Every single game in the X-Wing series had capital ships. Or did you mean allowing the players to take control of the capital ships? That would be very nice. I don't think I've seen it done in online play.
Regardless, the best capital ships in any space combat sim I've played are in Freespace 2.
Unfortunately, the X series has no multiplayer. As anyone who spent much time playing X-Wing vs. TIE or X-Wing: Alliance can tell you, this is disheartening. Multiplayer in those games was amazing.
That's for legal reasons. The DMCA is a tricky piece of legislation. Online service providers found in violation of it can lose "safe harbor" protection, which would more or less kill YouTube. Better safe than sorry.
High end joysticks cost about 90 bucks, but that's always been the case. You can still pick up a decent quality joystick that will do just fine for X-wing/TIE Fighter style games for about 20 bucks. I spent a good chunk of my free time this summer playing just these kinds of games.
If it seems that joysticks cost 90 bucks, that's because the main focus in the joystick industry for the last five years has been on realistic flight sims; there just haven't been any high-profile, high-budget Mech or space combat sims since Freespace 2. Were LucasArts (Or anyone else for that matter) were to rectify the situation, there would be a lot more budget joysticks being sold.
IANAL, but I would think that's not allowed under the DMCA. To retain "safe harbor" protection, they have to comply with all DMCA takedown notices. The onus is on the users whose material is taken down to submit counter-claims.
Unfortunately, those who submit counter-claims must do so under penalty of perjury. There is no perjury threat for submitting the original claim.
If it can bring beer from the refrigerator, it can bring pretty much anything else of similar shape and size.
I have a great aunt who is currently living alone, but can only manage to do so because she has regular support from family members, and won't be able to manage for much longer. She isn't eating as much as she probably needs because of a lack of appetite. It's becoming more and more difficult for her to get up and walk to the refrigerator to get more food or a relatively calorie rich Slimfast shake.
A robot capable of bringing her food and diet shakes from the refrigerator would make it much easier for her to ingest the calories she needs. That would help her maintain her health and her independence for substantially longer than she would be able to otherwise.
So, yes. The important thing isn't the beer, but the fact that the robot can retrieve items from the refrigerator. This task is very critical for a number of people suffering from disabilities, age-related or not.
Here in Oklahoma, things like palm reading and tarot reading are still illegal to do for money--despite similar provisions having been knocked down as unconstitutional in other states. It's not strongly enforced, but if you keep your ear to the ground, you'll hear about an arrest every couple of years. Fortune tellers get around the law by just that strategy--selling gaudy trinkets and providing readings as an incidental bonus.
Tattoo parlors used to do the same kinds of things until they were fully legalized a couple of years ago.
These kinds of workarounds are only effective when the police and judiciary don't care too much, though. It's just a waste of their time to go rounding up fortune tellers, and it makes them look bad. Rounding up prostitutes, however, is something that they're expected to do, and such tactics aren't guaranteed to pass judicial muster.
The population explosion is not, for the most part, something that has happened in the industrialized, developed nations. It isn't children in the US, Europe, Australia, Japan, or Canada that are the problem. Instead, it's mostly a consequence of numerous problems, including poor birth control, in developing nations such as Bangladesh. The birth rate in developed nations is actually dropping.
In the global market, the US is moving less and less from being a producer of goods to being a provider of services. Education is becoming more and more essential to economic success. Those who don't have it, lose out, while the more educated do better and better in the workforce. Combined with the dropping birth rate, this means that, for children in developing nations to remain in an economically strong position,there must be a much greater investment in time and money per child during primary education, secondary, and beyond to university education.
Though, I do worry a bit about the highly trained specialist Firearms Unit shooting *eleven* dumdum bullets at the guy on a busy subway train. Three of the bullets actually missed at close range.
If he hit the guy with seven out of eleven shots, as I read in a news article, that's actually very good marksmanship. As both police and military know, at least in America, relatively few bullets fired actually hit the target, especially when using a handgun rather than a rifle. Even a close range.
You can't expect accuracy in the field to be anything close to accuracy on the shooting range. Only when there's sufficient time to set up and aim can one hope for anything close, and even then the stress, fear, and nervousness of the situation can ruin even the best marksman's aim.
A scared lunatic probably wouldn't have hit the target with more than one or two bullets. Police are trained to put as many bullets as possible in the assailant or suspect; bullets aren't nearly as instantly effective as on TV.
The process more or less involves copying a few things from one computer to another. I don't consider that cracking, myself. Where it gets arcane is that you have to find a particular registry entry and copy that over, as well. I'm unsure as to whether this works when moving to a new operating system.
If you back up a copy of your clientregistry.blob file around, I'm fairly certain there are ways to move it to another computer, though then it's probably easier to just back up the GCF files (which contain the game data) directly, rather than use the Steam backup utility.
