" side by side.
I can't imagine a system like that would do much good.
Barack Obama was born in [1971/1973/1966] in [Nigeria/Kenya/Zimbabwe]. He was elected to the US Senate in [2001/2003/2006].
We may be entitled to our opinions, but we aren't entitled to our own facts.
Give me an adventure in space. Stop taking the thing so seriously. Quit trying to make bullshit technology sound like it was meant to work in the real world. I don't believe that transporters could work any more than I think being bitten by a radioactive spider will make me able to shoot webs. I'm not interested in a crew that can wank on about philosophy or captains chosen for their ability to "look concerned" and quote shakespeare. ST was an adventure show, it may have originally had a bit of philosophical and technological "spice", but it wasn't a deep show, and I wish they'd go back to that style rather than the current "soap opera" thing. I want a soap opera, I'll watch a soap opera.
ps happy birthday or some junk.
What's going to kill ps3 is one single factor. The price. As it stands, and without the probable next-october-price-drop from Xbox, one will be able to buy BOTH a Wii AND a 360 for the price of a ps3. Maybe all the people on budgets will for some mythical, magical reason not notice that little fact. Maybe people on budgets will buy the most expensive thing on the market, even if xbox is pretty well comparable. Or maybe Momma, who knows nothing about consoles will be able to justify spending $200 more on a console because junior wants that one. I mean really, show me a person who doesn't think Sony is DOA, and I'll show you a fanboi. And that's just on price.
It's bad enough, imo when people use a single source, esp. a secondary or teriary source as their only source in a serious report. Worse still is when they trust the accuracy of people who don't leave their names or list credentials, which means that there is no chance of determining whether or not the person behind the page (or in the case of Wpedia) has any actual knowledge of the subject, has an agenda, or is a 12-year old having fun by reversing terms in that math equation.
Wpedia may be OK if you're using it to find related terms so that you can look up articles and technical material in professional journals or even news articles to confirm what Wpedia says. Or if you're looking up something that just doesn't matter much (say Jedi fighting styles for an internet Star Wars debate). But if you're doing something like writing a report (for school or business) or researching because you want to understand an issue, Wpedia isn't a good enough source to be the main source. Most webpages aren't and those that are, in general are the online versions of offline magazines and journals or newspapers.
As to the first part Ricky/Lucy vs. Kirk/Uhura, which is the greater blow for equality? Even granting hispanics getting a somewhat better deal than blacks, I would think showing a hispanic married to a white woman (and from everything I saw in Lucy it was pretty much treated as no big deal), eventually having a child, etc. is probably further along the equality path than a "fling" of about 3 minutes of kissing that's forgotten in the next episode. Even granting the difference between hispanics and blacks in the 1950's/1960's it's still not as Paramount wants people to think -- that ST was on the vanguard of civil rights. I'm tired of the claim, as well as some of the other alleged "social justice" things.
But it's a common thing with Trek. Unlike other "culturally impacting" TV/movies, almost all of Trek's claims seem to come years after the fact. With Harry Potter or Da Vinci Code, I can point to news articles and documentaries produced fairly soon after the release: "Does Harry Potter encourage Witchcraft?", "Is there any Truth Behind the Da Vinci Code", "Should Christian Children read Harry Potter?", etc. Each one speculating about the cultural impact of these books. We had news reports of kids standing in line for the the next HP book. That isn't something JK Rowling came up with 5 years after, or even 10 years after. It happened while the HP series was being written. I've never seen the same for Trek, although it seems (almost) to be credited with starting the Hippy movement altogether, as well as the invention of everything up to (and probably soon added to the trek-list) Blu-Rays. Sorry, but no. Roddenberry isn't a prophet, and ST didn't change the world.
Maybe we just disagree on what Cultural Impact is. I think it needs to reach a bit higher to be a cultural impact. Show me a anti-war protester in a Starfleet uni, and I'll believe in St's impact. Until then, I'm not convinced. It's a fictional TV show given far too much credit as a force in America. Other than for the few for whom ST is a Bible or Quran, it's probably less influencial than Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Simpsons.
It's HYPED as cultural success. That isn't the same as BEING a cultural success. The "cultural success" of ST is more a product of nostalgia and media marketing than anything the original Trek did by itself.
Rather trivial example:
Trek is credited with the first interracial kiss. While that's true, and it was probably a fairly big deal at the time, that isn't all it's cracked up to be. First off, that wasn't the first interracial couple. Heck Lucy married Hispanic Ricky in the 1950's and HAD A BABY WITH HIM. That's probably bigger on the "anti-racism" scale than a 2-minute kiss by a captain who's kissed every alien woman within arm's reach. Secondly, at least by my reading of TV ratings, the "interracial kiss" that "made history" wasn't seen by all that many people in the 1960's. In fact in all the re-runs I've seen of TOS, I don't remember ever seeing it. Yet people credit "Der Trek" with helping to end racism, despite the rather obvious facts: Lucy did more, earlier, with a bigger audience. The reason that Trek gets credit is that the marketing machine of Trek trumpets it's hippyness and work toward human progress or whatever.
