Anne Mcaffery, Ursula K Le Guin, Orson Scott Card, Brian Aldiss, Larry Niven
Of the more recent crop we have Neal Stephenson, Vernor Vinge and William Gibson
And on a more mutimedia front we have Neil Gaman and Joss Whedon (He has one the Hugo Award, but then again, so has J.K Rowling).
We may have lost many of the Grand masters, but there will allways be young heros stepping up to the plate. I personally think Andre Infante shows a great level of promise, and returns my faith in the future of sci fi
From the news i've seen out of russia recently, The Mafia is the legal system. After the fall of the USSR much of the KGB moved over to the mafia and continued doing basically the same thing they had been. If you look at the present russian government, you will find that most of the cabinet are ex kgb.. i.e. mafia. It was silent coo, at least in the west, but certainly not bloodless. Anti-government protesters are killed everyday, it is a mafia state.
I think there should be a test in all role playing games, to test how well you role play. Any game that doesn't actually involve playing out roles, should be classed as a hacknslash. I am sick of buying role playing games only to be confronted with "buff plz tnx". I want these people banned, not people who are actually role playing!
"The Internet: where men are men, women are men, and children are FBI agents."
I remember those days, but i was a kid at the time. My dad was an uber nerd and taught me from a very early age. Now days it may not be unusual to have a ten year old online, but 15 years ago it was rare as hens teeth. I often ran into trouble with my age, because as soon as i told someone i was anything under 15, they assumed i was an agent of some kind. And any girls i found that were my age, weren't. I saw more pictures of hairy old men between the ages of 10 and 15 than i have in the next 10 years.
So i started lying about my age online as soon as i got on, and while anonymity has all but disapeared I still feel no real inclination to give out my real asl to anyone except close friends. games are no different.
I think sexuality is a sliding scale, not black and white. Between homosexuals, heteroexuals and transexuals, there are infinite shades of grey. But growing up in a situation where i couldn't believe anyones asl, I learnt to judge people on what they said and how they acted, not on who they said they were. And after a while, I pretty reliably learnt how to identify peoples sex by simply talking to them. I also believe it is possible to fall in love with someones personality, regardless of their sex.
Banning someone from playing a female character is just as bad as banning someone from being gay or being a transexual. It is outright discrimination. If you are so blind that you end up going home with a tranny, that is your own stupid fault! and not a reason to ban transexuals!
you'll find no arguement from me on that front, no one should ever stop questioning their beliefs. I only take issue with reporters who allow opinion to be interpreted as fact.
Ice ages are not caused by planet Earth's orbital variations as once thought, but by the dimmer switch inside the sun that causes its brightness to rise and fall on timescales of around 100,000 years which is exactly the same period as between ice ages on Earth, according to a radical new theory proposed by renowned astrophysicist Robert Ehrlich of George Mason University.
shouldn't that be:
According to a radical new theory proposed by renowned astrophysicist Robert Ehrlich of George Mason University, Ice ages are not caused by planet Earth's orbital variations as once thought, but by the dimmer switch inside the sun that causes its brightness to rise and fall on timescales of around 100,000 years which is exactly the same period as between ice ages on Earth.
that's like writing
THE EARTH IS FLAT!!!! according to some guy somewhere.
instead of
some guy somewhere thinks the earth is flat!!
It appears to me that you find imperial easier because you are used to it.
i remember helping my dad on a building site as a kid, everything was measured in milimeters but not as in "this piece of wood is three hundred and twenty millimeters" you'd just say "its three twenty mill" which is as easy top say as "its a bit more than a foot" or "roughly 13 inches". you off handedly dismiss accuracy in building, but if your joists are a couple of mill wrong at one end, they can be a foot off at the other..
Kilometers vs miles: this one is a doozy, when you are doing 60 miles an hour, i'll be doing a hundred k's. no matter what speed we are doing, i will allways sound faster, and on our spedometers it will look like i am accelerating faster too. not to mention that if my car breaks down and i'm walking, i know my step is about a meter, and there is 1000 meters in a kilometer, so I know i am only 10,000 steps from the nearest town, and i can count them down.
