I know you're just joking around, but to be fair, there are millions of earth based toilets being manufactured each year, and yet I still have the occasional problem with mine. I'd imagine a space station toilet is a bit more complex.
I don't think Nintendo is trying to be a "responsible" game company, in the sense that I don't think they feel that they have to somehow atone for the fact that there are fat kids out there. I think they're more interested in making money, and one of the ways they've chosen to do that is by releasing new types of games that appeal to a wider market than video games traditionally had. Their strategy seems to be working quite well.
Sure, playing WiiFit isn't as strenuous as swimming laps, but if you're up and moving at all, you're getting more exercise than you would be sitting on a couch. I think the bigger problem with a lot of exercise routines has less to do with the fact that you don't get results and more to do with the fact that exercising is hard work and usually not particularly fun.
If someone finds WiiFit to be a good time, they'll probably keep playing it until it stops being fun. And in the meantime, they'll get a little bit more exercise than they used to. No harm done. I don't think you'll see any currently fit people giving up their habit of running three miles every morning and just playing WiiFit instead.
It doesn't really work that way though. I don't have to crack it myself if I want a cracked version. I just wait for one of that 1% to do it and release the crack on the internet. Then all I have to do is download.
All insurance systems are basically spreading out risk. When my house catches fire, the insurance company pays me out of the pile of money they've collected from everyone who's got insurance.
Social security just spreads the "risk" of living longer than you expected.
While Europa is certainly well worth studying, I think mars makes a lot of sense for a couple reasons. First, there's still plenty to learn about it. Second, when you're talking about planetary distances, mars is pretty close, so you get feedback on your missions much quicker. Not only scientific data, but also about how your spacecraft did/didn't perform, which should help improve the designs of future spacecraft. And third, there's a decent amount of satellites already orbiting mars, and the newer landers and such can utilize those satellites to facilitate their mission.
Basically, I think you get a lot of bang for your buck with mars. Europa would be great, no doubt, but it's likely that for the same cost, they'd only be able to send a smaller probe with less instruments on it, and would get significantly less data out of it. But hopefully we'll get there one day.
Not to mention that it's probably not the fault of your everyday co-workers that the bosses are acting foolishly, but those same co-workers are going to have to deal with the fall out just as much (if not more so) than the bosses. I have days at work where my main motivation to keep working is just to keep that work from getting dumped on my co-workers.
There's a big difference between a hobby that millions of 10 year old kids enjoy on a daily basis and illegal drug use. One of the main differences being that one is already illegal and the other is not. I don't think it's a particularly informative comparison.
Let older people remember all the bad things they did. Gaming isn't bad. 99.9% of the people out there doing bad things are not doing them as a result of playing video games. Street racing is actually a very dangerous and irresponsible activity, and your dad's experience makes him well justified to have strong opinions about it. I think you'll be hard pressed to find many people who have been gamers but then later decided that it was a dangerous mistake. A waste of time maybe, but not really dangerous.
I doubt we'll ever see any politicians working to actively defend gaming, more like they'll just ignore the issue, because there won't be as many 40-50 year olds with nothing better to do that complain about video games that they've never even played. Instead, those bored 40-50 year olds will go play video games with their free time, because that's what they've always done, because it's entertaining.
I played through the demo last night, and was reasonably well entertained. The artwork is very well stylized in a way that reminds you of the comic, and I think it works pretty well. The art style works really well with the type of mood that they're trying to create in the game, and the narration worked well too.
Combat in the game is a strange mix of turn-based and sort of real-time clicking, it was different from anything I've played before but I don't have that much experience with those sorts of games. The demo didn't have enough combat for me to become comfortable with the combat system, so I can't give a complete opinion, but it seems like it works well enough.
If you've read penny arcade over the years, the notion of a character that you created (and which most likely you identify as yourself for the purpose of the game) interacting with characters that you've been watching for years is pretty neat.
I'll probably buy the game after next week when I'm done with a crunch at work. It's certainly worth at least downloading the demo. I don't think it's the type of game that will appeal to everyone just because of the gameplay, but for what it is it appears to be carefully crafted and generally high quality. Certainly not a cheap cash-in of their PA brand or anything like that.
If the public wants to have a reasonable and adult discussion about violence in video games, I don't think that's something to be afraid of. Just as our culture went through similar grumblings about movies and television, and almost repeatedly about music, it's a valid conversation to have. There's a useful discussion to be had about the appropriateness of certain types of games for particular age groups, and the most effective ways to introduce children to various things they might experience through games. At the end of the day, we've still got the first amendment, and not a particularly realistic chance that video game violence will somehow end up banned.
What's most likely going to happen is that a smattering of state laws will get passed and quickly be overturned because they're unconstitutional. Ten more years or so down the line, there will be enough people in positions of authority who grew up as gamers that the issue will mostly go away. There will still be the occasional whining and controversy, just like we've got with movies/tv/music today when a game really decides to push the envelope, but most people won't give it a second thought anymore.
