Thanks for the details on this. I'm getting tired of all the unbased assertions flying around--but then, that's normal for Slashdot.
The Bush administration itself has dropped the WMD issue like a hot potato. It's a lost cause. They now sells the war under the cause of exporting democracy. The WMD argument only persists on the administration side because they don't want to admit to deceit or incompetence.
Hussein wanted all the dangerous toys he could lay his hands on, all the way back to the 70's and Bull's Super Gun. That doesn't mean that he could get them. Nobody in their right mind thinks that Hussein was a good thing for Iraq, but late 2001 and early 2002 was probably the worst possible time to be planning a war in Iraq.
What is missing from this picture is the reality that existed before abortion was possible, and birth control was practically non-existent. In Ireland in the early part of the 20th century (and probably long before) the combined edicts of the Catholic Church against both birth control and abortion led to thousands, and perhaps hundreds of thousands, of babies being starved, buried alive, or simply neglected to death. And hundreds of thousands is not an exaggerated figure, because it is now believed that many of the infant deaths previously ascribed to simple infant mortality may fall into this category. Not foetuses--babies. Because in addition to the bans on birth control and abortion, there was a crushing stigma attached to children born out of wedlock. Nor was marriage any guarantee of a glowing childhood. Read Angela's Ashes.
The early abortionists chose to defy the law as an act of mercy, not because they had a hankering for the job. The liberalisation of attitudes to unwed mothers and their children was encouraged in large part due to the alternative option of abortion--condemning unwed mothers simply drove them to the clinic. Ban abortion, and those narrow views will creep back into the mouths of the clergy. Ask yourself this: how would you like to be an unwed mother in Pakistan?
Oh, and there's a really offensive book out there that has all kinds of violence and sex, incest, even the ritual sacrifice of children. It exhorts people to "dash little children against the stones", condones torture, genocide, slavery, mass rape and slaughter, and all kinds of other horrible things.
It's called the Bible. Take a look at it. I can't believe they leave this stuff lying around where anyone can get a hold of it. The first time I read it, I couldn't believe that people would actually want their children exposed to this. Subsequent readings have not changed my opinion. By comparison, GTA is light sentimental fluff.
One of these days this censorious bullshit is going to come home to roost.
Each new medium stirs up a hornet's nest of doom criers who denounce it as the corrupter of youth, and this has gone on for over 2500 years. Plato called for the pan-pipes to be banned because they aroused unwholesome excitement, and it's been going on ever since. Epic poems, romances, the printing press, Beethoven, prose fiction, radio, television, rock and roll, Dungeons and Dragons, the internet, and now video games have each been attacked in turn. They arouse the wrong emotions, or people cannot tell fiction from reality, it seems.
But the political speeches of a demagogue can arouse emotions worse than any form of entertainment, and for those who can't tell fact from fiction, entertainment is the least of our worries. The world is now troubled--yet again--by the fantasies of religious fanatics, who have the courage to die simply because they lack the courage to live. Fantasy isn't the problem, nor religion. It's the dim-witted confusion of those who are so inexpert in navigating the worlds of imagination that they get lost. Magic is all around us, in brilliant stories that distill the wisdom of generations, in the work of scientists who distill a simple law from a mountain of data, or in that piece of code that tells a computer how to do what only a human mind could do before. This is the imagination honed to a laser's intensity. Against this stand the real muggles, who would end the magic, and end the world.
If there is a God, may he protect us from muggles.
I don't know--our group included some spectacularly good looking girls, including a couple of runway models. And none of the guys looked particularly pasty.
It's not a game about vampires, it's a game about politics. At least, that's the way we played it.
Many teachers now focus on self-esteem rather than learning. Well, I'm sorry, but all they're doing is delaying that crushing moment when the kid stands up before others and reveals his ignorance. Worse yet, the kid is quite likely to become a narcissistic arsehole, who is blithely unaware of how unaware he is, and refuses to learn any better.
The problem with incompetents is that they have no idea how incompetent they are--that's one of the main reasons for their incompetence. Socrates said near the end of his life that all he knew was that he knew nothing. It takes time and effort to understand this; a grasp of the size of the domain that only comes through learning.
I agree that there should be more emphasis on math, particularly in the choice of who teaches it. There are many schools where the math teacher is the gym teacher filling in his off hours, or the teacher who is so dull that the administration figures they should teach math (which everyone hates anyway, right?) There are different ways of grasping math--people grasp numbers verbally, spatially, or even physically (Einstein said that numbers had a 'muscular' feeling.) I was able to teach my wife things she had never been able to grasp just by taking a different approach. And frankly, most math is taught in a way that seems to hang in the air with no practical application, so many kids get the idea that they will never need it anyway.
As for grammar, the ability to express yourself coherently in writing is essential in constructing arguments of any kind. Grammar is partly logic, and much of philosophy deals with unpacking and examining the meaning of words. One of Plato's socratic dialogues hinges on a sense of the verb to be--the point of the dialogue is lost until you realize that this is the first time that this now common sense was explored. Those who can't form their thoughts into words cannot think, and have no chance of grasping subtle concepts. I don't think I need to tell you the importance of this for a democracy.
