But enough hammering the workers. As you can see they are not the problem.
Whenever I read a little Republican screed, I always think of this from an American master of rhetoric:
To understand this, you have to go back to what [the] young brother here referred to as the house Negro and the field Negro -- back during slavery. There was two kinds of slaves. There was the house Negro and the field Negro. The house Negroes - they lived in the house with master, they dressed pretty good, they ate good 'cause they ate his food -- what he left. They lived in the attic or the basement, but still they lived near the master; and they loved their master more than the master loved himself. They would give their life to save the master's house quicker than the master would. The house Negro, if the master said, "We got a good house here," the house Negro would say, "Yeah, we got a good house here." Whenever the master said "we," he said "we." That's how you can tell a house Negro.
If the master's house caught on fire, the house Negro would fight harder to put the blaze out than the master would. If the master got sick, the house Negro would say, "What's the matter, boss, we sick?" We sick! He identified himself with his master more than his master identified with himself. And if you came to the house Negro and said, "Let's run away, let's escape, let's separate," the house Negro would look at you and say, "Man, you crazy. What you mean, separate? Where is there a better house than this? Where can I wear better clothes than this? Where can I eat better food than this?" That was that house Negro. In those days he was called a "house nigger." And that's what we call him today, because we've still got some house niggers running around here. -- Malcolm X -- Message To The Grass Roots
Little Republicans would make me laugh if it didn't mean we all had to deal with Big Republicans. Big Republicans are smart, they know that there is practically no class mobility in this country and that their policies are transferring what little wealth the working class, including the Little Republicans, has managed to aquire into their own pockets. (They also know that they have more in common with Wesley Mouch than Hank Rearden, and they don't care because they think Rearden was a chump.)
Republicans are more likely to be self-sufficient go-getters, to work at startups where they have a hand in the direction, focus, and success of their endeavor. They expect to have to earn everything they get.
The problem with WWII for the U.S. is that the U.S. didn't experience it the way the other involved countries did. Like, remember the Blitz, when bombs were dropping on New York City? Oh, that was London. Remember when San Francisco and Chicago were destroyed by firestorms? Oh, that was Tokyo and Dresden. Remember the long war of attrition that took place in Detroit? Oops, that was Stalingrad.
Not only that, but the U. S. had a similar experience with WWI.
So, basically, the rest of the industrialized world was in ruins, but America was in fine shape, relatively speaking. This caused a lot of Americans to draw the wrong lessons about war, and War Socialism.
The truth is the Second World War didn't so much help America as it destroyed all of America's competitors across the world.
There's no need to go to the Third World. In another country that doesn't have a corrupt equivalent of the FCC beholden to special interests, Google can go ahead with the tests.
Seriously, Google needs to be thinking about the future and the U. S. ain't it. Someday, and not very far out, the U. S. (or whatever ends up replacing it on the North American land mass) will be the Third World Government getting bribed for Science!!!
Japan maybe, France, plenty of countries will want to get a jump on this technology. If the U. S. wants to fall behind because a few rich people can corrupt a regulatory body so they can buy a few more ivory backscratchers, so be it! Lord knows it's a drop in the bucket compared to what has been outsourced or legally crippled because of our little masters of the Universe on Wall Street. We're getting near the end of Atlas Shrugged here or the beginning of 1984 or sometime way before the beginning of Revolt in 2100. Take your pick, dystopias in real life all end the same way.
Just kidding, also more than 20 years PC usage (although if you go too far back my PC of choice was an Atari 800), no exploding capacitors so far. In fact, nothing on my PCs explode, I guess I should be disappointed. I did have some modems get fried in a lightening storm a few years back, but that was a good excuse to replace them with external ones and upgrade my surge protection. That was back when I was still using dial-up.
The thing about Mac fans is, how can I put this delicately, they just don't tend to be computer geeks (cool POSIX compliant OS non-withstanding). It's possible they read a news story some time about some crummy PC brand that also sells mainly to non-geeks with exploding capacitors. Or perhaps not. Does Apple issue talking points?
Hmm, they sound very cool. I'm not interested in trying OSX on my PC, but if I was I would buy from them. (Of course, with any odd company you have to be careful, but this About Us page actually makes me like them better.)
