Does anyone else find this trend of item/achievement hording to be troubling?
I wish I could denigrate and demean those who waste away their online lives pursing the virtual carrots on virtual sticks, but then I remembered that I logged 40+ hours in the last two weeks trying to unlock the new spy & sniper weapons in a Team Fortress 2 content expansion pack... Now I've got them, and I've played with them for at least a few hours, but now I feel no reason to play the game by myself much anymore. (I will still play if my friends ask me to, because then it's a social experience.) That said, when the next patch comes out, I might invest a few more hours in the game.
Still, I think my behavior is troubling, because the amount of quality development time put into those new weapons and maps in TF2 is nowhere near the level of quality development time put into most single-player games, and I put just as much play-time into those titles.
I hate seeing less innovation leading to more profitability, because that encourages developers to take the easy way out: "let's use our remaining development time to add achievements instead of new gameplay modes or side missions!"
It's also incredibly discouraging to see my hobby, which some liken to an art, to turn into a world-wide e-peen waving contest. For some reason, I have an urge to turn off the computer and read a novel, purely as a political gesture to make myself feel better.
Whoever marked the parent post as a Troll is being an asshat. You and I may not agree with his claims, and he may be flat out wrong, but it is certainly not "trolling" behavior, and to mark it as such is abusing the Troll tag.
Now, contrast that with the majority of Scientology literature out there where people have lost all of their money or even their lives to Scientology. Where brutal and underhanded tactics are used to quiet dissenters and acquire new followers. Where even the founder is on record stating that religion is the way to make money.
That is the difference.
I'm not aware of any wars that were fought in the name of Scientology.
More often than not, it's an excuse or rationalization for war, not a cause.
Why do people keep saying this? It doesn't matter whether politicians/leaders use religion as an excuse to commit atrocities. It's used as an excuse because it EFFECTIVELY convinces their followers of the atrocity's righteousness! It other words, religion often acts as a recruitment tool, whose tenets cannot be disputed through rational argument.
1.) The Bible is pretty easy to access. In fact, you can often get it for free because its believers want you to read it.
Granted, but unless you're a college graduate (and even that assumes a lot), you'll probably have trouble understanding the text without intermediaries and Bible study sessions. Most believers barely touch the Bible, and they're content with a fairy-tale-like understanding of the Bible: everyone knows David and Goliath, Jonah and the Whale/BigFish, Passion of the Christ, etc. However, once the faithful start babbling about the nature of the Trinity or whether the 6 days in Genesis were literal 24-hour days or metaphorical epochs, they're in counting-the-number-of-angels-that-can-dance-on-the-head-of-a-pin land, which is just as theologically insane as anything Scientology has come up with.
2.) I submit that believing some creator of the universe manifested its power in the form of a sacrificial holy man long ago is far less wacky then believing an intergalactic overlord imprisoned in a volcano who attached alien ghosts to primitive humans, causing all their problems.
Scientology is based on science fiction ideas from the 1950s.
Christianity is based on science fiction ideas ("prophecies") from the Old Testament.
I think our culture is simply accustomed to souls, the afterlife, and other Judeo-Christian ideas (so you're saying there's this invisible ghost that lives inside me, but when I die it flies away to some other dimension and lives with other ghosts? OMG U CRAAAZY). It's hard to know what's crazy until we take a huge step back and re-examine our own beliefs.
Seriously, we'd be raising our eyebrows at angels and cupids too (half-bird men?), if we didn't have them immortalized in the form of cartoons, greeting cards, and famous paintings. And who is to say that a fiery underworld filled with red, pitchfork-wielding evil ex-birdmen is any stranger than throwing intergalactic prisoners into volcanos and blowing them to smithereens?
3.) In spite of all the shit they get, the Christians I've met in life have generally been very friendly and nice to me. Just good folks who believe what they believe. You have your bad apples, but that's true for every group in the world. Scientologists, on the other hand, will ask you if you rape babies and are trained to believe that anyone critical of the religion is a criminal who is hiding dark secrets.
