"Wed, June 23 2010
Is grateful to Slashdot for finally noticing that LGP exists, after militantly ignoring any game release we have made for the last 5 years, as soon as reports of our death come through, we get a front page story. Slashdot - Your support of Linux is inspirational. For others who wonder, we are very much alive. We have had a couple of staffing issues, but work is progressing on more than one unannounced title. We will offer furether updates as and when there is news to update you with."
Seems like ya'll have hit a nerve! For me, I've bought 2 LGP games in the past, and enjoyed them, though they were certainly not AAA titles. I do wish they were more forthcoming with information though.
LOL. Congratulations, you just made every British person still reading this topic laugh. Not being British, I doubt you understand why. The Daily Mail! The Daily Mail is a tabloid newspaper that sells by making scary shit up for ridiculous headlines, and backing this up with manipulated statistics or paid off "experts". Would any American take you seriously if you brought The National Enquirer as a source into a debate? No! You'd be laughed out of the room. This is akin to what you've just done.
For the last several years, the Daily Mail has been engaged in the heroic pursuit of classifying things that cure and cause cancer. Some things do both. Since you're apparently a fan, maybe you can help them.
It is quite obvious at this point that not only are you terrible at picking your sources, but that you also know nothing at all about the UK on which to pick any good source. I won't deny that the UK has problems in its inner cities, but they are not at all caused by a lack of guns for people to defend themselves. By any real measure of crime, the US falls behind the UK. The US has a higher homicide rate, higher rape rate, higher murder rate, lower World Peace Index ranking. If you think these things are an acceptable trade off for being 1.4 times more likely to come home with your wallet still in your pocket, that's your prerogative - though one I doubt that most sane people would share.
The figures on your (ridiculous) sources, if they are to be believed, point to "only" a 1.4-2 times higher chance to be robbed/burgled in the UK than the US. Even if this were true, and I accept it's a considerable amount, it's nowhere near the 5x hyperbole that you were spouting previously. I wonder what your next post would contain, if I cared enough to refute your sources again. Would your estimates drop a second time?
The gun lobby source in particular, that one is amusing. It points out alleged fabrications of the statistics in the UK figures, due to political pressures of trying to keep a lid on crime rates for public approval. Yet, in a country like the US, with a much higher murder/rape rate, surely the same pressures apply, and the same abuses can be found. Look into any bureaucracy and you'll find corruption of some kind, especially the "victimless" cooking of statistics. Purely as an example in the opposite direction: in the homicide ratios between the US and UK, the UK figures included those who died in terrorist attacks. The US did not. The gun lobby source then continues with hilariously bad mis-information, which just 2 minutes of reseach for me refuted. Take this gem:
"Suppose that three men kill a woman during an argument outside a bar. They are arrested for murder, but because of problems with identification (the main witness is dead), charges are eventually dropped. In American crime statistics, the event counts as a three-person homicide, but in British statistics it counts as nothing at all."
In direct contridiction to the Home Office report on how homicide is classified in their statistics:
"deaths were initially recorded as homicide, a decrease of two per cent on the previous year. Where the police initially record an offence as homicide it remains classified unless the police or courts decide later that no offence or homicide took place."
Note that the homicide recording isn't based on getting a conviction - but on the police later deciding that what was previously suspected to be a homicide turned out not to be the case.
The page also mentions this: "England: According to the BBC News, handgun crime in the United Kingdom rose by 40% in the two years after it passed its draconian gun ban in 1997". Which is true, the BBC report mentioned can be found here. What the page fails to do however is mention the conclusion of the BBC's report, which is that although a new law was introduced, it was badly implemented since it was only targetted at hobbyist/sporting gun communities, instead of targetting the illegal smuggling of weapons. Why is this an important distinction? Because this snippet was introduced in the context of supporting the idea that gun control laws do not work/make you less safe. The BBC report does not condone that conclusion whatsoever; it merely re-iterates the hopefully obvious point that a bad law won't work, whereas a better law with similar aims may well have.
