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Maybe senior is thrown around a bit loosely sometimes, but you can probably blame that on HR.

I blame 90% of weird job-related stuff on HR. I used to think that catbert was a caricature, now i see that he/she is a mere shadow of the truth

if you're arguing that we're far more a socialist state, then i'd totally agree. even though we've a far smaller percentage of gdp from gov't spending, it's a creeping mentality, schools, health care, etc. think about the katrina aftermath. people are blaming the government for inaction. it's as if they can't function without it. i'm not talking about the indigent, that's different, but those that sit around and wait to be taken care of. it's problematic.

do the "corporations" have too much power? sure. but it spans ideology. the left wants open borders to dilute and destroy the American culture, and the right wants open borders to drive down labor costs. the left wants big government to protect "open space", the environment, etc., the right wants big government b usiness relationships all the same. is there a difference? hardly. i am a federalist, small government conservative. i would vote against gay marriage, but if my state voted for it, then it's the law. i accept that. neither the right nor the left would accept voting. both want the courts to impose the law. it's sad.

given the level of protest and poltical virulency, it's hardly that we're a fascist state. what the real problem is is that we've cocooned ourselves into our little enclaves. think about the red/blue map. you could drive from coast to coast and never leave a red county. the red gets redder, the blue gets bluer. the blue "enclaves" and th red sprawl rarely come into contact. they see each other less frequently, interact less with them, and end of with a caricatured view of each other.

the right (of which I would consider myself) are not neanderthals, gun toting, bible thumping, women opressing nut cases. the left are not commie appeasing, terrorist supproting, baby killing, environmental wackos. but we see each other as such. and we become more polarized. so you, who don't agree with the president (and by the way, neither do I on many things: immigration, spending, trade, education, etc. in fact damn near everything except the war on terror) only see him and his supporters in the distance. you know few who voted for him, or few who would openly say so.

perhaps my station, a public school teacher, gives me appreciation for "minority" status. I am the "other". I know how many view me, hell, they've as much called me it many times. perspective is, as always, a valuable commodity.

yes, state and corporate power are merged as you say, but it's hardly a move rightward. they want all the big government amenities and protections. when I said that the protests are the very contradictory evidence, it is ironic at best, tragic at worst, that bush is called hitler, mocked in films, belittled by public office holders, and slandered in the worst way almost reflexively by people so ibued with the zeal they chastise him for. as for tolerance of dissent, the left is equally guilty. but like I said, we hardly know each other anymore.

Similarly, the gender expectations that are so rigid in mainstream America are not as clearly defined in Japanese culture. Japanese gamers are less concerned with appearing "masculine," at least in the American sense of reveling in games that flex their graphical muscle. The comments of U. S. gamers, especially those participating in forums, are influenced by the need to protect a certain macho image, one in favor of "grownup" realism instead of "childish" stylization.

Actually, my point, probably not well expressed, is that you would be anti-Bush no matter what the Bush administration does. It doesn't matter what evidence is presented, you know your position beforehand.

Your ideology shades your view of the world. There is 'evidence' of all sorts of things. If you want to look at the opposite side, there is 'evidence' that Vince Foster was murdered by the Clintons. There is 'evidence' that Ted Kennedy is a malevolent womanizing hypocrite.

Stongly slanted, ideologically motivated 'evidence.' The same kind you rely on to reinforce your preconcieved caricatures of the 'Right.' Just the opposite polarity.

Where in the original post do I defend the Canadian suburban sprawl? And yes, suburban sprawl here is just as bad as south of the border.

You're not a European, but perhaps you've always been a city dweller and are looking at this from that particular frame of reference (i.e., romanticizing the idea of city life).

You romanticize suburban lifestyle as much as I romanticize urban living (which I don't really). Throughout my life I spent years in various environments, staring with pure rural on my granparents farm, through high density urban tower block living, to eventually move out to suburbia with my parents a few years before I moved out and started living on my own.

I know fairly well about European lifestyle because I spent eight years living there and I'm fairly familiar with how their cities operate. I can guarantee you that given a choice, at least half of American (or Canadian) suburbanites would pick a modern European city lifestyle over the caricature of rural living that is North American suburbia.

Do you notice how we Canadians (and you Americans) keep fooling ourselves about the wonders of suburbia? How subdivision names often represent that which they destroy ("Beaver Creek Valley", "Oak Hills", etc).

