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Tolkien seemed to do just fine with caricaturized good and evil.

That's because he was using the whole story metaphorically. But anyway.

Tolkien seemed to do just fine with caricaturized good and evil. I believe Sauron and Saruman were well aware that they were unquestionably evil.

It's bad story that gamers don't like. Characterization is part of that, but really, how characterized was a disembodied eye?

"lidless, wreathed in flame," was about it.

But the story (for most people) was captivating, despite its apparent 'simplicity'. 'Believable' villians are only a requirement if you're trying to craft a 'believeable' story.

and even then, self-delusion is not a set-in-stone requirement (Hannibal Lector).

As with any storytelling, there are no set rules, there are no silver bullets - there is only what works and what does not work. And no-one can tell you which is which by description alone. You must read the work to know where it lays on your subjective scale.

Trying to adhere to structure or processes that were defined via hindsight, doesn't guarantee future success - so why bother?

(You may argue with 3 act play, 9 part story, joseph campbell, et al. - but the overbundance of crap stories that adhere to those structures and the instances of good stories that don't use them already prove my point)

A storyteller should get inside every character's head, to make sure they're well-written. But self-justified evil is not a prerequisite of a well characterized Bad Guy.

it's also important to note the distinction between the disillusioned bad guy who thinks he's doing good, and the Bad Guy who realizes that his actions will be seen as evil, and perhaps are evil, but he still feels a compulsion to execute them anyway (the Borg, any Mob Boss, etc).

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

I was able to modify mine once too. It took forever and I was working for 3-4 months without signing the NDA -- actually, I think we struck out all the bad portions and I signed that. But the company and their lawyers were willing to work with me and drafted a better NDA which i signed to replace the original.

We struck out the inventions off company time part and there was another clause saying they could use my likeness or caricature for all eternity. Not like I expect them to, but it's a very odd thing to sign. Even the lawyers were suprised to see that clause in the company wide NDA.

Raise Taxes.

Ah yes--the classic caricature: Democrats/Liberals/the Left believe in tax and spend government.

Observation of recent Republican governments reveals an interesting financial model: don't tax--and spend. The largest U.S. federal deficits were under Reagan, and now Bush is out to set some new records of his own. Spending more while taxing less doesn't work--it just generates debt. Even a Democrat can figure that out. You can only spend money that you don't have for so long before it catches up to you.

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

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 fragmen

On your first point, I'll point you to this article that attempted to examine the effects of US-imposed drug price controls on overall global drug R&D spending. Note that the 15 largest pharmaceutical companies he studied were Pfizer, Merck & Co., AstraZeneca, Aventis, Bristol-Meyers Squibb, GlaxoWellcome, Pharmacia, Roche, Johnson & Johnson, American Home Products, Eli Lilly, SmithKline Beecham, Abbott Laboratories, Bayer, and Amgen. As is obvious from looking at the list and checking company websites, the pharmaceutical business is a global one. You can also note from the article (on page 23) that many European countries, including where a number of the top pharmaceutical companies are based, have drug price controls of one kind or another. It might be more accurate to say that U.S. consumers are the target market for the lion's share of new drugs.

The conclusion of the modeling study is that U.S. adoption of price controls equal to the average of industrialized European countries would result in lowered R&D spending overall, but that the decline could range in intensity from "a very small decline to a near complete cessation of R&D activity; the latter is, of course, an absurd conclusion". In other words, we probably shouldn't place much faith in any results from his model. The question of whether U.S. price controls would significantly cut R&D expenditures, or simply shift more of the burden for R&D to other global customers is beyond his model to answer.

On your second point, you gave the URL for the Pharmaceutical Researchers and Manufacturers of America site which contained a number of links. Not knowing exactly which article you wished to refer to, I'll simply choose the rebuttal article to this report by the Attorney General of the state of Minnesota, as they seem to clearly summarize the viewpoints of the pharmacy trade group and the opposing camp. Anyone interested in the subject should read both, hopefully with an open mind. If you would like to discuss any particular point, just let me know.

