Interesting Links for 12-12-2011

[andrewducker]

• First Private Spaceship Flight to the ISS now has a date.
  (tags: space iss Spacex )
• Motorola secures Europe-wide sales ban on iPhone, iPad - oh for goodness sake.
  (tags: patents germany law europe apple iphone motorola )
• This Banana Alien Might Have Ascorbic Acid for Blood
  (tags: banana alien sculpture awesome )
• The Evolution of Fictional Characters
  (tags: Character Comics tv comic )
• If Tarot Cards Actually Predicted the Future
  (tags: funny tarot webcomic )
• D&D;: More accurate than you think
  (tags: roleplaying dnd reality )
• Problems with anti-Mormons and anti-Adulterers - will the demographics hurt the Republicans?
  (tags: republicans voting usa )
• 57% of people thought that David Cameron was right to use the veto, with 14% disagreeing and 29% don’t know.
  (tags: europe uk opinion )
• Alternative Engineering - the future of architecture!
  (tags: architecture Alternative funny satire )
• Why Spotify can never be profitable: The secret demands of record labels
  (tags: spotify music business )
• AdBlock Plus to allow "acceptable" ads by default soon. I'm actually in favour of this.
  (tags: advertising adblock firefox )

Comments

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'd be in favour of the adblock plus thing too I think.

[andrewducker]

I don't mind well-targeted ads that don't cover things up, move, play music, etc.

Text-only ads that offer me things I might actually find useful are both potentially good _and_ help the websites I'm visiting. I'm just fine with that :->

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

Apart from the moving flashing musical ones, the other ones I dislike strongly are those websites that cover up like, 30% and upwards of their page in adverts, so it becomes increasingly difficult to read the article or whatnot.

Or the pop-ups. I have a seething hatred of pop-ups.

It strikes me as similiar to the issue Channel 4 seem to have. As they squeeze in ever more intrusive ad breaks into programs, more and more people decide to watch their programs via other methods. Revenue falls. So they react by shoving in more and more ads.

[andrewducker]

Yeah - I got Adblock todeal with things like that, and make the internet readable again (see also things like "Readability").

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

Websites must be desperate I guess. I've always wondered at the revenue streams.

[fearmeforiampink]

I use Opera's integrated adblocker for that sort of thing; it's almost certainly not as good as AdBlock, but it allows me to get rid of the big, the flashing and the distracting, fairly effectively.

The thing I'm currently finding most annoying ad-wise are the ads on The Daily Show on Comedy Central; when I first started watching it there, possibly because I didn't allow the ads bit of the flash to save any data to my computer, it didn't show me any ads. Now it shows me the same two every ad break (currently Captain America and Harold and Kumar). I mute it and do other stuff, but it's rather annoying and I don't know if it'd be possible to block it with adblock without blocking the show itself.

[0olong.livejournal.com]

Just wanted to chime in on this too. I think it's a bad thing that web sites have to rely on ads for money, but there you have it. In the absence of a better revenue model, I'd much rather see unobtrusive ads than block everything indiscriminately - but I'd much rather block everything than EVER have ads obscuring what I'm trying to read, or even just dancing in my peripheral vision.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that sounds really good. I was recently reminded that adverts:

* That aren't incredibly offensive
* That aren't incredibly intrusive
* That don't actively hinder my seeing whatever it is I'm trying to see
* That aren't deceptive
* That are for a product I might someday, ever, under some circumstances, care about in any way whatsoever
* That provide some, any, information about the product (for some products "I exist" is enough, for others, not)
* That aren't repeated so often they start to make me foam at the mouth.

I actually quite enjoy. Eg. Adverts for other webcomics on webcomic homepages, adverts for books, etc. It's just that almost all adverts I see seem to fail _most_ of the above criteria.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

Aye, I can remember in days per-ad-block, I did used to click on the occasional banner ad if it looked interesting. But then I was just driven to ad-block, out of sheer bloody irritation. Particularly the porn ads that appear on some image-hosts.

[del-c.livejournal.com]

I don't have Adblock per se, but the Opera equivalent, and I never block ads that aren't moving. They don't bother me, I've spent a lifetime reading paper magazines with ads in. I always block ads that move, because I can't concentrate on the editorial content I'm trying to read if I don't block. If advertisers only understood this simple truth, they'd stop making their adverts move.

I feel the Harry Potter/Minority Report future, where stuff moves on reading matter, could only be imagined by people who don't get the idea of reading.

[andrewducker]

I don't mind videos embedded in news reports, so long as I have control over when they animate. Animating on opening is clearly an abomination.

[alextfish.livejournal.com]

Likewise. I used to have Adblock installed but with no sync list, only blocking ads that I specifically told it to. Any time anything flashed or moved, it got blocked, and certain static images that annoyed me I'd block, but I was happy with text ads and most static image ads. Certain hosting sites that hosted lots of animated images would get a blanket block, and obviously I have Flashblock so no flash gets to do anything unless I say so.

Net result: the ad-supported sites that I visit still get their ads, and occasionally I'd even click on some that were interesting; but the irritating flashy animating things died and stayed dead. It was great.