Celcius vs Farenheit: ok, in my town our temperatures range from -10~ to +40~, room temperature is 22. I know that at 0, water freezes, at 100 water boils. for you, when it hits 0 degrees, nothing special happens, its a warm winters day. at 100, nothing special happens, its a warm summer day. they are all just numbers. where is the magic? when i was out in the desert, we had a 50 degree day, that was halfway to boiling point.. Thats when you know its hot..
Here in australia we still use imperial terms occassionally, but more as relics of old speech, or as references to american movies..
i.e. 2 by 4's are still called 2 by 4's.. even though they are actually 5 by 10's.. not because either is easier.. but because that is what they have allways been called.. We might say "he was going at 100 miles an hour" because thats what they say in the movies.. and i suppose because 100 miles is quicker than 100 k's. Old timers still ask for a pint of beer and there are a few other relics of speech around the place, but mainly people use metric.
It seems to me that all of your arguements revolve around this, you have allways used it, so that is what makes it easier..
but if i had to spend my time figuring out what 2 times 5/7's was, i would pull my hair out.
Sentience is not a line drawn in the sand, it is a sliding scale on which all living things reside.
The measure of a things sentience, is its sentience quotient.
A sentience quotient is not a measure of pain, or emotions, or of the substance of higher thinking patterns. It is a measure of the raw processing power of an organisms neuron, or their functional equivalent.
The scale of sentience quotients stretches from roughly -70 which would be a being the size of the universe that took the entire lifetime of the universe to process one bit of information, right up to +50 which is the maximum posible speed at which information can travel as defined by quantum physics.
On this scale, humans, along with all animals and insects on this planet, fall at +13. most plants fall at -2, and most importantly to this argument, all computers fall in a range of +6 to +9.
allthough theoretical computers could reach as high as +20 or more, for the moment, computers have less sentience than insects but more than plants.
for more information on this, please visit the wiki
or the original Robert A Freitas article entitled "Xenopsychology"
Well there are HUD's and projector glasses, but headsets seem to have gone out of fashion.
you are right tho, with two high powered video cards in SLI, providing sufficient data to two small lcd's should not be too hard.
Realistically, with the size of those headsets, you should be able to fit a couple of GPU's and some software in the unit itself, allowing it to render any output signal in 3D.
non-native 3D sources would not look AS good, but still not shocking, just like old 3D movies.
I guess the problemwith 3D viewers in general is not the hardware, it is the software. Yes it is popssible to render slightly different images from the same engine, but the overall quality of each image has to be sacrificed, It is kind of like running two instances of the game at once.
It is really a catch 22, until we have good games designed for 3D, we wont have mass uptake of 3D goggles. until we have mass adoption of 3D goggles, we won't have the financial insentive to create native stereoscopic video output.
But with nintendo sacrificing graphics for fun, perhaps the time is right for a new breed of lower quality graphics games that can output two visual signals simeltaneously.
You will have to know what an.iso file is and how to burn it. If that just scared you then just buy a large pizza with extra cheese and a six-pack of beer. Then invite your geek friend over to do it for you. This way is much easier and more fun.
TRANSLATION
"hey guys, i can get you free porn if you'll be my friends!"
The best news story are not allways the newest.
The best story is the one that have been there all along but which no one has covered, it is the story that requires investigation. This is true for journalism and photojournalism.
The best story takes time, and editting. the best video sequence takes time and editing. It takes skill to frame the shot, to know the light, to capture a moment in ultra realism. If all the video bloggers leave journalists free, and indeed forced to focus on high quality reporting, then that can only be a good thing.
while it may be true that the prevelance of portable recording devices gives a higher probability of first images being recorded by ametuers, It doesn't change the true art of journalism.
or to put it in a way/.'ers will relate to:
Evey joe sixpack can make a myspace, only true designers can make sites
Slashdot Mirror
screw the hardware, what file format will be around in 25 years?
