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Well the main point I was making was about computational complexity.

But I actually enjoy limit games quite a bit, although I don't think it has the same mass appeal for watching. The fact that all your chips can be at risk at any moment in no limit adds a made-for-tv drama that you just aren't going to get from limit. I don't agree however that NL cannot have nuance, you have just chosen a very caricatured example.

ESPN did televise the mixed event from the WSOP this year, a step in the right direction?

I don't really see the problem. Most of the straight people on tv are also caricatures and not very realistic. That's just the way television is, if you want realism turn off the tube.

You swine. You vulgar little maggot. Don't you know that you are pathetic? You worthless bag of filth. As we say in Texas, I'll bet you couldn't pour piss out of a boot with instructions on the heel. You are a canker. A sore that won't go away. I would rather kiss a lawyer than be seen with you.

You are a fiend and a coward, and you have bad breath. You are degenerate, noxious and depraved. I feel debased just for knowing you exist. I despise everything about you. You are a bloody nardless newbie twit protohominid chromosomally aberrant caricature of a coprophagic cloacal parasitic pond scum and I wish you would go away.

You're a putrescence mass, a walking vomit. You are a spineless little worm deserving nothing but the profoundest contempt. You are a jerk, a cad, a weasel. Your life is a monument to stupidity. You are a stench, a revulsion, a big suck on a sour lemon.

You are a bleating fool, a curdled staggering mutant dwarf smeared richly with the effluvia and offal accompanying your alleged birth into this world. An insensate, blinking calf, meaningful to nobody, abandoned by the puke-drooling, giggling beasts who sired you and then killed themselves in recognition of what they had done.

I will never get over the embarrassment of belonging to the same species as you. You are a monster, an ogre, a malformity. I barf at the very thought of you. You have all the appeal of a paper cut. Lepers avoid you. You are vile, worthless, less than nothing. You are a weed, a fungus, the dregs of this earth. And did I mention you smell?

If you aren't an idiot, you made a world-class effort at simulating one. Try to edit your writing of unnecessary material before attempting to impress us with your insight. The evidence that you are a nincompoop will still be available to readers, but they will be able to access it more rapidly.

You snail-skulled little rabbit. Would that a hawk pick you up, drive its beak into your brain, and upon finding it rancid set you loose to fly briefly before spattering the ocean rocks with the frothy pink shame of your ignoble blood. May you choke on the queasy, convulsing nausea of your own trite, foolish beliefs.

You are weary, stale, flat and unprofitable. You are grimy, squalid, nasty and profane. You are foul and disgusting. You're a fool, an ignoramus. Monkeys look down on you. Even sheep won't have sex with you. You are unreservedly pathetic, starved for attention, and lost in a land that reality forgot.

And what meaning do you expect your delusionally self-important statements of unknowing, inexperienced opinion to have with us? What fantasy do you hold that you would believe that your tiny-fisted tantrums would have more weight than that of a leprous desert rat, spinning rabidly in a circle, waiting for the bite of the snake?

You are a waste of flesh. You have no rhythm. You are ridiculous and obnoxious. You are the moral equivalent of a leech. You are a living emptiness, a meaningless void. You are sour and senile. You are a disease, you puerile one-handed slack-jawed drooling meatslapper.

On a good day you're a half-wit. You remind me of drool. You are deficient in all that lends character. You have the personality of wallpaper. You are dank and filthy. You are asinine and benighted. You are the source of all unpleasantness. You spread misery and sorrow wherever you go.

I cannot believe how incredibly stupid you are. I mean rock-hard stupid. Dehydrated-rock-hard stupid. Stupid so stupid that it goes way beyond the stupid we know into a whole different dimension of stupid. You are trans-stupid stupid. Meta-stupid. Stupid collapsed on itself so far that even the neutrons have collapsed. Stupid gotten so dense that no intellect can escape. Singularity stupid. Blazing hot mid-day sun on Mercury stupid. You emit more stupid in one second than our entire galaxy emits in a year. Quasar stupid. Your writing has to be a troll. Nothing in our universe can really be this stupid. Perhaps this is some primordial fragment from the or

Nevertheless, other than the abstract possibility that such a disconnect could be occurring [..] Since I specifically discussed the possibility in the post you are responding to,

You dismissed it. Unduly, I feel, but whatever. I raised it again, but as less of a caricature. Whenever any product goes from A) to B) dollars are spend and margins can be made. And in such cases, whenever there's a possibility of someone making a buck, there's also a probability of it. If you want me to provide evidence that it will happen, well your about a year too early.