I can remember doing dozens of grammar exercises most nights when I was in grade school. I couldn't tell you the name of most of those grammatical structures, but I can use them. And it helped a great deal when I went to study logic.
I was pleasantly surprised to see the conservative judges line up against this one. This could have gone either way. Yes, it's the government taking the property, but they are taking it for the benefit of private business interests. This means that a big company *cough*Wal Mart*cough* could slip the local government some "incentives" and practically rezone and rebuild the city to their liking.
This is private interests screwing other private interests through the intermediary of government. Come to think of it, since the rights of all corporations are legal constructs enforced by governments, isn't that always the way it works?
Not that I'm a strict libertarian--everybody is a libertarian about their own freedoms and a fascist when it comes to their own rights. Get rid of the government you elect, and it will be replaced by one you didn't elect--and can't unelect.
Yeah, but there's black hat and white hat. There are people who would hack into a system and leave a note saying "I was here, this is how I got in...fix this!" Then there were the ones who would hack in, delete everything or otherwise fuck it up, and then erase all signs that they were ever there. There are virus writers who write proof of concept worms and viruses to alert people to flaws in their systems, and then there are the script kiddies who have nothing better to do with their time but tweak existing viruses to beat the anti-virus signatures.
I have no use for destructive hackers. It's much easier to find a hole in a system then it is to anticipate all possible angles of attack. If some ass-hat script kiddy wants to show what a clever boy he is, he should do something useful and become a security consultant. On the other hand, that would take brains and work...
Disney may not have believed it, but the marketing droids do. And much as I hate to be the bearer of bad news, they have the focus group studies to prove it. Keep in mind that Alice in Wonderland and Mary Poppins were made in the 60's, before the marketing droids took over. Lion King and Mulan are essentially Americans in Africa and China.
You also wouldn't believe the number of movies made with English, Australian, or New Zealand accents that are 'dubbed' into American. I've often found myself watching a movie and realizing that the whole cast is British or from down under, and wondering what the hell happened to their accents. It is believed that the British accents are too hard for Americans to understand. Likewise, sad endings can often destroy a movie at the box office--which is why many movies have multiple endings shot, and the happiest ending is almost always used after showing it to a test audience. The final product that ships to the theatres often sickens almost everyone involved in it. In some cases, the original tragic ending was the whole point of the movie. Some potentially great movies have had their guts slashed out and left on the cutting room floor (David Lynch's Dune is one that comes to mind--even Frank Herbert loved the original, but the studio hated it.)
So yeah, you're getting crap dished to you. As P.T. Barnum put it, nobody ever went broke by underestimating the taste of the American public. That statement has become the motto of the marketer. Lucky us.
Star Trek functions in much the same way as religions in that it predicts dark times but eventual triumph. It encourages the belief that no matter what happens, we'll get through it. Sartre might have called this a form or collective bad faith, but frankly, I see nothing wrong with this. Pure defeatism just isn't a productive attitude. Pessimists may have a more accurate estimation of their own abilities, but optimists are more likely to succeed. We need both.
The main upside to the Star Trek 'prophecies' is that it is supposed to be based upon cooperation amongst the entire human race (tribalism is death), requires the application of hard science to address our current problems, and stresses that no hand from the sky is going to reach down and clean our diapers for us. We're going to have to do it ourselves. I'll take that over the Great Wet Nurse in the Sky any day. The boneyard of history is littered with civilizations whose motto was "God will provide."
Does it serve as an opiate? It probably does...to trekkies. But then, the really hardcore fanatic is always winged out on something. Better "Live long and prosper" than "Die, unbeliever!" I prefer my loonies sedated rather than armed.
I have to agree with this. And frankly, the complaints about the mainstream media from bloggers is the pot calling the kettle black. Even the best political blogs out there probably post more outright lies and distortions in a day than the mainstream media does in a year. I can spot bias when I see it, thank you very much. I don't need some online pundit to harp on about it.
I also find that people who spend all their time cruising the web for their information end up rather, shall we say, eccentric. I have a friend who considers himself a liberal, but has actually managed to become a Nazi--he doesn't wear the uniform, but get a few drinks into him and he will start spouting vintage Goebbels propaganda. The reason is that the Nazis distributed their propaganda amongst the arabs back during the war (the Baath party is actually the Iraqi version of the Nazi party.) This stuff is now resurfacing; it forms the basis for a lot of the Islamic anti-semitism, and is also making its way back into vogue amongst some parts of the radical left through the anti-war movement. So you end up with "leftists" embracing the beliefs of Adolf Hitler. As Northrop Frye put it, an open mind should be open at both ends, and should excrete as well as consume.
If the mainstream media does not carry stories, it probably isn't because the story is supressed or too dangerous. It's probably because they looked into it, and found out it was bull. I've discovered that if you fact check the fact checkers in blogs, you will usually find that their "facts" evaporate into a puff of inuendo when examined carefully. I can't tell you how many times I've followed links on popular blogs like instapundit and found myself standing up to my neck in garbage. Everything in blogs should be taken with a LOT of salt.
