The fabulous property of computer-based slot machines is the total control it gives the programmer over the mark's experience. The sole purpose of the game is to keep you playing until your money runs out. All the govt keep track of is whether the % payoff is within the legal limits.
Let's take a simple 5 symbol slot machine. With a mechanical device, the player can know they're a loser when the second wheel stops. A video slot machine can keep the suspense going right up until the last symbol... oh look! Two bars! Three! Oh sweet Jesus a fourth bar! That's 5K if the next bar comes around!
At this point, speaking as a programmer, I'd make damn sure that the winning symbols just drifts past the window before flashing the "Deposit another $5 to NUDGE?" button.
Since you have total control, the programmer can make the sucker believe they are coming arbitrarily close to winning without actually paying out anything. The idea is to give the sucker a lift, a high, a thrill. A glimpse of that "big win", that will keep him/her putting the money in.
Not illegal. Just behavioural conditioning. The same thing B.F. Skinner did with pigeons.
In his experiments the pigeons were taught to repeatedly peck a switch to get a small food reward. If the food was delivered after set number of pecks (even dozens), the bird would only peck away when it was hungry. But if the reward (food) was delivered after a random number of pecks, the bird eventually came to peck at the button continually, even frantically.
A slot/fruit machine is nothing more than a behavioural conditioning machine that skillfully supplies small, random rewards, all the while sustaining the belief in the player that the big reward is just waiting for the next game.
Illegal? No. Ethical? Well, gambling is a tax on the stupid.
Built my version of Star Trek on a PDP-8a, FTREK eventually made its way onto the decus tapes.
Eventually I made a multiplayer simulation in APL running on an Amdahl mainframe since it was the only subsystem with inter-process communication (I/O was through IBM selectric teletypes.... no crt's at that time...)
> I can't tell you how many times this has happened to me. After 5 years of programming, my favorite language >has become assembler - not because I hate HLL's, but rather, because you get exactly what you code in assembler. >There are no "Leaky Abstractions" in assembly.
Sorry, there are many.
For example, in 1983 it took me two weeks to discover that the assembler was generating an incorrect op-code for the stop instruction. (when the latest motorola chip had added an interrupt mask argument to the stop instruction, the assembler writers changed the back-end to set the "single argument" bit on the stop op-code. Unfortunately this works for every instruction but the stop.) I was writing a real-time operating system at the time, and the only time the stop instruction was called was during the idle task. So the system would crash at random times, and since this was an embedded system (no debugger - take that you wimps) adding printf's to the code simply ensured the idle task was never executed, and the blasted thing wouldn't crash.
Another example of a leaky abstraction is assembly programming was on a Honeywell level 6. If you're program wouldn't run and you really didn't know why, sometimes bringing the system down and re-seating the memory boards would fix it....
Every abstraction contains assumptions which may not hold true in all circumstances.... it's probably related to Godel's incompleteness theorem.
nurb432 is correct, though perhaps not quite in the draconian way he intimates.
The folk who pay the bills and want to make money in their businesses have a problem with the internet: they require a way to authenticate who people are (or more accurately, who belongs to the money).
The era which people (and their machines) can operate anonymously is coming to a rapid close. (although this may work with psuedonyms). The amount of fraud and cheating that occurs on ebay, on-line gaming and even how well google operates (and how it spoils the benifits of same) are but the tip of the iceberg of the impetus to bring authentication to the internet.
To those that believe that those god-like hackers will always be able to circumvent restrictions are dreaming.
Consider the following scenario: Wireless becomes pervasive, computers become cheaper and more ubiquitous - your typical consumer has a choice between a $0.50 internet connected player that comes as a prize in a cereal box and uses their DCMA account and spending $100 dollars for a hacked player that has to be constantly updated to circumvent the dynamicall downloaded encryption schemes - or playing on hacked on-line game vs a non-hacked DCMA version, or using a version of ebay where users are accountable for their behaviour, or a version of google that indexes only those pages where the source/nature of the content is verifiable?
Which will the typical consumer choose?
Walking into a store with a mask over your head is not acceptable in the real world, it will soon not be acceptable on the internet.
This brave new world also scares the willies out of me...
Was it Frost that wrote:
This is the way the world ends, This is the way the world ends,
This is the way the world ends,
Not with a bang,
But with a whimper.
P.S. Please tell me that the nurb in nurb432 doesn't stand for Non-Uniform Rational B-spline....
