Nope. As much as I like video games, I won't waste my time buying games that are just going to break if I get a new computer or do a clean wipe of my hard drive. People need to grow a pair when it comes to being a consumer. Just don't buy things. I can happily pass up on a game because its DRM sucks without any remorse. I spend money on games because I have money to spend on games, not because I need to. If a company like EA wants to try and make my life miserable? Eh, that is a few hundred dollars a year less they are going to get from my pocket.
I agree, I think EA is blowing its own foot off. I spend a LOT of money on games. I spend a lot of money on computer games. I am in the process of building a new machine from scratch is basically a gaming computer spawned from hell. I like games.
I also never pirate. The last time I pirated something I was 16. Buying things is quick, easy, and without hassle. Pirating on the other hand is a pain in the ass, time consuming, and risky. My time is worth more than what it takes to pirate. I have a large disposable income because I don't spend my money on cars, HD TVs, or anything like that. I'll buy a game if I have any interest it and I won't feel bad if I decide I don't like it. I have never resold a game. I am the perfect guy to sell games too.
I won't be buying Spore, C&C3, or anything with this absurd DRM. I am not going to have a game install crippleware onto my computer, and then limit how many times I can install games. I have reinstalled Starcraft, Fallout, and Knight of the Old Republic more times than I can count. Hell, I will burn through three installs in under a year. I will easily kill 5 installs in a year when I make/buy a new computer.
So, EA can continue down this path, but I won't go with them. It isn't going to stop piracy (as Spore has shown). If anything, it will increase piracy as the pirated version is the non-crippled version. So it won't stop piracy, but it will stop someone like me who merrily blows a few hundred dollars a month on games from buying.
Your dismissive attitude towards drones misses what makes them such excellent military toys. They are far more then airplane without pilots. First, most drones are stealthy by nature. They have small radar signatures, are hard to see, and are quiet. More importantly though, drones are great at loitering. To get a couple of hellfire missiles to loiter over where they shouldn't be (say Pakistan) would be extremely costly. It would require rotating shifts of large airplanes with big crews pouring tons of gas into a machine designed do many things.
A drone the other hand can circle over Pakistan without fear that if it crashes a pilot is now in enemy hands (or even "friendly" hands of the Pakistan state). It can stay as long as its fuel lets it and be replaced by another. The drone itself can be (comparatively) light because it doesn't need defensive systems, pilot life support, or to fill multiple roles like an F-16 or Raptor has to. The cost effectiveness of a drone opens it up to a world of missions that normal planes just can't do. The gap is going to become even more absurd once the next generation of drones comes out that are designed better to the missions that they are being given and there are remote refuelers.
Asymmetrical war is ugly. The entire point of such a war is to use civilians as terrain. The guy with all the guns wants you fighting out in the open, while the guy with the smaller weaker force wants to dodge among civilian such that using your power results in needless casualties that simple further their cause.
The US would like nothing more than for insurgents to leave homes and families and go find a nice cave or tent to live in. You can drop MOABs on caves and tens, carpet bomb the area, and send in a squad of marines with orders to shoot anything that isn't a marine. It isn't an accident that civilians tend to die when insurgents die. It is part of their strategy to counter the fact that if you US knew that an insurgent was somewhere in a quarter mile radius of some place, they could merrily exterminate all life in the area. Toss some civilians into the radius, and now it means that they need find which house you are in AND when you drop a bomb it needs to be just big enough to do the job. If the bomb is too big, you whack more civilians than you are already going to kill.
It sucks, but if the US had a magical wand that made insurgents drop dead and all the civilians walk away unharmed, they would use it. They don't have it, and so the best they can do is give up fighting anyone willing to use civilians as cover or just accept that innocents are going to die and try desperately to keep the numbers down. Even if the US had no great moral compunctions about whacking civilians, it is counter productive to their goals. Each dead civilian is an insurgent victory.
Because some people like violence. Eh, simple enough? Not all games are for kids. God forbid we get the occasional truly adult game.
The reason why violence is good is because it enhances the fantasy. If you shoot someone, and they die in a horrible and realistic way, it makes whatever fantasy they are trying to sell you more believable. Personally, I could do with a society without thought crimes. If this is what makes you happy, go for it. I would much rather people play out their fantasies, no matter how unacceptable in the real world, in video games.
No, I am afraid it goes even deeper than that. I wouldn't want surveillance even in a "perfect democracy". Majority rule and surveillance make bad bedfellows. There is nothing inherently "good" about majority rule, it just happens to be more just than the alternatives. In a majority rule state, you can still have 49% of the population enslaved by other 51%.
I specifically want a NON-Democratic government. I am not asking for a tyranny or a dictatorship or anything of that nature, but a government where the whim of the majority isn't law. The things I love best about the American government are its non-democratic parts. The Bill of Rights in particular is a document that sets out exactly what is beyond the realm of majority rule. It sets down rights that are (supposed) to be kept, majority be damned.
How do you set up a just liberal non-democratic government where surveillance doesn't send shivers down my spine? The hell if I know. I just know that surveillance and democracies do not go together. I would rather suffer higher crime rates than suffer a surveillance society in a society filled with literally countless laws.
The problem with surveillance isn't the surveillance, especially if you toss it into a solid framework of checks and balances. The problem with surveillance is that we live in nations with uncountable laws, many of which are simply bad laws. The old cliche of "well if you have nothing to hide..." is actually true. The problem is that most people DO have something to hide.
Imagine for a moment what it would be like if you and the people you know were suddenly tossed in jail and fined for every single law you have broken. If every illegal thing you have ever done was tallied up and the proper punishments were dolled out, the vast majority of people would be looking at years of jail time and literally billions of dollars worth of fines.
The problem is democracy. In a system of majority rule, a large part of the minority is generally having laws passed against it. I wouldn't mind perfect surveillance in a state that just enforces a few "no shit" rules against violence and theft, but we don't live in such a world. For that reason, good surveillance scares the shit out of me. I don't want to live in a world where I spend my time being paranoid about what laws I could possibly be breaking every time I step out the door.
Slamming a creationist is funny in a crowd that has a regard for science. We also laugh at the hypercube and the flatearth people. Respecting the right to a belief doesn't mean you have to respect the belief. So, I think people should be able to believe whatever crazy nonsense they want, but I that isn't going to stop me from laughing at them.
I personally put 4000 year creationist below the crazy drunk guy on the street rambling incoherently. At least the crazy drunk guy has an excuse for not using his mental facilities. I can stomach the ID people only slightly easier, as at least their god of holes actually lives in a hole and rank them not much worse than a UFO nut. People who believe that god, FSM, or whatever touched off a big bang or what not, eh, I have nothing wrong with them. Science really doesn't offer up all that much, and so if you insist on believing something magic is just as good as anything else.
I don't think we disagree. I say that we have shaped our society such that we can live peacefully together, and that as time has progressed we have shaped our society into more and more peaceful of a state. You apparently agree.