Well what'd you expect? There is no body of video game related laws that for someone to violate. Much of the nonsense that he's perpetrated has been as a result of the bizarre war he's trying to wage against games.
The issue isn't just that some guy doesn't like video games, it's that he's not only embarked on some sort of loony campaign against them, but he's also abused the legal system to harass video game developers and publishers. And he's also made sweeping, negative, and sometimes offensive generalizations about an entire branch of media and the millions of people who consume said media.
Whether this guy is unethical enough to purposely crap all over the legal system over something like video games, or whether he's just plain insane, either way he should not be practicing law. And he certainly shouldn't be wasting tax dollars on his bizarre personal crusade against a bunch of gamers. The legal system is better off without him, regardless of his views on video games or anything else. He's pretty much proven that he has no respect for the proper functioning of the courts/etc.
And third, this guy has managed to convince various media outlets that he is a credible expert on video games. Having an opinion on something does not make you a credible voice. We can only hope that whatever the end result of all this is, news programs will stop asking him to share his thoughts on video games or anything else.
One of the main problems is that "climate change" is really a bunch of problems all lumped together because they're interconnected. It's not an easy or quick idea to express in a useful way. And there isn't just one solution that will solve the whole thing. You can't get people/society/etc. to drop everything and tackle all of these problems at once, so you've got to pick your battles.
Sometimes it's about being efficient with your time/money/media exposure. The ozone layer was a big issue, and some positive changes came about as a result of the all the attention it received. Is the problem 100% solved? No, but it's getting better. The low-hanging fruit of "protecting the ozone layer" was grabbed, and so they movement has moved to other issues where they can get more bang for their buck. Instead of fighting tooth and nail to change the whole world, many environmentalists accept the fact that you can't have it all, and so they move to another issue where there's a clear path towards making progress.
Sometimes it's an issue of other people making certain battles not worth fighting. Getting people to switch to CFL's, that's pretty easy, let's try that. Uh oh, turns out CFL's(while still probably better environmentally overall compared to incandescents) can have mercury in them and aren't perfect. We can't get much further on this issue because people won't stop making a huge deal about the mercury, so let's try something else.
And sometimes it's an issue of the answer not being entirely clear, and the reality that we sometimes have to try things before we know how well they'll work, or even if they'll work at all. Wind and thermal solar have been around for a long time, but haven't been economically feasible to produce on a large scale. That didn't stop people from trying, but it did stop serious adoption from spreading. But technology marches forward, economies change, and people learn about new things, and suddenly something that didn't seem like a solution becomes viable.
The ethanol issue is a complicated one. It's certainly caused some price increases for corn in the USA and surrounding areas, but the food crisis is far more complicated than that. But either way, the amount of corn-based ethanol going into our fuel supply is increasing and will continue to increase, so is there that much of a need to fight for it right now?
Anyways, tomorrow it will be soybean-based fusion.
True enough, although one can hope that a civilization advanced enough to colonize the galaxy would be smart enough to plan for language changes. It'd certainly be possible for them to plan out a "set" language that would be used specifically for these official communications, and which would exist outside of the normal evolution of languages, and not be subject to change. I guess it'd be necessary for there always to be a small set of the population who learns this language, but that's not too hard to imagine. Look how many people still study Latin today. There'd be an issue in regards to developing words for new inventions/discoveries/etc. But maybe it could be worked out.
Anyways, my point in regards to your original post was more that just because those groups were so far apart (even to the point of becoming separate civilizations), doesn't mean that there'd be no communications between them for us to potentially eavesdrop on.
If you define a galaxy-wide civilization in a way similar to how earth based civilizations have worked, then what you say makes sense. But I think that's a pretty narrow definition, and not a particularly useful one.
Even with a lag time of possibly hundreds of years, that doesn't mean that there's no useful communication to be made. Twitter probably wouldn't be all that popular with that sort of latency, but I'd imagine there'd still be plenty to talk about (scientific discoveries (maybe a new planet to colonize), news of a horrible catastrophe that's made a particular planet suddenly uninhabitable, or maybe just regular status updates just for historical record keeping.
Without FTL communication, it's likely that any sort of galaxy-spanning civilization would end up more like a bunch of different civilizations just with a common origin. They might just keep in touch with each other out of tradition or some vague sense of connection. Some colonies might very well stop those communications for various reasons. But it doesn't seem likely that they'd just give up on communicating wholesale just because it takes a long time.
The future certainly sounds much more interesting if some sort of FTL travel or at least communication ends up being possible. But it's not required.
Guitar Hero was kind of fun for me, but RockBand really blew it out of the water, due to the whole group dynamics part of it. If I had spent all my RockBand time screwing around on a real guitar, I could probably make some amusing sounds and maybe even something that I'd call a song. But I'd have a hard time convincing a bunch of my friends to go learn instruments as well, and we wouldn't be able to get a few of us together on a whim and "rock out" the way RockBand lets us do. Not only does it allow us to "play" far better than we could with real instruments, it easily compensates for different skill levels, it makes it much easier for us to switch instruments, and it makes it easy for new people to jump in. Also it puts cool looking stages behind us and a cheering crowd in front of us.
