the "realism" in the sims is limited to an upper-middle class, suburban hell devoid of politics, weather, changes in economy, environment, and a billion other things. though I agree that what Maxis has implemented in the game is very impressive, I was disappointed by the expansion pack:
The expansion pack dwelved into less realistic, more fantastic add-ons (with the exception of the "play in bed" option). IMHO the Sims is not popular because it simulates what life is like
, it is popular because people enjoy playing a simulation of what life should be like.ie:
-- you can get stronger/more skilled in just a few hours
-- having the right skills and friends will lead automatically to success
-- more posessions = happiness++
-- everyone can afford a house in the suburbs, even if you're a slacker.
-- everything happens for a reason
This game expouses a philosophical message which in no way I am accusing to be deliberate -- the complexities of life are far too great to be modelled by a home computer game. But as a game, it aims at fantasy rather than simulation.
IBM, Motorola, and AMD have teamed up to develop a new advanced network chip architecture code-named Mollusc. This new chip is designed to "suck" all of the information from the internet and "retain all the juicy bits", like it's bivalve namesake.
The partners plan to invest $800 trillion clams in the project and have recruited the talents of many scum-sucking bottom-feeders who have recently been laid off in Silicon Valley.
The chip is slated for many home users who want all the *extremely* useful information on the internet available at home without really wanting it.
A secrect document, penned by the hand of L. Ron Hubbard himself, inscribed on a "Bob's Big Boy" bar-size paper napkin with blue ball-point pen:
I, L. Ron Hubbard, swear to pay the holder of this contract twenty dollars if I cannot start a religion with a completely ficticious basis within ten years. Signed, L. Ron Hubbard
Ladies and gentlemen, this bar bet has gone on too long.
This is starting to get off-topic, but I will respond more seriously.
In the old country (Russia) Jews were at best second class citizens, we got here and someone told us that we could be full citizens of a country, and we have become just that.
My great-grandfather (my namesake) was a German jew who came over before WWI and the rest of his family in Hamburg was wiped out in WWII, so please don't play the "hardluck-immigrant-family" anecdote on me. It's immaterial, anyway.
Well you could have no government, I bet the multinationals would
love that. All those pesky rules that they have to live by now would be gone.
That's a matter of ideology, which I'm not going to get to on slashdot, but you're welcome to follow the links. Philiadelphia has a rich history of anarchist russian-Jewish immigrants, who both opposed the czar and the bolsheviks.
Governments acts to defend those "pesky multinationals" from the hoardes of people who would rather do without them, thank you very much. Don't forget that it is fascism, after all, that persecutes peoples because it provide a convenient scapegoat for economic problems.
How can you fit a good analysis and critique of free trade and globalized capitalism into a 3-second sound byte? (I can hardly fit that sentence in) The [major network] Media does a really good job of dumbing-down just about everything, and protests are no exception. Here's why:
--sensationalism: focusing on the few dozens smashing Starbucks rather on the thousands with poignant signs and irony-laden puppets. they'll focus on a car crash as much as a major demonstration.
--brevity: if you ever, ever watch a newscast in another country (or even the Newshour with Jim Lehrer) you will be struck by how long those other news stories go, and the detail. Our major network news stories run an average of two minutes, with well over 10 minutes devoted to sports.
--superficiality:under the guise of "objectivity" the major netwrok TV news rarely ever gets more communicated than the immediate facts. They don't ask why, they just tell you what is happening.
The reasons that FOX, CNN, CBS, NBC, ABC, and even MTV news do this I will leave to you to decipher. However I urge you to seek out your own information and stories than rely on third parties. Look at the web sites of both sides.
If you want to end global poverty than you should be encouraging trade, not fighting agenst it.
LOL! I'm sorry but...I think you have been hopelessly misinformed/indoctrinated.
I
just don't think you have a very good idea of what change you want
How about an end to capitalism and the state? Is that not specific enough for you? Why? Oh jeez, I'm sorry, I forgot that the world is perfect...at least, your world.
