From The Onion:

My opinion? We need more games of this nature before we can be sure.

I loved Assassin’s Creed.  It was entertaining in its own way, the graphics were stunning, and though the storyline was slightly bland it was not boring.  I bought it on sale on Steam early last year.

I have been quite excited about the sequel.  It’s supposed to come out on the PC next month (it has been out on consoles for a few months already).  From all appearances, they’ve fixed all the problems with the original game’s gameplay, and refined and improved it, until what they had left was pure liquid awesome.

As it turns out, Ubisoft has decided on adding something else to the game: a horrendously draconian DRM scheme.  In order to play Assassin’s Creed 2, you must be online at all times.

What’s worse, if your internet connection drops at any time, for any reason, your game pauses until the connection is restored.  When this happens, Assassin’s Creed 2 will resume at your last checkpoint, which could be anywhere from five seconds ago to five minutes ago (if its checkpoints are spaced anything like the original).

Five minutes might not seem like a big deal.  But what if your connection is flaky?  What if you’re on a weak-signal wireless connection?  It could happen every five minutes.

What if you just don’t have an internet connection for whatever reason?  What if your ISP decides to shut down your connection for maintenance, or reset your modem remotely, or any number of other things that ISPs like to do which interrupt your connection?

It gets worse.  If Ubisoft’s servers go offline, you can’t play.  What’s more, if they go out of business entirely, you can’t play ever again.

And all this for a single-player game.

There is absolutely no reason for them to be informed of every moment I spend playing their game.  And even if they do want to know for some reason, the game could simply cache data until the connection comes back, and allow you to continue playing uninterrupted.

Anyway, I really, really hate invasive DRM, and this rates an 8 out of 10 on the “Invasive DRM” scale.  The only way it could be worse is if they installed CD-ROM-checking drivers even if you buy a digital copy.  (Other games are guilty of that.)

As a result, I’ll be boycotting Assassin’s Creed 2 — a game I was really looking forward to playing, at full purchase price — until such a time as they remove these measures.

Last time I wrote about global warming, I said this:

I won’t claim the climate isn’t changing.  That much is obvious.  But I have yet to see anyone show that we’re causing it.  What’s more, I have yet to see anyone show that the climate would stop changing if we (magically) completely eliminated pollution tomorrow – and there’s certainly practically no evidence that we can actually reverse it.

As it turns out, I was wrong; the climate isn’t really changing.

I suspect some of you are staring at your screen with your jaw on the floor.  Allow me to elaborate.  You know the CRU?  The group which was at the forefront of the pro-Anthropogenic-Global-Warming movement?  The group whose e-mails were leaked, displaying their scientific misconduct to the world?

Their director, Phil Jones, has temporarily resigned from his position while the whole thing is investigated.  What’s more, he has publicly admitted that not only is global warming not caused by man, but nothing significant is happening!

But don’t take my word for it.  In his interview with the BBC, he admits that since 1995 there has been no statistically significant planetary warming.  He goes on to quibble over “almost significant” and “over longer periods of time”, in an effort to still support his pro-AGW stance, but then he says this:

Of course, if the [Medieval Warming Period] was shown to be global in extent and as warm or warmer than today (based on an equivalent coverage over the NH and SH) then obviously the late-20th century warmth would not be unprecedented.

Forbes.com points out that “A Nature study last year showed water temperatures in the Indonesia area were the same in medieval times as they are today.”

In other words, there is, in fact, evidence that the MWP was just as warm as we see things today, which means our current warmth is not unprecedented.

Why does this all this matter?  Well, people who think global warming is man-made always point to greenhouse gases as the cause.  Since 1995, we’ve increased our yearly GHG production by 26%; however, this has had no effect on planetary temperatures.

So if greenhouse gases don’t actually affect the planet’s temperature, and if there have been similar warm periods in the past, then what evidence remains to support AGW?

Jones also states something else:

It would be supposition on my behalf to know whether all scientists who say the debate is over are saying that for the same reason. I don’t believe the vast majority of climate scientists think this. This is not my view.

