And when it's my boyfriend doing that, then it's elevate to not only aren't I wanted, but that I'm less attractive than a hunk of circuits and plastic. So yeah, most girls are going to be rightly pissed about that!
No, you're less attractive than naked night elf bank-mules dancing on mailboxes. There's a clear difference. Get it right.
show me a roomful of intelligent, platonic, perfectly personality matched non sex addicted couples, and i'l show you the extinction of homo sapiens in 1.4 generations
Morality prescripts of puritanical Victorianism, I'm looking at you.
What happens when virtual reality becomes as real as actual reality?
What happens when these "threshold markers" [i.e., controllers, or the technological interfaces between game and gamer] become invisible to the user? Has this already happened to some degree?
(I remember playing F-Zero for a long time one day. A few hours later while actually driving, I had a fleeting impulse to double-tap the trigger button to butt another driver off the road. Of course, the car didn't have a trigger button. Still, it was eerie to have an outside stimulus trigger that phantom feeling of a controller in my hand. I don't think this is all that uncommon or even that frightening, but more intriguing than anything.)
Games break the fourth wall all the time. Any time a game tells you what button to press, there was a conscious decision at some point to break the wall. If the wall was never broken, then it wouldn't be a game; it'd be a long cinema scene or something (think: why do people like Valve games and complain about long MGS/Final Fantasy cutscenes?). Because of this, the author says there is no fourth wall, because the gamer is an integral part of the experience (I think it's a lot more profound than it sounds).
Maybe this would be more poignant: if you play a movie, and no one is around to watch it, is it still a movie?
If a game is turned on, but no one plays it, is it still a game?
(Literary buffs will counter with the idea that a reader/viewer brings their own views along whenever they experience art. I agree, but don't feel like dealing with that issue here.)
One last thing about MGS: I think the author commends MGS for acknowledging the integral relationship between gamer and game and then incorporating it into the narrative itself (with varying levels of success). I don't necessarily believe he thinks all games should try this, or even that this is the best way of constructing a game's story. He probably just thinks it's interesting from a literary standpoint.
The author preemptively counters your counterpoint:
Sonic's impatience (nor anything else about his personality) is not made apparent otherwise. It only becomes evident by watching how he reacts to his relationship with the player. If the player is slow or absent-minded, Sonic isn't happy. This may be a very simple example, but I think it serves to illustrate just how bound up fiction can be with interface elements in games. Sonic is aware of his relationship with the game controller, and with the player, and reacts to them within the psychological parameters set by the game's fiction. Just because he is being puppeteered by the player does not mean that Sonic ceases to be himself. He is holding up his end of the relationship, "So what is your problem?" he seems to be thinking. Should you, the player, fail to perform, he stares at you in frustrated apprehension, as if he were your co-actor on stage and you had forgotten your line in the middle of a performance. Sonic isn't breaking the fiction [i.e., fourth wall] - you are. He's just sitting there, in character, waiting for you to join him in the game world.
(emphasis mine)
It's a complicated argument, but essentially, the author says there is no fourth wall. The relationship between the gamer and the game is different than the relationship between the audience and the conventional theater.
The author acknowledges that the narrative of a game can break the fourth wall (numerous adventure games do this), but he argues that the gameplay itself cannot, because the relation between avatar and player is usually quite interdependent; much moreso than narrator and reader (books), or lead actor and viewer (TV/movies).
Sorry, I play 4th edition, and we don't have none of that shades of neutrality crap.
We have "neutral" for your typical Zen Buddhist, but now we also have "unaligned," which means I'm just as likely to vanquish an evil wizard as I am to drown a crate full of puppies.
Actually, from a psychology angle, it's substantially different. It has been shown many times that humans are psychologically capable of stretching their moral limits further when they can distance themselves from the action (If you want me to get a citation, I'll go get one -- I'm just too lazy to get it right now).
Essentially, Milgram found a surprising number of people obeyed a labcoat-wearing authority figure when he asked them to perform remote-controlled electrical shocks on unseen victims. Despite hearing screams, many of the participants continued to administer shocks when the authority figure assured them that everything was OK. Of course, the electrical shocks weren't real.
Here's a nice haunting paragraph written by Milgram himself, courtesy of the Wikipedia article:
Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.