They oppose scientific progress, not technical progress. They haven't figured out the connection yet. Not that this is terribly surprising, given how little they know about science.
The people who are opposing this are actually a different breed of religious fanatic, the neo-pagans, who do not espouse any particular religious affiliation but are nevertheless highly superstitious (often believing in ghosts, ESP, and psychics).
The fear of AI and nanotechnology is born largely out of ignorance of their limitations, combined with science-fiction scenarios that make for great fiction but terrible science. The grey goo just isn't going to happen. It's a matter of simple thermodynamics. It requires too much energy to break most things down and reassimilate them, far more than the goo is going to get in consumption. And the goo would have to have an encyclopedic knowledge of chemistry, so it could adapt to novel compounds. Anyone who still thinks this lies within the realm of possibility just took too much damn acid.
Conventional AI is just too limited to operate without a human babysitter. The closest thing we have to human style AI, neural nets, have to be trained, and remain remarkably limited. More powerful machines aren't the solution--more powerful AI's just require human correction more often. Rather than replace human beings with machines, we are far more likely to build human-machine hybrids, just because we are a whole lot better and cheaper at doing some things than machines. A human hive-mind is far more likely than a godlike AI that tells us what to do. We are are already moving towards this with the net and the first neural interface technologies, but Marvin Minsky and company have been banging their heads against AI for 40 years now, and they really don't have much to show for it. What we really want to do is build a human mind, but the fact is, it's just easier and cheaper to use the ones we have.
Yeah, right another "X is doomed" story. Take a number.
Computers have a mouse and a keyboard. Consoles have crappy little controllers. Console manufacturers strongly discourage support for keyboards and mice because it allows people to hack the console. But the fact is, controllers are really only good for a small subset of games. They suck for shooters, and they are absolutely useless for RTSs, simulation, and building games. I like games with a lot of depth and complexity. Consoles just can't do these because of the controller. And forget about MMOGs, probably the only game business model that makes money these days. For these, even keyboards don't have enough buttons.
I'm not likely to stop playing on my computer for the forseeable future because of this. Give me a console that acts like a computer, and I will consider it. But as long as consoles behave like toys and only play toy games, I'm not interested.
Another edge that the console used to have over PCs was that consoles were standardized, but PCs weren't. In fact, abstraction layers and base functionality has settled to the point that unless you are obsessing over cutting edge graphics rather than gameplay, it is actually easier to create a PC game now than a console. In fact, cutting edge graphics on a console may be harder than on a PC, primarily because console manufacturers demand so much work to make their machines look good. They also take a slice of your profits and have veto rights over the game. The economics no longer favour consoles over PCs. So if anything, the moribund PC game world may soon rebound.
By the way, you should know that the next gen consoles will actually be worse for gameplay and AI then the current gen. The games will get stupider and simpler, despite all the high end graphics, because the cell technology is terrible at random memory access (graphics are mainly big chunks of sequential memory.) So if you like very pretty Mario games, great. If you don't, you better start shopping for a game PC.
Actually, I don't mind this copy protection scheme, which allows you to use your copy and keep the master in a safe place.
The worst aspect of most DRM schemes is that they actually encourage piracy. Consider Windows XP copy protection scheme--it's the reason I haven't bought a copy of XP, and continue to use my old copy of 2000 (hurry up and get games to run on Linux!) Copy protection schemes that prevent CDs from working on old players have made buying CDs a risk. You're much safer just to rip a friend's copy or grab it off the web, since CDs in the stores may now be essentially defective.
But I still prefer digital distribution, because it doesn't require manufacturing. If Google wants to make a buttload of money, they should set up a repository of IP where quality is user moderated and intelligent user profiles will alert you to new music, fiction, etc that you may not have heard yet. Google is the natural for this because of their specialty in data management and searching. The artist sets the price, Google gets a cut for hosting, and you can kiss the Man goodbye.
As for copy protection, forget it, there is always a way around it. We just have to grow up and realize that there is no free lunch. If you don't want to pay for the music you like, well, don't blame anyone else if all the music you hear is stuff that you hate...
Congratulations. By your narrow definition of science, you've managed to exclude several branches of physics, including astro-physics, where timelines are so huge that the future will, for our purposes, never arrive to be tested.
Evolution is an ongoing process, and can be observed in species that exist today. In fact, that's where most of the research is done; evolutionary theory has its most pressing application in the study of new diseases. Evolutionary theory is an indispensible part of this. Stop teaching it, and you cripple medicine. There is also a wealth of evidence in the fossil record that can be used to test hypotheses.
The argument with religion is that religion attempts to make claims about the world, which are blatantly false and have serious practical implications. Maybe you don't mind people lying and spinning BS to kids who can't tell the difference, but I do.
You may not be religious, but you sure as hell don't know anything about science.