[Bender is checking his e-mail inside of his head]
Bender: Porn. Porn. Free porn. Get rich watching porn? I find that rather hard to believe. [reading] Scientists at West Johnson Pornoversity need test subjects to rate top quality roborotica. Ooh, top-quality.
[A "Scan for virus?" alert pops up]
Bender: Warning, perform virus scan? I'm waiting for porn over here.
[Bender repeatedly clicks "No"]
Bender: Oh, yeah, come on, baby.
[An obedience virus downloads itself into bender, and he starting babbling nonsense]...
Nudar: Guess I was wrong. There was a robot stupid enough to download the obedience virus.
Some of the mortgage companies were handing out Boiler Room as a training tape. (No accounting for taste, I'd have used Glen Garry Glen Ross.) In other words, they knew they were committing fraud, an took a movie about fraud and said, "We need to be like those guys."
The people who bought houses they couldn't afford are relevant to the current crisis only in that they are the product that these mortgage brokers were selling. This is no different than, say, if someone in the meat industry said, "I got some tainted meat, real bad, but folks won't know though, I've got a special process that covers it up." They knew that these were bad loans, and not knowing wouldn't be an excuse because it was their business to know and to refuse loans to people who couldn't pay. So, corruption or incompetence, take your pick (really? a little from column A and a little from column B.).
Understand, the mortgage brokers were not trying to make money in the traditional way that is done with a mortgage (loan out money, have the person pay it back with interest, make a profit). No, they were collecting mortgages to be sold on the open market, after being sliced, diced and repackaged into complex derivatives.
To get product to sell, they went after people with senile dementia, and helped people lie about their ability to pay back the loans they were taking out. They knew they were selling fiction. Of course, some of the buyers knew they were buying fiction, too, which they could then sell to their "little people" customers. How much people knew and when they knew it I don't know, but they should have paid attention to Warren Buffet, who called them Financial Weapons of Mass Destruction. Now we are recieving the payload, and we all get to pay to bail out these corrupt, incompetant charlatans.
Actually, at that point in SEGA's lifespan, the Dreamcast didn't just have to do well, it had to win unambiguously. The basically were at a doomed point in their life. Even their commercials reflected this, Bizarre Japanese Sega commercial
I think the actual goal of the system was to make SEGA the company attractive to a decent buyer, instead they ended up being hostiley taken over by a company that sells gambling machine to sleazy gambling dens and brothels. (Nothing, I object to of course having been in both sorts of places, but it has not been good for SEGA, sadly.)
But back to the topic at hand - how does text-based gaming's lack of graphics equate to a better game?
Oh, they don't. I'd never say the lack of something leads to a better game. However, if you have access to something and deliberately leave it out for artistic reason, it could occasionally lead to a better game. Note, that's "could" and "occasionally." Hey, Eddie Casica thinks that old-timey sitcoms went to Hell in a Ham Sandwich when they switched to color. People still occasionally make black and white films, and radio shows.
I had the Lurking Horror and Beyond Zork. Now, I don't know if there is some "souped up" copy of those somewhere that has graphics, but mine didn't have them. I do remember that if you had the right PC, Lurking Horror had sound. However, it's pretty well documented that Cornerstone killed Infocom. There were some games that included graphics, I think Zork Zero was one. Incidentally, the last Infocom branded game I ever played was Tombs and Treasures on the NES, which was sort of similar to Shadowgate. I expect there were others that I didn't play. There were also the digital comics they made a while back, I had one of those...
Homebrew isn't going to produce a much better text parser, and probably text parsers will have the great next leap forward when they are voice parsers. (Phoenix Wright, anyone). My problem is that games that could use text parsers, or games that do use text parsers, tend to use primitive ones. I'm talking about big budget, AAA titles. (Specific Example: Using a computer in Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines. Sure the game failed for various reason, but it was definitely both high budget and high concept. The text interface on the in game PCs was not as robust as it could have been. I was glad they included it, though, and primitive as it was it made the game more fun and increased the immersion.)