So? Access to food and water isn't a problem for the vast majority of the people for whom these computers are being purchased.

It's the problem for the vast majority of people, period. And it should be a priority for anyone trying to 'help'.

Insofar as food and water (and electricity, healthcare, roads, physical structures for schools, etc.) are problems in the target areas, most of the countries involved are spending resources to address them already. In many cases, there is a point of diminishing returns where there is a limited amount that can be done efficiently at a time, and you have to complete that before moving on to the next project. These problems can't just absorb more resources efficiently to cut down the time to solve them. [...]
Uruguay has a 98% literacy rate. Argentina about 97%. Libya, Brazil, and Peru above 80%. Getting "classrooms with at least pencils and papers so kids and adults can learn to read and write" is quite simply not a fundamental pressing need in most of countries that are involved in the OLPC.

So the target group you mention includes people who can read and write (a minority in many countries), probably only in the roman alphabet. Hopefully these people have sufficient means to meet the basic necessities of life, but they are not yet purchasers of IT-related goods.

So the goal is not necessarily to help the most needy, but to develop a taste for tools, interfaces, and brands in a developing market. It sounds an awful lot to me like car companies giving away toy cars to kids during the depression.

Also, these types of projects have a history of being abused or counted towards 'aid' commitments. What "type"? Examples?

Here's a few:
http://www.cbc.ca/onthemap/fullpage.php?id=93

In particular, note the following passage:

Phantom aid includes over-priced technical assistance, tying aid to purchases from the donor countries own firms, high-cost consultants, excessive administrative costs, and double counting of debt relief.

Sound familiar?

Anyhow, I'm not saying it's a bad project, but people need to ask and keep asking these questions.

I think you're confusing the reality of non-leftists with the caricature you just used to describe them.

You're making a very serious mistake. Never believe your own press.

Did you read my initial post? I like Miis for what they are. I just question how well a celebrity HotOrNot style competition would work with these kinds of caricatures. Maybe I'm wrong...apparently some people think it'll do great. I just imagine thousands of wii owners creating hundreds of celebrity wiis and many many of them being almost exact duplicates. When they are almost the same (or exactly the same) what is the fun (or use) in rating them?

It's called the art of caricature. Some people have features which are easily caricatured, others have very plain looking faces. Regardless, a good artist will be able to bring out a person's features and convert them into a cartoon figure. People are doing some really amazing Miis even now, and we can expect this to mature in the years to come.

I have an original release SOB with Walters name and picture on the back.
I also have SOB2, WTC, and By Request with his name. The By Request album has his caricature.

So, what you're saying is you don't want caricatures, you just want to paste a picture of yourself on a Mii's head? Seriously... there are more than enough options to do a decent representation of anyone, of any race, including personality. Everyone knows that my Mii is me because the smile goes up on one side, and I have a lopsided smile. Kinda like the Woody Allen caricature from the link in the GPP. Everything else is unremarkable, though. Maybe it's just your family and friends that are vanilla, and not the Mii's?

Why do normal human faces look distinctive? Let's face it, there are less distinctive shapes of nose/eye/mouth/etc in real life than the Mii's get to choose from. Of course, there are infinite variations in real life, but we're all generally made up of the same components with slight variations and layed out slightly differently. Yet we can see a face we haven't seen in years and recognize it instantly. Check out this article on wikipedia.

I find that sometimes if I try to remember someone's face, I just remember the features that particularly stick out; it seems like what I store about that face is more a caricature than an accurate image. The Mii creation tool is about making caricatures, not photo-realistic faces. You will be surprised.

Exactly. Most of those I couldn't name until I read who they were. Then it became obvious and, yes, it's a decent caricature. But imagine what the runner up Hulk Hogan would look like. Probably identical. Same with all the others.