The hilarity continues, with the next table that claims to indicate a higher level of violence in countries with a low level of gun ownership, in comparison to those with high levels of gun ownership. Did you even read this table? I suspect not, because it could be the very definition of selective reading and statistical manipulation that it was so keen to decry only a paragraph before. For a summary: 3 countries are listed as high gun ownership (Switzerland, US, Israel) and 3 with low gun ownership (Denmark, France, Japan). Only 6 countries? What kind of study was this? Well actually, if you follow the source, the study had A LOT more countries, so firstly, what methodology was used to pick those 6? As it turns out: a bad one - but more on that later. What do the statistics actually show? They tally up suicide rate and homicide rate to arrive at a total ({24.1, 19.0, 7.9} for high gun rates vs {27.2, 21.9, 17.3} for low g
Reading a Simon Cowell interview? Paying heed to what he says and trusting its integrity? Bringing up what he says in a discussion about a serious issue? What are people like you doing on/.?
Here, let me help you. The interwebs can get confusing sometimes, take a wrong tube and you soon find yourself somewhere you don't belong.
Except that you're a retard who pulls statistics out of his ass and doesn't bother to wipe off the shit before waving them around in public.
Yes, on a brainless glance at the figures, you're right, that's what they say. But congratulations on throwing yourself in with the homoeopaths and Intelligent Design crowd for the Outstanding Lack of Intellectual Integrity award. The UK statistics cover a huge number of crimes that are omitted in the US figures.
A slightly more honest comparison would be the the US:UK homicide ratio. Which, as of several years ago was 4:1.
I can indeed. Because intelligent people around here in the countryside who walk their dogs at night wear bright clothing, or a reflective sash - or even jacket. It's extremely obvious that they're there, because they're glowing.
And the side effect: since my lights are on, they know I'm there too.
They are being stupid, and your ridiculously obvious "experiment" does nothing to prove otherwise. It goes without saying that if you have no artificial light available that waiting until your eyes adjust to the darkness gives you better vision. The point is that it's better vision only in comparison to what you would have if you had no light at all. How you've managed to take this answer and extrapolate it to night-vision being superior to a source of light in the darkness is stupefying. If you truly believed this wasn't stupid, tell me, do you drive at night without your headlights on? No? Thought not. As to the argument of counting the pennies saved on petrol - that works right up until the first time you hit a tree because you couldn't see properly. The only short-sighted thing here is these morons driving so dangerously and your leap to defend them from deserved criticism.
What other absurd superstitious beliefs of technologically backwards societies do you feel compelled to defend out of some political correctness gone awry? Voodoo? Condoms being responsible for AIDS? AIDS drugs being a plot of the "white man" to test out dangerous substances and keep their society down?
Romanticising and defending these cultures as somehow more "natural" than our own, is ridiculous, and I feel inclined to remind anyone bent to do so that the second they need their modern society for something, they'll jump straight back into it, romanticism be damned.
Because it cuts into two of Apple's core user segments:
1.) People who like to pay far more than something is actually worth.
2.) Exclusivity. To their userbase, an Apple product is a statement of who you are. IE, someone with more money than sense and probably homosexual (*). If everyone started picking up $1 iPads, they wouldn't be so special anymore.
* A funny aside, when the iPhone was new, Stephen Fry was doing an interview on Top Gear, espousing its virtues, and in particular talking about gaydar app that he found very useful. I fear though that this particular app may have fallen foul of App Store policy, as it would no doubt be duplicating functionality already present - in the hardware, no less.
I'd suggest that the reason Gentoo isn't mentioned more often around here is the slashdot groupthink predisposition to actually like Linux. If however we were forced to focus too much on Gentoo, and put up with more Gentoo users, it is likely that the backlash would so negatively affect the image of Linux as a whole that it'd fall out of favour, turning slashdot into an MS fanboy website, hence collapsing reality, time and space into a supermassive black hole that consumes the rest of the universe.
