Slashdot Mirror

I actually pity you, that you imagine that a mere politician has the power to restrain progress for any great length of time.

This is exactly the case, 100%. Trump sold a bill of goods saying he'll bring jobs back and people bought it. There's actually a really great article over at Cracked about Trump's popularity. The TL;DR summary is that "Make America Great Again" means "bring back the manufacturing jobs", not necessarily "let's have racism again". At least that's the theory, anyways.

But those jobs are gone and not coming back, no matter what Trump does. Or if Hillary or Bernie or Stein or Vermin Supreme or anyone else who happened to win would be able to do. Progress isn't partisan and doesn't care who the President is.

Trump's "clean coal" bit? Even if Congress rubber stamps everything he proposes, the coal industry is still doomed, jobs wise. The coal industry is set to drop half its workforce through automation over the next 10 years. That's not theoretical either. The tech is already there. Coal industry will drop 300,000 jobs at least over the next decade, and nothing can stop it. If some crazy "mandatory-buggy-whip-for-each-automobile" type law gets passed here mandating mines can't use robots - still doomed. All that would do is drive up the price of our coal as the rest of the world digs it up cheaper and cheaper.

Best thing we can do is accept it and move on. And plan for it. You're right - people should be *far* more worried about robots than the Chinese. Nobody is talking about how the coal industry is set to drop those 300,000 jobs. Everyone in the rural areas are all aglow with Trump getting elected. They're about to be sorely disappointed though when the robots take over those jobs. Don't think I'm bashing Trump there either - I'm not. Again, it'll happen no matter who the President is. It's just that with Trump he promised to fix things, and he can't. It'll be more bitter.

And the worst is yet to come. Nobody is talking about Google's self-driving car and what stands to happen when that gets perfected. We have 3,500,000 truck drivers employed in the USA. It's the most common profession today, truck driver. And pretty soon most of those people will be unemployed too. It absolutely will happen. What then?

We need to focus more on the future, what we know it will hold, and make our plans for it in the here-and-now.

And http://www.cracked.com/ ... Sadly two of the better news sources out there.

At any rate, as far as canada goes, right now I'm only staying because of familiy, which is mainly my mother, but I could easily see myself there someday, hopefully in the distant future. I am an engineer, so presumably I could eventually get admission.

I'm assuming you're an American, and I'm not a Canadian. Bearing that in mind...

I've noticed that a lot of Americans on the left seem to bring up Canada most often when they're dissatisfied with their own country. As if Canada only exists as a "liberal" utopia for your convenience, an escape route ready to welcome you when your own country gets too much, happy to be forgotten about when your flight of fancy about escaping there slips down the priority list once more.

It's almost as if you're not *actually* wanting to move there because you're interested in Canada and Canadian culture itself- as if all this says more about your implicit sense of entitlement that you'll fit into someone else's country you had no interest in except as a proxy for your own problems with America.

Say what you like about Cracked, but I found that this article from an actual Canadian somewhat crystallised this opinion and a whole lot more:-

Now, if you're [in a position of genuine threat] you'll find that Canada is a welcoming country. [..]

But for everyone else -- and I really apologize for how harsh this is going to be -- Canada is not your fucking safety school. If you drive across the border, there will not be a career magically waiting for you in the middle of an economic downturn. If you're a middle-class white guy and your first instinct is to abandon your country when you experience a setback, I'm not sure how you expect to ace a job interview here. "I was sad about my country so I decided to fall back on yours" is not a good answer to "What attracted you to this position?"

I spent a lot of time on social media during election night, because it was a great excuse to not work, and two things stuck out to me. I saw lots of Americans asking themselves how they could have gotten so out of touch with the world, and then several of my American friends with a history of making exhaustingly cliched maple syrup and igloo jokes asked me how my government worked. Because up until then, they had no clue and no interest. That's not an approach to life that helps you settle down in a new country -- it's the approach that got you into trouble in the country you're in now.

Because none of those past presidents were elected on a platform that actually threatened anybody's actual life and physical wellbeing, which now has happened.