Now, if we wiped out society and everyone went back to hunting and gathering, would we become more violent than we are now? Probably. Does that make us a "peaceful" species? Eh, it depends upon how you define it. In practical and measurable terms we certainly are more peaceful. There can be no argument that humans kill each other proportionally less than they ever have in history.
Now, you might argue that it is out "nature" to be violent and that we are thus still the same savage territorial pack animals that we always have been. I would argue that you are missing out on a very fundamental piece of human evolution. Humans have a certain genetic code that, baring society, produces a relatively cunning pack animal, and we still have that same savage genetic code. However, part of that evolution is the ability to transcend evolution through technology and communication. What makes a humans unique is that it has flipped evolution the bird and has made its own rapid "evolution" through non-genetic means. If you strip away that non-genetic evolution, we certainly are the same old savages, but by stripping away that piece of humanity you are removing our greatest evolutionary trait.
So. Are humans as violent as ever if you strip them of technology and society? Sure. Does that mean jack shit in the grand scheme of things? Nope. We have found a way to blast all of our natural evolutionary limits that demand violence, bloodshed, in communities larger than a nuclear family. I personally consider these advances to be as important of an identity to humans today as our base genetic code is.
In the end, the argument is an argument over semantics. We agree. Humans today act more peacefully than they ever have, and we agree that should you strip away one of our greatest evolutionary traits, we would be nasty territorial savages again
70 million out of 2 million... or 3.5% of the population. To beat that same death rate in a pack of 20 dogs, you need to kill one. To do the same in a tribe of humans 50 big, you need to kill 2. Go back and reread my post because I think you missed the point. Even our worst genocides are pocket change in the context of the human population and the societies we live in. The only thing that has changed is that we have gotten more peaceful and our societies have gotten bigger.
2 people dying out of a tribe of 50 doesn't sound like much, but that was proportionally more death than was see during World War II.
Lets do a thought experiment. The population of the participating nations during World War II (see wikipedia) was roughly 2 billion. An estimate of total casualties during World War II, both civilian and military is around 70 million. This was a full scale industrial. Civilian infrastructures were target by all sides, the Axis and to a lesser extent the Soviets intentionally rounded up certain civilian populations for the singular goal of exterminating unarmed civilian populations. This is as bad as it gets, and so how to the numbers roll out?
Total losses for the participating parties? A paltry 3.5%. If in your band of hunter-gatheres just 2 people die in war, you just managed to score a higher casualty rate than World War II. The US had a 0.32% casualty rate.
My point isn't that we over estimate how much death is involved in tribal conflict. My point is that we vastly over estimate how much death there is in modern warfare. Modern nations have vastly smaller portions of their population devoted to war. Even the big mean US with its absurd military spending has a military that makes up just 0.5% of its population.
Finally, your concepts of tribal warfare are a little off.
First, the Aztecs and the Mayans were not egalitarian tribal civilizations.
Second, the Aztecs and Mayans did prefer to capture their opponents and so built weapons accordingly... but they captured people for the purpose of human sacrifice. Hardly an improvement.
Third, your concept of tribal warfare is a bit dated and harks back to the "noble savage" days of anthropology. The idea was that those stone age tribes were all peaceful people that lived in harmony with nature and a pile of assorted bullshit. As it turns out, the data universally debunked this absurd notion. Anthropologist that have done studies tracking deaths in stone age tribes all come to the same conclusion... they suffer excessively high proportions of violent deaths. This shouldn't come as a shock. If you kill two people in a tribe of 50, you just scored a higher death rate than World War II. Wipe out a family of 10, and you just had a genocide worse than any modern society has ever seen.
Humans have been and continue to get more peaceful. Your likelihood of dying in violent conflict continues to drop. The only difference is that you simply care about far more people and your ape brain just can't wrap around the numbers.
You could certainly make that argument, but you will still probably die of some other cause than violent death.
You also miss the point that a 1950's human or a 1900's human was VASTLY less likely to die a violent death than his ancient tribal ancestors. We might like violent media, but it certainly isn't violent media that is keeping humans in check. We had mastered a great deal of our violent tendencies LONG before violent media came into existence.
Humans are about as "naturally" violent any other pack/tribe based creature. Packs/tribes of anything will fight when they bump too close. Meerkats, wolves, wild dogs, lions, apes... all of these creatures will go after each other if their territories bump. What separate humans is that even in our least technological "natural" state, we do a fair amount of trading with rivals. We also develop far more complex relationships using alliance and the like to try and gain a little more leverage. Our relationship with rivals can go beyond simply keeping them out of territory, but can extend to complex trades for women/resources/alliances.
Humans have done a very remarkable thing. They have tossed off their natural tribal tendencies that basically spell certain war with terrible costs the as soon as the population reaches over a few hundred, and replaced them with massive stable societies that are very peace pron. We have extended the circle of our empathy well beyond its natural limits of a few hundred to hundreds of millions.
Sure, this defying of nature through social institutions has its draw backs. We can pretty easily delude ourselves into believing the worst in our selves because our empathy is so expanded, but our natural fairness tallying devices are still ancient. Hence, you get the silly assertions that humans are abnormally violent despite pretty clear indications that humans today are one of the least likely creatures to commit genocide against each other. On the whole though, I think what humans have done is a truly remarkable achievement that should be looked upon with with pride.
No, we really are not that violent, and we are getting more peaceful as time drags on. As a human, the chances of dying in war are very small. In fact, your chances of dying a violent death have been rapidly plummeting as time has moved on. Even our most horrific industrial wars kill vastly fewer people as a percentage of the population than simple day to day tribal conflict.
If you want to compare us against animals, we really don't rate that high. Society wide genocide is pretty common for insects. Other primates are at least as aggressive as us and suffer far more violent deaths. Many animals suffer pretty grievous loses to violent conflict over mating.
The only thing humans have going for them when it comes to the mass slaughter is that we have absolutely blasted our internal social limits on empathy. As a human, you are hard wired to live in a society no big than roughly 400 people. That is the limit of how many faces you can keep track of at a time, a pretty well documented limit of purely egalitarian human societies. Egalitarian tribal societies that get that big inevitably split. Through various methods of division of labor and hierarchies we have slowly been bumping up the size of a viable society. We are now to the point where a few hundred million is a perfectly reasonable size for a society.
France is a great example. This is a society of 60 million people. In general, they feel that they share a common bond and they feel empathy for each other. In general, they trust each other more than they trust others, and they think of each others needs over outsiders. True, one Frenchmen doesnâ(TM)t have as tight of a bond as his fellow country men as two men in a 100 unit tribal society, but it is close enough where they are a clearly distinct society. Just a couple of weeks ago 10 Frenchmen were killed in war (in Afghanistan). That is 0.000016% of the population. Despite this, it was a big deal in France. People acted like their social order had just taken not worthy losses and reacted accordingly.