As to user interface, a Koan:
One evening, Master Foo and Nubi attended a gathering of programmers who had met to learn from each other. One of the programmers asked Nubi to what school he and his master belonged. Upon being told they were followers of the Great Way of Unix, the programmer grew scornful.
The command-line tools of Unix are crude and backward, he scoffed. Modern, properly designed operating systems do everything through a graphical user interface.
Master Foo said nothing, but pointed at the moon. A nearby dog began to bark at the master's hand.
I don't understand you! said the programmer.
Master Foo remained silent, and pointed at an image of the Buddha. Then he pointed at a window.
What are you trying to tell me? asked the programmer.
Master Foo pointed at the programmer's head. Then he pointed at a rock.
Why can't you make yourself clear? demanded the programmer.
Master Foo frowned thoughtfully, tapped the programmer twice on the nose, and dropped him in a nearby trashcan.
As the programmer was attempting to extricate himself from the garbage, the dog wandered over and piddled on him.
The Gates/Seinfeld ads were an attempt to be really creative and iconoclastic. People hate that. They want faux creative and faux iconoclastic. As Fry remarked once, "Clever things make people feel stupid, and unexpected things make them feel scared."
So rather than being entertained by interesting commercials (I try to avoid commercials, but if I have to watch them I prefer them to be interesting), we'll get the new ads which are not interesting. Just like Apple's ads are not interesting, come to think of it.
Honestly, the Apple ads are similar to the Chad ads from Alltel, or the Welcome to the Next Level ads from SEGA. Or the "plumber boy" ads from Sony which basically ripped off SEGA's ad campaign, but were entertainingly extra-obnoxious. I'll admit, that when I was a SEGA partisan, I had fun with the SEGA ads, I loved telling my brother all about Blast Processing knowing full well it was somewhat disingenuos marketing. Since I'm not an Apple fan, I find the Apple ads only slightly amusing, sometimes. Mostly something to fast forward through or a cue to get a drink.
Honestly, you are probably too intelligent for ads to work on you the way they are supposed to. Advertising targetted toward you will be more subtle and harder to pin down. That's why advertisers employ psychologists, after all.
In general a suppression of the truth, when a party is bound to disclose it, vitiates a contract. In the contract of insurance a knowledge of the facts is required to enable the underwriter to calculate the chances and form a due estimate of the risk; and, in this contract perhaps more than any other, the parties are required to represent every thing with fairness.
Suppressio veri as well as suggestio falsi is a ground to rescind an agreement, or at least not to carry it into execution.
It's basically a Comedy of Manners. Most of my favorite sitcoms, The Office, The Sopranos, Fawlty Towers, Curb Your Enthusiasm are.
Society has all these hidden rules. We all know what the rules are. We might not realize how important they are or how serious a breach of these social rules will be until someone does it. George and the others, for whatever reason, ends up breaching these rules constantly on the show, usually when he's put into a situation where breaching the rules = personal gain (or avoiding a personal loss). For example, a fire in which he tramples old people, cripples, women and children to get out alive and then has to justify his "unmanly" behavior later when confronted with it.
Often, Seinfeld himself plays the role of the straight man. So he doesn't get the funniest lines or to do the funniest things, but he does get to react to other characters (both the main ones and some of the weird guest stars). He acts as "the voice of reason" informing the characters that something is a bad idea as an aside, "Oh, that should be enough video tape to record the experiment, the arrest and most of the trial."
Seinfeld was revolutionary for its time, which is something people miss. Also, it was revolutionary for an American sitcom, so if you grew up on Brit-coms (like me) you might have liked it but wondered what all the fuss was about.
The main characters of Seinfeld were bad people, who did bad things, and didn't care, or learn or grow. Jerry Seinfeld said that the seminal moment was when his character said, "Now lets go watch this fat bastard get sliced open." He wasn't sure if he could get away with being that unlikable and heartless.
Now, I don't have much of a sense of humor for whatever reason. Getting genuine laughter out of me is difficult, and Seinfeld didn't have any easier a time with me than anything else. Even so, I liked Seinfeld, although for that kind of comedy my favorite show was the similar, but in my opinion far funnier, The Sopranos. Both shows were fun because they were comedies of manners, petty nonsense on the shows would get blown up out of all proportion to reality. (Oh, and for me, some comforting familiarity. I'm from that part of the country, New Jersey, and certain things rang true for me on both shows.)