I was replying to a posting that said that the interactivity in games would make it less likely that people be spectators.
All my arguments argue against that. So do yours.
If there is no difference between a game and deciding if a piece of meat is bad or determining proper driving habits, and the latter does not encourage people to "particpate" (any more than
they do now), then games won't.
I'm not arguing game's don't have value, can't have complex interactions etc.
It's sociology, not technology.
So I don't disagree with the points you are making. But they don't address the issue:
Do games make people less inclined to be passive because of their complexity and interactivity?
I say no.
No more than any other game or past-time.
It even may even tend to people more passive by isolating them (physically and intellectually), reducing levels of physical activity and making them less likely to be able to cope with the complexities of the real world through compelling and complete immersion in an entertainment that is geared to creating an enjoyable experience.
Note the word "tend". No-where do I say that games don't have value under some metric. No-where do I say that games can't be used to train or improve certain skills.
BTW. You'll find out that there is far more to physics than the three laws of motion. That they don't explain everything, and they don't really hold except in extremely simplified situations.
(they can't accurately predict the position of a ball on a pool table after more than one bounce).
But they're good enough for rock 'n roll!
And the boys in marketing are sure glad to hear that you think you know why you bought that game.:-):-)
Played these games. I work at a game company.
These games aren't that complicated. They work on a state-based game with essentially rock-paper-sicsors type interation moderated by local, and circumstance. They have to be built
this way for the game designer to have a hope of
balancing gameplay.
Real-life is still very very much harder and the rules change. This is a common error of comp sci types and gamers who somehow think the simulations are even remotely as complex as real-world interactions. Every game succumbs to a technique that exploits a weakness in the tuning of the game.
From terminus info page: "Every ship system is modeled down to the last detail, including weapons, propulsion, armor, and/or cargo."
Every last detail? What utter bull.
A researcher in the states has, after decades of work, come up with a mathematical model for multi-celluar predator/prey relationships that has some reasonable predictive power. Note- this is not for animals, small multi-celluar protists in
extremely simplified environments. And you think these games reflect the real world?
"The fact of games not being sufficiently similar to real life are completely bogus".
I'm not arguing that they are bogus because they are insufficient, I am arguing against people that say these games are special and somehow change or improve people because of their realism and interaction. Their *argument* (not the game themselves) are bogus because the reality of the sim is extremely poor and the interaction is weak.
Item 2: You are always being manipulated. Games are constantly tweaked before release to ensure balance and playability. Again, I'm not saying this is bad - just that you are proving exactly the point I was trying to make. You have been fooled into thinking your virtual experience is
genuine and unmanipulated and is more than just a shadow of the complexity of life.
Item 3. Name a game where there are no cheaters, no "guides" that exploit weaknesses in the game tuning. Tell me a game where you don't discover the "optimum" strategy for a given situation.
Again, this isn't "bad". Just don't tell me it
makes people more participatory. It fools them into thinking they are doing more than they are.
Point 4 is not irrelevant. The discussion was about how the interactive nature of games somehow made the participants more likely to participate (in whatever) than TV or chess. People aren't trying to say chess, books or movies make you less
likely to be a spectator.
My point is that games are entertainment, you are being sold, marketed and manipulated in these games. The old phrase was an "Opiate for the masses", my contention is that games are even
more of an opiate because of their interactive,
immersive engagement of a small subset of your personality.
As for multiplayer games teaching communication. You think this is "communication"? You are already happy with less.:-)
Yes, multiplayer games are even more interactive. Some people spend a major proportion of their lives on-line. This makes them participants? It makes them spectators, happy to live inside a terribly simplified existence with nice cosy rules and no real consequences.
I'd really would like to figure out how to change this.
Paradoxically, interactivity of the sort games provide will make people more passive.
1) real-life is a lot harder, no reset, no cheats - much easier to just go play a game
2) Interaction in games is largely illusional. You are being manipulated into an experience (eg. the way MarioKart racing slows and speeds opponents to make the race always close).
3) Many games are "won" by rote memorization of patterns. This is not interaction. The game is training the user.
4) The interaction is highly constrained and limited. A monitor, keyboard and a mouse (even a full-blown VR setup) has a ridiculously low bandwidth compared to the real-world. Incredible nuances are lost. Only a small part of your sensing and ability to act is being used.
