Generally by people without the faintest clue what they're talking about. People think that if a language supports lambda, it's a Lisp child; you might as well say all modern programming languages are descendants of algebra. It's nonsense.
Lambda is a tiny fraction of LISP, and frankly it's a silly assertion to claim that languages are becoming LISPish just because some of the features LISP implemented are becoming common in broad-paradigm languages that everyone's migrating back towards lisp. Modern languages are far closer to Simula than LISP, and no Simula programmer would have the hubris to pretend that languages are migrating towards it, even though most languages are picking up features to work with C++, and even though C++ got its wardrobe from Simula.
The fact of the matter is simple: LISP programmers have been told by older LISP programmers that all languages want to be LISP, so they believe it. You can do Lambda in C++, Object Pascal and Forth. If you want to tell me those three languages are LISPish, I think I'll just pigeonhole you nice and early.
Want further proof? C# 2.0 is getting lexical closures.
Ahem. LISP didn't invent lexical closures, or in fact closures at all, in the language world; Scheme did. LISP got closures from its own child. By your logic, that means all languages are becoming Scheme, not LISP. Hell, Smalltalk had blocks before LISP or Scheme had closures. Does that mean that all langauges are becoming Smalltalk too?
Here's the giant cluebulb: "all roads lead to Rome" is only true if you're standing in Rome, looking outwards, and have never been anywhere else. Talk about how languages are reinventing LISP when you're more familiar with them, please; there's a whole lot that C++ can do that LISP just can't, and once you've bothered to read things like MC++D and gotten familiar with tools like Boost and Loki, you'll find that the converse just isn't true, no matter what your dogma says.
People will tell you LISP lost because its syntax looks like line noise, but Forth and K are still pretty common. LISP lost because it's impractical. It wants to be too smart, to do too much, and as a result it spends so much time on nonsense work that it's just not fast enough. Tell me all you like about solvability; I won't be impressed until you can show me a kernel or a database core that comes within, say, 50% of the speed of a mediocre C equivalent.
'cause these days, all the "new" features of today's languages are decades old...
Sounds like someone has no idea what modern languages do. Just because you finally see something you recognize doesn't mean it's all old hat.
This isn't an apology, it's a slap in Google's face. ZDNet is attempting to cast Google as a bully, wherein the concept is that the censure Google is applying is evil, based on some vague notion that all research leading to a story is fundamentally a good thing.
What Google is protesting is not research, but rather the posting of private data in a public forum to make a point. The point could as easily have been made by releasing the second letter of each word, but they didn't do that. It's got nothing to do with that the search was done on Google; that's just ZDNet UK spinning it as hard as they can to look like a wounded party.
Frankly, if they had gone down to the city county buolding, they could have gathered the same information, and if they had posted it in the article that way, I'd think they were equally legitimate targets for punishment.
I mean, come on, did home addresses really make the point so much that their impact - the impact of the home address of one of the world's richest people being published internationally - is justifiable?
This is some smarmy editor stepping in and pretending to be bent over a barrel so that nobody can see the black eye he was given for not stopping a fundamentally inappropriate article in its tracks. In normal modern journalism, where there are standards - magazines, newspapers, journals - article author writers get fired and their work left unpublished for less.
Frankly, I'm surprised the writer or their managing editor are still employed. It almost makes me wish ZDNet had released something worth reading in the last ten years, so I could boycott them.
You're one for three. WarioWare debuted on the GBA, and alsomade it to the n64. Animal Crossing also hit the GBA. How WarioWare, which is just a themed no-board Mario Party, which itself is just a new Panic!, is a "new concept" is beyond me. Pikmin you can make the argument for, though I see it as just another automaton game like Lemmings. Mario Baseball started on the NES, and Mario Tennis on the SNES; besides, I'm not sure how you think Baseball and Tennis ratify a point about Nintendo churning out old material. Oh, and Nintendogs is an old, old idea; it was dead for ten years, but was popular again recently as Tamagatchi, Dogz or Creatures, depending on your scale of complexity. That said, the earlier raiser I'm aware of is Little Computer People, by EA back in the late 70s or early 80s, which you now know as the "revolutionary" game The Sims.
Also, to my amusement, all three of the games you named have sequels.
Recreating a tracked surface wouldn't be anywhere near as difficult as, say, cracking a huge RSA thumbprint, so this isn't good enough for authentication. Destroying the surface would be as easy as a microwave or bleach, so it's no good for permanent identification.
But Lord Fountleroy, affectations whence and once put upon do nothing but to reinforce one's demeanor and bearing with the riff and the raff; why, ask anyone - even Count Bonguledorf, that blathering buffoon - all one need exercise is the lexicon the proletariat excise, and one should promptly be the fluff in the pompadour's pomp!