It is a caricature of rural living because it offers no advantages of rural lifestyle (healthy food, work in the open air, contact with nature) but bears all disadvantages (isolation from culture, kids trapped in the house, long distances to travel in order to trade, work and entertain etc). As such it's fair to say that suburbia is a giant misallocation of resources.

Do you notice how car commercials always show empty mountain roads and vehicles happily roaring through the wilderness? Now look at the traffic jam at your nearest interstate. See the dissonance between the commercial on TV and real life? All of suburbian living is built on delusions like that.

Now, city living in a European styled city (if you want to experience it but are on a budget, take a trip to Quebec city for a taste of Europe that's a surprisingly realistic imitation) has downsides such as housing closer together. Yet, sacrificing your quarter acre yard in exchange for shorter commute (or no commute), beautiful architecture, nice neighbourhoods, functioning infrastructure, access to culture and independence for teenagers to socialize without asking mom for a "lift to the mall" is a small price to pay in the opinion of great many people.

Suburbia was invented to address the problem of having some nastiest most horrible looking, most disgustingly polluted cities in the world, and was hardly the pinnacle of human habitation. It was a temporary fix that got horribly out of control.

In the era of expensive oil this bizzarre societal setup will have to be fixed. There is no way around it whether the majority of us like it or not. I just hope we still have enough resources (financial as well as natural) to reshape our structures to survive the energy shortage shock that's coming in the next few years. And I hope that what emerges is a bit more worthwhile of preserving than a bunch of cheap slapped together McHouses with fried chicken huts in between them. Wouldn't you agree?

I don't think that's what Chomsky was trying to say. I agree that the system is at fault, but to me that just means, for example, that you could change the system to a better one and the problem will be solved. But if you try to replace the entire population with good people, the situation would eventually devolve. Think of it like you're swapping new components into a malfunctioning device one at a time until it works, to figure out which component is faulty.

In my example, if you replaced the system with a better one, people like Steve Ballmer would not remain in their position where they have a disproportionately large influence on the rest of the population.

Now, imagine that you instead replaced the 'bad' people with good people, but the system remained the same. The problem would be solved temporarily, but the result would be unstable. The nature of the system is that it promotes people with very undesirable qualities to positions of power. A powerful job that only one person in a million can have is quite literally occupied by a one-in-a-million person. If the system selects this person for their underhandedness, and the ability to intimidate others and compromise ethics for the sake of business, the result can be quite a caricature.

And there's more than just selection going on, because the system is also training those bad qualities into people as they try to outdo each other in competition. Those that don't want to participate are disqualified, and those that do participate play a game of ethical chicken, where each player lowers his or her standards until all challengers refuse to go lower than the victor.

What you get is the lowest of the low in the highest position. It's a backwards system.

I think the industry needs to focus not on what women would enjoy, but on making games less obviously targeted at the young demographic.

Characters in games are so often caricatures - men with lantern jaws and bulging biceps, women with cavernous cleavage and wasp waists. It'd be better to have people who actually look like you could meet them in the street.

Women seem to react more negatively to stereotypes of women than men react to stereotypes of men. That drives them away from many games.

One has to wonder if the above is really just some smart ass attempting to make Mac zealots look really, really stupid. I mean, I know there are some people that are just so totally ignorent that they assume what they see today is what things where always like (in game development, it's people wondering what OpenGL calls Quake 1 used).

But the second paragraph "...they just refined it" (especially the three dot wait) makes you wonder if the person is attempting to caricature a Mac zealot struggling for an excuse, rather then being the real deal. (for reference, check out screenshots of Xerox Star GUI from 1981, Apple's from 1983, and Microsoft's 1985 Windows - 2 of these have a desktop with icons on the left, a trashcan on the buttom and file folders you can open up into new windows to navigate. 1 of them is an MDI task manager interface with none of the above elements)

First was IBM's results claiming Linux TCO was lowest, now it doesn't matter!?

OK, let's base it off something else...maybe security? Oh wait, I got it, who has the easiest to configure applications?

No...it has to be something more. Maybe we should see who has the better mascot. I think that's Linux, considering Windows doesn't really have a mascot; although personally I think I'd vote for Windows is their mascot was a caricature of Bill Gates getting pied in the face.