Though things will probably get somewhat arcane. It is possible, it's just somewhat difficult.
The manuals were. The "feelies" were usually extra goodies. At least, that's how Infocom did it. The cloth map that came in Origin's Ultima VII, for instance, was used for determining the longitude and latitude of locations in the game world before you could go traipsing around outside the starting city.
(To read the map, though, you had to translate it from the Futhark-inspired rune cipher all the place names were written in. It was extra effort learning the runes, but they were all over the game and added an extra level of immersion.)
The Valve guys apparently didn't want Bioshock to have Securom or any other DRM protection besides their own Steam protection.
Apparently 2k games was reluctant to trust them.
As for copy protection, you're talking to the wrong people. Copy protection costs the developers - both in money for the software and public perception of the game. It wouldn't be there if it wasn't economically beneficial to include.
Correction: It wouldn't have been used if it had not been thought to be economically beneficial.
The fact that it was once economically beneficial does not mean that it will always continue to be beneficial. There are currently no major PC titles for which the DRM has not been circumvented with easily acquired cracks. At this point, getting around most games' DRM is no more difficult than downloading a file and copying it to the right directory.
The ease of acquiring a crack seems to make it unlikely that DRM is any kind of deterrent to piracy. On the other hand, DRM is driving users away. I don't think DRM is economically beneficial anymore. The big game companies just haven't caught up with this yet.
Backing up your game collection to DVD isn't going to work if it won't play on the new computer you restore it to.
But it will play on the new computer. That's why they make DVD backups possible. So you don't have to download everything again when you reinstall Windows or buy a new computer.
IIRC, adding that kind of thing to games was in response to piracy. Infocom got the ball rolling in that area by packaging some nifty "feelies" with their games. At the time, anyone could pirate a game who could copy a floppy. Adding feelies was a ridiculously popular move that kept Infocom in business until the move from text-based games to graphical games.
Actually, that is how the Prisoner's Dilemma works.
There are basically two versions: one in which it only happens once, and the iterated dilemma, in which the prisoners are going to have to deal with dilemma over and over again.
In the iterated version, altruistic strategies tend to work much better. That is, it will tend to your benefit NOT to screw over the other guy. Assuming that all prisoners act rationally, there will usually be relatively few confessions, though this only works if the exact number of iterations is unknown to the prisoners.
The iterated version much more closely resembles telecom competition. The companies are going to have to "compete" for some time. It's to their benefit to behave most of the time in ways that look like cooperation, even if there is no actual collusion. If both companies adopt strategies of cutthroat competition, then they'll get much slimmer profits than if they don't. Given that they both understand this, and they are both (relatively) rational actors, they will be reluctant to set off a cycle that might lead to drastically lower profit.
They can handle critical thinking. They don't automatically have college level reasoning ability, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be learning to think for themselves. They can do it. We just don't teach them how.
Blah, that's what I get for posting after 6 drinks.
Assuming the antecedent is a deductive thing, not an inductive thing. It isn't even a fallacy. One assumes the antecedent any time one uses a syllogism; one cannot make a simple Modus Ponens argument without affirming the antecedent.
It's affirming the consequent which is a fallacy.
Eh? Intelligent Design uses inductive reasoning. (Very poor inductive reasoning, but nonetheless...) Assuming the antecedent is an inductive fallacy. I have no idea how an inductive argument can make deductive fallacies. I'm all ears.
As for the rest of your post, I have no idea what you're talking about. Literally. I don't know what you're talking about.
(Philosophy of religion is one of the branches of philosophy. I recommend a Google search if you can't infer from the name what it's all about.)
This is a bad thing.
In high school, my critical and logical faculties were more developed and better honed than they have been since. I have yet to attain the depth of thought and mental acuity I had at age 16-`19. Conversations with friends have confirmed that this was not just me.
My friends and I were homeschooled. We weren't exposed to public education except as something dull and relatively uninformative a few of our friends were exposed to.
It was, by the by, during this time that--without prompting or encouragement by the parents who educated us--me and my friends came to reject anything like the Creationist theories we had been raised with in favor of the evil "evolutionist" ideas that so many around us had vilified.
Public schools aren't very good about teaching critical thinking. This is extremely unfortunate. Critical thinking abilities are extremely acute during mid-adolescence.
No, it's philosophy. It's been taught in the philosophy classroom since the 18th century, since William Paley presented his "watchmaker" analogy.
It's not very good philosophy, though. In fact, it's really bad philosophy, but you need to know the mistakes of the past to avoid the same mistakes in the future. Which is why it is taught in the classroom.
(I say this as someone who spent four years studying philosophy--mostly philosophy of religion--and earned his bachelor's in the subject.)
Slashdot Mirror
Every single game in the X-Wing series had capital ships. Or did you mean allowing the players to take control of the capital ships? That would be very nice. I don't think I've seen it done in online play.
