Re:Confusion About Abbie Hoffman
on
Steal This Film
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I still see that as a distinction without a difference.
But rather than taking the obvious argumentative tack of trying once again to convince you of How Wrong You Are In The Light Of My Obvious And Transcendental Rightness (TM)*, I'm going to point out this is a great example of different biases (in the mathematical sense), in this case about the nature of documentaries. You are making a claim that with my personal biases basically can't even be expressed. With your biases, clearly there is one.
Who's right? Who's wrong? And most interestingly of all, do those questions even make sense with such a subjective subject?
Personally, I tend towards separating the act of "definition" or "distinction" from the act of analyzing the distinction. So you have provided a definition/distinction, I've disagreed that it means anything, and now it is for the reader to decide.
The upshot being that neither of us can claim to have an "unbiased" opinion about the goodness of a given documentary. (Not that you were making that claim any more than I was.)
(*: Just to be clear, that's sarcasm.)
Re:Confusion About Abbie Hoffman
on
Steal This Film
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
There's a massive difference between "filmmaker's view shining through" and "film created to make a point".
And what exactly would that massive difference be?
It's impossible to create an "unbiased" work; I think this is mathematical fact, in the highest sense of the term, not a mere rhetorical point.
Given this impossibility, the only difference between "filmmaker's view shining through" and "film to make a [presumably different] point" is how honest the filmmaker is being about their own point of view.
I'd honestly rather see a documentary that accurately reflects the maker's viewpoint, because anything else is likely to be dishonest and probably sub-par, because if they don't believe what they are saying that, too, tends to come through.
The key point here is that it is possible to hold a nuanced opinion, or to believe that the situation is very complicated and you just want to give up, or that the situation is pretty complicated, here's what I think the facts are, here's my call, your call may differ based on the same facts. I know this because I have many opinions of my own of that nature. This is only bad if you assume that everybody always has firm opinions about every question, which I think is something that only someone naive enough to have firm opinions about every question can believe. (Many other people don't think this explicitly, but clearly reason with it as an implicit point.)
All documentaries "make a point". The better people may make documentaries with more nuanced points, but points nonetheless. The only question is whether the filmmaker is lying about their viewpoint to appear "unbiased", and whether they are lying about the facts.
"Unbiased" is actually itself a social construct that prescribes certain beliefs and viewpoints, and is definitely a bias itself; for instance, the "unbiased" social construct states that if there are two opposing sides, and that both sides have the slightest fact in their favor, than we are obligated to throw up our hands and say "We can't decide who's right, the situation is complicated." It doesn't matter how overwhelming the evidence may be, if we are to be "unbiased" we must not make a call. Without speaking to the truth or falsehood of this view, that itself constitutes a "bias" in both the mathematical and human sense (which overlap more than it may appear upon casual inspection of the mathematical definition(s)), a "bias" against making firm decisions about who is right and wrong. This is merely one part of the "unbiased" myth; ultimately the very word is an oxymoron.
It's going to get to the point with these cases that just citing all the relevant precedent alone is going to take tens of pages.
Maybe the ESRB should help these guys out and provide a pre-written list of all the relevant citations so the judges can just copy/paste the list into the ruling.:) (After checking them, of course.)
I don't think it's that they can't think of anything else, it's that they can't implement anything else.
Take Nethack. Now, make a magnificent modern AAA 3D game out of it that sacrifices absolutely nothing. Every spell effect, every creature, every action, everything. It is probably theoretically possible, but it would be a monstrous undertaking. Nethack casually does very advanced things because the graphics, perhaps ironically, support those advanced things as well as they do anything else.
Angband is simpler in many ways, but it also does some things with terrain and detection spells that a modern 3D graphics engine could hardly dream of.
Graphics have shot well ahead of our ability to actually represent things with them. Combat's all that's left, and honestly, it tends to suck; if my sword was actually going straight through that orc, shouldn't it be in two pieces now? But it's easily fakable. Most other things aren't. So we're left with games consisting of the things that are sorta, kinda fakable in 3D.
Who knows how many wonderful features have been cut because there was no way to render them in breathtaking 3D? We end up with only the games we can represent in 3D, which is a horrific subset of the games we could do in 2D. There's still room for 2D games because we aren't as advanced in 3D as we think we are.
The Wii at least attacks one problem, that of the fundamentally binary input of buttons and a directional pad being your only interface into a complicated world. (I am aware that the directional pads are technically analog, but they aren't really very good at it.) But it doesn't do anything to attack the graphics problem.
There must not be a mechanism in a web browser (or any other application that displays untrusted content) for a document to request privileges above and beyond those that are actually required for displaying untrusted content. Rather, the user must request privileges by installing a plugin or extension outside the encapsulated user interface.
That's already how it works. "A document" can't ask for extended privs. Show me the HTML snippet that invokes "extended privileges" in a standard Firefox. There actually is a way to ask, and there actually is a deeply-buried about:config setting that a developer can set to allow these privs to be obtained, but on a normal browser it'll just fail without the user even being asked, and even with that secret setting set you still have to click through a dialog box.
Instead, you have to explicitly download and install an extension, which is no different than my downloading anything else. Documents on the web at large still can't use these extensions to obtain more privileges unless the plugin explicitly provides for it, and I can't think of any off-hand that do that. If I'm willing to download an extension and run it, all bets are off anyhow, and that is ultimately because the operating systems of today are weak and have an all-or-nothing security model, which the browser can't do much more about than it already does.
This is not the same as ActiveX, where in the worst case a new program could be downloaded without the user's knowledge, although those were bugs, not features. Pages could be written that would do anything with an ActiveX control that would be downloaded and installed with a single click. There is no equivalent to this in Mozilla. There is no way to write a page that depends on a plugin that results in that plugin getting downloaded and executed all in the same page context.
All that leaves you with is an argument that the browser shouldn't be able to install extensions into itself, which I suppose you could argue, but I find it very weak. The distinction between programs just isn't meaningful enough at this present time to make that worth caring about. If the "extensions installation program" ran with meaningfully different privileges, maybe I'd be willing to consider the argument further, but at the present time it just doesn't matter whether it's a separate program or not.