Basically games are training you to be happy with less, to live in a world where you get to live out your fantasies and achieve goals at the punch of a cheat-code, where you can escape of complexities of real-life because the rules are so much simpler.
Games are compelling, the escapism is useful and fun, but don't tell me they promote participation.
If anything, this compelling nature makes them all the more likely to turn us into spectators of real-life.
The pervasive use of cars and the creation of a communication and transport infrastructure to support them destroyed the core of most American cities in this century.
Much of the social and criminal problems can be traced to the fact that once the more affluent members of a society were able to move, they did so - forming downtown ghettos and trackless suburbia which were both culturally and racially fairly uniform.
The information superhighway is going to do the same thing, but the effect will be much worse.
Not only will there be geographic and economic stratification and separation, but increased philosophical separation as people tend to hang out in cyberspace with people who think the same way.
Many here seem to think this is ok.
But the inner city riots of the past will be nothing compared to the effect of disenfranchising a majority of the population simply because they aren't high-tech workers.
Yes it is an option. An option that has tremedous appeal to the vast majority of folk who don't have the time or inclination to wade through the complexities of good security.
To them it will save worry, time and money.
Sometime in the future there will be an option only to allow "signed" packets through to your computer. Switches will lead this trend by giving preferencial treatment to trusted hosts, or banning all others outright for security reasons.
Business will love this, the general populace won't know what's happening (and from a day-to-day practical point of view will love it) and the infrastructure that controls the flow of information will solidify.
These things get heavily "tweeked", and still tend to look like rubber, not cloth with reasonable anisotropic behaviour, creasing and wrinkling.
BTW. Hanging skirts are the easiest form of cloth to do, and all examples from one system tend to look the same.
For games it will eventually be "good enough" though, and for the most part people aren't good observers of nature and won't really care that what they are looking at doesn't act real.
As far as the animators go, it has to do what they want when they want it to. Simulations are notoriously hard to control, but are great for secondary motion effects in those cases.
Sorry, but these packages do not produce motion that looks like real cloth in anything other than
very restricted situations....
Like draping over simple objects.
The technology is a long way from producing convincing simulations automatically.
Well, it may be all that. Of course it could be related to something else entirely...
1) Fewer children. The baby boomlet is over, they're packed in less tightly, less competition, less violence
2) Abortion means fewer unwanted children with fewer problems.
And there are probably lots of others you could come up with.
I'm not saying these *are* the reasons necessarily, just that determining causality in large human populations is trickly, there is nothing that really can be called a fact, and really what ideologies (pick one) want is PR, something to wrap themselves in to sell to the masses.
As the amount of commerce over the net increases, the viability of anonymity decreases because people and businesses will no longer tolerate interaction with non-trusted sources.
We already see it here where anonymous postings are automatically moderated down. This is just the beginning, as more of the infrastructure of society becomes networked the less it will tolerate the lack of identity in the participants.
People walking around town with ski-masks over their faces are viewed with suspicion, so too will the equivalent people on the net.
Of course, this means that for some a "black market" internet will spring up, but the very technology that we are installing can make it possible, profitable, and viewed as "good for business" to eliminate this sort of network.
"When the printing press came around those with power feared it, because if they can not control information they can not use it to manipulate it the people."
This is hardly the case anymore. Bandwidth is required by the people in power to advertise and manipulate.
This was shown in it's highest form during the Persian Gulf war where information was strictly controlled. You also may want to read "Manufacturing Consent" as background material about how information flow is manipulated.
While teaching the first year intro to CS course at UBC, I'd always give one lecture on security, privacy and related topics. Near the beginning of the lecture I'd ask for a show of hands of who would like to have an identification number that would be unique to them. Naturally everyone thought this was a bad idea. I'd go on from there for about 10 or 15 minutes and then start talking about all the marvelous new technology out there, eventually talking about getting a telephone number that they could keep, that would automatically route phone or even email messages to them. A poll of the class had almost everyone stating that this would be a fantastic feature of the communication system. Of course, the next step was to compare that unique phone number with the identification number we talked about at the beginning of the class. I leave that as an exercise for the reader.
This has happened before. Cars, the physical analog to the information superhighway essentially destroyed the downtown of most american cities. Cars made it easy for people to segregate themselves physically. The internet makes it easy for people to segregate themselves physically, emotionally and intellectually! The net makes it easy for people to just hang around with people that think the same way. My prediction is that the net will have far greater impact and cause far greater ghettos than the car ever did... Hope I'm wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's take a simple 5 symbol slot machine. With a mechanical device, the player can know they're a loser when the second wheel stops. A video slot machine can keep the suspense going right up until the last symbol... oh look! Two bars! Three! Oh sweet Jesus a fourth bar! That's 5K if the next bar comes around!