I'd rather have Federation Starfleet over the Nazi Shutzstaffel (SS) any day.
We have tremendous technological and economic advantages over our enemies for the time being, so we can afford to fight one-handed. The idea of fighting a just war is to prevent further wars. I don't believe we've always lived up to this ideal, but we're trying, I hope.
Yes, we could indiscriminately obliterate or imprison every civilian we suspect to harbor terrorist sympathies, and that might make us safer in the short term. But, as the current thinking goes, we want to establish Iraq as a bastion of democracy in the Middle East, and to enlist the people as our allies, we must convince the coming generations that we are the good guys, and the terrorist underdogs are the bad guys. Blowing up a school bus full of kids is bad PR, whether you're a terrorist or a US fighter pilot, and war is just as much about politics as it is about the battles.
Yeah, it sucks for the guys on the ground, but I want to believe they're fighting for a noble cause and not just to satisfy someone's thirst for oil. While the war itself is illegal (both internationally and by our own Constitution), we're there until we get out, so we better damn follow the rules and not betray our ideals just to save our necks. It's a volunteer army--you get to join the best goddamned fighting force on the planet in return for trying to make the world a slightly better place to live on.
Yeah, Bush lied and people died. He also betrayed the planet by launching us into most unpopular war in history. He wasn't the first to betray our democratic and humanistic ideals, but I hope he's one of the last.
It's called revision, and the best writers are masters of it.
Unfortunately, Slashdot doesn't have an "edit" button, and maybe he's just a lazy first-draft writer, and maybe the guy was late for his writer's workshop because he was too busy typing up a post on Slashdot; maybe he was too busy reliving his youth by playing Planescape in his head; maybe he was thinking about how damn funny that floating, talking skull was; maybe he almost sacrificed the talking skull on that pillar of other talking skulls but then got him back because he missed that damn talking skull so damn much.
Maybe that's why he couldn't be bothered to tighten up his prose right now just for you.
You know what the first mod for Wow was? Fast Quest Text, which became so popular that Blizzard made it that option officially supported. Most gamers (or us game devs) just don't care about dialogue, so your premise that dialogue is half-assed is correct.
And here is the problem with narrative/exposition/dialogue/writing in online games. It's all in the wrong place.
WoW is a perfect example. When I played, I read most of my quest text, and I enjoyed some of it (if I could ignore the formulas for a minute). However, by the time I got around to DOING the quests, I've already forgotten the narrative, and by the time I turned the quests in, I had forgotten what it was I did to complete them, so the "completion text" didn't make a whole lot of sense. In the end, all I did was look for gold question marks over people's heads.
The problem multiplied when I join a group. Some like to read, some don't. Some want to run through them quickly, some want to take their time. Some are on stage 1 of the quest, some are on stage 3, and some don't even know where to pick it up. It was hard as hell just to sync up on an experience, unless you were playing with good friends.
All of the stories were neat and tidy in the little quest panel, and nothing stood out as particularly engaging. All of the writing happened before and after quests, and rarely were there interesting moments during gameplay (the few times I remember noticing some attempt at cinematic spectacle happened right before a confusing raid boss). There was no immersion factor. There was no cinematic appeal that could be shared between the party members.
The game Left 4 Dead stands as an interesting comparison to cooperative story-telling, even if there's not a whole lot of writing:
1. Some of the characters banter back-and-forth during the missions. When it's verbalized, the dialogue is synced between players, unlike when reading quest text.
2. Between missions, you can read the writing on the safehouse walls and get a more immersive sense of story.
I think if MMOs would concentrate on single instanced quests--say, escape the town while zombies are chasing you--rather than offer a salad bar of dully-imagined quests, then we could see some very interesting cooperative storytelling. There would be more chances to develop heroes and villains, weave more complicated plots, throw in suspense and cliff-hangers, etc. I think if multiplayer game developers worked on an "immersion-first" attitude toward quest/mission creation, hired a few decent voice actors to bring it to life, and added a modicum of randomization to keep it fresh for repeated play-throughs, we might have some more interesting MMOs in the future.
Yes, but don't turn this into a new reality TV show.
Raise a number of them in quiet, comfortable conditions, allowing them every chance to aspire. Discover if they are capable of language, reading, writing, and art. Study how they approach problems in comparison with a human control group. Maybe we can learn something.