Anne Mcaffery, Ursula K Le Guin, Orson Scott Card, Brian Aldiss, Larry Niven
Of the more recent crop we have Neal Stephenson, Vernor Vinge and William Gibson
And on a more mutimedia front we have Neil Gaman and Joss Whedon (He has one the Hugo Award, but then again, so has J.K Rowling).
We may have lost many of the Grand masters, but there will allways be young heros stepping up to the plate. I personally think Andre Infante shows a great level of promise, and returns my faith in the future of sci fi
I am waiting for someone to hire storm to attack echelon.
gah! books are so low tech! and talking to other people? there must be another way!
ah, so your saying we need to build some kind of "star wars" defense system?
From the news i've seen out of russia recently, The Mafia is the legal system. After the fall of the USSR much of the KGB moved over to the mafia and continued doing basically the same thing they had been. If you look at the present russian government, you will find that most of the cabinet are ex kgb.. i.e. mafia. It was silent coo, at least in the west, but certainly not bloodless. Anti-government protesters are killed everyday, it is a mafia state.
It's gonna make for some damn dull episodes of "worlds craziest police chases"!
I think that online comics have also contributed to the decline in comic sales.
actually, my gf refuses to let me buy one until it comes out in pink.
Beats the hell out of a heat ray! mmmm god ray.. I'd go to a lot more protests if i could get shot by one of those :P
So why does it weigh so much? 10 pounds? thats like 5 kilos... My laptop is way less than that, even with a couple of extra batteries.
"he government would then need to be in the business of stockpiling currently illegal drugs and accurately tracking their prices" it is. see the CIA
I think there should be a test in all role playing games, to test how well you role play. Any game that doesn't actually involve playing out roles, should be classed as a hacknslash. I am sick of buying role playing games only to be confronted with "buff plz tnx". I want these people banned, not people who are actually role playing!
"The Internet: where men are men, women are men, and children are FBI agents." I remember those days, but i was a kid at the time. My dad was an uber nerd and taught me from a very early age. Now days it may not be unusual to have a ten year old online, but 15 years ago it was rare as hens teeth. I often ran into trouble with my age, because as soon as i told someone i was anything under 15, they assumed i was an agent of some kind. And any girls i found that were my age, weren't. I saw more pictures of hairy old men between the ages of 10 and 15 than i have in the next 10 years. So i started lying about my age online as soon as i got on, and while anonymity has all but disapeared I still feel no real inclination to give out my real asl to anyone except close friends. games are no different. I think sexuality is a sliding scale, not black and white. Between homosexuals, heteroexuals and transexuals, there are infinite shades of grey. But growing up in a situation where i couldn't believe anyones asl, I learnt to judge people on what they said and how they acted, not on who they said they were. And after a while, I pretty reliably learnt how to identify peoples sex by simply talking to them. I also believe it is possible to fall in love with someones personality, regardless of their sex. Banning someone from playing a female character is just as bad as banning someone from being gay or being a transexual. It is outright discrimination. If you are so blind that you end up going home with a tranny, that is your own stupid fault! and not a reason to ban transexuals!
Well then, to my google overlords I welcome your matrix and hereby suplicate my credit card to your nominal subscription fee. bring it on!
I had just assumed they were, or at least that they were spying on each other.
I own robot jox on vhs, how dare you slander it! those giant killing robots won alaska back for you!
you'll find no arguement from me on that front, no one should ever stop questioning their beliefs. I only take issue with reporters who allow opinion to be interpreted as fact.
shouldn't that be:
that's like writing
THE EARTH IS FLAT!!!! according to some guy somewhere.
instead of
some guy somewhere thinks the earth is flat!!
Surely you mean an MMORPG of Snow Crash
It appears to me that you find imperial easier because you are used to it.
i remember helping my dad on a building site as a kid, everything was measured in milimeters but not as in "this piece of wood is three hundred and twenty millimeters" you'd just say "its three twenty mill" which is as easy top say as "its a bit more than a foot" or "roughly 13 inches". you off handedly dismiss accuracy in building, but if your joists are a couple of mill wrong at one end, they can be a foot off at the other..