What, did you train at the Montgomery Burns school of tact? Or, do you think introducing words you learned from manpages makes you like sophistimacated?
Every time you make a joke about corporate misbehavior, some tired hack with nothing worth saying will extend the RIAA and MPAA onto a joke about kittens.
However, take for example, this quote from Bush in 2003, "Before September the 11th, many in the world believed that Saddam Hussein could be contained." Now you can't say the average person wouldn't read an implied link between SH and 9/11 there. But, he's safe on the technicality.
Hardly. This is a textbook fallacy of composition, arguably also questionable cause, and can even be cast as the spotlight fallacy, if you don't believe Americans are as stupid about the Middle East as the Bush administration would have you believe. Either way, it's a red herring, given that the quote given was as regards justifying his war, when in fact whether the average american holds any given belief about Saddam has approximately nothing to do with us stomping the Taliban flat.
You really shouldn't declare someone's arguments sound until you've actually inspected them. Bush is absolutely rife with nonsense, and the idea that he's "technically correct" is an appalling testament to the low quality of our public schools. You should be able to see through that by third grade.
Uh, no. If you understood thermodynamics and/or information theory, you'd know that the state of higher order is information, and that the state of lower order is noise. There is no "higher order" to secrecy versus freedom. That's just a nonsense emotional argument.
Do us a favor and argue only things you grok, in the future. This one... yeesh.
If you want to worry about the exposure of impressionable young minds to bad information, I suggest you begin by learning the difference between fallacy and falsehood.
No, in the absence of any measures, information ceases to exist. Fail to remember, fail to record it, fail to anything with it and it doesn't exist.
Nature records information all the time. There will always be information available to any who wish to retrieve it.
How is it that you get from "in the absence of measures" to "nature is making recordings?" There are two things to which you might be referring. A more careful selection of language reveals them both to be fundamentally broken arguments.
One is that an active process of nature creates a derivative product of information with long-term storage characteristics. One can make this non-argument for cases like fossils, where the information of the creature's structure can be determined occasionally billions of years after the organism itself disappears. The problem is, this isn't the lack of measures to maintain information to which the grandparent referred; there requires some active process, such as sedimentation or water fossilization (petrifaction) in order to occur. In the absence of such a mechanism, which is extremely rare (there's a reason there are so few fossils,) creatures do not leave significant information behind.
The other case is more difficult to explain. There is the argument that information is retreivable through some or another forensic process. Examples include using carbon patterns to determine the nature and temperature of fires or lava, gulleys to divine the presence of water on Mars, and pretty much anything you'd see on CSI: Miami which isn't a self serving pablumessage about the evils of racism or profiteering or some damned thing. There are those who would try to cast this as Nature or The World or something "recording information" which the intrepid researcher can come back and re-discover. Find something rotting? Plot out the progress of the putrifaction and you can (mostly) reconstruct the corpse's original state.
The problem is, that's not recording information at all. That's an incomplete loss of information. In many ways you can think of the physical world as an immensely error correcting signal. This is a fundamentally false analogy, but it serves my explanatory purpose, so run with it anyway. What we're doing when we walk back through partial information to reconstruct the original information is not finding other recordings of that information. What we're doing is looking for correlary effects which when summed give us the complete set of original information. It may sound like the same thing, but there's a critical semantic difference: we're not relocating, we're recreating. Granted it's the same information. Still, it's information lost and remade from evidence, not information located through crafty means.
The difference is quite real. I'm not just playing semantics. Consider The Einstein Puzzle as a good example of a way to recreate lost information, whose goal can only be reached thus.
"Information wants to be free" may not be as accurate as "people generally want to share information and make it available", but sounds a bit more philosophicalisticalish.
If you choose your phrasing to make yourself sound smart instead of to accurately convey information, then you deserve the opinion of ignorance other people aim your way. Besides, philosophy literally translates as "the love of knowledge;" even if the word meant what you seem to think it means, the bit about sharing would be far more in tune with the word than some vacuous notion about the supposed intent of recorded state.
there is nothing that the government can do even half as efficiently as the collective power of tens of millions of people with nothing better to do with their time than plink.
Exactly what do you think the government is, if not the collective power of tens of millions of people with nothing better to do with their time than solve tasks? (Yes, tens of millions. The government employs more than 5% of this nation, and the nation's around 300 million these days.)
Information "wants" to be free in the same sense that things "want" to fall to the ground; it's the path of least resistance.
