Everyone knows humans make knee jerk assumptions about people. Everyone should also know that, if you're sitting on a jury, you don't post those knee jerk assumptions on Facebook - it highlights the mockery of the fair trial process, and judges don't like that at all.
Just what I was thinking of - albeit I played on the BBC Micro. I can't comment on what it was like for other games, as we played it at school and the only other games were "educational" rubbish. At the time, when other games were pretty much ASCII character platformers or text adventures, having an entire universe to explore and trade in, in full 3D, was just stunning and felt like endless freedom. I just wish it didn't look increasingly like Elite IV was going to turn out to be vapourware.
Not to mention that the notes we now consider "real money" began life in exactly the same way - they relied on someone giving something of established value to a banker or such in return for a token promising to pay the bearer an equal value. I'm sure back then they were equally ridiculed, "Look, Jebediah is giving up a real cow in return for a note saying he is oweth'd a cow! Methinks I have some Floridian swampland he may wish to barter items of worth for!"
Even then I don't think it's so clear cut. If it's a case of buying stuff that's obtainable by playing the game normally, that's wholly different to buying stuff that requires endless grinding. A lot of people are cash rich and time poor, I wouldn't give up my job so I could grind in my favourite game, but if I could divert some of the proceeds of one to the other I might consider it, if it lets me get on with enjoying the parts of the game that are not so time intensive. Imagine a quest in a game that takes an hour or so and the upshot is you get a magical sword. Buying the sword outright seems lame, you entirely negate the need to run what might be a fun little quest. On the other hand, an hour long question with a 1% chance of getting the same magic sword is likely to be a maddening time sink - once you've run the quest once and seen the content, I don't think it would be unreasonable to be able to say I don't want to invest all this time farming a sword, I've already invested the time elsewhere and now I want to trade the proceeds of that time for this item so I can get on with the next quest. I actually think that kind of system is pretty fair as it lets the people with little money but lots of spare time (kids, students) participate, but it doesn't unfairly punish those with jobs who just want a fun game to play in their leisure time. Of course, it's also possibly a slippery slope because if it works, every game where you would automatically get the sword after the quest will move to the model where you get a % chance of getting the sword with an option to buy...
Huh? You're comparing the graphics of "current" games to old titles by comparing Half Life to Puzzle Bobble? You do realise that Half Life was release over a decade ago? (In fact only four years atfer the arcade version of Puzzle Bobble).
Indeed - Microsoft have had a system of "points" on their Live platform for years now, and for almost as long it's been possible to walk into a store, pay real money for a card with a scratch-off panel and use them to attain points which are spent on "imaginary items" like games, avatar accessories, desktop themes and such, and it was hardly the first system to do this (just one of the early ones to allow you to use the points across a range of games and purchase types under their umbrella platform). The "story" here is that Facebook are selling the credits, you'd get the impression from this that the story was the credit system itself (and if it was it would be a slightly more interesting story) - file this under "anything FB does has to be news".
No, he shows that a designer is needed in order to improve things quickly. Life would have likely returned to the island eventually, once the conditions were right, he just helped it along. Not to mention we hardly "improved" things, since we were responsible for the initial devastation caused by introducing grazing animals, and it's hardly back to its former glory. The evolutionary process on Earth was anything but speedy, if there was a designer's hand involved why did it take billions of years to get to this stage?
It would be far more useful if we'd had a control island right next to it to see if life naturally returned in that time. After all, we already know Earth (of this time period) has perfect conditions for supporting life, to use this as evidence that we can terraform other planets is quite the leap, there are much, much bigger issues to solve on Mars than soil erosion.
Haha - that's exactly what came to mind when I saw that scene in the movie. I can't remember if he was in Paris or London at the time but I just thought, how the hell did he buy a phone and start using it without having to register his payment method and add some credit. As far as I know you've not been able to do that in the UK (and I think most of Europe) for at least most of the last decade. I think in the US there's no restriction, though, so I guess it was the Hollywood reality distortion affect?
GP is talking about prepaid (or "pay as you go") phones - how does submitting your info have anything to do with paying your bills for a device you can only use up to a prepaid credit limit?
Of course you can't be guaranteed that they won't notice shortly after and get it cancelled, or that someone won't see you picking it up and alert the authorities. If a terrorist plot centred around obtaining cell phones from drunken revellers, I think we could pretty safely ignore them as a credible threat.
Exactly my thoughts - it's been the same in the UK for a while now. I think they now ask for these details when you buy a SIM/PAYG phone, but even if they don't or you get around it by buying online, you have to register the phone with the phone company in order to add credit, which requires giving them your details.
