I have demanded and received my money back from a theater when the quality of goods (Skinwalkers) was unacceptable.
I have asked for and received a replacement substitute for unacceptable goods from a restaurant (maybe with spit, maybe without, I tried to be very nice about the request).
Neither of these I can do for a game that is buggy, broken, or just plain completely sucks. I am not paying to be defrauded, I am paying for something that is of value to me. If I can't get any value, I don't intend encourage them to continue making or releaseing crap.
One of the things that gets lost is that GPS units have a learning curve. Just like any other technological device in our society, the operator has to know enough to decide whether or not to follow the directions being given.
I have seen accounts of people following GPS intructions into wildly illegal and sometimes fatal misdirections, which points out that we can't just turn off our brains and follow the commands.
For myself, I drive a commercial truck and am in constant interaction with my GPS. Having a simple map display gives me a constant read on where I am in relation to the roads around me, and allow me to change my actual driving route quickly in response to traffic conditions. The interaction between local knowledge and the information given by the GPS allow me to get around town much faster than I would without it, or even by just blindly following the directions it gives.
Unfortunately annoying people is a valid marketing strategy.
By pissing someone off, the marketers create a sense of emotion for the product that tends to outlast the memories of anger. A customer walks down a grocery aisle and the product catches their eye, they feel some sort of emotion linked to it, assume it is a good emotion and buy it.
Like and dislike can cause some of the same physiological responses, it is only memory and perception that tells us which feeling is which at the time. Lose the memory and we have a much harder time telling what we are feeling.
Anger can also be a pretty useful tool in building an association between a problem and a supposed solution (the product). When I get a headache, I still sometimes think of those annoying "apply directly to the forehead" commercials.
Anything that gets a person thinking about a product helps to differentiate it from the huge formless mass of the same thing in the market, and so may help make a sale later down the line.
What springs to mind first is the terrible potential to abuse this technology on political prisoners, criminals, etc.
Depending on how well you pinpoint certain areas of the brain, but I wonder if you can permanently destroy a person's effectiveness at whatever skills the government doesn't want them pursuing. It sounds like this procedure doesn't leave any external evidence, and the internal lesion may not be readily identifiable without biopsy.
"We will release you to your family immediately, but only if you consent to this minor procedure...."
There are some key differences. In a fresnel lense the ridges just bend the light passing through a small amount. It is basically the surface of a regular lense stepped into a flat surface. Thus it acts almost exactly like a standard lense and has a focal point somewhere behind that all the light is reflected to.
From the sound of it, this lens bends all the incoming light 90 degress or more, sending it towards the center through the lens itself to a secondary optic area which concentrates the light and reflects it all out of the center with a focal length of effectively zero.
My house has an nearly unbeatable infestation of small ants, and I can't help but think just what a magnificent burning lens one of these would make minus the solar chip.
But aside from that, there are some other pretty nifty uses for concentrated sunlight. I am definitely curious whether the lens can be scaled up to a square meter or more, enough to possibly melt glass or aluminum.
your arguments stand up with current visual technology (monitors = a small 2d window into "data space") but not neccesarily with technology that is not yet in common use.
Look around whatever room you are in and see how much data is intuitively organized in a three dimensional space. I can point to any of a hundred books on my shelves, DVD's by approximate location, files of financial data, etc. The human brain has an amazing ability to organize objects using spacial relationships. This ability is part of what makes folders, desktops and menus a useful and usable means of organization instead of or along side simple file lists. (I intuitively know the "physical" location of the couple clicks it takes to get to all my commonly used files and software. This is done without even reading the text and tends to be quickly relearned when I change things on my system)
But, all these are very limited by display space and lack of depth. I think that upcoming technologies will make more use of our brains spacial abilities to expand the "area" usable to organize data in all three dimensions.
One final thought is that tabbed browsing is somewhat of an analog to having a third dimension added to a browser. There is one layer "on top" with all the rest underneath.
Actually, that's not how (real) addiction works. Addiction to a substance happens when your brain chemistry starts adjusting in the other direction....
Addiction to something fun isn't an addiction at all. There is no external chemicals perturbing the brain balance. It's just the normal way the brain works.
Unfortunately you are missing a key point here.