This is a cute analogy, but it's also boldfacedly false. There is a physical principle underlying gravity. There is no physical principle attempting to disseminate knowledge. In fact, if you bother to actually figure out what physics says, it says something very ugly: Information wants to disappear. Entropy increases, signal fades.
Information doesn't want to be free. Human ethics want knowledge to spread. Phrased that way, not only is it more powerful, clearer and broader in scope, but it's also accurate.
Stop flinging catch phrases around as arguments. If you bother to think for yourself and say what you mean to say, instead of adopting some sentence you've heard several times because you admire who said it, you'll find that you can communicate with significance, instead of to simply self-label such that educated people tune you out.
What the statement means to me is that information usually becomes free in the absence of measures taken to prevent it from doing so. I think we can agree that that's true.
No. Information disappears without measures taken to keep it around. Any measures regarding preventing it from spreading are absolute nonsense. I'm not taking any such measures with my backup discs, yet you don't see my filesystem's layout leaking into general knowledge.
Information is not alive, and it does not grow or breed. Putting information onto the web or into a filesharing client isn't the absence of measures against dissemination. That's the active transmission and support of said data. That modern systems and clients make that so easy that people with a tendency to smear the details to better suit their worldview can actually forget that transmission is an action rather than the lack of one is testament to the design of those systems, not to some fundamental intangible property of information to spread.
If information spread on its own, we wouldn't lose data. Grow up. It's not information that wants to spread, it's ethics that demand that we share. There's a gigantic and important difference between the two. The latter demands you share medicine, theology, science, mathematics, all that good stuff, just like the former does.
The only difference is that the ethical need to share doesn't extend to stealing music and tv. Funny how a detail like that makes a community lie to itself, isn't it?
It is that there is both which creates the versus. Whereas I agree with you in principle - manned spaceflight is critical to the sort of growth, development and refined understanding which will lead to automation handling these tasks, that does not justify turning a blind eye to the legitimate comparison between manned and unmanned approaches to tasks.
regardless of what fools like you think you know.
Tsk, tsk, this is the same sort of personal attack you pointed out in the parent post.
To wit, neither this nor the parent is Argumentum ad Hominem; something is not a fallacy simply because it superficially mimics the structure of a fallacy. In order to be ad Hominem, there need not only be an insult, but rather an insult must be used as the basis either of an argument or an attempt to destroy an argument. You'll pardon my response, I hope, as I don't really get to say this outside of slashdot stories about NASA, but come on: fallacy isn't rocket science.
Seriously, though, I can think of more than 10 "broad-acceptance games" on the GC alone.
I don't know what to tell you. I'm going by EA's market research, which lists exactly three: bust a move 3000, mario party 5 (not 4, 6 or 7), and Super Monkey Ball 2.
I should also point out that at three broad-acceptance games at the 80% mark out of a set of 464, the GC has the second highest broad-acceptance rate of any major console in history, after the GameBoy Color, and of the top five seats, only one - #4, the Atari 2600 - isn't a Nintendo. You're right to point out that Nintendo is very good at generalized games. However, the wide-band 80% line is the gold standard; it gets hit once a year or so on all systems put together.
(BTW, there are actually 467, but three aren't listed here; if you look at the Nintendo site and see 519, please realize that that site also lists games that are coming out but aren't out yet, so obviously I don't have stats for those.)
Seriously, though, I can think of more than 10 "broad-acceptance games" on the GC alone.
I don't know what to tell you. I'm going by EA's market research, which lists exactly three: bust a move 3000, mario party 5 (not 4, 6 or 7), and Super Monkey Ball 2. Note that Tetris Worlds did not make the cut. I would be interested in hearing the rest of your list, however.
Please note that when I say on my hands, I'm counting the several Monkey Balls on various platforms as a single game; all the tetrises are a single game; et cetera.
One possible issue is that you don't realize how high I'm setting the standard. The number is 80% acceptance for each major age category. Few games hit that in even one category, let alone all of them.
I think that you have a very strange understanding of demographic targets in general. Let me correct some of your stranger mumblings.
Do understand that this is what I do for a living, and that I'm pretty good at it. Do understand also that I have access to the market statistics that drive several multibillion dollar corporations. I'm not just pulling this out of thin air; there are people who figure these things out for a living, and since they can mean a difference of eight digits in the profit of a single game, the ones in the big companies are generally very very good at what they do.
Mario is not a cartoon character. There is no Super Mario BLAM! on Nickelodeon.
Mario has had four seperate cartoon shows, two of which are still in syndication. Amusingly, Nick still runs both Captain N and the Power Hour in some districts, though not nationally, on NickToons or NickJr. There's another one under tentative production at DIC right now.
