Used to create resolution where there is none. Theoretically, if that works it should be possible to start with a single grey pixel and arrive at the Mona Lisa (or whatever else it was that you wanted to enhance).
This guy must be marketing to idiots. I have no other explanation of why he's advertising the absence of lead in components never known to use lead, such as heat sinks, optical drives, power supplies, etc.
I also have no idea why he's using power supplies and heat sinks with fans when there are fanless options (and hence less power consumption). Or why not go the whole hog and try and eliminate fans altogether?
Actually, laptops are generally designed to be very energy efficient. The power supplies are not. They are designed to be cheap to manufacture, small, and to transform just enough DC power to power a laptop. They get quite warm.
Some people learn by example
on
MySQL Cookbook
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Imagine a "checklist" for a pilot! What would you think of a pilot with a checklist tucked under his arm? I'd hope that my surgeon had a checklist too, that way I'd be far less likely to get an X-ray several years later revealing a surgical instrument left inside me.
Concerns over the (dubious) trustworthiness of MySeQueL to hold your precious data aside, a good recipe can prove invaluable for reasons besides making sure you're not forgetting anything.
I'm an engineer. At some stage, you have to understand the theory. However, I find that I learn best by osmosis. If I first learn how to do problems, then I have a context to place the theory and a motivation to learn it.
Do you build your skill as a writer by picking up Elements of Style, a dictionary and a book on grammar, or first addicting yourself to reading novels and then reading about theory? For most people it's the former. It's also how you learned spoken language as a child. The brain is in fact very well adapted to that mode of learning.
The problem is not with cookbooks but with people who have no desire at all to learn the theory, or who don't ask "What could I be potentially screwing up by taking this approach?".
The number of geniuses who aren't given an opportunity because they are born poor pales in comparison to the number of geniuses who haven't been born thanks to the dysgenic social engineering of the last 60 years.
Ironically, most of it has been sold as "liberation" and "freedom" for women. They don't realize they have been had until they wake up age 38 in some job they don't hate, find out that the "free love" they have been having over the years has given them infertility, and can't find a good husband because men have been naturally selected to desire a young wife.
One of the worst propaganda motifs has been the idea that intelligent women should prioritize career at all costs over making babies. Equal pay for equal work has also made it much more difficult for breadwinners/stay at home moms (due to doubling supply of labor), so outsourcing the mothering (which is done poorly by daycare) is more viable.
It's not that hard a concept; if we want geniuses the best strategy is to breed more of them.
The funny thing is now we have several new orthodoxies.
For example, when was the last time you heard the full title of Darwin's book?
It's actually "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life", but that tends to get swept under the rug since race supposedly is a social construct these days, or is just a skin color, or some such bollocks.
Or try and get grant money to investigate the possibility that a bacteria/virus causes homosexuality. That might lead to a vaccine, and of course we can't have that.
"In it's (apparently) intended use for shooting down missiles/mortars in the short-range theater...the ranges involved shouldn't allow for much in the way of intensity of the scatter."
I wonder what the possibilities for friendly fire are when using this as an anti-mortar device while maintaining air superiority?
75 percent of MIT students have at least a combined math/verbal SAT score of 1430. If you don't have that, chances are poor that you will get in unless you are "more equal than others", i.e. you are anything other than a White male.
Here's a homework assignment for you:
SAT score is a good enough proxy for IQ that most high IQ societies will accept it in lieu of an official IQ test. You can find out the mapping between SAT (and other tests) here: http://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/GREIQ.aspx
1. Find out the 25th percentile SAT score of the top 5-10 schools. (They are very similar.) 2. Find out the freshman population of all these schools in total, times that by.75 to get the number above the 25th percentile. (You might want to subtract international students, or just estimate.) 3. Using US population pyramids and the IQ distribution (bell shaped curve), estimate the total number of US students who these schools can actually draw from to get such a student population. 4. From there, estimate the probability that they will accept you based on SAT score alone.
MIT was 1410 versus 1270 for CMU (25th percentile). That means if you take a random sample of the population who would just make it into the 25th percentile of CMU, there would only be 1/6 of them who would just make it into the 25th percentile of MIT.
There are a few here. Along with some misunderstandings.
1) Why is it perfectly mainstream and acceptable to link sympathetically to a site called "Black Voice News", when if you did the same thing for a site called "White Voice News", you'd be instantly accused of wanting to gas 6 million people?
