Ignoring your paranoid flamebait, someone should point out that there's plenty of other products like that, so I guess I will. Apple's iOS has a kill switch and Amazon removed 1984 and Animal Farm from all Kindles following a licensing dispute with the rights holders. And let's not forget the PS3 Other OS fiasco. Also, any DRM system that has to contact the master server to determine if a game is properly licensed (Steam, Spore's DRM, Games for Windows Live...) can have the same effect.
If it bothers you so much, jailbreak and pirate everything. No regulatory body has ever succeeded in stamping out a black market for which there was sufficient financial incentive; in this era of information, notoriety and ego will suffice instead, and have sufficed for the past thirty years, since the invention of the first copy prevention mechanism. Yar-har, fiddle dee-tee.
Eventually, the people who commission these systems will get the clue that a free culture is the best solution. Until then, just work around their silly unenlightened nonsense. But remember to pay them. They need to survive too.
I had a clear understanding of recursion when I needed to put it to the task of doing something, but as I'd never read a programming textbook until university, I had a bad habit of adding extra cases for handling the second-last step, with the mistaken belief that avoiding the base case's function call was preferable. It wasn't really a disaster as much as a confusion of concepts. Seeing a large number of examples of recursive implementations for greedy algorithms and dynamic programming helped a great deal, as did exposure to functional programming. This was something of a handicap in the regional programming competitions I entered in high school; universally it seemed that every other school's students were better-prepared, though I still managed to hold my own with enough work.
Pointers were actually not that hard for me once I'd absorbed a proper explanation of them. It's a lot easier to get used to them once you've spent a long stretch programming in a language that heavily uses implicit references—try implementing some fancy trees in Java or some other childproofed object-oriented language, and you'll build up the understanding in a hurry. After that, pointers just feel like syntactic salt, and less like quicksand. It's remarkable how such small subtle details can be such a tripping point... and a great example of how the head-first approach is a bad idea in programming.
I mean study it at the university level. The Classics programmes at American universities have extremely high attrition rates and some of the oldest average faculties. This is in part due to how thoroughly the field has been analysed, meaning that the only work left to be done outside of archaeology is literary critique, but a major factor in this is heavy reliance on textbooks that have barely changed since the professors learned from them—Wheelock's, for example—and a disconnect from how things are done in other linguistics departments. In fifty years, it is unlikely that there will be more than a few Classics departments in the United States. There won't be any PhDs to run them.
Some people just aren't destined to code, and unfortunately we can't argue people into being creative. It's very difficult to create someone highly imaginative, period, although starving children of creative inputs seems to be the way to go. Recursion is something that I struggled with, in varying degrees, throughout all of high school; I only got it down for certain in second year, and that was with many thousands of hours of prior experience. Without a doubt, it's one of the trickiest leaps of logic in CS to absorb, and my university actually didn't expect us to really be comfortable with it until after first year. (It sure made mathematical induction make more sense when I finally was comfortable with it, though!)
Well... literary epics from two millennia ago are considered artefactual. Just because the manuals still exist doesn't mean the idioms and style of the language won't become so archaic that reading it is a challenge. If the programmers in twenty years are raised on a diet of Haskell, Python and Javascript, this isn't so infeasible. Even the new C++ includes lambda functions—that's going to make reading traditional imperative code very alien. Assembly is already perceived as magic by many, and yet once it was standard fare. (Maybe we're working off two different definitions of 'artefact', here, but I'm going with some degree of veneration and mystery as required.)
Completely agree. But we must emphasise that learning how to do something wisely follows learning how to do it; one model might be learning how to program willy-nilly in high school and then properly in college/university. Demanding rigour in the interests of a child will either kill the interests or kill the child.
Johnny probably needs motivation and opportunity to learn how to code before he worries about attaining production-quality habits. Trying to ingrain correctness from day one is why no one studies Latin and Ancient Greek any more. (And can we, as a society, really afford FORTRAN programs becoming mysterious cultural artefacts?)
I apologise for calling you a troll; I hope you can see how your statements could be read as purposed primarily to sow confusion and be argumentative. (A troll doesn't need to bring up an inconsistent argument until they run out of angles to attack from, so unfortunately there's no way to distinguish right away.) Your first post equated one particular cultural image of masculinity with the male sex, and the second was easy to see as a personal attack. That combination struck me as vexatious; I am glad I am not arguing with a straw man.