Unfortunately, for anyone who cares about how their data is used, it's the companies who will make the decision. I might switch my bank to one I consider more secure only to find in two months time that they intend to outsource key parts of the business. I wonder if we'll eventually see a niche market in organisations which guarantee to keep your data within the boundaries of your own country (then you only have to worry about your own government getting their hands on it).
Exactly - better that you're at least informed, if it had said nothing you'd be blissfully unaware that your music app was tracking your position and accessing the web. And if you don't want it to do those things, mail the developer and give them some useful feedback (I would have bought/used your app except...) and maybe they'll explain what the usage is, or even offer a version with those things removed. That's the beauty of the system, you have a lot of visibility of what's going on.
You're missing the guy's point. He wasn't saying that people didn't sometimes (or even often) nail it, he was saying that for every piece of evidence of someone using a natural remedy which science today validates, there is an ocean of examples of people using remedies that either did nothing or were counter-productive, even fatal (I mean it's practically yesterday in historical terms since the definitive treatment for most ailments was a good bleeding, and less than a hundred years since we thought it was a good idea to add radium to toothpaste). We only ever hear about the ones that were correct, which might give the impression that there's some vast untapped well of ancient knowledge instead of a hodgepodge of trial and error and superstition.
Still, while people are arguing about whether the buttons should be grey or not, they're diverted from complaining about the recently announced Live price increases - and MS can always then say in a little while, "Hey, we're listening to you, you can have your coloured buttons back" for the bonus PR win.
And, honestly, I can barely remember a time when I've had to rely on the D-Pad for anything in game other than menu/weapon selection. Assuming they still do an edition with the colours, then improving the D-Pad is a nice touch, even if hardly needed (and potentially another route for dirt to get into the controller).
I thought for a second that the Captcha read "fictions", which would have been eerily apt to your point - unless of course that turned out to be faked too:)
Hell, you don't even need to be in the industry. They're commonly referenced online, I've seen the name crop up in non-technical forums. Several times they've actually made the news offline and they're commonly talked about in online news sources (I see them mentioned at the BBC and Google news quite a lot), both with charges and raids against them and, latterly, with their political ambitions. They sell merchandise, too, so you don't even need to be a big follower of news or politics to have come across them. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of non-technical internet users, and even a good few non-internet users were aware of them.
And yet now, just as back then, the people who trade said copies are the people most passionate about it and who are more likely to buy music. The argument of the big labels is that there's no reason to buy music when an exact digital copy can be had for free - maybe they underestimate the talent of their artists that they could make people want to reward them regardless, or maybe they underestimate the passion of the fans who are more than happy to buy stuff but also like to share music with their friends and hear new stuff for free, but the end result still seems to be that the ones they are most demonising for downloading are their core customers.
I never learned latin (I can generally decipher the meaning of it but I couldn't write or speak it) and I can honestly say I come across latin words and phrases far more often than I have to read cursive writing, does that mean we should all learn latin as well? It's very rare these days that I'll have to read anything hand-written (and not because I have any real trouble with cursive unless it's particularly rushed or scribbled, we were never taught it at school and I can read it just fine), I'd guess this applies to most people. If the amount of time spent learning, and re-learning because it will fade with underuse, to read cursive is likely to be much greater than the time spent fumbling over a particularly bad case then you'll waste less time by just not bothering.
We're not talking about some ancient dead language, there are people undoubtedly still alive from before the switch and I'd be surprised if the switch itself happened overnight and wasn't a long process. Want to know what someone's grandparents wrote on that photo? Ask someone's grandparents! Meanwhile there's plenty of scope even today for recording every nuance of the previous language in order to make translations as accurate as possible. Seriously, what he describes is no different than if my grandparents had been from a foreign country and I'd never learned their language of origin - I could find out what they'd written with the application of just some small effort on my part.
I find I'm even losing the ability to write my own signature. Every time I do it now it looks nothing like the last, and yet it's still relied on as a secure method of validating my identity by my bank. I'm convinced one day I'll completely forget how to do it and be locked out of my accounts. My one saving grace is that, even as I get worse at writing my signature, people seem to care less and less - I bought a house last year and was convinced my signature on the agreement to transfer a substantial deposit out of my account looked nothing like the one they have on record for me, but the woman at the bank barely looked at it. It's nice to know that's the level of security I can expect from them - personally I'll be glad when we can do away with signatures completely, they're such an outdated concept when there are much more secure technological solutions around.