Uh, we're protesting, uh, bad corporations, and, uh, the effect on, uh, world politics. Yo, check it out, I got beat up by a cop!"
And what exactly are you doing? Oh wait, I'm sorry, you're the one that's comfortably scorning it all from the safety of your SUV. Well drone on, lackey.
I can't wait until this overinflated market falls down, and all you reactionary, right-wing, individualist, ayn-rand-reading, libertarian-capitalist, black-turtleneck-swathed, diamond-rio-wearin', law-abiding, afraid-of-police-pepper-sprayin', afraid-to-do-anything-but-criticizin', egotistically-sniggerin', hard-drive-comparin', career-minded technophiles are out on the street begging for change to buy blank WORM-CD's so you can sell pirated mp3 albums for food.
I like Slashdot and all, but geek culture is starting to wear thin on me. I can't count the geeks I've met who don't give a shit about anything but the next Star Wars flick, career move, or electronic gizmo. They seem incapable of any opinion that isn't petty criticism or condescending mockery.
I have absolutely nothing to say to these people who have no connection, no empathy for the plight of the world; who refuse to acknowledge that their expensive lifestyle is supported at great cost by the majority of the world's population; who seem to think that just because property destruction is a defined as a crime, and "hurts" corporations, that it is "violent"; who secretly voted for Bush because they're suddenly in those higher tax brackets (and want to see lower capital gains taxes); who maintain a air of being "above it all" because politics and demonstrations and actions are for the "hot-headed youth" and in their self-proclaimed maturity do absolutely nothing about the state of the world;
[gasp for air]
because what they truly love (in this order) is:
-1- their computer
-2- their significant other (sometimes the same as #1)
-3- their cell phone / palm-pilot
-4- their posh urban apartment in a completely gentrified neighborhood
-5- Natalie Portman
Have at you, geeks / nerds / 1337 h4X0rs / whatever! See you in the streets!
I agree - the dolphins kept in captivity, isolated from their tribe or whatever, must be pathologically disturbed as a result of their confinement. Any prisoner, State/Federal, who has been in the joint long enough will tend to become despondant, disciplined, and "institutionalized".
Dophins are social creatures - remove them from their socierty and their language becomes meaningless. I think the only way to discover their language would be to follow them around and record their communications and try to decipher that. If they are indeed as intelligent as a monkey or more, then there is no reason not to suspect that they have a rich culture and philosophical tradition. Why would they care to surf the web? Technology only serves to imprison and humiliate them - the ones who are later released must seem completely insane to the "wild" dolphins out there.
I agree, plus also I can't help but point out that laws like this are only going to increase the pirated music trade even more. There are so many avenues through which to copy and distribute music that cannot be shut down or regulated or even prosecuted. Plus, it never matters to people whether or not something illedgal; only whether or not they can get away with it. Let's face it, people will NOT be deterred by laws screaming bloody retribution for pirating MP3's and distributing them.
All this amounts to is government and corporations blowing hot air at each other, while we folks fill our hard drives with sweet, sweet sounds.
Perhaps you should correct her, because they're not going to copy it and sell it for their own , they're just going to share it with everyone. Besides, your friend is at fault for paying $16.00 for a CD that was produced for $0.75, minus the cover art.
I know I may be just mixing terms, but what if search queries were smarter, in that nodes retained knowlege of the same or similar queries: i.e. remembering what "direction" they came from, thus slowly strenghtening certain paths, associated with certain queries. What this would amount to is neural net - type of of development.
Not sure if this would speed up searches or compromise privacy, though. Freenet is designed to be totally anonymous, with encryption. Maybe I'll just read the ALPINE FAQ...
I run gnome-apt to yank down debian packages. gnome apt uses apt-get's config and soruces, but displays it all nicely, and does nice things like "Smart Mark Updates" where it will automatically detect newer versions or "Fix Broken" that will resolve dependancy conflicts.