I could, almost certainly, learn to play a real guitar. I might even be able to get pretty darn good at it if I enjoyed it enough. But given all the other important things going on in my life, it's not realistic for me to expect to be a rock star someday. Further more, even if I could snap my fingers and be a rock star tomorrow, I don't think I'd want to.
But hell yeah I enjoy pretending I am for a couple of hours every now and then.
You're sort of dancing around the biggest problem with having Capitalism as a defining feature of civilization. True, unbridled capitalism invariably will end up with lots of very wealthy people throwing around huge amounts of money, completely indifferent to the chaos that it causes for all the less-successful people trying to go about their lives. There's certainly plenty of moral arguments to be made about it, but even from a more practical standpoint, you'll eventually get to the point where you damage the society and civilization around you so much that it can no longer function.
Maybe I just don't understand this thirst for wealth and power, but I'd rather be a reasonably successful guy in a prosperous society than be a king in a wasteland. A young entrepreneur selling out his start-up company to make his first few million dollars I can understand, but someone who's already rich beyond the imagination of the average person selling out a giant company just so he can be even richer just doesn't seem worth it to me.
Considering the alternatives, I think capitalism is probably the best economic system we've realistically got. But it's a shame that we don't do more to control some of its most extreme excesses. Not that we should make such moves illegal, but I think at least as a community of social beings, there should be some sort of societal pressure against such actions. So maybe guys like this have the legal right to do such things, but there should be some severe social stigmas against it. Someone who causes hundreds or thousands of everyday people to lose their jobs just so he can pad his already ridiculous bank account should be shunned by society. Instead, they're too often excused with "that's how capitalism works, survival of the fittest", or they're even applauded for gaming the system so hard.
At the end of the day, it should all be about people. Not capitalism, not even democracy, it's about people. A democratic government isn't good just because it magically is, it's good because it's the best way to treat people as a whole. We aren't a capitalistic society because we worship the stock market, we're capitalist because capitalism was the best way we could figure out to help people overall. As our society has evolved, and some of the issues with capitalism start to become apparent, it's not wrong to modify things to help people.
A "free market" should not be our ideal. A just and prosperous civilization should be the ideal. If a free market helps us somewhere along the path, then that's great. But we shouldn't let part of the process blind us from the ultimate goal.
Good technology will be successful on its own merits, especially with a company like MS funding it. You could make a decent argument that Google was late to the game, when they came on the scene Yahoo was already well established, and there were other players like Altavista.
Google didn't win by somehow levering legions of users, they won by having better search technology that convinced people to move.
If MS has a better search engine than Google, then why doesn't anyone know about it? It's not like MS is some obscure company that's new to the scene. And beyond searching, what other web "technologies" does MS really shine in? Is hotmail any better than yahoo mail? Are either of them better than gmail?
I understand the basic principle that you're getting at in why the merger might seem to make some sense, but I don't think reality really backs it up. It's more likely to me that MS just doesn't know what the hell to do about Google, so Ballmer just decided to do something. He chose something big and bold to make it look like he has some sort of master plan, and he used the same logic that you're describing to try to convince investors that it'll work.
But when you really look at it closely, it's a silly plan. MS doesn't have any magical technology that they just can't get people to look at. Nor do they have any sort of awesome internet plan that just needs eyeballs to take off. Add in the reality that the process of merging two companies of that size would likely involve a couple years of disarray, and you're creating a great opportunity for Google to increase their lead even further.
The merger has been a terrible idea from the beginning. And I'll bet most MS employees frowned at the potential deal just as much as most yahoo employees, whether they feared for their jobs or not.
Personally, I've considered my religious beliefs to be a mostly personal thing. Sort of my relationship with God, what I can figure out about God, and how that helps me live my life. "Organized religion" is when people get together to pray together, and talk about that stuff, because you're dealing with questions bigger than any one mind can wrap itself around (so far bigger than billions of minds can wrap around), and listening to how other people have interpreted the world around them can help you gain insight to your own life. Also, humans are inherently social creatures, so why shouldn't something as important in as religion is in many people's lives have a social aspect to it?
The personal side of religion is still the more important part. Helping other people learn about God is good and noble, but it's hard to do that if you yourself aren't somewhat comfortable with God.
Anyways, I generally only bother making a distinction because despite the fact that their ultimate purpose points towards God, organized religions are human organizations, and subject to all the same problems and failures that any other human organization can face. Criticizing the Mormon Church, or the Catholic Church, or Islamic groups, etc for their actions is certainly a valid argument much of the time, as all those those organizations have made some serious mistakes. But what I see far too often is people using the failures of those human run groups as some sort of proof that their fundamental beliefs must be wrong, and that God couldn't exist. Like you said, "organized religion" is a popular scarecrow, a punching bag that many people use to attack the idea of religion in general. It's not a very compelling argument in my opinion, partially because it ignores a bunch of common group dynamics that aren't exclusive to religion, and partially because I don't like being judged by the actions that some asshole pope chose 400 years ago just because I got married in a catholic church.