Wait, I'm sorry, but I'm calling bullshit on this. And I voted for Clinton, and I'm disappointed that Trump won.

What SPECIFIC parts of Trump's platform "threatened anybody's actual life and physical well-being"?

When the people at the new president's victory party are chanting "We hate Jews, We hate Blacks, we will take out country back" - you fucking run

Neither your purple prose, nor your apparent inability to fact-check your sources, or even quote correctly, does your case any favors.

The chant was actually purported to go, "We hate Muslims, we hate Blacks, we want our great country back." And, of course, since somebody reported it on Twitter, it must be true, right?

Look, there's a great many things to dislike about our new President-elect and his policies, and a lot of things he intends to do that I will oppose as strongly as I'm able to do so. But making false and unsubstantiated claims to your little clique of liberal friends as some sort of shorthand for "I don't like Donald Trump" in some sort of bizarre attempt at self-consoling and telling yourselves that you're smarter and better than everybody else is *exactly* why Clinton lost this fucking election. She under-performend President Obama among minorities. She took her white working-class vote (the so-called 'uneducated whites' who flocked to Trump across the Rust Belt) for granted. And she got shellacked for her trouble. Keep behaving like this, and you'll simply guarantee a repeat of the same in 2020.

The people who supported Trump are not, by and large, "evil" people. Nor are they "stupid" people. They are struggling, they have been taken for granted, and when they listened for someone who was talking to them, about their problems - it was Trump telling them he'd bring back the manufacturing jobs, and fix their failing infrastructure, and lower their taxes, and pay attention to THEIR problems, too.

Please, go read this article and think about it for a few minutes. It's a brilliant piece of writing, and if you really think about it, you'll see some absolutely fantastic points that explain a major part of Trump's appeal. (Spoiler alert: it has very little to do with "we hate blacks and muslims.") Here's an excerpt:

Hey, remember when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans? Kind of weird that a big hurricane hundreds of miles across managed to snipe one specific city and avoid everything else. To watch the news (or the multiple movies and TV shows about it), you'd barely hear about how the storm utterly steamrolled rural Mississippi, killing 238 people and doing an astounding $125 billion in damage.

But who cares about those people, right? What's newsworthy about a bunch of toothless hillbillies crying over a flattened trailer? New Orleans is culturally important. It matters.

To those ignored, suffering people, Donald Trump is a brick chucked through the window of the elites. "Are you assholes listening now?"

The Democrats USED to also care about the poor and working class white people (see: Appalachian Regional Development Act, and their consistent support from unions over the years), but they've been taking them for granted for years now. What we saw on Tuesday was a middle finger from those people to the candidate and the party that simply assumed that "Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania are solidly blue, there's no need to do much campaigning there."

http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-one-talks-about

I'm not saying the author isn't pissing in his own pocket, but the last 2 democratic presidential terms have been a fucking disaster for the rural areas.

The "DNC liberals" actively threw away a gimme with Bernie, who had a massive point score over Trump, unlike SoS Clinton.
Obama didn't help the blacks, didn't help the poor and put drone killing into high gear. In his first year with a dem majority, he didn't pull his weight as promised.

What Hillary has been doing to the poor rural areas in Eastern Europe, Northern Africa and Mesopotamia doesn't bear speaking any more about.
She's not REALLY interested in the poor rural areas of America either, more in the rich, swanky corrupt corridors of America's stinking cities that host Sachs parties and other elite "important" matters. Hillary isn't a NYC boy, no. Make up your own suitable epithet, but she ain't no country girl neither.

Everyone, especially Liberals in Big Cities ... you need to read this.

http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-...

After you actually read that article, then we can have a proper discussion. Our view of "Our World" is distorted by our view of "our world". The people in other places that seem "weird" are only that way because ... we're weird ourselves. It is all a matter of perspective.

http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-...

Then that is a bet you've already lost. Stop projecting your failings on to others.

LOL at guy who thinks he knows all the laws.

http://www.cracked.com/article...

Wells Fargo management ordered employees to take the fall on this

These guys need to be strung up

If you decide to try number one (which you should) you may find this article quite insightful.

Relavent link: http://www.cracked.com/blog/th...