That is a wild generalization of both groups. There are some Christians who believe using birth control is tantamount to child murder, and others believe that critics of religion aren't simply anti-religious--they're downright anti-American, or even just plain evil! As for Scientology, I don't know how many "casual Scientologists" exist, but it IS a new religion, after all. They don't have the history and resources of a larger religion, and they're seriously threatened by their much more established competitors. Christians also went through some serious growing pains (with a hefty dose of conspiracy, murder, brainwashing...), but now they more or less own the joint, so they can afford to have a lax membership.
So, yeah, very little like Christianity, to be perfectly honest. You were just going for a cheap +5 Insightful by bashing the easy target.
Scientology IS the easy target. Even Christians I know make fun of Scientologists for the EXACT same reasons that I critize Christians. Drawing comparisons between Scientology and Christianity is what will get you ostracized by the majority. It seems exceedingly difficult for people to turn the mirror on themselves. How do those verses go: "Judge not, lest ye be judged" and "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone"?
I prefer just saying "African" if it's not clearly know whether s/he is an American or not. It's got the same number of syllables as Cau-ca-sian and Hi-span-ic, and one less than A-sian.
"Black" works too as an adjective, but some people find it mildly offensive as a noun: "I saw a couple of blacks walking around outside the store."
Umm, I wasn't West-bashing. I find this practice to be just as abhorrent as you do. The only difference is that I'm not going to judge another culture by the standards of my own. It shouldn't be our role to impose our morality on the rest of the world.
Well why not? I might vacation there sometime! </imperialism>
You mean how we enshrine our(American) blue collar workers as the heroes in almost all our action movies? We spin tales of steel workers, lumberjacks, beat cops, butchers, plumbers and mechanics rising above their station and making things better for themselves and their families.
You kidding? Since when did Japan NOT enshrine the blue collar worker in their entertainment?
I trust you've never heard of a little game about a pair of plumbers who rise above their stations in life, going so far as to rescue royalty from the cruel clutches of a draconian overlord... Yeah, "The Super Mario Brothers" was all about ending racism... and eating mushrooms... and stuff...
The tedium is why I quit playing MMOs too. As soon as I find myself "grinding" or faced with some incredibly boring task (hiking across the world to turn in a quest), that's when I decide to turn it off and find something else to do.
Alternatively, find a new game to play. Something with faster progression or more exciting eye-candy, like a single-player game.
Actually most "religious" wars are just conflicts over resources or land, and religion is used as an excuse.
That "excuse" is a prime recruitment tool for the unwashed masses, who do the majority of the fighting. Without that excuse, the resource conflict would be front and center in people's minds, and I bet most would find that conflict to be a lot less noble and worthy of dying for.
Parentheses, man! Learn to use them (or if you don't want to learn how to use them, just avoid using them (unless you are just trying to be hopelessly recursive (which is not always a bad thing))).
So the things *you* hold hold dear should be enforced on everyone else via the federal government? Gotcha.
I couldn't give a damn about marriage or abortions, because they don't affect me currently. I just don't understand why the outcome of being gay, or needing an abortion, or setting a car's MPG should be based on a state law as opposed to a federal law. Just because a state has fewer people in it doesn't mean that I'm somehow better represented by the legislators. I'm one out of 12 million instead of one out of 300 million. My vote counts just as much: zero-point-zero-zero-zero-diddly-squat percent.
Then again if abortion is to be *banned* at the federal level I'm sure you'd sing a different tune. More along the lines of "well in california it's legal! the feds can't override their laws1!!"
No, that'd be a stupid argument. I would argue that it shouldn't/should be banned federally because it's moral/immoral, not because California decided it should be one way.
If a state passes a law that bans abortion, then all that's going to do is make a person jump in a car and go to the neighboring state to do it.
(And if all the states ban it, that means she's going look for a hanger, but that's a different argument).
To answer the rest of your arguments:
I don't see the difference between a big state and a big country. One is just bigger than the other by an order or two--they're both still many orders of magnitude bigger than me.