Hell, take a step back and look at something more âoehorrificâ. 9/11 killed roughly 3000 people. That is 0.001% of the US population. That is 1 in every 100,000 people in the US died. We are talking about a miniscule number of people as compared to the society as a whole, yet despite this, Americans took the losses psychologically like family members had died.
My point is this; our murdering of fellow man has not increased. It has actually dropped, and dropped by a substantial amount. Further, compared to nearly all other species, as a human you are vastly less likely to suffer a violent death. The only thing that makes humans unique, is our empathy. Human empathy has grown and increased to the point where we care about millions and millions of people, rather than three or four around us. In our growing empathy, our old brains hardwired for societies less than 400 people have not kept up. As a result we think that the loss of 1 person in a tribe of 400 is less of a tragedy than the loss of 3000 people in a society of 300 million.
To put it more succinctly, your old monkey brain is fooling you. Humans are remarkably peaceful creature who get more peaceful with time, your old monkey brain just canâ(TM)t grasp that.
True, you can't examine what you don't know exists. What you can do is examine what has been leaked. The NSA wire tapping is the best example. The conspiracy was relatively small, while it wasn't overtly legal, it wasn't overtly illegal. You can make a credible argument either way. The level of "evilness" was pretty minimal. Spying on people, while not notice, doesn't even exist on the same scale as "killing a few thousand Americans".
So, here you have this baby weight, relatively small conspiracy that is only marginally illegal and only mildly morally dubious... and someone cracks and leaks it. Now, the 9/11 conspiracies are a whole different ball game. You are talking about something that is massively illegal, as in "if we catch you we can legally kill you in a civilian court" illegal. Further, you are taking about a conspiracy involving mass murder that is so utterly morally depraved that you basically need to be a sociopath in order to justify it. Finally, to top it all of, you are talking about a conspiracy that is massively complicated and would take hundreds or thousands of people to pull off.
Maybe my faith in human morality is too high and my faith in stupidity is too great, but I don't buy it. If the government can gather together that many sociopaths in to perform the most elaborate conspiracy of all times and keep every single one of them from leaking... shit I'll throw in the towel. If they can pull that off, they clearly know what they are doing and I'll bow to my far superior shadowy overlords as the rightful rulers of the world.
Personally, I think I'll keep my faith in human stupidity.
I think the quasi-satellite implications of this really can't be overlooked. Shooting things into space, especially into a geosynchronous orbit is really expensive. Shooting things simply into orbit is still extremely expensive AND you need to launch multiple satellites to get continuous coverage. If you could pop a few of these up at a fraction of the costs, you could get massive coverage, extremely cheaply.
For a place like the US that would be neat and useful, but where it would REALLY pay dividends would be in places like India where they have shitty infrastructure and a democratic government that can't blast peoples' houses easily to make way for new infrastructure (like they can in China). If you could toss a few of these up over India, you could cheaply (much cheaper than laying down land lines or towers) get some serious coverage even to remote places with bad roads.
I think you miss my point. Even something as simple as ignoring an imminent attack is something you can't cover up (at least in the US). It isn't like Dick Cheney sits in the middle of an information spider web where only he sees the true picture. He only sees a fraction of the picture. He gets filtered down summaries and one page briefs. In other words, anything that Bush/Cheney/evil shadow conspirators is know by many other people in the intelligence agencies.
So, even if you can buy that the neo-cons are pure evil and would happily let an attack, you also need to buy that all the people with their hands in the information in the intelligence agencies also subscribe to pure unadulterated evil. Personally, I just don't buy.
Take the NSA wire tapping. One scale of 1 to 10 of conspiracies, 10 being slaughtering a few thousand American civilians through action or inaction, and 1 being a perfectly legally legit wire tap, the NSA thing was a 3. What they were doing was legally dubious but vaguely defensible and only mildly morally gray. In this relatively benign case of a conspiracy someone felt morally outraged enough to best the entire thing open. Are you really suggesting that a 9/11 conspiracy (even if it was simply intentional inaction) that involves thousands of dead Americans really could have operated without someone busting it wide open?
Neo-cons suck, but they are not evil. Intelligence agencies in the US do some shady things, but they are still run by people that leak the greatest offenses. Either there was no deep 9/11 conspiracy, or the shadow overlords are playing a game that is way too deep for us mere mortals to compete in. Personally, I just think that the government is roughly as incompetent as it appears to be when it comes to keeping a secret.
I think his larger point is that if you have the resources to kill a few thousand Americans in a very public way and have the magical ability to keep everyone from feeling a pang of guilt and spilling the goods in an operation that would take hundreds of people, what the hell were they doing during Iraq. Planting a few weapons on Saddam would have been trivial compared to to the absurd conspiracy theories surrounding 9/11.
The government really just isn't that good. It really does suck roughly as much as it appears to. They can't keep a little thing like wiretaps a secret, and you think that they can orchestrate the most elaborate conspiracy in human history without a hitch that involved killing thousands of Americans without anyone snitching? Ha!
People highly over rate what it means to have plans sitting around. I am pretty sure that somewhere we have a plan to invade Canada. I bet we also have some shitty legislation for fill in government agency here sitting around that no one wants to enact. The fact that the PATRIOT act was basically read to go with such short notice shouldn't be surprising. The spooks had a wish list that was tossed in a dusty folder somewhere. Shit hits the fans, politicians screams for someone to DO SOMETHING, and the PATRIOT act is dusted off and shoved into the politicians hands.
If 9/11 had any conspiracy to it, we should just throw in the towel and surrender to the shadow overlords now, because they are playing a game WAY the hell too deep for us. Just consider all the bungled conspiracies that have been leaked out over the life of the Bush administration (and earlier even). None of them even begin to scratch the surface level of conspiracy that attacking the US reaches. Every time the government does something that is simply too sketchy, it gets leaked. The idea that the government could pull off the largest and most devious conspiracy in the history of man kind and NO ONE felt a twinge of guilt and leaked is absurd.
The only possible explanations left are that:
1) There is no conspiracy and the government sucks basically as much as it appears to. It can't carry out a conspiracy on any real scale, and even stuff that should be pretty basic, like a few warrantless wire taps is well outside of their abilities to keep a lid on.
2) The government is playing a vastly deeper game than you realize. All the bungled conspiracies were intentionally bungled to make you think that the government is incompetent and incapable of carrying out even the most basic morally dubious conspiracy. There is a small army of perfectly loyal conspirators with absolutely no sense of guilt that can commit horrible acts and keep them a secret. We are basically fucked and don't even realize it. The best we can hope for is that our evil shadowy overlords have good intentions.
Personally, I have a feeling that the truth is that people suck and are stupid, and that option #1 is what we are dealing with.