Kilometers vs miles: this one is a doozy, when you are doing 60 miles an hour, i'll be doing a hundred k's. no matter what speed we are doing, i will allways sound faster, and on our spedometers it will look like i am accelerating faster too. not to mention that if my car breaks down and i'm walking, i know my step is about a meter, and there is 1000 meters in a kilometer, so I know i am only 10,000 steps from the nearest town, and i can count them down.
Celcius vs Farenheit: ok, in my town our temperatures range from -10~ to +40~, room temperature is 22. I know that at 0, water freezes, at 100 water boils. for you, when it hits 0 degrees, nothing special happens, its a warm winters day. at 100, nothing special happens, its a warm summer day. they are all just numbers. where is the magic? when i was out in the desert, we had a 50 degree day, that was halfway to boiling point.. Thats when you know its hot..
Here in australia we still use imperial terms occassionally, but more as relics of old speech, or as references to american movies.. i.e. 2 by 4's are still called 2 by 4's.. even though they are actually 5 by 10's.. not because either is easier.. but because that is what they have allways been called.. We might say "he was going at 100 miles an hour" because thats what they say in the movies.. and i suppose because 100 miles is quicker than 100 k's. Old timers still ask for a pint of beer and there are a few other relics of speech around the place, but mainly people use metric.
It seems to me that all of your arguements revolve around this, you have allways used it, so that is what makes it easier..
but if i had to spend my time figuring out what 2 times 5/7's was, i would pull my hair out.
Sentience is not a line drawn in the sand, it is a sliding scale on which all living things reside.
The measure of a things sentience, is its sentience quotient.
A sentience quotient is not a measure of pain, or emotions, or of the substance of higher thinking patterns. It is a measure of the raw processing power of an organisms neuron, or their functional equivalent.
The scale of sentience quotients stretches from roughly -70 which would be a being the size of the universe that took the entire lifetime of the universe to process one bit of information, right up to +50 which is the maximum posible speed at which information can travel as defined by quantum physics.
On this scale, humans, along with all animals and insects on this planet, fall at +13. most plants fall at -2, and most importantly to this argument, all computers fall in a range of +6 to +9.
allthough theoretical computers could reach as high as +20 or more, for the moment, computers have less sentience than insects but more than plants.
for more information on this, please visit the wiki
or the original Robert A Freitas article entitled "Xenopsychology"
Well there are HUD's and projector glasses, but headsets seem to have gone out of fashion.
you are right tho, with two high powered video cards in SLI, providing sufficient data to two small lcd's should not be too hard.
Realistically, with the size of those headsets, you should be able to fit a couple of GPU's and some software in the unit itself, allowing it to render any output signal in 3D.
non-native 3D sources would not look AS good, but still not shocking, just like old 3D movies.
I guess the problemwith 3D viewers in general is not the hardware, it is the software. Yes it is popssible to render slightly different images from the same engine, but the overall quality of each image has to be sacrificed, It is kind of like running two instances of the game at once.
It is really a catch 22, until we have good games designed for 3D, we wont have mass uptake of 3D goggles. until we have mass adoption of 3D goggles, we won't have the financial insentive to create native stereoscopic video output.
But with nintendo sacrificing graphics for fun, perhaps the time is right for a new breed of lower quality graphics games that can output two visual signals simeltaneously.
TRANSLATION
The best news story are not allways the newest. The best story is the one that have been there all along but which no one has covered, it is the story that requires investigation. This is true for journalism and photojournalism.
/.'ers will relate to:
The best story takes time, and editting. the best video sequence takes time and editing. It takes skill to frame the shot, to know the light, to capture a moment in ultra realism. If all the video bloggers leave journalists free, and indeed forced to focus on high quality reporting, then that can only be a good thing.
while it may be true that the prevelance of portable recording devices gives a higher probability of first images being recorded by ametuers, It doesn't change the true art of journalism.
or to put it in a way
Evey joe sixpack can make a myspace, only true designers can make sites