Way off topic, but the snow scenes in "The Hunted" were set in British Columbia, not Oregon. Seeing snow like that near Portland, Silver Falls, or any of the other Oregon settings in the film would be highly unusual.

That movie was almost intolerably bad, but I watched it all the way through anyway because it featured Portland. And what a ludicrous caricature of Portland it was -- steam emanating from city manhole covers, TLJ "warping" between distant parts of the city within the same chase scene, the MAX train going over a bridge it doesn't actually go over, etc. Funny and annoying at the same time.

This is the most blatant karmawhore I've ever seen on Slashdot.

"See, the thing about soldiers is, they need to kill people"

You don't know many soldiers do you? Yours is a fuzzy sentence but it's hard to read it in any other way than that you're saying they have some basic need to kill out of their own volition. Some people do have such a need but those aren't fit for anything really, least of all things military duty (yes they get screened out and denied). Does killing and war break some people? Of course, but extremely few have a "need" to kill, quite the opposite.

If you have a society that makes every soldier into a "must-kill" caricature of the human beings they are well then the military is truly the least of your problems. The only society I know of where this could be even remotely close to being the case is North Korea (and even there it's unlikely that even if they try to do it they actually succeed).

Soldiers are human and it doesn't make sense to take the "human" out of them - it is counterproductive and realized to be so by just about everyone associated with any modern military force (which excludes people who think children suicide bombers is a good idea or communism and facism which instigated programs like Hitlerjugend and Red Pioneers).

"The answer to this paradox, IMO, war is simply incompatible with civil society"

You're beating Jacques Chirac, the master of the art of speaking without saying anything, at his own game here - are you a politician?

FYI I'm a former military officer in a european country and I can assure you that my opinon on this is not in the minority.

Ummm, FYI, both of those were done in the 1950's as an explicitly religious response to 'godless communism' (the currency thing was off-and-on for awhile beforehand, but the motto was specifically changed in the 50's). Not that the US had particularly pronounced separation of church and state back in the 1800's; in fact I'd say we're better off today than at any point in the first 150 years of nationhood. But I think the concerted attack on the Enlightenment and secularism in general by the Christian Right _is_ rather new and particularly dangerous.

Other than that, very much in agreement. Combining religion and politics makes a mockery of both. But I won't for one minute think, "It can't happen here". You need look no further than the mideast for a fantastic example of a combined church and state becoming caricatures of their former selves.

Bush and stem cells is probably a good example of religion and science interacting properly

Are you kidding? He crippled the entire line of ESC research for years. And every argument given for doing so was entirely baseless. The Christian Right simply wouldn't ever shut up about how it encourages abortion, even though the one has utterly nothing to do with another. As a result, the US has already begun falling behind in biosciences. He puts _faith healers_ on medical boards. Money spent on actual scientific studies of environmental problems gets thrown away because the guys at the top don't like the results. The latest crop of republicans are about the worst thing to happen to science and they are making religion look like a caricature of itself. To the rest of the world, the most powerful nation on earth looks like it's becoming a Christian version of Saudi Arabia.

The lunar missions ended because American leaders decided the money was better spent getting GIs killed in Vietman. The space program ultimately stagnated because US leaders made it a government monopoly run by a political committee. I see a solid week of news dedicated to ongoing technical problems with a single solitary shuttle (i.e., a third of our entire manned fleet) and I think, "We don't have a space program, we have a space hobby". And the reason people get pissed off with the expense is because it doesn't _do_ anything useful or even new anymore.

Anyway, it's not so much that there's a declining number of competent researchers and scientists. It's just that they are increasingly being told that neither they nor their work is wanted here. Fact is old and busted, faith-based-government is the new hotness. Average Joe is not just getting dumber, he's becoming more and more convinced that this is a virtue. Nothing could demonstrate this better than the studies showing that half the voting population would refuse to vote for a candidate for no other reason than because he was an atheist. I.e., competency and intelligence are secondary to whimsy and insanity.

I've got the "By Request" Album (vinyl) with `Walter`'s caricature and credits on it.

Needless to say, I also have SOB and WTS as Walter. SOB-II album I have and Sonic Seasonings has `Wendy` on it.

20 years ago, I build my own monophonic synthesizer using (I think, it's been a while) 755 and 756 Voltage Controlled Oscillators with Bob Moog and Wendy clearly being the motivation.
We (had a friend in with me) built a 1-octave key bank and kept most everything on breadboards.
We did etch a few copper plates for our circuits but it was a cool project.