The brain is very capable of producing its own addictive chemicals in response to external stimuli. When you do something you enjoy, the brain produces endorphins, which can be highly addicting. Wow and many other MMO's are very precisely designed to play on this endorphin response in much the same way that slot machines do.
Do a search for studies on intermittent reinforcement/rewards. The surprise of getting a good drop or hitting a jackpot strongly reinforces the behavior that produced it and can keep people playing for long after the game stops being "fun". Unfortunately these behaviors are built deeply into our biology as they provide reinforcement for food/mate/play finding and learning.
I am not at all surprised to see people losing their entire lives in MMO's and have lost a number of friends to them. Nothing is more powerful than the brain's own chemistry and biology subverted through applied behavioral psychology.
Unless the server was required for the gameplay (MMO), I certainly would not buy and play such a game that relies on a constant internet connection and a complete dependency on the company to keep the server running for as long as I care to play the game.
i already have a $70 copy of Auto Assault lying around that makes a rather expensive coaster, I don't wish to repeat the experience.
I know that I should reliably be able to install and play any of my games (besides AA) in a decade or two if I feel nostalgic for them and want to boot up an XP or Dos emulator on the holocube 3000 : b -- Sometimes the wolves are silent and the moon is howling
Unfortunately the copy protection is part of the reason that games are getting pirated. It adds to the cost of the product (driving away people who would buy at a lower cost), it imposes ridiculous hoops to jump through (making it easier to download a cracked version than to get through the registration and DRM), and it shows that publishers don't trust their customers.
This last element is important, if a person is already being treated like a criminal or a potential criminal, it makes it far less of a leap for that person to act in such a manner. If a person is shown an element of trust they are more likely to act in a trustworthy manner.
There certainly are exceptions, people who will take advantage of the trust, but most likely these are the same people that would have pirated the game even if the DRM were in place. -- Sometimes the wolves are silent and the moon is howling
Likely a company name you have never heard of, but another sunken testement to the Dot com bubble burst.
Circadence started as a small online games developer (VR-1) with well under a hundred employee and in a very short time grew to just under 500 people, millions of dollars of deployed hardware at 20+ network backbone nodes, a 24 hour NOC, 4 full time customer service people (each making 40k+) all without having a single customer. During this growth, the only money making arm of the company (the games development section) was sold off for additional capital.
Circadence was going to revolutionize e-commerce by speeding up vender to backbone node communication through packet manipulation. (Thus all the deployed hardware). No more static image caching for them, they could deliver dynamic shopping pages to the customer as much as.... 5-10% faster.... Wait. (To give some credit, the speed improvements would have been better if the projected e-commerce boom started to congest the internet, unfortunately that also never happened)
The first layoff went from 400+ employees down to 130 or so and was couched in terms of a company wide meeting in both an upper and lower conference rooms. The lower conference room got the talk and were walked out the door en masse and then escorted back one by one to get personal possessions. The upper conference room was told to go home for the day and to come in tomorrow for business as usual.
A couple months later was the next round of layoffs, which took the company down to 11.
All those millions of dollars of network gear and servers showed up on trucks to be auctioned off at pennies on the dollar. An entire building worth of computers, office furniture, desk detritus, everything either went into dumpsters or boxes (which later went into dumpsters), or was also auctioned off.
Millions and millions of investor capital spent all for nothing. I wanted to cry as I watch everything being thrown out, boxed up and disassembled. The beautiful NOC where I watched the events of 9-11 for half a day in shock was cold, dark, and in pieces... as was the hopes and dreams of the rest of the company.
If I had bandwidth to burn (a LOT of bandwidth), I think it would be interesting to register nowhere.com and see just how much spam comes in to the address noone@nowhere.com. I have had to stop using it as a fake on sites that remember, as it has inevitably already been used before.
Snowcrash, Neuromancer, and other books of the genre are one of the reasons that I play SL.
It has the possibility of growing into far more than it is now. Maybe even of growing into the massive virtual worlds that cyberpunk has used so often. Currently, it is a little clunky and lag happens, but any new technology starts that way (look at the model T). If SL is it, THE BEGINNING, then it will be very interesting to have been there from nearly the start, to have watched it all develop.