I particularly liked the comment that gaming is dead because there are only 5 basic genres of games with stories tacked on to make them more interesting. It can be argued that there are only 7 basic stories, and all stories are variations and combinations of these. Does this means that all forms of fiction are dead?
So game engines are about to become photo-real. Great! We can stop dumping all our production budgets into rendering and physics code and assets, and concentrate on gameplay and story. This won't kill gaming, it will set it free, because if the cutting edge becomes easy, we'll be able to move on to the next level. We can stop worrying about the goddamn framerate! Right now only huge megastudios have the resources to build good titles, and they just crank out last year's formula. Once the engines plateau, it will be only a couple years before a state of the art free engine appears (probably coughed up by a small developer who created before being stepped on...)
Combine this with internet distribution to bypass the publishers, and garage game studios become possible again.
You should be writing simpler code. If the code is too hard to understand by itself, then it is your job to make it simpler.
You've never worked in game development. This is not an option... not if you want something that runs at a workeable framerate. Simple code tends to be brute force and slow.
And you think "trial by fire" is the best way to get newcomers aquainted with the code?!?? Document complex concepts in... guess what... documents.
Efficient code for mathematical algorithms usually requires that the mathematical formula be broken down into a form that bears almost no resemblance to the original formula. Documentation of the formula will tell you nothing about the code.
Reading the code may tell you what it does, but not why. You have to know the why or you may end up cutting a bunch of code that you think is extraneous but is actually plugging up a hole in some third party library and preventing the whole project from crashing. And you don't want that in the documentation, you want it right there with the code where someone who is working on it can see it, so that your next version doesn't go out with a bomb in it.
A lot of code consists of workarounds, efficiency tweaks, and bizarre arrangements required by circumstances out of the coder's control. If you don't know what those circumstances are, you're going to break things.
There are other factors involved as well. The vast majority of alcoholics come from families where the parents are either tea totallers or alcoholics themselves. The main feature in both cases is that the child never learns moderation. Alcoholism is rare amongst Jews, who give their children small amounts of alcohol on holy days, ritualizing its use. But alcohol was devastating to North American natives, who had no cultural experience with it. Again, moderation is the key.
As Paracelsus (1493-1541) put it: "Everything is a poison, nothing is a poison, the dose alone makes the poison." The religious right are people who see things in black and white, and who believe that more of a good thing is always better--so if you can have too much of something, any amount must be bad.
The world just doesn't work this way. And once they've thrown their simple rules away, there are no rules. The whole mindset is frighteningly narrow. The kids raised in it just aren't equipped to make it in the real world. Freedom is a problem for them, because they don't know how to deal with it. You can see the same thing happening in Islamic countries. And the solution they come up with is to curtail everyone's freedom.
I got to experience first-hand the reason why we get some much repetitive crap. We've been working on a game that is very close to release, and some screenshots and previews were released a couple months back. On one of the sites where they appeared, a group of l33t d00ds (my guess is that the ages ranged in the early teens) took turns flaming and bashing it based upon a handful of screenshots. It was obvious from the comments that they didn't get what the game was about. But take a bunch of comments like that and show it to some marketing exec who doesn't know the landscape (or that there are quite a few idiots out on the web who can be safely ignored) and what do you get? Fear and repetition--endless version updates of sports franchises.
Bought reviews are actually written by the game developers themselves. In some cases this is laziness on the part of the reviewer, not paid opinion. I helped write one myself a couple weeks ago for the game we're working on. And this isn't a big studio title, but a relatively small indy game!
If you're in front of a comic book store alone cursing out kids, then a reasonable person could infer that you represent marvel and you would in fact be damaging the value of their property.
Or if you're a lawyer trying to sue a game for allowing fans of Marvel to play characters like their favourite heroes... oh, wait, they are doing that.
Lawyers and good publicity don't mix. Besides, Marvel went to great lengths to try to screw Stan Lee out of every penny they make on the characters he created. I have no sympathy for these corporate low-lifes.
They may have smart people working for them, but any strongly hierarchical system will end up with blind spots that originate at the top and are perpetuated throughout the system. The psychologists do what they're told, same as anyone else. They find what they're told to look for.
Military, Intelligence, and police forces usually don't have the tightest grip on reality themselves. Most police forces still believe in lie detectors, and many consult psychics. The CIA gave us MK-Ultra, remote viewing, and the tin foil hat, and to this day the U.S. military is paying soldiers to sit in a room and try to think their way through a wall. They probably picked this up from the KGB, who were the largest wholesale distributers of woo-woo science on the planet. The psychological tests the IDF is using probably falls into this category. If they actually worked, there would be no such thing as double agents...
I have to agree with this: if the job is driving you crazy, you pretty much have to quit. I worked at one company that was so disfunctional that a lot of people came out of it damaged--paranoid, burnt out, with bad work habits, and with egos either so over-inflated or badly broken that they were useless to any employer for a couple years afterwards. Some of the people who worked there crashed and burned spectacularly in their next job and ended up unemployed for a while.