At this point, speaking as a programmer, I'd make damn sure that the winning symbols just drifts past the window before flashing the "Deposit another $5 to NUDGE?" button.
Since you have total control, the programmer can make the sucker believe they are coming arbitrarily close to winning without actually paying out anything. The idea is to give the sucker a lift, a high, a thrill. A glimpse of that "big win", that will keep him/her putting the money in.
Not illegal. Just behavioural conditioning. The same thing B.F. Skinner did with pigeons.
In his experiments the pigeons were taught to repeatedly peck a switch to get a small food reward. If the food was delivered after set number of pecks (even dozens), the bird would only peck away when it was hungry. But if the reward (food) was delivered after a random number of pecks, the bird eventually came to peck at the button continually, even frantically.
A slot/fruit machine is nothing more than a behavioural conditioning machine that skillfully supplies small, random rewards, all the while sustaining the belief in the player that the big reward is just waiting for the next game.
Illegal? No. Ethical? Well, gambling is a tax on the stupid.
Built my version of Star Trek on a PDP-8a, FTREK eventually made its way onto the decus tapes.
Eventually I made a multiplayer simulation in APL running
on an Amdahl mainframe since it was the only subsystem with
inter-process communication (I/O was through IBM selectric
teletypes.... no crt's at that time...)
I must be officially old now...
There are no "easy to use" 3D interfaces that exist even in the real world. Go ahead, try to find one.
Uh... airplane control
Nope, not easy to use, and it's mainly a 2D interface with the rudder thrown in.... talk to a pilot.
Any others?
I predict that the problem was in the updated avionics software.
You heard it hear first.
>has become assembler - not because I hate HLL's, but rather, because you get exactly what you code in assembler.
>There are no "Leaky Abstractions" in assembly.
Sorry, there are many.
For example, in 1983 it took me two weeks to discover that the assembler was generating an incorrect op-code for the stop instruction. (when the latest motorola chip had added an interrupt mask argument to the stop instruction, the assembler writers changed the back-end to set the "single argument" bit on the stop op-code. Unfortunately this works for every instruction but the stop.)
I was writing a real-time operating system at the time, and the only time the stop instruction was called was during the idle task. So the system would crash at random times, and since this was an embedded system (no debugger - take that you wimps) adding printf's to the code simply ensured the idle task was never executed, and the blasted thing wouldn't crash.
Another example of a leaky abstraction is assembly programming was on a Honeywell level 6. If you're program wouldn't run and you really didn't know why, sometimes bringing the system down and re-seating the memory boards would fix it....
Every abstraction contains assumptions which may not hold true in all circumstances.... it's probably related to Godel's incompleteness theorem.
432...
4th order, 3rd degree...... 2 duplicated knots?
nurb432 is correct, though perhaps not quite in the draconian way he intimates.
The folk who pay the bills and want to make money in their businesses have a problem with the internet: they require a way to authenticate who people are (or more accurately, who belongs to the money).
The era which people (and their machines) can operate anonymously is coming to a rapid close. (although this may work with psuedonyms). The amount of fraud and cheating that occurs on ebay, on-line gaming and even how well google operates (and how it spoils the benifits of same) are but the tip of the iceberg of the impetus to bring authentication to the internet.
To those that believe that those god-like hackers will always be able to circumvent restrictions are dreaming.
Consider the following scenario: Wireless becomes pervasive, computers become cheaper and more ubiquitous - your typical consumer has a choice between a $0.50 internet connected player that comes as a prize in a cereal box and uses their DCMA account and spending $100 dollars for a hacked player that has to be constantly updated to circumvent the dynamicall downloaded encryption schemes - or playing on hacked on-line game vs a non-hacked DCMA version, or using a version of ebay where users are accountable for their behaviour, or a version of google that indexes only those pages where the source/nature of the content is verifiable?
Which will the typical consumer choose?
Walking into a store with a mask over your head is not acceptable in the real world, it will soon not be acceptable on the internet.
This brave new world also scares the willies out of me...
Was it Frost that wrote:
This is the way the world ends, This is the way the world ends,
This is the way the world ends,
Not with a bang,
But with a whimper.