2) "The video game industry is all about money"... um, ok. Like any other form of media, it's an immense power that has a small ability to make some money on the side. The ability to shape the minds of millions of people to an extent that movies can't is worth far more than any revenue stream that could be derived from games. 10 billion a year is small potatoes on a world scale. An Iraq war alone costs an order of magnitude more. For someone who has the resources to promote such a thing, the game industry is cheap at multiples of the price.
3) "The problem is that our youth and adult players see themselves as players and not designers or illustrators." It's far more likely because of inherent genetic limitations of IQ wrt population size. It's simply unrealistic to expect large numbers of Black people to be effective in creating video games, the same way it would be to expect the White working class players of video games to be putting out content that has mass appeal. (Obviously there will be a small minority who will.)
I've got to give Richard O. Jones credit though. He does capitalize the word White when referring to race, something that Blacks, Jews, Asians, and Hispanics have benefited from for decades now. It's nice to start being recognized as a people for once. Maybe "our" media will follow suit one day? I'm not holding my breath.
Re:Economics of interstellar travel
on
Interstellar Ark
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
"The only thing that likely could spur a manned interstellar mission, barring drastic improvements in technology, is the impending destruction of human civilization -- and who would see that coming in time, with enough certainty, to spur the development of a crash program like that? (Especially given the wars likely to ensue if people are that sure of the annihilation of the human race.)"
I think you (unintentionally) put your finger on it. That sounds like a very realistic scenario of what would have to happen. Problem, reaction, solution.
That asteroid supposedly coming near earth in a few decades could be an excellent pretext, or problem. Even if it didn't hit the earth, it could probably be simulated with enough hydrogen bombs in the middle of an ocean. The populace could be effectively prepped by a few movies like Armageddon. Tsunamis take out a few ocean cities.
People clamor for humanity to be saved, and are willing to face outrageous taxes etc to fund the ark.
At that point, either the ark gets built, or it gets a movie made about it and various politicians / ark contractors pocket the funds.
The "Blasts" word in the title is a dead giveaway. It presupposes that IBM has done something wrong, and that people actually give a crap what MS thinks about the subject.
I suppose when you have a monopoly that forces much of the Western world to fork over a few hundred dollars for dubious "improvements", you can afford to pay off a journo or two.
"The reason FOSS will _have_ to be a grassroots movement is because it's not about making money. This is also the reason it will always be a backwater movement, like anarcho-communists or Larouchers, which 99% of people will fail to understand or agree with."
Most people don't have the IQ to code anything worthwhile, and a smaller set has the motivation, so by definition any movement about the creation of code will not be majority. I'm not sure why you would label it backwater though.
It's just another phase in a grand European tradition of public scientific contribution. Pythagoras, Newton, Leibnitz, Darwin right through to Torvalds, Stallman et al. I suspect their names may loom larger in the history books than Gates or Ellison.
Ultima 6 is a prime example. That fictional universe was probably a prime reason in me becoming pro-multicultural at the time. Looking back on it, the propaganda aspects are obvious.
All these Gargoyles have invaded Britannia. You start off killing them, encouraged by your king, Lord British. Of course, part way through you discover that they are only coming through to your world because their world is falling into a void and they need you to rectify it. And they aren't evil, they in fact mean you no harm and are a very cultured and learned race. As an added bonus, you will pick up a gargoyle character who has better stats than anyone in the entire game. And of course, the only way you can finish the game is to help them out. (I'm somewhat surprised that the game didn't have you lobby Lord British to give amnesty for undocumented Gargoyles or go on a quest to get the local bards to put on a Live Aid show.)
As the audience in games has grown larger and recognition has dawned on people that you can buy tens to hundreds of hours of influence with a game compared to 2 hours with a movie, it's no accident that anyone with the desire to manipulate public opinion and the means to create video games decides who is cast as villain or hero in games, what the quests shall be, and what assumptions will be challenged by the protagonist in the game.
Propaganda in art is as old as art itself. I'm not sure why this is news.