I've seen this in other places since, people in jobs that are no-win situations, which literally drive them to drink. The boss or the environment just has some toxic psychological effect, and the worst part is that it's hard for the person to tell if its them or the job until some time afterwards. This usually happens when someone higher up doesn't actually want the job to be done (and ensures that it can't be, while the person trying to do it takes the blame,) or when the employee's immediate supervisor is scapegoating the person to make themselves look better. In both cases, the real problem is hidden, because the manager creating the problem always does so covertly. This is a helluva lot more common in large organisations (private or public) than you might think.
But this is a whole different ballgame than just personal tool preferences--these kinds of situations can trash your career or sanity.
I have to agree. The Mac has traditionally been the machine that just gets out of your way and gets the job done. The fiddle factor on the PC has always been a major time sink. And admit it folks, we like Linux because everything is hands on. Now OS X has a true Unix under the hood, making it the OS of choice for the expert as well as the non-techie.
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Thanks for the details on this. I'm getting tired of all the unbased assertions flying around--but then, that's normal for Slashdot.
The Bush administration itself has dropped the WMD issue like a hot potato. It's a lost cause. They now sells the war under the cause of exporting democracy. The WMD argument only persists on the administration side because they don't want to admit to deceit or incompetence.
Hussein wanted all the dangerous toys he could lay his hands on, all the way back to the 70's and Bull's Super Gun. That doesn't mean that he could get them. Nobody in their right mind thinks that Hussein was a good thing for Iraq, but late 2001 and early 2002 was probably the worst possible time to be planning a war in Iraq.
What is missing from this picture is the reality that existed before abortion was possible, and birth control was practically non-existent. In Ireland in the early part of the 20th century (and probably long before) the combined edicts of the Catholic Church against both birth control and abortion led to thousands, and perhaps hundreds of thousands, of babies being starved, buried alive, or simply neglected to death. And hundreds of thousands is not an exaggerated figure, because it is now believed that many of the infant deaths previously ascribed to simple infant mortality may fall into this category. Not foetuses--babies. Because in addition to the bans on birth control and abortion, there was a crushing stigma attached to children born out of wedlock. Nor was marriage any guarantee of a glowing childhood. Read Angela's Ashes.
The early abortionists chose to defy the law as an act of mercy, not because they had a hankering for the job. The liberalisation of attitudes to unwed mothers and their children was encouraged in large part due to the alternative option of abortion--condemning unwed mothers simply drove them to the clinic. Ban abortion, and those narrow views will creep back into the mouths of the clergy. Ask yourself this: how would you like to be an unwed mother in Pakistan?
Oh, and there's a really offensive book out there that has all kinds of violence and sex, incest, even the ritual sacrifice of children. It exhorts people to "dash little children against the stones", condones torture, genocide, slavery, mass rape and slaughter, and all kinds of other horrible things.
It's called the Bible. Take a look at it. I can't believe they leave this stuff lying around where anyone can get a hold of it. The first time I read it, I couldn't believe that people would actually want their children exposed to this. Subsequent readings have not changed my opinion. By comparison, GTA is light sentimental fluff.
One of these days this censorious bullshit is going to come home to roost.
Each new medium stirs up a hornet's nest of doom criers who denounce it as the corrupter of youth, and this has gone on for over 2500 years. Plato called for the pan-pipes to be banned because they aroused unwholesome excitement, and it's been going on ever since. Epic poems, romances, the printing press, Beethoven, prose fiction, radio, television, rock and roll, Dungeons and Dragons, the internet, and now video games have each been attacked in turn. They arouse the wrong emotions, or people cannot tell fiction from reality, it seems.
But the political speeches of a demagogue can arouse emotions worse than any form of entertainment, and for those who can't tell fact from fiction, entertainment is the least of our worries. The world is now troubled--yet again--by the fantasies of religious fanatics, who have the courage to die simply because they lack the courage to live. Fantasy isn't the problem, nor religion. It's the dim-witted confusion of those who are so inexpert in navigating the worlds of imagination that they get lost. Magic is all around us, in brilliant stories that distill the wisdom of generations, in the work of scientists who distill a simple law from a mountain of data, or in that piece of code that tells a computer how to do what only a human mind could do before. This is the imagination honed to a laser's intensity. Against this stand the real muggles, who would end the magic, and end the world.
If there is a God, may he protect us from muggles.
I don't know--our group included some spectacularly good looking girls, including a couple of runway models. And none of the guys looked particularly pasty.
It's not a game about vampires, it's a game about politics. At least, that's the way we played it.
Many teachers now focus on self-esteem rather than learning. Well, I'm sorry, but all they're doing is delaying that crushing moment when the kid stands up before others and reveals his ignorance. Worse yet, the kid is quite likely to become a narcissistic arsehole, who is blithely unaware of how unaware he is, and refuses to learn any better.
The problem with incompetents is that they have no idea how incompetent they are--that's one of the main reasons for their incompetence. Socrates said near the end of his life that all he knew was that he knew nothing. It takes time and effort to understand this; a grasp of the size of the domain that only comes through learning.