At least until said black hole had finished its 'emerge universe', got on with another Big Bang and finally presented us with a command prompt to once again get something useful done. This process may however take many millions of years to complete, ironically similar to setting up a Gentoo system in the first place. Scary thought.
Or even worse, what if God was a Gentoo user, creating the fabric of spacetime with ridiculous and troublesome optimization flags. Dark Matter? Nah. Just a bug from compiling with -O3.
You're clearly lying. You must fear something. My bet would be your Shift key.
Oh but then, hmm. You did capitalise 'AND', so you are capable of it. Perhaps the fear is of a more general kind - fear of looking intelligent maybe? I'd say it was a stretch, but then, you are an apple fanboy who programs for the iPhone and doesn't seem at all concerned with the fact that Apple can at any time with no real explanation remove your products from their store. So yeah, that's not too intelligent either. Corraborates my theory.
The point is, it's Microsoft's fault that the problem has been allowed to escalate. It's Microsoft that released a hideous "upgrade" to XP and allowed it continue well past the point where it should have been consigned to history. It's Microsoft that continues selling a defunct OS out of a scrambling fear to stop a competitor from making inroads into a netbook market that they had disregarded.
How many millions of netbooks with XP on them have been sold over the past 2 years? MS apologists like yourselves harp on about how ridiculous it is to support a 15 year old codebase. But guess what, if you continued selling the product of that codebase until recently, then yes, the consumer has a right to expect it to be maintained.
+1 offtopic incoming.
Regarding your signature, it's somewhat more difficult to find a feature of this nature in Linux as it would be in Windows. Which strikes me as a bit odd. Anyway, what you want to do can be simulated with this apparantly:
Though if you wanted that functionality for the same reason I wanted it (specifically playing games on a dual-headed Linux using TwinView, your best bet is to start researching adding a extra MetaMode into your X config. It's what I ended up doing instead, since it just turns the other monitor off and allows me to play on my main monitor. Works fine.
No it is not reasonable at all, because it leads to a situation whereby the consumers are ultimately penalised for the anti-competitive structures of business. Scale out your example a bit to include your competitors and your potential customers. You consider your discovery to be a unique selling point, something with which you will attract many customers. But your example is willfully stupid because it neglects to mention anything of your competitors other than painting them in the villainous nature of thieves. Lets say you have two main competitors, and they each have their own patented USPs.
One of them has developed an innovative gesture recognition system that's an order above anything else on the market. It is something customers find extremely useful and saves them time when operating their phones. However, they've got a solid patent on the system and even if you were able to successfully reproduce (even without reverse engineering) the result, you'd be unable to include it in a product.
The other has developed the means for a device to drain significantly less power than it currently does. Up to doubling the operational time between charges. It works in tandem with another of their patented developments to draw power from the environment. Solar cells in convenient locations, drawing heat from being in a near-to-body pocket, and drawing power from simply being moved around. Overall, their devices could last up to 4-5 times longer than yours, but you can't mimic that functionality.
From the perspective of a consumer, what I want is a device that can do all of the above. But I can't get it. The three companies have all patented their greatest innovations, and will of course refuse to license them to protect their unique position in the market. Surely the correct answer is not to artifically create a market where 3 companies with 3 sub-par products battle it out for our money? I'd much rather having a device that is capable of all of the above with the companies competing not on mutually exclusive technology, but on the efficiency of their production and distribution, the build quality of their devices, their customer service levels and their reputation as a company that's responsible to its immediate environment.
How lucky for us that you have taken it upon yourself to provide straitjacket definitions for commonly used words and impose them on the rest of us.
Newsflash: lag is not just network latency. It's a catch-all term, which if I had to summarise, I'd say would be best described as a failure in terms of performance to maintain expectations. You know, like, jet-lag, or a runner lagging behind the pack. In the case of the GP post, it was the failure of the 3D engine to maintain the framerate at an expected level. Hence, lag. As a term it does of course have implications in the speed of a network also, but that's hardly all the term is limited too.