The director of the Climate Research Unit believes the debate is not over.  How then can Gibbs, the White House press secretary, make the statement he made back in December?

… on the order of several *thousand* scientists have come, uh, to the conclusion that, uh, climate change is happening.  Uh, I don’t think that’s, uh, anything that is quite frankly, among most people, in dispute anymore.

Even the CRU didn’t really know whether climate change is happening, or whether it’s man-caused.  (If they were sure, there would have been no reason to engage in all the scientific misconduct they did.)

I, for one, am uncomfortable making policies based on such controversial opinions.

There are plenty of reasons to reduce pollution, so it’s complete and utter nonsense to base any pollution-reducing measures on whether global warming is happening (or even on whether it’s our fault).  (Here I’m referring to the Copenhagen conference, whose stated goal is, according to Gibbs, to “stop and reverse climate change”.)

I already wrote briefly about Star Trek Online during its open beta period.  Back then I promised I’d write a Let’s Play series using Star Trek Online; beginning with this post, I am going to attempt to do so.  I’ll post one per week, if all goes well.

The majority of everything I write after this paragraph will be from my character’s point of view; if I have something to say I’ll set it off somehow so you know it’s me, rather than my character.  All of the missions I describe will be real, but my characterizations of various… characters… is usually completely fictional – after all, nobody wants to read a literal account of the game.  So, with no further ado, let’s play

The year is 2409.  The Federation and the Klingon Empire are at war, the Romulan homeworld has been destroyed, the Cardassian sector is in turmoil in the aftermath of the Dominion War, and… oh  yeah.

The Borg are attacking.

I’m Ensign Jason O’Malley, a recent graduate of the Starfleet Academy of Engineering.  Welcome to the mess hall of the U.S.S. Innovation.  I’m off duty, despite the Borg attack, which suits me just fine.  It has given me time to tweak my phaser.  That’s basically how I spend my free time… I’m always fiddling with one thing or another.  Last night I improved the efficiency of the food replicator in my quarters by twenty percent, and there aren’t any really bad side effects.  Unless you ask for banana pancakes.  Please don’t ask my food replicator for banana pancakes.  Or anything made with bananas, really.

But other than that, it’s perfect.  Just like this phaser here – it works perfectly.  I’ve only made minor modifications.  At any rate, it doesn’t matter.  I won’t get a chance to use it.  I’m the most junior officer on board, so it’s not like they’re going to ask me to go on any away missions or anything, and the Borg probably won’t beam on board to attack us.  Why would they?  That cube there is a thousand times the size of our little ship.

(more…)

There has been a lot of nerd rage and fanboyism on both sides of the “is the iPad actually interesting” debate.  Of course, that means I’m going to subject you to my opinions on it. So, without further ado…

I have always had a love-hate relationship with Apple’s products.  They’re generally shiny and easy-ish to use, but they aren’t really meant for half of my computer usage (gaming), and it’s much cheaper to just build my own desktop myself.  Their “PC vs Mac” commercials anger me.  I’m very much against intrusive DRM.  All told, I’m simply not in their target demographic.

… Then I got an iPhone.  It’s a gorgeous little device.  The interface is intuitive and responsive.  The built-in apps are slick.  The App Store, while technically DRM-laden, does not intrude with its DRM (as I only own the one Apple device, and even so, apps are transferable to other Apple devices).  The App Store itself is extremely convenient.  It’s handy having an internet connection available on-the-go.

So what does that all mean with respect to the iPad?  Probably nothing.  I still don’t like Apple any better than I did before I got my iPhone… but they do make sleek products.

A lot of people are saying that the iPad is merely a giant iPod Touch.  Others are outraged at the implication, and go out of their way to point out every single minute difference in an attempt to show that the two devices are completely different.  The intent of this post is to show that I fall somewhere in between those two extremes, and to explain why my opinion falls there.