I doubt that show still holds the franchising power of a smash hit like Spongebob Squarepants.
You do realize that the franchise isn't the show, but everything - the toys, the clothes, and (get this) the video games, right?
Spongebob has never had anything like the franchise power of Mario. Mario is in fact one of the most successful franchises in history, right up there with Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny.
Second, everyone I know who owns a Game Cube also owns Animal Crossing. Every single person.
Then you have an extremely atypical set of acquaintences. Penetration of Animal Crossing into adult households without children under the age of 9 is less than ten percent. Something tells me national retailer statistics are a better representative sample than your friends, no offense intended.
Third, I think you put American Idol in the wrong category. The show is very strong with the youth market, and I would be surprised if more adults than kids were responsible for its sales. Especially on the GBA.
Then prepare to be surprised. On the PC and TV consoles, the largest consumer of American Idol is the young adult market, ages 20-27. On the GBA, it's neck and neck between them and the late teen market, 15-19.
Fourth, I bought the latest Harvest Moon game yesterday. Did I mention I'm 24? I think that's well out of the "two or three years" scope you gave. It's a very complicated game, and the complexity scales with how much you want to do in it. I like that.
You need to understand that this is the mark of an exceptionally open-minded gamer. I wish there were more consumers out there like you; exceptional games frequently rot on the shelves, like Stars!, where tripe like Master of Orion makes bujillions.
The young adult penetration of Harvest Moon is under fifteen percent. That you're in two such marginal categories should be a signal to you: you're more open to odd games than most people in your demographic, which usually means your friends are too; you aren't going to be a good representation of the average gamer. When you're do
Mmm, you've got a point. That said, the PSX was in a spectacular position - the saturn was too early to get good video from CDs, and the N64 made a phenomenally bad storage decision.
Don't expect to see that kind of flub again by the time you die.
1) I didn't say they were going anywhere. I expect them to stay around for a long time.
2) Their investor's prospectus breaks down their revenue streams. I have it in my hands. The company makes less than one half of one percent of its gross income from external investments in non-software companies.
It's easy to say bullshit as an anonymous coward without any reference. Maybe you should have the courage to admit who you are, before you bother to waste our time with guesses presented as facts a second time, eh?
I never realized Nintendo games were geared towards any particular age range.
Oh, god, yes. Demographics are a huge part of market research. Very, very few games appeal to more than three years of a kid's age; most of them only two. If your business proposal doesn't discuss what demographic you're targetting, you're immediately taken much less seriously.
When do you become too 'mature' for Super Mario Brothers, exactly?
Super Mario Brothers has entirely too much nostalgia to be seen with clear eyes. How many adults do you expect to play Spongebob, Jimmy Neutron, Animal Snap, Animal Crossing, Harvest Moon or the surprising current Nintendo #1 seller, Lego Starwars? How many six year olds do you expect in WoW, 4x4 Evo, Quake, American Idol, Advance Wars or Chess? How tired of you hearing about the new Zelda games being kid's games?
Demographics are absolutely critical to this industry. If you get a broad-acceptance game - and I can count the non-clones on that list in history on both hands (kids don't play solitaire) - then you're making a mint. But you'd better be damned able to either explain it at the business pitch of show user testing results, because that's a total holy grail; it never, ever happens in this line of work.
From the perspective of a game designer, I wholly believe that this game is a tamagatchi with RPG elements, not an RPG. The quest is an afterthought, much like Monster Rancher, Dragon Warrior Monsters, Azure Dreams, and so on.
The only problem with it is they ran out of ideas for new pokemon, so they got cuter and stupider with each new generation of game.
Many people believe that Nintendo just shifted its focus to a younger, more profitable demographic.
1) No, it's for the 7-11 male and 8-10 female demographics. That's where the money is. Teenagers don't buy video games the way little kids do - they pick one game in a genre as a favorite and stick to it. Little kids want eight different versions of the same game. That's why you don't see Tekken Flame, Tekken Crystal and Tekken Monolith. It doesn't work on 12 year olds.
2) Huhu. Ruby and Emerald, Fire and Leaf, Red Blue and Yellow seemed better to you?
Slashdot Mirror
Javascript has been called Lisp in C's clothing.
Generally by people without the faintest clue what they're talking about. People think that if a language supports lambda, it's a Lisp child; you might as well say all modern programming languages are descendants of algebra. It's nonsense.
Lambda is a tiny fraction of LISP, and frankly it's a silly assertion to claim that languages are becoming LISPish just because some of the features LISP implemented are becoming common in broad-paradigm languages that everyone's migrating back towards lisp. Modern languages are far closer to Simula than LISP, and no Simula programmer would have the hubris to pretend that languages are migrating towards it, even though most languages are picking up features to work with C++, and even though C++ got its wardrobe from Simula.
