my case is slightly different. I tend to pursue my daily gaming after I go to sleep, usually in the form of 'dream-gaming' : long, detailed sessions of the game I was playing while awake happening all in my dreams.
At some point when I was (admitedly) playing way too much texas-hold-em, I would keep playing in my dreams, often several hundred hands a night, and could even wake up knowing how much I had 'made' or 'lost' that particular night. I could also remember vividly most of the hands, my opponents' characteristics and the session's specific vibe.
used to be the same when i was playing (admitedly) too much UO: I would go as far as MACROING in my sleep sometimes.
I used to pilot a Panther clipper (some really big transport ship with 6 gun mount-points and 2.000 metric tons of cargo capacity) and I would fit it with an hydrogen scoop (to collect fuel from gas giants).
I would then buy 300t of grain, 50t of narcotics and a few sex slaves, a few automated mining installations, and head straight AWAY from the civilizaed core of the galaxy, into the unknown (and the unpopulated), where I would simply jump from star to star, refueling out of the outer layers of gas giants' atmospheres, dropping mining stations on select asteroids and rocky planets.
I once managed to reach the center of the galaxy that way (hundreds of hours of play), until a statistical rarefaction of gas giants occurence inside a 300 ly zone forced me to stop jumping and settle.
Oh yeah. I would also converse with my ship computer, discussing philosophy and politics, that sort of stuff. 'her' name was, unsurprisingly, 'Panther'.
The idea of leaving the corruption and conformism of the federation / empire far behind would procure me intense joy, and that truly was the only way I could play the game while still feeling different.
yeah, let's all get together, fix the "injustice", and in the process let's just trash our cities, murder our citizens and rape 5 million women a year.
If you intend on blaming everything on racism I know I surely can't stop you : I know from experience that a lot of people will just NOT look at cultural, religious, racial, climatic or biological factors IF they can just shout "racist !" instead and get away with it.
For your information, and after having spent 8 years in SA, claiming that blacks commit 95% of all violent crimes in SA isn't "racism" but merely stating obvious facts. So the first comment you just quoted is hardly indicative of racism, although it is indicative of decent familiarity with the statistics.
I don't deny the fact that social and economic factors are essential in order to grasp the new SA criminal reality, but to outright dismiss biological and cultural factors as "racist" is frankly delusional.
I remember a time when aliens in fiction were used as a mean to explore the intricacies of our own evolution as a species, or to reflect on our own tendencies toward self-destruction, the H-Bomb, the cold war, that sort of stuff.
When Stanislas Lem wrote Fiasco, aliens were a way to reflect on the nature of communication and its philosophical conundrums. Good stuff.
Saddening to see political correctness take over that too, and turn a potentially mind-boddling discovery into a mere pretext for bigoted post-cultural and post-racial propaganda.
"good thing you're white I guess", bleh, you obviously haven't even read some of the comments, including the one made by someone who isn't black but whose girlfriend is, and who all happen to find this bullshit revoltingly idiotic.
The simple fact is that most of us are aware of racial factors, just like most of us are aware of social, political, sexual, and younameit factors which happen to MATTER in our lives and jobs. Most of us also tend to make fun of essentially two things : ourselves (self-derision) and OTHERS, i.e people and things with substantially different backgrounds, natures, ways of life, etc.
If you can't live with your own humanity, try the Borg. You sound like an 8-yo left-wing convert with the appropriate zeal.
As for the article you linked, I find it very refreshing, especially in our era of self-doubt, total relativism and utter lack-of-ballness.
Also, I am an arab from north Africa. Yeah. Cops are racist indeed ; so are we all.
possibly no writer ever stimulated, fascinated and moved me as intensely as JGB routinely did.
one poster mentionned Voices of Time, yes one of the greatest short stories ever written, but others are also must-reads : the Overloaded Man, Manhole 69, Billenium and Theatre of War immediately come to mind.
his style was truly unique, an insane blend of clinical precision and hyper-sensate, almost hallucinatory inventiveness. His lucidity regarding our present collective condition was unparalleled, possibly a by-product of the way his overimaginative mind coped with his bigger-than-life early years (he was interned in a japanese prison camp outside Shanghai when he was 9) and latter hardships (the death of his wife impacted his writing more than any other event in his adult life)
What should one read from Ballard ? Everything.
" Slowly he felt the puttylike mass of his body dissolving, his temperature growing cooler and less oppressive. Looking out through the surface of the water six inches above his face, he watched the blue disc of the sky, cloudless and undisturbed, expanding to fill his counciousness. At last he had found the perfect background, the only possible field of ideation, an absolute continuum of existence uncontaminated by material excrescences. Steadily watching it, he waited for the world to dissolve and set him free. "
to develop multi-billion dollar jet aircrafts for the sole purpose of concealing reverse-engineered secret antigrav air-to-space troop transports (project XBLuRG)shows the utter disregard of the Air Force for taxpayers' money.
