When the politically correct newer versions of Trek came out, and changed the line "To boldly go where no man has gone before" - which was one of the greatest ever! - to a neutered, lame "no ONE has gone".... it pretty much jumped the shark.
Yeah, what were they thinking when they made a NEGRO captain... or to use the sissy-pants liberal parlance, "African"? I mean, come on!
And how about "Android"? What the hell, right? Data was a fucking ROBOT (or METAL-MAN if you prefer), and all those dictionary-nazis just HAD to change the word to suit the LIBERAL AGENDA!
Damn politically correct liberals! They stole my naive childhood, outdated vocabulary, and culturally-biased catch-phrases!
Status symbols are for fools. I have no interest in "keeping up with the Joneses" or even what they think about me using some ten-year-old phone. Most of today's economic recession was caused by people boring money they didn't have to try to impress others with shiny new gadgets/homes. AKA fools.
Correction: most of today's economic recession was caused by profit-driven lenders allowing people to borrow money and purchase homes that were beyond their means.
You can't fault people for taking a good opportunity when they see it (stupid people or not), but you CAN fault snake oil salesmen for knowingly pushing shitty products onto stupid people for short-term gain.
I don't mind fools as much as I mind people taking advantage of fools.
You may not feel the need to write "Straight" in your online profiles, but the odds are good that you acknowledge your heterosexuality in one way or another, like you did several times in your post. The issue with this reasoning is that straight people flaunt their sexual orientation every bit as much as gay people do, if not far, far moreso.
Very true!
It's quite difficult to see your own biases, especially when you live in an environment that supports your way of doing things.
When a right-handed person walks into a computer lab and sits at a computer with a mouse on the right side, it seems normal to him. A left-handed person immediately recognizes a problem, if they haven't already adjusted to using mice on the right side.
A white man goes to the store to buy band-aids. Traditionally, band-aids were made to blend with white skin, not black or other shades of brown. If asked what color a band-aid is, the white man might say "flesh colored," not realizing that the band-aid was manufactured to complement certain skin-tones and not others.
We flaunt and support our biases just by living them, and when we encounter a different way of doing them, the "other-ness" factor triggers and we feel uncomfortable. Completely normal part of human existence, as long as it is recognized with curiosity as opposed to hostility.
Speaking as a conservative Christian who believes that same-sex sexual activity transgresses an objective moral principle:
This whole thing is BS. Microsoft should not be restricting people from mentioning that they're gay.
I know, right? How are we going to know which ones to hang when the revolution comes if everyone's passing for straight?
The only thing that would make it fair would be this: They restrict you from mentioning sexual orientation, period.
Fair for the majority, maybe. Nowadays it's assumed you're straight, and it might stay that way for a long way to come. That's like saying they should restrict you from mentioning age and then expecting everyone to be happy playing with the majority of gamers: teenage boys. Plenty of players on "mature gamer" servers would disagree.
But for those of us who don't want to assimilate into the Borg collective (or keep our heads bowed while passing for a member of the majority), we want chances to identify ourselves in a social network, so we can make friends with those who have similar interests.
The easiest, cheapest, and most profitable model is simply do that the largest number of your potential customers want you to do, and hang the rest. To all that say "vote with your feet/dollars", this can be the result.
Even better model: assume the appearance of supporting your majority base while implicitly supporting the minority.
Examples:
Sims 2: Maxis does not advertise that you can raise a gay family or pursue gay and lesbian relationships. If two male characters have a high friendship status, I do not think (correct me if I'm wrong) that the NPC will initiate a homosexual "love" relationship. It might be the same way with hetero "loves" too, I don't know. However, if the player DOES try to make his character kiss the other one, then the NPC will usually accept (given a good enough relationship rating), and the "love" begins. The impetus is on the player to decide whether hetero, bi, and homo relationships are possible in his/her game.
Politics: In general, the Democratic party does not support gay marriage. Yet they do support gay rights, civil unions, etc. Presumably, Democrats don't want to alienate highly religious members, while still implicitly supporting gay voters. Supporting gay issues makes them progressive, but supporting gay marriage would possibly alienate more people than they would gain: it's not like there's another party out there saying gay marriage should be legal.
In both examples, Maxis and the Democratic party want to reach the most amount of people and alienate the fewest, so they take (sometimes paradoxical) positions that allow them to do so.
Well, i hate flash as website menu and eyecandy. But some flash games are really nice. If you never played ANY flash game, you miss something. There are so many different games, one might be good for you.
Consider that just because a nation's average income is relatively high, it does not follow that everyone in that country is able to buy the products at the higher price. Why should people who had the dumb luck to be born in some shithole country be blessed with lower-priced medicine?
That's not social justice. It's social prejudice.