If I believed for a moment that the enviroment might be fully usable as shown, then this might at least make it to "interesting". But historically speaking, there will only be a set of motions that are "acceptable" and a whole series of other things the game won't understand, and setting up an environment won't be a matter of putting a table here and four chairs there, but fully specifying everything the player can do, which makes for a smaller environment because the developers have to do a lot of work per area.
I base this on history: The canonical example in my mind is the megazoom in Black and White from an apple with a worm in it out to the full island view. Cute, but in-game, there was nothing else with the level of detail of that worm, other than that apple. The video, hyped as a promise of things to come, was actually the complete set of cool actions you could take. Molyneux seems to keep giving us that.
Honestly, combat is the one thing that modern action-based video games do tolerably well at; it's the other aspects of the game I'd like to see improved first. (Note that I really do mean "tolerably well"; it's not perfect, but the fact that it has been the primary focus of gaming for nigh unto these many years shows, and the near-complete lack of attention paid to anything else but graphics also shows.)
the Ori haven't visited there either, evidently, which puts a whole lie to the Ancients protecting earth's galaxy, but that's another story
There are a number of inconsistencies in the whole Ancient/Ori storyline, and I still wonder which, if any, are deliberate, which are oversights, and which are the effect of writing-by-committee.
Most interesting to me is the claims by the Ori that they do Ascend their followers and it is the Ancients lying about what they are doing. If you think about it, we really have no objective way to judge the truth of either claim. We may prefer the way the Ancients let us live to the Ori's strict rules, but on the other hand, if the Ori really do Ascend their followers whereas the Ancients just let us go die and poof into oblivion, it may be worth living under the Ori.
There is also the entire issue of the Ancient's non-interference policies, which I am very glad to see the show take on directly. Every since Season One, all the advanced races of the galaxy have been advocated pacifism, a policy that if actually followed by the humans of Earth would have resulted in their death. I couldn't help but notice the only races advocating pacifism were the races with big enough guns to take anything on. If the show is going to go out, I'm glad they're taking one of these pacifistic races (the biggest of them all, in fact), and throwing a threat they can't just "handle" at them to see what happens. We have limited evidence that at least some of the Ancients are reconsidering their position, but not enough yet.
(Other peoples have faced reckoning for this policy; the Tollan were, as far as we know, wiped out after being overconfident in the Big Guns = Pacifism policy.)
The thought has crossed my mind that if I were in the position of SG-1, and I got ahold of that weapon to wipe out Ascended beings, that the rational thing to do may be to wipe out both the Ancients and the Ori and start fresh. Odds are good that with the possession of Atlantis and the other things left behind by the Ancients we could work out Ascension on our own in a short period of time. (For instance, you could raid the time-bubble in the Pegasus galaxy for whatever they left behind there; without Ancients guarding it all you have to do is go in there and turn off the machine creating the bubble.)
Anyway, the upshot of all of this is that the Stargate universe has basically tapped itself out; they've shot to the top of the villian scale with the Ori and while I'd actually be ecstatic to watch a show that returned to the first-season roots of exploration, it seems impossible for a sci-fi series that has picked up a Cause to return to that. (Star Trek failed, even after Voyager handed them the setup to return on a silver platter, and Captain Picard even commented in one of the movies, "Does anybody remember when we were explorers?")
Note they still seem to contain a "charge" and can become "depleted", so odds are they aren't actually anything more than an extremely-high-quality storage device.
Now, the energy claimed to be in one of those devices is another thing altogether; clearly something not known to us was used to power those things up.
I've always wondered how it is that the Ancient Database has nothing on how to charge a ZPM...
Perhaps, but in the Free Energy domain there's a trivial path to "the light of day": Start selling your wonderful free energy device. If it works, it'll sell, because first crackpots will buy it, then they'll notice that it actually works, tell their friends, whom will satisfy themselves it works and order one, and it'll go from there.
Free energy ideas tend to stall at the "working" part. See the Mythbusters episode, for instance, not because they disprove the entire idea (technically not possible), but because the free energy devices are hilarious and obviously don't work. If they actually had, we'd know now.
I honestly don't know what to say here that won't sound like a flame, so I'm going to settle for: You've either got serious reading comprehension problems, or you are flagrantly intellectually dishonest with yourself.
You can convince yourself you've won any argument if you arbitrarily twist the words of others into some other argument, but you're not doing yourself any favors. How about admitting that you didn't know what you were talking about, and either deciding you won't make that mistake again in the future, or trying to fix your ignorance, instead of defensively trying to strike out at me?
What you are doing when you see everybody's cards is calculating the odds of a player winning the hand once every community card has been dealt. Those are the odds you typically see on TV poker shows.
Again, you're trying to talk up some kind of disadvantage for odds computation for the AI because they can't compute a number the other players can't compute either.
Clearly, it is not a simple matter of math to compute the odds knowing what you have an not knowing anything else.
Yes it is. You just get different odds. But this number is already all humans have to go off of. And you can't sit there and tell me they don't, because those guys certainly seem to realize that a suited AK has better "odds" than off-suit 25.
You can "compute odds" for everything from nobody having any cards yet (easy because you can just use a symmetry argument to say it's 1 out of N) to having all the cards specified (one person has odds 1, everybody else has 0).
Again, the entire purpose of probability is to deal with situations where you don't know everything. There's nothing special about the difference between "knowing your cards" and "knowing everybody elses" that makes computing odds impossible. You just get different odds.
Computing the odds of having the best hand is trivial. It's knowing what to do with them that is hard. Knowing that you're a %50 percent favorite in a group of 4 doesn't tell you whether to call your opponents bluff. You seem to want to conflate these two issues into one number.
No matter how "Intelligent" artifical or otherwise I manage to code a game, it can't reason out the reasoning behind a non-logical person.
Your understanding of Artificial Intelligence is about forty years out of date.