The fact of the matter is simple: LISP programmers have been told by older LISP programmers that all languages want to be LISP, so they believe it. You can do Lambda in C++, Object Pascal and Forth. If you want to tell me those three languages are LISPish, I think I'll just pigeonhole you nice and early.
Want further proof? C# 2.0 is getting lexical closures.
Ahem. LISP didn't invent lexical closures, or in fact closures at all, in the language world; Scheme did. LISP got closures from its own child. By your logic, that means all languages are becoming Scheme, not LISP. Hell, Smalltalk had blocks before LISP or Scheme had closures. Does that mean that all langauges are becoming Smalltalk too?
Here's the giant cluebulb: "all roads lead to Rome" is only true if you're standing in Rome, looking outwards, and have never been anywhere else. Talk about how languages are reinventing LISP when you're more familiar with them, please; there's a whole lot that C++ can do that LISP just can't, and once you've bothered to read things like MC++D and gotten familiar with tools like Boost and Loki, you'll find that the converse just isn't true, no matter what your dogma says.
People will tell you LISP lost because its syntax looks like line noise, but Forth and K are still pretty common. LISP lost because it's impractical. It wants to be too smart, to do too much, and as a result it spends so much time on nonsense work that it's just not fast enough. Tell me all you like about solvability; I won't be impressed until you can show me a kernel or a database core that comes within, say, 50% of the speed of a mediocre C equivalent.
'cause these days, all the "new" features of today's languages are decades old...
Sounds like someone has no idea what modern languages do. Just because you finally see something you recognize doesn't mean it's all old hat.
Result rejection was first employed in simulated agent behavior in 1968. Good to see the armchair quarterbacks are making well-informed suggestions.
This isn't an apology, it's a slap in Google's face. ZDNet is attempting to cast Google as a bully, wherein the concept is that the censure Google is applying is evil, based on some vague notion that all research leading to a story is fundamentally a good thing.
What Google is protesting is not research, but rather the posting of private data in a public forum to make a point. The point could as easily have been made by releasing the second letter of each word, but they didn't do that. It's got nothing to do with that the search was done on Google; that's just ZDNet UK spinning it as hard as they can to look like a wounded party.
Frankly, if they had gone down to the city county buolding, they could have gathered the same information, and if they had posted it in the article that way, I'd think they were equally legitimate targets for punishment.
I mean, come on, did home addresses really make the point so much that their impact - the impact of the home address of one of the world's richest people being published internationally - is justifiable?
This is some smarmy editor stepping in and pretending to be bent over a barrel so that nobody can see the black eye he was given for not stopping a fundamentally inappropriate article in its tracks. In normal modern journalism, where there are standards - magazines, newspapers, journals - article author writers get fired and their work left unpublished for less.
Frankly, I'm surprised the writer or their managing editor are still employed. It almost makes me wish ZDNet had released something worth reading in the last ten years, so I could boycott them.
Pikmin, WarioWare*, or Animal Crossing**
You're one for three. WarioWare debuted on the GBA, and alsomade it to the n64. Animal Crossing also hit the GBA. How WarioWare, which is just a themed no-board Mario Party, which itself is just a new Panic!, is a "new concept" is beyond me. Pikmin you can make the argument for, though I see it as just another automaton game like Lemmings. Mario Baseball started on the NES, and Mario Tennis on the SNES; besides, I'm not sure how you think Baseball and Tennis ratify a point about Nintendo churning out old material. Oh, and Nintendogs is an old, old idea; it was dead for ten years, but was popular again recently as Tamagatchi, Dogz or Creatures, depending on your scale of complexity. That said, the earlier raiser I'm aware of is Little Computer People, by EA back in the late 70s or early 80s, which you now know as the "revolutionary" game The Sims.
Also, to my amusement, all three of the games you named have sequels.
Will we see ratings for racism, sexism, political and other similar behaviors?
What is this, 1986? Have you looked at a game box since we all learned who Tipper Gore was? Did you not realize those letters meant things?
I agree with the sentiment, but that's not what irony means.
Recreating a tracked surface wouldn't be anywhere near as difficult as, say, cracking a huge RSA thumbprint, so this isn't good enough for authentication. Destroying the surface would be as easy as a microwave or bleach, so it's no good for permanent identification.
Remind me what this is good for again?
But Lord Fountleroy, affectations whence and once put upon do nothing but to reinforce one's demeanor and bearing with the riff and the raff; why, ask anyone - even Count Bonguledorf, that blathering buffoon - all one need exercise is the lexicon the proletariat excise, and one should promptly be the fluff in the pompadour's pomp!