Aww, I'm so sorry that you weren't be born into a malaria-infested swamp ravaged by ethnic warfare and that your country doesn't have coupons for 75% off popular drugs.
Cry me a river, then sign up for Medicaid, you ungrateful bastard.
Lysenko is the perfect example of why mixing politics and science can be a bad thing.
The belief in acquired characteristics was widespread through the Soviet Union. How else, the Communists argued, would progress be possible if you couldn't better yourself in life and pass on those traits to your children? If everyone just started over a blank slate at birth, wouldn't it be just a big wash where nobody ever improved?
Of course, that model fails to take into account cultural evolution (memetics), like giving new generations more educational options than previous generations, which actually can result in generational progress.
President Abraham Lincoln's popular image as a log-splitting bumpkin is being re-assessed
I doubt any serious Lincoln scholar would ever say Lincoln was a "log-splitting bumpkin". He was a brilliant, self educated man with a ferocious curiosity and probably one of the highest IQs of any president we've ever had. The guy who managed to end slavery, preserve the Union, AND assist in ushering in modern medical techniques on the battlefield a log-splitting bumpkin? Yeah, sure.
Emphasis on popular image.
Lincoln probably splits logs, because there are Lincoln logs. That's about as far as regular people get when it comes to historical analysis.
Maybe we are the first to achieve this capability. If life did create itself from a universe that created itself, ONE of the life forms which achieved this interstellar communication would have to be first. Why not us?
Sure, that's what we all thought about our first girlfriends too...
All magazines are falling off, but Science Fiction magazines have always lived closer to the edge...so any fall off in business affects them more profoundly.
The more esoteric, the more difficult it is to get people to read it. This goes doubly for science-fiction, doubly for literary fiction, and quadrupally for literary science-fiction.
IAAEM (I am an english major... how often do I get to use that acronym on slashdot?), and I can assure you that writing fiction and (more importantly) expecting to be paid for it IS a problem.
Traditionally, writers start in small literary magazines before a larger publisher will take them seriously and offer a book deal. Very few publishers take internet experience seriously, though as I understand that is changing rapidly.
However, fiction readership is down and continues to decline (especially the high-browed literary sorts), so it's quite an exclusive business to get into. Sure there are plenty of big-name writers, but plenty of others are toiling around in obscurity. I don't expect that to change much.
I do believe that the Internet has and will continue to evolve fiction. For one, some of the middle-men printing companies will be cut out of the money loop, so perhaps there will be more money around for the average writer. I hope that's the case, but generally writers are squashed beneath the publishing bureaucracies.
One guy kept jumping every time he got into combat. It was like clockwork. I had thought he was a really bad player until he made this weirdly accurate flak cannon shot while falling. These two things didn't make sense in a player, and as I soon learned, he was a bot.
Another guy kept running into walls as he was backing up. That is a very human behavior, but I have yet to see a bot do it convincingly.
Weapon switching is another good indicator. When a human runs out of ammo, there is usually some fumbling. Bots seem to switch quickly and efficiently, even when their accuracy and play-style is subpar.
Target acquisition is another. Bots stick to one player at a time. Every once in a while humans get tunnel vision, but more often than not they freak out when they are sniping someone and then bump into someone else. A bot's transition between targets is usually smooth.
Of course, all of these criteria are subject to skill level. The videos seemed to be detailing low to medium quality players. On the upper tiers, players can become strangely botlike. It's almost more difficult to tell a terrible player from a bot pretending to be a terrible player, and easier to tell a good player from a bot playing a good player.
Damn it, got the arrow pointing the wrong way... I was too concerned about getting it to show up at all what with the < and all.
Ah, I thought you were making some kind of psychological statement on the general population's attitudes and perception about worth. You know, the reason why your dad has no problem paying $200 for Windows Vista or a monthly bill for McAfee but scoffs when you talk about open-source software.
Slashdot Mirror
You put forth a strong argument with pie, however I feel that cake is a better argument.
Even today, machines are still struggling with this basic question. We're smarter than them, though. We know that the cake is a lie.
You demand that the government censor the entire internet for the safety of The Children! ;)
Brilliant! Where could you possible have come up with that simple, elegant solution? If only someone had thought about that before!
When the politically correct newer versions of Trek came out, and changed the line "To boldly go where no man has gone before" - which was one of the greatest ever! - to a neutered, lame "no ONE has gone".... it pretty much jumped the shark.
Yeah, what were they thinking when they made a NEGRO captain... or to use the sissy-pants liberal parlance, "African"? I mean, come on!
And how about "Android"? What the hell, right? Data was a fucking ROBOT (or METAL-MAN if you prefer), and all those dictionary-nazis just HAD to change the word to suit the LIBERAL AGENDA!