Artificial intelligence does not use "logic" as its basic representation and hasn't for a while now. In fact your statement is trivially false; it is easy to write a program based on Markov Chains that will beat the snot out of an average human at Rock-Paper-Scissors, and the worst way to lose to that program will be to randomly/"non-logically" bash on the keyboard. I'm talking "undergrad homework assignment" easy. And even a skilled human will find themselves challenged by the program for quite while until they basically learn how to execute the program in their head and out-guess it.
And Markov Chains are old and no longer considered interesting.
You only know your odds if you know exactly what every opponent has... and that's where simple heuristics fail miserably.
Completely untrue; you clearly don't understand the purpose of "odds" and probability. The entire purpose of "computing odds" is to deal with situations where you don't have all the information. If you had all the information, you wouldn't be "computing odds", you'd just know.
It is a simple matter of math to compute odds based on knowing what you have, and not knowing anything else. You can't compute the odds they show you on the TV when they know all the hands on the table, but the human gamblers don't get those odds either.
It isn't a simple matter of math to know what to do with those odds, and that's the problem. Computing the odds is a pretty straightforward task, though.
So, in a nutshell, you're claiming that AI players have special problems because they can't compute odds that the human players can't compute either. If anything, it's easier for bots because they can run 100%-accurate real math in the blink of an eye, where a human will probably be using an approximation.
How about, "if it were that easy, we would have already done it"?
It's not as if physicists collectively have large bets out on the inability to communicate or travel faster than light; indeed, for the person who manages it it's probably a guaranteed Nobel prize and quite possibly public acclaim that physics hasn't seen since Einstein.
If you want a more technical explanation, go Google for it. I'm tired of explaining it to people who don't want to believe it and use their mighty high-school-dropout physics skills to "debunk" it. (That's not aimed at you, RedDirt, you just asked a question. But any such answer posted on Slashdot inevitably collects the high-school dropouts who think that the English explanation is the real thing and start quibbling about what are basically grammar points, and not equations and experiments they wouldn't recognize if they bit them on the ass.)
Along with the other problems mentioned by repliers, there's the problem that if we all retreat to boat-based transportation, the terrorists will do the same with boat-based transportation as they did to planes.
Both sides of the situation react. Terrorists aren't stuck on "attacking planes", they are attacking society. And if it seems to you like society is "overreacting", that's because it's going to keep stepping up the pressure on the terrorists until they go away. (Mind you, I'm not saying the pressure chosen will be "right" or "effective", just that it will increase as long as the terrorists stimulate it.) You can't react by, for example, moving to boat-based transportation and think you've solved the problem, because there will be second-order effects, such as terrorists attacking boats.
In fact, boats are a lot easier to attack; remember the USS Cole? The equivalent attack on a military plane is certainly possible but much harder. Getting "a missle" is much harder than getting "a boat and some explosives".
but if you try and write about another fictional villain, say a Star Wars Sith Lord, and you will find your ass sued into the ground.
Yes, if you write about a Sith Lord.
However, you can write about a guy that looks devilish, has wicked special powers with a vibro-sword due to his being specially attuned to the negative aspects of the universe, is an apprentice of another even badder bad dude, and is working on his skills with shooting lightning from his fingers.
The only problem you'll face then is accusations of ripping the character off, but George isn't going to sue you.
My guess is that they completely understand that and it's pure marketing.
There's this set of "obvious applications" that comes up in marketing, but mysteriously never materializes in the real world because it's either really hard to create, really hard to make useful, or completely uninteresting in real life. Classic examples include:
"Mom using the computer to store recipes." Never happened; the web makes it easy to get *other* recipes but Mom never put a computer in the kitchen and typed all her recipes into it. "Uninteresting in real life."
The home console that will also double as a computer (a promise older than many Slashdotters). "Really hard to make useful" against the competition of a real computer.
The fully voice-controlled computer. Easy to talk about; "really hard to create".
Pretty much any AI promise ever made.
Most convergance promises; this falls into the "really hard" category and slowly but surely it is actually happening, but it's as much a matter of exploring the design space as it is developing the hardware. A few things have converged, but nowhere near what was promised, and much of what actually has converged wasn't predicted. I do not remember people talking about cell phone + camera until it was virtually on top of us, for instance, whereas "PDA + cell phone" still hasn't really happened, nor has "cell phone + good MP3 player". And I could fill another couple of paragraphs about failed convergances I've seen...
Each sub-category of computing develops its own promises, and "peripheral promises" are an old and rich vein in the console domain. This is going to be marketed as "putting you in the game"; in practice, it'll be the EyeToy 2.
(I'm going to classify this as "uninteresting in real life"; when I say I want to be "in the game", I don't mean I want to see my face, I mean I want to feel like I'm living the game, and generally, I don't see my own face in real life, so that's pretty jarring. Granted, the poker example isn't that, but it really isn't terribly interesting either; you might as well let people represent themselves as anything they want, rather than their own face. Isn't that one of the advantages of being online, nobody knows you're a dog?)
Many Suzuki students after a year are completely unable to read music because they focus so much on rote play.
Not sure this is a direct reply, but it's worth sharing.
I got royally fucked by a piano teacher using the Suzuki method on me. I believe that the Suzuki method dictates that you must not progress until you are perfect. I was a little lazy, and I didn't quite nail it. As a result, I was not allowed to progress. As a result, I got less motivated. As a result, I did not progress. As a result, I got less motivated. Repeat until stupified.
Eventually, I moved on and realized I needed a different teacher, but my piano playing, especially reading piano music, was very damaged by the experience. I spent far, far too long on simple pieces all in the key of C, and even with years more practice I basically have never learned to really read piano music, especially out of C. You're supposed to learn that a note on a given line "means" either the natural, sharp, or flat version, but I ended up with the natural version hammered into me.
Later, I played trombone in the school band, where keys never really bothered me, which I found interesting.
Also later, I ended up taking up electronic music composition on a keyboard up as a hobby, where keys also didn't bother me, which I found really interesting. (In fact I can only recall doing one song in C, and it wasn't even the first.) Flipping keys around, even very rapidly, was a no-brainer to me in short order. (Note to non-piano players: By no means is this bragging; this is a normal skill for piano players and other musicians. This isn't exceptional talent, my piano-reading skills are exceptionally deficient.)