Regardless, the best capital ships in any space combat sim I've played are in Freespace 2.
Unfortunately, the X series has no multiplayer. As anyone who spent much time playing X-Wing vs. TIE or X-Wing: Alliance can tell you, this is disheartening. Multiplayer in those games was amazing.
That's for legal reasons. The DMCA is a tricky piece of legislation. Online service providers found in violation of it can lose "safe harbor" protection, which would more or less kill YouTube. Better safe than sorry.
High end joysticks cost about 90 bucks, but that's always been the case. You can still pick up a decent quality joystick that will do just fine for X-wing/TIE Fighter style games for about 20 bucks. I spent a good chunk of my free time this summer playing just these kinds of games.
If it seems that joysticks cost 90 bucks, that's because the main focus in the joystick industry for the last five years has been on realistic flight sims; there just haven't been any high-profile, high-budget Mech or space combat sims since Freespace 2. Were LucasArts (Or anyone else for that matter) were to rectify the situation, there would be a lot more budget joysticks being sold.
IANAL, but I would think that's not allowed under the DMCA. To retain "safe harbor" protection, they have to comply with all DMCA takedown notices. The onus is on the users whose material is taken down to submit counter-claims.
Unfortunately, those who submit counter-claims must do so under penalty of perjury. There is no perjury threat for submitting the original claim.
If it can bring beer from the refrigerator, it can bring pretty much anything else of similar shape and size.
I have a great aunt who is currently living alone, but can only manage to do so because she has regular support from family members, and won't be able to manage for much longer. She isn't eating as much as she probably needs because of a lack of appetite. It's becoming more and more difficult for her to get up and walk to the refrigerator to get more food or a relatively calorie rich Slimfast shake.
A robot capable of bringing her food and diet shakes from the refrigerator would make it much easier for her to ingest the calories she needs. That would help her maintain her health and her independence for substantially longer than she would be able to otherwise. So, yes. The important thing isn't the beer, but the fact that the robot can retrieve items from the refrigerator. This task is very critical for a number of people suffering from disabilities, age-related or not.
Here in Oklahoma, things like palm reading and tarot reading are still illegal to do for money--despite similar provisions having been knocked down as unconstitutional in other states. It's not strongly enforced, but if you keep your ear to the ground, you'll hear about an arrest every couple of years. Fortune tellers get around the law by just that strategy--selling gaudy trinkets and providing readings as an incidental bonus.
Tattoo parlors used to do the same kinds of things until they were fully legalized a couple of years ago.
These kinds of workarounds are only effective when the police and judiciary don't care too much, though. It's just a waste of their time to go rounding up fortune tellers, and it makes them look bad. Rounding up prostitutes, however, is something that they're expected to do, and such tactics aren't guaranteed to pass judicial muster.
The population explosion is not, for the most part, something that has happened in the industrialized, developed nations. It isn't children in the US, Europe, Australia, Japan, or Canada that are the problem. Instead, it's mostly a consequence of numerous problems, including poor birth control, in developing nations such as Bangladesh. The birth rate in developed nations is actually dropping.
In the global market, the US is moving less and less from being a producer of goods to being a provider of services. Education is becoming more and more essential to economic success. Those who don't have it, lose out, while the more educated do better and better in the workforce. Combined with the dropping birth rate, this means that, for children in developing nations to remain in an economically strong position,there must be a much greater investment in time and money per child during primary education, secondary, and beyond to university education.
In a stressful situation, even that isn't necessarily bad shooting.
Though, I do worry a bit about the highly trained specialist Firearms Unit shooting *eleven* dumdum bullets at the guy on a busy subway train. Three of the bullets actually missed at close range.
If he hit the guy with seven out of eleven shots, as I read in a news article, that's actually very good marksmanship. As both police and military know, at least in America, relatively few bullets fired actually hit the target, especially when using a handgun rather than a rifle. Even a close range.
You can't expect accuracy in the field to be anything close to accuracy on the shooting range. Only when there's sufficient time to set up and aim can one hope for anything close, and even then the stress, fear, and nervousness of the situation can ruin even the best marksman's aim.
A scared lunatic probably wouldn't have hit the target with more than one or two bullets. Police are trained to put as many bullets as possible in the assailant or suspect; bullets aren't nearly as instantly effective as on TV.
The "feelie" in Bureaucracy was a pencil.
The interesting or funny printed bits were, IIRC, called "browsies." If there was any copy protection, it was usually a browsie.
The process more or less involves copying a few things from one computer to another. I don't consider that cracking, myself. Where it gets arcane is that you have to find a particular registry entry and copy that over, as well. I'm unsure as to whether this works when moving to a new operating system.
If you back up a copy of your clientregistry.blob file around, I'm fairly certain there are ways to move it to another computer, though then it's probably easier to just back up the GCF files (which contain the game data) directly, rather than use the Steam backup utility.