The way that a skyscraper is designed and built favors it falling more or less straight down rather to one side or the other. The reason being that if it were to topple, as remote a possibility as that is, the building shouldn't be allowed to hit other buildings. Nobody wants a set of dominoes that large.
I can safely say with 100% assurance that that is absolutely not true. I would kill to see a set of dominoes that size.
The problem with the "everyone is a hero" mentality is that it not only makes for a wildly inconsistent and boring world, but it also fails in its objective. Seriously, can anyone out there claim that they felt like the hero after doing a quest that a thousand other people have done? Do you really feel the hero when you ask on chat how to save the princess and someone LOLs about how easy that quest was? The "you are a hero" quests are as mundane as any other quest.
Personally, I think MMORPG should realize that the MMO part is supposed to mean something greater than making a really tedious single player where other people also play. I personally think that many people would be far more interested in a changing and dynamic world than a world of dozens "you are the hero!" quests that everyone and their dog has done.
I think that the biggest problem is that MMORPG makers are afraid to have people lose. They want you to always feel like a winner, and as a result the game becomes very dull for many people. There is absolutely nowhere to go in an MMORPG but up. I am not advocating massive exp loss or anything of that nature. People hate that sort of thing because they hate to grind. What I am advocating is a world that can turn for the worse. While you are at it, maybe it is time to rethink the absurd exponential power curves that forces content segregation.
Consider:
Forget the mechanics for a moment; just imagine an MMORPG built upon the principle that all people should be able to enjoy the content. That means instead of having to make content for each 5 level slice, content is there for all. It might mean that you need to rethink "power" and âoeprogressâ in the game.
Now, you have a game where everyone can participate in content. Now imagine a threat arises that is dynamic and moving. Instead of the "threat" being a new area spawned in that you can go to and spawn camp at, imagine if it was a living and moving thing.
So, letâ(TM)s take the classic zombie horde. The threat is a zombie horde. It starts at one end of the world and moves to the other end. As it kills it grows. It moves slowly, but it clearly moves. As it moves into an area, zombies wander in slowly. When resistance is met, zombies start heading that way. Any prolonged resistance results in a horde concentrating. So, if you defend a town, you can hold it for a while, but after some time you get swamped and either need to flee or get reinforcements. Even if you do not resist, at some point the zombie population gets thick and everyone dies.
Make it so that there are no-win scenarios. You can hold a town for a time, do so damage to the horde, but in the end you WILL lose. The best you can do is do some damage and fall back.
So, the players keep fighting and falling back. Perhaps they make some valiant last stands in various popular cities, but in the end the cities are conquered one by one. If the players fall back effectively, do damage as they retreat, than at some point they might thin the horde enough to actually hold a city. Instead of being swamped in a few days, they might just find themselves in a long term siege that lasts weeks or months. Other players might try and fight supplies in, while others fight from the walls, clean up sewers, and clear out zombies that slip in. Maybe after a time the momentum is reversed, and the players are able to push back the zombies and reclaim land.
Of course, things could go the other way. The players could be pushed back and pushed back until there is nowhere to go. The world could end and the game starts anew with some different challenge facing it.
Some people will hate this type of game play. Some people want to win every time. Other people will love it. I don't know about you, but the idea that you could actually lose is thrilling. A desperate retreat fight back to the center of the empire, losing city after city sounds a shit ton more exciting than farming NPCs or doing save the princess quests. Do I g
Quicksilver is probably the slower of the three books. That said, I think it takes a certain personality trait to really appreciate the whole Baroque Cycle. The books are a little slower, but, in my opinion, more than make up for it with exceptional action, interesting politics, and an absolutely fascinating look at the philosophical changes taking place in that time period.
Things like Snow Crash and (to a slightly lesser extent) Cryptonomicron are good quick and dirty reads. I think you can take his work and toss it on a scale from mindless nerd fun to intellectual nerd fun. Snow Crash is well over in the mindless nerd fun range, Cryptonimicron and Diamond Age sit somewhere in the middle, and The Baroque Cycle is way over on the other end of the scale being full of intellectual nerd fun.
Personally, I suggest anyone who likes good mindless fun from Neal Stephenson and desperately need another hit to give his older book Zodiac a try. Bonus points if you live or have lived in Boston.
Right, because there are LOTS of historical examples of protectionism resulting in wide spread economic bliss.
Protectionism has been proven time and time again to be a failed path. The arguments for it take blatantly ignoring economic reality. Take a place like the US. Throw up protectionist barriers and what happens? Sure, you will see American workers hired to make plates. Hurray for the workers making the plates because they have a job, but there is a price that needs to be paid. They are being paid American wages, which means that the price of your cheap plate isn't so cheap. In fact, ALL the goods in the economy suddenly cost more. Not only do goods cost more because you have to pay American workers, but you are taking away workers from other parts of the economy, pushing all wages and prices up.
Personally, I am okay with Americans not making cheap widgets. I am okay with the fact that I can go to the store and get cheap foreign made products.
If we want to do something, we should not be foolishly trying to close the wagons under the delusional belief that protection will work this (unlike all the other times it has utterly failed). We should be trying to push to stay ahead of the curve. Through education, infrastructure, and ingenuity, we should do things that others in the world can't. Using protectionism to create jobs for Americans to screw on tooth paste caps is the LAST thing we should be contemplating.
Should we allow fights to the death as sport so long as the contestants aren't forced into it?
You pose good questions, and after having contemplated it, I think the answer is clear. We need more steroids and, far more importantly, good old fashion blood sports.
Speak for yourself. As someone with no interest in ever doing professional sports, I think unlimited doping sounds like great fun to watch. Let a few he-men battle it out like demigods. I don't care if they get that way by training like fanatics or injecting themselves with teenage mutant ninja turtles goo. It is all the same to me - crap I would never do, even if I had the capacity to do it. Personally, I don't think doping ruins the sports from a spectators perspective. It makes the sports more exciting and toss in another element to the mix.
That isn't to say we should allow doping. We disallow doping for health reasons and to make it so that you don't have to have a suicidal devotion to your sport... just a near suicidal devotion (do you think that much training is healthy?. That said, as far as pure entertainment goes, doping is great. The only thing that could make it better would be an arena, a few lions, and some more lax laws on pit fighting to the death.
Eh, I'll take American censorship over the crap the rest of the world* pulls any day of the week. Don't get me wrong, I love boobs, but the lack of a pair of tits in a game is far less damaging than a lack of violence. This could just be my inner American speaking, but cutting out violence out of Fallout is a farm worse crime than cutting out nudity. Strippers wearing bras instead of baring it all? Eh, it sucks, but I'll live. Not being able to rip someone in half with a critical hit form my full auto SMG? Please put a fucking bullet in my head now and splatter my brains on the sidewalk.
*Excluding Japan. Those fun loving pacifist make Americans look hypochondriacs afraid of a little blood and Europeans puritanical anti-sex Nazis.