I agree that there should be more emphasis on math, particularly in the choice of who teaches it. There are many schools where the math teacher is the gym teacher filling in his off hours, or the teacher who is so dull that the administration figures they should teach math (which everyone hates anyway, right?) There are different ways of grasping math--people grasp numbers verbally, spatially, or even physically (Einstein said that numbers had a 'muscular' feeling.) I was able to teach my wife things she had never been able to grasp just by taking a different approach. And frankly, most math is taught in a way that seems to hang in the air with no practical application, so many kids get the idea that they will never need it anyway.
As for grammar, the ability to express yourself coherently in writing is essential in constructing arguments of any kind. Grammar is partly logic, and much of philosophy deals with unpacking and examining the meaning of words. One of Plato's socratic dialogues hinges on a sense of the verb to be--the point of the dialogue is lost until you realize that this is the first time that this now common sense was explored. Those who can't form their thoughts into words cannot think, and have no chance of grasping subtle concepts. I don't think I need to tell you the importance of this for a democracy.
I can remember doing dozens of grammar exercises most nights when I was in grade school. I couldn't tell you the name of most of those grammatical structures, but I can use them. And it helped a great deal when I went to study logic.
I was pleasantly surprised to see the conservative judges line up against this one. This could have gone either way. Yes, it's the government taking the property, but they are taking it for the benefit of private business interests. This means that a big company *cough*Wal Mart*cough* could slip the local government some "incentives" and practically rezone and rebuild the city to their liking.
This is private interests screwing other private interests through the intermediary of government. Come to think of it, since the rights of all corporations are legal constructs enforced by governments, isn't that always the way it works?
Not that I'm a strict libertarian--everybody is a libertarian about their own freedoms and a fascist when it comes to their own rights. Get rid of the government you elect, and it will be replaced by one you didn't elect--and can't unelect.
Yeah, but there's black hat and white hat. There are people who would hack into a system and leave a note saying "I was here, this is how I got in...fix this!" Then there were the ones who would hack in, delete everything or otherwise fuck it up, and then erase all signs that they were ever there. There are virus writers who write proof of concept worms and viruses to alert people to flaws in their systems, and then there are the script kiddies who have nothing better to do with their time but tweak existing viruses to beat the anti-virus signatures.
I have no use for destructive hackers. It's much easier to find a hole in a system then it is to anticipate all possible angles of attack. If some ass-hat script kiddy wants to show what a clever boy he is, he should do something useful and become a security consultant. On the other hand, that would take brains and work...
Disney may not have believed it, but the marketing droids do. And much as I hate to be the bearer of bad news, they have the focus group studies to prove it. Keep in mind that Alice in Wonderland and Mary Poppins were made in the 60's, before the marketing droids took over. Lion King and Mulan are essentially Americans in Africa and China.
You also wouldn't believe the number of movies made with English, Australian, or New Zealand accents that are 'dubbed' into American. I've often found myself watching a movie and realizing that the whole cast is British or from down under, and wondering what the hell happened to their accents. It is believed that the British accents are too hard for Americans to understand. Likewise, sad endings can often destroy a movie at the box office--which is why many movies have multiple endings shot, and the happiest ending is almost always used after showing it to a test audience. The final product that ships to the theatres often sickens almost everyone involved in it. In some cases, the original tragic ending was the whole point of the movie. Some potentially great movies have had their guts slashed out and left on the cutting room floor (David Lynch's Dune is one that comes to mind--even Frank Herbert loved the original, but the studio hated it.)
So yeah, you're getting crap dished to you. As P.T. Barnum put it, nobody ever went broke by underestimating the taste of the American public. That statement has become the motto of the marketer. Lucky us.
Star Trek functions in much the same way as religions in that it predicts dark times but eventual triumph. It encourages the belief that no matter what happens, we'll get through it. Sartre might have called this a form or collective bad faith, but frankly, I see nothing wrong with this. Pure defeatism just isn't a productive attitude. Pessimists may have a more accurate estimation of their own abilities, but optimists are more likely to succeed. We need both.
The main upside to the Star Trek 'prophecies' is that it is supposed to be based upon cooperation amongst the entire human race (tribalism is death), requires the application of hard science to address our current problems, and stresses that no hand from the sky is going to reach down and clean our diapers for us. We're going to have to do it ourselves. I'll take that over the Great Wet Nurse in the Sky any day. The boneyard of history is littered with civilizations whose motto was "God will provide."
Does it serve as an opiate? It probably does...to trekkies. But then, the really hardcore fanatic is always winged out on something. Better "Live long and prosper" than "Die, unbeliever!" I prefer my loonies sedated rather than armed.
I have to agree with this. And frankly, the complaints about the mainstream media from bloggers is the pot calling the kettle black. Even the best political blogs out there probably post more outright lies and distortions in a day than the mainstream media does in a year. I can spot bias when I see it, thank you very much. I don't need some online pundit to harp on about it.
