No Zelda, Dragon Quest or even Final Fantasy. Only obscure western titles that faded into obscurity. In the 80s the RPG genre was mostly japanese, the western scene didn't really exist on the market until Baldur's Gate.
Like genetic evolution, it's simple conceit to imagine that evolution moves from worse to better - in society or genetics. Conditions change, and we evolve towards optimal for conditions as they exist.
Evolution projects that men will be weaker, as they will need their physical strength less and less. How is that "better"? Evolution is not improvement. It's just different.
Society doesn't improve over time. The 20th century proved that. Destruction is the most obvious "wrong", even outside of our norms.
For a time, and it was isolated and very different to the one we have today.
Chattel slavery (the particularly pernicious kind we had in America) hasn't been all that common in history (we really had little excuse for it, even adjusting for the times).
Slavery has been very common throughout history. Whole civilizations were built on it, like Egypt, albeit it was more forced labor than chattel slavery (not very different in any case). And even some things which were not technically slavery were pretty close, with often throughout history people being reduced into serving others.
Today's norms of "everyone is to be equal" (which would be utter nonsense for most people in other time periods) and "the majority is right" are not necessarily better. It could be argued that slavery etc. are better for humanity. At least a minority of people can have an easy and happy life. In a world where everyone is equal no one can. Machines may change the game though, since they'd become the slaves to replace people.
In any case, the same arguments you're using against criticizing norms can be used to criticize them, since norms vary over time, and there is no clear association between "better" norms and "longer period they were valid in". There is no absolute and no God, even to engineers. A good engineer is pragmatic and does work that match the specifications, regardless of whether the specifications are "good" or "bad".
The current social norm is that the social norms from the past thousands years (lack of democracy, slavery, etc.) were very bad. Yet they were in place for way longer than the current ones.
Thousands of years of history cannot be wrong, right?
Deceiving oneself with fallacies of what ought to be, what is right or what is wrong is not useful.
It is important that people understand that all those morals society lives with are completely arbitrary. As part of society, one has to follow the norm to get things done, but one should be critical of people using such unfounded beliefs to justify facts that would stigmatize or impair certain people, which might end up wasting the society's resources when fixing those problems later on.
There is no good or bad attached to events. They just happened. Nothing more, nothing less.
You may have an opinion on certain events, giving them a certain quality to your eyes, but that doesn't make those events bear that quality in an absolute referential.
The cell is just one in a long line of "Hey lets use lots of general purpose CPUs for graphics!" ideas that never panned out.
SPUs are not general-purpose. Also GPUs are becoming more and more general-purpose. There are a lot of companies that make many-core general-purpose processors too.
In the past half-decade PPC seems to be going nowhere in the consumer space.
Both the Xbox 360 and the Wii are also PowerPC. I wouldn't say it's going nowhere when it's covering the whole console market.
None in particular, but the fact that multiple countries will co-operate the system will provide similar benefits to multiple companies sharing a market. The US having a monopoly on DNS registration just means that only the US view of things will be pushed. ICANN often takes actions against the enemies of the United States. Wikileaks, "copyright infringement" websites (i.e. torrent trackers), etc. have all been blocked at the ICANN level by US demand, even when their authors were not convicted of anything.
That makes me think copyright infringement is the new weapon against the first amendment, and is way worse than hate speech.
To repeat what you said in other words: We Americans are better than the rest of the world, which isn't good enough to be in charge of as great a responsibility as the Internet.
Slashdot Mirror
Some people value science and engineering more than girls.
It's quite more fulfilling to engineer something than to have sex with a shallow woman.
I wonder if someday, people will stop posting yes/no questions with obvious answers on slashdot.
Sorry, I failed to realize that this article assumed the US were the center of the world.
Game consoles are computers.
No Zelda, Dragon Quest or even Final Fantasy. Only obscure western titles that faded into obscurity. In the 80s the RPG genre was mostly japanese, the western scene didn't really exist on the market until Baldur's Gate.
The reason why there is none is that plain text converts information better than HTML with embedded images.
It's more of a philosophy than a religion.
Plus geeks always secretly found asian religions interesting.
The parts alone would probably cost that much.
Telling whether NP-hard is a buzz word is itself NP-hard.
Evolution projects that men will be weaker, as they will need their physical strength less and less.
How is that "better"? Evolution is not improvement. It's just different.
Society doesn't improve over time. The 20th century proved that. Destruction is the most obvious "wrong", even outside of our norms.
For a time, and it was isolated and very different to the one we have today.
Slavery has been very common throughout history. Whole civilizations were built on it, like Egypt, albeit it was more forced labor than chattel slavery (not very different in any case).
And even some things which were not technically slavery were pretty close, with often throughout history people being reduced into serving others.
Today's norms of "everyone is to be equal" (which would be utter nonsense for most people in other time periods) and "the majority is right" are not necessarily better.
It could be argued that slavery etc. are better for humanity. At least a minority of people can have an easy and happy life. In a world where everyone is equal no one can. Machines may change the game though, since they'd become the slaves to replace people.
In any case, the same arguments you're using against criticizing norms can be used to criticize them, since norms vary over time, and there is no clear association between "better" norms and "longer period they were valid in". There is no absolute and no God, even to engineers. A good engineer is pragmatic and does work that match the specifications, regardless of whether the specifications are "good" or "bad".
The current social norm is that the social norms from the past thousands years (lack of democracy, slavery, etc.) were very bad.
Yet they were in place for way longer than the current ones.
Thousands of years of history cannot be wrong, right?
I only care about things that are useful.
Deceiving oneself with fallacies of what ought to be, what is right or what is wrong is not useful.
It is important that people understand that all those morals society lives with are completely arbitrary. As part of society, one has to follow the norm to get things done, but one should be critical of people using such unfounded beliefs to justify facts that would stigmatize or impair certain people, which might end up wasting the society's resources when fixing those problems later on.
There is no good or bad attached to events. They just happened. Nothing more, nothing less.
You may have an opinion on certain events, giving them a certain quality to your eyes, but that doesn't make those events bear that quality in an absolute referential.
Not more or less than anything else that human beings have done.
You mean O_n, not O^n
Or good and bad, rather.
There is no such thing as right and wrong.
Thank you Captain Obvious, but we'd already realized the game industry was going towards game-as-a-service years ago.
SPUs are not general-purpose.
Also GPUs are becoming more and more general-purpose. There are a lot of companies that make many-core general-purpose processors too.
Both the Xbox 360 and the Wii are also PowerPC.
I wouldn't say it's going nowhere when it's covering the whole console market.
None in particular, but the fact that multiple countries will co-operate the system will provide similar benefits to multiple companies sharing a market.
The US having a monopoly on DNS registration just means that only the US view of things will be pushed. ICANN often takes actions against the enemies of the United States. Wikileaks, "copyright infringement" websites (i.e. torrent trackers), etc. have all been blocked at the ICANN level by US demand, even when their authors were not convicted of anything.
That makes me think copyright infringement is the new weapon against the first amendment, and is way worse than hate speech.
Law is irrelevant. What matters is how it gets applied in practice.
Consider also how the US choose to not follow their own laws at international borders or at US facilities outside of the US.
You'd have to be terribly misinformed to believe that.
Remove the 'we' then. The rest still stands.
To repeat what you said in other words:
We Americans are better than the rest of the world, which isn't good enough to be in charge of as great a responsibility as the Internet.