You shouldn't presume to speak for all of humanity.

YOU shouldn't, either. And don't start anthropomorphizing things, either -- they don't like that. Especially Gaia.

"One death is a tragedy. One million deaths is a statistic." -Kevin Federline

we'd repeal the DMCA

A complete repeal of the DMCA would include a repeal of 17 USC 512, the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act. This would take away the defense that allows sites that display user-uploaded-works, such as YouTube and Slashdot, to continue to operate without requiring editorial review of each post. Instead of forcing one comment off Slashdot, Scientology would have been able to close Slashdot entirely.

A complete repeal of the DMCA would also include a repeal of 17 USC 117(c). This would restore the dangerous precedent set in MAI v. Peak, which forbids independent repair shops to turn on a device that contains copyrighted firmware.

Or did you refer only to 17 USC 1201, the circumvention ban, and not its riders?

I think we've pretty much decided that the only thing we'll ever produce here is crappy super hero movies.

And even that bubble is due to burst by the end of this decade. Luis Prada explains.

I liked the cracked.com take on it which was written when the trailers for Jurassic World and the new Terminator movie came out. It pointed out six big mistakes that many CG-heavy movies make, and many times it's not just the effects shots that are to blame for why it looks unrealistic. Summarized:
6) Lack of visual restraint where you can make objects move in unrealistic ways when everything else in the movie obeys the laws of physics.
5) Color grading nightmares. Jurassic World had this dreary blue/grey sheen over every shot, digital or not. It made the whole movie look poor.
4) CGI was originally used as a last resort. Entire scenes weren't created CG, you had, say, close-ups of the T-Rex from Jurassic Park using animatronics, and that gave CG artists a baseline to match when lighting their digital creatures.
3) Most films forget a camera needs to exist. In wholly-digital shots, many directors feel the need to zip the virtual camera around in ways we couldn't possibly move -- and again, it just adds to sense of unrealism. I liked the Misty Mountains bridges/etc sequence from the first Jackson Hobbit movie as an example.
2) Uncanny Valley -- this can be triggered by miniatures as well. We also knew when CG didn't look quite right, so Jurassic Park did the smart thing by hiding most of it in the rain and dark. Some of the daytime outdoor scenes look terrible by today's standards, while the T-Rex rain attack still holds up.
1) I'm not sure the author really made his point well here, but it was something about how big effects sequences should have a build-up (first two Jurassic Park movies) and awe.

The problem is that this is likely to be a one-off response. If we started seeing a mass killing of police every time some unarmed citizen is offed by an officer, you would actually see some action. As it is right now, it's not enough of a problem for politicians to want to take on the police unions.

I utterly fail to comprehend why the police unions are not FOR strong gun control. They would benefit from it more directly than any other group in the country. Countries that don't allow guns enables cops to not have to carry guns. It makes them safer in a real, tangible and measurable way and yet instead we are militarizing the police force and escalating the violence even against unarmed people. I get why it is politically difficult but I don't get why police aren't leading the charge for gun control.

I mean, I'm with you on that point. The article cracked did ( http://www.cracked.com/blog/tr... ) was pretty informative, but the part that stuck out to me was: "People are not angry at Washington; they are totally over Washington. They don't feel Washington can do anything to make their lives better."

This level of distrust, derision and populist hatred was earned over the years. It did not come instantly, it did not come from Rush Limbaugh, it was not a top-down phenomena. To get candidate Trump, you have to EARN candidate Trump, with years of bullshit, weakness, and pandering. If you spend years promising some group that you are opposed or in favor of something, and you never actually press for the change you promised, you'll eventually lose that group. It doesn't even matter if the thing you promised is idiotic and impossible, if you keep promising it, you'll eventually be branded a panderer, whatever the word chosen to brand you is. To get president Trump, it is mostly the same formula, just expanded over more voters, and we'll see if only the Republicans feel this way soon enough.