South Park nailed it in both the "Towelie" and "Make Love, Not Warcraft" episodes. An addicted gamer has very similar symptoms to chemical addicts. Gamers: -get irritable without their fix, and angry when denied it -think about the game when they are doing other things -spend all their leisure time and time when they should be doing chores or work playing the game -build up a tolerance, and then go searching for something new and better that triggers the same receptors -spend large amounts of money on their fix (compute cost of home computer + video card upgrades + games + power + etc etc) if they can't avoid it. -will lie to themselves and others, cajole, respond aggressively, etc, indeed anything they can think of to give themselves an opportunity to play some more.
Instead of using a chemical to tap into the pleasure receptors of the nervous system, the game taps into those receptors in a more roundabout way. How? 1) By simulating one or more aspects of real life where success or merely participation gives good feelings (which drive us to do more of them). 2) Quickening the feedback loop to make the game able to generate good feelings that are more intense or generated at a faster rate compared to real life. Essentially, to take out enough of the parts of the real life experience that seem like work, but not enough so that our brains aren't fooled and don't dole out the pleasure.
As a result, real life seems a little hard and stale by comparison. Why slog away spending ten years to become a master carpenter when in 6 months you can be a 50th level mage with a huge cachet of spells, able to take out powerful monsters (though carefully selected so that you always have a chance to defeat them if you work hard, except for Lord British of course), with many and varied adventures and friends along the way?
Different people are wired slightly differently. Some people don't get addicted easily to them. And all those who are addicted tend to have their type of addiction, be it combat simulation (killing), exercising strategy and tactics (to kill people), cooperating with friends (in between killing people), ransacking dungeons or climbing the virtual ladder.
Thus it's not surprising how companies market, and why we see relatively little experimentation now that a lot of the population is hooked and we know the methods of hooking them. It's not that surprising really. We have a few traits that have been honed by thousands of years of natural selection - to mate, to band together and make war, to eke a living from the land, to function in a community doing some sort of service, to accrue scarce resources, to climb a pecking order, to explore and find new and better pastures or new and better things that other people own and we can liberate from them. (And women have a different set of drives. Which is why we have house cats and yip yip dogs.)
There are only so many human drives, and thus, only so many games that will have mass appeal.
"Boredom's not a burden Anyone should bear" - Maynard James Keenan
A small quibble, I don't think fun should be in that list. A good game is fun by definition. I've never been addicted to a game that wasn't in some way fun.
Now if you don't mind, I'm off to fill out my tax return. It's got: Trade, Tactics, Strategy (Problem Solving), Pattern Recognition and Organization. Looks like it's gonna kick ass!
OR downloads something like PCLinuxOS, reformats the hard drive and installs itself at 4:00am when no one is around to stop it. And then downloads and opens Wesnoth, ready to play. So that before they realize that the Office package isn't like MS, at least a certain percentage of the population will be hooked on one of the best OSS games out there.
Most major religions have some offensive bits. It's how their followers (or leaders) gain enough success to propagate the religion, after all, by doing something that takes resources away form other people.
In order to attract less harrassment, they tend to put all the obnoxious stuff in oral codes. When that gets too complex for anyone to remember, they make a book in their own language. That book is usually accompanied by rules to kill any outsider who reads the book and the insider who shows it to them. They will also usually have some guidelines for insiders to create a bunch of obfuscation, not limited to: - "It's untranslatable." - "You've got us all wrong. That book is not really important in our religion. Here, have a look at our other, tolerant book all about puppy dogs, philanthropy and niceness that is the primary focus of our religion." (There actually may be sects that are true to this, but they are usually offshoots) - "Those are mistranslations. Here are the official translations."
Works the same, be it Scientology, Islam, Talmudists, Mormons, Freemasonry. Probably Christians too, for all I know, since that was certainly spread by the sword too.
The first of which requires an understanding of what the most important resources are, and where they are located. I'll give you a hint - it's oil. To a lesser extent, other, less convenient energy sources.
Yes, the USA has a finger in almost everywhere, and especially in those places with valuable resources. The US is nothing at all like the fictional non-expansionist America of Sid Meier's Civilization game. There is no power in history that has controlled as much of the globe as has America, and maybe the percentage as well. Even back then, the Romans never controlled China, or Russia for that matter. The world is bigger now and the US controls more of it. Compare: http://www.unrv.com/roman-map-for-sale.php
Of course, it gets sold to Americans (and the world) that they are being "world's policeman", a good natured bobby who wanders around making sure that the kids play nice. And they are so nice, they supposedly do it all for no fee, no taxation required.
