Slashdot Mirror

I'm an adult and I disagree with you. I've only played Vice City and San Andreas in full so my experience is limited among all the releases, but I do believe Vice City was one of the funniest games I've played. Hopefully someone who has played them all can throw in their voice and perhaps say Vice City is the funniest of all the GTA titles.

Visually and thematically, the whole 80s thing was brilliant. Hawaiian shirts, lesiure suits, big white marble Neo-Classical mansions etc.

Then there was the 80s music, some of which is funny because we're embarassed how much we like it and then the moronic Spinal-tap-ish band made up of drug-addled Northerners and Scotsmen. Love Fist was it? I think it was also based on the backstage and off-stage scandalous antics of bands like Motley Crue.

They outdid themselves with the commercials and the talk radio shows. Yes, I concede that some of the ads are very crude, like Robot Chicken crude. No finesse, just toilet humour on steroids (I'm thinking of a particular commercial promoting chocolate donuts). They poked fun at things like the Atari having super-realistic graphics ("That one dot just vaporized the other dot!!!")and Casio Keyboards making you an instant musician (anyone remember the 'key-tar' i.e the "keyboard guitar").

My greatest praise goes to the talk shows. They did a great job satirizing the biggest topics of American politics: religion, gender and sexuality, Republicans vs. Democrats and the usual Oprah topics for flavour.

Of course let's not forget all the racial stereotypes. Sort of a very dark Quentin Tarantino makes fun of Mel Brooks' standard character tropes. The cowardly neurotic accountant comes to mind. Then there are the silly names so typical of TV shows of the 80s like Lance Vance. C'mon, you had to chuckle at that. Finally the random soundbites from NPCs walking around who themselves are each and every one, a caricature of some stereotype. I thought the bikini-clad rollerskating girls were hilarious, such an artifical expression of 80's beach culture.

What I suspect is meant by an attractive woman is someone with nice hips and ample breasts, meaning the appropriate qualities for child-bearing. However, because of humanity's appreciation for aesthetic qualities other factors may come into play. I also think that popular culture was twisted what men find attractive so that guys end up going for woman who are overly plasticky or, at the other extreme, thin as toothpicks.

I think there is probably a general template for what is considered attractive, but certainly there are specific characteristics that are more appealing in some cultures. And again, I think popular culture has turned beauty into a caricature.

"Realism" is easy to chase. You don't need a strong artistic vision. You can easily guide a large team down this path: "just make it look as realistic as possible, in these restrictions" is pretty easy to articulate. The programmers can dig into research papers, the artists can go outside.

(There can be a hell of a lot of hard work put into this goal; something like Crysis has clearly been polished and loved. But its visual goals are conceptually simple: "make it look real".)

When you're striving for something striking but stylized, you need a unified artistic vision. If you have more than a couple artists on the team, you need one person whose job is pretty much just going around and saying "that's a nice model, but it doesn't quite fit the artistic vision - tweak this, this, and this and pass it by me when you're done." And the programmers have to find ways to support this style. There was a paper making the rounds a while back on the very sophisticated shaders that were developed to give Team Fortress 2 a particular feel to its lighting, for instance. There was a hell of a lot of directed work that went into making it look a certain unrealistic way.

When your restrictions are tighter, visual style becomes more important. The Pokémon games are done on 2D hardware with pixels big enough to see; they are already highly abstracted by the nature of the medium. You pretty much have to stylize and caricature the hell out of things to make them read.

Not every team has an artistic visionary. When you don't have one, "realism" is pretty much your only option.

"The community reacted violently to the publication of the Ode. Appellants received death threats and a shot was fired at the family home, forcing the family to move out of [AnyPlaceUSA]. Due to severe losses, David closed the 20-year-old family business."

Did the lawyers for both sides stipulate to these "facts"? Or were they somehow proven in the trial court? There are at least six assertions here:

1. The community reacted violently.
2. Appellants received death threats.
3. A shot was fired at the family home.
4. The family [was forced] to move.
5. The [business suffered] severe losses.
6. David closed the business.