The first question to get out of the way is, “How is the iPad similar to the iPod Touch?”  Here is a short list of the similarities I see:

• The iPad’s look and feel was deliberately designed to be similar to the iPod Touch and iPhone, both in software and hardware.
• The iPad’s operating system is largely identical to that of the iPod Touch and iPhone; it merely contains some additional functionality suitable for a device its size.
• The iPad is capable of running unmodified iPod Touch and iPhone apps straight from the App Store.

You could, in effect, use the iPad as nothing more than a giant iPod Touch, and you would see virtually no change in usage.

Let’s pretend for a moment that we want to make a device that is, literally, little more than a giant iPod Touch.  We take the existing device, and enlarge it to 10″ diagonal.  We upgrade the internal hardware appropriately for its new size, and we redesign the UI to take advantage of the additional screen space.  (We’ll say that these upgrades merely make it faster, rather than adding new features, so that it really is just a large iPod Touch.  Upgrading from 802.11g to 802.11n would fall within the scope of these changes, since no new functionality is obtained, but adding a built-in SD card slot would not.)  Let’s call this hypothetical device the iGiant.

The question now becomes, how is the iPad different from the iGiant?  (Stating the question in this matter actually addresses the crux of the issue – it lets us see whether the iPad is in fact an innovative device, or whether it is simply a giant iPod Touch with some UI polish.)  I’m going to further narrow down the question by explicitly discussing the wifi-only iPad, since I do not intend to purchase a 3G-enabled iPad.

So let’s see if we can figure out the differences here between the iPad and the iGiant.  UI differences are irrelevant, as the iGiant would, hypothetically, make virtually all the same UI upgrades.  Let’s see if we can list any features of the iPad that wouldn’t be on the iGiant:

• Increased bluetooth capabilities.  The iPhone and iPod Touch are only capable of pairing with headsets or with other iP* devices, whereas the iPad is capable of also pairing with keyboards and, theoretically, other bluetooth devices, though a mouse is not supported.
• Video output capabilities.  The iPad is capable of connecting to an external display.  Natively, the iPad will only mirror its display onto the external one, but the SDK allows for using the external display as a *second* display, which opens interesting possibilities for using the iPad as a control panel for whatever is being displayed on the external monitor.
• Local file storage.  This makes it far easier to use the iPad as a writing tool.  While it would technically be possible to do word processing on the iGiant, its lack of local file storage would make the prospect cumbersome at best.  This can be seen in existing iPhone and iPod Touch apps (mostly for jailbroken phones) which attempt to enable local file storage by using the app’s configuration storage as file storage.
• iBooks.  The iPad will come with an integrated eBook store, which presumably will not be available for iPhones and iPod Touches.  Some people will find the iPad’s screen to be better for reading than (for example) the Kindle, but that’s mostly personal preference, but the iPad will also enable additional content in eBooks like color pictures and video, which could make for some very interesting educational eBooks.
• A few hardware peripherals.  The camera adapter is an interesting addition, allowing you to use your iPad as a photo organizer (the iPod Touch can’t do this without using your computer as an intermediary), and the same goes for the SD card adapter.  The keyboard dock is also interesting.

I can’t think of anything else, really, and Apple’s tech specs on their iPad page don’t give me any other ideas.

So based on this list, I would conclude the iPad is more than just an iGiant, but not by much.  Edit: You might be wondering why I dismiss the features I’ve listed as “not much”.  The reason is that the iPad doesn’t do multitasking, making real desktop-class usage impossible, and that in my opinion disqualifies it from being “completely different” from the iPod Touch.

Does this mean the iPad isn’t an interesting device?  Hardly; the larger touchscreen is by itself significant.  People have innovated quite a bit with the smaller touchscreens on the iP* devices we already have; I imagine we’ll see even more creativity when people get their hands on a larger interactive area.

All in all, I think the iPad is an interesting and tantalizing move by Apple, and it does have a lot of potential as a platform, but I don’t think it’s anywhere near the world-shaking innovation some fanboys seem to think it is.

Do I plan to get an iPad?  Probably.  The cheapest one.  It will be fun to play with, and I have some interesting ideas for apps that will be fun to tinker with even if I never sell them.