We demand congressional hearings on this issue RIGHT NOW !
signed : PETT (People for the Ethical Treatment of Taxpayers)
Why should anyone care what you "suspect"? Unlike you, these guys actually did a study and found something that actually predicts road rage (or at least correlates with it).
Erm, I was expressing an opinion, which, by definition, you can freely choose to ignore or consider.
See, for example, I don't need to perform any kind of 'study' before confidently putting you in the "pompous jerk" category...just my opinion of course.
"The number of territory markers predicted road rage better than vehicle value, condition, or any of the things that we normally associate with aggressive driving,"
Measuring the degree of car territorialisation to predict road rage? Seems like a damn roundabout way of doing it, you might as well measure your car velocity by looking at the apparent motion of the stars.
I suspect analyzing drivers' I.Q would make a simpler, better job at predicting stupid road behaviour.
While I concede 'their' hatred isn't entirely blind either, the truth certainly doesn't "lie in the middle": you obviously don't take into account the weight of religious dogma and political unconsciousness in our enemies' life.
So much socio-religious engineering has taken place in those people's life (the Quran) that their present attitude is *mostly* driven by irrational, i.e purely emotional reasons. Finding any kind of intellectual common ground with them just wonâ(TM)t work, because it is our very existence as a culture and as a people that drives them to mass murder.
As for the course of action "I" recommend (a CoA actually recommended by most of our strategic analysts, I didn't just pull that out of my ass), you mistakenly believe it would fuel more hatred because you assume fighting our enemies doesn't involve killing them.
No living enemies to fight us = no problem, and the more of their peers fear our might the better. Not everyone can be kept in check by pure reasoning, some primitives actually require a good show of thundery might. Think Shock and Awe.
if you think nobody can hate you for who you are, that is, if you truly believe people need rational motives to murder, enslave, and oppress their fellow homo sapiens, then you clearly are the one who hasn't got a clue.
racial, religious and cultural differences leading to hatred and mistrust are *REAL*, they're real in the western world despite our high standards of living and liberal, democratic political systems, but they exist even more massively in third-world dictatorships.
The only way to fight such blind hatred is force and the will to use it. To assert anything else is only suicidal wishful self-delusion.
The whole "that would be like a magic wand" line is basically a self-invalidating argument, especially when it comes to the energy involved in sending usefull ammounts of manpower and material to other planets/star systems.
The overall energy used by mankind since the early roman empire has increased from 0.25 x 10-e8 to 0.17 x 10-e13 W, roughly a 75.000-fold increase as we tapped into wind and water power, fossil fuels (=> chemical rockets) and nuclear fission (=> inevitable fission powered spaceflight).
I would like to remind this gentleman (the one from the article) that the considered time-period, roughly 2000 years, only ammounts to 1/20.000 of the total career of Homo Sapiens, whose overall existence has been defined by an ever-increasing ammount of usable energy. There is NO indication whatsoever that this trend is about to end, with still pentifull coal and oil desposits (there is even an entirely virgin continent left to exploit), quickly spreading fission technology and probable fusion power in the next 50 years.
What i am trying to say (i'm a bit drunk though) is that weither or not we're going to the outer planets and to the stars is only a matter of how much a fraction of our overall energy production such a trip would cost : early transatlantic ships would have been impossible without a convenient way to use wind power, flight relied on internal combustion and fossil fuels, similarily practical spaceflight is gonna require more advanced energy sources that are not only probable, but providing we don't go extinct, inevitable. We can't do it now, but we soon will.
From that perspective an upcoming "magic wand" (which wouldn't be magic at all but only the logical replacement of our present energy-harnessing techniques) is not 'highly unlikly' but rather 'highly probable'. Practical fusion power, space-based solar energy, giant tidal generator, thermoclinal conductors, cheap antimater production, you name it, the only question about them is "when", not "how".
just look at the curves, we're getting there, saying that RIGHT NOW we couldn't do it is irrelevant, it's all a matter of how much energy we find ourselves able and willing to invest.
Seems to me this guy is just trying to upset his fans (havn't read his work though).
Slashdot Mirror
obviously you've never played zelda in your life, am I wrong ?
I wont even address what you said because you simply suck.
my case is slightly different. I tend to pursue my daily gaming after I go to sleep, usually in the form of 'dream-gaming' : long, detailed sessions of the game I was playing while awake happening all in my dreams.
At some point when I was (admitedly) playing way too much texas-hold-em, I would keep playing in my dreams, often several hundred hands a night, and could even wake up knowing how much I had 'made' or 'lost' that particular night. I could also remember vividly most of the hands, my opponents' characteristics and the session's specific vibe.
used to be the same when i was playing (admitedly) too much UO: I would go as far as MACROING in my sleep sometimes.