I am worried that if Trump wins, the take-home message to most of the politicians will be "be bold and brash, appear independent". That's just one of the things Trump is doing to appeal to people, and I think he is doing it because Trump is inherently bold, brash, and independent- it isn't some poser bullshit, but nor is it relevant. The fact that people who feel disenfranchised are swarming to Trump is VERY IMPORTANT, and all the attempts to break his campaign down into tiny bite sized tactics that future operatives can employ on the field is doomed to failure. Trump will succeed or fail based on how much faith America has lost in its highly educated oligarchic leader-class (that it pretends doesn't exist, because class doesn't exist and everyone is equal). If Americans feel that only Donald Trump has their best interests in mind, that is not because Donald Trump is a High Wizard Of Illusion (though he appears to be!), it's because they stopped believing that their leaders are leading in the correct direction. That's not just a communication failure, it's also a failure of direction.

Airports can be kept safe, it just doesn't look as safe, and requires actually training and drilling employees.

http://www.cracked.com/blog/7-...

People knew that Adolf Hitler was a violent demagogue (from his Hitler-Ludendorff-Putsch in 1923), but they absolutely refused to vote for the alternatives because they thought they had done something worse.

Godwin's Law strike 1

There are plenty more strikes against Trump where that came from. See Adam Tod Brown's article "5 Ways Donald Trump Perfectly Mirrors Hitler's Rise To Power".

Coding, like all forms of creative writing, is best done on tools and methods tailored to them. The terminal, or electronic typewriter, is an image of the best physical device we have created to do that so far, the mechanical typewriter. Second only to pencil/pen and paper it enables those with the messiest of hand writing to become published authors.

Thanks to Sturgeon's Law the only thing that greatly increasing the number of coders does is increase the number of mediocre ones. Good ones are still going to be expensive and rare.

Fortunately there is not that much of a market for the computer version of Romance novels. Only so many companies can ripoff programs and games and still profit.

Software valuable enough to sell is often valuable enough to have Free/Open Source clones. And both require skills of laborers who charge quite a lot for this effort - either in salary or in commitment of "Intellectual Property" back. The artists and writers got screwed buy business a long time ago. Everyone can see this and aren't fooled. Trying to reduce the cost of the labor pool by increasing the number of mediocre programmers will only work to a certain point and not for successful projects.

To make it obvious, let's re-write the CEO's messsage a little:

"Instead of attempting to lure literate teachers away from Libraries, we need to revolutionize the way book-writing is done. Rather than fit the person to the tool, let's fit the tool to the person. Pop literature can help us get there, offering a gloriously diverse array of tools to match our gloriously diverse species. It's only a matter of time before the process of writing books itself is transformed, from one that requires a mastery of syntax -- the precise stringing of sentences needed to tell a story -- to the mastery of logic. Logic is the essence of plot creation, and the second step after mastering syntax.'

President Camacho wouldn't be bad at all. Seriously:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

http://www.cracked.com/blog/th...

And on the flip side, what does Donald Trump do exactly? I know he's rich and considered successful, but what work does he actually do? Or Kim Kardashian?

Kim Kardashian has started several successful businesses using microloans and know-how from her father, who had defended O.J. Simpson among other things.

Has anyone actually called Trump 'Hitler' ?

You mean other than Adam Tod Brown in his article "5 Ways Donald Trump Perfectly Mirrors Hitler's Rise To Power"?

LOL... Really? I mean, yeah, we don't usually read the article around here - and I'm kind of guilty of that one myself. Heck, I might even be more guilty of that than most. I almost never read the article. I do, at least, skim the summary. Yeah, a helmet would have, almost certainly, helped this person in this particular crash. There's some claim that a helmet might have actually killed him in this crash but that's a REALLY unlikely outcome.

He flipped upside down and smashed into the ground, head-first. There's no severe brain damage mentioned. In fact, he went home the same day. He probably is concussed, swollen, tender to the touch, throbbing, and has a booming headache but he's almost certainly not brain damaged. We humans are pretty tough, actually. However unlikely, people have fallen from great heights and lived to tell the tale.

Did you really "TL;DR" the summary?

As for falling and living, you might want to see this... Here's the record holder:
http://www.guinnessworldrecord...

(She feel from over 33,000'/10,000 m.)