Well, they tend to be better at text parsing than modern games. How many times do you run into a character in a modern RPG and are given multiple choice answers to his/her questions? Heck I occaisionally even run into a game that requires, gasp, typing and the interface is at best more Scott Adams (the other one) than Infocom. This is in 2008.
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The truth is this goes all the way back to the beginning, you had your graphical adventure games which tended to to have crummy -VERB- -NOUN- parsers, and Infocom which had state of the art text parsers for their games but no graphics.
Infocom died not because their games stopped being popular (though that may have happened eventually, it didn't in the companies lifetime) but because they were mismanaged into the ground by people who wanted them to be the next Microsoft and switch from games to office software. That didn't work, and killed the company, but their games sold all the way up to the bitter end.
Hmmm... I think you are right. One of the under-reported stories this election is the way the Libertarian party crumbled like a cheaply made levee amidst an attack by sleazy Republican operatives, one of whom is now their presidential candidate. It was quite the thing to behold.
Not sure what I think of that article, one thing stands out:
In India, the study of mathematics is practically a religion. In the United States, how many retail clerks can make change without relying on a calculator?
See, I both have a mathematics oriented degree (Computer Science) and I've worked as a retail clerk. First of all, the two skills, doing simple arithmetic and complex abstract mathematics don't relate as much as people think.
Secondly, one problem you don't have when taking a mathematics test? People trying to bully you or trick you into giving them a higher answer in the math problem you are doing than is actual fact. This happens all the time when you are a retail clerk. I can just imagine the kind of nightmare the average cashier at K-Mart (one of my summer jobs) would have if he/she had to do all all that math in his/her head on a busy night.
Not that the stores would want them to do that, since in that case it would be fairly easy for an employee to skim from the till. One of the things I had to do in the old days, and may well still be true, is make sure that the sales that the computer recorded and the amount of money in my drawer matched at the end of the evening. There's your math, right there. You could end up getting in trouble if those don't add up, and I'd use a calculator if I were you... it's easy to lose track of singles.
But no, let's mock the simple clerks slaving away for minimum wage when they can't do the on the spot calculation we want them too. Especially when the best they can hope for is not getting in trouble with the floor manager for doing whatever favor for you it is that you want them to do that they are doing without using the register's calculator. Hmm, probably you walk up, no merchandise, "Could you change this $20.00?" expecting them to open the drawer and hope that you aren't a quick-change scammer (Police Search for "Quick Change" Scammers). I doubt that anyone is offering to tip them for their change making abilities.
See, what the average store customer doesn't realize is that if I'm not working on commission, I'm not there to make you happy. I mean, I used to try with some customers (according to my whim) when I worked those kind of jobs, but that was the kind of thing considered detrimental to job performance by your manager. Your job is to make your manager happy, and his job is to please someone higher up.
Slashdot Mirror
Whenever I read a little Republican screed, I always think of this from an American master of rhetoric:
Little Republicans would make me laugh if it didn't mean we all had to deal with Big Republicans. Big Republicans are smart, they know that there is practically no class mobility in this country and that their policies are transferring what little wealth the working class, including the Little Republicans, has managed to aquire into their own pockets. (They also know that they have more in common with Wesley Mouch than Hank Rearden, and they don't care because they think Rearden was a chump.)
I'd have modded you "funny" for that one, myself.
The problem with WWII for the U.S. is that the U.S. didn't experience it the way the other involved countries did. Like, remember the Blitz, when bombs were dropping on New York City? Oh, that was London. Remember when San Francisco and Chicago were destroyed by firestorms? Oh, that was Tokyo and Dresden. Remember the long war of attrition that took place in Detroit? Oops, that was Stalingrad.
Not only that, but the U. S. had a similar experience with WWI.
So, basically, the rest of the industrialized world was in ruins, but America was in fine shape, relatively speaking. This caused a lot of Americans to draw the wrong lessons about war, and War Socialism.
The truth is the Second World War didn't so much help America as it destroyed all of America's competitors across the world.