For all that, I'm not convinced that Suzuki is bad, inherently, but I think it's probably a poor match for some students and can do more damage than good. It may produce technically proficient players, but my personal talent was not with technical proficiency, which was merely adequate, but with the other aspects of music. Unfortunately, my Suzuki teacher never profitably developed those other aspects because the Suzuki system is so focused on technical proficiency. Had I progressed in other ways, I am convinced that I would have had the motivation to catch up on my technical proficiency as well, once I wasn't continuously playing Twinkle, Twinkle, You Fucking Star every week for I don't even care to guess how long.
I've been experimenting with using Backspace, on the theory that I'm already happy with where the control key is, and I use backspace a lot.
So far, I still tend to forget the caps lock key exists at all, which would cause trouble no matter how I remapped it...
This could be especially useful to me since I use Dvorak, which, regardless of whatever other effects it may have, does definitely cause you to have your fingers on the home keys a lot more. (With QWERTY I wandered all over the place, with Dvorak I actually touch-type "correctly".)
I bring that up to segue into something else: Like most Dvorak users, I haven't bought a "Dvorak" keyboard. I just use OS features to remap the keyboard, which has always been pretty easy in X and is pretty easy in XP (although as usual not quite as polished if you like to switch a lot, though I've since gotten over that). You really can't just "get rid of" the Caps Lock key, but this guy doesn't seem to propose what it should be. I suppose by default we're going to go back to control (though I'd like to see some thought put into it; backspace ought to at least be considered and there may be some other good choices too, though I have to admit I doubt Escape is it in modern times), but this guy really ought to suggest something.
I think some of his problem is the canvas got too big.
Dungeon Keeper was a great game. Especially the first one, all things considered. A small set of changes and it'd shine as an engine even today. The AI was spectacular in practice. It was actually fairly simple, each creature had certain rules and preferences, but with a good mix of creatures the dungeon really hummed along by itself without a lot of dumb intervention. Combat could use some work (they tried to fix it in the second one, but the ultimate problem is you probably need to be able to play without picking up the creatures at all, at least as an optional mode), and there were a couple of other bugaboos, but it was really solid. Really packed a lot in on those older computers.
Now he wants to really pack a lot in on these newer machines and consoles, and our tools just aren't up to it. Theoretically the games he envisions probably could exist, but they'd take longer to develop than the consoles will actually be economically viable for. People bitch about bloat, but the fact is that in general, even allowing "bloat" our programmer tools have not kept up with hardware, and truly pushing a complicated world to the limit in code (not just graphics) is basically beyond us right now. An XBox 360 may be, say, 100 times more powerful than a Super Nintendo, but we can't really make a game's code and engine 100 times more complex. (In fact, going from a Super Nintendo RPG to a modern RPG can sometimes leave you wondering what we've been doing with our time since then.)
I do not say this to excuse him; ultimately, despite various self-esteem-propoganda to the contrary, you do need to limit you dreams to the possible. But I think it's a good stab at an explanation.
Someone who would probably fall prey to this is Garriot, the guy behind Ultima. Ultima games were always just on this side of dissolving into a quivering mass of bugs because they were always so cutting edge. (Mind you, I'm not saying they were quivering masses of bugs; they are in general quite good, although 7 and on get a little glitchy. I'm saying that it took a lot of work to get them there and sheer willpower. Witness the fun involved with getting Ultima 7 running, with its incredible memory management scheme. (You're better off running Exult, now.)) And you know, while I've heard about some plans of his, I haven't heard about anything he's done and finished since before the first Black and White...
Is the next wave of innovation in gaming going to occur nowhere near the video game screen?
You mean, "augmented reality" gaming?
This being slashdot, I'll spell out my implication: This isn't an entirely new idea. In fact, most demos of augmented reality that I've seen involve gaming.
The problem is still technology. We're in the Atari 2600 phase of augmented reality gaming, if that. Probably not, since one of the distinguishing characteristics of the 2600 was the fact it could take carts to play multiple games. We're probably, technically, still in the "Pong in the arcade" era. (Or even "Pong in the lab", moving towards "Pong in the arcade".)
The next innovation is probably still going to be the Wii. (Not trying to be a fanboy.)
However, the Wii will be part of the inevitable progression towards augmented reality gaming; I know it technically doesn't have the first Wii-mote-like functionality, but it will be the first platform to get more developers thinking about it, using it, experimenting with it, and generally putting the technology through its paces. That will most likely be very useful input for true augmented-reality gaming.
And if we're really lucky, the 360 and PS3 will follow through on some of the abortive attempts to bring image processing up to the point where it could match some of the Wiimote functionality. I still think there will be a period when you're going to hold something, but the image processing power and experience will still be necessary.
By the time all this software innovation has taken place, perhaps the hardware will be in place. But it won't be "the next wave of innovation". It's at least two waves down the road. Think ten years, not ten months.
That said, pong in the arcade is also a necessary first step towards the development of the video games of today that we know and love. Don't think I disapprove of what Frank Lantz is trying; in fact I approve wholeheartedly. I just don't think what he is doing is "the next wave of innovation".
Sure, there's a bit of smoke. I don't deny that. But there has pretty much always been smoke since the founding of the Republic. The US doesn't have a magic anti-authoritarian screen that prevent such people from being born or attaining power.
The real question is, are all the people screaming about the smoke being silenced? And the answer is, no.
I'll be sure to check back in a year and make sure your post wasn't censored by the goverment; if it was I'll start worrying.
So there's smoke... but it's not much. I'm far more concerned about what I see coming out of the paradise that is Europe than what I see in this country at the moment.
What people like you don't understand is the old "Boy Who Cried Wolf" story. If you keep claiming the sky is already falling, when it actually does you'll have no credibility.
'Course, you're also a person that thinks a media that never says a good word about the current administration "favors" them, and I have to admit I tend to dismiss the opinions of people who think that the media is "nice" to the Administration because the media doesn't scream and bitch about everything you want them to, only some of the things. Generally speaking, I'd imagine that a media "favorable to the current administration" might actually say something positive about them every once in a while, but hey, what do I know?