(I'm going to put "or maybe it should be 'straw person'" here in quotes just in case you get worried about it, but let's dispense with the man-hating; "straw person" just looks a bit sillly. Maybe we should call them scarecrow fallacies?)
It's true that it's a very pretentious thing to claim to know how others should lead their lives. On Slashdot, there's a large set of such claims that one can make, and be assured that the responses will be knowing nods and hollow Insightful moderations. This set is so large that I sometimes forget where the boundaries are, and it's rather easy to make a well-thought-out statement sound tragically bombastic. I guess that's happened here, and I must apologise for putting forth my own experiences as general fact without solid evidence.
My unadorned opinion on the matter of fantasies is this: a significant portion of the Western population, especially men but people in general, have become increasingly emotionally detached from real life responsibilities. We no longer live the way our ancestors did; thanks to advances in technology, the amount of leisure time available to the average person has greatly increased, and thanks to media, many spend a significant portion of that time in, essentially, dreams. I posit that there is such a thing as going too far, primarily because the world outside hasn't changed all that much. The success of a civilization is still (at least partially) a result of the aggregate action of its people, and as such, people not engaged in seeking the goals prescribed by society have a diminished value to it. People who spend a lot of time gaming fall into this bracket not only while they're gaming, but because the wish-fulfilment they achieve inside the games is better than real life.
One TED Talker, Jane McGonigal, argued that the inherent property of video games in particular that allowed games to be so much more appealing was the feeling that their rules were stable, consistent, and dependable, unlike real life. (I believe there are also some statistics about gaming's pervasiveness circa last February, if you're interested.) While McGonigal maintains that this makes gamers good problem solvers, it also has an implicit downside in that heavy players have rejected the real world's complicated ambiguities. This does not bode well for society in its present state.
I've heard it argued (by everyone from male septuagenarian math professors to dangerously-radical women's studies survivors) that loss of male ambition has played a significant role in the recent progress toward gender equality in higher learning, and it's a fact of genetics that the bell curve for IQ is broader in men than women. (This brings to light the uncomfortable point that, statistically, there should be more men in universities, at which point most of my friends throw me out.) It seems to me that with so much of modern media so expertly tailed to them, and the money being spent on it still on a steady increase, that video games have at least contributed. In a way, women arguing for balance in gaming are those of us annoyed that we've been left with the baby.
Of course, say the futurists, society is fundamentally mutable. We just need to put the right architecture in place and everyone can live in Second Life forever, without any responsibilities at all. This would be nice, but it hasn't happened yet, and even if it were going to happe
There's nothing wrong with escapism in principle, but popular culture has become extremely rife with some downright antisocial ones. They're having some fairly significant effects on people's psyches; Americans in particular have become filled with hate and aggression in the last sixty or so years, and most of them don't even realise it. There's such a thing as too much escapism.
At any rate, however, I wasn't arguing that there's anything wrong with wish-fulfilment; just that one particular set of fantasies has come to dominate to the point that it's poisonous and resistant to the entry of any others. In a way, your replies to me have been a demonstration of this process; at no point have I been attacking you, but you've been openly hostile the entire time, as I've got some jihad against your way of life or something. (For future reference, by the way, most trolls are more subtle.)
Well, I particularly like about:memory and about:permissions. The list of features and changes is long and curious, but I doubt there will be a change as big as 4 for some time.
That's not at all sexist. There are things that I find nauseatingly girly, as well. Sexism is when you apply a negative stereotype to one or both of the sexes. Macho manliness is not the same as masculinity, just the same as cute girliness isn't the same as femininity. Modern warfare military games revel in a specific attitude which glorifies violence and survival instead of treating them like the hardships they actually are. Nowhere in these games do we see battle-weary men struggling to cope with the horrors of war; instead we have action heroes in military fatigues who are swift, confident, and always in control of their circumstances. MW2 did a good deal of work to push away from this (with its constant loss of player control), but the single player campaign is level after level of dominance wish-fulfilment. This is why Machiavelli does not make a good template for a father figure, or indeed a good role model for men in general.