Of course, in the real world taxation is the basis of all empires, and the US empire is no different. The way the tax works is harder to understand, but no less effective.
In the modern world, everyone needs oil. In order to buy that oil, it must be purchased in US dollars. If an oil producing nation decides to sell in another currency, the US will invade. Saddam tried to sell in Euros in 2000 and paid the penalty. And because France and Germany would have benefited, they opposed Gulf War 2 and hence the US responded with all the "cheese eating surrender monkey" propaganda that was produced around that time.
How does the tax work? Consider that the number of US dollars has been increasing all the time, and that the cost to print them is effectively zero. If the US runs out of money, it can just print more. Or, at least, the FRB can. But who owns the FRB is something you can google yourself.
And the US _has_ been printing more dollars for a long time now. When the US does that, the rest of the world picks up the tab by making more of what US citizens are willing to buy. Here is a graph of the US dollars in circulation, the M3. http://www.economagic.com/em-cgi/charter.exe/fedst l/m3sl
So that's the first reason why the US is "policing" Iraq. To maintain a monopoly on the currency oil is traded for, and hence, the foundation of their empire.
The second reason is for Israel. Saddam was considered a major threat to Israel. Consider the goals of PNAC, what they wrote before the war, the members, and where they are seated in the Bush regime. http://zfacts.com/p/775.html
Creak... (Door opens) "Manual? Who needs that? Looks like we've been left us just enough corn, wheat and barley to make a loaf of bread! You get the firewood, I'll figure out how we're gonna grind it up."
Slashdot Mirror
My personal favorite: Enhance! As seen on CSI.
Used to create resolution where there is none. Theoretically, if that works it should be possible to start with a single grey pixel and arrive at the Mona Lisa (or whatever else it was that you wanted to enhance).
"This is the clearest, simplest, Occam-obeying explanation for the basic acceptance of religion in most people regardless of culture."
And it's the one explanation those who kneel before the fashionable god of Political Correctness have the most problem with.
But... it's not evil! How can they be evil when they have pretty colored letters and an elegant, uncluttered interface?
This guy must be marketing to idiots. I have no other explanation of why he's advertising the absence of lead in components never known to use lead, such as heat sinks, optical drives, power supplies, etc.
I also have no idea why he's using power supplies and heat sinks with fans when there are fanless options (and hence less power consumption). Or why not go the whole hog and try and eliminate fans altogether?
Actually, laptops are generally designed to be very energy efficient. The power supplies are not. They are designed to be cheap to manufacture, small, and to transform just enough DC power to power a laptop. They get quite warm.
Imagine a "checklist" for a pilot! What would you think of a pilot with a checklist tucked under his arm? I'd hope that my surgeon had a checklist too, that way I'd be far less likely to get an X-ray several years later revealing a surgical instrument left inside me.
Concerns over the (dubious) trustworthiness of MySeQueL to hold your precious data aside, a good recipe can prove invaluable for reasons besides making sure you're not forgetting anything.
I'm an engineer. At some stage, you have to understand the theory. However, I find that I learn best by osmosis. If I first learn how to do problems, then I have a context to place the theory and a motivation to learn it.
Do you build your skill as a writer by picking up Elements of Style, a dictionary and a book on grammar, or first addicting yourself to reading novels and then reading about theory? For most people it's the former. It's also how you learned spoken language as a child. The brain is in fact very well adapted to that mode of learning.
The problem is not with cookbooks but with people who have no desire at all to learn the theory, or who don't ask "What could I be potentially screwing up by taking this approach?".
He can do the swagger, he can do the arrogance and has similar acting ability/range. What's not to like?
The number of geniuses who aren't given an opportunity because they are born poor pales in comparison to the number of geniuses who haven't been born thanks to the dysgenic social engineering of the last 60 years.
Ironically, most of it has been sold as "liberation" and "freedom" for women. They don't realize they have been had until they wake up age 38 in some job they don't hate, find out that the "free love" they have been having over the years has given them infertility, and can't find a good husband because men have been naturally selected to desire a young wife.
One of the worst propaganda motifs has been the idea that intelligent women should prioritize career at all costs over making babies. Equal pay for equal work has also made it much more difficult for breadwinners/stay at home moms (due to doubling supply of labor), so outsourcing the mothering (which is done poorly by daycare) is more viable.
It's not that hard a concept; if we want geniuses the best strategy is to breed more of them.