Something will come around, if not SL then some other environment. The possibilities for use demand it. My only question is, am I driving around in a model T or a stanley steamer at the moment?
I look forward to advances in interface technology, which will help to bring the player more directly into the virtual world. Someone has already done an interesting experiment with linking the viewpoints of 2 avs to provide a stereoscopic 3D view of the SL world. (I can't find the link at the moment). I also suspect that the new 3D display monitors may help spur use and developement of 3D spaces such as SL. http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/ 16/1739244
i haven't played SL, but in concept it sounds cool, but online i'd rather be kicking my friends asses in CSS, but anyhoo. Look up, look way up - your on Slashdot - news for...ah you know. Now go read Snowcrash. Now sit and ponder that for a second. SL is the closest thing i have heard of to the metaverse(or whatever they called it, it's been a bit since i read it) in Snowcrash. In other words, SL is the closest thing to what all the cyber-punk cyber-whatevers always wanted the internet to be, now it's just a serious of Tubes geared towards heavy pr0n distros.
Stepping aside from animation for film, what about the use of this technology as an interface for transfering fine facial details into a virtual space?
It would be interesting to write the interpreter/translator between this technology and online avatars, both human and non human.
And yes, I am a furry. Thinking about seeing a smile on my face reflected in a canine ear and tail "smile" in second life makes me happy.....
Rowanyote
Unfortunately that hatred works nearly as well, or possibly better than appreciation of the add.
Got this out of Social Psychology class: If a commercial irritates you enough, it implants a reaction. For a while, when you go to the store you will see the product and remember that it pissed you off and not buy it (a negative reaction). But after a while (a pretty short time for many people) the active memory of being angry at a product will fade, but you will still have a feeling (neutral reaction) when you see it. Lacking the concious memory cue of being angry, you are more likely to read that reaction as positive and favor the product over it's competitors.
I loved that class, I learned a lot about low level mind control and how to look for it.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a self encrypting hard drive already.
IBM Deskstar from last decade.
Unfortunately no one has the key....
I have demanded and received my money back from a theater when the quality of goods (Skinwalkers) was unacceptable.
I have asked for and received a replacement substitute for unacceptable goods from a restaurant (maybe with spit, maybe without, I tried to be very nice about the request).
Neither of these I can do for a game that is buggy, broken, or just plain completely sucks. I am not paying to be defrauded, I am paying for something that is of value to me. If I can't get any value, I don't intend encourage them to continue making or releaseing crap.
Generally medical equipment has an exemption to nearly any of the transport rules. You might need a note from a physician, but check into it.
One of the things that gets lost is that GPS units have a learning curve. Just like any other technological device in our society, the operator has to know enough to decide whether or not to follow the directions being given.
I have seen accounts of people following GPS intructions into wildly illegal and sometimes fatal misdirections, which points out that we can't just turn off our brains and follow the commands.
For myself, I drive a commercial truck and am in constant interaction with my GPS. Having a simple map display gives me a constant read on where I am in relation to the roads around me, and allow me to change my actual driving route quickly in response to traffic conditions. The interaction between local knowledge and the information given by the GPS allow me to get around town much faster than I would without it, or even by just blindly following the directions it gives.
Unfortunately annoying people is a valid marketing strategy.
By pissing someone off, the marketers create a sense of emotion for the product that tends to outlast the memories of anger. A customer walks down a grocery aisle and the product catches their eye, they feel some sort of emotion linked to it, assume it is a good emotion and buy it.
Like and dislike can cause some of the same physiological responses, it is only memory and perception that tells us which feeling is which at the time. Lose the memory and we have a much harder time telling what we are feeling.
Anger can also be a pretty useful tool in building an association between a problem and a supposed solution (the product). When I get a headache, I still sometimes think of those annoying "apply directly to the forehead" commercials.
Anything that gets a person thinking about a product helps to differentiate it from the huge formless mass of the same thing in the market, and so may help make a sale later down the line.
What springs to mind first is the terrible potential to abuse this technology on political prisoners, criminals, etc.
Depending on how well you pinpoint certain areas of the brain, but I wonder if you can permanently destroy a person's effectiveness at whatever skills the government doesn't want them pursuing. It sounds like this procedure doesn't leave any external evidence, and the internal lesion may not be readily identifiable without biopsy.