By no means isolate them from the world, but don't allow them to become some sort of media fascination.
I don't see anything innately dehumanizing about raising someone and studying them like you would a long-term science experiment. Most human children born in this world don't get anywhere near that level of scrutiny and commitment. Maybe we'd be better off if we did.
We have been very charitable in the West in determining who, mentally and in body, is a "person" and who is not. Perhaps out of guilt from deciding that wrongly in the past? I don't know. Nevertheless we have granted "rights" to "people" who fit the definition only by stretching that definition. Worldwide in recent decades (if we can ignore certain parts of the Middle East and Persia), there has been more tolerance of who is a "person" and who is not, by local society's definition.
Uh, charitable? At least in America, I think our long history of bigotry, intolerance, and general hostility toward blacks, the poor, native Americans, Japanese-Americans, women, and the mentally handicapped would attest differently. Rather than "charitably," I would use the adverb "grudgingly" to describe much of the rights-distribution experience.
Maybe we're talking about different kinds of "people" or "rights," though. An honest mistake.
Neanderthals are considered to be part of the Homo Sapiens species. Wouldn't the concerns (and legalities) be the same as any human cloning project?
We both belong to the Homo genus, but Neanderthals are H. neanderthalensis, while we are H. sapiens.
Though here's an interesting paragraph on the Neanderthal page that I didn't know before I browsed around on Wikipedia:
For some time, professionals debated whether Neanderthals should be classified as Homo neanderthalensis or as Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, the latter placing Neanderthals as a subspecies of Homo sapiens. Genetic statistical calculation (2006 results) suggests at least 5% of the modern human gene pool can be attributed to ancient admixture, with the European contribution being from the Neanderthal.[10] Some morphological studies support that Homo neanderthalensis is a separate species and not a subspecies. [11] Some suggest inherited admixture. Others, for example University of Cambridge Professor Paul Mellars, say "no evidence has been found of cultural interaction"[12] and evidence from mitochondrial DNA studies have been interpreted as evidence Neanderthals were not a subspecies of H. sapiens.[13] Homo sapiens mtDNA from Australia (Mungo Man 40ky ) is also not found in recent human genomic pool and mtDNA sequences for temporally comparative African specimens are not yet available.
I would posit that I am the center of the universe. No matter where I am, I'm here. As I walk, the world moves beneath my feet.
You could construct an accurately moving model of the solar system, have the earth as the center, and still have it be accurate. The moon doesn't orbit the earth, both bodies orbit a spot somewhere beneath the earth's crust.
When an American geeks constantly recycle the same handful of Monty Python routines, it's depressing. It's humor-by-algorithm: if it was funny once, the memory of the experience of that humor displaces the actual spontaneity and discovery of new sources of humor in a kind of compulsive repetition, which I think is meant more to reassure geeks than to amuse them.
Meh. I bought a WRT-54 from the store because I read about how great a product it was, took it home, set it all up... then found out it was a "new and improved" model that had scaled back the onboard RAM so much that installing open-source firmware proved to be impossible. And it's not possible to know what version-model you've purchased until you break open the theft-proof box and look at the label, either. Unfortunately I did not have the luxury to purchase a used box or find the GL model online, but nonetheless I was highly dismayed to find out that my later model had less than half the RAM of earlier models.
I took it back and decided not to skimp out by spending a mere $80 on a router. So I bought a DIR-655 for around $120 because of all the great reviews it was receiving.
*sigh*
To be fair, the DIR-655 has served me QUITE well. The QoS feature is reason alone to justify the extra cost.
Simple solution to this firmware update, which applies to ALL firmware, regardless of hardware: if it ain't broken, don't patch it.
So let me get this straight... America is like Microsoft, the natives are like small companies that were absorbed by Microsoft's lumbering, jello-like mass, and James Polk is like that one commercial for Windows 386?
That ends up segregating a whole portion of the population and forces acne-ridden dandruff-flakers even further into the cavernous recesses of their own forgotten lives.
A very powerful story, and I respect you for sharing your anxieties and fears openly.
I understand your position very closely. I was young when my parents separated, and it was a very difficult position to be in: shifting loyalties between parents, having to deal with complicated issues, and trying to live a normal kid's life amidst the chaos and uncertainty entirely out of my control.