Then Adblock removed the workflow that made that easy to do. (They used to have an item on the right-click menu for any image saying "Adblock this image", but now that either doesn't exist or is far harder to use in that way.) So I've given up and moved to Chrome, and I still have Flashblock but I just put up with the occasional animated image. (If there's one that really irritates me, there's always the "Inspect element" -> DEL key option, to outright remove it from the HTML source.)

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

Hmmmm... on Friday I was concerned about our new German overlords.

But, if they are going to fuck with Apple, I have a newfound respect for them.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I remember recently thinking that for all the talk of "space-age technology" we used to have, now it might have been most apt to describe the space age as in the past. SpaceX fills me with at least a little optimism that some people are still trying.

I'm interested in the description of it as a successful public-private partnership. That definitely seems to be the case: probably no-one would have gone to space if the United States and Russian governments hadn't gone it first, and created a vast body of experience. But conversely, NASA was getting moribund, and having someone drive the creation of new rockets designed somewhat practically seems (judgement pending) to have been necessary.

But the necessary prerequisites seem to be (a) one man with a vision (b) a lot of people with extensive experience happy to get onboard (c) from somewhere, ridiculous amounts of funding. (Are people investing in SpaceX because they think it's commercially viable, they expected to recoup there profits some way other than success of the company, or because the amount of money isn't actually that much for investors and it's worth gambling, or because they think it's cool and _might_ work and want to support it?) I'm not sure if this is a vindication of our current system of "government funds pie-in-the-sky research, later free enterprise takes over when it starts to be viable" or is a "it worked despite the current mess of a system, what would work better?"

[andrewducker]

Have an awesome article on SpaceX that goes into some of the detail behind this:
http://www.airspacemag.com/space-exploration/Visionary-Launchers-Employees.html

(Posted a couple of weeks ago, but very good)

I do think that getting the human race into space in the first place was such a big job that it required governments, and SpaceX is using a lot of the things learned during that original exploration. But everything I read about the shuttle tells me that it was a bad decision to make it the way we did.

[simont]

I was disappointed by "The Evolution of Fictional Characters" turning out to be a cartoon parodying visual changes. I was hoping for a thoughtful essay on the gradual change in characters' personalities and natures over long-running series, along the lines of the case studies of Star Trek races in the essay "Brain Bugs" but widening its focus to look at fiction in general rather than Star Trek (or any other specific work) in particular.

(I think the thing I disagree with most in the brain-bugs essay is the comment that simplification of a once-complex character or race into a one-note parody is a consequence of a game of Chinese whispers between successive writers working in the same canon. To me, the clear counterexample is Rincewind, who suffered exactly the same fate in spite of having the single guiding mind of Pratchett in charge of him throughout – he started off as a complex and interesting main character, whose surface layers were a mix of character flaws such as cowardice, greed and largely unjustified pride in his wizardhood but if pushed too far his underlying core of strength and conscience would be revealed, but in later books he became more and more one-dimensional until he was simply The Character Who Always Runs Away From Everything.)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm sure character decay is excacerbated by multiple successive writers, but it definitely happens all over the place. (Conversely, the opposite also happens, an originally one-note character developing facets -- again I don't know if that may be helped or hindered or both by multiple writers.)

[andrewducker]

I can't read the article from here, but I agree that it's not as simple as the message being lost between writers. I got very fed up with Pratchett forgetting that the Wizards of Unseen University were more than a collection of annoying tics, and had a modicum of personality once upon a time.

I think there's a general principle of refinement that goes on, where people remember the character's distinguishing characteristics and everything else fades into the background. Fighting against that can be really hard. See, for instance, treatment of Xander in Buffy, who never manages to break out of his original role.

This is actually highlighted in the strip I linked to by The Sitcom Character.

[simont]

Yes, I agree that the UU wizards were more fun in the old days. The personality quirks of a collection of elderly dons were a much richer source of surreal comedy when combined with the cut-throat environment of the old-style UU, in which a lovable doddering character would suddenly turn round and be totally badass in the face of a would-be assassin. After Ridcully showed up and basically put a stop to the backstabbing, they had nothing left but the quirks, and ended up just shuffling around being collectively confused.

(And yes, the Sitcom Character did strike me as being a close visual analogue of the gradual-oversimplification trope.)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

See, for instance, treatment of Xander in Buffy, who never manages to break out of his original role.

Indeed. Although to be fair to Xander, the character does start off pretty simple, and makes several efforts to grow, but always ends up falling back into the inneffectual comic most of the time. So I agree the character gets short shrift, but at least it's a "failure to grow from 2D while other characters do" rather than "started interesting but became self parody".

I think it's that the show always needed a comic relief, and couldn't find a way to make Xander consistently competent and still interesting, so he ended up always being a klutz (despite isolated moments of competence).

[simont]

And I recommend the Brain Bugs article, if you can read it at a later stage. My Star Trek knowledge is too limited to actually check all the facts in the detailed dissection of the Klingons and Ferengi and so on, but I definitely approve of the later part where he has a go at more general SF tropes such as spaceships being powered by fusion reactors that blow the whole ship up at the drop of a hat.