On the third point, I think your characterization of scientists is more of a caricature than a true picture. Scientists, whether publicly or privately funded, are people, who have normal human concerns and awareness of things around them. One thing basic research does is provide knowledge that makes the drug discovery phase more efficient. Discovery in finding the right compositions to pursue for new drugs is essential for making sure only the most promising approaches are followed up with more expensive development efforts and clinical trials. The pharmaceutical companies are often better suited for carrying on the later processes, but they heavily benefit from public research efforts that point them in the right direction. It's not just about total dollars spent, but also how much is saved by developing a proper scientific foundation for the search.

This also brings up the point that while the industry likes to brag about how much it costs to bring a new drug to market and how risky the prospects are for success, the truth is that the greatest development costs occur during the latest stages of product development (such as holding large clinical trials involving thousands of subjects). By the time decisions are made to hold such trials, the company must have already experienced enough success from earlier work to have a high degree of confidence in success. Most unsuccessful drugs are thus weeded out early, before huge expenditures are incurred in development. The better the basic science that is available, the more efficient this filtering process can be.

BUT, nothing in mathematics is just 'made up'. All mathematics is based on fundamental, logical axioms (truths), and if anything were to violate those axioms, or the completely logical conclusions drawn therefrom, it would not be mathematics.

Yeah, right! Like if you were to try to do Set Theory without the Axiom of Choice it wouldn't be mathematics; or Geometry without the Parallel Postulate, likewise. Because the axioms of mathematics are just built-in to the nature of thought, or the universe, or something... [sarcasm off]

Don't confuse social constructive ideas--or for that matter, mathematical constructivism--with some stupid caricature some right wing ideologue spouted on the Fox Network. Thinkers like Kuhn, Feyerabend, Foucault, Latour, even Lyotard or Baudrillard are far more rigorous and intelligent than their critics are (the critics have no idea what the social constructivists are saying in the first place).

It just so happens that I've both done some real work in social constructive philosophy of science... and also know VASTLY more mathematics than does the parent poster. Don't settle for ignorance!

Apparently you don't actually read my posts, you just scan for buzzwords. I find it creepy how much a caricature of a wooden archetype is the noisy "Conservative" today. Predicable characteristics feature the otherwise ironic projection of the rightwinger's own flaws inappropriately onto the threatening behavior of their critic.

My sentences, when I'm willing to believe there's a reader who will appreciate them, maintain constructions appropriately complex to what they describe. But that:

I get so freaking tired of trying to read comments on an article and most of the comments modded high enough for me to see have nothing to do with the original topic, but are spawns of nutjobs who hate people who don't think like them.

Is a runon sentence, typically sloppy thinking that grammatical conventions would tidy on rephrase. Instead, you apparently parse your own speech about as closely as you parse mine. While I prefer to use your own words against you, as I commonly find them your own worst enemy. If I cared what you think, I would ask you for your description of my "ideology". I'm really just amused by your hypocritical namecalling.

3-D artists? What are they going to do, throw hot latte at you? Raytrace an unflattering caricature of you?

Never fear a guy with a goatee, a black turtleneck, and a beret.

• Q-bert
• Tetris
• Bubble Bobble
• Dig Dug
• Doom

• Mortal Kombat
• Lethal Inforcers
• After Burner
• Operation Wolf

I guess that wasn't what he meant. His point was that enough Americans are so ignorant about history, geography, and spelling and grammar that this is "typical" in the USA. Of course, any classification must consider exceptions, but when one does a caricature a certain amount of exageration is OK.

Linus Torvalds: Uses blackbox on three monitors, all full of Xterms running vi. The background is a roll of toilet paper, edited in The Gimp to look like a roll of Transmeta, RedHat and VA Linux stock shares.