My dad erred on the side of spoiling us too much, I think, despite living in an apartment on a fairly meager income. I am only now coming to grips with the situation, and in many ways I feel guilty for taking advantage of him. That doesn't excuse his actions previous to and following the divorce, but that doesn't change my guilt, either.
I don't think the gifts did all that much to help. I didn't like spending time with him, and I still feel very awkward around him. Probably some underlying trust issues, which simply can't be solved by buying things, offering free dinners, or watching movies together. I don't really know how things go from here.
What I do know is that with the current statistics of marriages and divorces, things look grim for me. I don't want to repeat the mistakes of my parents. So I try to imagine what I would do differently.
If I was in his place or your place, I think my role as a parental figure would have to change significantly, especially if you only see your children a fraction of the time that the mother does. It's simply impossible to be consistent with punishments, rewards, and so on if the mother won't cooperate with you, and that's unfair for the children.
I guess I would try to cooperate as much as I could on that, which sounds like a legislative hell. Find some common grounds to agree on and work from there. TV and video game schedules would make a good starting ground, but be willing to compromise. Work from there.
If cooperation is totally out of the picture... then it's truly an injustice you have little real power over, short of some kind of court order. Maybe I'm just being very pessimistic. But you might just have to focus less on instilling parental discipline, trying to make them into good adults, and so on, and more on just being a person they can rely on and depend on for guidance or security. It really sucks that you might lose the authority to step in and discipline poor behavior, but you might still be able to have a prominent influence in their lives. Maybe offer to help with homework. Teach them how to drive. Pay for their music lessons and encourage them at the recitals. That kind of thing.
Like I said, I'm not a parent, but this is the only advice I can give from a child's perspective. Good luck.
Slashdot Mirror
And when it's my boyfriend doing that, then it's elevate to not only aren't I wanted, but that I'm less attractive than a hunk of circuits and plastic. So yeah, most girls are going to be rightly pissed about that!
No, you're less attractive than naked night elf bank-mules dancing on mailboxes. There's a clear difference. Get it right.
show me a roomful of intelligent, platonic, perfectly personality matched non sex addicted couples, and i'l show you the extinction of homo sapiens in 1.4 generations
Morality prescripts of puritanical Victorianism, I'm looking at you.
I know plenty of atheists who don't believe in god. It's those pesky believers of belief that make me so damn suspicious of just plain believers.
Ann Coulter fan-fiction... good god, I love the Internet.
What happens when virtual reality becomes as real as actual reality?
What happens when these "threshold markers" [i.e., controllers, or the technological interfaces between game and gamer] become invisible to the user? Has this already happened to some degree?
(I remember playing F-Zero for a long time one day. A few hours later while actually driving, I had a fleeting impulse to double-tap the trigger button to butt another driver off the road. Of course, the car didn't have a trigger button. Still, it was eerie to have an outside stimulus trigger that phantom feeling of a controller in my hand. I don't think this is all that uncommon or even that frightening, but more intriguing than anything.)
Games break the fourth wall all the time. Any time a game tells you what button to press, there was a conscious decision at some point to break the wall. If the wall was never broken, then it wouldn't be a game; it'd be a long cinema scene or something (think: why do people like Valve games and complain about long MGS/Final Fantasy cutscenes?). Because of this, the author says there is no fourth wall, because the gamer is an integral part of the experience (I think it's a lot more profound than it sounds).
Maybe this would be more poignant: if you play a movie, and no one is around to watch it, is it still a movie?
If a game is turned on, but no one plays it, is it still a game?
(Literary buffs will counter with the idea that a reader/viewer brings their own views along whenever they experience art. I agree, but don't feel like dealing with that issue here.)
One last thing about MGS: I think the author commends MGS for acknowledging the integral relationship between gamer and game and then incorporating it into the narrative itself (with varying levels of success). I don't necessarily believe he thinks all games should try this, or even that this is the best way of constructing a game's story. He probably just thinks it's interesting from a literary standpoint.