No offence to Mr Colfer, but they really should have gone with a more appropriate writer. Someone in the same vein of writing, or at least comedy.
I wonder if Pratchett would have been a preferred candidate before his diagnosis?
At what I feel may be a very real risk of WHOOSH, I'll respond. This hate on "generalising" is totally irrational. Humans are habit forming, pattern matching biological machines who owe a large part of our success as a species to the ability to generalise. Forming connections based on observed behaviours between multiple sources and using those connections to draw conclusions. Sometimes right, sometimes wrong, but largely useful. Surely you recognise that in even attempting to speak on the character on something as widely varied as the culture of a generation of people, you're dealing with such huge numbers of people that in order to say anything of non-obvious value means identifying the largest occupied unions of the set. What's crazy here is your apparent level of butthurt over someone putting a label on something which by your tone you already knew to be true.
Or maybe you're hating on generalisations for the sake of them being generalisations. Which is twisted in its own ironic way because it's not based on any proof that abstraction is a bad thing, but rather on the feared result of being subject to some inappropriate application of generalisation to an individual. So really you're damning generalisation as a whole because some idiots misuse it. Generalising generalising not out of its most frequent use, but most feared misuse, a highly faulty premise.
I find the concept of the reinvention of COBOL to be severely troubling. On the one hand, although Zombies are cool, they're still sufficiently dragged down by COBOL that the result would be terrible.
On the other, a reinvention of COBOL could lead to the eventual development of time travel, fueled by the desire to go back and kill the nefarious project and/or creator in its infancy.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably referring to the PSP Go as the second iteration.
"Wed, June 23 2010
Is grateful to Slashdot for finally noticing that LGP exists, after militantly ignoring any game release we have made for the last 5 years, as soon as reports of our death come through, we get a front page story. Slashdot - Your support of Linux is inspirational. For others who wonder, we are very much alive. We have had a couple of staffing issues, but work is progressing on more than one unannounced title. We will offer furether updates as and when there is news to update you with."
Seems like ya'll have hit a nerve! For me, I've bought 2 LGP games in the past, and enjoyed them, though they were certainly not AAA titles. I do wish they were more forthcoming with information though.
LOL. Congratulations, you just made every British person still reading this topic laugh. Not being British, I doubt you understand why. The Daily Mail! The Daily Mail is a tabloid newspaper that sells by making scary shit up for ridiculous headlines, and backing this up with manipulated statistics or paid off "experts". Would any American take you seriously if you brought The National Enquirer as a source into a debate? No! You'd be laughed out of the room. This is akin to what you've just done.
For the last several years, the Daily Mail has been engaged in the heroic pursuit of classifying things that cure and cause cancer. Some things do both. Since you're apparently a fan, maybe you can help them.
It is quite obvious at this point that not only are you terrible at picking your sources, but that you also know nothing at all about the UK on which to pick any good source. I won't deny that the UK has problems in its inner cities, but they are not at all caused by a lack of guns for people to defend themselves. By any real measure of crime, the US falls behind the UK. The US has a higher homicide rate, higher rape rate, higher murder rate, lower World Peace Index ranking. If you think these things are an acceptable trade off for being 1.4 times more likely to come home with your wallet still in your pocket, that's your prerogative - though one I doubt that most sane people would share.
What happened to 5x higher violent crime rate?
The figures on your (ridiculous) sources, if they are to be believed, point to "only" a 1.4-2 times higher chance to be robbed/burgled in the UK than the US. Even if this were true, and I accept it's a considerable amount, it's nowhere near the 5x hyperbole that you were spouting previously. I wonder what your next post would contain, if I cared enough to refute your sources again. Would your estimates drop a second time?