What am I supposed to do to get my views "represented"? Move to a new state? Isolating myself from people I don't agree with is lame. There are no people "over the hill" who think differently than me. I'm surrounded by people who think differently from me, who develop laws that I don't agree with. That doesn't mean I don't tolerate them, or don't like them. If I surrounded myself with people who thought exactly like me--then I'd be in some kind of cult!
So what I guess I'm saying: you get diversity of opinion from larger sample sizes. I wouldn't trust Texas to come up with moral laws about how the the oil industry can conduct business, because the Texas economy has a vested interest in that industry. I would feel much better knowing that members from all 50 states had a say, because it usually affects them too in some way.
I have a hard time coming up with ways that the policies of a single state ONLY affect that state, because we rarely live in a vacuum. But in the case of gas MPG: if we want the auto industry to do better, we need cars to compete with the rest of the world. Of course, there's also that thing about needing to work together to fight global warming, but I expect that argument wouldn't work against many conservatives.
And yet you believe that people on the other side of the country who have little in common with you should tell you what kind of car you can buy? Have you even considered how inconsistent your position is?
Please don't misrepresent me and then berate that misrepresentation.
My argument is that state lines seem arbitrary. I live in a tri-state area, and business is freely conducted and unimpeded when it moves from state to state. However, each of those three states operate under different business laws, and the conflicts between those laws cause unnecessary confusion, bureaucracy, and sluggishness. My honest question is "why do we do that?", yet I am attacked.
"Because it's in the Constitution" isn't really a good answer to me. Why is it in the Constitution, then?
Since when was the last century a "'progressive' destruction of constitutional protections"? We've survived wars, emerged as a world power, discovered and thwarted corruption at the highest levels, ensured rights to our oppressed minorities, and invented the Internet, so I think we're doing pretty good in comparison to much of the world. I think we could do much, much better, but I don't share your sense of self-inflicted, inevitable downfall.
So could someone please explain to me why states' rights are defended so vigorously in so many cases where it doesn't make sense? (For example: gay marriage, abortion rights, fuel MPG). I don't see the sense of arguing that MPG should be regulated on a state-by-state basis (and neither does Obama, I suppose).
I have little in common with someone on the opposite side of my state. No more than someone on the opposite side of the country.
Possibly inept analogy: one of the prime directives of programming is to centralize and avoid re-using code. This helps usability, maintenance, and generally keeps things clean efficient. Now why, oh why, does the legal system strive to do the exact opposite? (And in some cases, proponents of state rights too--that means rewriting the same piece of legislation with possible variations at least 50 times!).
I installed Ubuntu for the first time last year, and man, I was disappointed.
Right out of the box, so to speak, there were problems: 1. NVIDIA graphics card drivers weren't installed because they were proprietary. Come on. Even then, dragging windows around and typing into text boxes had a minor delay that didn't feel natural.
2. All websites looked different and ugly as sin, because the package didn't come with the fonts that every other system used. Come on!
3. Multi-monitor use was difficult to set up without having to alter configuration files ( though I do wish taskbars on multiple screens would come to Windows 7). Some things I found simply couldn't be done without writing scripts: setting up a hotkey to send a window to the other monitor, etc.
To resolve most of these issues, I had to navigate a bunch of forums and wiki help pages. I couldn't imagine trying to show my mom how to do that, for instance.
Ubuntu has a lot of strengths, and many of its features made me go "OOOO, cool!" But the Linux learning curve is freakishly steep. To do something of medium difficulty in Windows generally requires advanced console command knowledge in Ubuntu.
Slashdot Mirror
Humanity, sliding down that slippery slope since 1984.
We've been sliding down that slippery slope since the invention of writing.
Oh CRAP. I slid down a slippery slope at a water-park when I was a kid too!
DAMN YOU, SLIPPERY SLOPES!
Does anyone else find this trend of item/achievement hording to be troubling?
I wish I could denigrate and demean those who waste away their online lives pursing the virtual carrots on virtual sticks, but then I remembered that I logged 40+ hours in the last two weeks trying to unlock the new spy & sniper weapons in a Team Fortress 2 content expansion pack... Now I've got them, and I've played with them for at least a few hours, but now I feel no reason to play the game by myself much anymore. (I will still play if my friends ask me to, because then it's a social experience.) That said, when the next patch comes out, I might invest a few more hours in the game.