The author preemptively counters your counterpoint:
Sonic's impatience (nor anything else about his personality) is not made apparent otherwise. It only becomes evident by watching how he reacts to his relationship with the player. If the player is slow or absent-minded, Sonic isn't happy. This may be a very simple example, but I think it serves to illustrate just how bound up fiction can be with interface elements in games. Sonic is aware of his relationship with the game controller, and with the player, and reacts to them within the psychological parameters set by the game's fiction. Just because he is being puppeteered by the player does not mean that Sonic ceases to be himself. He is holding up his end of the relationship, "So what is your problem?" he seems to be thinking. Should you, the player, fail to perform, he stares at you in frustrated apprehension, as if he were your co-actor on stage and you had forgotten your line in the middle of a performance. Sonic isn't breaking the fiction [i.e., fourth wall] - you are. He's just sitting there, in character, waiting for you to join him in the game world.
(emphasis mine)
It's a complicated argument, but essentially, the author says there is no fourth wall. The relationship between the gamer and the game is different than the relationship between the audience and the conventional theater.
The author acknowledges that the narrative of a game can break the fourth wall (numerous adventure games do this), but he argues that the gameplay itself cannot, because the relation between avatar and player is usually quite interdependent; much moreso than narrator and reader (books), or lead actor and viewer (TV/movies).
Sorry, I play 4th edition, and we don't have none of that shades of neutrality crap.
We have "neutral" for your typical Zen Buddhist, but now we also have "unaligned," which means I'm just as likely to vanquish an evil wizard as I am to drown a crate full of puppies.
Actually, from a psychology angle, it's substantially different. It has been shown many times that humans are psychologically capable of stretching their moral limits further when they can distance themselves from the action (If you want me to get a citation, I'll go get one -- I'm just too lazy to get it right now).
Let me help you out:
Milgram's experiment
Essentially, Milgram found a surprising number of people obeyed a labcoat-wearing authority figure when he asked them to perform remote-controlled electrical shocks on unseen victims. Despite hearing screams, many of the participants continued to administer shocks when the authority figure assured them that everything was OK. Of course, the electrical shocks weren't real.
Here's a nice haunting paragraph written by Milgram himself, courtesy of the Wikipedia article:
Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.
I'd rather have Federation Starfleet over the Nazi Shutzstaffel (SS) any day.
We have tremendous technological and economic advantages over our enemies for the time being, so we can afford to fight one-handed. The idea of fighting a just war is to prevent further wars. I don't believe we've always lived up to this ideal, but we're trying, I hope.
Yes, we could indiscriminately obliterate or imprison every civilian we suspect to harbor terrorist sympathies, and that might make us safer in the short term. But, as the current thinking goes, we want to establish Iraq as a bastion of democracy in the Middle East, and to enlist the people as our allies, we must convince the coming generations that we are the good guys, and the terrorist underdogs are the bad guys. Blowing up a school bus full of kids is bad PR, whether you're a terrorist or a US fighter pilot, and war is just as much about politics as it is about the battles.
Yeah, it sucks for the guys on the ground, but I want to believe they're fighting for a noble cause and not just to satisfy someone's thirst for oil. While the war itself is illegal (both internationally and by our own Constitution), we're there until we get out, so we better damn follow the rules and not betray our ideals just to save our necks. It's a volunteer army--you get to join the best goddamned fighting force on the planet in return for trying to make the world a slightly better place to live on.
Yeah, Bush lied and people died. He also betrayed the planet by launching us into most unpopular war in history. He wasn't the first to betray our democratic and humanistic ideals, but I hope he's one of the last.
It's called revision, and the best writers are masters of it.
Unfortunately, Slashdot doesn't have an "edit" button, and maybe he's just a lazy first-draft writer, and maybe the guy was late for his writer's workshop because he was too busy typing up a post on Slashdot; maybe he was too busy reliving his youth by playing Planescape in his head; maybe he was thinking about how damn funny that floating, talking skull was; maybe he almost sacrificed the talking skull on that pillar of other talking skulls but then got him back because he missed that damn talking skull so damn much.
Maybe that's why he couldn't be bothered to tighten up his prose right now just for you.
You know what the first mod for Wow was? Fast Quest Text, which became so popular that Blizzard made it that option officially supported. Most gamers (or us game devs) just don't care about dialogue, so your premise that dialogue is half-assed is correct.
And here is the problem with narrative/exposition/dialogue/writing in online games. It's all in the wrong place.