I've just used the mighty Google so I've not read these yet.
http://www.cracked.com/article...
http://www.mandatory.com/2012/...

Those are all folks who have fallen from absurd heights and, from the looks of it - just a quick skim of the Cracked article, they somehow managed to do so without losing a whole lot of brain function.

Two caveats - I didn't actually read the mandatory.com link. I didn't load the JavaScript up to see it. The second is that #1 at Cracked is the most awesome one of them all, of course. Dude bailed out of a plane, passed out from a lack of O2, and managed to only get banged up a little bit with a sprained ankle. The dude fell a couple of miles, or so it would appear. That's kind of neat.

But, there's some more stuff for you to read - seeing as you didn't even read the summary. :/

In fairness, reality itself is making a lot less sense than usual. Did you catch them girls at the Trump rally singing "Deal from strength or get crushed every time?"

Cracked (reasonably liberal site) has a summary, but the mere fact that it is happening is a pretty serious glitch in the Matrix.

http://www.cracked.com/video_1...

After the Dark Ages, where the Church basically did their best to wipe out human knowledge and sanitize everything...

I was under the impression that it was rather the opposite. In reality the "dark ages" were neither literally nor figuratively dark. The name was given by Italians who were butthurt about not ruling the world anymore.

It also seems that Christianity (Catholic monks in particular) was responsible for preserving western culture, civilization, and knowledge during the "dark ages" not destroying it.

Even a gutter press site like Cracked seems to disagree with you on this matter.

Contrariwise, there's a lot of evidence that certain modern, "scientific", and atheistic governments have destroyed and censored knowledge (I've linked only a few obvious and famous examples but there are others).

Streaming services are crap and they will always be. Give me a non-DRM video file to download or don't give me anything!

Traditionally, publishers are willing to offer rental cheaper than purchase, leaving purchase for things like Frozen and Shrek 2 that get watched repeatedly. Digital restrictions management on things like Netflix is used to enforce the rental terms. The only way non-DRM is likely to happen is as a purchase equivalent. Are you willing to pay $20 to watch a movie once?

Because he is dead and will not be able to falsely claim credit for it's invention. http://www.cracked.com/article...

I'm not entirely sure but I think the Chipmunks were in "night shirts"

Which fits in with the apparel of John Darling and Mickey "the Yellow Kid" Dugan, which are called nightshirts in canon. In fact, the big reason that men don't dress that way all the time is because of cavalry. But now that vehicles have replaced horseback riding, trousers are obsolete technology.

Where'd you pick it up?

I buy most of them from the men's section of AlHannah.com. When I explain it to others on the bus, I sometimes call it "Al and Hannah's" to disguise that it's an Islamic clothing store. You can find other places selling them by searching the web for "thobe" or "dishdasha". When it gets cold, you can wear over-the-calf socks and a shorter (knee-length) flannel nightshirt under it. Just make sure to wear typical western-world headgear with it, not anything obviously Arabic, and don't grow a long beard.

Fortunately, there's no copyright on the act of wearing a nightshirt with a top hat. US law largely considers costume designs "useful articles" rather than works of authorship unless they have a pictorial work printed on them. It's "fruits of one's labor" yet not subject to exclusive rights.

Companies also do some funny things to pirates:

http://www.cracked.com/article...

A while back, I was reading about a game that if you pirate it, you turn into a pirate in the game, but I didn't see the game in a Google search.

"Mein Kampf" was arguably a derivative work itself. There were a lot of others writing similar racialist pamphlets or books in the late 19th- and early 20th- centuries.

Such as Henry Ford. Much of Mein Kampf is plagiarized from a German translation of Ford's The International Jew.

From the featured article:

The Lego Group, a privately held Danish firm, already does business with the company, licensing products (including Star Wars) and placing shops at Disney’s theme parks. It would make an obvious target for the firm that has already bought up so many other pieces of your childhood.

That would certainly be a clash of corporate culture. The Walt Disney Company's history of banning fan works and lobbying for copyright maximalism wouldn't mesh so well with the criticism of copyright shown in the third act of the The LEGO Movie (huge spoilers).