Still, I think my behavior is troubling, because the amount of quality development time put into those new weapons and maps in TF2 is nowhere near the level of quality development time put into most single-player games, and I put just as much play-time into those titles.
I hate seeing less innovation leading to more profitability, because that encourages developers to take the easy way out: "let's use our remaining development time to add achievements instead of new gameplay modes or side missions!"
It's also incredibly discouraging to see my hobby, which some liken to an art, to turn into a world-wide e-peen waving contest. For some reason, I have an urge to turn off the computer and read a novel, purely as a political gesture to make myself feel better.
Whoever marked the parent post as a Troll is being an asshat. You and I may not agree with his claims, and he may be flat out wrong, but it is certainly not "trolling" behavior, and to mark it as such is abusing the Troll tag.
We have no GUIs in Iran.
That's an extremely clever, if entirely misplaced, joke. Kudos.
The home-school Christians took their football and went to play at Conservapedia, which is JUST AS FUN and as important as Wikipedia.
I seriously think that Conervapedia is just satire. Some of the bullshit on there is just too unreal to be serious...
You don't hang out with too many conservatives, do you?
Now, contrast that with the majority of Scientology literature out there where people have lost all of their money or even their lives to Scientology. Where brutal and underhanded tactics are used to quiet dissenters and acquire new followers. Where even the founder is on record stating that religion is the way to make money.
That is the difference.
I'm not aware of any wars that were fought in the name of Scientology.
More often than not, it's an excuse or rationalization for war, not a cause.
Why do people keep saying this? It doesn't matter whether politicians/leaders use religion as an excuse to commit atrocities. It's used as an excuse because it EFFECTIVELY convinces their followers of the atrocity's righteousness! It other words, religion often acts as a recruitment tool, whose tenets cannot be disputed through rational argument.
1.) The Bible is pretty easy to access. In fact, you can often get it for free because its believers want you to read it.
Granted, but unless you're a college graduate (and even that assumes a lot), you'll probably have trouble understanding the text without intermediaries and Bible study sessions. Most believers barely touch the Bible, and they're content with a fairy-tale-like understanding of the Bible: everyone knows David and Goliath, Jonah and the Whale/BigFish, Passion of the Christ, etc. However, once the faithful start babbling about the nature of the Trinity or whether the 6 days in Genesis were literal 24-hour days or metaphorical epochs, they're in counting-the-number-of-angels-that-can-dance-on-the-head-of-a-pin land, which is just as theologically insane as anything Scientology has come up with.
2.) I submit that believing some creator of the universe manifested its power in the form of a sacrificial holy man long ago is far less wacky then believing an intergalactic overlord imprisoned in a volcano who attached alien ghosts to primitive humans, causing all their problems.
Scientology is based on science fiction ideas from the 1950s.
Christianity is based on science fiction ideas ("prophecies") from the Old Testament.
I think our culture is simply accustomed to souls, the afterlife, and other Judeo-Christian ideas (so you're saying there's this invisible ghost that lives inside me, but when I die it flies away to some other dimension and lives with other ghosts? OMG U CRAAAZY). It's hard to know what's crazy until we take a huge step back and re-examine our own beliefs.
Seriously, we'd be raising our eyebrows at angels and cupids too (half-bird men?), if we didn't have them immortalized in the form of cartoons, greeting cards, and famous paintings. And who is to say that a fiery underworld filled with red, pitchfork-wielding evil ex-birdmen is any stranger than throwing intergalactic prisoners into volcanos and blowing them to smithereens?
3.) In spite of all the shit they get, the Christians I've met in life have generally been very friendly and nice to me. Just good folks who believe what they believe. You have your bad apples, but that's true for every group in the world. Scientologists, on the other hand, will ask you if you rape babies and are trained to believe that anyone critical of the religion is a criminal who is hiding dark secrets.