The funny thing is now we have several new orthodoxies.
For example, when was the last time you heard the full title of Darwin's book?
It's actually "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life", but that tends to get swept under the rug since race supposedly is a social construct these days, or is just a skin color, or some such bollocks.
Or try and get grant money to investigate the possibility that a bacteria/virus causes homosexuality. That might lead to a vaccine, and of course we can't have that.
"In it's (apparently) intended use for shooting down missiles/mortars in the short-range theater...the ranges involved shouldn't allow for much in the way of intensity of the scatter."
I wonder what the possibilities for friendly fire are when using this as an anti-mortar device while maintaining air superiority?
"Only company that bothers to release stuff as best they can is Valve I think."
When Duke Nukem Forever comes out, it will be so perfect that it will require negative patches to scale back the brilliance.
75 percent of MIT students have at least a combined math/verbal SAT score of 1430. If you don't have that, chances are poor that you will get in unless you are "more equal than others", i.e. you are anything other than a White male.
.75 to get the number above the 25th percentile. (You might want to subtract international students, or just estimate.)
l
Here's a homework assignment for you:
SAT score is a good enough proxy for IQ that most high IQ societies will accept it in lieu of an official IQ test. You can find out the mapping between SAT (and other tests) here:
http://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/GREIQ.aspx
1. Find out the 25th percentile SAT score of the top 5-10 schools. (They are very similar.)
2. Find out the freshman population of all these schools in total, times that by
3. Using US population pyramids and the IQ distribution (bell shaped curve), estimate the total number of US students who these schools can actually draw from to get such a student population.
4. From there, estimate the probability that they will accept you based on SAT score alone.
(Hint, it's pretty damn high).
As to your case, colleges stay pretty constant in their 25th or 75th SAT percentiles. I think the SAT may have been renormed recently, but it was still the same test around the early 2000 era.
http://www-tech.mit.edu/V122/N40/40usnews.40n.htm
http://www.cmu.edu/ira/CDS/c_9900.html
MIT was 1410 versus 1270 for CMU (25th percentile). That means if you take a random sample of the population who would just make it into the 25th percentile of CMU, there would only be 1/6 of them who would just make it into the 25th percentile of MIT.
There are a few here. Along with some misunderstandings.
1) Why is it perfectly mainstream and acceptable to link sympathetically to a site called "Black Voice News", when if you did the same thing for a site called "White Voice News", you'd be instantly accused of wanting to gas 6 million people?
2) "The video game industry is all about money"... um, ok. Like any other form of media, it's an immense power that has a small ability to make some money on the side. The ability to shape the minds of millions of people to an extent that movies can't is worth far more than any revenue stream that could be derived from games. 10 billion a year is small potatoes on a world scale. An Iraq war alone costs an order of magnitude more. For someone who has the resources to promote such a thing, the game industry is cheap at multiples of the price.
3) "The problem is that our youth and adult players see themselves as players and not designers or illustrators." It's far more likely because of inherent genetic limitations of IQ wrt population size. It's simply unrealistic to expect large numbers of Black people to be effective in creating video games, the same way it would be to expect the White working class players of video games to be putting out content that has mass appeal. (Obviously there will be a small minority who will.)
I've got to give Richard O. Jones credit though. He does capitalize the word White when referring to race, something that Blacks, Jews, Asians, and Hispanics have benefited from for decades now. It's nice to start being recognized as a people for once. Maybe "our" media will follow suit one day? I'm not holding my breath.
"The only thing that likely could spur a manned interstellar mission, barring drastic improvements in technology, is the impending destruction of human civilization -- and who would see that coming in time, with enough certainty, to spur the development of a crash program like that? (Especially given the wars likely to ensue if people are that sure of the annihilation of the human race.)"
I think you (unintentionally) put your finger on it. That sounds like a very realistic scenario of what would have to happen. Problem, reaction, solution.
That asteroid supposedly coming near earth in a few decades could be an excellent pretext, or problem. Even if it didn't hit the earth, it could probably be simulated with enough hydrogen bombs in the middle of an ocean. The populace could be effectively prepped by a few movies like Armageddon. Tsunamis take out a few ocean cities.
People clamor for humanity to be saved, and are willing to face outrageous taxes etc to fund the ark.
At that point, either the ark gets built, or it gets a movie made about it and various politicians / ark contractors pocket the funds.