There's no need to go to the Third World. In another country that doesn't have a corrupt equivalent of the FCC beholden to special interests, Google can go ahead with the tests.
Seriously, Google needs to be thinking about the future and the U. S. ain't it. Someday, and not very far out, the U. S. (or whatever ends up replacing it on the North American land mass) will be the Third World Government getting bribed for Science!!!
Japan maybe, France, plenty of countries will want to get a jump on this technology. If the U. S. wants to fall behind because a few rich people can corrupt a regulatory body so they can buy a few more ivory backscratchers, so be it! Lord knows it's a drop in the bucket compared to what has been outsourced or legally crippled because of our little masters of the Universe on Wall Street. We're getting near the end of Atlas Shrugged here or the beginning of 1984 or sometime way before the beginning of Revolt in 2100. Take your pick, dystopias in real life all end the same way.
Does that include capacitors I made myself?
Just kidding, also more than 20 years PC usage (although if you go too far back my PC of choice was an Atari 800), no exploding capacitors so far. In fact, nothing on my PCs explode, I guess I should be disappointed. I did have some modems get fried in a lightening storm a few years back, but that was a good excuse to replace them with external ones and upgrade my surge protection. That was back when I was still using dial-up.
The thing about Mac fans is, how can I put this delicately, they just don't tend to be computer geeks (cool POSIX compliant OS non-withstanding). It's possible they read a news story some time about some crummy PC brand that also sells mainly to non-geeks with exploding capacitors. Or perhaps not. Does Apple issue talking points?
Hmm, they sound very cool. I'm not interested in trying OSX on my PC, but if I was I would buy from them. (Of course, with any odd company you have to be careful, but this About Us page actually makes me like them better.)
Apple sucks, Windows sucks more.
I'm not sure which I'd be more upset about if I woke up from a coma, the Infected or the fact that my PC couldn't run OSX anymore!
Why is it that when God tells me to "Rise, kill, eat!" people always get a scared look and tell me to take my meds? It's in the Bible, people!
[Bender is checking his e-mail inside of his head]
Bender: Porn. Porn. Free porn. Get rich watching porn? I find that rather hard to believe. [reading] Scientists at West Johnson Pornoversity need test subjects to rate top quality roborotica. Ooh, top-quality.
[A "Scan for virus?" alert pops up]
Bender: Warning, perform virus scan? I'm waiting for porn over here.
[Bender repeatedly clicks "No"]
Bender: Oh, yeah, come on, baby.
[An obedience virus downloads itself into bender, and he starting babbling nonsense] ...
Nudar: Guess I was wrong. There was a robot stupid enough to download the obedience virus.
Some of the mortgage companies were handing out Boiler Room as a training tape. (No accounting for taste, I'd have used Glen Garry Glen Ross.) In other words, they knew they were committing fraud, an took a movie about fraud and said, "We need to be like those guys."
The people who bought houses they couldn't afford are relevant to the current crisis only in that they are the product that these mortgage brokers were selling. This is no different than, say, if someone in the meat industry said, "I got some tainted meat, real bad, but folks won't know though, I've got a special process that covers it up." They knew that these were bad loans, and not knowing wouldn't be an excuse because it was their business to know and to refuse loans to people who couldn't pay. So, corruption or incompetence, take your pick (really? a little from column A and a little from column B.).
Understand, the mortgage brokers were not trying to make money in the traditional way that is done with a mortgage (loan out money, have the person pay it back with interest, make a profit). No, they were collecting mortgages to be sold on the open market, after being sliced, diced and repackaged into complex derivatives.
To get product to sell, they went after people with senile dementia, and helped people lie about their ability to pay back the loans they were taking out. They knew they were selling fiction. Of course, some of the buyers knew they were buying fiction, too, which they could then sell to their "little people" customers. How much people knew and when they knew it I don't know, but they should have paid attention to Warren Buffet, who called them Financial Weapons of Mass Destruction. Now we are recieving the payload, and we all get to pay to bail out these corrupt, incompetant charlatans.