WoW is a perfect example. When I played, I read most of my quest text, and I enjoyed some of it (if I could ignore the formulas for a minute). However, by the time I got around to DOING the quests, I've already forgotten the narrative, and by the time I turned the quests in, I had forgotten what it was I did to complete them, so the "completion text" didn't make a whole lot of sense. In the end, all I did was look for gold question marks over people's heads.
The problem multiplied when I join a group. Some like to read, some don't. Some want to run through them quickly, some want to take their time. Some are on stage 1 of the quest, some are on stage 3, and some don't even know where to pick it up. It was hard as hell just to sync up on an experience, unless you were playing with good friends.
All of the stories were neat and tidy in the little quest panel, and nothing stood out as particularly engaging. All of the writing happened before and after quests, and rarely were there interesting moments during gameplay (the few times I remember noticing some attempt at cinematic spectacle happened right before a confusing raid boss). There was no immersion factor. There was no cinematic appeal that could be shared between the party members.
The game Left 4 Dead stands as an interesting comparison to cooperative story-telling, even if there's not a whole lot of writing:
1. Some of the characters banter back-and-forth during the missions. When it's verbalized, the dialogue is synced between players, unlike when reading quest text.
2. Between missions, you can read the writing on the safehouse walls and get a more immersive sense of story.
I think if MMOs would concentrate on single instanced quests--say, escape the town while zombies are chasing you--rather than offer a salad bar of dully-imagined quests, then we could see some very interesting cooperative storytelling. There would be more chances to develop heroes and villains, weave more complicated plots, throw in suspense and cliff-hangers, etc. I think if multiplayer game developers worked on an "immersion-first" attitude toward quest/mission creation, hired a few decent voice actors to bring it to life, and added a modicum of randomization to keep it fresh for repeated play-throughs, we might have some more interesting MMOs in the future.
Yes, but don't turn this into a new reality TV show.
Raise a number of them in quiet, comfortable conditions, allowing them every chance to aspire. Discover if they are capable of language, reading, writing, and art. Study how they approach problems in comparison with a human control group. Maybe we can learn something.
By no means isolate them from the world, but don't allow them to become some sort of media fascination.
I don't see anything innately dehumanizing about raising someone and studying them like you would a long-term science experiment. Most human children born in this world don't get anywhere near that level of scrutiny and commitment. Maybe we'd be better off if we did.
We have been very charitable in the West in determining who, mentally and in body, is a "person" and who is not. Perhaps out of guilt from deciding that wrongly in the past? I don't know. Nevertheless we have granted "rights" to "people" who fit the definition only by stretching that definition. Worldwide in recent decades (if we can ignore certain parts of the Middle East and Persia), there has been more tolerance of who is a "person" and who is not, by local society's definition.
Uh, charitable? At least in America, I think our long history of bigotry, intolerance, and general hostility toward blacks, the poor, native Americans, Japanese-Americans, women, and the mentally handicapped would attest differently. Rather than "charitably," I would use the adverb "grudgingly" to describe much of the rights-distribution experience.
Maybe we're talking about different kinds of "people" or "rights," though. An honest mistake.
Neanderthals are considered to be part of the Homo Sapiens species. Wouldn't the concerns (and legalities) be the same as any human cloning project?
We both belong to the Homo genus, but Neanderthals are H. neanderthalensis, while we are H. sapiens.
Though here's an interesting paragraph on the Neanderthal page that I didn't know before I browsed around on Wikipedia:
For some time, professionals debated whether Neanderthals should be classified as Homo neanderthalensis or as Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, the latter placing Neanderthals as a subspecies of Homo sapiens. Genetic statistical calculation (2006 results) suggests at least 5% of the modern human gene pool can be attributed to ancient admixture, with the European contribution being from the Neanderthal.[10] Some morphological studies support that Homo neanderthalensis is a separate species and not a subspecies. [11] Some suggest inherited admixture. Others, for example University of Cambridge Professor Paul Mellars, say "no evidence has been found of cultural interaction"[12] and evidence from mitochondrial DNA studies have been interpreted as evidence Neanderthals were not a subspecies of H. sapiens.[13] Homo sapiens mtDNA from Australia (Mungo Man 40ky ) is also not found in recent human genomic pool and mtDNA sequences for temporally comparative African specimens are not yet available.
It's just an old wise tale
Old wive's tale.
My wife always tells me I'm a wise guy.