What, did you train at the Montgomery Burns school of tact? Or, do you think introducing words you learned from manpages makes you like sophistimacated?
Ascii doesn't allow me to snore loudly enough to get my point across.
Actually, that should read:
Every time you make a joke about corporate misbehavior, some tired hack with nothing worth saying will extend the RIAA and MPAA onto a joke about kittens.
Yes, every time some company fails, it's important that the COO from competitors answer personal mail from the failing company's highschool adjuncts.
No, really, no sarcasm at all. I think you're very important. (cough)
However, take for example, this quote from Bush in 2003, "Before September the 11th, many in the world believed that Saddam Hussein could be contained." Now you can't say the average person wouldn't read an implied link between SH and 9/11 there. But, he's safe on the technicality.
Hardly. This is a textbook fallacy of composition, arguably also questionable cause, and can even be cast as the spotlight fallacy, if you don't believe Americans are as stupid about the Middle East as the Bush administration would have you believe. Either way, it's a red herring, given that the quote given was as regards justifying his war, when in fact whether the average american holds any given belief about Saddam has approximately nothing to do with us stomping the Taliban flat.
You really shouldn't declare someone's arguments sound until you've actually inspected them. Bush is absolutely rife with nonsense, and the idea that he's "technically correct" is an appalling testament to the low quality of our public schools. You should be able to see through that by third grade.
Uh, no. If you understood thermodynamics and/or information theory, you'd know that the state of higher order is information, and that the state of lower order is noise. There is no "higher order" to secrecy versus freedom. That's just a nonsense emotional argument.
... yeesh.
Do us a favor and argue only things you grok, in the future. This one
If you want to worry about the exposure of impressionable young minds to bad information, I suggest you begin by learning the difference between fallacy and falsehood.
No, in the absence of any measures, information ceases to exist. Fail to remember, fail to record it, fail to anything with it and it doesn't exist.
Nature records information all the time. There will always be information available to any who wish to retrieve it.
How is it that you get from "in the absence of measures" to "nature is making recordings?" There are two things to which you might be referring. A more careful selection of language reveals them both to be fundamentally broken arguments.
One is that an active process of nature creates a derivative product of information with long-term storage characteristics. One can make this non-argument for cases like fossils, where the information of the creature's structure can be determined occasionally billions of years after the organism itself disappears. The problem is, this isn't the lack of measures to maintain information to which the grandparent referred; there requires some active process, such as sedimentation or water fossilization (petrifaction) in order to occur. In the absence of such a mechanism, which is extremely rare (there's a reason there are so few fossils,) creatures do not leave significant information behind.
The other case is more difficult to explain. There is the argument that information is retreivable through some or another forensic process. Examples include using carbon patterns to determine the nature and temperature of fires or lava, gulleys to divine the presence of water on Mars, and pretty much anything you'd see on CSI: Miami which isn't a self serving pablumessage about the evils of racism or profiteering or some damned thing. There are those who would try to cast this as Nature or The World or something "recording information" which the intrepid researcher can come back and re-discover. Find something rotting? Plot out the progress of the putrifaction and you can (mostly) reconstruct the corpse's original state.
The problem is, that's not recording information at all. That's an incomplete loss of information. In many ways you can think of the physical world as an immensely error correcting signal. This is a fundamentally false analogy, but it serves my explanatory purpose, so run with it anyway. What we're doing when we walk back through partial information to reconstruct the original information is not finding other recordings of that information. What we're doing is looking for correlary effects which when summed give us the complete set of original information. It may sound like the same thing, but there's a critical semantic difference: we're not relocating, we're recreating. Granted it's the same information. Still, it's information lost and remade from evidence, not information located through crafty means.
The difference is quite real. I'm not just playing semantics. Consider The Einstein Puzzle as a good example of a way to recreate lost information, whose goal can only be reached thus.
"Information wants to be free" may not be as accurate as "people generally want to share information and make it available", but sounds a bit more philosophicalisticalish.
If you choose your phrasing to make yourself sound smart instead of to accurately convey information, then you deserve the opinion of ignorance other people aim your way. Besides, philosophy literally translates as "the love of knowledge;" even if the word meant what you seem to think it means, the bit about sharing would be far more in tune with the word than some vacuous notion about the supposed intent of recorded state.
there is nothing that the government can do even half as efficiently as the collective power of tens of millions of people with nothing better to do with their time than plink.
Exactly what do you think the government is, if not the collective power of tens of millions of people with nothing better to do with their time than solve tasks? (Yes, tens of millions. The government employs more than 5% of this nation, and the nation's around 300 million these days.)