"You made a lot of points, that I don't feel the need to reply to, partly because they don't apply to me and partly because this thread is pointless."

It's fun watching some of the debate strategies play out. "Oh I must save face! Maybe I can put him on the defensive by painting a cartoonesque caricature of him!" Heh. Nice try. :) Next time, try not being so transparent.

"SCO employee? Check out the bounty [sec.gov]"

So now there's a bounty on SCO employees!?! Cool! It's about time! Perhaps now I can make up some of the money I lost trying to short their stock. ;)

I take it this started after they all went around carrying caricatures of a grossly overweight Linus smoking pot?

Well, we also had MC Kids for the NES (which wasn't half bad), and some game about Cheetos for the SNES... Chester Cheetah?

Those aside, I can't remember any other glaring examples offhand. I like to think that sort of thing died with the early 90's. Maybe you can count some sports games and that sort of thing in there since they're basically _made_ so that you're simulating playing football with actual players, driving real cars, etc. The people who buy those games, though, don't need to see NFL or McLaren (or whatever) ads--they're suffused with the former, and can't afford the latter. You could only succeed with this sort of ad cum game by pitching it to people who can afford it--sell popular junk food and junk TV to teens who're too brain-dead to realize they're not actually playing one big ad, but are doing so in essence. Throw it on top of the piles of ads in the uninspired TV they watch, the vapid magazines they read, the movies they watch at the theater; all the nonsense that people who don't buy crap because they saw it in between Big Brother and the nightly news put up with on an increasing basis.

I'm off-subject. Unless they come to dominate the genre, I'm not afraid of entire games devoted to promoting a product in this day and age. I'm afraid of the subtle infiltration of ads into other games, that I'll have to sit through three minutes of commercials while FFMCMXLI loads, or click through Sony ads whenever I die in Counter-Strike: Substance, or dine in GTA4 at Taco Bell. I don't want to see real-life ads in my video games, because I don't play video games to emulate real life. I don't want to play as cheeky pop-culture caricature Bingo Protagonist, siding with McDonald's or Burger King in between missions. I'd love to see more clever spoofs of real-world ads and corporations as much as I'd hate for the industry to be infiltrated by actual corporate advertising.

An Eldrich Gun-Fu Shotgun Dancer healing with a can of Sprunk could even be funny, under the right conditions.

It seems that white people still have problems seeing the racial divide in the U.S. I'm an Artist currently working on my 5th game title, btw I'm also Black. I grew up in inner city philedelphia, I went to black schools and white schools, private and public, I even went to a catholic school. Point: my mother did the best she could to keep me out of inner city public schooling, but when it came time for high school public schooling was all she could do, the money just wasn't there. Once I got out of college (don't ever go to an Art Institute) I landed my first job as an assisitant animator and a lip sync animator. The other animator (a young white male) I worked with once told me that when he was in High school his art teacher gave him is big head start in learning animation. He had a chance to start learning 3d studio vr.1 (dos) and that gave him the boost he needed once he got into college and out into the career path. He had an oppurtunity to learn 3d and animation at a much earlier age than most people. At first I thought this was a odd coincedence, wow he he was lucky, good for him. As the years have gone by I've met more and more White's and asians in the industry that at some point in life had incredible opportunities to learn thier area of expertise at a younger age than I was. These sorts of experiences are difficult to come by in urban schools, the money just isn't there and sports and music are a stronger focal point than art. I feel that blacks need to be educated in game development at a much earlier age, learning about game art once you get into the field is a daunting task that many blacks and non-blacks have trouble adapting to. P.S. As far as GTA is concerned I feel it's a weak argument to make, I'm more concerned with the role of black "caricatures" like T-Bag in the downhill domination game. Who ever designed that character need's to be shot.

If you understand the philosphy of their mentor, Leo Strauss, their objective is to create myths of good and evil they can use to unite disaffected Westerners behind an easily understood cause of good versus evil.

Thank you, Ms. Drury. This is, as is typical of most folks who set out to comment on Leo Strauss, indicative of someone who has either A) not read Strauss at all, and has instead substituted someone else's absurd caricature for actual reading and critical thought, or; B) has read Strauss, and yet purposefully misrepresents his writings because he makes a convenient boogeyman with which to tar people whose politics differ from your own. For those interested in the man and his actual writings, as opposed to the deep role he apparently plays in the fantasy lives of some, I commend unto you a relatively even-handed Wikipedia overview. For those who also don't follow the "Ms. Drury" crack, mash here for a somewhat less even-handed (but no less accurate) explanation.