Numbers 2, 3 and 5 are assertions that should be straightforward to establish evidentially. Although the precise scenario of the "severe losses" is not laid out. Did business simply drop precipitously? Or was there an extended period of tedious sniping back-and-forth, for instance in the local chamber of commerce? How exactly did the (former) customers learn that the business was connected to the girl's family? And what kind of business was it, anyway? What was happening with the business's competition at the same time? Did one profit at the expense of the other? Or did the entire local industry fail (a very familiar scenario in small towns)?

But was the business forced to close (#6) as a direct result of the republication? The implication is that the family moved due to both safety and economic concerns (#4). The first of these seems a criminal matter almost impossible to connect back to republication unless the bullet is traced to a gun and the gun to a death threat and the death threat to someone unhinged by a letter to the editor. In rural America, having a shot fired at a house is more likely to be an incautious sportsman. Was it deer season? While moving due to economic reasons is simply a restating of the prior assertion about the business failing. This is perhaps pertinent to damages, but not to the facts of the case.

What does it mean for an appellate judge to assert "the community reacted violently"? Surely there must be prior case law to understand this point? The implication in the Slashdot article is that this happened in fact and that it was causally related to one poor girl's teenage angst about where she happened to grow up.

It appears rather to this reader that the judge overreached unnecessarily. To come to the same decision ("go away little girl, you bother me") there was no reason to rule on the copyright aspects of the case at all. The judgement can be taken to say that any intentional "publication", no matter how temporary, to an online source permits a newspaper to republish your work. This doesn't do the newspaper industry any favors. Fair use is a two-edged sword:

"Having been published on myspace.com, the Ode was not private."

Doesn't this apply to everything a newspaper ever publishes? If there is no copyright protection of the girl's expression of her all-too-typical teenage thoughts, why can't complete articles from this newspaper now be republished at will as letters to the editor on MySpace pages? Either MySpace is a publication coequal with a newspaper - or it isn't.

One remains skeptical about the facts in this case. Surely the bad actions (as described) of the community's high school principal and newspaper publisher would have been even more likely to arouse community ire? While one could almost take a sensitivity to insult as a defining characteristic of small town life versus city life - similar negative screeds to city life are published every day in city newspapers - one is skeptical that this small town is such a caricature of the girl's description. In Aesop's fable, it is the Country Mouse who scurries home.

According to economic theory, financial crises don't happen, clearly standard economics is wrong.

According to Newtonian mechanics, an object in motion will never stop, clearly Newtonian mechanics is wrong.
According to Darwinism, apes evolved into humans, but there are still apes, so clearly Darwinism is wrong.

Or, more precisely: "If you attack an uneducated caricature of what a discipline actually says, you merely reveal your ignorance."

It is horrifying, but you wont remember it.
I survived 12 rounds with a brain eating virus (acute viral encephalitis from an unknown pathogen) in '03. One of the bad things that resulted from the brain injury is my short term to long term memory transfer got totally borked. It took me years to realize how f***ed I really am.
short term memory is really only about 30 seconds worth, any thing longer is long term memory.
My Doctors have given me useful advice like "write things down" Completely unusable advice, by the time I get a pen and paper (or open a Text editor) to write it down I've forgotten what I wanted to write down. I'm consistently surprised by what day month or year it is.
But it's not all bad, with a broken memory and no sense of time one can accomplish things like the absurdly mind numbing task of reverse engineering some of the undocumented features of 440GX chipsets, or helping pmdata and marcheu RE some nvidia GPUs.

Perhaps I could get a job chauffeuring evil corporate overlords around.
"Where would you like to go today Mr Rivera" and get dosed with some GuadalajaraPink. Ahh the joy of forgetting. (reference is to Pat Cadigan's 1991 cyberpunk novel "Synners")
Or maybe stick to assembling robotic caricatures of all the people who wronged me that I almost remember. (William Gibson "Mona Lisa Overdrive")

And since 'they' are all childish caricatures of 'real' people, they will eat up with their baby food spoons.

What a bunch of bitter stereotypical drivel. This sounds like it was written by someone who'd never been in a real relationship but had only read outlandish caricatures of them. It's probably being modded up by others who have also not been in a real relationship.

>>The kind of obese aging people you find in much of the US are rarer in Western Europe, however, as are those scooters that carry them around.