It's easier to build a world empire being a black nobel-winning liberal than a white ivy league dropout.
bah nevermind, useless.
you obviously w
- work for EA for a while, at least until I can find a real job : CHECK
- leave the company with a nice bundle of cash and the appearance of now having insider knowledge : CHECK
- take various SHORT positions on EA stocks with the leverage of my new firm : CHECK
- write a nasty paper about how bad EA is ran, and have it published on /. : CHECK
- take even SHORTER positions on EA stock : CHECK
- wait for stocks to drop, take LONG positions and retire to the caiman islands.
ahhhh Elite 2 : Frontier... what a game
I used to pilot a Panther clipper (some really big transport ship with 6 gun mount-points and 2.000 metric tons of cargo capacity) and I would fit it with an hydrogen scoop (to collect fuel from gas giants).
I would then buy 300t of grain, 50t of narcotics and a few sex slaves, a few automated mining installations, and head straight AWAY from the civilizaed core of the galaxy, into the unknown (and the unpopulated), where I would simply jump from star to star, refueling out of the outer layers of gas giants' atmospheres, dropping mining stations on select asteroids and rocky planets.
I once managed to reach the center of the galaxy that way (hundreds of hours of play), until a statistical rarefaction of gas giants occurence inside a 300 ly zone forced me to stop jumping and settle.
Oh yeah. I would also converse with my ship computer, discussing philosophy and politics, that sort of stuff. 'her' name was, unsurprisingly, 'Panther'.
The idea of leaving the corruption and conformism of the federation / empire far behind would procure me intense joy, and that truly was the only way I could play the game while still feeling different.
good thing I never installed Eve Online...
yeah, let's all get together, fix the "injustice", and in the process let's just trash our cities, murder our citizens and rape 5 million women a year.
great plan.
If you intend on blaming everything on racism I know I surely can't stop you : I know from experience that a lot of people will just NOT look at cultural, religious, racial, climatic or biological factors IF they can just shout "racist !" instead and get away with it.
For your information, and after having spent 8 years in SA, claiming that blacks commit 95% of all violent crimes in SA isn't "racism" but merely stating obvious facts. So the first comment you just quoted is hardly indicative of racism, although it is indicative of decent familiarity with the statistics.
I don't deny the fact that social and economic factors are essential in order to grasp the new SA criminal reality, but to outright dismiss biological and cultural factors as "racist" is frankly delusional.
a good picture being better than a thousand words...
http://deathofjohannesburg.blogspot.com/
"I'm South African so yay for South Africans of all colours, shapes and broken accents"
How long since your last trip to J-Burg ? Remember the city as it was 15, say, 20 years ago maybe ? Clean and ordered ?
guess not.
I remember a time when aliens in fiction were used as a mean to explore the intricacies of our own evolution as a species, or to reflect on our own tendencies toward self-destruction, the H-Bomb, the cold war, that sort of stuff.
When Stanislas Lem wrote Fiasco, aliens were a way to reflect on the nature of communication and its philosophical conundrums. Good stuff.
Saddening to see political correctness take over that too, and turn a potentially mind-boddling discovery into a mere pretext for bigoted post-cultural and post-racial propaganda.
They surely won't get my money for that one.
oh please, enough with the preaching already.
"good thing you're white I guess", bleh, you obviously haven't even read some of the comments, including the one made by someone who isn't black but whose girlfriend is, and who all happen to find this bullshit revoltingly idiotic.
The simple fact is that most of us are aware of racial factors, just like most of us are aware of social, political, sexual, and younameit factors which happen to MATTER in our lives and jobs. Most of us also tend to make fun of essentially two things : ourselves (self-derision) and OTHERS, i.e people and things with substantially different backgrounds, natures, ways of life, etc.
If you can't live with your own humanity, try the Borg. You sound like an 8-yo left-wing convert with the appropriate zeal.
As for the article you linked, I find it very refreshing, especially in our era of self-doubt, total relativism and utter lack-of-ballness.
Also, I am an arab from north Africa. Yeah. Cops are racist indeed ; so are we all.
possibly no writer ever stimulated, fascinated and moved me as intensely as JGB routinely did.
one poster mentionned Voices of Time, yes one of the greatest short stories ever written, but others are also must-reads : the Overloaded Man, Manhole 69, Billenium and Theatre of War immediately come to mind.
his style was truly unique, an insane blend of clinical precision and hyper-sensate, almost hallucinatory inventiveness. His lucidity regarding our present collective condition was unparalleled, possibly a by-product of the way his overimaginative mind coped with his bigger-than-life early years (he was interned in a japanese prison camp outside Shanghai when he was 9) and latter hardships (the death of his wife impacted his writing more than any other event in his adult life)
What should one read from Ballard ? Everything.