I would posit that I am the center of the universe. No matter where I am, I'm here. As I walk, the world moves beneath my feet.
You could construct an accurately moving model of the solar system, have the earth as the center, and still have it be accurate. The moon doesn't orbit the earth, both bodies orbit a spot somewhere beneath the earth's crust.
It's all a matter of how you look at it.
Let's just invoke the cosmological principle and leave it at that:
"On large spatial scales, the Universe is homogeneous and isotropic. Or simply put, the universe is the same everywhere on a large scale."
Excellent article. You did your homework.
When an American geeks constantly recycle the same handful of Monty Python routines, it's depressing. It's humor-by-algorithm: if it was funny once, the memory of the experience of that humor displaces the actual spontaneity and discovery of new sources of humor in a kind of compulsive repetition, which I think is meant more to reassure geeks than to amuse them.
Oh be quiet, Dennis, we haven't got enough mud.
You need to read some Oscar Wilde and Mark Twaine!
After having used Actiontec, Belkin, Linksys, and D-Link, I can do one better:
Consumer routers are shit. You're better off with cups and string.
Meh. I bought a WRT-54 from the store because I read about how great a product it was, took it home, set it all up... then found out it was a "new and improved" model that had scaled back the onboard RAM so much that installing open-source firmware proved to be impossible. And it's not possible to know what version-model you've purchased until you break open the theft-proof box and look at the label, either. Unfortunately I did not have the luxury to purchase a used box or find the GL model online, but nonetheless I was highly dismayed to find out that my later model had less than half the RAM of earlier models.
I took it back and decided not to skimp out by spending a mere $80 on a router. So I bought a DIR-655 for around $120 because of all the great reviews it was receiving.
*sigh*
To be fair, the DIR-655 has served me QUITE well. The QoS feature is reason alone to justify the extra cost.
Simple solution to this firmware update, which applies to ALL firmware, regardless of hardware: if it ain't broken, don't patch it.
So let me get this straight... America is like Microsoft, the natives are like small companies that were absorbed by Microsoft's lumbering, jello-like mass, and James Polk is like that one commercial for Windows 386?
Maybe we need a car analogy?
... you need a face.
That ends up segregating a whole portion of the population and forces acne-ridden dandruff-flakers even further into the cavernous recesses of their own forgotten lives.
Won't somebody think of the social outcasts?
A very powerful story, and I respect you for sharing your anxieties and fears openly.
I understand your position very closely. I was young when my parents separated, and it was a very difficult position to be in: shifting loyalties between parents, having to deal with complicated issues, and trying to live a normal kid's life amidst the chaos and uncertainty entirely out of my control.
My dad erred on the side of spoiling us too much, I think, despite living in an apartment on a fairly meager income. I am only now coming to grips with the situation, and in many ways I feel guilty for taking advantage of him. That doesn't excuse his actions previous to and following the divorce, but that doesn't change my guilt, either.
I don't think the gifts did all that much to help. I didn't like spending time with him, and I still feel very awkward around him. Probably some underlying trust issues, which simply can't be solved by buying things, offering free dinners, or watching movies together. I don't really know how things go from here.
What I do know is that with the current statistics of marriages and divorces, things look grim for me. I don't want to repeat the mistakes of my parents. So I try to imagine what I would do differently.
If I was in his place or your place, I think my role as a parental figure would have to change significantly, especially if you only see your children a fraction of the time that the mother does. It's simply impossible to be consistent with punishments, rewards, and so on if the mother won't cooperate with you, and that's unfair for the children.
I guess I would try to cooperate as much as I could on that, which sounds like a legislative hell. Find some common grounds to agree on and work from there. TV and video game schedules would make a good starting ground, but be willing to compromise. Work from there.
If cooperation is totally out of the picture... then it's truly an injustice you have little real power over, short of some kind of court order. Maybe I'm just being very pessimistic. But you might just have to focus less on instilling parental discipline, trying to make them into good adults, and so on, and more on just being a person they can rely on and depend on for guidance or security. It really sucks that you might lose the authority to step in and discipline poor behavior, but you might still be able to have a prominent influence in their lives. Maybe offer to help with homework. Teach them how to drive. Pay for their music lessons and encourage them at the recitals. That kind of thing.
Like I said, I'm not a parent, but this is the only advice I can give from a child's perspective. Good luck.