Robert Evans of Cracked has also reviewed Dabiq .

Would you actually say that we have more order and civility in our cities than we did 60 years ago?

Yes. AuntieMeme has made a collection of infographics showing that several misery metrics have been declining.

I get little excitement from gaudy effects, and while it's absolutely possible to produce a good film with good CGI, I've never watched something from the past and thought, "Oh wow! The poor effects are spoiling this!" Use your imagination, cunts. Or let the scenario speak for itself. A modern high res computer-generated action scenario is probably no more realistic, anyway - space is actually big and mostly empty, war rooms and costumes aren't polished to within an inch of their life, every second of existence doesn't come with a backing track, and humans need to concentrate to do hard shit rather than be confronted with a billion distractions. In fact, just read the half a dozen articles like this one about how modern special effects don't really work out well for a decent narrative, i.e. not unless all you're looking for is special effects.

Hail to the new boss, same as the old boss.

And hopefully it won't be Heil to the new boss.

Do you have a generally positive or negative opinion of these people?

• Harvard's cheer department
• Henry Ford (automotive entrepreneur and author of The International Jew
• Andrew Jackson (US President behind the Indian Removal Act)
• Thomas Calloway Lea, Jr. (El Paso mayor behind use of cyanide pesticide at the border crossing)
• Oliver Wendell Holmes (SCOTUS justice favoring sterilization of criminals)

Source: "Worst Ideas You Didn't Know Come From America" by Melissa Dylan

Is Adam Tod Brown of Cracked justified in comparing Donald Trump's rise to power to that of an infamous German chancellor?

'To maintain the perception that diamonds were rare, De Beers not only significantly limited how many diamonds they mined each year, but also literally started buying up all the other diamonds and just stockpiling them (along with their own excess supply). Combined with a decades-long advertising campaign, they created a perception out of thin air that diamonds were rare and valuable, and that you had to drop thousands of dollars on one to prove you loved your spouse. The monopoly De Beers holds is so blatantly illegal by U.S. antitrust laws that they've been banned from selling in the U.S. (they're forced to sell to intermediaries on the international market). Until they pleaded guilty to price fixing charges in 2004, their executives wouldn't even set foot on American soil because they feared they'd be arrested on sight. While there are indications that the cartel might finally be slowly losing its grip on the market, it's been a pretty damn impressive run.' http://www.cracked.com/article... http://www.cracked.com/article...

'To maintain the perception that diamonds were rare, De Beers not only significantly limited how many diamonds they mined each year, but also literally started buying up all the other diamonds and just stockpiling them (along with their own excess supply). Combined with a decades-long advertising campaign, they created a perception out of thin air that diamonds were rare and valuable, and that you had to drop thousands of dollars on one to prove you loved your spouse. The monopoly De Beers holds is so blatantly illegal by U.S. antitrust laws that they've been banned from selling in the U.S. (they're forced to sell to intermediaries on the international market). Until they pleaded guilty to price fixing charges in 2004, their executives wouldn't even set foot on American soil because they feared they'd be arrested on sight. While there are indications that the cartel might finally be slowly losing its grip on the market, it's been a pretty damn impressive run.' http://www.cracked.com/article... http://www.cracked.com/article...

>"Nobel Prizes are given for making important â" preferably fundamental â" breakthroughs in the realm of ideas"

Um, not always. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.cracked.com/article...

Sometimes the Nobel prize is a joke.

Pointing out your use of an ad hominem is not, itself, an ad hominem.

I don't have a dog in this fight; my position is that you're being a jackass. I'm not trying to argue about the effects of radiation here. While Mr D has also not provided evidence, at least he was polite.

For some reason, I typo'd his name: he's Mr. Rogers. Further reading.

Pointing out your use of an ad hominem is not, itself, an ad hominem.

I don't have a dog in this fight; my position is that you're being a jackass. I'm not trying to argue about the effects of radiation here. While Mr D has also not provided evidence, at least he was polite.

For some reason, I typo'd his name: he's Mr. Rogers. Further reading.