Slashdot Mirror
Everyone knows humans make knee jerk assumptions about people. Everyone should also know that, if you're sitting on a jury, you don't post those knee jerk assumptions on Facebook - it highlights the mockery of the fair trial process, and judges don't like that at all.
Just what I was thinking of - albeit I played on the BBC Micro. I can't comment on what it was like for other games, as we played it at school and the only other games were "educational" rubbish. At the time, when other games were pretty much ASCII character platformers or text adventures, having an entire universe to explore and trade in, in full 3D, was just stunning and felt like endless freedom. I just wish it didn't look increasingly like Elite IV was going to turn out to be vapourware.
Of course he saw boredom as the end point of the fulfilment of all a man's needs. They didn't have Farmville in Schopenhauer's day!
Not to mention that the notes we now consider "real money" began life in exactly the same way - they relied on someone giving something of established value to a banker or such in return for a token promising to pay the bearer an equal value. I'm sure back then they were equally ridiculed, "Look, Jebediah is giving up a real cow in return for a note saying he is oweth'd a cow! Methinks I have some Floridian swampland he may wish to barter items of worth for!"
Even then I don't think it's so clear cut. If it's a case of buying stuff that's obtainable by playing the game normally, that's wholly different to buying stuff that requires endless grinding. A lot of people are cash rich and time poor, I wouldn't give up my job so I could grind in my favourite game, but if I could divert some of the proceeds of one to the other I might consider it, if it lets me get on with enjoying the parts of the game that are not so time intensive. Imagine a quest in a game that takes an hour or so and the upshot is you get a magical sword. Buying the sword outright seems lame, you entirely negate the need to run what might be a fun little quest. On the other hand, an hour long question with a 1% chance of getting the same magic sword is likely to be a maddening time sink - once you've run the quest once and seen the content, I don't think it would be unreasonable to be able to say I don't want to invest all this time farming a sword, I've already invested the time elsewhere and now I want to trade the proceeds of that time for this item so I can get on with the next quest. I actually think that kind of system is pretty fair as it lets the people with little money but lots of spare time (kids, students) participate, but it doesn't unfairly punish those with jobs who just want a fun game to play in their leisure time. Of course, it's also possibly a slippery slope because if it works, every game where you would automatically get the sword after the quest will move to the model where you get a % chance of getting the sword with an option to buy...
Huh? You're comparing the graphics of "current" games to old titles by comparing Half Life to Puzzle Bobble? You do realise that Half Life was release over a decade ago? (In fact only four years atfer the arcade version of Puzzle Bobble).
Indeed - Microsoft have had a system of "points" on their Live platform for years now, and for almost as long it's been possible to walk into a store, pay real money for a card with a scratch-off panel and use them to attain points which are spent on "imaginary items" like games, avatar accessories, desktop themes and such, and it was hardly the first system to do this (just one of the early ones to allow you to use the points across a range of games and purchase types under their umbrella platform). The "story" here is that Facebook are selling the credits, you'd get the impression from this that the story was the credit system itself (and if it was it would be a slightly more interesting story) - file this under "anything FB does has to be news".
No, he shows that a designer is needed in order to improve things quickly. Life would have likely returned to the island eventually, once the conditions were right, he just helped it along. Not to mention we hardly "improved" things, since we were responsible for the initial devastation caused by introducing grazing animals, and it's hardly back to its former glory. The evolutionary process on Earth was anything but speedy, if there was a designer's hand involved why did it take billions of years to get to this stage?
It would be far more useful if we'd had a control island right next to it to see if life naturally returned in that time. After all, we already know Earth (of this time period) has perfect conditions for supporting life, to use this as evidence that we can terraform other planets is quite the leap, there are much, much bigger issues to solve on Mars than soil erosion.
Haha - that's exactly what came to mind when I saw that scene in the movie. I can't remember if he was in Paris or London at the time but I just thought, how the hell did he buy a phone and start using it without having to register his payment method and add some credit. As far as I know you've not been able to do that in the UK (and I think most of Europe) for at least most of the last decade. I think in the US there's no restriction, though, so I guess it was the Hollywood reality distortion affect?
GP is talking about prepaid (or "pay as you go") phones - how does submitting your info have anything to do with paying your bills for a device you can only use up to a prepaid credit limit?
Of course you can't be guaranteed that they won't notice shortly after and get it cancelled, or that someone won't see you picking it up and alert the authorities. If a terrorist plot centred around obtaining cell phones from drunken revellers, I think we could pretty safely ignore them as a credible threat.
Exactly my thoughts - it's been the same in the UK for a while now. I think they now ask for these details when you buy a SIM/PAYG phone, but even if they don't or you get around it by buying online, you have to register the phone with the phone company in order to add credit, which requires giving them your details.