P.S. Please tell me that the nurb in nurb432 doesn't stand for Non-Uniform Rational B-spline....
I was replying to a posting that said that the interactivity in games would make it less likely that people be spectators.
All my arguments argue against that. So do yours.
If there is no difference between a game and deciding if a piece of meat is bad or determining proper driving habits, and the latter does not encourage people to "particpate" (any more than they do now), then games won't.
I'm not arguing game's don't have value, can't have complex interactions etc. It's sociology, not technology.
So I don't disagree with the points you are making. But they don't address the issue:
Do games make people less inclined to be passive because of their complexity and interactivity?
I say no. No more than any other game or past-time.
It even may even tend to people more passive by isolating them (physically and intellectually), reducing levels of physical activity and making them less likely to be able to cope with the complexities of the real world through compelling and complete immersion in an entertainment that is geared to creating an enjoyable experience.
Note the word "tend". No-where do I say that games don't have value under some metric. No-where do I say that games can't be used to train or improve certain skills.
BTW. You'll find out that there is far more to physics than the three laws of motion. That they don't explain everything, and they don't really hold except in extremely simplified situations. (they can't accurately predict the position of a ball on a pool table after more than one bounce). But they're good enough for rock 'n roll!
And the boys in marketing are sure glad to hear that you think you know why you bought that game. :-) :-)
Real-life is still very very much harder and the rules change. This is a common error of comp sci types and gamers who somehow think the simulations are even remotely as complex as real-world interactions. Every game succumbs to a technique that exploits a weakness in the tuning of the game.
From terminus info page: "Every ship system is modeled down to the last detail, including weapons, propulsion, armor, and/or cargo." Every last detail? What utter bull.
A researcher in the states has, after decades of work, come up with a mathematical model for multi-celluar predator/prey relationships that has some reasonable predictive power. Note- this is not for animals, small multi-celluar protists in extremely simplified environments. And you think these games reflect the real world?
"The fact of games not being sufficiently similar to real life are completely bogus". I'm not arguing that they are bogus because they are insufficient, I am arguing against people that say these games are special and somehow change or improve people because of their realism and interaction. Their *argument* (not the game themselves) are bogus because the reality of the sim is extremely poor and the interaction is weak.
Item 2: You are always being manipulated. Games are constantly tweaked before release to ensure balance and playability. Again, I'm not saying this is bad - just that you are proving exactly the point I was trying to make. You have been fooled into thinking your virtual experience is genuine and unmanipulated and is more than just a shadow of the complexity of life.
Item 3. Name a game where there are no cheaters, no "guides" that exploit weaknesses in the game tuning. Tell me a game where you don't discover the "optimum" strategy for a given situation. Again, this isn't "bad". Just don't tell me it makes people more participatory. It fools them into thinking they are doing more than they are.
Point 4 is not irrelevant. The discussion was about how the interactive nature of games somehow made the participants more likely to participate (in whatever) than TV or chess. People aren't trying to say chess, books or movies make you less likely to be a spectator.
My point is that games are entertainment, you are being sold, marketed and manipulated in these games. The old phrase was an "Opiate for the masses", my contention is that games are even more of an opiate because of their interactive, immersive engagement of a small subset of your personality.
As for multiplayer games teaching communication. You think this is "communication"? You are already happy with less. :-)
Yes, multiplayer games are even more interactive. Some people spend a major proportion of their lives on-line. This makes them participants? It makes them spectators, happy to live inside a terribly simplified existence with nice cosy rules and no real consequences.
I'd really would like to figure out how to change this.
Paradoxically, interactivity of the sort games provide will make people more passive.
1) real-life is a lot harder, no reset, no cheats - much easier to just go play a game
2) Interaction in games is largely illusional. You are being manipulated into an experience (eg. the way MarioKart racing slows and speeds opponents to make the race always close).
3) Many games are "won" by rote memorization of patterns. This is not interaction. The game is training the user.
4) The interaction is highly constrained and limited. A monitor, keyboard and a mouse (even a full-blown VR setup) has a ridiculously low bandwidth compared to the real-world. Incredible nuances are lost. Only a small part of your sensing and ability to act is being used.
Basically games are training you to be happy with less, to live in a world where you get to live out your fantasies and achieve goals at the punch of a cheat-code, where you can escape of complexities of real-life because the rules are so much simpler.