The "Blasts" word in the title is a dead giveaway. It presupposes that IBM has done something wrong, and that people actually give a crap what MS thinks about the subject.
I suppose when you have a monopoly that forces much of the Western world to fork over a few hundred dollars for dubious "improvements", you can afford to pay off a journo or two.
"The reason FOSS will _have_ to be a grassroots movement is because it's not about making money. This is also the reason it will always be a backwater movement, like anarcho-communists or Larouchers, which 99% of people will fail to understand or agree with."
Most people don't have the IQ to code anything worthwhile, and a smaller set has the motivation, so by definition any movement about the creation of code will not be majority. I'm not sure why you would label it backwater though.
It's just another phase in a grand European tradition of public scientific contribution. Pythagoras, Newton, Leibnitz, Darwin right through to Torvalds, Stallman et al. I suspect their names may loom larger in the history books than Gates or Ellison.
Ultima 6 is a prime example. That fictional universe was probably a prime reason in me becoming pro-multicultural at the time. Looking back on it, the propaganda aspects are obvious.
All these Gargoyles have invaded Britannia. You start off killing them, encouraged by your king, Lord British. Of course, part way through you discover that they are only coming through to your world because their world is falling into a void and they need you to rectify it. And they aren't evil, they in fact mean you no harm and are a very cultured and learned race. As an added bonus, you will pick up a gargoyle character who has better stats than anyone in the entire game. And of course, the only way you can finish the game is to help them out. (I'm somewhat surprised that the game didn't have you lobby Lord British to give amnesty for undocumented Gargoyles or go on a quest to get the local bards to put on a Live Aid show.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima_6
As the audience in games has grown larger and recognition has dawned on people that you can buy tens to hundreds of hours of influence with a game compared to 2 hours with a movie, it's no accident that anyone with the desire to manipulate public opinion and the means to create video games decides who is cast as villain or hero in games, what the quests shall be, and what assumptions will be challenged by the protagonist in the game.
Propaganda in art is as old as art itself. I'm not sure why this is news.
Er, that should be cache, not cachet. Preview is for cwoards.
Games are the opiate of the twenty first century.
South Park nailed it in both the "Towelie" and "Make Love, Not Warcraft" episodes. An addicted gamer has very similar symptoms to chemical addicts. Gamers:
-get irritable without their fix, and angry when denied it
-think about the game when they are doing other things
-spend all their leisure time and time when they should be doing chores or work playing the game
-build up a tolerance, and then go searching for something new and better that triggers the same receptors
-spend large amounts of money on their fix (compute cost of home computer + video card upgrades + games + power + etc etc) if they can't avoid it.
-will lie to themselves and others, cajole, respond aggressively, etc, indeed anything they can think of to give themselves an opportunity to play some more.
Instead of using a chemical to tap into the pleasure receptors of the nervous system, the game taps into those receptors in a more roundabout way. How?
1) By simulating one or more aspects of real life where success or merely participation gives good feelings (which drive us to do more of them).
2) Quickening the feedback loop to make the game able to generate good feelings that are more intense or generated at a faster rate compared to real life. Essentially, to take out enough of the parts of the real life experience that seem like work, but not enough so that our brains aren't fooled and don't dole out the pleasure.
As a result, real life seems a little hard and stale by comparison. Why slog away spending ten years to become a master carpenter when in 6 months you can be a 50th level mage with a huge cachet of spells, able to take out powerful monsters (though carefully selected so that you always have a chance to defeat them if you work hard, except for Lord British of course), with many and varied adventures and friends along the way?
Different people are wired slightly differently. Some people don't get addicted easily to them. And all those who are addicted tend to have their type of addiction, be it combat simulation (killing), exercising strategy and tactics (to kill people), cooperating with friends (in between killing people), ransacking dungeons or climbing the virtual ladder.
Thus it's not surprising how companies market, and why we see relatively little experimentation now that a lot of the population is hooked and we know the methods of hooking them. It's not that surprising really. We have a few traits that have been honed by thousands of years of natural selection - to mate, to band together and make war, to eke a living from the land, to function in a community doing some sort of service, to accrue scarce resources, to climb a pecking order, to explore and find new and better pastures or new and better things that other people own and we can liberate from them. (And women have a different set of drives. Which is why we have house cats and yip yip dogs.)