(Paraphrased: we've tried to build fusion reactors, and it's incredibly hard, and the reason why it's hard is because it's very difficult to persuade stuff to start fusing in the first place or to keep it doing so once it's started. So why on earth would you expect a fusion reactor to even be able to suffer a runaway acceleration of the reaction culminating in explosion, let alone have that as its most common failure mode? Surely you would expect fusion reactors, should we ever get one working at all, to be devices which at the slightest provocation simply stop, and refuse to start again, ever.)

[andrewducker]

Aaah. I simply do not expect the physics in a show like Star Trek to map onto the real universe in any meaningful manner. I don't expect it from most SF novels either, unless they explicitly aim for that. I grew up with the likes of Lensman, and am quite happy with people turning solar systems into massive laser-death-weaponry because it sounds cool, without working out the physics behind it.)

(I will read the article though)

[simont]

Sure, there's nothing wrong with silly physics done on purpose for the sake of coolness or plot dynamic. The article's complaint is that a lot of these things aren't done on purpose any more: they've become unquestioned traditions of SF-in-general, and now ships' fusion reactors blow up all the time not because a particular show has decided to adopt a counterfactual premise for the sake of the plot but just because that's what writers in general think fusion reactors do – they probably don't even realise it's a counterfactual premise.

[andrewducker]

Aaah, gotcha.

I shall hold fire until I've read the piece!

D&D;: More accurate than you think

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I think I saw this before somewhere, but I can't remember where, or if the discussion came to any conclusion.

I thought it was a good point that for many purposes DnD 3.5 worked pretty well, and that people are silly to complain about things that look ridiculous but changing them would be impossible without making the game an impossibly detailed simulation, or unfun. But I thought he was waaaay too optimistic to think that it _usually_ worked like that.

I think he's right that for many fantasy epics and myths, the "larger than life, characters" or even "demigod characters" are best mapped as levbel 4/5. Enough to be superhuman by usual standards, but not enough to reshape the world with their mind. That's one big misconception.

And I'm sure that many every day tasks work with the stats given in the rules. And many more do if you take the rules with a pinch of common sense.

But I still think the system as written will end up having at least as many common tasks which _don't_ match the real world, partly because there's a limit to how much effort the designers could do, and partly because the basic assumption of the rules that everything fits into "a feat that lets you do it automatically" or a "take 10" or "a skill based on skill ranks and a stat with a normal distribution" isn't true in the real world, so there will always be cases where an appropriate DC for one character just doesn't work for another, and the DM won't be able to automatically improvise a non-problematic alternative.

Which isn't a knock to DnD: many game systems are better for many things, but for what DnD does, it's very good at it, and people should just enjoy what it does, without expecting it to model "housecat vs average human fight" or "falling" realistically. So it's better than many people think, but not, I think, as good as that article hoped :)

Re: D&D;: More accurate than you think

[spacelem.livejournal.com]

Justin Alexander is pretty switched on with these sorts of articles, and has quite a few like this on his site. I'm pretty sure that if you saw it somewhere else, it was just a reposting.

I think this article might have been partly responsible for inspiring E6, a mod for D&D 3e where you cap out at level 6, although you still gain access to feats as you gain XP. It's pretty popular, and aims to keep 3e in the sweet spot where the balance lines up, the complexity isn't too great, and characters are still within the realms of reality.

Note that the housecat vs commoner fight is a consequence of course granularity and assuming the baseline very close to one. Also, falling is not well handled by HP (which are really only a resource to use as a pacing mechanism), and would be much better solved with a Fort save (or save vs breath weapon in earlier editions -- probably, there is some logic which is totally obvious provided someone spends a lot of time explaining it to you :P )

Re: D&D;: More accurate than you think

[andrewducker]

Thanks for the link to e6, I hadn't encountered it before.

Re: D&D;: More accurate than you think

[spacelem.livejournal.com]

If you want an actual link, then here's one from ENWorld. I'm not sure if there is a main site for E6, but a quick search for "E6 - the game inside D&D" will find a lot of good links.

[hano.livejournal.com]

for some reason I parsed that first link as 'First Pirate Spaceship Flight To The ISS Now Has A Date.'
Maybe I've been playing Eve too much...

[andrewducker]

I do look forward to them preparing to repel boarders...

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

I would be fine with advertising if it was actually targeted, relevant and interesting.

Facebook have access to more information about me and my tastes other than any single organisation other than my bank and at no point did I see an advert on facebook worth even a second glance to me.

[martling.livejournal.com]

Motorola secures Europe-wide sales ban on iPhone, iPad - oh for goodness sake.

"Oh for goodness sake?"

Would you have the same reaction if it was Apple securing a sales ban on Motorola products?

What if it were Apple, or indeed Motorola, securing a sales ban on products made by some small company you'd never heard of?

[andrewducker]

Yup, same reaction in all cases. I despise pretty much all patents nowadays.