If it helps you sleep at night, the nightly builds are currently 7.0a1, and planning for FF8 is underway. And prior to FF4, Gecko was still in the 1.9 numbering series. (They bumped it up to match the FF version release.)
Ironically, SeaMonkey is still at version 2, when it comes from a branch of the Netscape tree that should make it six or seven.
And furthermore, all of these web browsers are identified as Mozilla/5.0 in their user agents.
I'm sorry, but there's no "let's bash the evil x" going on here, where x is whatever pleases the audience. I have no interest in fighting with your straw ad hominems. I realise that you probably don't even know how much of your post is flamebait, so I'll try to step around it entirely. Maybe something will get through to you.
People enjoy playing games where they can closely identify with the characters. Games are already fantasies and lack realism in all sorts of other ways; where not dramatically or technically infeasible, there are lots of cases where giving the players a choice in their self-representation would do more to benefit marketability than hinder artistic value. A lot of games deal with this problem successfully without turning into Second Life.
There's no such thing as a gamer who doesn't empathise with his or her avatar within the game. This isn't vanity in the sense of Narcissus sitting in front of a mirror all day, but part of the experience and what makes video games unique. Being Duke Nukem makes you feel powerful and unrestricted; being Chell makes you feel tenacious and irritated; being Gordon Freeman makes you feel desperate but ingenuitive. Try as we might, gender is still a very strong dividing line in our world—much moreso than skin colour or cultural heritage—and as such, it has a powerful dampening effect on this empathetic process.
In the hypothetical end-game of feminism, this dividing line is virtually invisible—but then, so are the stereotypes that caused the problem in the first place. These aren't new arguments.
I didn't set out with the intention of saying that MW2 needs to be more girl-friendly, by the way; merely that testosterone-drenched games currently dominate the market, and without a counterbalance, it's easy to see the genre of FPSes as a whole as a boy's club.
Wow. You should have thought twice before posting.
Comparing a statistic that describes the dynamics and personal decisions of hundreds if not thousands of people to the presence of a token character is not even slightly equatable. I assume you haven't taken a second-year statistics course.
Further, the targets are different and not necessarily causally linked. The fraction of women with the potential to enjoy engineering is not the same question as the fraction of women interested in gaming, which TFS argues is about the same as the number of men; even if the sheer numbers are approximately comparable, that doesn't even support the idea that they're identical sets.
Further still, you're comparing fractions of representation to fractions of audience, which is a little like tying your own shoelaces together and then tripping over them. Universities have been improving the sex ratio in STEM programs primarily through enhanced representation of women in promotional materials and cultural portrayals of their disciplines. Because the cultural image the institutions put forth is woman-friendly, we're not turned off at the front door, and because the staff and faculty within are conscious of their organizations' intended office culture (typically canonized in policy), they themselves make an effort to be more egalitarian.
No mandate or attitude for such reform exists in the commercial world, where products live and die based on sales, even though they carry with them potentially powerful cultural impact. As a result, the games industry has a long-standing habit of staying within the boundaries it's comfortable with, lest they alienate what they perceive to be their core audience—as it often occurs in these sorts of cases, one dollar sign is making a judgment about another dollar sign's value system, and screwing over a third.
Going back to picking on Valve: only one in five special infected in the original L4D was female, and you couldn't even play her in Versus. The amount of effort that would have been required to make the Hunter, Smoker and Boomer be gender-neutral would have been trivial compared to the rest of the game.
Relatedly, and continuing to pick on Valve, players have been working for years now to create workable female models for TF2—and there's still been precious little interest from Mann Co. Even though the gender bias is part of the game's atmosphere, a significant portion of the fanbase feels slighted by it. This seems to be a stumbling block outside of extreme fantasy and science fiction; sometimes authenticity needs to be sacrificed in favour of modern moral values. Just ask Benjamin Sisko.
There's a trick here that's creating the illusion that women aren't interested, and that trick is that the goalposts for what makes a "girl-friendly" game are moving. When Pong came out, there was a very extreme gender bias in anything related to technology or computers, and as such, the average woman didn't feel comfortable stepping into something so clandestinely electronic. It wasn't that there was a major stigma associated with it, but merely that the subconscious sensation of being a fish out of water became extremely unpleasant. In gaming today, this is still a problem for a large portion of women, though fortunately more and more are being raised on excellent titles like the Portal series (which has, of course, been discussed to death) that not only fail to propagate the chauvinism (which the eternally popular puzzle games also do), but present women in a variety of roles with meaningful emotions.