This is just a really basic overview of some of my thoughts on all this, many people have dedicated their entire lives to writing about religion, so I'm not going to try to duplicate all that work in one/. post (especially because I have to go to work in 5 minutes). It's an interesting topic though.
Well, the reality of life is that most jobs suck, at least some of the time. Even if it's in a field that you like and you're working on something that you're passionate about, there's going to be plenty of times where it just plain sucks. Maybe it's all the overtime you have to work during the crunches, maybe it's the unavoidable paperwork, maybe it's all the phone calls you're constantly getting. Perhaps it's the dumbass marketing department you have to deal with from time to time, maybe it's the occasional client with absolutely no idea what they're asking you to do and even less patience, maybe it's the know-it-all asshole co-worker. It might be your back hurting from sitting in a chair eight hours per day, or maybe it's a job where you never get to sit and your feet are always hurting. And chances are you don't get paid as much as you think you should either.
More likely than not your career, whatever it is, is going to have a mix of many of those problems listed above, and probably dozens more that I didn't think of.
My field is architecture. I love buildings and designing them can be incredibly fascinating and seeing them get built can be extremely satisfying. But at the same time I have plenty of crappy days, and I have to deal with plenty of crappy people. My wife is a librarian. She loves libraries, loves books. But she has plenty of crappy days and has to put up with plenty of crappy people.
I guess the point is, IT really isn't that different from lots of other jobs out there. The same stuff your father complained about is pretty much the same stuff everyone complains about. Once you realize that, then it's more about just finding a field that you're interested in and can care about, so you can have some good days to balance out the bad.
There are plenty of religious people out there who would freely admit that they aren't absolutely 100% certain about much of anything, not even about some of the basic questions that religion tries to answer. While you can always find loud and obnoxious individuals who will proudly tell you how they have all the answers and how they completely understand God's will, people like that generally have agendas beyond the basic premise of religion (a search for answers to some of life's hard questions).
And religion isn't alone in having loud-mouth assholes that feel the need to tell everyone else how wrong they are. Science, at its most abstract level, should be immune to such things. But all the science I've ever seen has been practiced by human beings, and history records many plenty smart scientists making bold and absolute proclamations that ended up being quite wrong. It's more a condition of humanity than religion.
Considering a dictionary definition of the word "irrational", your point may well be valid, but the word irrational has gained a fairly negative connotation, and isn't necessarily useful to use when describing someone with religious beliefs.
When you use the word irrational, most people would imagine someone acting almost insane, ranting and raving and just being crazy. And while there are certainly people who do tend to get wrapped up in God-frenzy now and then, most religious people are in pretty good control of their thoughts.
And I think that many of those people, if they trusted you enough to talk about such things, would offer that they're not really absolutely certain about much of anything. Religion doesn't require 100% blind faith to be useful or helpful.
I'm not a mormon, and not in any way qualified to speak on their behalf, but in a more general sense, many people with religious beliefs view organized religion as a sort of communal search for truth. There might be other functions that a religion serves, but the idea of helping people learn fundamental truths about God, the world, existence, life, etc. is a pretty fundamental aspect of religion. Your church is supposed to help you discover those truths and what they mean for you.
The idea of secrets within a church pushes against that ideal. That doesn't mean that a church needs to publish a daily list of what their pastors all had for breakfast every day, but it does mean that if there's some sort of offical documentation that is shared among part of the church, there's really no good reason why it shouldn't be available to everyone in the church. And since most churches are actively trying to bring others as potential members, then that stuff should be free to all.
Probably the same reason why there are fourteen thousand different text editors out there that I could download. Because curiosity leads people to create things.
I think that the real challenge for a useful autonomous vehicle isn't the terrain conditions of roads (maybe in New Orleans), but has more to do with the millions of other cars/bicycles/pedestrians/etc. that a driver has to deal with. The hard part is not staying on the road, it's avoiding all the other stuff moving along that road. Those other drivers don't always do things that make sense, they don't always do things that are technically legal, and a good driver will not only see those sorts of things, they'll be able to predict them. I can see which direction the other drivers are looking towards, I can anticipate whether or not they know I'm coming, I can anticipate them darting out in front of me because they don't know I'm there. Sure it'd be their fault if there was a collision, but for my own safety and sanity I'd much rather prefer to avoid an accident.
Until a self-driving car can have that level of awareness and make those sorts of predictions and act accordingly, I don't see computers doing any serious driving.
Re:Criticized for use of USB?
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iMac Turns 10
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The original iMac didn't have ADB. It wasn't criticized for using USB as much as it was criticized for using USB instead of everything else. All those old standard mac ports (ADB/serial/scsi) were gone, and most mac users at the time didn't have any USB peripherals. So you were stuck buying new printers/scanners/webcams/etc, even if your old ones still worked.
Huh, I was not aware of that. Good for Gil. I sometimes wonder if he was really as useless as he gets accused of being, or if he just got stuck in a really bad situation that would've been hard for anyone to make lemonade out of. I was too young in those days to really understand what was going on. *shrug*
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I know you're just joking around, but to be fair, there are millions of earth based toilets being manufactured each year, and yet I still have the occasional problem with mine. I'd imagine a space station toilet is a bit more complex.