That is a wild generalization of both groups. There are some Christians who believe using birth control is tantamount to child murder, and others believe that critics of religion aren't simply anti-religious--they're downright anti-American, or even just plain evil! As for Scientology, I don't know how many "casual Scientologists" exist, but it IS a new religion, after all. They don't have the history and resources of a larger religion, and they're seriously threatened by their much more established competitors. Christians also went through some serious growing pains (with a hefty dose of conspiracy, murder, brainwashing...), but now they more or less own the joint, so they can afford to have a lax membership.
So, yeah, very little like Christianity, to be perfectly honest. You were just going for a cheap +5 Insightful by bashing the easy target.
Scientology IS the easy target. Even Christians I know make fun of Scientologists for the EXACT same reasons that I critize Christians. Drawing comparisons between Scientology and Christianity is what will get you ostracized by the majority. It seems exceedingly difficult for people to turn the mirror on themselves. How do those verses go: "Judge not, lest ye be judged" and "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone"?
And who knows what other inventions will revolutionize it farther?
I'm looking forward to Akoonahs and embark on my own iVision-Quest.
Er, one more than Asian. Slashdot needs an edit button.
I prefer just saying "African" if it's not clearly know whether s/he is an American or not. It's got the same number of syllables as Cau-ca-sian and Hi-span-ic, and one less than A-sian.
"Black" works too as an adjective, but some people find it mildly offensive as a noun: "I saw a couple of blacks walking around outside the store."
Just out of curiosity, how do you call a person who has three white and one black grand parent?
That would make the person a quadroon, according to dead, racist white guys.
Umm, I wasn't West-bashing. I find this practice to be just as abhorrent as you do. The only difference is that I'm not going to judge another culture by the standards of my own. It shouldn't be our role to impose our morality on the rest of the world.
Well why not? I might vacation there sometime!
</imperialism>
You mean how we enshrine our(American) blue collar workers as the heroes in almost all our action movies? We spin tales of steel workers, lumberjacks, beat cops, butchers, plumbers and mechanics rising above their station and making things better for themselves and their families.
You kidding? Since when did Japan NOT enshrine the blue collar worker in their entertainment?
I trust you've never heard of a little game about a pair of plumbers who rise above their stations in life, going so far as to rescue royalty from the cruel clutches of a draconian overlord... Yeah, "The Super Mario Brothers" was all about ending racism... and eating mushrooms... and stuff...
The tedium is why I quit playing MMOs too. As soon as I find myself "grinding" or faced with some incredibly boring task (hiking across the world to turn in a quest), that's when I decide to turn it off and find something else to do.
Alternatively, find a new game to play. Something with faster progression or more exciting eye-candy, like a single-player game.
Actually most "religious" wars are just conflicts over resources or land, and religion is used as an excuse.
That "excuse" is a prime recruitment tool for the unwashed masses, who do the majority of the fighting. Without that excuse, the resource conflict would be front and center in people's minds, and I bet most would find that conflict to be a lot less noble and worthy of dying for.
Then one day, he comes upstairs and says to his dad "I canceled my account. I'm going for a run."
Relax. As soon as he finds his body, he'll be ready to play again.
Parentheses, man! Learn to use them (or if you don't want to learn how to use them, just avoid using them (unless you are just trying to be hopelessly recursive (which is not always a bad thing))).
Not everyone has such hang-ups about nudity. Some might even consider it a job perk.
So the things *you* hold hold dear should be enforced on everyone else via the federal government? Gotcha.
I couldn't give a damn about marriage or abortions, because they don't affect me currently. I just don't understand why the outcome of being gay, or needing an abortion, or setting a car's MPG should be based on a state law as opposed to a federal law. Just because a state has fewer people in it doesn't mean that I'm somehow better represented by the legislators. I'm one out of 12 million instead of one out of 300 million. My vote counts just as much: zero-point-zero-zero-zero-diddly-squat percent.
Then again if abortion is to be *banned* at the federal level I'm sure you'd sing a different tune. More along the lines of "well in california it's legal! the feds can't override their laws1!!"
No, that'd be a stupid argument. I would argue that it shouldn't/should be banned federally because it's moral/immoral, not because California decided it should be one way.