Bill Gates: Last night's build of longhorn. Has 5 monitors: one for the PowerPoint slideshow he's rehearsing, one for Outlook, and three for all the extra clocks, sliders, gizmos, icons, etc. that Longhorn puts on the desktop. His background is one of the default WinXP images.

George W. Bush: Cheney and Rumsfeld won't let him touch the "big kid computers", but he has an Etch-a-Sketch with a caricature of Saddam Hussein sitting on a canister of nerve gas.

Steve Jobs: 3 21" Apple Cinema displays. Beta build of OSX 10.4 ("Puma"). Only has one icon on the desktop, but damn if it doesn't look *really cool*.

..the days of really simple game concepts. I miss the game 'Haunting' for the Sega Genesis. There were people in your house, you were poltergeists, and you were constantly setting little traps to spook them. Imagine playing the Sims where you can make the oven try to bite the occupants.

Wanna know what bugs me? This article suggested that everything be a '3d remake'. I must say, no, 3D does not make everything better. I just can't see Xenophobe being better for it. Part of the appeal of that game was the goofy artwork, and in 3D it's hard to make it stand out as a caricature.

I agree with their choices, but I don't necessarily agree with how they should be reborn. Personally, I wish they'd try to stay as faithfula as possible to the original in a lot of their choices.

s/plantation/corporation/g

#include "usual_inhabitants"

This, I think, is the world some (no, I don't believe all) of the Republicans want, and will stop at nothing to create.

Some of these power hungry grubbers really seem to miss flat out owning people.

Compare some of the last few events to some of the characters (villians) in a Vernor Vinge novel (e.g. - Marooned in Real Time, Deepness in the Sky). While the characters in a book may be caricatures, it's still somewhat disconcerting what with TIA, protecting us for our own good and all the other stuff about how much Big Brother loves me. Bah!

You need to stop dealing wholesale in caricature, and at least acknowledge your opponents are not scarecrows of your own creation.

But with a name like 'nycsubway' you probably seldom leave the comfort of your city, so you've likely never seen America or a non-liberal in your life.

Well, thats your particular caricature, and I'd argue that things don't really work that way, at least with the more successful, well-known open source projects (which are much better managed than you assume). So exactly who is "throwing" junk into the wild, hoping that someone else cleans up the mess? In my experience it's hard to argue with the results, which are usually quite excellent.

Before you consider talking about geek stuff, consider that this is a country that does not allow other religions other than islam to be followed here. I mean, how pathetic is that?

No, no evidence. My point was that any argument which supports your side can equally well support the other. All it takes is a change of belief. One of the reasons that I'm no longer an athiest is that I noticed that everything I thought was a proof of God's non-existance was also being touted as a proof of the opposite. It got me started thinking. I finally realized that God wants us to take Him on faith, or not at all, so there won't be any irrefutable evidence or proof.

But are you trying to argue that rational Christians would have a problem with representations of the BSD daemon? What possible problems would they be -- other than a simple 'it offends my supernatural beliefs'?

How about this one: By using a cute caricature of evil as the mascot for something good, we blur, just a little, our ability to distinguish good from evil. The Germans followed Nietze a whole lot farther down a similar path around the turn of the last century, and the euthanasia program resulted. That predated Hitler and the Nazis, by the way.

There's nothing wrong with the BSD daemon, or the NetBSD logo, except for the effect they might have on future decisions. If they're ok, so is something just a little more extreme, and so on. The little guy with the horns is cute, but I'm not sure that it's a wise choice for logo.

How about if we get back to Maxwell's demon, and use a funny little guy with his hand on a gate? Or a cute polar bear, to go along with the polar theme which worked so well for Linux?

Changing the subject a bit, is your wife a recent convert? The bible warns us strongly against marrying unbelievers[1]. My wife and I married when I was athiest and she was pagen. Fortunately, we both acknowleged God at about the same time, so that saved one or the other of us a lot of worry and trouble.

[1] The bible also tells us we should stick to an unbelieving spouse.