Maybe you can't pick up the GE data and dump it right into your game, but it definitely enhances the mapping possibilities for both professional developers and mod scripters to be able to not only see a satellite image and some stitched together street view pictures, but to actually be able to move around the cityscape in a 3D representation. Suddenly something as logistically difficult as mapping out a city in your game became a whole lot easier - now, how long until we get the first "terrorist training sim" newspaper headlines?
The kind of thing that's never been tested in court - most likely because they know it would never stand up in court expressly because it's common knowledge nobody reads them. One of those kind of things, you mean?
Apologies for replying to my own post, but having said the above, consider this - if we even discovered something like an amoeba living on Mars it would be possibly the biggest event in the planet's history (i.e. turns out we're not alone in the universe after all). If the alien planet is part of some republic of sentient planets, likely our disovery wouldn't even make front page news. If, on the other hand, they are similarly alone in the universe, even as a massively technologically advanced race, it would still be big news to find us and even bigger to communicate/visit (hell, we spend billions as humans just to discover if the basic building blocks for life exist on other planets, let alone life itself).
When was the last time you seeked out an unknown person in the developing world here on planet Earth and called the person or sent an e-mail, inquiring about how he likes the slum, how he likes the lack of clean water and how he likes the war going on there and stuff?
Well, speaking for developed countries in general - usually when the developing nation has something we want or need. Resources, for instance. Of course, mineral resources are likely to be much more available much closer to home than coming all the way here, so it would have to be something that is peculiar to our planet. Like... large quantities of meat?
Meh, this is just the same old puritan crap all over again.
He even scored a hat-trick: video games, fast food and pornography.
Now he just needs to tie those back into the internet, or even better Facebook or Twitter (and let's face it, two of the three are easy) and he'll be an overnight tabloid sensation.
Who did not see it nowadays. Interestingly Idiocracy is a kind of self fulfilling prophecy. Naturally it is easy to see oneself in shoes of Joe Bauers or Rita (although I liked that Guitar band in the arena so much, and it would be interesting to have Sara Rue as Attorney General if I were the President), and most people says that it is hopeless anyway, thus there is no need to breed:) after seeing the movie.
More likely the people who see the movie and say there's no need to breed are the kind of people who weren't likely to be offered the chance to breed in the first place and are using this as a convenient excuse:) Of course, a big chunk of those will be nerds, so the end result is pretty much the same...
It would almost be worth seeing humanity devoured by a sentient alien hive mind, just so that we can say told you so to the religious types. Except the scientologists - in that scenario they would have pretty much nailed it:)
Why shouldn't it be welcomed by the 10%, so long as the 10% is spread around (i.e. you only have to work one in ten of your normal work days, and everyone else does the same)?
Even interstellar *communication* is wildly impractical. I mean, come on, latency measured in *years*? What kind of conversation could you have, EVEN if you already spoke the same language? And if you don't, how are you going to learn it? Cultural immersion is NOT possible. Back-and-forth dialog isn't even really possible. With no pre-existing linguistic information to help you bridge the gap, *and* no interaction, how would you characterize an alien language? You could spend centuries analyzing a single hour's worth of message and get nowhere.
But something as a big as a recognisable alien communication would be enough in itself to prove the existence of aliens (or a deity with a sick sense of humour). People would happily devote centuries to studying such a message. If we even just swapped Wikipedias that would give enough data to be getting on with for at least a few centuries.
Who said it was a failure? Most of the negative comments I've seen were along the lines of "underpowered, too many restriction only really useful for Joe Sixpack, will probably sell a ton despite all that", while most of the positive comments were along the lines of "it's not restrictive, it's a streamlined user experience which brings applications to the average guy, and for that reason it will sell a ton". If sales are you success/failure metric, I don't think I've seen anyone saying on either side of the fence that this would be a failure, just a missed opportunity.
I'm not sure if it's escaped your intention, but something called the App Store came along which might just have skewed their business plan from its original course...
Opera Mini is far from a fully featured browser, it seems the actual browser is running on Opera's servers and they just send you a compressed image, which might be largely fine for static websites, but it's certainly not going to cut it in the dynamic web application arena.