Trust me, as an American who has spent a great deal of time in Europe and the Middle East- this is very true. It's really sad. And the first couple of days back home are weird... You really notice the difference and it feels like you're walking through a carnival sideshow or something. No offense to anyone personally, but the caricatures of us are sadly true for the most part.

-b

Dunno who was the original model

According to a copy of the writer's bible for TNG that I read once, the Ferengi were supposed to be modeled after Yankee Traders. Don't bother looking that up on Wikipedia, since the article there is about some stupid BBS turn-based game that loosely relates to the historical concept of a Yankee Trader, and borrows the term as its name. Yankee Traders were American merchants who, when the United States was still young, practiced a sort of wild and wooly capitalism which was characterized (or caricatured) by rapacious greed and dishonest dealings. "Swindler" is given as a synonym for "Yankee horse trader" by some older dictionaries.

Makes sense when you realize that the United States was a so-called "pirate nation" in its early years, with 14-year copyrights for us and no recognition of anyone else's copyrights -- we had a lot of books published here with no money going to their European authors.

It certainly would reduce the amount of humidity downwind. Luckily, downwind is where some poor bastard who isn't you lives. Handy, isn't it?

(In a less "caricature of a Fremen libertarian" vein, I imagine that this sort of tech, on a large scale, could indeed have unpleasant effects for those downwind of it. Looking at the stark difference in climate of otherwise similar regions, one in front of the big mountain range that blocks moist air, and the other behind it, is pretty much geography 101 stuff, the effects are that unsubtle.)

I didn't say "impossible". What I am saying is that it appears to be better for people to be able to openly identify their political views so that others can debate them.

Well, the classical Nazis wouldn't because they'd risk getting lynched. Many neo-Nazis do; they just chose different symbols (well, they essentially ripped off the Skinhead movement from the UK).

Right after WWII, Germany was a defeated nation full of ex-Nazis; imposing restrictions on speech was justified and necessary. That has nothing to do with whether such restrictions are a good idea in a mature and functioning democracy.

The question is, when do you stop? After five years, ten, twenty? When the last Nazi is dead? That last one still hasn't occurred. When the idea of national socialism has died out? That's not going to happen anytime soon. We as a people are just starting to become comfortable with ourselves, so you can't expect us to drop all cautionary measures we have taken.

You're just making that up. Paragraph 185 is an unusual restriction on speech even within Europe, distinct from libel laws. It's so unusual that the EU itself has taken a position against these kinds of laws.

Again, "libel" is a bad translation for what it tries do cover. Also, yes, I've dug a bit more and have uncovered a lot of rather petty cases (although in essence it all revolves around when someone feels that his reputation or dignity has been violated). I certainly wouldn't shed a tear if we got rid of it.

It's by no means a perfect law but it's also not a law that can be used to suppress political speech - as evidence I point to the current election campaign of the SPD, which is essentially rather infantile name-calling, as well as the various anti-Schäuble actions, the most high-profile of which calls him the direct successor of the GDR's Ministry for State Security. The SPD is getting no legal trouble from the other parties at all and Schäuble has tried all kinds of obscure things (like trying to pretend the people demonstrating against him are enemies of the constitution) - if the insult paragraph could help him he'd use it.

Yes, one is openly insulting two billion people. Christians, atheists, and other groups often insult each other in that way without rioting. Insults are a normal and necessary part of political discourse in a democracy. If people riot because they feel insulted, then the problem is with the rioters, not with the people making the insults.

I never felt that deeply offending someone was necessary in political discourse but if it's deemed that way over there it does explain why nobody likes the USA anymore.

Imagine there's a bit more violence in Iraq, the USA responds by sending more troops and in response to that some Eurasian newspaper makes a caricature that shows Barack Obama as Adolf Hitler, declaring that the States will now begin an ethnic cleansing of the Middle East. Because, you know, America is all about ruling one's subjects with an iron fist. I'd expect a lot of Americans becoming quite angry about that - it's not only very insulting but also shows the American values as something they explicitly aren't. Even if only one percent of all Americans gets angry, that's still three million people. One percent of all Muslims getting angry makes twenty million people - enough to seem like an army and make for some very impressive TV footage, even though most muslims don't even care about it.