The gun lobby source in particular, that one is amusing. It points out alleged fabrications of the statistics in the UK figures, due to political pressures of trying to keep a lid on crime rates for public approval. Yet, in a country like the US, with a much higher murder/rape rate, surely the same pressures apply, and the same abuses can be found. Look into any bureaucracy and you'll find corruption of some kind, especially the "victimless" cooking of statistics. Purely as an example in the opposite direction: in the homicide ratios between the US and UK, the UK figures included those who died in terrorist attacks. The US did not. The gun lobby source then continues with hilariously bad mis-information, which just 2 minutes of reseach for me refuted. Take this gem:
"Suppose that three men kill a woman during an argument outside a bar. They are arrested for murder, but because of problems with identification (the main witness is dead), charges are eventually dropped. In American crime statistics, the event counts as a three-person homicide, but in British statistics it counts as nothing at all."
In direct contridiction to the Home Office report on how homicide is classified in their statistics:
"deaths were initially recorded as homicide, a decrease of two per cent on the previous year. Where the police initially record an offence as homicide it remains classified unless the police or courts decide later that no offence or homicide took place."
Note that the homicide recording isn't based on getting a conviction - but on the police later deciding that what was previously suspected to be a homicide turned out not to be the case.
The page also mentions this: "England: According to the BBC News, handgun crime in the United Kingdom rose by 40% in the two years after it passed its draconian gun ban in 1997". Which is true, the BBC report mentioned can be found here. What the page fails to do however is mention the conclusion of the BBC's report, which is that although a new law was introduced, it was badly implemented since it was only targetted at hobbyist/sporting gun communities, instead of targetting the illegal smuggling of weapons. Why is this an important distinction? Because this snippet was introduced in the context of supporting the idea that gun control laws do not work/make you less safe. The BBC report does not condone that conclusion whatsoever; it merely re-iterates the hopefully obvious point that a bad law won't work, whereas a better law with similar aims may well have.
The hilarity continues, with the next table that claims to indicate a higher level of violence in countries with a low level of gun ownership, in comparison to those with high levels of gun ownership. Did you even read this table? I suspect not, because it could be the very definition of selective reading and statistical manipulation that it was so keen to decry only a paragraph before. For a summary: 3 countries are listed as high gun ownership (Switzerland, US, Israel) and 3 with low gun ownership (Denmark, France, Japan). Only 6 countries? What kind of study was this? Well actually, if you follow the source, the study had A LOT more countries, so firstly, what methodology was used to pick those 6? As it turns out: a bad one - but more on that later. What do the statistics actually show? They tally up suicide rate and homicide rate to arrive at a total ({24.1, 19.0, 7.9} for high gun rates vs {27.2, 21.9, 17.3} for low g
Oh, well, if Simon Cowell said so...
/.?
Reading a Simon Cowell interview? Paying heed to what he says and trusting its integrity? Bringing up what he says in a discussion about a serious issue? What are people like you doing on
Here, let me help you. The interwebs can get confusing sometimes, take a wrong tube and you soon find yourself somewhere you don't belong.
Except that you're a retard who pulls statistics out of his ass and doesn't bother to wipe off the shit before waving them around in public. Yes, on a brainless glance at the figures, you're right, that's what they say. But congratulations on throwing yourself in with the homoeopaths and Intelligent Design crowd for the Outstanding Lack of Intellectual Integrity award. The UK statistics cover a huge number of crimes that are omitted in the US figures. A slightly more honest comparison would be the the US:UK homicide ratio. Which, as of several years ago was 4:1.
I can indeed. Because intelligent people around here in the countryside who walk their dogs at night wear bright clothing, or a reflective sash - or even jacket. It's extremely obvious that they're there, because they're glowing.
And the side effect: since my lights are on, they know I'm there too.