Exactly, this kind of technology just allows some similarity with everyone sitting in one room - which in itself would remove much of the need for meetings (it's occasinally still more productive to get a subset of people together face to face to talk issues over). The other benefit I find with working this way over traditional meetings is that, unless the entire meeting is centred around me and what I'm doing, it's usually more productive for me to dip in and out as required and be doing other things in the meantime. In a meat-space meeting, that's not really possibly unless everyone takes laptops along, and what usually happens is I lose interest then suddenly realise when someone does ask me a question that I've not been listening for the past five minutes and have no context. With online meetings, there is a trail I can follow if necessary to find out what the question was really about, so I don't need to give 100% of my focus to the meeting. We also seem to lose at least 10 minutes out of every meeting because some people won't be there on time, or need to go pick something up from the copier, or someone's stolen the room and we have to relocate, etc - might seem small but having a room full of devs sitting around doing nothing while some manager is late back from a pub lunch can soon start to become an expensive pursuit.
I think a lot of the time it's just that you can't recapture that initial impact. When I played GoW back in 2006, the graphics were amazing, the cover system was clever and new, the game world was unexplored so every encounter was something new - even if the basic underlying game improves on the predecessor in every way you're still not going to get that same first time feeling without the kind of jump forward that usually requires a technology or format shift.
It is a multiplayer game, but a lot of people (myself included) play it mostly for the single player storyline. I don't have enough time to get into the MP side of every game that comes along, so it's nice to have a bit more of the story every couple of years, but having said that, horde mode was a great, fun addition to the MP aspect that was probably worth the sequel. I'm also not sure Halo is a great example of longevity, considering we've had Halo, Halo 2, Halo 3, Halo ODST and now Halo Reach is on the radar. Also, on GGP's claim of two sequels in three years, it's actually closer to five years (series started 2006, second sequel is 2011), that's pretty much on a par with Halo.
Well from what I can tell the suggestion is that the video was meant to be a very early teaser (I've seen it, there's no gameplay just an FMV of "man's last stand" (spolier - looks like this time around it's woman's last stand too)) but the date was added at the end and kind of forced Epic's hand. Apparently it was run on some US TV show a couple of days earlier, I assume without the date, maybe someone screwed up and posted the wrong version, more likely the whole "Ah, you got us, okay we weren't going to talk about this yet but yeah, it's true..." is just FUD and the whole thing is a marketing exercise. When it's a couple of years between games, I'm sure it doesn't hurt Epic to have a bridging point where suddenly people are talking about the series.
This is exactly what I'm working to with my system at home. Now everyone has laptops and netbooks and WiFi phones, etc, it makes sense to have a big block of storage that's always on and can be nicely hidden away somewhere dark and cool and which anyone can dip into as they come and go.
Followed by millions of angry users switching to another ISP.
You're missing the point. You can easily switch ISP, you cannot easily switch country.
Governments might be greedy but they're not, for the most part, stupid - not when it comes to feathering their own nests, anyway. No government is going to take the circus out of the bread and circuses equation, it'd be political suicide.
I'd just be happy to be told what my monthly allowance is, in clear and simple text, not subject to fair or acceptable usage (I've never hit whatever the theoretical limit is, but as someone who requires web access to work, it's worrying whenever I have to download a couple of big linux distros or whatever in a month, not knowing if I'll get my access cut).
I'd like to see how well such a contract would stand up in court, where the customer pays for internet service only to find, three months later, that some of the prime websites have been blocked. I certainly wouldn't continue to uphold my side of the contract as a customer if the service being offered as the ISP's side of the bargain had fundamentally altered, despite the clauses they include in the contracts, the contract itself still ultimately has to pass the test of reasonableness.
Also, what are they going to do if Google refuses to play ball - they can't force it to pay, they can only say pay up or don't serve our customers. How long will they keep their customers or their monopoly once people can no longer watch kitten videos?
"Also, if Google end up having to pay ISPs in Europe, you can bet lobbyists will use that as a reason to reopen the debate stateside."
Estimated chance of that happening: nil to none at all.
Estimated chance of ISPs being clobbered over promising bandwidth they can't reasonably supply to all their customers: better than average.
Agree with the first point, not so much with the second. The way this works is the big business always stomps on the little guy. In the ISP to customer relationship, the ISPs stomp on our consumer rights by not providing what they advertised, and apart from the occasional admonishment from a toothless body like Offcom, they get away with it. When that same ISP goes up against Google, though, well then they'll feel what it's like to be told to assume the position.
Exactly right - maybe there is an argument against ads, since most people don't particularly want to see them and yet we're paying to download them (and of course Google would be included in that sector, but an ad impression is much less bandwidth intensive than a video). In terms of content, if I download something it's because I want it and am paying for it - get that, ISPs? I'm paying for the bandwidth, not just renting a tube down which someone else can pay to send their content. I'm sick of paying for an advertised service and not getting what I pay for.
Slashdot Mirror
On the plus side, traffic jams will be a lot less hassle when all the other cars are flat 2D representations on the road.