I also find that people who spend all their time cruising the web for their information end up rather, shall we say, eccentric. I have a friend who considers himself a liberal, but has actually managed to become a Nazi--he doesn't wear the uniform, but get a few drinks into him and he will start spouting vintage Goebbels propaganda. The reason is that the Nazis distributed their propaganda amongst the arabs back during the war (the Baath party is actually the Iraqi version of the Nazi party.) This stuff is now resurfacing; it forms the basis for a lot of the Islamic anti-semitism, and is also making its way back into vogue amongst some parts of the radical left through the anti-war movement. So you end up with "leftists" embracing the beliefs of Adolf Hitler. As Northrop Frye put it, an open mind should be open at both ends, and should excrete as well as consume.
If the mainstream media does not carry stories, it probably isn't because the story is supressed or too dangerous. It's probably because they looked into it, and found out it was bull. I've discovered that if you fact check the fact checkers in blogs, you will usually find that their "facts" evaporate into a puff of inuendo when examined carefully. I can't tell you how many times I've followed links on popular blogs like instapundit and found myself standing up to my neck in garbage. Everything in blogs should be taken with a LOT of salt.
They oppose scientific progress, not technical progress. They haven't figured out the connection yet. Not that this is terribly surprising, given how little they know about science.
The people who are opposing this are actually a different breed of religious fanatic, the neo-pagans, who do not espouse any particular religious affiliation but are nevertheless highly superstitious (often believing in ghosts, ESP, and psychics).
The fear of AI and nanotechnology is born largely out of ignorance of their limitations, combined with science-fiction scenarios that make for great fiction but terrible science. The grey goo just isn't going to happen. It's a matter of simple thermodynamics. It requires too much energy to break most things down and reassimilate them, far more than the goo is going to get in consumption. And the goo would have to have an encyclopedic knowledge of chemistry, so it could adapt to novel compounds. Anyone who still thinks this lies within the realm of possibility just took too much damn acid.
Conventional AI is just too limited to operate without a human babysitter. The closest thing we have to human style AI, neural nets, have to be trained, and remain remarkably limited. More powerful machines aren't the solution--more powerful AI's just require human correction more often. Rather than replace human beings with machines, we are far more likely to build human-machine hybrids, just because we are a whole lot better and cheaper at doing some things than machines. A human hive-mind is far more likely than a godlike AI that tells us what to do. We are are already moving towards this with the net and the first neural interface technologies, but Marvin Minsky and company have been banging their heads against AI for 40 years now, and they really don't have much to show for it. What we really want to do is build a human mind, but the fact is, it's just easier and cheaper to use the ones we have.
Yeah, right another "X is doomed" story. Take a number.
Computers have a mouse and a keyboard. Consoles have crappy little controllers. Console manufacturers strongly discourage support for keyboards and mice because it allows people to hack the console. But the fact is, controllers are really only good for a small subset of games. They suck for shooters, and they are absolutely useless for RTSs, simulation, and building games. I like games with a lot of depth and complexity. Consoles just can't do these because of the controller. And forget about MMOGs, probably the only game business model that makes money these days. For these, even keyboards don't have enough buttons.
I'm not likely to stop playing on my computer for the forseeable future because of this. Give me a console that acts like a computer, and I will consider it. But as long as consoles behave like toys and only play toy games, I'm not interested.
Another edge that the console used to have over PCs was that consoles were standardized, but PCs weren't. In fact, abstraction layers and base functionality has settled to the point that unless you are obsessing over cutting edge graphics rather than gameplay, it is actually easier to create a PC game now than a console. In fact, cutting edge graphics on a console may be harder than on a PC, primarily because console manufacturers demand so much work to make their machines look good. They also take a slice of your profits and have veto rights over the game. The economics no longer favour consoles over PCs. So if anything, the moribund PC game world may soon rebound.
By the way, you should know that the next gen consoles will actually be worse for gameplay and AI then the current gen. The games will get stupider and simpler, despite all the high end graphics, because the cell technology is terrible at random memory access (graphics are mainly big chunks of sequential memory.) So if you like very pretty Mario games, great. If you don't, you better start shopping for a game PC.
Actually, I don't mind this copy protection scheme, which allows you to use your copy and keep the master in a safe place.
The worst aspect of most DRM schemes is that they actually encourage piracy. Consider Windows XP copy protection scheme--it's the reason I haven't bought a copy of XP, and continue to use my old copy of 2000 (hurry up and get games to run on Linux!) Copy protection schemes that prevent CDs from working on old players have made buying CDs a risk. You're much safer just to rip a friend's copy or grab it off the web, since CDs in the stores may now be essentially defective.
But I still prefer digital distribution, because it doesn't require manufacturing. If Google wants to make a buttload of money, they should set up a repository of IP where quality is user moderated and intelligent user profiles will alert you to new music, fiction, etc that you may not have heard yet. Google is the natural for this because of their specialty in data management and searching. The artist sets the price, Google gets a cut for hosting, and you can kiss the Man goodbye.