I don't think Nintendo is trying to be a "responsible" game company, in the sense that I don't think they feel that they have to somehow atone for the fact that there are fat kids out there. I think they're more interested in making money, and one of the ways they've chosen to do that is by releasing new types of games that appeal to a wider market than video games traditionally had. Their strategy seems to be working quite well.
Sure, playing WiiFit isn't as strenuous as swimming laps, but if you're up and moving at all, you're getting more exercise than you would be sitting on a couch. I think the bigger problem with a lot of exercise routines has less to do with the fact that you don't get results and more to do with the fact that exercising is hard work and usually not particularly fun.
If someone finds WiiFit to be a good time, they'll probably keep playing it until it stops being fun. And in the meantime, they'll get a little bit more exercise than they used to. No harm done. I don't think you'll see any currently fit people giving up their habit of running three miles every morning and just playing WiiFit instead.
It doesn't really work that way though. I don't have to crack it myself if I want a cracked version. I just wait for one of that 1% to do it and release the crack on the internet. Then all I have to do is download.
All insurance systems are basically spreading out risk. When my house catches fire, the insurance company pays me out of the pile of money they've collected from everyone who's got insurance.
Social security just spreads the "risk" of living longer than you expected.
While Europa is certainly well worth studying, I think mars makes a lot of sense for a couple reasons. First, there's still plenty to learn about it. Second, when you're talking about planetary distances, mars is pretty close, so you get feedback on your missions much quicker. Not only scientific data, but also about how your spacecraft did/didn't perform, which should help improve the designs of future spacecraft. And third, there's a decent amount of satellites already orbiting mars, and the newer landers and such can utilize those satellites to facilitate their mission.
Basically, I think you get a lot of bang for your buck with mars. Europa would be great, no doubt, but it's likely that for the same cost, they'd only be able to send a smaller probe with less instruments on it, and would get significantly less data out of it. But hopefully we'll get there one day.
Not to mention that it's probably not the fault of your everyday co-workers that the bosses are acting foolishly, but those same co-workers are going to have to deal with the fall out just as much (if not more so) than the bosses. I have days at work where my main motivation to keep working is just to keep that work from getting dumped on my co-workers.
There's a big difference between a hobby that millions of 10 year old kids enjoy on a daily basis and illegal drug use. One of the main differences being that one is already illegal and the other is not. I don't think it's a particularly informative comparison.
Let older people remember all the bad things they did. Gaming isn't bad. 99.9% of the people out there doing bad things are not doing them as a result of playing video games. Street racing is actually a very dangerous and irresponsible activity, and your dad's experience makes him well justified to have strong opinions about it. I think you'll be hard pressed to find many people who have been gamers but then later decided that it was a dangerous mistake. A waste of time maybe, but not really dangerous.
I doubt we'll ever see any politicians working to actively defend gaming, more like they'll just ignore the issue, because there won't be as many 40-50 year olds with nothing better to do that complain about video games that they've never even played. Instead, those bored 40-50 year olds will go play video games with their free time, because that's what they've always done, because it's entertaining.
I played through the demo last night, and was reasonably well entertained. The artwork is very well stylized in a way that reminds you of the comic, and I think it works pretty well. The art style works really well with the type of mood that they're trying to create in the game, and the narration worked well too.
Combat in the game is a strange mix of turn-based and sort of real-time clicking, it was different from anything I've played before but I don't have that much experience with those sorts of games. The demo didn't have enough combat for me to become comfortable with the combat system, so I can't give a complete opinion, but it seems like it works well enough.
If you've read penny arcade over the years, the notion of a character that you created (and which most likely you identify as yourself for the purpose of the game) interacting with characters that you've been watching for years is pretty neat.
I'll probably buy the game after next week when I'm done with a crunch at work. It's certainly worth at least downloading the demo. I don't think it's the type of game that will appeal to everyone just because of the gameplay, but for what it is it appears to be carefully crafted and generally high quality. Certainly not a cheap cash-in of their PA brand or anything like that.
If the public wants to have a reasonable and adult discussion about violence in video games, I don't think that's something to be afraid of. Just as our culture went through similar grumblings about movies and television, and almost repeatedly about music, it's a valid conversation to have. There's a useful discussion to be had about the appropriateness of certain types of games for particular age groups, and the most effective ways to introduce children to various things they might experience through games. At the end of the day, we've still got the first amendment, and not a particularly realistic chance that video game violence will somehow end up banned.
What's most likely going to happen is that a smattering of state laws will get passed and quickly be overturned because they're unconstitutional. Ten more years or so down the line, there will be enough people in positions of authority who grew up as gamers that the issue will mostly go away. There will still be the occasional whining and controversy, just like we've got with movies/tv/music today when a game really decides to push the envelope, but most people won't give it a second thought anymore.