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Nope. As much as I like video games, I won't waste my time buying games that are just going to break if I get a new computer or do a clean wipe of my hard drive. People need to grow a pair when it comes to being a consumer. Just don't buy things. I can happily pass up on a game because its DRM sucks without any remorse. I spend money on games because I have money to spend on games, not because I need to. If a company like EA wants to try and make my life miserable? Eh, that is a few hundred dollars a year less they are going to get from my pocket.
I agree, I think EA is blowing its own foot off. I spend a LOT of money on games. I spend a lot of money on computer games. I am in the process of building a new machine from scratch is basically a gaming computer spawned from hell. I like games.
I also never pirate. The last time I pirated something I was 16. Buying things is quick, easy, and without hassle. Pirating on the other hand is a pain in the ass, time consuming, and risky. My time is worth more than what it takes to pirate. I have a large disposable income because I don't spend my money on cars, HD TVs, or anything like that. I'll buy a game if I have any interest it and I won't feel bad if I decide I don't like it. I have never resold a game. I am the perfect guy to sell games too.
I won't be buying Spore, C&C3, or anything with this absurd DRM. I am not going to have a game install crippleware onto my computer, and then limit how many times I can install games. I have reinstalled Starcraft, Fallout, and Knight of the Old Republic more times than I can count. Hell, I will burn through three installs in under a year. I will easily kill 5 installs in a year when I make/buy a new computer.
So, EA can continue down this path, but I won't go with them. It isn't going to stop piracy (as Spore has shown). If anything, it will increase piracy as the pirated version is the non-crippled version. So it won't stop piracy, but it will stop someone like me who merrily blows a few hundred dollars a month on games from buying.
Your dismissive attitude towards drones misses what makes them such excellent military toys. They are far more then airplane without pilots. First, most drones are stealthy by nature. They have small radar signatures, are hard to see, and are quiet. More importantly though, drones are great at loitering. To get a couple of hellfire missiles to loiter over where they shouldn't be (say Pakistan) would be extremely costly. It would require rotating shifts of large airplanes with big crews pouring tons of gas into a machine designed do many things.
A drone the other hand can circle over Pakistan without fear that if it crashes a pilot is now in enemy hands (or even "friendly" hands of the Pakistan state). It can stay as long as its fuel lets it and be replaced by another. The drone itself can be (comparatively) light because it doesn't need defensive systems, pilot life support, or to fill multiple roles like an F-16 or Raptor has to. The cost effectiveness of a drone opens it up to a world of missions that normal planes just can't do. The gap is going to become even more absurd once the next generation of drones comes out that are designed better to the missions that they are being given and there are remote refuelers.
Asymmetrical war is ugly. The entire point of such a war is to use civilians as terrain. The guy with all the guns wants you fighting out in the open, while the guy with the smaller weaker force wants to dodge among civilian such that using your power results in needless casualties that simple further their cause.
The US would like nothing more than for insurgents to leave homes and families and go find a nice cave or tent to live in. You can drop MOABs on caves and tens, carpet bomb the area, and send in a squad of marines with orders to shoot anything that isn't a marine. It isn't an accident that civilians tend to die when insurgents die. It is part of their strategy to counter the fact that if you US knew that an insurgent was somewhere in a quarter mile radius of some place, they could merrily exterminate all life in the area. Toss some civilians into the radius, and now it means that they need find which house you are in AND when you drop a bomb it needs to be just big enough to do the job. If the bomb is too big, you whack more civilians than you are already going to kill.
It sucks, but if the US had a magical wand that made insurgents drop dead and all the civilians walk away unharmed, they would use it. They don't have it, and so the best they can do is give up fighting anyone willing to use civilians as cover or just accept that innocents are going to die and try desperately to keep the numbers down. Even if the US had no great moral compunctions about whacking civilians, it is counter productive to their goals. Each dead civilian is an insurgent victory.
Because some people like violence. Eh, simple enough? Not all games are for kids. God forbid we get the occasional truly adult game.
The reason why violence is good is because it enhances the fantasy. If you shoot someone, and they die in a horrible and realistic way, it makes whatever fantasy they are trying to sell you more believable. Personally, I could do with a society without thought crimes. If this is what makes you happy, go for it. I would much rather people play out their fantasies, no matter how unacceptable in the real world, in video games.
No, I am afraid it goes even deeper than that. I wouldn't want surveillance even in a "perfect democracy". Majority rule and surveillance make bad bedfellows. There is nothing inherently "good" about majority rule, it just happens to be more just than the alternatives. In a majority rule state, you can still have 49% of the population enslaved by other 51%.
I specifically want a NON-Democratic government. I am not asking for a tyranny or a dictatorship or anything of that nature, but a government where the whim of the majority isn't law. The things I love best about the American government are its non-democratic parts. The Bill of Rights in particular is a document that sets out exactly what is beyond the realm of majority rule. It sets down rights that are (supposed) to be kept, majority be damned.
How do you set up a just liberal non-democratic government where surveillance doesn't send shivers down my spine? The hell if I know. I just know that surveillance and democracies do not go together. I would rather suffer higher crime rates than suffer a surveillance society in a society filled with literally countless laws.
The problem with surveillance isn't the surveillance, especially if you toss it into a solid framework of checks and balances. The problem with surveillance is that we live in nations with uncountable laws, many of which are simply bad laws. The old cliche of "well if you have nothing to hide..." is actually true. The problem is that most people DO have something to hide.
Imagine for a moment what it would be like if you and the people you know were suddenly tossed in jail and fined for every single law you have broken. If every illegal thing you have ever done was tallied up and the proper punishments were dolled out, the vast majority of people would be looking at years of jail time and literally billions of dollars worth of fines.
The problem is democracy. In a system of majority rule, a large part of the minority is generally having laws passed against it. I wouldn't mind perfect surveillance in a state that just enforces a few "no shit" rules against violence and theft, but we don't live in such a world. For that reason, good surveillance scares the shit out of me. I don't want to live in a world where I spend my time being paranoid about what laws I could possibly be breaking every time I step out the door.
Slamming a creationist is funny in a crowd that has a regard for science. We also laugh at the hypercube and the flatearth people. Respecting the right to a belief doesn't mean you have to respect the belief. So, I think people should be able to believe whatever crazy nonsense they want, but I that isn't going to stop me from laughing at them.
I personally put 4000 year creationist below the crazy drunk guy on the street rambling incoherently. At least the crazy drunk guy has an excuse for not using his mental facilities. I can stomach the ID people only slightly easier, as at least their god of holes actually lives in a hole and rank them not much worse than a UFO nut. People who believe that god, FSM, or whatever touched off a big bang or what not, eh, I have nothing wrong with them. Science really doesn't offer up all that much, and so if you insist on believing something magic is just as good as anything else.
I don't think we disagree. I say that we have shaped our society such that we can live peacefully together, and that as time has progressed we have shaped our society into more and more peaceful of a state. You apparently agree.
