Parrots and some other birds (like corvids) are ludicrously intelligent for their size and brain size. They can solve puzzles, use tools, copy speech and do all sorts of things that we usually associate with big-brained higher mammals.
This looks like we're finally getting some sense of how birds' intelligence works from a neuroevolutionary sense.
Three games' approaches to death come to mind immediately:
First, Braid, where your character can die in the usual way for a 2D platformer, killed by monsters or falling in holes. But the game lets you manipulate time, so the answer to death is just to rewind a few seconds while the music plays backwards and you come back to life.
Second, the original Monkey Island. Unlike the Sierra click puzzlers of the time (King's Quest etc) you couldn't die. But if you stood at the edge of the cliff, you fell off and got a Sierra-style Game Over screen... for a few seconds. Then you bounced back up on a 'rubber tree'.
Finally, there's the original ZX Spectrum isometric platformer version of Batman. In that game, if you died in a particularly frustrating way or at the same puzzle repeatedly, the game would sometimes give you a "Dog's life", an extra life as a consolation prize.
The Braid mechanic was great for that kind of game. Hopefully more games will use it. IIRC, you could also speed forward again if you did that quickly enough after rewinding and it was a way to try to figure out what incorrect assumptions you might be making on some of the harder levels.
I really liked how checkpoints are presented in Prince of Persia: Sands of Time (at least, not sure about others in that series). It introduces the game as retelling of a story and if you mess up enough to "die", the main character says "no, no, that's not how it went" and then you continue from the last checkpoint.
I have some faint kind of an impression that I've once played (?) some game (?), where if your character died, it woke up in some kind of "netherworld", and there was also something to do there. (I seem to recall being hugely surprised and impressed by this course of events.) Does this trigger some more concrete memories about particular name of a game to anyone here?
I don't think so, but I'm not sure. I didn't play Prey; but then there's some chance I could have watched some playthrough on Youtube, and only see that happening to someone else. Don't know.
Back in the day, when Netflix was the most successful DVD rental company, people used to point out that Netflix sent more Gigabytes of data every day as DVDs in the mail than the whole Internet transmitted in a day. Netflix was given as an example of how the Internet couldn't compete with physical delivery. Ironic.
I don't live in the US, so I Don't know, but as far as I understand, DVD.com can legally offer essentially every title that exists. This is because in the US, if you own a disc, you can rent it to someone.
If true, this is awesome and so much better (for me) than any streaming service.
Yeah, that definitely depends on your preferred method of consuming movies and TV.
If you're the sort of person who decides they really want to watch Film XYZ and is happy to wait a few days for it, DVDs are perfect.
On the other hand, some people watch TV to fill an hour or two here and there on an ad hoc basis. If your approach is "I feel like vegging out now, so let's flip through the channels and see what's on", the instantaneous nature of streaming is perfect because you don't have to plan ahead to watch the things you're interested in.
Legal grey area; iirc MP3.com operated on a similar premise and got burned to the ground. I believe there was also a company that had racks of video or dvd players and would stream the movie over the internet, claiming similar protections.
Of course, in a nutshell Netflix is doing the same, only legally. Those companies were too early and too dodgy.
There's a few others that skirted around similar laws as well, like Aereo which was shut down for rebroadcasting OTA signals using customer rented antennas.
Right. This presumably is also why library e-book collections contain a finite number of "copies" (licenses) of each book, and if all those copies are checked out, anyone else who wants the book is put on a waiting list. They're allowed to loan the copies they've paid for already, but not to make additional copies.
I had no idea they rebranded it as DVD.com. I remember a few years ago when they tried to rebrand it as Qwikster and it was an enormous failure. I guess they pulled it off this time by not really marketing it.
The Qwikster thing wasn't as much of a failure as the "we're going to split this service you like in two raising the price of your current plan 1.8x in order to save you money" messaging.
How much of this is to hide proprietary information, and how much is because no one person actually understands the bigger picture enough to write about it?
Ah, the heady days of the first Dot Com bubble. I remember it well.
This was a period when one of the biggest drags on the development of e-commerce and monatizing Internet businesses was the absence of a good micro-payment solution. PayPal hadn't really taken off yet, App Stores weren't a thing, and everyone was scrabbling around for a way to enable cost-effective small payments that didn't have prohibitive transaction fees. Plus the advertising infrastructure that Google enables didn't exist, so micropayments for doing things online made a sort of sense.
Beenz was one option for this that I vaguely remember. I think I had an account, though I never spent any Beenz on anything. e-Gold was another popular option.
I'm not sure the analogy with Bitcoin and crypto really holds. Beenz was trying to solve a particular problem, and became obsolete when that problem was solved more elegantly by PayPal, Amazon and the credit card vendors. Bitcoin is trying to solve the 'problem' of state-backed inflationary fiat currencies. It might fail in its own terms but fiat currencies aren't changing in response to it.
That said, clearly most of the crypocurrencies and ICOs out there are somewhere between follies and scams. Almost all will fail, but they'll fail because they're largely dumb and they suck and they aren't solving a problem at all.
After reading the article I learned that Beenz had a bit more capitalist greed to it than I thought at the time. It was never quite there yet, always chicken and egg. I was notionally in favour of it but I was not an early adopter. Coverage in the press was generous but it did not seem they had fallen for the hype, there was something genuine about it. We also did not realise micropayments were not going to solve everything, eventually 'free' ads to stalk you everywhere became the 'solution'.
If it was brought back today I would endorse it a lot more than those silly ponzi-coins that people get so excited about.
I say ponzi-coins pejoratively for everything cryptocurrency related, and I do think that there does need to be some campaigning against them. A little bit of idle speculation here and there by people wanting to get rich with a bit of play money does encourage those people that skim off from the rest of society with their ponzi-coin scheming.
Trade makes the world happen and makes us human rather than Neanderthals, they died out because they did not trade. Beenz may have had get rich quick dreams but the ethos was there, to enable publishers to get money for articles and for people to buy/sell stuff.
The problem I am having with ponzi-coins is that there is none of that, not even a veneer of wanting to make the world a better place. An army of people now exist that just have nothing better to do than to make everyone else bag holders of their blockchain bamboozle voodoo and I think they need to have their oxygen supply cut off. Ponzi coins have done nothing for the public good. Does this make Visa/Mastercard and the banks 'better'? Nope, but just like Beenz was not the right solution neither are these ponzi coins.
> The problem I am having with ponzi-coins is that there is none of that, not even a veneer of wanting to make the world a better place.
My experience with the Bitcoin community goes back to 2012-3, when they were very much Libertarian Utopians trying to make the world a better place (at least their concept of a better place!). Those people still exist, though they've been drowned out a bit by the "Lambo" goldrush types.
Of course, the VAST majority of scamcoins are just about getting rich and have no idealists at all, just the conmen and the conned.
Fascinating. I love constrained writing and constrained poetry.
No If-statements in code reminds me a bit of the E-Prime movement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime) which was about removing the verb 'to be' and all its variants like 'is', 'was' etc from English language. Supposedly it made English easier to understand and encouraged clarity and precision.
Why aren't tools like this just available from the cloud provider? I get the sense serverless is really useful but it's developed so fast that it's suffering from a lack of native tools.
This looks like we're finally getting some sense of how birds' intelligence works from a neuroevolutionary sense.