Well what'd you expect? There is no body of video game related laws that for someone to violate. Much of the nonsense that he's perpetrated has been as a result of the bizarre war he's trying to wage against games.
The issue isn't just that some guy doesn't like video games, it's that he's not only embarked on some sort of loony campaign against them, but he's also abused the legal system to harass video game developers and publishers. And he's also made sweeping, negative, and sometimes offensive generalizations about an entire branch of media and the millions of people who consume said media.
Whether this guy is unethical enough to purposely crap all over the legal system over something like video games, or whether he's just plain insane, either way he should not be practicing law. And he certainly shouldn't be wasting tax dollars on his bizarre personal crusade against a bunch of gamers. The legal system is better off without him, regardless of his views on video games or anything else. He's pretty much proven that he has no respect for the proper functioning of the courts/etc.
And third, this guy has managed to convince various media outlets that he is a credible expert on video games. Having an opinion on something does not make you a credible voice. We can only hope that whatever the end result of all this is, news programs will stop asking him to share his thoughts on video games or anything else.
One of the main problems is that "climate change" is really a bunch of problems all lumped together because they're interconnected. It's not an easy or quick idea to express in a useful way. And there isn't just one solution that will solve the whole thing. You can't get people/society/etc. to drop everything and tackle all of these problems at once, so you've got to pick your battles.
Sometimes it's about being efficient with your time/money/media exposure. The ozone layer was a big issue, and some positive changes came about as a result of the all the attention it received. Is the problem 100% solved? No, but it's getting better. The low-hanging fruit of "protecting the ozone layer" was grabbed, and so they movement has moved to other issues where they can get more bang for their buck. Instead of fighting tooth and nail to change the whole world, many environmentalists accept the fact that you can't have it all, and so they move to another issue where there's a clear path towards making progress.
Sometimes it's an issue of other people making certain battles not worth fighting. Getting people to switch to CFL's, that's pretty easy, let's try that. Uh oh, turns out CFL's(while still probably better environmentally overall compared to incandescents) can have mercury in them and aren't perfect. We can't get much further on this issue because people won't stop making a huge deal about the mercury, so let's try something else.
And sometimes it's an issue of the answer not being entirely clear, and the reality that we sometimes have to try things before we know how well they'll work, or even if they'll work at all. Wind and thermal solar have been around for a long time, but haven't been economically feasible to produce on a large scale. That didn't stop people from trying, but it did stop serious adoption from spreading. But technology marches forward, economies change, and people learn about new things, and suddenly something that didn't seem like a solution becomes viable.
The ethanol issue is a complicated one. It's certainly caused some price increases for corn in the USA and surrounding areas, but the food crisis is far more complicated than that. But either way, the amount of corn-based ethanol going into our fuel supply is increasing and will continue to increase, so is there that much of a need to fight for it right now?
Anyways, tomorrow it will be soybean-based fusion.
True enough, although one can hope that a civilization advanced enough to colonize the galaxy would be smart enough to plan for language changes. It'd certainly be possible for them to plan out a "set" language that would be used specifically for these official communications, and which would exist outside of the normal evolution of languages, and not be subject to change. I guess it'd be necessary for there always to be a small set of the population who learns this language, but that's not too hard to imagine. Look how many people still study Latin today. There'd be an issue in regards to developing words for new inventions/discoveries/etc. But maybe it could be worked out.
Anyways, my point in regards to your original post was more that just because those groups were so far apart (even to the point of becoming separate civilizations), doesn't mean that there'd be no communications between them for us to potentially eavesdrop on.
If you define a galaxy-wide civilization in a way similar to how earth based civilizations have worked, then what you say makes sense. But I think that's a pretty narrow definition, and not a particularly useful one.
Even with a lag time of possibly hundreds of years, that doesn't mean that there's no useful communication to be made. Twitter probably wouldn't be all that popular with that sort of latency, but I'd imagine there'd still be plenty to talk about (scientific discoveries (maybe a new planet to colonize), news of a horrible catastrophe that's made a particular planet suddenly uninhabitable, or maybe just regular status updates just for historical record keeping.
Without FTL communication, it's likely that any sort of galaxy-spanning civilization would end up more like a bunch of different civilizations just with a common origin. They might just keep in touch with each other out of tradition or some vague sense of connection. Some colonies might very well stop those communications for various reasons. But it doesn't seem likely that they'd just give up on communicating wholesale just because it takes a long time.
The future certainly sounds much more interesting if some sort of FTL travel or at least communication ends up being possible. But it's not required.
Guitar Hero was kind of fun for me, but RockBand really blew it out of the water, due to the whole group dynamics part of it. If I had spent all my RockBand time screwing around on a real guitar, I could probably make some amusing sounds and maybe even something that I'd call a song. But I'd have a hard time convincing a bunch of my friends to go learn instruments as well, and we wouldn't be able to get a few of us together on a whim and "rock out" the way RockBand lets us do. Not only does it allow us to "play" far better than we could with real instruments, it easily compensates for different skill levels, it makes it much easier for us to switch instruments, and it makes it easy for new people to jump in. Also it puts cool looking stages behind us and a cheering crowd in front of us.