Now, if we wiped out society and everyone went back to hunting and gathering, would we become more violent than we are now? Probably. Does that make us a "peaceful" species? Eh, it depends upon how you define it. In practical and measurable terms we certainly are more peaceful. There can be no argument that humans kill each other proportionally less than they ever have in history.
Now, you might argue that it is out "nature" to be violent and that we are thus still the same savage territorial pack animals that we always have been. I would argue that you are missing out on a very fundamental piece of human evolution. Humans have a certain genetic code that, baring society, produces a relatively cunning pack animal, and we still have that same savage genetic code. However, part of that evolution is the ability to transcend evolution through technology and communication. What makes a humans unique is that it has flipped evolution the bird and has made its own rapid "evolution" through non-genetic means. If you strip away that non-genetic evolution, we certainly are the same old savages, but by stripping away that piece of humanity you are removing our greatest evolutionary trait.
So. Are humans as violent as ever if you strip them of technology and society? Sure. Does that mean jack shit in the grand scheme of things? Nope. We have found a way to blast all of our natural evolutionary limits that demand violence, bloodshed, in communities larger than a nuclear family. I personally consider these advances to be as important of an identity to humans today as our base genetic code is.
In the end, the argument is an argument over semantics. We agree. Humans today act more peacefully than they ever have, and we agree that should you strip away one of our greatest evolutionary traits, we would be nasty territorial savages again
70 million out of 2 million... or 3.5% of the population. To beat that same death rate in a pack of 20 dogs, you need to kill one. To do the same in a tribe of humans 50 big, you need to kill 2. Go back and reread my post because I think you missed the point. Even our worst genocides are pocket change in the context of the human population and the societies we live in. The only thing that has changed is that we have gotten more peaceful and our societies have gotten bigger.
2 people dying out of a tribe of 50 doesn't sound like much, but that was proportionally more death than was see during World War II.
Lets do a thought experiment. The population of the participating nations during World War II (see wikipedia) was roughly 2 billion. An estimate of total casualties during World War II, both civilian and military is around 70 million. This was a full scale industrial. Civilian infrastructures were target by all sides, the Axis and to a lesser extent the Soviets intentionally rounded up certain civilian populations for the singular goal of exterminating unarmed civilian populations. This is as bad as it gets, and so how to the numbers roll out?
Total losses for the participating parties? A paltry 3.5%. If in your band of hunter-gatheres just 2 people die in war, you just managed to score a higher casualty rate than World War II. The US had a 0.32% casualty rate.
My point isn't that we over estimate how much death is involved in tribal conflict. My point is that we vastly over estimate how much death there is in modern warfare. Modern nations have vastly smaller portions of their population devoted to war. Even the big mean US with its absurd military spending has a military that makes up just 0.5% of its population.
Finally, your concepts of tribal warfare are a little off.
First, the Aztecs and the Mayans were not egalitarian tribal civilizations.
Second, the Aztecs and Mayans did prefer to capture their opponents and so built weapons accordingly... but they captured people for the purpose of human sacrifice. Hardly an improvement.
Third, your concept of tribal warfare is a bit dated and harks back to the "noble savage" days of anthropology. The idea was that those stone age tribes were all peaceful people that lived in harmony with nature and a pile of assorted bullshit. As it turns out, the data universally debunked this absurd notion. Anthropologist that have done studies tracking deaths in stone age tribes all come to the same conclusion... they suffer excessively high proportions of violent deaths. This shouldn't come as a shock. If you kill two people in a tribe of 50, you just scored a higher death rate than World War II. Wipe out a family of 10, and you just had a genocide worse than any modern society has ever seen.
Humans have been and continue to get more peaceful. Your likelihood of dying in violent conflict continues to drop. The only difference is that you simply care about far more people and your ape brain just can't wrap around the numbers.
You could certainly make that argument, but you will still probably die of some other cause than violent death.
You also miss the point that a 1950's human or a 1900's human was VASTLY less likely to die a violent death than his ancient tribal ancestors. We might like violent media, but it certainly isn't violent media that is keeping humans in check. We had mastered a great deal of our violent tendencies LONG before violent media came into existence.
Humans are about as "naturally" violent any other pack/tribe based creature. Packs/tribes of anything will fight when they bump too close. Meerkats, wolves, wild dogs, lions, apes... all of these creatures will go after each other if their territories bump. What separate humans is that even in our least technological "natural" state, we do a fair amount of trading with rivals. We also develop far more complex relationships using alliance and the like to try and gain a little more leverage. Our relationship with rivals can go beyond simply keeping them out of territory, but can extend to complex trades for women/resources/alliances.
Humans have done a very remarkable thing. They have tossed off their natural tribal tendencies that basically spell certain war with terrible costs the as soon as the population reaches over a few hundred, and replaced them with massive stable societies that are very peace pron. We have extended the circle of our empathy well beyond its natural limits of a few hundred to hundreds of millions.
Sure, this defying of nature through social institutions has its draw backs. We can pretty easily delude ourselves into believing the worst in our selves because our empathy is so expanded, but our natural fairness tallying devices are still ancient. Hence, you get the silly assertions that humans are abnormally violent despite pretty clear indications that humans today are one of the least likely creatures to commit genocide against each other. On the whole though, I think what humans have done is a truly remarkable achievement that should be looked upon with with pride.
No, we really are not that violent, and we are getting more peaceful as time drags on. As a human, the chances of dying in war are very small. In fact, your chances of dying a violent death have been rapidly plummeting as time has moved on. Even our most horrific industrial wars kill vastly fewer people as a percentage of the population than simple day to day tribal conflict.
If you want to compare us against animals, we really don't rate that high. Society wide genocide is pretty common for insects. Other primates are at least as aggressive as us and suffer far more violent deaths. Many animals suffer pretty grievous loses to violent conflict over mating.
The only thing humans have going for them when it comes to the mass slaughter is that we have absolutely blasted our internal social limits on empathy. As a human, you are hard wired to live in a society no big than roughly 400 people. That is the limit of how many faces you can keep track of at a time, a pretty well documented limit of purely egalitarian human societies. Egalitarian tribal societies that get that big inevitably split. Through various methods of division of labor and hierarchies we have slowly been bumping up the size of a viable society. We are now to the point where a few hundred million is a perfectly reasonable size for a society.
France is a great example. This is a society of 60 million people. In general, they feel that they share a common bond and they feel empathy for each other. In general, they trust each other more than they trust others, and they think of each others needs over outsiders. True, one Frenchmen doesnâ(TM)t have as tight of a bond as his fellow country men as two men in a 100 unit tribal society, but it is close enough where they are a clearly distinct society. Just a couple of weeks ago 10 Frenchmen were killed in war (in Afghanistan). That is 0.000016% of the population. Despite this, it was a big deal in France. People acted like their social order had just taken not worthy losses and reacted accordingly.