Information "wants" to be free in the same sense that things "want" to fall to the ground; it's the path of least resistance.
This is a cute analogy, but it's also boldfacedly false. There is a physical principle underlying gravity. There is no physical principle attempting to disseminate knowledge. In fact, if you bother to actually figure out what physics says, it says something very ugly: Information wants to disappear. Entropy increases, signal fades.
Information doesn't want to be free. Human ethics want knowledge to spread. Phrased that way, not only is it more powerful, clearer and broader in scope, but it's also accurate.
Stop flinging catch phrases around as arguments. If you bother to think for yourself and say what you mean to say, instead of adopting some sentence you've heard several times because you admire who said it, you'll find that you can communicate with significance, instead of to simply self-label such that educated people tune you out.
What the statement means to me is that information usually becomes free in the absence of measures taken to prevent it from doing so. I think we can agree that that's true.
No. Information disappears without measures taken to keep it around. Any measures regarding preventing it from spreading are absolute nonsense. I'm not taking any such measures with my backup discs, yet you don't see my filesystem's layout leaking into general knowledge.
Information is not alive, and it does not grow or breed. Putting information onto the web or into a filesharing client isn't the absence of measures against dissemination. That's the active transmission and support of said data. That modern systems and clients make that so easy that people with a tendency to smear the details to better suit their worldview can actually forget that transmission is an action rather than the lack of one is testament to the design of those systems, not to some fundamental intangible property of information to spread.
If information spread on its own, we wouldn't lose data. Grow up. It's not information that wants to spread, it's ethics that demand that we share. There's a gigantic and important difference between the two. The latter demands you share medicine, theology, science, mathematics, all that good stuff, just like the former does.
The only difference is that the ethical need to share doesn't extend to stealing music and tv. Funny how a detail like that makes a community lie to itself, isn't it?
There is no verses. We do BOTH.
It is that there is both which creates the versus. Whereas I agree with you in principle - manned spaceflight is critical to the sort of growth, development and refined understanding which will lead to automation handling these tasks, that does not justify turning a blind eye to the legitimate comparison between manned and unmanned approaches to tasks.
regardless of what fools like you think you know.
Tsk, tsk, this is the same sort of personal attack you pointed out in the parent post.
To wit, neither this nor the parent is Argumentum ad Hominem; something is not a fallacy simply because it superficially mimics the structure of a fallacy. In order to be ad Hominem, there need not only be an insult, but rather an insult must be used as the basis either of an argument or an attempt to destroy an argument. You'll pardon my response, I hope, as I don't really get to say this outside of slashdot stories about NASA, but come on: fallacy isn't rocket science.
Seriously, though, I can think of more than 10 "broad-acceptance games" on the GC alone.
I don't know what to tell you. I'm going by EA's market research, which lists exactly three: bust a move 3000, mario party 5 (not 4, 6 or 7), and Super Monkey Ball 2.
I should also point out that at three broad-acceptance games at the 80% mark out of a set of 464, the GC has the second highest broad-acceptance rate of any major console in history, after the GameBoy Color, and of the top five seats, only one - #4, the Atari 2600 - isn't a Nintendo. You're right to point out that Nintendo is very good at generalized games. However, the wide-band 80% line is the gold standard; it gets hit once a year or so on all systems put together.
(BTW, there are actually 467, but three aren't listed here; if you look at the Nintendo site and see 519, please realize that that site also lists games that are coming out but aren't out yet, so obviously I don't have stats for those.)
You must be a very well-endowed polydactyl. We should meet. ;-)
Huhuhuh. <flow style="magic mike">Heeeey Laaadies</flow>
Seriously, though, I can think of more than 10 "broad-acceptance games" on the GC alone.
I don't know what to tell you. I'm going by EA's market research, which lists exactly three: bust a move 3000, mario party 5 (not 4, 6 or 7), and Super Monkey Ball 2. Note that Tetris Worlds did not make the cut. I would be interested in hearing the rest of your list, however.
Please note that when I say on my hands, I'm counting the several Monkey Balls on various platforms as a single game; all the tetrises are a single game; et cetera.
One possible issue is that you don't realize how high I'm setting the standard. The number is 80% acceptance for each major age category. Few games hit that in even one category, let alone all of them.
I think that you have a very strange understanding of demographic targets in general. Let me correct some of your stranger mumblings.
Do understand that this is what I do for a living, and that I'm pretty good at it. Do understand also that I have access to the market statistics that drive several multibillion dollar corporations. I'm not just pulling this out of thin air; there are people who figure these things out for a living, and since they can mean a difference of eight digits in the profit of a single game, the ones in the big companies are generally very very good at what they do.