And the same can be said of FTL travel -- Trek probably wasn't the first to suggest FTL travel, but since Paramount keeps Trek in sight, it can contend that the only reason anybody's working on FTL travel or any other treknology was of course directly influenced by "The Trek". Same with mp3s. I seriously laughed out loud to hear Shatner take credit -- through his connection to Trek of course -- for mp3s and thus iPods. Not like Apple had anything to do with the iPod.
It's good TV, I'll give it that, but it's not a "cultural phenomenon". That's more due to Paramount always shouting about their "cultural phenomenon". And honestly, I think STAR WARS was the big reason for the first Star Trek movie, not the fans. The show was cancelled, there wasn't a huge fanbase. They saw that STAR WARS, a movie about space was making big money. So like so many other hollywood companies, they cashed in. They made their own space movie, based on an old TV show that was essentially collecting dust in Paramount's basement.
And really, come up with a better "cultural impact" than "Beam me up Scotty". That's actually proof positive that most Americans hadn't ever seen the show, because that line was never said.
I like the shows, I just hate the "cultural impact" arguments that distort history. Star Trek may have a big geek/nerd following, but it was a product of the 1960's and managed to get reborn in the 1980's. It's just a TV show. One that's been made into "culture" by the power of hype to tell people exactly what they remember from the '60's.
I think it would be best if they had to play through three or four levels. One early, one in the middle, and one towards the end. Do that and put the "ESRB scorecard" on the web, and I don't see how you could be surprised by the game's content -- if you're a responsible person doing research on the game before you buy it.
I would get a patent, but I think someone beat me to it... http://www.starchaser.nl/medcon/fotos/Mvc-312f.jpg
to make a long story short, the fastest way to make any form of entertainment get stale and derivitive is to make the cost of failure catastrophic.
PS, I loved Andromeda. Earth: Final Conflict was nonsensical though.
You can say it ain't racism all you want to, but the fact that it's not changed in 50 years suggests that it's more than just "I don't have black friends".
So in essence, these companies can't take risks with their blockbuster movies. They have to get a hit, because if they don't the company's out millions of dollars, and quite frankly it would make it hard for the producers and directors responsible to get anyone else to take a risk on them. No company can afford to lose 50 million.
So it adds up to the same old thing. The same old Superman, the same old X-men, the generic romantic comedy, the generic cop movie, the generic action film. Doing otherwise is just too risky, for the producers/directors (a flop at the BO is almost career-ending), to the movie studio (a flop can put them in the red for the rest of the year, or maybe several), etc.
Most often good sci-fi presents a modern problem in a different contexy, to give a different angle. Dune dealt with resources controlled by religious fanatics, a substance that could let a person see the future. The early ST dealt with racism, overpopulation, etc. Babylon 5 dealt in politics, especially the rise of the Fascist Clarke presidency.
I think that's part of the problem, most Sci-Fis are at least partially morality plays, and it's hard to do that in your typical MMORPGs. Most of the quests tend toward "mine this ore for Maliki the Metalworker for exp" or "kill 500 Gorgons and bring back the teeth" variety. No heroism. No save the colony. Nothing "moral" really.
I'm waiting for the whale probe.
Or overpopulation. We in the west have convinced ourselves that the reason that there aren't enough resources is that the poor are having too many babies. That may be partially true, but the biggest reason for the lack of resources has more to do with wheat and other foodstuffs being used to make doggy treats for our overpampered pets while people starve. You know there's a major problem when the people on diets and who insist on nothing but Organic Doggy Treats for lil Frufru have decided that the earth can't feed them.
As far as the environment, it's a mixed bag. We do need to control greenhouse gases, but on the other hand, it seems highly unfair to ban the factory after we've already moved to a post-industrial economy, where we can ban the chemical byproducts of processes we no longer do ourselves.
This is probably the worst time for much of the planet -- because we're not only living like feudal lords, but because we don't live anywhere near the third world, and we just so happen to be in control of most of the major media. We've created a bubble -- one that makes darn sure that we never have our consciences pricked by having to see so much as a picture of a poor person, let alone talk to them. At least when the old feudal lords left the castle to go somewhere, he'd usually have to pass a peasant or two on the roadside, possibly even having a conversation with them. Until we start looking the third worlders in the face and start listening, we may as well be the new Marie Antonettes. But who cares, American Idol is on TeeVee.