Unfortunately, for anyone who cares about how their data is used, it's the companies who will make the decision. I might switch my bank to one I consider more secure only to find in two months time that they intend to outsource key parts of the business. I wonder if we'll eventually see a niche market in organisations which guarantee to keep your data within the boundaries of your own country (then you only have to worry about your own government getting their hands on it).
Exactly - better that you're at least informed, if it had said nothing you'd be blissfully unaware that your music app was tracking your position and accessing the web. And if you don't want it to do those things, mail the developer and give them some useful feedback (I would have bought/used your app except...) and maybe they'll explain what the usage is, or even offer a version with those things removed. That's the beauty of the system, you have a lot of visibility of what's going on.
Quite a lot of expectant mothers drink copious amounts of beer just prior to pregnancy, too.
You're missing the guy's point. He wasn't saying that people didn't sometimes (or even often) nail it, he was saying that for every piece of evidence of someone using a natural remedy which science today validates, there is an ocean of examples of people using remedies that either did nothing or were counter-productive, even fatal (I mean it's practically yesterday in historical terms since the definitive treatment for most ailments was a good bleeding, and less than a hundred years since we thought it was a good idea to add radium to toothpaste). We only ever hear about the ones that were correct, which might give the impression that there's some vast untapped well of ancient knowledge instead of a hodgepodge of trial and error and superstition.
Still, while people are arguing about whether the buttons should be grey or not, they're diverted from complaining about the recently announced Live price increases - and MS can always then say in a little while, "Hey, we're listening to you, you can have your coloured buttons back" for the bonus PR win.
And, honestly, I can barely remember a time when I've had to rely on the D-Pad for anything in game other than menu/weapon selection. Assuming they still do an edition with the colours, then improving the D-Pad is a nice touch, even if hardly needed (and potentially another route for dirt to get into the controller).
I thought for a second that the Captcha read "fictions", which would have been eerily apt to your point - unless of course that turned out to be faked too :)
Hell, you don't even need to be in the industry. They're commonly referenced online, I've seen the name crop up in non-technical forums. Several times they've actually made the news offline and they're commonly talked about in online news sources (I see them mentioned at the BBC and Google news quite a lot), both with charges and raids against them and, latterly, with their political ambitions. They sell merchandise, too, so you don't even need to be a big follower of news or politics to have come across them. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of non-technical internet users, and even a good few non-internet users were aware of them.
And yet now, just as back then, the people who trade said copies are the people most passionate about it and who are more likely to buy music. The argument of the big labels is that there's no reason to buy music when an exact digital copy can be had for free - maybe they underestimate the talent of their artists that they could make people want to reward them regardless, or maybe they underestimate the passion of the fans who are more than happy to buy stuff but also like to share music with their friends and hear new stuff for free, but the end result still seems to be that the ones they are most demonising for downloading are their core customers.
I never learned latin (I can generally decipher the meaning of it but I couldn't write or speak it) and I can honestly say I come across latin words and phrases far more often than I have to read cursive writing, does that mean we should all learn latin as well? It's very rare these days that I'll have to read anything hand-written (and not because I have any real trouble with cursive unless it's particularly rushed or scribbled, we were never taught it at school and I can read it just fine), I'd guess this applies to most people. If the amount of time spent learning, and re-learning because it will fade with underuse, to read cursive is likely to be much greater than the time spent fumbling over a particularly bad case then you'll waste less time by just not bothering.
We're not talking about some ancient dead language, there are people undoubtedly still alive from before the switch and I'd be surprised if the switch itself happened overnight and wasn't a long process. Want to know what someone's grandparents wrote on that photo? Ask someone's grandparents! Meanwhile there's plenty of scope even today for recording every nuance of the previous language in order to make translations as accurate as possible. Seriously, what he describes is no different than if my grandparents had been from a foreign country and I'd never learned their language of origin - I could find out what they'd written with the application of just some small effort on my part.
I find I'm even losing the ability to write my own signature. Every time I do it now it looks nothing like the last, and yet it's still relied on as a secure method of validating my identity by my bank. I'm convinced one day I'll completely forget how to do it and be locked out of my accounts. My one saving grace is that, even as I get worse at writing my signature, people seem to care less and less - I bought a house last year and was convinced my signature on the agreement to transfer a substantial deposit out of my account looked nothing like the one they have on record for me, but the woman at the bank barely looked at it. It's nice to know that's the level of security I can expect from them - personally I'll be glad when we can do away with signatures completely, they're such an outdated concept when there are much more secure technological solutions around.