I could, almost certainly, learn to play a real guitar. I might even be able to get pretty darn good at it if I enjoyed it enough. But given all the other important things going on in my life, it's not realistic for me to expect to be a rock star someday. Further more, even if I could snap my fingers and be a rock star tomorrow, I don't think I'd want to.
But hell yeah I enjoy pretending I am for a couple of hours every now and then.
You're sort of dancing around the biggest problem with having Capitalism as a defining feature of civilization. True, unbridled capitalism invariably will end up with lots of very wealthy people throwing around huge amounts of money, completely indifferent to the chaos that it causes for all the less-successful people trying to go about their lives. There's certainly plenty of moral arguments to be made about it, but even from a more practical standpoint, you'll eventually get to the point where you damage the society and civilization around you so much that it can no longer function.
Maybe I just don't understand this thirst for wealth and power, but I'd rather be a reasonably successful guy in a prosperous society than be a king in a wasteland. A young entrepreneur selling out his start-up company to make his first few million dollars I can understand, but someone who's already rich beyond the imagination of the average person selling out a giant company just so he can be even richer just doesn't seem worth it to me.
Considering the alternatives, I think capitalism is probably the best economic system we've realistically got. But it's a shame that we don't do more to control some of its most extreme excesses. Not that we should make such moves illegal, but I think at least as a community of social beings, there should be some sort of societal pressure against such actions. So maybe guys like this have the legal right to do such things, but there should be some severe social stigmas against it. Someone who causes hundreds or thousands of everyday people to lose their jobs just so he can pad his already ridiculous bank account should be shunned by society. Instead, they're too often excused with "that's how capitalism works, survival of the fittest", or they're even applauded for gaming the system so hard.
At the end of the day, it should all be about people. Not capitalism, not even democracy, it's about people. A democratic government isn't good just because it magically is, it's good because it's the best way to treat people as a whole. We aren't a capitalistic society because we worship the stock market, we're capitalist because capitalism was the best way we could figure out to help people overall. As our society has evolved, and some of the issues with capitalism start to become apparent, it's not wrong to modify things to help people.
A "free market" should not be our ideal. A just and prosperous civilization should be the ideal. If a free market helps us somewhere along the path, then that's great. But we shouldn't let part of the process blind us from the ultimate goal.
Good technology will be successful on its own merits, especially with a company like MS funding it. You could make a decent argument that Google was late to the game, when they came on the scene Yahoo was already well established, and there were other players like Altavista.
Google didn't win by somehow levering legions of users, they won by having better search technology that convinced people to move.
If MS has a better search engine than Google, then why doesn't anyone know about it? It's not like MS is some obscure company that's new to the scene. And beyond searching, what other web "technologies" does MS really shine in? Is hotmail any better than yahoo mail? Are either of them better than gmail?
I understand the basic principle that you're getting at in why the merger might seem to make some sense, but I don't think reality really backs it up. It's more likely to me that MS just doesn't know what the hell to do about Google, so Ballmer just decided to do something. He chose something big and bold to make it look like he has some sort of master plan, and he used the same logic that you're describing to try to convince investors that it'll work.
But when you really look at it closely, it's a silly plan. MS doesn't have any magical technology that they just can't get people to look at. Nor do they have any sort of awesome internet plan that just needs eyeballs to take off. Add in the reality that the process of merging two companies of that size would likely involve a couple years of disarray, and you're creating a great opportunity for Google to increase their lead even further.
The merger has been a terrible idea from the beginning. And I'll bet most MS employees frowned at the potential deal just as much as most yahoo employees, whether they feared for their jobs or not.
Personally, I've considered my religious beliefs to be a mostly personal thing. Sort of my relationship with God, what I can figure out about God, and how that helps me live my life. "Organized religion" is when people get together to pray together, and talk about that stuff, because you're dealing with questions bigger than any one mind can wrap itself around (so far bigger than billions of minds can wrap around), and listening to how other people have interpreted the world around them can help you gain insight to your own life. Also, humans are inherently social creatures, so why shouldn't something as important in as religion is in many people's lives have a social aspect to it?
/. post (especially because I have to go to work in 5 minutes). It's an interesting topic though.
The personal side of religion is still the more important part. Helping other people learn about God is good and noble, but it's hard to do that if you yourself aren't somewhat comfortable with God.
Anyways, I generally only bother making a distinction because despite the fact that their ultimate purpose points towards God, organized religions are human organizations, and subject to all the same problems and failures that any other human organization can face. Criticizing the Mormon Church, or the Catholic Church, or Islamic groups, etc for their actions is certainly a valid argument much of the time, as all those those organizations have made some serious mistakes. But what I see far too often is people using the failures of those human run groups as some sort of proof that their fundamental beliefs must be wrong, and that God couldn't exist. Like you said, "organized religion" is a popular scarecrow, a punching bag that many people use to attack the idea of religion in general. It's not a very compelling argument in my opinion, partially because it ignores a bunch of common group dynamics that aren't exclusive to religion, and partially because I don't like being judged by the actions that some asshole pope chose 400 years ago just because I got married in a catholic church.