You argued that laws similar to paragraph 130 exist in the US and in support of that statement pointed to an ADL page on hate crime laws. But paragraph 130 is very different from US hate crime laws. Hate speech is generally legal in the US, even speech advocating illegal violence against minorities.

Ah. I would've known right away had you quoted the sentence where I talk about the Sta

I have no idea why this is modded as funny. I am not Russian, nor Chinese, but Western (grew up in Europe, Canada, and the States). And jokes like these is what made us inferior. Remember those jokes in the 1970's regarding Japanese cars! What could wrong! HA! We know what went wrong...

Oh come on, I don't think people actually believe this now; it's just joking around using caricatures. Most people know that USA-made goods are just as crappy as other ones (perhaps moreso), and that most of it is made in China anyway, good and bad.

Ah, you see, you're claiming that String theorists are claiming that they're right. And guess what, they're not making those kind of claims, as far as I've ever heard. Even Brian Greene, whose cheerleading for String theory is well-known, has been careful to point out that nothing is proven yet and a lot of work needs to be done.

String theory may or may not turn out to be wrong, but it hasn't been disproven yet, and nobody has come up with a better theory yet, and thus I would opine that it's still worth exploring.

Your example is a red herring, anyway. As the caricature of the religious believer that you've drawn does have a competing theory, and that believer thinks it's better. If the hypothesis that god created the universe is the only theory you have, you can justify accepting it conditionally, until a better theory comes along or until you've disproven your hypothesis.

I'll second the picture idea. I'm a developer by trade and for the longest time I couldn't figure out what to do with my site. I am not a graphic designer and all my designs don't quite cut it. Some time last year I went to an 'IT Hero' event where I had a caricature drawn up of me as the flash. That was backdrop to my site for a good 18 months. I find that a good whimsical picture makes people enjoy the otherwise pointless visit to the site. caricature

Yes. This is how I see society working as well. Men are expendable.

Also, as much as there are horrific abuses of women in the Arab world, I suspect they are aberrations. I have known a lot of Arabic guys in university, and with the exception of one creep, those guys dote on their wives and do what their wives tell them. The women really seem to wear the pants and make the big decisions; the guys are like children who are given a little more slack because they go out and earn the money.

I honestly think that this view of society needs to be put out there more. I live in Japan, and this is very much how this works. Guys go out and work themselves to death; housewives have the bank card and give the guy an allowance.

You know that saying "behind every great man there is a great woman?" Well, people think that it's sexist, because it implies that women are in a support role, but what it doesn't mention is the strings connecting the woman's hands to the man, and the fact that the man is in front because that's always where you put a shield. He's there to do the bidding of the woman and soak up bullets.

Okay, so the model of society I'm posing here isn't exactly true, but I would argue that it is no less true than the model of male dominance. The truth is always a lot more complex than any little caricature we can dream up.

That's a great article and I bookmarked it. Sadly, I think a lot of people are going to read that and just indignantly think, "Well I know that *I* agree with those, but those other assholes definitely don't," thus missing the entire point.

I think the world would be a better place if we learned to think of our opponents as actual humans rather than ridiculous caricatures.

My local Amiga Users Group chartered a bus back in 1989 or so and went to an Amiga convention in NYC. The bus's route took us through Harlem and I did notice a lot of little fried chicken places - almost every other corner seemed to have one. So, it seems there is some basis in fact for that particular stereotype.

I think the problem arises when the stereotype is used as an intentionally insulting caricature. That's more likely to be done by an individual than an organization.

Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons (to name one) is not a caricature. He's a real guy. I've met him. He lives in most comic book shops.

Exactly. He was partly inspired by a specific comic book guy in LA, but Matt Groening says: "I can't tell you how many times people have come up to me and said, 'I know who you based that comic book guy on. It's that comic-book guy right down the block.' And I have to tell them, 'No, it's every comic-bookstore guy in America.'"

Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons (to name one) is not a caricature. He's a real guy. I've met him. He lives in most comic book shops. He will make fun of you for liking the wrong comics, he will make fun of you for buying the wrong set of dice. He is the alpha nerd, and he's not going to let you forget it.

AFAIK, I'm still banned from the Laughing Dragon in Dallas because when I was 12 years old, I suggested that I liked DBZ better than Akira.