If a state passes a law that bans abortion, then all that's going to do is make a person jump in a car and go to the neighboring state to do it.
(And if all the states ban it, that means she's going look for a hanger, but that's a different argument).
To answer the rest of your arguments:
I don't see the difference between a big state and a big country. One is just bigger than the other by an order or two--they're both still many orders of magnitude bigger than me.
What am I supposed to do to get my views "represented"? Move to a new state? Isolating myself from people I don't agree with is lame. There are no people "over the hill" who think differently than me. I'm surrounded by people who think differently from me, who develop laws that I don't agree with. That doesn't mean I don't tolerate them, or don't like them. If I surrounded myself with people who thought exactly like me--then I'd be in some kind of cult!
So what I guess I'm saying: you get diversity of opinion from larger sample sizes. I wouldn't trust Texas to come up with moral laws about how the the oil industry can conduct business, because the Texas economy has a vested interest in that industry. I would feel much better knowing that members from all 50 states had a say, because it usually affects them too in some way.
I have a hard time coming up with ways that the policies of a single state ONLY affect that state, because we rarely live in a vacuum. But in the case of gas MPG: if we want the auto industry to do better, we need cars to compete with the rest of the world. Of course, there's also that thing about needing to work together to fight global warming, but I expect that argument wouldn't work against many conservatives.
Interesting. So state laws are just a way to "beta-test" for the real thing? I could get behind that!
And yet you believe that people on the other side of the country who have little in common with you should tell you what kind of car you can buy? Have you even considered how inconsistent your position is?
Please don't misrepresent me and then berate that misrepresentation.
My argument is that state lines seem arbitrary. I live in a tri-state area, and business is freely conducted and unimpeded when it moves from state to state. However, each of those three states operate under different business laws, and the conflicts between those laws cause unnecessary confusion, bureaucracy, and sluggishness. My honest question is "why do we do that?", yet I am attacked.
"Because it's in the Constitution" isn't really a good answer to me. Why is it in the Constitution, then?
Since when was the last century a "'progressive' destruction of constitutional protections"? We've survived wars, emerged as a world power, discovered and thwarted corruption at the highest levels, ensured rights to our oppressed minorities, and invented the Internet, so I think we're doing pretty good in comparison to much of the world. I think we could do much, much better, but I don't share your sense of self-inflicted, inevitable downfall.
So could someone please explain to me why states' rights are defended so vigorously in so many cases where it doesn't make sense? (For example: gay marriage, abortion rights, fuel MPG). I don't see the sense of arguing that MPG should be regulated on a state-by-state basis (and neither does Obama, I suppose).
I have little in common with someone on the opposite side of my state. No more than someone on the opposite side of the country.
Possibly inept analogy: one of the prime directives of programming is to centralize and avoid re-using code. This helps usability, maintenance, and generally keeps things clean efficient. Now why, oh why, does the legal system strive to do the exact opposite? (And in some cases, proponents of state rights too--that means rewriting the same piece of legislation with possible variations at least 50 times!).
Also, slavery.
DirectX 11 support, even! Whatever that is.
I installed Ubuntu for the first time last year, and man, I was disappointed.
Right out of the box, so to speak, there were problems:
1. NVIDIA graphics card drivers weren't installed because they were proprietary. Come on. Even then, dragging windows around and typing into text boxes had a minor delay that didn't feel natural.
2. All websites looked different and ugly as sin, because the package didn't come with the fonts that every other system used. Come on!
3. Multi-monitor use was difficult to set up without having to alter configuration files ( though I do wish taskbars on multiple screens would come to Windows 7). Some things I found simply couldn't be done without writing scripts: setting up a hotkey to send a window to the other monitor, etc.
To resolve most of these issues, I had to navigate a bunch of forums and wiki help pages. I couldn't imagine trying to show my mom how to do that, for instance.
Ubuntu has a lot of strengths, and many of its features made me go "OOOO, cool!" But the Linux learning curve is freakishly steep. To do something of medium difficulty in Windows generally requires advanced console command knowledge in Ubuntu.