Still, the proximity in genre and cultural context to some of the worst offenders (Duke Nukem and Lara Croft come to mind, but even military games like MW2's single-player campaign are so Saxton-Hale-grade manly it makes me physically ill) has a powerful dampening effect: the prolonged success and influence of such games still underscore the message "you are an outsider here," and that's something that today's teenagers are really the first to make a stand against, en masse. Every Zoey (L4D) and Samus helps push against this... but Valve, why do you still only have one girl per L4D game? All it takes is equal representation. We figured this out in academia; heck, the engineering department at my university now has a 20% female undergraduate population. It's not as hard as it may seem at first.
Well, there is an interval for which we can say for certain. Let's say a legit casino gets taxed $x per month, and of those x dollars, $y go to local government salaries. If it costs more than $y to bribe the local officials, then we can say with certainty that an illegal casino is worse than a legal one. If it costs more than $x dollars, there's probably no reason not to go and get yourself licensed... unless you're doing the whole black market thing (pick any three social evils: drugs, terrorism, moonshine, guns, child porn, hookers, blood diamonds, slaves, stolen art...), in which case I think we agree that's bad.
You can't say that for certain. It's worse if a greater amount goes to political bribes than would go to government salaries in a legal situation. People don't put 100% of their income back into the market, anyway.
Both of us are arguing from assumptions without any real data. You're being just as silly as I am, except it might be worse, because you sound serious. Please chill out.
Why drag out those when organized crime has such a rich range of its own nefarious activities? Drugs yes, but also guns... bribes... kickbacks... actually when you think about it, the major difference is that when it's taxed, a small portion of it goes to programmes instead of just the politicians.
Slashdot Mirror
Ignoring your paranoid flamebait, someone should point out that there's plenty of other products like that, so I guess I will. Apple's iOS has a kill switch and Amazon removed 1984 and Animal Farm from all Kindles following a licensing dispute with the rights holders. And let's not forget the PS3 Other OS fiasco. Also, any DRM system that has to contact the master server to determine if a game is properly licensed (Steam, Spore's DRM, Games for Windows Live...) can have the same effect.
If it bothers you so much, jailbreak and pirate everything. No regulatory body has ever succeeded in stamping out a black market for which there was sufficient financial incentive; in this era of information, notoriety and ego will suffice instead, and have sufficed for the past thirty years, since the invention of the first copy prevention mechanism. Yar-har, fiddle dee-tee.
Eventually, the people who commission these systems will get the clue that a free culture is the best solution. Until then, just work around their silly unenlightened nonsense. But remember to pay them. They need to survive too.
No, "they're used by upstart companies aboard." It says that in the summary.
Aboard. Just like that.
Aboard what, you may ask.
To you, the doubter, I say: aboard everything.
You may want this.
I had a clear understanding of recursion when I needed to put it to the task of doing something, but as I'd never read a programming textbook until university, I had a bad habit of adding extra cases for handling the second-last step, with the mistaken belief that avoiding the base case's function call was preferable. It wasn't really a disaster as much as a confusion of concepts. Seeing a large number of examples of recursive implementations for greedy algorithms and dynamic programming helped a great deal, as did exposure to functional programming. This was something of a handicap in the regional programming competitions I entered in high school; universally it seemed that every other school's students were better-prepared, though I still managed to hold my own with enough work.
Pointers were actually not that hard for me once I'd absorbed a proper explanation of them. It's a lot easier to get used to them once you've spent a long stretch programming in a language that heavily uses implicit references—try implementing some fancy trees in Java or some other childproofed object-oriented language, and you'll build up the understanding in a hurry. After that, pointers just feel like syntactic salt, and less like quicksand. It's remarkable how such small subtle details can be such a tripping point... and a great example of how the head-first approach is a bad idea in programming.
I mean study it at the university level. The Classics programmes at American universities have extremely high attrition rates and some of the oldest average faculties. This is in part due to how thoroughly the field has been analysed, meaning that the only work left to be done outside of archaeology is literary critique, but a major factor in this is heavy reliance on textbooks that have barely changed since the professors learned from them—Wheelock's, for example—and a disconnect from how things are done in other linguistics departments. In fifty years, it is unlikely that there will be more than a few Classics departments in the United States. There won't be any PhDs to run them.