Damn politically correct liberals! They stole my naive childhood, outdated vocabulary, and culturally-biased catch-phrases!
Left4Dead has a button for spinning 180 in no time at all.
I don't miss PC/mouse gaming at all, and this is coming from a guy who was hardcore into online Quake 12/13 years ago.
Oh man, I had a button for spinning around 180 degrees in Heretic II too!
The memories!
The 10-year-old memories of counter-intuitive control schemes!
"Ever had a super needy girlfriend that demanded all your love and attention and would freak whenever you would leave her alone?"
No.
*silently weeps*
Status symbols are for fools. I have no interest in "keeping up with the Joneses" or even what they think about me using some ten-year-old phone. Most of today's economic recession was caused by people boring money they didn't have to try to impress others with shiny new gadgets/homes. AKA fools.
Correction: most of today's economic recession was caused by profit-driven lenders allowing people to borrow money and purchase homes that were beyond their means.
You can't fault people for taking a good opportunity when they see it (stupid people or not), but you CAN fault snake oil salesmen for knowingly pushing shitty products onto stupid people for short-term gain.
I don't mind fools as much as I mind people taking advantage of fools.
You may not feel the need to write "Straight" in your online profiles, but the odds are good that you acknowledge your heterosexuality in one way or another, like you did several times in your post. The issue with this reasoning is that straight people flaunt their sexual orientation every bit as much as gay people do, if not far, far moreso.
Very true!
It's quite difficult to see your own biases, especially when you live in an environment that supports your way of doing things.
When a right-handed person walks into a computer lab and sits at a computer with a mouse on the right side, it seems normal to him. A left-handed person immediately recognizes a problem, if they haven't already adjusted to using mice on the right side.
A white man goes to the store to buy band-aids. Traditionally, band-aids were made to blend with white skin, not black or other shades of brown. If asked what color a band-aid is, the white man might say "flesh colored," not realizing that the band-aid was manufactured to complement certain skin-tones and not others.
We flaunt and support our biases just by living them, and when we encounter a different way of doing them, the "other-ness" factor triggers and we feel uncomfortable. Completely normal part of human existence, as long as it is recognized with curiosity as opposed to hostility.
Speaking as a conservative Christian who believes that same-sex sexual activity transgresses an objective moral principle:
This whole thing is BS. Microsoft should not be restricting people from mentioning that they're gay.
I know, right? How are we going to know which ones to hang when the revolution comes if everyone's passing for straight?
The only thing that would make it fair would be this: They restrict you from mentioning sexual orientation, period.
Fair for the majority, maybe. Nowadays it's assumed you're straight, and it might stay that way for a long way to come. That's like saying they should restrict you from mentioning age and then expecting everyone to be happy playing with the majority of gamers: teenage boys. Plenty of players on "mature gamer" servers would disagree.
But for those of us who don't want to assimilate into the Borg collective (or keep our heads bowed while passing for a member of the majority), we want chances to identify ourselves in a social network, so we can make friends with those who have similar interests.
The easiest, cheapest, and most profitable model is simply do that the largest number of your potential customers want you to do, and hang the rest. To all that say "vote with your feet/dollars", this can be the result.
Even better model: assume the appearance of supporting your majority base while implicitly supporting the minority.
Examples:
Sims 2: Maxis does not advertise that you can raise a gay family or pursue gay and lesbian relationships. If two male characters have a high friendship status, I do not think (correct me if I'm wrong) that the NPC will initiate a homosexual "love" relationship. It might be the same way with hetero "loves" too, I don't know. However, if the player DOES try to make his character kiss the other one, then the NPC will usually accept (given a good enough relationship rating), and the "love" begins. The impetus is on the player to decide whether hetero, bi, and homo relationships are possible in his/her game.
Politics: In general, the Democratic party does not support gay marriage. Yet they do support gay rights, civil unions, etc. Presumably, Democrats don't want to alienate highly religious members, while still implicitly supporting gay voters. Supporting gay issues makes them progressive, but supporting gay marriage would possibly alienate more people than they would gain: it's not like there's another party out there saying gay marriage should be legal.
In both examples, Maxis and the Democratic party want to reach the most amount of people and alienate the fewest, so they take (sometimes paradoxical) positions that allow them to do so.
Well, i hate flash as website menu and eyecandy.
But some flash games are really nice.
If you never played ANY flash game, you miss something.
There are so many different games, one might be good for you.
Was that some kind of poem?
I thought it read "Robotic Prostitutes for Human Feces." Stop thinking, brain of mine...
Consider that just because a nation's average income is relatively high, it does not follow that everyone in that country is able to buy the products at the higher price. Why should people who had the dumb luck to be born in some shithole country be blessed with lower-priced medicine?