Though things will probably get somewhat arcane. It is possible, it's just somewhat difficult.
The manuals were. The "feelies" were usually extra goodies. At least, that's how Infocom did it. The cloth map that came in Origin's Ultima VII, for instance, was used for determining the longitude and latitude of locations in the game world before you could go traipsing around outside the starting city.
(To read the map, though, you had to translate it from the Futhark-inspired rune cipher all the place names were written in. It was extra effort learning the runes, but they were all over the game and added an extra level of immersion.)
The Valve guys apparently didn't want Bioshock to have Securom or any other DRM protection besides their own Steam protection. Apparently 2k games was reluctant to trust them.
As for copy protection, you're talking to the wrong people. Copy protection costs the developers - both in money for the software and public perception of the game. It wouldn't be there if it wasn't economically beneficial to include. Correction: It wouldn't have been used if it had not been thought to be economically beneficial.
The fact that it was once economically beneficial does not mean that it will always continue to be beneficial. There are currently no major PC titles for which the DRM has not been circumvented with easily acquired cracks. At this point, getting around most games' DRM is no more difficult than downloading a file and copying it to the right directory.
The ease of acquiring a crack seems to make it unlikely that DRM is any kind of deterrent to piracy. On the other hand, DRM is driving users away. I don't think DRM is economically beneficial anymore. The big game companies just haven't caught up with this yet.
Backing up your game collection to DVD isn't going to work if it won't play on the new computer you restore it to.
But it will play on the new computer. That's why they make DVD backups possible. So you don't have to download everything again when you reinstall Windows or buy a new computer.
IIRC, adding that kind of thing to games was in response to piracy. Infocom got the ball rolling in that area by packaging some nifty "feelies" with their games. At the time, anyone could pirate a game who could copy a floppy. Adding feelies was a ridiculously popular move that kept Infocom in business until the move from text-based games to graphical games.
Actually, that is how the Prisoner's Dilemma works.
There are basically two versions: one in which it only happens once, and the iterated dilemma, in which the prisoners are going to have to deal with dilemma over and over again.
In the iterated version, altruistic strategies tend to work much better. That is, it will tend to your benefit NOT to screw over the other guy. Assuming that all prisoners act rationally, there will usually be relatively few confessions, though this only works if the exact number of iterations is unknown to the prisoners.
The iterated version much more closely resembles telecom competition. The companies are going to have to "compete" for some time. It's to their benefit to behave most of the time in ways that look like cooperation, even if there is no actual collusion. If both companies adopt strategies of cutthroat competition, then they'll get much slimmer profits than if they don't. Given that they both understand this, and they are both (relatively) rational actors, they will be reluctant to set off a cycle that might lead to drastically lower profit.
He still hosts the Sunday evening show.
Bollocks.
They can handle critical thinking. They don't automatically have college level reasoning ability, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be learning to think for themselves. They can do it. We just don't teach them how.
Blah, that's what I get for posting after 6 drinks. Assuming the antecedent is a deductive thing, not an inductive thing. It isn't even a fallacy. One assumes the antecedent any time one uses a syllogism; one cannot make a simple Modus Ponens argument without affirming the antecedent. It's affirming the consequent which is a fallacy.
Eh? Intelligent Design uses inductive reasoning. (Very poor inductive reasoning, but nonetheless...) Assuming the antecedent is an inductive fallacy. I have no idea how an inductive argument can make deductive fallacies. I'm all ears.
As for the rest of your post, I have no idea what you're talking about. Literally. I don't know what you're talking about. (Philosophy of religion is one of the branches of philosophy. I recommend a Google search if you can't infer from the name what it's all about.)
This is a bad thing.
In high school, my critical and logical faculties were more developed and better honed than they have been since. I have yet to attain the depth of thought and mental acuity I had at age 16-`19. Conversations with friends have confirmed that this was not just me.
My friends and I were homeschooled. We weren't exposed to public education except as something dull and relatively uninformative a few of our friends were exposed to. It was, by the by, during this time that--without prompting or encouragement by the parents who educated us--me and my friends came to reject anything like the Creationist theories we had been raised with in favor of the evil "evolutionist" ideas that so many around us had vilified. Public schools aren't very good about teaching critical thinking. This is extremely unfortunate. Critical thinking abilities are extremely acute during mid-adolescence.
No, it's philosophy. It's been taught in the philosophy classroom since the 18th century, since William Paley presented his "watchmaker" analogy.
It's not very good philosophy, though. In fact, it's really bad philosophy, but you need to know the mistakes of the past to avoid the same mistakes in the future. Which is why it is taught in the classroom. (I say this as someone who spent four years studying philosophy--mostly philosophy of religion--and earned his bachelor's in the subject.)