" Slowly he felt the puttylike mass of his body dissolving, his temperature growing cooler and less oppressive. Looking out through the surface of the water six inches above his face, he watched the blue disc of the sky, cloudless and undisturbed, expanding to fill his counciousness. At last he had found the perfect background, the only possible field of ideation, an absolute continuum of existence uncontaminated by material excrescences. Steadily watching it, he waited for the world to dissolve and set him free. "
The Overloaded Man, 1961
Hope he felt something similar upon departure.
to develop multi-billion dollar jet aircrafts for the sole purpose of concealing reverse-engineered secret antigrav air-to-space troop transports (project XBLuRG)shows the utter disregard of the Air Force for taxpayers' money.
We demand congressional hearings on this issue RIGHT NOW !
signed : PETT (People for the Ethical Treatment of Taxpayers)
Why should anyone care what you "suspect"? Unlike you, these guys actually did a study and found something that actually predicts road rage (or at least correlates with it).
Erm, I was expressing an opinion, which, by definition, you can freely choose to ignore or consider.
See, for example, I don't need to perform any kind of 'study' before confidently putting you in the "pompous jerk" category...just my opinion of course.
"The number of territory markers predicted road rage better than vehicle value, condition, or any of the things that we normally associate with aggressive driving,"
Measuring the degree of car territorialisation to predict road rage? Seems like a damn roundabout way of doing it, you might as well measure your car velocity by looking at the apparent motion of the stars.
I suspect analyzing drivers' I.Q would make a simpler, better job at predicting stupid road behaviour.
While I concede 'their' hatred isn't entirely blind either, the truth certainly doesn't "lie in the middle": you obviously don't take into account the weight of religious dogma and political unconsciousness in our enemies' life.
So much socio-religious engineering has taken place in those people's life (the Quran) that their present attitude is *mostly* driven by irrational, i.e purely emotional reasons. Finding any kind of intellectual common ground with them just wonâ(TM)t work, because it is our very existence as a culture and as a people that drives them to mass murder.
As for the course of action "I" recommend (a CoA actually recommended by most of our strategic analysts, I didn't just pull that out of my ass), you mistakenly believe it would fuel more hatred because you assume fighting our enemies doesn't involve killing them.
No living enemies to fight us = no problem, and the more of their peers fear our might the better. Not everyone can be kept in check by pure reasoning, some primitives actually require a good show of thundery might.
Think Shock and Awe.
if you think nobody can hate you for who you are, that is, if you truly believe people need rational motives to murder, enslave, and oppress their fellow homo sapiens, then you clearly are the one who hasn't got a clue. racial, religious and cultural differences leading to hatred and mistrust are *REAL*, they're real in the western world despite our high standards of living and liberal, democratic political systems, but they exist even more massively in third-world dictatorships. The only way to fight such blind hatred is force and the will to use it. To assert anything else is only suicidal wishful self-delusion.
then buy me a new keyboard, that will make you feel even more clever. account : PAYPAL#43673743 thanks.
The whole "that would be like a magic wand" line is basically a self-invalidating argument, especially when it comes to the energy involved in sending usefull ammounts of manpower and material to other planets/star systems. The overall energy used by mankind since the early roman empire has increased from 0.25 x 10-e8 to 0.17 x 10-e13 W, roughly a 75.000-fold increase as we tapped into wind and water power, fossil fuels (=> chemical rockets) and nuclear fission (=> inevitable fission powered spaceflight). I would like to remind this gentleman (the one from the article) that the considered time-period, roughly 2000 years, only ammounts to 1/20.000 of the total career of Homo Sapiens, whose overall existence has been defined by an ever-increasing ammount of usable energy. There is NO indication whatsoever that this trend is about to end, with still pentifull coal and oil desposits (there is even an entirely virgin continent left to exploit), quickly spreading fission technology and probable fusion power in the next 50 years. What i am trying to say (i'm a bit drunk though) is that weither or not we're going to the outer planets and to the stars is only a matter of how much a fraction of our overall energy production such a trip would cost : early transatlantic ships would have been impossible without a convenient way to use wind power, flight relied on internal combustion and fossil fuels, similarily practical spaceflight is gonna require more advanced energy sources that are not only probable, but providing we don't go extinct, inevitable. We can't do it now, but we soon will. From that perspective an upcoming "magic wand" (which wouldn't be magic at all but only the logical replacement of our present energy-harnessing techniques) is not 'highly unlikly' but rather 'highly probable'. Practical fusion power, space-based solar energy, giant tidal generator, thermoclinal conductors, cheap antimater production, you name it, the only question about them is "when", not "how". just look at the curves, we're getting there, saying that RIGHT NOW we couldn't do it is irrelevant, it's all a matter of how much energy we find ourselves able and willing to invest. Seems to me this guy is just trying to upset his fans (havn't read his work though).