That's not social justice. It's social prejudice.
Aww, I'm so sorry that you weren't be born into a malaria-infested swamp ravaged by ethnic warfare and that your country doesn't have coupons for 75% off popular drugs.
Cry me a river, then sign up for Medicaid, you ungrateful bastard.
Lysenko is the perfect example of why mixing politics and science can be a bad thing.
The belief in acquired characteristics was widespread through the Soviet Union. How else, the Communists argued, would progress be possible if you couldn't better yourself in life and pass on those traits to your children? If everyone just started over a blank slate at birth, wouldn't it be just a big wash where nobody ever improved?
Of course, that model fails to take into account cultural evolution (memetics), like giving new generations more educational options than previous generations, which actually can result in generational progress.
It won't buy you a Nintendo Wii, that's for sure.
President Abraham Lincoln's popular image as a log-splitting bumpkin is being re-assessed
I doubt any serious Lincoln scholar would ever say Lincoln was a "log-splitting bumpkin". He was a brilliant, self educated man with a ferocious curiosity and probably one of the highest IQs of any president we've ever had. The guy who managed to end slavery, preserve the Union, AND assist in ushering in modern medical techniques on the battlefield a log-splitting bumpkin? Yeah, sure.
Emphasis on popular image.
Lincoln probably splits logs, because there are Lincoln logs. That's about as far as regular people get when it comes to historical analysis.
Only in the alternate universe where English is more of a guideline
rather than a fully normative experience.
If that's what you think, I pose a simple question:
wanna cyber?
No, just the thought and fear of being infected is enough for people to pour money into it.
Names of my various computers:
Azaka, Kamedaki, SDF-1, Omoikane, Nadesico, King Kaioh...
And I don't even really like anime.
Maybe we are the first to achieve this capability. If life did create itself from a universe that created itself, ONE of the life forms which achieved this interstellar communication would have to be first. Why not us?
Sure, that's what we all thought about our first girlfriends too...
All magazines are falling off, but Science Fiction magazines have always lived closer to the edge...so any fall off in business affects them more profoundly.
The more esoteric, the more difficult it is to get people to read it. This goes doubly for science-fiction, doubly for literary fiction, and quadrupally for literary science-fiction.
IAAEM (I am an english major... how often do I get to use that acronym on slashdot?), and I can assure you that writing fiction and (more importantly) expecting to be paid for it IS a problem.
Traditionally, writers start in small literary magazines before a larger publisher will take them seriously and offer a book deal. Very few publishers take internet experience seriously, though as I understand that is changing rapidly.
However, fiction readership is down and continues to decline (especially the high-browed literary sorts), so it's quite an exclusive business to get into. Sure there are plenty of big-name writers, but plenty of others are toiling around in obscurity. I don't expect that to change much.
I do believe that the Internet has and will continue to evolve fiction. For one, some of the middle-men printing companies will be cut out of the money loop, so perhaps there will be more money around for the average writer. I hope that's the case, but generally writers are squashed beneath the publishing bureaucracies.
I tried to click this link, but I accidentally clicked the "Global Warming Irreversible" link by mistake.
Phew, for a second I almost read something worthy of front-page news.
Here are some more examples:
One guy kept jumping every time he got into combat. It was like clockwork. I had thought he was a really bad player until he made this weirdly accurate flak cannon shot while falling. These two things didn't make sense in a player, and as I soon learned, he was a bot.
Another guy kept running into walls as he was backing up. That is a very human behavior, but I have yet to see a bot do it convincingly.
Weapon switching is another good indicator. When a human runs out of ammo, there is usually some fumbling. Bots seem to switch quickly and efficiently, even when their accuracy and play-style is subpar.
Target acquisition is another. Bots stick to one player at a time. Every once in a while humans get tunnel vision, but more often than not they freak out when they are sniping someone and then bump into someone else. A bot's transition between targets is usually smooth.
Of course, all of these criteria are subject to skill level. The videos seemed to be detailing low to medium quality players. On the upper tiers, players can become strangely botlike. It's almost more difficult to tell a terrible player from a bot pretending to be a terrible player, and easier to tell a good player from a bot playing a good player.
This national censorship plan is so offensive that no one should ever hear about it again!
I propose that we censor it! Think of the children!
Demand at $0 < Demand at $14
And they get paid to figure this out?
Damn it, got the arrow pointing the wrong way... I was too concerned about getting it to show up at all what with the < and all.
Ah, I thought you were making some kind of psychological statement on the general population's attitudes and perception about worth. You know, the reason why your dad has no problem paying $200 for Windows Vista or a monthly bill for McAfee but scoffs when you talk about open-source software.