Maybe this sounds racist but I think most Miis look pretty much the same. I don't own a wii so maybe it's been updated since the last time I've played with it but the options seem pretty limited. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy it for what it is and I made one with a beard that looked halfway like mine but if they are going to make a contest on creating the most "realistic" celebrity I think we're going to see a whole lot of nearly identical miis that don't look all THAT much like any particular celebrity.

It's a very rough caricature. How realistic can people make them? Someone will make Madonna and when it's pointed out I might even agree that it kind of looks like her but if I would never have looked at the mii and immediately thought MADONNA!

My nephews own a wii and they created a mii for everyone in our extended family. They did as good a job as anyone could do but I couldn't pick out who people were because the options would have to be a lot more detailed to distinguish between my nose and my brother's nose, for instance. So how are people going to vote on celebrity miis? This one's head is a LITTLE bit bigger. That one has a slightly darker skin color. How do you decide which is better when they are all nearly identical?

Actually there are a lot of old Warner Bros cartoons which will never be shown again on tv. There are many more which have been censored (like the one you mention).

The reason for the ban on some is that they are considered 'not politically correct' and as Ted Turner owns the rights to them he refuses to allow them to ever be shown again.

Some of these are classics, like 'Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs', the 'Inki and the Mynah Bird' cartoons, even some of the wartime Bugs Bunny cartoons caricaturing the Japanese and Germans. Remember those?

The Censored Eleven: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censored_Eleven
Inki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inki
Bugs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herr_Meets_Hare
Bugs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bugs_Bunny_Nips_the_N ips

Some of them are becoming available on DVD in the 'Looney Tunes Golden Collection' volumes.

Where does Marx discuss luxuries? or is this your personal addition to the theory?

Yeah, you must be one of those people who believe that Christianity is simply the "stuff that Jesus said". Please. Communism is not restricted to Marx's writings; he laid the foundational theoretical work for the system he was describing; the evolution of the idea did not stop with his death.

But, beyond that, it doesn't take much assuming to fit a theory of luxury commodities into a Marxist framework. Since his major critique of Capitalism stemmed from the exploitation of the surplus value created by the appropriation of labor, and the major item that he wished to remove from an economic system was that exploitation, my thumbnail description of how luxury goods might work is perfectly apt. A good Marxist economist would probably factor in the fetishization of commodities in attempting to suss out the difference between a true luxury good and a practical but non-necessary good, but since I am neither a Marxist nor an economist, that isn't my job. I'll leave it to others.

Next time you want to make a smartass comment, be sure it isn't based on a caricature of an idea rather than the idea itself. Ideas, per se, do not belong to their creators, right from the moment where they publish it on a page or speak it from their mouths; to assume so is to place an arbitrary (and frankly ridiculous) restriction upon how to understand how an idea has evolved into its present form and the manner in which it is likely to continue to do so.

Look, the point is, no offense to the insurance agent above, but you gotta get the insurance companies out of the system. They're like an early Marxist caricature of capitalists, and they're the reason your costs keep going up, and people get denied coverage. They are the single biggest problem with your health care system. God knows how you'll do that, but up here in Canada, I'm involved with groups like The Council of Canadians, specifically to stop that sort of thing. 'Cause once you get them in, god knows how you'll get them out.

But reasonable people DO NOT ignore data that threatens their position. People who do that are dangerously irrational.

Reasonable people also also don't expect other people to die just so that we can claim that our society is keepin' it real, capitalist-style. People who cling to an ideology even when it means that millions of people suffer from and die from preventable illnesses ... well, I just can't say enough bad things about them. They are either too stupid to hold sensible opinions (I suppose I might have some pity on such people, but it's hard...) or too evil to care about the suffering of others, in which I don't feel even the slightest resistance to mocking and insulting them.

And the SUV thing was what is known as a caricature -- a literary device that you may have heard of by this point in your life. I suspect you have, since you did the same thing with your little comment about "You're a boogerhead so there!". Obviously, I never said that or anything like it (this is actually the first time in the last two decades that I've used the word "booger", even if only in quotation).

Where did this silly notion that people can't use strong language in debate come from? What purpose does it serve? If you can't insult morons who hold stupid positions, who the hell can you insult?

Neurons definitely talk to each other and at least some are more sophisticated than you seem to think, even though they may be very specialized.

Some people even have a "Halle Berry" neuron - if they see the name "Halle Berry" or her picture or even a caricature, that neuron will fire.