The necons need Bin Laden, al-Zarqawi and al-Zawahri in the wild to demonize and terrify Americans to make Americans easier to control and manipulate....The neocons needed a new boogie man when the Soviet Union collapsed. Saddam filled the bill but badly and now he is in jail so is a write off.

And now we delve into the self-contradictory mess that is the typical crackpot spin on current events. We are presented with a conspiracy of sorts, one that is alternately composed of evil geniuses bent on some mad plan, yet who make stunningly bone-headed moves from time to time - depending, of course, on which is more convenient to the storyteller at the time. So how, pray tell, did Saddam wind up in jail? Did he miracle himself in there? If the plan was to use him as a demon to terrorize the sheep at home, doesn't actually capturing him sort of constitute blowing a big hole in your own foot? Why bother capturing him if he's so very valuable out there in the wild?

Team B took the same data the CIA had which said the Soviet Union wasn't that much of a threat, and was crumbling from within...

Jeezus fucking Christ. Who fed you this junk, the CIA? Back during the Reagan years, the CIA was most assuredly not saying any such thing about the Soviets - as late as 1985, the CIA was saying that per-capita income in the USSR was on a par with that of the United States. In fact, we now know that it was less than one-third that of the US at the time, but at the time, they sure didn't know it. It's actually hard to think of a less reliable source for info on the USSR during the Cold War than the CIA - they repeatedly and consistently gave out bad information regarding the threat capabilities of the Soviets, virtually uniformly over-estimating the long-term threat they posed. In hindsight, the collapse of the Soviet Union may well have been inevitable, but you sure wouldn't have gotten that impression if you'd been listening to the CIA during the early- to mid-1980's. I'm sure the staff revisionists at the CIA would like you to believe otherwise - and in the Reagan administration, but nevermind that - but it really just ain't so.

William Casey was a big subscriber of the Soviet Union leading a global terror network. People of the CIA tried to point out to him it was untrue, because in fact it was black propaganda the CIA itself had started.

Excuse me? The links between the Soviet Union and international terrorism are both extensive and well-documented - mash here and here for just a small taste, and please note that the author of those two pieces is a former head of Romanian Intelligence, so spare us "explanations" of how this is more evidence of CIA nefariousness.

This

"No, creationists are making up new terms that sound cool, but really are just admissions that change does occur, but they think it doesn't occur across "kinds"."

Everyone agrees that change occurs. To say that creationists don't think that change occurs is simply a caricature, not reality. Creationists have believed in change since Linnaeus.

"Take this change and add billions of years and there is nothing yet seen which it cannot explain. And there is, further, much evidence in the fossil record showing exactly what one would expect from this hypothesis."

That's incorrect. Evolution supposes that diversity precedes disparity, but the fossil records shows the opposite.

"So which is it? "Semantic information" cannot be created or it can be created in 9 days?"

It is semantic information which cannot be created. Think about it this way: a program can use non-deterministic methods to devise solutions to problems, but what makes the non-deterministic methods usable is the fact that they are based on a very stable system that has such changes planned in. It is the stable constraints and systems that are the semantic information. The organism has simply inferred a set of enzymes from the environment, but was ultimately able to do so because it is specifically programmed to adapt in that way. I argue this in greater detail here.

"Ok. So the allegation is that it could not have occured without divine intervention."

Nope. You misunderstood my argument. The allegation is that it could not have occurred if the cell was not specifically designed to search and find adaptations for a new food source, and that the ability of a genome to adapt is fundamentally constrained because if it weren't the adaptation mechanism would fall into error catastrophe. This is why, even though pseuodomas can generate genes in 9 days, it has been fundamentally stable for over a hundred years -- it's basic foundational programming around which change occurs has remained the same.

The alternatives are (a) pseudomonas has been subject to random mutations at this rate, and it just happened upon this one that worked. This would lead almost immediately to error catastrophe if the general mutation rate throughout the genome occurred at this speed. The other alternative (b) is that pseudomonas already had the ability to do this, which has been confirmed to be untrue.