Slashdot Mirror
I still see that as a distinction without a difference.
But rather than taking the obvious argumentative tack of trying once again to convince you of How Wrong You Are In The Light Of My Obvious And Transcendental Rightness (TM)*, I'm going to point out this is a great example of different biases (in the mathematical sense), in this case about the nature of documentaries. You are making a claim that with my personal biases basically can't even be expressed. With your biases, clearly there is one.
Who's right? Who's wrong? And most interestingly of all, do those questions even make sense with such a subjective subject?
Personally, I tend towards separating the act of "definition" or "distinction" from the act of analyzing the distinction. So you have provided a definition/distinction, I've disagreed that it means anything, and now it is for the reader to decide.
The upshot being that neither of us can claim to have an "unbiased" opinion about the goodness of a given documentary. (Not that you were making that claim any more than I was.)
(*: Just to be clear, that's sarcasm.)
There's a massive difference between "filmmaker's view shining through" and "film created to make a point".
And what exactly would that massive difference be?
It's impossible to create an "unbiased" work; I think this is mathematical fact, in the highest sense of the term, not a mere rhetorical point.
Given this impossibility, the only difference between "filmmaker's view shining through" and "film to make a [presumably different] point" is how honest the filmmaker is being about their own point of view.
I'd honestly rather see a documentary that accurately reflects the maker's viewpoint, because anything else is likely to be dishonest and probably sub-par, because if they don't believe what they are saying that, too, tends to come through.
The key point here is that it is possible to hold a nuanced opinion, or to believe that the situation is very complicated and you just want to give up, or that the situation is pretty complicated, here's what I think the facts are, here's my call, your call may differ based on the same facts. I know this because I have many opinions of my own of that nature. This is only bad if you assume that everybody always has firm opinions about every question, which I think is something that only someone naive enough to have firm opinions about every question can believe. (Many other people don't think this explicitly, but clearly reason with it as an implicit point.)
All documentaries "make a point". The better people may make documentaries with more nuanced points, but points nonetheless. The only question is whether the filmmaker is lying about their viewpoint to appear "unbiased", and whether they are lying about the facts.
"Unbiased" is actually itself a social construct that prescribes certain beliefs and viewpoints, and is definitely a bias itself; for instance, the "unbiased" social construct states that if there are two opposing sides, and that both sides have the slightest fact in their favor, than we are obligated to throw up our hands and say "We can't decide who's right, the situation is complicated." It doesn't matter how overwhelming the evidence may be, if we are to be "unbiased" we must not make a call. Without speaking to the truth or falsehood of this view, that itself constitutes a "bias" in both the mathematical and human sense (which overlap more than it may appear upon casual inspection of the mathematical definition(s)), a "bias" against making firm decisions about who is right and wrong. This is merely one part of the "unbiased" myth; ultimately the very word is an oxymoron.
It's going to get to the point with these cases that just citing all the relevant precedent alone is going to take tens of pages.
:) (After checking them, of course.)
Maybe the ESRB should help these guys out and provide a pre-written list of all the relevant citations so the judges can just copy/paste the list into the ruling.
Designers can't seem to think of anything else.
I don't think it's that they can't think of anything else, it's that they can't implement anything else.
Take Nethack. Now, make a magnificent modern AAA 3D game out of it that sacrifices absolutely nothing. Every spell effect, every creature, every action, everything. It is probably theoretically possible, but it would be a monstrous undertaking. Nethack casually does very advanced things because the graphics, perhaps ironically, support those advanced things as well as they do anything else.
Angband is simpler in many ways, but it also does some things with terrain and detection spells that a modern 3D graphics engine could hardly dream of.
Graphics have shot well ahead of our ability to actually represent things with them. Combat's all that's left, and honestly, it tends to suck; if my sword was actually going straight through that orc, shouldn't it be in two pieces now? But it's easily fakable. Most other things aren't. So we're left with games consisting of the things that are sorta, kinda fakable in 3D.
Who knows how many wonderful features have been cut because there was no way to render them in breathtaking 3D? We end up with only the games we can represent in 3D, which is a horrific subset of the games we could do in 2D. There's still room for 2D games because we aren't as advanced in 3D as we think we are.
The Wii at least attacks one problem, that of the fundamentally binary input of buttons and a directional pad being your only interface into a complicated world. (I am aware that the directional pads are technically analog, but they aren't really very good at it.) But it doesn't do anything to attack the graphics problem.
Instead, you have to explicitly download and install an extension, which is no different than my downloading anything else. Documents on the web at large still can't use these extensions to obtain more privileges unless the plugin explicitly provides for it, and I can't think of any off-hand that do that. If I'm willing to download an extension and run it, all bets are off anyhow, and that is ultimately because the operating systems of today are weak and have an all-or-nothing security model, which the browser can't do much more about than it already does.
This is not the same as ActiveX, where in the worst case a new program could be downloaded without the user's knowledge, although those were bugs, not features. Pages could be written that would do anything with an ActiveX control that would be downloaded and installed with a single click. There is no equivalent to this in Mozilla. There is no way to write a page that depends on a plugin that results in that plugin getting downloaded and executed all in the same page context.
All that leaves you with is an argument that the browser shouldn't be able to install extensions into itself, which I suppose you could argue, but I find it very weak. The distinction between programs just isn't meaningful enough at this present time to make that worth caring about. If the "extensions installation program" ran with meaningfully different privileges, maybe I'd be willing to consider the argument further, but at the present time it just doesn't matter whether it's a separate program or not.
If I believed for a moment that the enviroment might be fully usable as shown, then this might at least make it to "interesting". But historically speaking, there will only be a set of motions that are "acceptable" and a whole series of other things the game won't understand, and setting up an environment won't be a matter of putting a table here and four chairs there, but fully specifying everything the player can do, which makes for a smaller environment because the developers have to do a lot of work per area.