There are only so many human drives, and thus, only so many games that will have mass appeal.
"Boredom's not a burden Anyone should bear" - Maynard James Keenan
Interesting.
A small quibble, I don't think fun should be in that list. A good game is fun by definition. I've never been addicted to a game that wasn't in some way fun.
Now if you don't mind, I'm off to fill out my tax return. It's got: Trade, Tactics, Strategy (Problem Solving), Pattern Recognition and Organization. Looks like it's gonna kick ass!
OR downloads something like PCLinuxOS, reformats the hard drive and installs itself at 4:00am when no one is around to stop it. And then downloads and opens Wesnoth, ready to play. So that before they realize that the Office package isn't like MS, at least a certain percentage of the population will be hooked on one of the best OSS games out there.
Most major religions have some offensive bits. It's how their followers (or leaders) gain enough success to propagate the religion, after all, by doing something that takes resources away form other people.
In order to attract less harrassment, they tend to put all the obnoxious stuff in oral codes. When that gets too complex for anyone to remember, they make a book in their own language. That book is usually accompanied by rules to kill any outsider who reads the book and the insider who shows it to them. They will also usually have some guidelines for insiders to create a bunch of obfuscation, not limited to:
- "It's untranslatable."
- "You've got us all wrong. That book is not really important in our religion. Here, have a look at our other, tolerant book all about puppy dogs, philanthropy and niceness that is the primary focus of our religion." (There actually may be sects that are true to this, but they are usually offshoots)
- "Those are mistranslations. Here are the official translations."
Works the same, be it Scientology, Islam, Talmudists, Mormons, Freemasonry. Probably Christians too, for all I know, since that was certainly spread by the sword too.
There are at least two main reasons.
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The first of which requires an understanding of what the most important resources are, and where they are located. I'll give you a hint - it's oil. To a lesser extent, other, less convenient energy sources.
Here is a map of the oil:
http://wolf.readinglitho.co.uk/mainpages/oilmap.h
Here is a map of the all the US bases in the world:
http://respectsacredland.org/no-us-bases/
Yes, the USA has a finger in almost everywhere, and especially in those places with valuable resources. The US is nothing at all like the fictional non-expansionist America of Sid Meier's Civilization game. There is no power in history that has controlled as much of the globe as has America, and maybe the percentage as well. Even back then, the Romans never controlled China, or Russia for that matter. The world is bigger now and the US controls more of it. Compare:
http://www.unrv.com/roman-map-for-sale.php
Of course, it gets sold to Americans (and the world) that they are being "world's policeman", a good natured bobby who wanders around making sure that the kids play nice. And they are so nice, they supposedly do it all for no fee, no taxation required.
Of course, in the real world taxation is the basis of all empires, and the US empire is no different. The way the tax works is harder to understand, but no less effective.
In the modern world, everyone needs oil. In order to buy that oil, it must be purchased in US dollars. If an oil producing nation decides to sell in another currency, the US will invade. Saddam tried to sell in Euros in 2000 and paid the penalty. And because France and Germany would have benefited, they opposed Gulf War 2 and hence the US responded with all the "cheese eating surrender monkey" propaganda that was produced around that time.
How does the tax work? Consider that the number of US dollars has been increasing all the time, and that the cost to print them is effectively zero. If the US runs out of money, it can just print more. Or, at least, the FRB can. But who owns the FRB is something you can google yourself.
And the US _has_ been printing more dollars for a long time now. When the US does that, the rest of the world picks up the tab by making more of what US citizens are willing to buy. Here is a graph of the US dollars in circulation, the M3.
http://www.economagic.com/em-cgi/charter.exe/feds
So that's the first reason why the US is "policing" Iraq. To maintain a monopoly on the currency oil is traded for, and hence, the foundation of their empire.
The second reason is for Israel. Saddam was considered a major threat to Israel. Consider the goals of PNAC, what they wrote before the war, the members, and where they are seated in the Bush regime.
http://zfacts.com/p/775.html
Google is already more scary than Microsoft. It just has better marketing.
And it is already in a position to hold off criticism of itself for the majority of the population. That's something that MS never really had.
Creak... (Door opens)
"Manual? Who needs that? Looks like we've been left us just enough corn, wheat and barley to make a loaf of bread! You get the firewood, I'll figure out how we're gonna grind it up."