There are plenty of problems with the "look at the back of the box" or "look at the trailers" solution. Namely, both are ADVERTISING. They aren't representative of the entire game, nor do they even give a representative taste of the story.
http://video.search.yahoo.com/search/video?p=suiko den+v&fr=FP-tab-vid-t-t400&toggle=1&cop=&ei=UTF-8
Watch any of these and tell me the plot of Suikoden V
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIaW5T8R1X4 Or watch this and tell me the proper rating of Xenosaga III. How much violence do you see here? To be honest, there are plenty of game trailers that don't show any gameplay.
The back of the box is the same thing. They might show something, but unless the publishers are selling the game on gore, they aren't going to put a screenshot of an exploding head on the back. What they'll show are features, for the most part, the general setting maybe.
Seeing the ESRB scorecard would give a lot more of a clear picture of what the game is really like in a way that ratings and developer selected screenshots can't do.
First off, it would essentially eliminate "flyover country", because getting 51% in a large state (say CA) would no longer mean that you get all the EC votes (in the case of CA, it's 54). instead, you'd get (X/2 + 1) votes (CA would give only 54/2 + 1 or 28 EC votes). In the CA senario, those 28 votes aren't any more valueabe than getting all 32 from TX.
But even within states, the same would hold true. You can't just hit NYC and take all of NY, nor LA and get all of California, or even Chicago and get all of Illinois. In the case of Illinios, the southern part of the state is conservative, but IL is never a "red state" precisely because of the extreme "blue state" nature of Chicago. So if you live in Southern Illinois, for all intents and purposes, your presidential vote doesn't matter. How much time do you think Bush and Kerry spent on the issues important to the voters in Edwardsville? How much ad money was spent trying to convince the people of Edwardsville that they caredH^H^H^H^H^gave two shits about them? But with proportionality, Edwardsville would matter, because Chicago isn't 100% of Illinois. At best, Chicago is 22.7% of Illinois' population, a good chunk yes, but it shouldn't be able to choose the president for all of Illinois.
The problem of "winner take all" is that it concentrates power into the hands of densly populated areas, thus creating an "elite" class -- city-folk who by shear numbers get to set the national agenda. That's why farm issues are never discussed, nor are the farmer's concerns over the effects of environmental laws ever an issue. There aren't enough small-town farmers to outweigh the influence of Californian urban environmentalists.
It's lead to some issues. One of them is the issue of prarrie dogs on farmer's ranch lands. A new law prevents a rancher from shooting a prarrie dog. Not sporting, I suppose. The trouble is that the tunnels made by these prarrie dogs injure the farmer's cattle. That lead to a good number of ranchers poisoning the nests before the law took effect, so as not to lose money when the cattle would step on a PD tunnel and break their legs. Nobody asked the ranchers about the effects of the law -- in essence because their numbers were too small and they lived in areas with low electoral counts.
The thing is that for most people, they don't adopt a new technology just for "newness' sake", but because the benefit of the new device makes the older device look like a pain in the ass by comparison. Computers didn't enter the office because computers were cool, but because they were able to allow on-the-fly editing of text documents and able to calculate payrolls faster than the older methods (typewriters and accountants with calculators or pen and paper).
HD is slow to catch on for the opposite reason -- the value of having marginally better graphics isn't worth getting rid of the old DVD player and TV. DVDs work just fine for most videos. By contrast, the DVD came into wide use fairly quickly -- it was easier to use, didn't wear out from too much use, and allowed film companies to add things like commentaries and deleted scenes and "making of" features in the bonus menu, plus you could skip directly to whatever part of the movie you wanted to see.
So unless "thinking machines" can do a specific task much much better than a human, or a Borg (for want of a better term) can hands-down outperform a human in specific tasks, I don't see such things becoming much more than a curiousity.
The question isn't "can we do it", or even "should we do it", but "what will we need it for". That's how most other new technologies came into common use -- they were superior, in most cases vastly superior -- to whatever they replaced. Not to say we can't actually become a borg tomarrow. I think within 10 years or maybe 15, the technology to turn a human into a cyborg, complete with neural implants will be available. In fact, I'll give you $20 if within 20 years, we can't literally kidnap Patrick Stewart and literally turn him into Locutus. Technology isn't the problem so much as having a reason to do it. I don't think we'll ever have a great need to build super intelligent machines, nor a great need to turn humans into cyborgs. For most applications, what we have now is good enough.
And then you get into miracles in the realm of organized religion. Lourdes for example. How many people are spending years of their lives around the "holy" fountain, praying for a miracle cure that never comes? In other areas, the same kinds of "miracles" can cause people to join cults or be completely controlled by the "Imam", "Guru", or "Medicine Man" who can produce these miracles. Upend your whole life -- after all "remote viewers" see the end of the world! Kill yourself for Allah, after all Imam Mahasapedajiwan says he actually saw the 1001 virgins -- and they all have breast implants!
Long story short, the problem isn't that psychic phenemena may exist, it's that almost all people using said phenomena are using it as a tool for controlling people or making money. And that is something I'll never give a pass to.