I base this on history: The canonical example in my mind is the megazoom in Black and White from an apple with a worm in it out to the full island view. Cute, but in-game, there was nothing else with the level of detail of that worm, other than that apple. The video, hyped as a promise of things to come, was actually the complete set of cool actions you could take. Molyneux seems to keep giving us that.
Honestly, combat is the one thing that modern action-based video games do tolerably well at; it's the other aspects of the game I'd like to see improved first. (Note that I really do mean "tolerably well"; it's not perfect, but the fact that it has been the primary focus of gaming for nigh unto these many years shows, and the near-complete lack of attention paid to anything else but graphics also shows.)
the Ori haven't visited there either, evidently, which puts a whole lie to the Ancients protecting earth's galaxy, but that's another story
There are a number of inconsistencies in the whole Ancient/Ori storyline, and I still wonder which, if any, are deliberate, which are oversights, and which are the effect of writing-by-committee.
Most interesting to me is the claims by the Ori that they do Ascend their followers and it is the Ancients lying about what they are doing. If you think about it, we really have no objective way to judge the truth of either claim. We may prefer the way the Ancients let us live to the Ori's strict rules, but on the other hand, if the Ori really do Ascend their followers whereas the Ancients just let us go die and poof into oblivion, it may be worth living under the Ori.
There is also the entire issue of the Ancient's non-interference policies, which I am very glad to see the show take on directly. Every since Season One, all the advanced races of the galaxy have been advocated pacifism, a policy that if actually followed by the humans of Earth would have resulted in their death. I couldn't help but notice the only races advocating pacifism were the races with big enough guns to take anything on. If the show is going to go out, I'm glad they're taking one of these pacifistic races (the biggest of them all, in fact), and throwing a threat they can't just "handle" at them to see what happens. We have limited evidence that at least some of the Ancients are reconsidering their position, but not enough yet.
(Other peoples have faced reckoning for this policy; the Tollan were, as far as we know, wiped out after being overconfident in the Big Guns = Pacifism policy.)
The thought has crossed my mind that if I were in the position of SG-1, and I got ahold of that weapon to wipe out Ascended beings, that the rational thing to do may be to wipe out both the Ancients and the Ori and start fresh. Odds are good that with the possession of Atlantis and the other things left behind by the Ancients we could work out Ascension on our own in a short period of time. (For instance, you could raid the time-bubble in the Pegasus galaxy for whatever they left behind there; without Ancients guarding it all you have to do is go in there and turn off the machine creating the bubble.)
Anyway, the upshot of all of this is that the Stargate universe has basically tapped itself out; they've shot to the top of the villian scale with the Ori and while I'd actually be ecstatic to watch a show that returned to the first-season roots of exploration, it seems impossible for a sci-fi series that has picked up a Cause to return to that. (Star Trek failed, even after Voyager handed them the setup to return on a silver platter, and Captain Picard even commented in one of the movies, "Does anybody remember when we were explorers?")
Note they still seem to contain a "charge" and can become "depleted", so odds are they aren't actually anything more than an extremely-high-quality storage device.
Now, the energy claimed to be in one of those devices is another thing altogether; clearly something not known to us was used to power those things up.
I've always wondered how it is that the Ancient Database has nothing on how to charge a ZPM...
Perhaps, but in the Free Energy domain there's a trivial path to "the light of day": Start selling your wonderful free energy device. If it works, it'll sell, because first crackpots will buy it, then they'll notice that it actually works, tell their friends, whom will satisfy themselves it works and order one, and it'll go from there.
Free energy ideas tend to stall at the "working" part. See the Mythbusters episode, for instance, not because they disprove the entire idea (technically not possible), but because the free energy devices are hilarious and obviously don't work. If they actually had, we'd know now.
I honestly don't know what to say here that won't sound like a flame, so I'm going to settle for: You've either got serious reading comprehension problems, or you are flagrantly intellectually dishonest with yourself.
You can convince yourself you've won any argument if you arbitrarily twist the words of others into some other argument, but you're not doing yourself any favors. How about admitting that you didn't know what you were talking about, and either deciding you won't make that mistake again in the future, or trying to fix your ignorance, instead of defensively trying to strike out at me?
What you are doing when you see everybody's cards is calculating the odds of a player winning the hand once every community card has been dealt. Those are the odds you typically see on TV poker shows.
Again, you're trying to talk up some kind of disadvantage for odds computation for the AI because they can't compute a number the other players can't compute either.
Clearly, it is not a simple matter of math to compute the odds knowing what you have an not knowing anything else.
Yes it is. You just get different odds. But this number is already all humans have to go off of. And you can't sit there and tell me they don't, because those guys certainly seem to realize that a suited AK has better "odds" than off-suit 25.
You can "compute odds" for everything from nobody having any cards yet (easy because you can just use a symmetry argument to say it's 1 out of N) to having all the cards specified (one person has odds 1, everybody else has 0).
Again, the entire purpose of probability is to deal with situations where you don't know everything. There's nothing special about the difference between "knowing your cards" and "knowing everybody elses" that makes computing odds impossible. You just get different odds.
Computing the odds of having the best hand is trivial. It's knowing what to do with them that is hard. Knowing that you're a %50 percent favorite in a group of 4 doesn't tell you whether to call your opponents bluff. You seem to want to conflate these two issues into one number.
No matter how "Intelligent" artifical or otherwise I manage to code a game, it can't reason out the reasoning behind a non-logical person.
Your understanding of Artificial Intelligence is about forty years out of date.
Artificial intelligence does not use "logic" as its basic representation and hasn't for a while now. In fact your statement is trivially false; it is easy to write a program based on Markov Chains that will beat the snot out of an average human at Rock-Paper-Scissors, and the worst way to lose to that program will be to randomly/"non-logically" bash on the keyboard. I'm talking "undergrad homework assignment" easy. And even a skilled human will find themselves challenged by the program for quite while until they basically learn how to execute the program in their head and out-guess it.
And Markov Chains are old and no longer considered interesting.
You only know your odds if you know exactly what every opponent has... and that's where simple heuristics fail miserably.
