Isn't that what all airport "security" is now? Come on, seriously, checking your ID? Because there's no way a terrorist could make a fake ID. 14 year old 8th grade drop out urban poor can manage it, but obviously it's beyond the technological capability of terrorists. What else do they do. Oh, yeah, scan your bags. Which is really efficient. Because in the 4000 years that humans have been smuggling things through security/border checkpoints, nobody expects to have their bags searched. Taking off your shoes. That's the best one. The new one. I feel much safer knowing I had to wait an extra 5 minutes to get on the plane, so that Bob in front of me could figure out how to untie his thigh-high lace-up hiking boots because he's been living in a cave for the last 15 years and/or can't read the 10,000 signs posted all over the place and is deaf to the cyclically repeated PA messages. That way, if a terrorist had a bomb in line behind me, it might go off 5 minutes early. Which I think you will concede is the most effective aspect of the entire charade.

K.

I bet nobody in that country notices the coup. Damn paywalls.

K.

When you use a bad logical process, your conclusion usually isn't right. That's just how things go. The scientific method, logical principles, and so on aren't random. It is the stuff that works reliably for separating truth from fiction. So when you fail to use it, well your results are probably incorrect.

Wow. You've obviously never had an argument with my girlfriend before. And lost.

K.

Dear IBM,
I have a Greddy Turbo Timer in my car. If you turn the car off, it takes 30 seconds to power down. What if the light changes first? What if you turn my car off when I've been racing around irresponsibly and seize up my $6000.00 turbo because you didn't give my car enough time to cool down before you turned it off?

K.

PS. This is a stupid idea.

You think warnings are going to help? They made a whole big hype about putting warnings on cigarette packs. Raised the price to do it.

Sorry, I don't know you. But this is asinine feel-good legislation. A debit card is an electronic checkbook. It contains, in one way or another, your account information.

You know that. Unless you're one of the people in 1990 that didn't know nicotine was addictive.

I fully agree they have a responsibility to protect their customers -- as much as is financially and practically feasible. But please. Signs don't solve problems. Or make a damn bit of difference in anything.

"But I also think that those producing these check cards should be required to advertise the hazards of having one of these cards (not in small print and maybe required in advertisement of these cards, similar to what is required with pharmaceutical drugs on television) and/or that if a debit or check card is issued a separate account should be required for its use, and users informed of the issues of placing all of their money in the same account that their debit card has access to."

Your argument is that you didn't know someone could steal your money? You were not aware of the hazards of carrying money (in whatever sense) in the modern world?

I'm sorry your account got cleaned out, identity theft is hardcore and there needs to be a lot more support and it needs to be treated like a much bigger crime than it is. I used to work in the check-authorization industry. It was awful to see these poor people getting their identity stolen and their life ruined.

But please. This is feel-good, 'blame the company'/lawsuit mitigation crap. It doesn't actually do anything. And it isn't anything that people shouldn't know already.

If we want to make a difference, we need a separate government bureau that is devoted to preventing/tracking/prosecuting/educating/defending citizens from/to/about identity theft. Smoke and lights aren't going to solve the problem. And they'll just make it more obnoxious and 8th grade-level instructions to do business with my bank. I hate that.

Again, it's not my intention to attack the OP personally. But those are the last things that are going to actually do any thing to help the problem. They will, though, cause the government/banks/credit card companies to spend a little bit of money, make a lot of noise, not make the situation any safer, and triple the hassle of doing through daily life. Airport security anyone?

K.

Any conclusion that does not assume there is other life in the universe is hopelessly Creation-ist and/or human-centric.

Any conclusion that accepts that beings capable of making ~87 light year voyages are going to crash into a freaking planet or come anal probe a red-neck in Kentucky is hopelessly absurd.

They've mastered FTL, they've mastered force fields or whatever it took to survive impacts with micro-meteors at Light+, they've managed to find one little marble, in an infinite velvet blanket, they're going to crash in the last .001 of the last 1% of the most difficult voyage humanity has ever conceived of? Then they come all this way, doodle some shit in a cornfield in Kansas, ass-probe some dude in Delaware, eviscerate some cows in Vermont, and go home. Wtf? Really? That's stupid.

That's like driving to your Aunt's house in California, and pulling into the drive way and breaking the flag off her mailbox and going back home.

Plus, we have nukes. Sure, there's a chance they have a star trek force field and nukes are so low tech they don't matter any more. But it's more likely their ship is made of metal or plastic and being caught in an airburst will rip it apart like any other physical structure we know of. Doesn't really sound like a risk worth taking, even to find out what happens when you sodomize the herdlings with a metal probe.

Maybe the whole thing is drunk teenagers, from Alpha Centauri? Like a frat hazing. They dodge the ICBM radar, swoop down, seize a redneck and drag him up into their saucer amidst homoerotic/in-group social status building shoulder punching and man-hugging and then fire up the alien beer-bong and do keg (?saucer?) stands and dissect the terran.

K.

I love you. This cracked me up.

K.

Playing the Assassin's Creed series lately really brought home to me how MMO's are basically just MUDs.

Sure they have pretty graphics, but even the most sophisticated don't take the basic step of letting you have some body-control, like AC does.

In effect, in any kind of chat or roleplay or whatever, even in some of the MMO's in combat, it's just a MUD.

Text scrolls by, and all the sparkly effects and 17mp on-the-fly rendered graphics are just a frame to house the same old text game that geeks have been doing since the mid-70s.

There doesn't seem to be any real interest in expanding beyond the basic MUD paradigm, grind, grind, grind.

Assassin's Creed doesn't take it nearly far enough, but letting you have control of your arms/legs/etc is at least 1% of a step toward where the technology needs to go before it expands beyond what you could do with Pueblo and a MUD 20 years ago. Which is connect graphics (and/or HTML) to text.

I'm really surprised that there's such potential here, and MMO's have really been around for 10 years, solidly now. And have created entire new disciplines of economy, social science, etc. But there's really nothing being done to expand the scope of what you can do with them.

I just see such potential in this technology, and I guess it is disappointing to see it stagnate and to find out that once you filter out all the hype and advertising it's just a MUD. Under the hood, there's nothing. Dunno.

K.

Remember kids, you can't break a few eggs without making an omelet.

K.

Thanks. This is one of the best answers I've ever seen on here. It should have been moderated much higher. It still seems like photo-realistic textures, or the textures from a photograph, could be used. And...by...being better/more realistic they'd be visually superior to latex-sheen looking CGI. Without 'costing' any more resources than generating that flat shiny plastic look that CGI has (up until the last year or two anyway.)

K.

Okay, so this is slightly off-topic, but something I've always wondered about.

I can take a 12megapixel picture. And reduce it down to a 12k gif. Or 120k or whatever the compression results are.

At that point, it's just a .gif. (or .jpg or whatever). The computer doesn't know it's any different than a .gif I created in MSPaint, right?

So if I open GameMaker 7, and use that photo as one of the frames in my character's animation. By repetition, I could create a character moving and walking frame by frame.

Right? What's wrong with this?

I understand that on-the-fly rendering is nice. And that the goal is to get a computer to generate a 'real' picture. But. The difference between a 'great' game and an okay one is the graphics. I could (if I could draw) take a pencil and do one of those black and white sketches that almost looks like a photo, and scan it in and use it too.

What are the technical hurdles or barriers that prevent someone from just doing this?

K.