"We will release you to your family immediately, but only if you consent to this minor procedure...."
I have joked that this sensation is a "hard in"
For me, it was only for a few weeks after surgery.
It was definitely a strange experience "watching" my own brain rewire my kinesthetic sense to match the new configuration of skin and nerves.
Now, about 5 years post-op, I just get the occasional strange dream every once and a while.
There are some key differences. In a fresnel lense the ridges just bend the light passing through a small amount. It is basically the surface of a regular lense stepped into a flat surface. Thus it acts almost exactly like a standard lense and has a focal point somewhere behind that all the light is reflected to.
From the sound of it, this lens bends all the incoming light 90 degress or more, sending it towards the center through the lens itself to a secondary optic area which concentrates the light and reflects it all out of the center with a focal length of effectively zero.
My house has an nearly unbeatable infestation of small ants, and I can't help but think just what a magnificent burning lens one of these would make minus the solar chip.
But aside from that, there are some other pretty nifty uses for concentrated sunlight. I am definitely curious whether the lens can be scaled up to a square meter or more, enough to possibly melt glass or aluminum.
One of the better reasons I have seen is the ability to target shoot without aggravating the neighbors.
your arguments stand up with current visual technology (monitors = a small 2d window into "data space") but not neccesarily with technology that is not yet in common use.
Look around whatever room you are in and see how much data is intuitively organized in a three dimensional space. I can point to any of a hundred books on my shelves, DVD's by approximate location, files of financial data, etc. The human brain has an amazing ability to organize objects using spacial relationships. This ability is part of what makes folders, desktops and menus a useful and usable means of organization instead of or along side simple file lists. (I intuitively know the "physical" location of the couple clicks it takes to get to all my commonly used files and software. This is done without even reading the text and tends to be quickly relearned when I change things on my system)
But, all these are very limited by display space and lack of depth. I think that upcoming technologies will make more use of our brains spacial abilities to expand the "area" usable to organize data in all three dimensions.
One final thought is that tabbed browsing is somewhat of an analog to having a third dimension added to a browser. There is one layer "on top" with all the rest underneath.
Actually, that's not how (real) addiction works. Addiction to a substance happens when your brain chemistry starts adjusting in the other direction. ...
Addiction to something fun isn't an addiction at all. There is no external chemicals perturbing the brain balance. It's just the normal way the brain works.
Unfortunately you are missing a key point here.
The brain is very capable of producing its own addictive chemicals in response to external stimuli. When you do something you enjoy, the brain produces endorphins, which can be highly addicting. Wow and many other MMO's are very precisely designed to play on this endorphin response in much the same way that slot machines do.
Do a search for studies on intermittent reinforcement/rewards. The surprise of getting a good drop or hitting a jackpot strongly reinforces the behavior that produced it and can keep people playing for long after the game stops being "fun". Unfortunately these behaviors are built deeply into our biology as they provide reinforcement for food/mate/play finding and learning.
I am not at all surprised to see people losing their entire lives in MMO's and have lost a number of friends to them. Nothing is more powerful than the brain's own chemistry and biology subverted through applied behavioral psychology.
--
Rowanyote
It took a lot of searching for drivers, but I was able do downgrade my Pavilion dv6910us to XP.
Runs great, dual install with Ubuntu that is working well.
Unless the server was required for the gameplay (MMO), I certainly would not buy and play such a game that relies on a constant internet connection and a complete dependency on the company to keep the server running for as long as I care to play the game.
i already have a $70 copy of Auto Assault lying around that makes a rather expensive coaster, I don't wish to repeat the experience.
I know that I should reliably be able to install and play any of my games (besides AA) in a decade or two if I feel nostalgic for them and want to boot up an XP or Dos emulator on the holocube 3000 : b
--
Sometimes the wolves are silent and the moon is howling
Unfortunately the copy protection is part of the reason that games are getting pirated. It adds to the cost of the product (driving away people who would buy at a lower cost), it imposes ridiculous hoops to jump through (making it easier to download a cracked version than to get through the registration and DRM), and it shows that publishers don't trust their customers.