I've got an ATI 128 Rage mobility pro on my laptop, running Win2k and I can watch DVD's fine -- the picture quality is astounding and fullscreen you don't notice the scaling at all.
Unfortunately, I've been extremely, extremely frustrated trying to get XFree86 working correctly on my Debian side. I've tried so many things, don't even bother suggesting anything else to me...I'm ready to just drop it and concentrate on actually using the damn thing.
so i hafta drop a whole bill just so i get box that essentially makes thousands of local calls a day? whatever happened to the old recorded-quarters-dropping-in-payphone trick?
I find what you know about Margaret Mead very interesting, but I'm also curious to know how she was proved wrong...
Also, what was this "socio/political agenda" you spoke of? Was it more than simply spreading the idea of cultural relativism?
Sociologists and psychologists will readily admit that most of what makes us us is constructed by our cultural/social experiences and non-cultural things like our materialistic environoment. Are you saying that this cult called "cultural relativists" are out there claiming that all of our personality and development is formed by the culture we're born into? Or are they just saying culture is one of many influences in our psychological construction?
Also I just wanted to say that every researcher has a strong agenda and that there is no "objective" research, especially in the field of ethnography and sociology.
will be just as quick to crack down on radical protestors as the so-called moderate/conservative repoublicans. If there's anything this election farce has taught us, is that both parties don't want anything to change, just business as usual.
The idea that our Democrats are somehow liberal is a farce. Ask any European. Hell, I find the Greens obnoxiously authoritarian and the Libertarians foolishly materialist.
These protestors were radicals, and like me, a lot of them are anarchists (not JUST the ones dressed in black).
A giant Magnetic Resonance Imaging chamber and sending all the data over as voxels? Of course the colors would be all wrong...
Use complex echolocation (or perhaps with radar?) from multiple transmitters/receivers to create a composite surface map of everything, render on the fly and image-map from cameras onto the model...
for tactile feedback overide signals in the spinal column, mapped for each individual user's particular feedback profile (since no two bundle of nerves is alike)? - not sure how the over-ride would be done, actually.
Have an robotic mannequin linked to a motion tracking suit, like in that goddawful movie FX2, and have it shipped to wherever you want to go.
train a monkey to act just like yourself. your colleagues can train and send their own monkey.
save the money and hire a grad student to do all the on-site work.
I couldn't find any significantly new technology that they developed.
true that. this is all systems integration which is what 90% of all technological development is about. However, it's pretty subjective how one would define a "real" technological innovation.
Is my understanding of history incorrect or is it your understanding of terminology (no offense - I'm not about to start a flame war)?
gentry: n.,pl.
1. People of gentle birth, good breeding, or high social position.
2.a. An upper or ruling class.
2.b. The class of English landowners ranking just below the nobility.
3. People of a particular class or group: another commuter from the suburban gentry.
Of course there were many small land-owners. However, I was referring to the so called "Founding Fathers" -- but I really should have made that clear -- who wrote those founding documents. No, I believe the American Revolution was for much less nobler reasons than Disney (an outright nationalist in any case) would like us to think. What they wanted was to not be taxed by the King, of course. This is understandable, since they 1: would have made a lot more profit if it weren't for the Crown skimming off the top, and 2: they thought they could get away with it (well, they were right).
Colonial revolution is inevitable, as history has shown us, though not always with similar incentives.
Slashdot Mirror
The expansion pack dwelved into less realistic, more fantastic add-ons (with the exception of the "play in bed" option). IMHO the Sims is not popular because it simulates what life is like , it is popular because people enjoy playing a simulation of what life should be like.ie:
-- you can get stronger/more skilled in just a few hours
-- having the right skills and friends will lead automatically to success
-- more posessions = happiness++
-- everyone can afford a house in the suburbs, even if you're a slacker.
-- everything happens for a reason
This game expouses a philosophical message which in no way I am accusing to be deliberate -- the complexities of life are far too great to be modelled by a home computer game. But as a game, it aims at fantasy rather than simulation.