I spend a bit of time trying to understand why the US seems so corrupt compared to other western democracies, and I believe the problem is less the size of the govt and more the size of the country. The Monkeysphere tells us that the human brain can only extend compassion to certain group sizes. If that is the case, then the answer might be to break up the US into a bunch of smaller, more manageable sizes? In a small country, you are more likely to know someone who knows someone that you are shitting on, so less likely to be a dick. As it stands, in the US you can fuck over millions of people and never meet a single one of them. I believe there is something in this that produces this type of behaviour.

"FaceYelp" was predicted by Randall Marsh of Cracked.com in 2012. Cracked.com later ran an entire Photoplasty contest of online customer reviews for people.

The downside is that it would make life very hard for people on the autistic spectrum in a world of people who don't understand the autistic spectrum.

"FaceYelp" was predicted by Randall Marsh of Cracked.com in 2012. Cracked.com later ran an entire Photoplasty contest of online customer reviews for people.

The downside is that it would make life very hard for people on the autistic spectrum in a world of people who don't understand the autistic spectrum.

Civilization Revolution, $3.49 on mobile, $29.99 on consoles.

For one thing, console game pricing has to account for the possibility of resale, for which the publisher receives no revenue. For another, does the mobile version of Civilization have the "pay or wait years" mechanic like that of Game of War ? Some things in that game literally take 58 years to research without paying extra.

No way I could talk my friends into buying a 3DS for an hour of Mario Kart or Mortal Kombat a few times a month.

One might say the same thing about PC games and their one system per player policy that PS3 and Xbox 360 happened to pick up as well. Besides, Mortal Kombat isn't Nintendo; it's WB, and it's on Steam. Even for Mario Kart, you can still "play games other than those published by Nintendo", such as Lego Racers or SuperTuxKart or emulated Crash Team Racing.

No, I don't work for Nintendo. If I did, I probably wouldn't have linked to original homebrew NES games a couple times in this discussion, and I wouldn't have recommended avoiding Nintendo's first-party games. I'm just trying to help clear up what current law and current facts are so that we have a better idea of what fans are up against.

What I mean is that this variation is all different in the same way. If you've ever spent time flying around the Elite Dangerous universe, you'll find that once you've seen one system, you're more or less seen them all.

But this has more to do with current state of procedural generators rather than the concept of general. Try Dwarf Fortress, and you do get extremely varied environments to get your dwarfs killed in.

Only artists and animators are able to genuinely surprise you.

That is untrue. Any game with sufficiently complex mechanics will create surprising situations, through glitching if nothing else.

What humans can currently do that computers can't is recognize and combine tropes, or generic thematic elements, and adapt them to current situation. However, there is no known reason why an algorithm couldn't do so too.

An intermediate step might be to move the gameworld over from curent scripted and otherwise static model to a strategic simulation. Imagine, for example, an open-world game where the computer was playing a game of Civilization in the background and a procedural generator was responsible for rendering the results - city growth, roads, marching armies, etc - in the player-explorable environment, along with quests to affect the game either way (for example, the player could sneak into a besieged city to open the gates, or assassinate the army's general). Space Rangers does something like this: the missions you do affect how the game world develops, the war goes on in the background, and as you get stronger you become more and more important player in it.

The whole reason everyone and their dog is investing in physics engines is precisely that they can procedurally generate behaviour as it's needed, thus freeing the artist from having to guess everything the player might do (which is impossible). Procedurally generating animation is currently under development - beyond current ragdoll physics, that is - and then, of course, there's games like Victoria which are about generating alternate world histories. Then there's the ancient Neverwinter Nights Aurora toolset where the designer laid down rooms and procedural generator filled them with semi-random details.

The future of gaming is procedural generation, both because automation is the only way to keep costs under control and because the end result is superior. That doesn't mean those games won't require artists, it simply means those artists will be doing high-level design of thematic elements and interacting systems rather than hand-painting every pixel and modeling every room.

I think the "braindead" part has something to do with the fact that dictatorships don't work that way.

Government uses eminent domain all the time http://www.cracked.com/blog/4-... so I'd love to see them go nope your license fees are too high so I think we'll just take control of you :-)