Games are compelling, the escapism is useful and fun, but don't tell me they promote participation. If anything, this compelling nature makes them all the more likely to turn us into spectators of real-life.
The pervasive use of cars and the creation of a communication and transport infrastructure to support them destroyed the core of most American cities in this century.
Much of the social and criminal problems can be traced to the fact that once the more affluent members of a society were able to move, they did so - forming downtown ghettos and trackless suburbia which were both culturally and racially fairly uniform.
The information superhighway is going to do the same thing, but the effect will be much worse. Not only will there be geographic and economic stratification and separation, but increased philosophical separation as people tend to hang out in cyberspace with people who think the same way.
Many here seem to think this is ok. But the inner city riots of the past will be nothing compared to the effect of disenfranchising a majority of the population simply because they aren't high-tech workers.
Yes it is an option. An option that has tremedous appeal to the vast majority of folk who don't have the time or inclination to wade through the complexities of good security.
To them it will save worry, time and money.
Sometime in the future there will be an option only to allow "signed" packets through to your computer. Switches will lead this trend by giving preferencial treatment to trusted hosts, or banning all others outright for security reasons.
Business will love this, the general populace won't know what's happening (and from a day-to-day practical point of view will love it) and the infrastructure that controls the flow of information will solidify.
Wake up folks. You're not creating a utopia here!
These things get heavily "tweeked", and still tend to look like rubber, not cloth with reasonable anisotropic behaviour, creasing and wrinkling. BTW. Hanging skirts are the easiest form of cloth to do, and all examples from one system tend to look the same.
For games it will eventually be "good enough" though, and for the most part people aren't good observers of nature and won't really care that what they are looking at doesn't act real.
As far as the animators go, it has to do what they want when they want it to. Simulations are notoriously hard to control, but are great for secondary motion effects in those cases.
Sorry, but these packages do not produce motion that looks like real cloth in anything other than very restricted situations....
Like draping over simple objects.
The technology is a long way from producing convincing simulations automatically.
Well, it may be all that. Of course it could be related to something else entirely...
1) Fewer children. The baby boomlet is over, they're packed in less tightly, less competition, less violence
2) Abortion means fewer unwanted children with fewer problems.
And there are probably lots of others you could come up with. I'm not saying these *are* the reasons necessarily, just that determining causality in large human populations is trickly, there is nothing that really can be called a fact, and really what ideologies (pick one) want is PR, something to wrap themselves in to sell to the masses.
Great, with PayPal you now can be panhandled via email! "Please sir, can you spare .25 for a cup of coffee?"
As the amount of commerce over the net increases,
the viability of anonymity decreases because people and businesses will no longer tolerate interaction with non-trusted sources.
We already see it here where anonymous postings are automatically moderated down. This is just the beginning, as more of the infrastructure of society becomes networked the less it will tolerate the lack of identity in the participants.
People walking around town with ski-masks over their faces are viewed with suspicion, so too will the equivalent people on the net.
Of course, this means that for some a "black market" internet will spring up, but the very technology that we are installing can make it possible, profitable, and viewed as "good for business" to eliminate this sort of network.
"When the printing press came around those with power feared it, because if they can not control information they can not use it to manipulate it the people."
This is hardly the case anymore. Bandwidth is required by the people in power to advertise and manipulate.
This was shown in it's highest form during the Persian Gulf war where information was strictly controlled.
You also may want to read "Manufacturing Consent" as background material about how information flow is manipulated.
While teaching the first year intro to CS course at UBC, I'd always give one lecture on security, privacy and related topics. Near the beginning of the lecture I'd ask for a show of hands of who would like to have an identification number that would be unique to them. Naturally everyone thought this was a bad idea. I'd go on from there for about 10 or 15 minutes and then start talking about all the marvelous new technology out there, eventually talking about getting a telephone number that they could keep, that would automatically route phone or even email messages to them. A poll of the class had almost everyone stating that this would be a fantastic feature of the communication system. Of course, the next step was to compare that unique phone number with the identification number we talked about at the beginning of the class. I leave that as an exercise for the reader.
This has happened before. Cars, the physical analog to the information superhighway essentially destroyed the downtown of most american cities. Cars made it easy for people to segregate themselves physically. The internet makes it easy for people to segregate themselves physically, emotionally and intellectually! The net makes it easy for people to just hang around with people that think the same way. My prediction is that the net will have far greater impact and cause far greater ghettos than the car ever did... Hope I'm wrong.