Some people just aren't destined to code, and unfortunately we can't argue people into being creative. It's very difficult to create someone highly imaginative, period, although starving children of creative inputs seems to be the way to go. Recursion is something that I struggled with, in varying degrees, throughout all of high school; I only got it down for certain in second year, and that was with many thousands of hours of prior experience. Without a doubt, it's one of the trickiest leaps of logic in CS to absorb, and my university actually didn't expect us to really be comfortable with it until after first year. (It sure made mathematical induction make more sense when I finally was comfortable with it, though!)
Well... literary epics from two millennia ago are considered artefactual. Just because the manuals still exist doesn't mean the idioms and style of the language won't become so archaic that reading it is a challenge. If the programmers in twenty years are raised on a diet of Haskell, Python and Javascript, this isn't so infeasible. Even the new C++ includes lambda functions—that's going to make reading traditional imperative code very alien. Assembly is already perceived as magic by many, and yet once it was standard fare. (Maybe we're working off two different definitions of 'artefact', here, but I'm going with some degree of veneration and mystery as required.)
Completely agree. But we must emphasise that learning how to do something wisely follows learning how to do it; one model might be learning how to program willy-nilly in high school and then properly in college/university. Demanding rigour in the interests of a child will either kill the interests or kill the child.
Johnny probably needs motivation and opportunity to learn how to code before he worries about attaining production-quality habits. Trying to ingrain correctness from day one is why no one studies Latin and Ancient Greek any more. (And can we, as a society, really afford FORTRAN programs becoming mysterious cultural artefacts?)
I apologise for calling you a troll; I hope you can see how your statements could be read as purposed primarily to sow confusion and be argumentative. (A troll doesn't need to bring up an inconsistent argument until they run out of angles to attack from, so unfortunately there's no way to distinguish right away.) Your first post equated one particular cultural image of masculinity with the male sex, and the second was easy to see as a personal attack. That combination struck me as vexatious; I am glad I am not arguing with a straw man.
(I'm going to put "or maybe it should be 'straw person'" here in quotes just in case you get worried about it, but let's dispense with the man-hating; "straw person" just looks a bit sillly. Maybe we should call them scarecrow fallacies?)
It's true that it's a very pretentious thing to claim to know how others should lead their lives. On Slashdot, there's a large set of such claims that one can make, and be assured that the responses will be knowing nods and hollow Insightful moderations. This set is so large that I sometimes forget where the boundaries are, and it's rather easy to make a well-thought-out statement sound tragically bombastic. I guess that's happened here, and I must apologise for putting forth my own experiences as general fact without solid evidence.
My unadorned opinion on the matter of fantasies is this: a significant portion of the Western population, especially men but people in general, have become increasingly emotionally detached from real life responsibilities. We no longer live the way our ancestors did; thanks to advances in technology, the amount of leisure time available to the average person has greatly increased, and thanks to media, many spend a significant portion of that time in, essentially, dreams. I posit that there is such a thing as going too far, primarily because the world outside hasn't changed all that much. The success of a civilization is still (at least partially) a result of the aggregate action of its people, and as such, people not engaged in seeking the goals prescribed by society have a diminished value to it. People who spend a lot of time gaming fall into this bracket not only while they're gaming, but because the wish-fulfilment they achieve inside the games is better than real life.
One TED Talker, Jane McGonigal, argued that the inherent property of video games in particular that allowed games to be so much more appealing was the feeling that their rules were stable, consistent, and dependable, unlike real life. (I believe there are also some statistics about gaming's pervasiveness circa last February, if you're interested.) While McGonigal maintains that this makes gamers good problem solvers, it also has an implicit downside in that heavy players have rejected the real world's complicated ambiguities. This does not bode well for society in its present state.
I've heard it argued (by everyone from male septuagenarian math professors to dangerously-radical women's studies survivors) that loss of male ambition has played a significant role in the recent progress toward gender equality in higher learning, and it's a fact of genetics that the bell curve for IQ is broader in men than women. (This brings to light the uncomfortable point that, statistically, there should be more men in universities, at which point most of my friends throw me out.) It seems to me that with so much of modern media so expertly tailed to them, and the money being spent on it still on a steady increase, that video games have at least contributed. In a way, women arguing for balance in gaming are those of us annoyed that we've been left with the baby.