Hell, take a step back and look at something more âoehorrificâ. 9/11 killed roughly 3000 people. That is 0.001% of the US population. That is 1 in every 100,000 people in the US died. We are talking about a miniscule number of people as compared to the society as a whole, yet despite this, Americans took the losses psychologically like family members had died.
My point is this; our murdering of fellow man has not increased. It has actually dropped, and dropped by a substantial amount. Further, compared to nearly all other species, as a human you are vastly less likely to suffer a violent death. The only thing that makes humans unique, is our empathy. Human empathy has grown and increased to the point where we care about millions and millions of people, rather than three or four around us. In our growing empathy, our old brains hardwired for societies less than 400 people have not kept up. As a result we think that the loss of 1 person in a tribe of 400 is less of a tragedy than the loss of 3000 people in a society of 300 million.
To put it more succinctly, your old monkey brain is fooling you. Humans are remarkably peaceful creature who get more peaceful with time, your old monkey brain just canâ(TM)t grasp that.
True, you can't examine what you don't know exists. What you can do is examine what has been leaked. The NSA wire tapping is the best example. The conspiracy was relatively small, while it wasn't overtly legal, it wasn't overtly illegal. You can make a credible argument either way. The level of "evilness" was pretty minimal. Spying on people, while not notice, doesn't even exist on the same scale as "killing a few thousand Americans".
So, here you have this baby weight, relatively small conspiracy that is only marginally illegal and only mildly morally dubious... and someone cracks and leaks it. Now, the 9/11 conspiracies are a whole different ball game. You are talking about something that is massively illegal, as in "if we catch you we can legally kill you in a civilian court" illegal. Further, you are taking about a conspiracy involving mass murder that is so utterly morally depraved that you basically need to be a sociopath in order to justify it. Finally, to top it all of, you are talking about a conspiracy that is massively complicated and would take hundreds or thousands of people to pull off.
Maybe my faith in human morality is too high and my faith in stupidity is too great, but I don't buy it. If the government can gather together that many sociopaths in to perform the most elaborate conspiracy of all times and keep every single one of them from leaking... shit I'll throw in the towel. If they can pull that off, they clearly know what they are doing and I'll bow to my far superior shadowy overlords as the rightful rulers of the world.
Personally, I think I'll keep my faith in human stupidity.
I think the quasi-satellite implications of this really can't be overlooked. Shooting things into space, especially into a geosynchronous orbit is really expensive. Shooting things simply into orbit is still extremely expensive AND you need to launch multiple satellites to get continuous coverage. If you could pop a few of these up at a fraction of the costs, you could get massive coverage, extremely cheaply.
For a place like the US that would be neat and useful, but where it would REALLY pay dividends would be in places like India where they have shitty infrastructure and a democratic government that can't blast peoples' houses easily to make way for new infrastructure (like they can in China). If you could toss a few of these up over India, you could cheaply (much cheaper than laying down land lines or towers) get some serious coverage even to remote places with bad roads.
I think you miss my point. Even something as simple as ignoring an imminent attack is something you can't cover up (at least in the US). It isn't like Dick Cheney sits in the middle of an information spider web where only he sees the true picture. He only sees a fraction of the picture. He gets filtered down summaries and one page briefs. In other words, anything that Bush/Cheney/evil shadow conspirators is know by many other people in the intelligence agencies.
So, even if you can buy that the neo-cons are pure evil and would happily let an attack, you also need to buy that all the people with their hands in the information in the intelligence agencies also subscribe to pure unadulterated evil. Personally, I just don't buy.
Take the NSA wire tapping. One scale of 1 to 10 of conspiracies, 10 being slaughtering a few thousand American civilians through action or inaction, and 1 being a perfectly legally legit wire tap, the NSA thing was a 3. What they were doing was legally dubious but vaguely defensible and only mildly morally gray. In this relatively benign case of a conspiracy someone felt morally outraged enough to best the entire thing open. Are you really suggesting that a 9/11 conspiracy (even if it was simply intentional inaction) that involves thousands of dead Americans really could have operated without someone busting it wide open?
Neo-cons suck, but they are not evil. Intelligence agencies in the US do some shady things, but they are still run by people that leak the greatest offenses. Either there was no deep 9/11 conspiracy, or the shadow overlords are playing a game that is way too deep for us mere mortals to compete in. Personally, I just think that the government is roughly as incompetent as it appears to be when it comes to keeping a secret.
I think his larger point is that if you have the resources to kill a few thousand Americans in a very public way and have the magical ability to keep everyone from feeling a pang of guilt and spilling the goods in an operation that would take hundreds of people, what the hell were they doing during Iraq. Planting a few weapons on Saddam would have been trivial compared to to the absurd conspiracy theories surrounding 9/11.
The government really just isn't that good. It really does suck roughly as much as it appears to. They can't keep a little thing like wiretaps a secret, and you think that they can orchestrate the most elaborate conspiracy in human history without a hitch that involved killing thousands of Americans without anyone snitching? Ha!
People highly over rate what it means to have plans sitting around. I am pretty sure that somewhere we have a plan to invade Canada. I bet we also have some shitty legislation for fill in government agency here sitting around that no one wants to enact. The fact that the PATRIOT act was basically read to go with such short notice shouldn't be surprising. The spooks had a wish list that was tossed in a dusty folder somewhere. Shit hits the fans, politicians screams for someone to DO SOMETHING, and the PATRIOT act is dusted off and shoved into the politicians hands.
If 9/11 had any conspiracy to it, we should just throw in the towel and surrender to the shadow overlords now, because they are playing a game WAY the hell too deep for us. Just consider all the bungled conspiracies that have been leaked out over the life of the Bush administration (and earlier even). None of them even begin to scratch the surface level of conspiracy that attacking the US reaches. Every time the government does something that is simply too sketchy, it gets leaked. The idea that the government could pull off the largest and most devious conspiracy in the history of man kind and NO ONE felt a twinge of guilt and leaked is absurd.
The only possible explanations left are that:
1) There is no conspiracy and the government sucks basically as much as it appears to. It can't carry out a conspiracy on any real scale, and even stuff that should be pretty basic, like a few warrantless wire taps is well outside of their abilities to keep a lid on.
2) The government is playing a vastly deeper game than you realize. All the bungled conspiracies were intentionally bungled to make you think that the government is incompetent and incapable of carrying out even the most basic morally dubious conspiracy. There is a small army of perfectly loyal conspirators with absolutely no sense of guilt that can commit horrible acts and keep them a secret. We are basically fucked and don't even realize it. The best we can hope for is that our evil shadowy overlords have good intentions.
Personally, I have a feeling that the truth is that people suck and are stupid, and that option #1 is what we are dealing with.
The way that a skyscraper is designed and built favors it falling more or less straight down rather to one side or the other. The reason being that if it were to topple, as remote a possibility as that is, the building shouldn't be allowed to hit other buildings. Nobody wants a set of dominoes that large.