See: http://www.physorg.com/news4703.html

Maybe that part is a bit like Bingo. Patterns are passed through a huge bunch of neurons, and one of them shouts out and says "Bingo: Halle Berry!", another says "Bingo: Catwoman", and the results are fed back through the neurons.

Whether QC comes into this is debatable. But given the lack of knowledge we have on how it all works, I'm not going to be so certain it doesn't play a role. As I said if QC is possible, it is likely to be advantageous.

"many which fall under metaphysics/religion (e.g. there is a god called survival of the fittest that drives evolution, science is good, good is good, you are right, this is important for humanity, all religions are false)."

Funny, I don't recall any of that in Origin or any major work on evolution since Origin. These ideas you speak of are not found in any science textbook I've ever encountered. Seems like you have a problem with making shit up. That's something you might want to have checked out.

Secondly, your reasoning here and from the dude the linked blog (I'm scared for that baby) is pretty crummy. We've heard the "if evolution is true, then we should live like animals" line plenty, thanks, and it's just plain silly, frankly. Is isn't ought, and a caricature of both what biology describes and how that relates to morality just won't do, sorry.

Flamebait? Sure. But badly-constructed flamebait- the only people who use the expression "politically correct" are those attacking the concept.

Very true.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say that "political correctness" only ever really existed as a convenient strawman caricature, useful for smearing anything remotely smacking of "liberal" or left wing views.

Heh, I don't know: I'd always considered myself reasonably to the left, but... I was surprised to run into a bunch of socially-acceptable racial bigotry during college, and the only way I can think to characterize it, is as having been "ok" because it was "politically correct." And this is the real point of my post.

What am I talking about? People complaining, over and over, about "rich white kids;" they'd use sneering language like "bastion of white privilege," repeat racial slurs like W.A.S.P. as though that was somehow acceptable (besides, at least get your facts straight: second-wave European immigrants were neither Anglo-Saxon nor Protestant), and harp on hundred-year-old European imperialism (as though they, going to an Ivy League school, were somehow victims thereof). This was insidious stuff, nothing more than socially-acceptable racism. And it wasn't just something that affected interactions with strangers; it infected friendships, sowing mistrust and contributing to the slow self-segregation that students settled into by senior year. Watching this happen was the saddest part of college for me.

An example:

I started out as good friends, my freshman year, with a Chinese-American girl, but by senior year this language had gotten even to her. In particular, she began to use the phrase "rich white kids" over and over -- never "spoiled rich kids" or "spoiled jerks;" always "rich white kids." In her case, there was irony written all over it, as (1) her father was a well-to-do doctor; (2) she had traveled all over the world at his expense; (3) I remember her being demonstrably shocked when one day I mentioned that I was responsible for paying for all of my own credit card bills ("What, you mean your parents don't pay them for you? Mine do!"); and (4) she'd had a number of important opportunities handed to her that she hadn't had to work for at all. It was a little infuriating to hear her, of all people, call someone else spoiled.

It got worse with time. I remember one incident in particular: I was walking down the sidewalk with her and an African-American (male) friend of hers (and so an acquaintance of mine), and she was complaining that Barak Obama wasn't dark enough: that the Caucasian part of his ancestry polluted him. She said that his skin looked "like mud." It was then that this other guy and I started exchanging meaningful glances, and I spoke our shared thought, "So, I'm not sure how to say this, [her name], but... look: You're standing between a dark black guy and a pale white guy *holds out arm with forearm up*, and... you're complaining that people with skin tones in-between are ugly? [(Implication: Look at yourself.)]" (I never understood how the racial ideas she'd begun to develop could withstand even a drop of sarcasm: You'd have thought that their self-contradictoriness would have caused them to annihilate each other at the tiniest hint of ironic illumination.)

A large part of the reason she was acting as she was at that time in particular was that she'd just broken up with another guy -- who, as always for her, was white. Now, the people you date are the people who get close to you and the people who cause you emotional pain, so it's easy to hate them and their groups -- hence the ubiquity of sexism -- so I understand, in part, how her anti-white sentiments had developed. But I don't think that this history of hers is the full explanation: I really think that the politically-correct norms on racial discourse had something to do with it too: She was using its language to justify her hate. Her pol