Completely untrue; you clearly don't understand the purpose of "odds" and probability. The entire purpose of "computing odds" is to deal with situations where you don't have all the information. If you had all the information, you wouldn't be "computing odds", you'd just know.
It is a simple matter of math to compute odds based on knowing what you have, and not knowing anything else. You can't compute the odds they show you on the TV when they know all the hands on the table, but the human gamblers don't get those odds either.
It isn't a simple matter of math to know what to do with those odds, and that's the problem. Computing the odds is a pretty straightforward task, though.
So, in a nutshell, you're claiming that AI players have special problems because they can't compute odds that the human players can't compute either. If anything, it's easier for bots because they can run 100%-accurate real math in the blink of an eye, where a human will probably be using an approximation.
Which now raises hope for those of us who want dual-boot flexibility.
So are you saying you're bi-curious?
"self-flagellating each other"?
:)
Hate to play Vocabulary Nazi, but I think you meant "fellating each other", not flagellate, although I'm not sure.
And "self-Xing each other" is pretty much an oxymoron for any X.
If you're going to be vulgar, get it right!
How about, "if it were that easy, we would have already done it"?
It's not as if physicists collectively have large bets out on the inability to communicate or travel faster than light; indeed, for the person who manages it it's probably a guaranteed Nobel prize and quite possibly public acclaim that physics hasn't seen since Einstein.
If you want a more technical explanation, go Google for it. I'm tired of explaining it to people who don't want to believe it and use their mighty high-school-dropout physics skills to "debunk" it. (That's not aimed at you, RedDirt, you just asked a question. But any such answer posted on Slashdot inevitably collects the high-school dropouts who think that the English explanation is the real thing and start quibbling about what are basically grammar points, and not equations and experiments they wouldn't recognize if they bit them on the ass.)
Along with the other problems mentioned by repliers, there's the problem that if we all retreat to boat-based transportation, the terrorists will do the same with boat-based transportation as they did to planes.
Both sides of the situation react. Terrorists aren't stuck on "attacking planes", they are attacking society. And if it seems to you like society is "overreacting", that's because it's going to keep stepping up the pressure on the terrorists until they go away. (Mind you, I'm not saying the pressure chosen will be "right" or "effective", just that it will increase as long as the terrorists stimulate it.) You can't react by, for example, moving to boat-based transportation and think you've solved the problem, because there will be second-order effects, such as terrorists attacking boats.
In fact, boats are a lot easier to attack; remember the USS Cole? The equivalent attack on a military plane is certainly possible but much harder. Getting "a missle" is much harder than getting "a boat and some explosives".
but if you try and write about another fictional villain, say a Star Wars Sith Lord, and you will find your ass sued into the ground.
Yes, if you write about a Sith Lord.
However, you can write about a guy that looks devilish, has wicked special powers with a vibro-sword due to his being specially attuned to the negative aspects of the universe, is an apprentice of another even badder bad dude, and is working on his skills with shooting lightning from his fingers.
The only problem you'll face then is accusations of ripping the character off, but George isn't going to sue you.
I mean, consider how many people could sue Lucas if it worked that way.
There's this set of "obvious applications" that comes up in marketing, but mysteriously never materializes in the real world because it's either really hard to create, really hard to make useful, or completely uninteresting in real life. Classic examples include:
- "Mom using the computer to store recipes." Never happened; the web makes it easy to get *other* recipes but Mom never put a computer in the kitchen and typed all her recipes into it. "Uninteresting in real life."
- The home console that will also double as a computer (a promise older than many Slashdotters). "Really hard to make useful" against the competition of a real computer.
- The fully voice-controlled computer. Easy to talk about; "really hard to create".
- Pretty much any AI promise ever made.
- Most convergance promises; this falls into the "really hard" category and slowly but surely it is actually happening, but it's as much a matter of exploring the design space as it is developing the hardware. A few things have converged, but nowhere near what was promised, and much of what actually has converged wasn't predicted. I do not remember people talking about cell phone + camera until it was virtually on top of us, for instance, whereas "PDA + cell phone" still hasn't really happened, nor has "cell phone + good MP3 player". And I could fill another couple of paragraphs about failed convergances I've seen...
Each sub-category of computing develops its own promises, and "peripheral promises" are an old and rich vein in the console domain. This is going to be marketed as "putting you in the game"; in practice, it'll be the EyeToy 2.(I'm going to classify this as "uninteresting in real life"; when I say I want to be "in the game", I don't mean I want to see my face, I mean I want to feel like I'm living the game, and generally, I don't see my own face in real life, so that's pretty jarring. Granted, the poker example isn't that, but it really isn't terribly interesting either; you might as well let people represent themselves as anything they want, rather than their own face. Isn't that one of the advantages of being online, nobody knows you're a dog?)
Many Suzuki students after a year are completely unable to read music because they focus so much on rote play.
Not sure this is a direct reply, but it's worth sharing.
I got royally fucked by a piano teacher using the Suzuki method on me. I believe that the Suzuki method dictates that you must not progress until you are perfect. I was a little lazy, and I didn't quite nail it. As a result, I was not allowed to progress. As a result, I got less motivated. As a result, I did not progress. As a result, I got less motivated. Repeat until stupified.
Eventually, I moved on and realized I needed a different teacher, but my piano playing, especially reading piano music, was very damaged by the experience. I spent far, far too long on simple pieces all in the key of C, and even with years more practice I basically have never learned to really read piano music, especially out of C. You're supposed to learn that a note on a given line "means" either the natural, sharp, or flat version, but I ended up with the natural version hammered into me.
Later, I played trombone in the school band, where keys never really bothered me, which I found interesting.
Also later, I ended up taking up electronic music composition on a keyboard up as a hobby, where keys also didn't bother me, which I found really interesting. (In fact I can only recall doing one song in C, and it wasn't even the first.) Flipping keys around, even very rapidly, was a no-brainer to me in short order. (Note to non-piano players: By no means is this bragging; this is a normal skill for piano players and other musicians. This isn't exceptional talent, my piano-reading skills are exceptionally deficient.)