I can safely say with 100% assurance that that is absolutely not true. I would kill to see a set of dominoes that size.
The problem with the "everyone is a hero" mentality is that it not only makes for a wildly inconsistent and boring world, but it also fails in its objective. Seriously, can anyone out there claim that they felt like the hero after doing a quest that a thousand other people have done? Do you really feel the hero when you ask on chat how to save the princess and someone LOLs about how easy that quest was? The "you are a hero" quests are as mundane as any other quest.
Personally, I think MMORPG should realize that the MMO part is supposed to mean something greater than making a really tedious single player where other people also play. I personally think that many people would be far more interested in a changing and dynamic world than a world of dozens "you are the hero!" quests that everyone and their dog has done.
I think that the biggest problem is that MMORPG makers are afraid to have people lose. They want you to always feel like a winner, and as a result the game becomes very dull for many people. There is absolutely nowhere to go in an MMORPG but up. I am not advocating massive exp loss or anything of that nature. People hate that sort of thing because they hate to grind. What I am advocating is a world that can turn for the worse. While you are at it, maybe it is time to rethink the absurd exponential power curves that forces content segregation.
Consider:
Forget the mechanics for a moment; just imagine an MMORPG built upon the principle that all people should be able to enjoy the content. That means instead of having to make content for each 5 level slice, content is there for all. It might mean that you need to rethink "power" and âoeprogressâ in the game.
Now, you have a game where everyone can participate in content. Now imagine a threat arises that is dynamic and moving. Instead of the "threat" being a new area spawned in that you can go to and spawn camp at, imagine if it was a living and moving thing.
So, letâ(TM)s take the classic zombie horde. The threat is a zombie horde. It starts at one end of the world and moves to the other end. As it kills it grows. It moves slowly, but it clearly moves. As it moves into an area, zombies wander in slowly. When resistance is met, zombies start heading that way. Any prolonged resistance results in a horde concentrating. So, if you defend a town, you can hold it for a while, but after some time you get swamped and either need to flee or get reinforcements. Even if you do not resist, at some point the zombie population gets thick and everyone dies.
Make it so that there are no-win scenarios. You can hold a town for a time, do so damage to the horde, but in the end you WILL lose. The best you can do is do some damage and fall back.
So, the players keep fighting and falling back. Perhaps they make some valiant last stands in various popular cities, but in the end the cities are conquered one by one. If the players fall back effectively, do damage as they retreat, than at some point they might thin the horde enough to actually hold a city. Instead of being swamped in a few days, they might just find themselves in a long term siege that lasts weeks or months. Other players might try and fight supplies in, while others fight from the walls, clean up sewers, and clear out zombies that slip in. Maybe after a time the momentum is reversed, and the players are able to push back the zombies and reclaim land.
Of course, things could go the other way. The players could be pushed back and pushed back until there is nowhere to go. The world could end and the game starts anew with some different challenge facing it.
Some people will hate this type of game play. Some people want to win every time. Other people will love it. I don't know about you, but the idea that you could actually lose is thrilling. A desperate retreat fight back to the center of the empire, losing city after city sounds a shit ton more exciting than farming NPCs or doing save the princess quests. Do I g
Quicksilver is probably the slower of the three books. That said, I think it takes a certain personality trait to really appreciate the whole Baroque Cycle. The books are a little slower, but, in my opinion, more than make up for it with exceptional action, interesting politics, and an absolutely fascinating look at the philosophical changes taking place in that time period.
Things like Snow Crash and (to a slightly lesser extent) Cryptonomicron are good quick and dirty reads. I think you can take his work and toss it on a scale from mindless nerd fun to intellectual nerd fun. Snow Crash is well over in the mindless nerd fun range, Cryptonimicron and Diamond Age sit somewhere in the middle, and The Baroque Cycle is way over on the other end of the scale being full of intellectual nerd fun.
Personally, I suggest anyone who likes good mindless fun from Neal Stephenson and desperately need another hit to give his older book Zodiac a try. Bonus points if you live or have lived in Boston.
Right, because there are LOTS of historical examples of protectionism resulting in wide spread economic bliss.
Protectionism has been proven time and time again to be a failed path. The arguments for it take blatantly ignoring economic reality. Take a place like the US. Throw up protectionist barriers and what happens? Sure, you will see American workers hired to make plates. Hurray for the workers making the plates because they have a job, but there is a price that needs to be paid. They are being paid American wages, which means that the price of your cheap plate isn't so cheap. In fact, ALL the goods in the economy suddenly cost more. Not only do goods cost more because you have to pay American workers, but you are taking away workers from other parts of the economy, pushing all wages and prices up.
Personally, I am okay with Americans not making cheap widgets. I am okay with the fact that I can go to the store and get cheap foreign made products.
If we want to do something, we should not be foolishly trying to close the wagons under the delusional belief that protection will work this (unlike all the other times it has utterly failed). We should be trying to push to stay ahead of the curve. Through education, infrastructure, and ingenuity, we should do things that others in the world can't. Using protectionism to create jobs for Americans to screw on tooth paste caps is the LAST thing we should be contemplating.
Should we allow fights to the death as sport so long as the contestants aren't forced into it?
You pose good questions, and after having contemplated it, I think the answer is clear. We need more steroids and, far more importantly, good old fashion blood sports.
UFC with knives? Greatest suggestion... ever.
You really framed that whole thing well, thanks.
Speak for yourself. As someone with no interest in ever doing professional sports, I think unlimited doping sounds like great fun to watch. Let a few he-men battle it out like demigods. I don't care if they get that way by training like fanatics or injecting themselves with teenage mutant ninja turtles goo. It is all the same to me - crap I would never do, even if I had the capacity to do it. Personally, I don't think doping ruins the sports from a spectators perspective. It makes the sports more exciting and toss in another element to the mix.
That isn't to say we should allow doping. We disallow doping for health reasons and to make it so that you don't have to have a suicidal devotion to your sport... just a near suicidal devotion (do you think that much training is healthy?. That said, as far as pure entertainment goes, doping is great. The only thing that could make it better would be an arena, a few lions, and some more lax laws on pit fighting to the death.
Eh, I'll take American censorship over the crap the rest of the world* pulls any day of the week. Don't get me wrong, I love boobs, but the lack of a pair of tits in a game is far less damaging than a lack of violence. This could just be my inner American speaking, but cutting out violence out of Fallout is a farm worse crime than cutting out nudity. Strippers wearing bras instead of baring it all? Eh, it sucks, but I'll live. Not being able to rip someone in half with a critical hit form my full auto SMG? Please put a fucking bullet in my head now and splatter my brains on the sidewalk.
*Excluding Japan. Those fun loving pacifist make Americans look hypochondriacs afraid of a little blood and Europeans puritanical anti-sex Nazis.