IBM, Motorola, and AMD have teamed up to develop a new advanced network chip architecture code-named Mollusc. This new chip is designed to "suck" all of the information from the internet and "retain all the juicy bits", like it's bivalve namesake.
The partners plan to invest $800 trillion clams in the project and have recruited the talents of many scum-sucking bottom-feeders who have recently been laid off in Silicon Valley.
The chip is slated for many home users who want all the *extremely* useful information on the internet available at home without really wanting it.
Governments acts to defend those "pesky multinationals" from the hoardes of people who would rather do without them, thank you very much. Don't forget that it is fascism, after all, that persecutes peoples because it provide a convenient scapegoat for economic problems.
--sensationalism: focusing on the few dozens smashing Starbucks rather on the thousands with poignant signs and irony-laden puppets. they'll focus on a car crash as much as a major demonstration.
--brevity: if you ever, ever watch a newscast in another country (or even the Newshour with Jim Lehrer) you will be struck by how long those other news stories go, and the detail. Our major network news stories run an average of two minutes, with well over 10 minutes devoted to sports.
--superficiality:under the guise of "objectivity" the major netwrok TV news rarely ever gets more communicated than the immediate facts. They don't ask why, they just tell you what is happening.
The reasons that FOX, CNN, CBS, NBC, ABC, and even MTV news do this I will leave to you to decipher. However I urge you to seek out your own information and stories than rely on third parties. Look at the web sites of both sides.
And what exactly are you doing? Oh wait, I'm sorry, you're the one that's comfortably scorning it all from the safety of your SUV. Well drone on, lackey.
I can't wait until this overinflated market falls down, and all you reactionary, right-wing, individualist, ayn-rand-reading, libertarian-capitalist, black-turtleneck-swathed, diamond-rio-wearin', law-abiding, afraid-of-police-pepper-sprayin', afraid-to-do-anything-but-criticizin', egotistically-sniggerin', hard-drive-comparin', career-minded technophiles are out on the street begging for change to buy blank WORM-CD's so you can sell pirated mp3 albums for food.
I like Slashdot and all, but geek culture is starting to wear thin on me. I can't count the geeks I've met who don't give a shit about anything but the next Star Wars flick, career move, or electronic gizmo. They seem incapable of any opinion that isn't petty criticism or condescending mockery.
I have absolutely nothing to say to these people who have no connection, no empathy for the plight of the world; who refuse to acknowledge that their expensive lifestyle is supported at great cost by the majority of the world's population; who seem to think that just because property destruction is a defined as a crime, and "hurts" corporations, that it is "violent"; who secretly voted for Bush because they're suddenly in those higher tax brackets (and want to see lower capital gains taxes); who maintain a air of being "above it all" because politics and demonstrations and actions are for the "hot-headed youth" and in their self-proclaimed maturity do absolutely nothing about the state of the world;
[gasp for air]
because what they truly love (in this order) is:
-1- their computer
-2- their significant other (sometimes the same as #1)
-3- their cell phone / palm-pilot
-4- their posh urban apartment in a completely gentrified neighborhood
-5- Natalie Portman
Have at you, geeks / nerds / 1337 h4X0rs / whatever! See you in the streets!
(but I'm assuming heterosexuality)
And found out that it was just an extremely stable (libc5) version of debian with a pretty/friendly install program. It is extremely kiddy-fied.
Dophins are social creatures - remove them from their socierty and their language becomes meaningless. I think the only way to discover their language would be to follow them around and record their communications and try to decipher that. If they are indeed as intelligent as a monkey or more, then there is no reason not to suspect that they have a rich culture and philosophical tradition. Why would they care to surf the web? Technology only serves to imprison and humiliate them - the ones who are later released must seem completely insane to the "wild" dolphins out there.
All this amounts to is government and corporations blowing hot air at each other, while we folks fill our hard drives with sweet, sweet sounds.