Mario is not a cartoon character. There is no Super Mario BLAM! on Nickelodeon.
Mario has had four seperate cartoon shows, two of which are still in syndication. Amusingly, Nick still runs both Captain N and the Power Hour in some districts, though not nationally, on NickToons or NickJr. There's another one under tentative production at DIC right now.
I doubt that show still holds the franchising power of a smash hit like Spongebob Squarepants.
You do realize that the franchise isn't the show, but everything - the toys, the clothes, and (get this) the video games, right?
Spongebob has never had anything like the franchise power of Mario. Mario is in fact one of the most successful franchises in history, right up there with Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny.
Second, everyone I know who owns a Game Cube also owns Animal Crossing. Every single person.
Then you have an extremely atypical set of acquaintences. Penetration of Animal Crossing into adult households without children under the age of 9 is less than ten percent. Something tells me national retailer statistics are a better representative sample than your friends, no offense intended.
Third, I think you put American Idol in the wrong category. The show is very strong with the youth market, and I would be surprised if more adults than kids were responsible for its sales. Especially on the GBA.
Then prepare to be surprised. On the PC and TV consoles, the largest consumer of American Idol is the young adult market, ages 20-27. On the GBA, it's neck and neck between them and the late teen market, 15-19.
Fourth, I bought the latest Harvest Moon game yesterday. Did I mention I'm 24? I think that's well out of the "two or three years" scope you gave. It's a very complicated game, and the complexity scales with how much you want to do in it. I like that.
You need to understand that this is the mark of an exceptionally open-minded gamer. I wish there were more consumers out there like you; exceptional games frequently rot on the shelves, like Stars!, where tripe like Master of Orion makes bujillions.
The young adult penetration of Harvest Moon is under fifteen percent. That you're in two such marginal categories should be a signal to you: you're more open to odd games than most people in your demographic, which usually means your friends are too; you aren't going to be a good representation of the average gamer. When you're do
Mmm, you've got a point. That said, the PSX was in a spectacular position - the saturn was too early to get good video from CDs, and the N64 made a phenomenally bad storage decision.
Don't expect to see that kind of flub again by the time you die.
Thanks kindly. Also, word to your sig.
1) I didn't say they were going anywhere. I expect them to stay around for a long time.
2) Their investor's prospectus breaks down their revenue streams. I have it in my hands. The company makes less than one half of one percent of its gross income from external investments in non-software companies.
It's easy to say bullshit as an anonymous coward without any reference. Maybe you should have the courage to admit who you are, before you bother to waste our time with guesses presented as facts a second time, eh?
I never realized Nintendo games were geared towards any particular age range.
Oh, god, yes. Demographics are a huge part of market research. Very, very few games appeal to more than three years of a kid's age; most of them only two. If your business proposal doesn't discuss what demographic you're targetting, you're immediately taken much less seriously.
When do you become too 'mature' for Super Mario Brothers, exactly?
Super Mario Brothers has entirely too much nostalgia to be seen with clear eyes. How many adults do you expect to play Spongebob, Jimmy Neutron, Animal Snap, Animal Crossing, Harvest Moon or the surprising current Nintendo #1 seller, Lego Starwars? How many six year olds do you expect in WoW, 4x4 Evo, Quake, American Idol, Advance Wars or Chess? How tired of you hearing about the new Zelda games being kid's games?
Demographics are absolutely critical to this industry. If you get a broad-acceptance game - and I can count the non-clones on that list in history on both hands (kids don't play solitaire) - then you're making a mint. But you'd better be damned able to either explain it at the business pitch of show user testing results, because that's a total holy grail; it never, ever happens in this line of work.
Ever.
Pokemon is just an rpg with cartoony characters.
From the perspective of a game designer, I wholly believe that this game is a tamagatchi with RPG elements, not an RPG. The quest is an afterthought, much like Monster Rancher, Dragon Warrior Monsters, Azure Dreams, and so on.
The only problem with it is they ran out of ideas for new pokemon, so they got cuter and stupider with each new generation of game.
Many people believe that Nintendo just shifted its focus to a younger, more profitable demographic.
1) No, it's for the 7-11 male and 8-10 female demographics. That's where the money is. Teenagers don't buy video games the way little kids do - they pick one game in a genre as a favorite and stick to it. Little kids want eight different versions of the same game. That's why you don't see Tekken Flame, Tekken Crystal and Tekken Monolith. It doesn't work on 12 year olds.
2) Huhu. Ruby and Emerald, Fire and Leaf, Red Blue and Yellow seemed better to you?