This is just a really basic overview of some of my thoughts on all this, many people have dedicated their entire lives to writing about religion, so I'm not going to try to duplicate all that work in one
Well, the reality of life is that most jobs suck, at least some of the time. Even if it's in a field that you like and you're working on something that you're passionate about, there's going to be plenty of times where it just plain sucks. Maybe it's all the overtime you have to work during the crunches, maybe it's the unavoidable paperwork, maybe it's all the phone calls you're constantly getting. Perhaps it's the dumbass marketing department you have to deal with from time to time, maybe it's the occasional client with absolutely no idea what they're asking you to do and even less patience, maybe it's the know-it-all asshole co-worker. It might be your back hurting from sitting in a chair eight hours per day, or maybe it's a job where you never get to sit and your feet are always hurting. And chances are you don't get paid as much as you think you should either.
More likely than not your career, whatever it is, is going to have a mix of many of those problems listed above, and probably dozens more that I didn't think of.
My field is architecture. I love buildings and designing them can be incredibly fascinating and seeing them get built can be extremely satisfying. But at the same time I have plenty of crappy days, and I have to deal with plenty of crappy people. My wife is a librarian. She loves libraries, loves books. But she has plenty of crappy days and has to put up with plenty of crappy people.
I guess the point is, IT really isn't that different from lots of other jobs out there. The same stuff your father complained about is pretty much the same stuff everyone complains about. Once you realize that, then it's more about just finding a field that you're interested in and can care about, so you can have some good days to balance out the bad.
There are plenty of religious people out there who would freely admit that they aren't absolutely 100% certain about much of anything, not even about some of the basic questions that religion tries to answer. While you can always find loud and obnoxious individuals who will proudly tell you how they have all the answers and how they completely understand God's will, people like that generally have agendas beyond the basic premise of religion (a search for answers to some of life's hard questions).
And religion isn't alone in having loud-mouth assholes that feel the need to tell everyone else how wrong they are. Science, at its most abstract level, should be immune to such things. But all the science I've ever seen has been practiced by human beings, and history records many plenty smart scientists making bold and absolute proclamations that ended up being quite wrong. It's more a condition of humanity than religion.
Considering a dictionary definition of the word "irrational", your point may well be valid, but the word irrational has gained a fairly negative connotation, and isn't necessarily useful to use when describing someone with religious beliefs.
When you use the word irrational, most people would imagine someone acting almost insane, ranting and raving and just being crazy. And while there are certainly people who do tend to get wrapped up in God-frenzy now and then, most religious people are in pretty good control of their thoughts.
And I think that many of those people, if they trusted you enough to talk about such things, would offer that they're not really absolutely certain about much of anything. Religion doesn't require 100% blind faith to be useful or helpful.
I'm not a mormon, and not in any way qualified to speak on their behalf, but in a more general sense, many people with religious beliefs view organized religion as a sort of communal search for truth. There might be other functions that a religion serves, but the idea of helping people learn fundamental truths about God, the world, existence, life, etc. is a pretty fundamental aspect of religion. Your church is supposed to help you discover those truths and what they mean for you.
The idea of secrets within a church pushes against that ideal. That doesn't mean that a church needs to publish a daily list of what their pastors all had for breakfast every day, but it does mean that if there's some sort of offical documentation that is shared among part of the church, there's really no good reason why it shouldn't be available to everyone in the church. And since most churches are actively trying to bring others as potential members, then that stuff should be free to all.
Probably the same reason why there are fourteen thousand different text editors out there that I could download. Because curiosity leads people to create things.
I think that the real challenge for a useful autonomous vehicle isn't the terrain conditions of roads (maybe in New Orleans), but has more to do with the millions of other cars/bicycles/pedestrians/etc. that a driver has to deal with. The hard part is not staying on the road, it's avoiding all the other stuff moving along that road. Those other drivers don't always do things that make sense, they don't always do things that are technically legal, and a good driver will not only see those sorts of things, they'll be able to predict them. I can see which direction the other drivers are looking towards, I can anticipate whether or not they know I'm coming, I can anticipate them darting out in front of me because they don't know I'm there. Sure it'd be their fault if there was a collision, but for my own safety and sanity I'd much rather prefer to avoid an accident.
Until a self-driving car can have that level of awareness and make those sorts of predictions and act accordingly, I don't see computers doing any serious driving.
The original iMac didn't have ADB. It wasn't criticized for using USB as much as it was criticized for using USB instead of everything else. All those old standard mac ports (ADB/serial/scsi) were gone, and most mac users at the time didn't have any USB peripherals. So you were stuck buying new printers/scanners/webcams/etc, even if your old ones still worked.
Huh, I was not aware of that. Good for Gil. I sometimes wonder if he was really as useless as he gets accused of being, or if he just got stuck in a really bad situation that would've been hard for anyone to make lemonade out of. I was too young in those days to really understand what was going on. *shrug*