This last element is important, if a person is already being treated like a criminal or a potential criminal, it makes it far less of a leap for that person to act in such a manner. If a person is shown an element of trust they are more likely to act in a trustworthy manner.
There certainly are exceptions, people who will take advantage of the trust, but most likely these are the same people that would have pirated the game even if the DRM were in place.
--
Sometimes the wolves are silent and the moon is howling
Likely a company name you have never heard of, but another sunken testement to the Dot com bubble burst.
Circadence started as a small online games developer (VR-1) with well under a hundred employee and in a very short time grew to just under 500 people, millions of dollars of deployed hardware at 20+ network backbone nodes, a 24 hour NOC, 4 full time customer service people (each making 40k+) all without having a single customer. During this growth, the only money making arm of the company (the games development section) was sold off for additional capital.
Circadence was going to revolutionize e-commerce by speeding up vender to backbone node communication through packet manipulation. (Thus all the deployed hardware). No more static image caching for them, they could deliver dynamic shopping pages to the customer as much as.... 5-10% faster.... Wait. (To give some credit, the speed improvements would have been better if the projected e-commerce boom started to congest the internet, unfortunately that also never happened)
The first layoff went from 400+ employees down to 130 or so and was couched in terms of a company wide meeting in both an upper and lower conference rooms. The lower conference room got the talk and were walked out the door en masse and then escorted back one by one to get personal possessions. The upper conference room was told to go home for the day and to come in tomorrow for business as usual.
A couple months later was the next round of layoffs, which took the company down to 11.
All those millions of dollars of network gear and servers showed up on trucks to be auctioned off at pennies on the dollar. An entire building worth of computers, office furniture, desk detritus, everything either went into dumpsters or boxes (which later went into dumpsters), or was also auctioned off.
Millions and millions of investor capital spent all for nothing. I wanted to cry as I watch everything being thrown out, boxed up and disassembled. The beautiful NOC where I watched the events of 9-11 for half a day in shock was cold, dark, and in pieces... as was the hopes and dreams of the rest of the company.
How many grams to the hectare?
Rowanyote
So is there enough information to reverse engineer it? RowanYote
If I had bandwidth to burn (a LOT of bandwidth), I think it would be interesting to register nowhere.com and see just how much spam comes in to the address noone@nowhere.com. I have had to stop using it as a fake on sites that remember, as it has inevitably already been used before.
Rowanyote
It has the possibility of growing into far more than it is now. Maybe even of growing into the massive virtual worlds that cyberpunk has used so often. Currently, it is a little clunky and lag happens, but any new technology starts that way (look at the model T). If SL is it, THE BEGINNING, then it will be very interesting to have been there from nearly the start, to have watched it all develop.
Something will come around, if not SL then some other environment. The possibilities for use demand it. My only question is, am I driving around in a model T or a stanley steamer at the moment?
I look forward to advances in interface technology, which will help to bring the player more directly into the virtual world. Someone has already done an interesting experiment with linking the viewpoints of 2 avs to provide a stereoscopic 3D view of the SL world. (I can't find the link at the moment). I also suspect that the new 3D display monitors may help spur use and developement of 3D spaces such as SL.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04
I play regularly
Rowanyote
USS Yorktown?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Yorktown_(CG-48)
I think a naval destroyer counts as life and mission critical...
Stepping aside from animation for film, what about the use of this technology as an interface for transfering fine facial details into a virtual space? It would be interesting to write the interpreter/translator between this technology and online avatars, both human and non human. And yes, I am a furry. Thinking about seeing a smile on my face reflected in a canine ear and tail "smile" in second life makes me happy..... Rowanyote
Unfortunately that hatred works nearly as well, or possibly better than appreciation of the add. Got this out of Social Psychology class: If a commercial irritates you enough, it implants a reaction. For a while, when you go to the store you will see the product and remember that it pissed you off and not buy it (a negative reaction). But after a while (a pretty short time for many people) the active memory of being angry at a product will fade, but you will still have a feeling (neutral reaction) when you see it. Lacking the concious memory cue of being angry, you are more likely to read that reaction as positive and favor the product over it's competitors. I loved that class, I learned a lot about low level mind control and how to look for it.