Actually, at that point in SEGA's lifespan, the Dreamcast didn't just have to do well, it had to win unambiguously. The basically were at a doomed point in their life. Even their commercials reflected this, Bizarre Japanese Sega commercial
I think the actual goal of the system was to make SEGA the company attractive to a decent buyer, instead they ended up being hostiley taken over by a company that sells gambling machine to sleazy gambling dens and brothels. (Nothing, I object to of course having been in both sorts of places, but it has not been good for SEGA, sadly.)
And what if your greatest fear be a crocodile with a clock in it's belly?
Oh, they don't. I'd never say the lack of something leads to a better game. However, if you have access to something and deliberately leave it out for artistic reason, it could occasionally lead to a better game. Note, that's "could" and "occasionally." Hey, Eddie Casica thinks that old-timey sitcoms went to Hell in a Ham Sandwich when they switched to color. People still occasionally make black and white films, and radio shows.
I had the Lurking Horror and Beyond Zork. Now, I don't know if there is some "souped up" copy of those somewhere that has graphics, but mine didn't have them. I do remember that if you had the right PC, Lurking Horror had sound. However, it's pretty well documented that Cornerstone killed Infocom. There were some games that included graphics, I think Zork Zero was one. Incidentally, the last Infocom branded game I ever played was Tombs and Treasures on the NES, which was sort of similar to Shadowgate. I expect there were others that I didn't play. There were also the digital comics they made a while back, I had one of those...
Homebrew isn't going to produce a much better text parser, and probably text parsers will have the great next leap forward when they are voice parsers. (Phoenix Wright, anyone). My problem is that games that could use text parsers, or games that do use text parsers, tend to use primitive ones. I'm talking about big budget, AAA titles. (Specific Example: Using a computer in Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines. Sure the game failed for various reason, but it was definitely both high budget and high concept. The text interface on the in game PCs was not as robust as it could have been. I was glad they included it, though, and primitive as it was it made the game more fun and increased the immersion.)
As to user interface, a Koan:
Incidentally, your rendition of "PC on Linux" reminds me of Purple Tentacle at the beginning of Day of the Tentacle.
The Gates/Seinfeld ads were an attempt to be really creative and iconoclastic. People hate that. They want faux creative and faux iconoclastic. As Fry remarked once, "Clever things make people feel stupid, and unexpected things make them feel scared."
So rather than being entertained by interesting commercials (I try to avoid commercials, but if I have to watch them I prefer them to be interesting), we'll get the new ads which are not interesting. Just like Apple's ads are not interesting, come to think of it.
Honestly, the Apple ads are similar to the Chad ads from Alltel, or the Welcome to the Next Level ads from SEGA. Or the "plumber boy" ads from Sony which basically ripped off SEGA's ad campaign, but were entertainingly extra-obnoxious. I'll admit, that when I was a SEGA partisan, I had fun with the SEGA ads, I loved telling my brother all about Blast Processing knowing full well it was somewhat disingenuos marketing. Since I'm not an Apple fan, I find the Apple ads only slightly amusing, sometimes. Mostly something to fast forward through or a cue to get a drink.
However, the new ads will likely be successful. See this article, "I'm a PC" ad: Finally, Microsoft gets it.
Honestly, you are probably too intelligent for ads to work on you the way they are supposed to. Advertising targetted toward you will be more subtle and harder to pin down. That's why advertisers employ psychologists, after all.
Well, I wouldn't trust a person like me if I were you.
SUPPRESSIO VERI - Concealment of truth.
In general a suppression of the truth, when a party is bound to disclose it, vitiates a contract. In the contract of insurance a knowledge of the facts is required to enable the underwriter to calculate the chances and form a due estimate of the risk; and, in this contract perhaps more than any other, the parties are required to represent every thing with fairness.
Suppressio veri as well as suggestio falsi is a ground to rescind an agreement, or at least not to carry it into execution.
--SUPPRESSIO VERI
SUGGESTIO FALSI. A statement of a falsehood. This amounts to a fraud whenever the party making it was bound to disclose the truth.
--SUGGESTIO FALSI
Latin saying suppressio veri, suggestio falsi: The suppression of the truth is the suggestion of a falsehood.
It's basically a Comedy of Manners. Most of my favorite sitcoms, The Office, The Sopranos, Fawlty Towers, Curb Your Enthusiasm are.