They are being stupid, and your ridiculously obvious "experiment" does nothing to prove otherwise. It goes without saying that if you have no artificial light available that waiting until your eyes adjust to the darkness gives you better vision. The point is that it's better vision only in comparison to what you would have if you had no light at all. How you've managed to take this answer and extrapolate it to night-vision being superior to a source of light in the darkness is stupefying. If you truly believed this wasn't stupid, tell me, do you drive at night without your headlights on? No? Thought not. As to the argument of counting the pennies saved on petrol - that works right up until the first time you hit a tree because you couldn't see properly. The only short-sighted thing here is these morons driving so dangerously and your leap to defend them from deserved criticism.
What other absurd superstitious beliefs of technologically backwards societies do you feel compelled to defend out of some political correctness gone awry? Voodoo? Condoms being responsible for AIDS? AIDS drugs being a plot of the "white man" to test out dangerous substances and keep their society down?
Romanticising and defending these cultures as somehow more "natural" than our own, is ridiculous, and I feel inclined to remind anyone bent to do so that the second they need their modern society for something, they'll jump straight back into it, romanticism be damned.
Because it cuts into two of Apple's core user segments:
1.) People who like to pay far more than something is actually worth.
2.) Exclusivity. To their userbase, an Apple product is a statement of who you are. IE, someone with more money than sense and probably homosexual (*). If everyone started picking up $1 iPads, they wouldn't be so special anymore.
* A funny aside, when the iPhone was new, Stephen Fry was doing an interview on Top Gear, espousing its virtues, and in particular talking about gaydar app that he found very useful. I fear though that this particular app may have fallen foul of App Store policy, as it would no doubt be duplicating functionality already present - in the hardware, no less.
She sounds awesome.
I'd suggest that the reason Gentoo isn't mentioned more often around here is the slashdot groupthink predisposition to actually like Linux. If however we were forced to focus too much on Gentoo, and put up with more Gentoo users, it is likely that the backlash would so negatively affect the image of Linux as a whole that it'd fall out of favour, turning slashdot into an MS fanboy website, hence collapsing reality, time and space into a supermassive black hole that consumes the rest of the universe.
At least until said black hole had finished its 'emerge universe', got on with another Big Bang and finally presented us with a command prompt to once again get something useful done. This process may however take many millions of years to complete, ironically similar to setting up a Gentoo system in the first place. Scary thought.
Or even worse, what if God was a Gentoo user, creating the fabric of spacetime with ridiculous and troublesome optimization flags. Dark Matter? Nah. Just a bug from compiling with -O3.
To be fair, they target gay men, so it's not that far removed from targetting women as you implied.
You're clearly lying. You must fear something. My bet would be your Shift key.
Oh but then, hmm. You did capitalise 'AND', so you are capable of it. Perhaps the fear is of a more general kind - fear of looking intelligent maybe? I'd say it was a stretch, but then, you are an apple fanboy who programs for the iPhone and doesn't seem at all concerned with the fact that Apple can at any time with no real explanation remove your products from their store. So yeah, that's not too intelligent either. Corraborates my theory.
Efficient as in, time efficient. Could well still be true, but not something to be flattered about ;)
The point is, it's Microsoft's fault that the problem has been allowed to escalate. It's Microsoft that released a hideous "upgrade" to XP and allowed it continue well past the point where it should have been consigned to history. It's Microsoft that continues selling a defunct OS out of a scrambling fear to stop a competitor from making inroads into a netbook market that they had disregarded. How many millions of netbooks with XP on them have been sold over the past 2 years? MS apologists like yourselves harp on about how ridiculous it is to support a 15 year old codebase. But guess what, if you continued selling the product of that codebase until recently, then yes, the consumer has a right to expect it to be maintained.
I get the feeling this conversation is turning into another User-Friendly strip.
+1 offtopic incoming. Regarding your signature, it's somewhat more difficult to find a feature of this nature in Linux as it would be in Windows. Which strikes me as a bit odd. Anyway, what you want to do can be simulated with this apparantly:
http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/~sm244/Jail.tar.gz
Though if you wanted that functionality for the same reason I wanted it (specifically playing games on a dual-headed Linux using TwinView, your best bet is to start researching adding a extra MetaMode into your X config. It's what I ended up doing instead, since it just turns the other monitor off and allows me to play on my main monitor. Works fine.