Perhaps you should correct her, because they're not going to copy it and sell it for their own , they're just going to share it with everyone. Besides, your friend is at fault for paying $16.00 for a CD that was produced for $0.75, minus the cover art.
Not sure if this would speed up searches or compromise privacy, though. Freenet is designed to be totally anonymous, with encryption. Maybe I'll just read the ALPINE FAQ...
I noticed that, too. Sounds like the the new, post-.com business strategy: Get mentioned on Slashdot, IPO, laugh all the way to Barbados.
I run gnome-apt to yank down debian packages. gnome apt uses apt-get's config and soruces, but displays it all nicely, and does nice things like "Smart Mark Updates" where it will automatically detect newer versions or "Fix Broken" that will resolve dependancy conflicts.
I've got an ATI 128 Rage mobility pro on my laptop, running Win2k and I can watch DVD's fine -- the picture quality is astounding and fullscreen you don't notice the scaling at all.
Unfortunately, I've been extremely, extremely frustrated trying to get XFree86 working correctly on my Debian side. I've tried so many things, don't even bother suggesting anything else to me...I'm ready to just drop it and concentrate on actually using the damn thing.
pico satellites, a threat? bah! vi !!!
so i hafta drop a whole bill just so i get box that essentially makes thousands of local calls a day? whatever happened to the old recorded-quarters-dropping-in-payphone trick?
Also, what was this "socio/political agenda" you spoke of? Was it more than simply spreading the idea of cultural relativism?
Sociologists and psychologists will readily admit that most of what makes us us is constructed by our cultural/social experiences and non-cultural things like our materialistic environoment. Are you saying that this cult called "cultural relativists" are out there claiming that all of our personality and development is formed by the culture we're born into? Or are they just saying culture is one of many influences in our psychological construction?
Also I just wanted to say that every researcher has a strong agenda and that there is no "objective" research, especially in the field of ethnography and sociology.
will be just as quick to crack down on radical protestors as the so-called moderate/conservative repoublicans. If there's anything this election farce has taught us, is that both parties don't want anything to change, just business as usual.
The idea that our Democrats are somehow liberal is a farce. Ask any European. Hell, I find the Greens obnoxiously authoritarian and the Libertarians foolishly materialist.
These protestors were radicals, and like me, a lot of them are anarchists (not JUST the ones dressed in black).
A giant Magnetic Resonance Imaging chamber and sending all the data over as voxels? Of course the colors would be all wrong...
Use complex echolocation (or perhaps with radar?) from multiple transmitters/receivers to create a composite surface map of everything, render on the fly and image-map from cameras onto the model...
for tactile feedback overide signals in the spinal column, mapped for each individual user's particular feedback profile (since no two bundle of nerves is alike)? - not sure how the over-ride would be done, actually.
Have an robotic mannequin linked to a motion tracking suit, like in that goddawful movie FX2, and have it shipped to wherever you want to go.
train a monkey to act just like yourself. your colleagues can train and send their own monkey.
save the money and hire a grad student to do all the on-site work.
I couldn't find any significantly new technology that they developed. true that. this is all systems integration which is what 90% of all technological development is about. However, it's pretty subjective how one would define a "real" technological innovation.
gentry: n.,pl.
1. People of gentle birth, good breeding, or high social position.
2.a. An upper or ruling class.
2.b. The class of English landowners ranking just below the nobility.
3. People of a particular class or group: another commuter from the suburban gentry.
Of course there were many small land-owners. However, I was referring to the so called "Founding Fathers" -- but I really should have made that clear -- who wrote those founding documents. No, I believe the American Revolution was for much less nobler reasons than Disney (an outright nationalist in any case) would like us to think. What they wanted was to not be taxed by the King, of course. This is understandable, since they 1: would have made a lot more profit if it weren't for the Crown skimming off the top, and 2: they thought they could get away with it (well, they were right).
Colonial revolution is inevitable, as history has shown us, though not always with similar incentives.