Maybe you can't pick up the GE data and dump it right into your game, but it definitely enhances the mapping possibilities for both professional developers and mod scripters to be able to not only see a satellite image and some stitched together street view pictures, but to actually be able to move around the cityscape in a 3D representation. Suddenly something as logistically difficult as mapping out a city in your game became a whole lot easier - now, how long until we get the first "terrorist training sim" newspaper headlines?
On the bright side, you don't need your soul to play lawyer.
The kind of thing that's never been tested in court - most likely because they know it would never stand up in court expressly because it's common knowledge nobody reads them. One of those kind of things, you mean?
Apologies for replying to my own post, but having said the above, consider this - if we even discovered something like an amoeba living on Mars it would be possibly the biggest event in the planet's history (i.e. turns out we're not alone in the universe after all). If the alien planet is part of some republic of sentient planets, likely our disovery wouldn't even make front page news. If, on the other hand, they are similarly alone in the universe, even as a massively technologically advanced race, it would still be big news to find us and even bigger to communicate/visit (hell, we spend billions as humans just to discover if the basic building blocks for life exist on other planets, let alone life itself).
When was the last time you seeked out an unknown person in the developing world here on planet Earth and called the person or sent an e-mail, inquiring about how he likes the slum, how he likes the lack of clean water and how he likes the war going on there and stuff?
Well, speaking for developed countries in general - usually when the developing nation has something we want or need. Resources, for instance. Of course, mineral resources are likely to be much more available much closer to home than coming all the way here, so it would have to be something that is peculiar to our planet. Like... large quantities of meat?
Meh, this is just the same old puritan crap all over again.
He even scored a hat-trick: video games, fast food and pornography.
Now he just needs to tie those back into the internet, or even better Facebook or Twitter (and let's face it, two of the three are easy) and he'll be an overnight tabloid sensation.
Who did not see it nowadays. Interestingly Idiocracy is a kind of self fulfilling prophecy. Naturally it is easy to see oneself in shoes of Joe Bauers or Rita (although I liked that Guitar band in the arena so much, and it would be interesting to have Sara Rue as Attorney General if I were the President), and most people says that it is hopeless anyway, thus there is no need to breed :) after seeing the movie.
More likely the people who see the movie and say there's no need to breed are the kind of people who weren't likely to be offered the chance to breed in the first place and are using this as a convenient excuse :) Of course, a big chunk of those will be nerds, so the end result is pretty much the same...
It would almost be worth seeing humanity devoured by a sentient alien hive mind, just so that we can say told you so to the religious types. Except the scientologists - in that scenario they would have pretty much nailed it :)
Why shouldn't it be welcomed by the 10%, so long as the 10% is spread around (i.e. you only have to work one in ten of your normal work days, and everyone else does the same)?
Even interstellar *communication* is wildly impractical. I mean, come on, latency measured in *years*? What kind of conversation could you have, EVEN if you already spoke the same language? And if you don't, how are you going to learn it? Cultural immersion is NOT possible. Back-and-forth dialog isn't even really possible. With no pre-existing linguistic information to help you bridge the gap, *and* no interaction, how would you characterize an alien language? You could spend centuries analyzing a single hour's worth of message and get nowhere.
But something as a big as a recognisable alien communication would be enough in itself to prove the existence of aliens (or a deity with a sick sense of humour). People would happily devote centuries to studying such a message. If we even just swapped Wikipedias that would give enough data to be getting on with for at least a few centuries.
Who said it was a failure? Most of the negative comments I've seen were along the lines of "underpowered, too many restriction only really useful for Joe Sixpack, will probably sell a ton despite all that", while most of the positive comments were along the lines of "it's not restrictive, it's a streamlined user experience which brings applications to the average guy, and for that reason it will sell a ton". If sales are you success/failure metric, I don't think I've seen anyone saying on either side of the fence that this would be a failure, just a missed opportunity.
I'm not sure if it's escaped your intention, but something called the App Store came along which might just have skewed their business plan from its original course...
Opera Mini is far from a fully featured browser, it seems the actual browser is running on Opera's servers and they just send you a compressed image, which might be largely fine for static websites, but it's certainly not going to cut it in the dynamic web application arena.