No it is not reasonable at all, because it leads to a situation whereby the consumers are ultimately penalised for the anti-competitive structures of business. Scale out your example a bit to include your competitors and your potential customers. You consider your discovery to be a unique selling point, something with which you will attract many customers. But your example is willfully stupid because it neglects to mention anything of your competitors other than painting them in the villainous nature of thieves. Lets say you have two main competitors, and they each have their own patented USPs.
One of them has developed an innovative gesture recognition system that's an order above anything else on the market. It is something customers find extremely useful and saves them time when operating their phones. However, they've got a solid patent on the system and even if you were able to successfully reproduce (even without reverse engineering) the result, you'd be unable to include it in a product.
The other has developed the means for a device to drain significantly less power than it currently does. Up to doubling the operational time between charges. It works in tandem with another of their patented developments to draw power from the environment. Solar cells in convenient locations, drawing heat from being in a near-to-body pocket, and drawing power from simply being moved around. Overall, their devices could last up to 4-5 times longer than yours, but you can't mimic that functionality.
From the perspective of a consumer, what I want is a device that can do all of the above. But I can't get it. The three companies have all patented their greatest innovations, and will of course refuse to license them to protect their unique position in the market. Surely the correct answer is not to artifically create a market where 3 companies with 3 sub-par products battle it out for our money? I'd much rather having a device that is capable of all of the above with the companies competing not on mutually exclusive technology, but on the efficiency of their production and distribution, the build quality of their devices, their customer service levels and their reputation as a company that's responsible to its immediate environment.
How lucky for us that you have taken it upon yourself to provide straitjacket definitions for commonly used words and impose them on the rest of us.
Newsflash: lag is not just network latency. It's a catch-all term, which if I had to summarise, I'd say would be best described as a failure in terms of performance to maintain expectations. You know, like, jet-lag, or a runner lagging behind the pack. In the case of the GP post, it was the failure of the 3D engine to maintain the framerate at an expected level. Hence, lag. As a term it does of course have implications in the speed of a network also, but that's hardly all the term is limited too.
Apparently this was funny too. I'm so confused...
Maybe my funny bone is broken
I have...which leaves me even more baffled. That was comedy?
No offence to Mr Colfer, but they really should have gone with a more appropriate writer. Someone in the same vein of writing, or at least comedy. I wonder if Pratchett would have been a preferred candidate before his diagnosis?
At what I feel may be a very real risk of WHOOSH, I'll respond. This hate on "generalising" is totally irrational. Humans are habit forming, pattern matching biological machines who owe a large part of our success as a species to the ability to generalise. Forming connections based on observed behaviours between multiple sources and using those connections to draw conclusions. Sometimes right, sometimes wrong, but largely useful. Surely you recognise that in even attempting to speak on the character on something as widely varied as the culture of a generation of people, you're dealing with such huge numbers of people that in order to say anything of non-obvious value means identifying the largest occupied unions of the set. What's crazy here is your apparent level of butthurt over someone putting a label on something which by your tone you already knew to be true.
Or maybe you're hating on generalisations for the sake of them being generalisations. Which is twisted in its own ironic way because it's not based on any proof that abstraction is a bad thing, but rather on the feared result of being subject to some inappropriate application of generalisation to an individual. So really you're damning generalisation as a whole because some idiots misuse it. Generalising generalising not out of its most frequent use, but most feared misuse, a highly faulty premise.
I find the concept of the reinvention of COBOL to be severely troubling. On the one hand, although Zombies are cool, they're still sufficiently dragged down by COBOL that the result would be terrible. On the other, a reinvention of COBOL could lead to the eventual development of time travel, fueled by the desire to go back and kill the nefarious project and/or creator in its infancy.
Paper bricks the RIAA will throw at you when they catch you downloading music.