Of course, say the futurists, society is fundamentally mutable. We just need to put the right architecture in place and everyone can live in Second Life forever, without any responsibilities at all. This would be nice, but it hasn't happened yet, and even if it were going to happe
Omniscient? Check. Omnipresent? Check. Omnipotent? Probably.
I'm not seeing how any of us can make a Google query without some divinity involved.
There's nothing wrong with escapism in principle, but popular culture has become extremely rife with some downright antisocial ones. They're having some fairly significant effects on people's psyches; Americans in particular have become filled with hate and aggression in the last sixty or so years, and most of them don't even realise it. There's such a thing as too much escapism.
At any rate, however, I wasn't arguing that there's anything wrong with wish-fulfilment; just that one particular set of fantasies has come to dominate to the point that it's poisonous and resistant to the entry of any others. In a way, your replies to me have been a demonstration of this process; at no point have I been attacking you, but you've been openly hostile the entire time, as I've got some jihad against your way of life or something. (For future reference, by the way, most trolls are more subtle.)
Well, I particularly like about:memory and about:permissions. The list of features and changes is long and curious, but I doubt there will be a change as big as 4 for some time.
That's not at all sexist. There are things that I find nauseatingly girly, as well. Sexism is when you apply a negative stereotype to one or both of the sexes. Macho manliness is not the same as masculinity, just the same as cute girliness isn't the same as femininity. Modern warfare military games revel in a specific attitude which glorifies violence and survival instead of treating them like the hardships they actually are. Nowhere in these games do we see battle-weary men struggling to cope with the horrors of war; instead we have action heroes in military fatigues who are swift, confident, and always in control of their circumstances. MW2 did a good deal of work to push away from this (with its constant loss of player control), but the single player campaign is level after level of dominance wish-fulfilment. This is why Machiavelli does not make a good template for a father figure, or indeed a good role model for men in general.
If it helps you sleep at night, the nightly builds are currently 7.0a1, and planning for FF8 is underway. And prior to FF4, Gecko was still in the 1.9 numbering series. (They bumped it up to match the FF version release.)
Ironically, SeaMonkey is still at version 2, when it comes from a branch of the Netscape tree that should make it six or seven.
And furthermore, all of these web browsers are identified as Mozilla/5.0 in their user agents.
I'm sorry, but there's no "let's bash the evil x" going on here, where x is whatever pleases the audience. I have no interest in fighting with your straw ad hominems. I realise that you probably don't even know how much of your post is flamebait, so I'll try to step around it entirely. Maybe something will get through to you.
People enjoy playing games where they can closely identify with the characters. Games are already fantasies and lack realism in all sorts of other ways; where not dramatically or technically infeasible, there are lots of cases where giving the players a choice in their self-representation would do more to benefit marketability than hinder artistic value. A lot of games deal with this problem successfully without turning into Second Life.
There's no such thing as a gamer who doesn't empathise with his or her avatar within the game. This isn't vanity in the sense of Narcissus sitting in front of a mirror all day, but part of the experience and what makes video games unique. Being Duke Nukem makes you feel powerful and unrestricted; being Chell makes you feel tenacious and irritated; being Gordon Freeman makes you feel desperate but ingenuitive. Try as we might, gender is still a very strong dividing line in our world—much moreso than skin colour or cultural heritage—and as such, it has a powerful dampening effect on this empathetic process.
In the hypothetical end-game of feminism, this dividing line is virtually invisible—but then, so are the stereotypes that caused the problem in the first place. These aren't new arguments.
I didn't set out with the intention of saying that MW2 needs to be more girl-friendly, by the way; merely that testosterone-drenched games currently dominate the market, and without a counterbalance, it's easy to see the genre of FPSes as a whole as a boy's club.
Wow. You should have thought twice before posting.
Comparing a statistic that describes the dynamics and personal decisions of hundreds if not thousands of people to the presence of a token character is not even slightly equatable. I assume you haven't taken a second-year statistics course.