For all that, I'm not convinced that Suzuki is bad, inherently, but I think it's probably a poor match for some students and can do more damage than good. It may produce technically proficient players, but my personal talent was not with technical proficiency, which was merely adequate, but with the other aspects of music. Unfortunately, my Suzuki teacher never profitably developed those other aspects because the Suzuki system is so focused on technical proficiency. Had I progressed in other ways, I am convinced that I would have had the motivation to catch up on my technical proficiency as well, once I wasn't continuously playing Twinkle, Twinkle, You Fucking Star every week for I don't even care to guess how long.
I've been experimenting with using Backspace, on the theory that I'm already happy with where the control key is, and I use backspace a lot.
So far, I still tend to forget the caps lock key exists at all, which would cause trouble no matter how I remapped it...
This could be especially useful to me since I use Dvorak, which, regardless of whatever other effects it may have, does definitely cause you to have your fingers on the home keys a lot more. (With QWERTY I wandered all over the place, with Dvorak I actually touch-type "correctly".)
I bring that up to segue into something else: Like most Dvorak users, I haven't bought a "Dvorak" keyboard. I just use OS features to remap the keyboard, which has always been pretty easy in X and is pretty easy in XP (although as usual not quite as polished if you like to switch a lot, though I've since gotten over that). You really can't just "get rid of" the Caps Lock key, but this guy doesn't seem to propose what it should be. I suppose by default we're going to go back to control (though I'd like to see some thought put into it; backspace ought to at least be considered and there may be some other good choices too, though I have to admit I doubt Escape is it in modern times), but this guy really ought to suggest something.
I think some of his problem is the canvas got too big.
Dungeon Keeper was a great game. Especially the first one, all things considered. A small set of changes and it'd shine as an engine even today. The AI was spectacular in practice. It was actually fairly simple, each creature had certain rules and preferences, but with a good mix of creatures the dungeon really hummed along by itself without a lot of dumb intervention. Combat could use some work (they tried to fix it in the second one, but the ultimate problem is you probably need to be able to play without picking up the creatures at all, at least as an optional mode), and there were a couple of other bugaboos, but it was really solid. Really packed a lot in on those older computers.
Now he wants to really pack a lot in on these newer machines and consoles, and our tools just aren't up to it. Theoretically the games he envisions probably could exist, but they'd take longer to develop than the consoles will actually be economically viable for. People bitch about bloat, but the fact is that in general, even allowing "bloat" our programmer tools have not kept up with hardware, and truly pushing a complicated world to the limit in code (not just graphics) is basically beyond us right now. An XBox 360 may be, say, 100 times more powerful than a Super Nintendo, but we can't really make a game's code and engine 100 times more complex. (In fact, going from a Super Nintendo RPG to a modern RPG can sometimes leave you wondering what we've been doing with our time since then.)
I do not say this to excuse him; ultimately, despite various self-esteem-propoganda to the contrary, you do need to limit you dreams to the possible. But I think it's a good stab at an explanation.
Someone who would probably fall prey to this is Garriot, the guy behind Ultima. Ultima games were always just on this side of dissolving into a quivering mass of bugs because they were always so cutting edge. (Mind you, I'm not saying they were quivering masses of bugs; they are in general quite good, although 7 and on get a little glitchy. I'm saying that it took a lot of work to get them there and sheer willpower. Witness the fun involved with getting Ultima 7 running, with its incredible memory management scheme. (You're better off running Exult, now.)) And you know, while I've heard about some plans of his, I haven't heard about anything he's done and finished since before the first Black and White...
I have tnied yourn snennessthion aand I fuund it duz nut wurk.
Pnease anvise.
Sninsneerly, Jurf.
This being slashdot, I'll spell out my implication: This isn't an entirely new idea. In fact, most demos of augmented reality that I've seen involve gaming.
The problem is still technology. We're in the Atari 2600 phase of augmented reality gaming, if that. Probably not, since one of the distinguishing characteristics of the 2600 was the fact it could take carts to play multiple games. We're probably, technically, still in the "Pong in the arcade" era. (Or even "Pong in the lab", moving towards "Pong in the arcade".)
The next innovation is probably still going to be the Wii. (Not trying to be a fanboy.)
However, the Wii will be part of the inevitable progression towards augmented reality gaming; I know it technically doesn't have the first Wii-mote-like functionality, but it will be the first platform to get more developers thinking about it, using it, experimenting with it, and generally putting the technology through its paces. That will most likely be very useful input for true augmented-reality gaming.
And if we're really lucky, the 360 and PS3 will follow through on some of the abortive attempts to bring image processing up to the point where it could match some of the Wiimote functionality. I still think there will be a period when you're going to hold something, but the image processing power and experience will still be necessary.
By the time all this software innovation has taken place, perhaps the hardware will be in place. But it won't be "the next wave of innovation". It's at least two waves down the road. Think ten years, not ten months.
That said, pong in the arcade is also a necessary first step towards the development of the video games of today that we know and love. Don't think I disapprove of what Frank Lantz is trying; in fact I approve wholeheartedly. I just don't think what he is doing is "the next wave of innovation".
"Smoke" is not a binary value.
Sure, there's a bit of smoke. I don't deny that. But there has pretty much always been smoke since the founding of the Republic. The US doesn't have a magic anti-authoritarian screen that prevent such people from being born or attaining power.
The real question is, are all the people screaming about the smoke being silenced? And the answer is, no.
I'll be sure to check back in a year and make sure your post wasn't censored by the goverment; if it was I'll start worrying.
So there's smoke... but it's not much. I'm far more concerned about what I see coming out of the paradise that is Europe than what I see in this country at the moment.
What people like you don't understand is the old "Boy Who Cried Wolf" story. If you keep claiming the sky is already falling, when it actually does you'll have no credibility.
'Course, you're also a person that thinks a media that never says a good word about the current administration "favors" them, and I have to admit I tend to dismiss the opinions of people who think that the media is "nice" to the Administration because the media doesn't scream and bitch about everything you want them to, only some of the things. Generally speaking, I'd imagine that a media "favorable to the current administration" might actually say something positive about them every once in a while, but hey, what do I know?