Exactly, this kind of technology just allows some similarity with everyone sitting in one room - which in itself would remove much of the need for meetings (it's occasinally still more productive to get a subset of people together face to face to talk issues over). The other benefit I find with working this way over traditional meetings is that, unless the entire meeting is centred around me and what I'm doing, it's usually more productive for me to dip in and out as required and be doing other things in the meantime. In a meat-space meeting, that's not really possibly unless everyone takes laptops along, and what usually happens is I lose interest then suddenly realise when someone does ask me a question that I've not been listening for the past five minutes and have no context. With online meetings, there is a trail I can follow if necessary to find out what the question was really about, so I don't need to give 100% of my focus to the meeting. We also seem to lose at least 10 minutes out of every meeting because some people won't be there on time, or need to go pick something up from the copier, or someone's stolen the room and we have to relocate, etc - might seem small but having a room full of devs sitting around doing nothing while some manager is late back from a pub lunch can soon start to become an expensive pursuit.
I think a lot of the time it's just that you can't recapture that initial impact. When I played GoW back in 2006, the graphics were amazing, the cover system was clever and new, the game world was unexplored so every encounter was something new - even if the basic underlying game improves on the predecessor in every way you're still not going to get that same first time feeling without the kind of jump forward that usually requires a technology or format shift.
It is a multiplayer game, but a lot of people (myself included) play it mostly for the single player storyline. I don't have enough time to get into the MP side of every game that comes along, so it's nice to have a bit more of the story every couple of years, but having said that, horde mode was a great, fun addition to the MP aspect that was probably worth the sequel. I'm also not sure Halo is a great example of longevity, considering we've had Halo, Halo 2, Halo 3, Halo ODST and now Halo Reach is on the radar. Also, on GGP's claim of two sequels in three years, it's actually closer to five years (series started 2006, second sequel is 2011), that's pretty much on a par with Halo.
Well from what I can tell the suggestion is that the video was meant to be a very early teaser (I've seen it, there's no gameplay just an FMV of "man's last stand" (spolier - looks like this time around it's woman's last stand too)) but the date was added at the end and kind of forced Epic's hand. Apparently it was run on some US TV show a couple of days earlier, I assume without the date, maybe someone screwed up and posted the wrong version, more likely the whole "Ah, you got us, okay we weren't going to talk about this yet but yeah, it's true..." is just FUD and the whole thing is a marketing exercise. When it's a couple of years between games, I'm sure it doesn't hurt Epic to have a bridging point where suddenly people are talking about the series.
This is exactly what I'm working to with my system at home. Now everyone has laptops and netbooks and WiFi phones, etc, it makes sense to have a big block of storage that's always on and can be nicely hidden away somewhere dark and cool and which anyone can dip into as they come and go.
Followed by millions of angry users switching to another ISP.
You're missing the point. You can easily switch ISP, you cannot easily switch country.
Governments might be greedy but they're not, for the most part, stupid - not when it comes to feathering their own nests, anyway. No government is going to take the circus out of the bread and circuses equation, it'd be political suicide.
I'd just be happy to be told what my monthly allowance is, in clear and simple text, not subject to fair or acceptable usage (I've never hit whatever the theoretical limit is, but as someone who requires web access to work, it's worrying whenever I have to download a couple of big linux distros or whatever in a month, not knowing if I'll get my access cut).
I'd like to see how well such a contract would stand up in court, where the customer pays for internet service only to find, three months later, that some of the prime websites have been blocked. I certainly wouldn't continue to uphold my side of the contract as a customer if the service being offered as the ISP's side of the bargain had fundamentally altered, despite the clauses they include in the contracts, the contract itself still ultimately has to pass the test of reasonableness.
Also, what are they going to do if Google refuses to play ball - they can't force it to pay, they can only say pay up or don't serve our customers. How long will they keep their customers or their monopoly once people can no longer watch kitten videos?
"Also, if Google end up having to pay ISPs in Europe, you can bet lobbyists will use that as a reason to reopen the debate stateside."
Estimated chance of that happening: nil to none at all.
Estimated chance of ISPs being clobbered over promising bandwidth they can't reasonably supply to all their customers: better than average.
Agree with the first point, not so much with the second. The way this works is the big business always stomps on the little guy. In the ISP to customer relationship, the ISPs stomp on our consumer rights by not providing what they advertised, and apart from the occasional admonishment from a toothless body like Offcom, they get away with it. When that same ISP goes up against Google, though, well then they'll feel what it's like to be told to assume the position.
Exactly right - maybe there is an argument against ads, since most people don't particularly want to see them and yet we're paying to download them (and of course Google would be included in that sector, but an ad impression is much less bandwidth intensive than a video). In terms of content, if I download something it's because I want it and am paying for it - get that, ISPs? I'm paying for the bandwidth, not just renting a tube down which someone else can pay to send their content. I'm sick of paying for an advertised service and not getting what I pay for.