Society has all these hidden rules. We all know what the rules are. We might not realize how important they are or how serious a breach of these social rules will be until someone does it. George and the others, for whatever reason, ends up breaching these rules constantly on the show, usually when he's put into a situation where breaching the rules = personal gain (or avoiding a personal loss). For example, a fire in which he tramples old people, cripples, women and children to get out alive and then has to justify his "unmanly" behavior later when confronted with it.
Often, Seinfeld himself plays the role of the straight man. So he doesn't get the funniest lines or to do the funniest things, but he does get to react to other characters (both the main ones and some of the weird guest stars). He acts as "the voice of reason" informing the characters that something is a bad idea as an aside, "Oh, that should be enough video tape to record the experiment, the arrest and most of the trial."
Seinfeld was revolutionary for its time, which is something people miss. Also, it was revolutionary for an American sitcom, so if you grew up on Brit-coms (like me) you might have liked it but wondered what all the fuss was about.
The main characters of Seinfeld were bad people, who did bad things, and didn't care, or learn or grow. Jerry Seinfeld said that the seminal moment was when his character said, "Now lets go watch this fat bastard get sliced open." He wasn't sure if he could get away with being that unlikable and heartless.
Now, I don't have much of a sense of humor for whatever reason. Getting genuine laughter out of me is difficult, and Seinfeld didn't have any easier a time with me than anything else. Even so, I liked Seinfeld, although for that kind of comedy my favorite show was the similar, but in my opinion far funnier, The Sopranos. Both shows were fun because they were comedies of manners, petty nonsense on the shows would get blown up out of all proportion to reality. (Oh, and for me, some comforting familiarity. I'm from that part of the country, New Jersey, and certain things rang true for me on both shows.)
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The truth is this goes all the way back to the beginning, you had your graphical adventure games which tended to to have crummy -VERB- -NOUN- parsers, and Infocom which had state of the art text parsers for their games but no graphics.
Infocom died not because their games stopped being popular (though that may have happened eventually, it didn't in the companies lifetime) but because they were mismanaged into the ground by people who wanted them to be the next Microsoft and switch from games to office software. That didn't work, and killed the company, but their games sold all the way up to the bitter end.
Hmmm... I think you are right. One of the under-reported stories this election is the way the Libertarian party crumbled like a cheaply made levee amidst an attack by sleazy Republican operatives, one of whom is now their presidential candidate. It was quite the thing to behold.
See, I both have a mathematics oriented degree (Computer Science) and I've worked as a retail clerk. First of all, the two skills, doing simple arithmetic and complex abstract mathematics don't relate as much as people think.
Secondly, one problem you don't have when taking a mathematics test? People trying to bully you or trick you into giving them a higher answer in the math problem you are doing than is actual fact. This happens all the time when you are a retail clerk. I can just imagine the kind of nightmare the average cashier at K-Mart (one of my summer jobs) would have if he/she had to do all all that math in his/her head on a busy night.
Not that the stores would want them to do that, since in that case it would be fairly easy for an employee to skim from the till. One of the things I had to do in the old days, and may well still be true, is make sure that the sales that the computer recorded and the amount of money in my drawer matched at the end of the evening. There's your math, right there. You could end up getting in trouble if those don't add up, and I'd use a calculator if I were you... it's easy to lose track of singles.
But no, let's mock the simple clerks slaving away for minimum wage when they can't do the on the spot calculation we want them too. Especially when the best they can hope for is not getting in trouble with the floor manager for doing whatever favor for you it is that you want them to do that they are doing without using the register's calculator. Hmm, probably you walk up, no merchandise, "Could you change this $20.00?" expecting them to open the drawer and hope that you aren't a quick-change scammer (Police Search for "Quick Change" Scammers). I doubt that anyone is offering to tip them for their change making abilities.
See, what the average store customer doesn't realize is that if I'm not working on commission, I'm not there to make you happy. I mean, I used to try with some customers (according to my whim) when I worked those kind of jobs, but that was the kind of thing considered detrimental to job performance by your manager. Your job is to make your manager happy, and his job is to please someone higher up.
"Let us cavort like the Greeks of old. You know the ones I mean." --Hedonism-bot
It was cheap!