Further, the targets are different and not necessarily causally linked. The fraction of women with the potential to enjoy engineering is not the same question as the fraction of women interested in gaming, which TFS argues is about the same as the number of men; even if the sheer numbers are approximately comparable, that doesn't even support the idea that they're identical sets.
Further still, you're comparing fractions of representation to fractions of audience, which is a little like tying your own shoelaces together and then tripping over them. Universities have been improving the sex ratio in STEM programs primarily through enhanced representation of women in promotional materials and cultural portrayals of their disciplines. Because the cultural image the institutions put forth is woman-friendly, we're not turned off at the front door, and because the staff and faculty within are conscious of their organizations' intended office culture (typically canonized in policy), they themselves make an effort to be more egalitarian.
No mandate or attitude for such reform exists in the commercial world, where products live and die based on sales, even though they carry with them potentially powerful cultural impact. As a result, the games industry has a long-standing habit of staying within the boundaries it's comfortable with, lest they alienate what they perceive to be their core audience—as it often occurs in these sorts of cases, one dollar sign is making a judgment about another dollar sign's value system, and screwing over a third.
Going back to picking on Valve: only one in five special infected in the original L4D was female, and you couldn't even play her in Versus. The amount of effort that would have been required to make the Hunter, Smoker and Boomer be gender-neutral would have been trivial compared to the rest of the game.
Relatedly, and continuing to pick on Valve, players have been working for years now to create workable female models for TF2—and there's still been precious little interest from Mann Co. Even though the gender bias is part of the game's atmosphere, a significant portion of the fanbase feels slighted by it. This seems to be a stumbling block outside of extreme fantasy and science fiction; sometimes authenticity needs to be sacrificed in favour of modern moral values. Just ask Benjamin Sisko.
There's a trick here that's creating the illusion that women aren't interested, and that trick is that the goalposts for what makes a "girl-friendly" game are moving. When Pong came out, there was a very extreme gender bias in anything related to technology or computers, and as such, the average woman didn't feel comfortable stepping into something so clandestinely electronic. It wasn't that there was a major stigma associated with it, but merely that the subconscious sensation of being a fish out of water became extremely unpleasant. In gaming today, this is still a problem for a large portion of women, though fortunately more and more are being raised on excellent titles like the Portal series (which has, of course, been discussed to death) that not only fail to propagate the chauvinism (which the eternally popular puzzle games also do), but present women in a variety of roles with meaningful emotions.
Still, the proximity in genre and cultural context to some of the worst offenders (Duke Nukem and Lara Croft come to mind, but even military games like MW2's single-player campaign are so Saxton-Hale-grade manly it makes me physically ill) has a powerful dampening effect: the prolonged success and influence of such games still underscore the message "you are an outsider here," and that's something that today's teenagers are really the first to make a stand against, en masse. Every Zoey (L4D) and Samus helps push against this... but Valve, why do you still only have one girl per L4D game? All it takes is equal representation. We figured this out in academia; heck, the engineering department at my university now has a 20% female undergraduate population. It's not as hard as it may seem at first.
Ah, but it was foreseen: we're trying to eliminate tobacco consumption in Canada.
Well, there is an interval for which we can say for certain. Let's say a legit casino gets taxed $x per month, and of those x dollars, $y go to local government salaries. If it costs more than $y to bribe the local officials, then we can say with certainty that an illegal casino is worse than a legal one. If it costs more than $x dollars, there's probably no reason not to go and get yourself licensed... unless you're doing the whole black market thing (pick any three social evils: drugs, terrorism, moonshine, guns, child porn, hookers, blood diamonds, slaves, stolen art...), in which case I think we agree that's bad.
You can't say that for certain. It's worse if a greater amount goes to political bribes than would go to government salaries in a legal situation. People don't put 100% of their income back into the market, anyway.
Both of us are arguing from assumptions without any real data. You're being just as silly as I am, except it might be worse, because you sound serious. Please chill out.
Why drag out those when organized crime has such a rich range of its own nefarious activities? Drugs yes, but also guns... bribes... kickbacks... actually when you think about it, the major difference is that when it's taxed, a small portion of it goes to programmes instead of just the politicians.
All that matters is that it's less rusty than theirs :\
Lovely. Now, was that really so hard?
Exactly my feelings. "Now, Mr. Submitter, is that GNU/Innovation that Mr. Torvalds gave us, or BSD/Innovation?"