As for copy protection, forget it, there is always a way around it. We just have to grow up and realize that there is no free lunch. If you don't want to pay for the music you like, well, don't blame anyone else if all the music you hear is stuff that you hate...
Congratulations. By your narrow definition of science, you've managed to exclude several branches of physics, including astro-physics, where timelines are so huge that the future will, for our purposes, never arrive to be tested.
Evolution is an ongoing process, and can be observed in species that exist today. In fact, that's where most of the research is done; evolutionary theory has its most pressing application in the study of new diseases. Evolutionary theory is an indispensible part of this. Stop teaching it, and you cripple medicine. There is also a wealth of evidence in the fossil record that can be used to test hypotheses.
The argument with religion is that religion attempts to make claims about the world, which are blatantly false and have serious practical implications. Maybe you don't mind people lying and spinning BS to kids who can't tell the difference, but I do.
You may not be religious, but you sure as hell don't know anything about science.
I particularly liked the comment that gaming is dead because there are only 5 basic genres of games with stories tacked on to make them more interesting. It can be argued that there are only 7 basic stories, and all stories are variations and combinations of these. Does this means that all forms of fiction are dead?
So game engines are about to become photo-real. Great! We can stop dumping all our production budgets into rendering and physics code and assets, and concentrate on gameplay and story. This won't kill gaming, it will set it free, because if the cutting edge becomes easy, we'll be able to move on to the next level. We can stop worrying about the goddamn framerate! Right now only huge megastudios have the resources to build good titles, and they just crank out last year's formula. Once the engines plateau, it will be only a couple years before a state of the art free engine appears (probably coughed up by a small developer who created before being stepped on...)
Combine this with internet distribution to bypass the publishers, and garage game studios become possible again.
You should be writing simpler code. If the code is too hard to understand by itself, then it is your job to make it simpler.
You've never worked in game development. This is not an option... not if you want something that runs at a workeable framerate. Simple code tends to be brute force and slow.
And you think "trial by fire" is the best way to get newcomers aquainted with the code?!?? Document complex concepts in... guess what... documents.
Efficient code for mathematical algorithms usually requires that the mathematical formula be broken down into a form that bears almost no resemblance to the original formula. Documentation of the formula will tell you nothing about the code.
Reading the code may tell you what it does, but not why. You have to know the why or you may end up cutting a bunch of code that you think is extraneous but is actually plugging up a hole in some third party library and preventing the whole project from crashing. And you don't want that in the documentation, you want it right there with the code where someone who is working on it can see it, so that your next version doesn't go out with a bomb in it.
A lot of code consists of workarounds, efficiency tweaks, and bizarre arrangements required by circumstances out of the coder's control. If you don't know what those circumstances are, you're going to break things.
Look at the name: Viralg Oy. Or, Viral Goy? Virtual algorithms? Things that smell like this usually send me running to snopes.
If it were, they could get the funding.
There are other factors involved as well. The vast majority of alcoholics come from families where the parents are either tea totallers or alcoholics themselves. The main feature in both cases is that the child never learns moderation. Alcoholism is rare amongst Jews, who give their children small amounts of alcohol on holy days, ritualizing its use. But alcohol was devastating to North American natives, who had no cultural experience with it. Again, moderation is the key.
As Paracelsus (1493-1541) put it: "Everything is a poison, nothing is a poison, the dose alone makes the poison." The religious right are people who see things in black and white, and who believe that more of a good thing is always better--so if you can have too much of something, any amount must be bad.
The world just doesn't work this way. And once they've thrown their simple rules away, there are no rules. The whole mindset is frighteningly narrow. The kids raised in it just aren't equipped to make it in the real world. Freedom is a problem for them, because they don't know how to deal with it. You can see the same thing happening in Islamic countries. And the solution they come up with is to curtail everyone's freedom.
I got to experience first-hand the reason why we get some much repetitive crap. We've been working on a game that is very close to release, and some screenshots and previews were released a couple months back. On one of the sites where they appeared, a group of l33t d00ds (my guess is that the ages ranged in the early teens) took turns flaming and bashing it based upon a handful of screenshots. It was obvious from the comments that they didn't get what the game was about. But take a bunch of comments like that and show it to some marketing exec who doesn't know the landscape (or that there are quite a few idiots out on the web who can be safely ignored) and what do you get? Fear and repetition--endless version updates of sports franchises.
Bought reviews are actually written by the game developers themselves. In some cases this is laziness on the part of the reviewer, not paid opinion. I helped write one myself a couple weeks ago for the game we're working on. And this isn't a big studio title, but a relatively small indy game!
If you're in front of a comic book store alone cursing out kids, then a reasonable person could infer that you represent marvel and you would in fact be damaging the value of their property.
Or if you're a lawyer trying to sue a game for allowing fans of Marvel to play characters like their favourite heroes... oh, wait, they are doing that.
Lawyers and good publicity don't mix. Besides, Marvel went to great lengths to try to screw Stan Lee out of every penny they make on the characters he created. I have no sympathy for these corporate low-lifes.
They may have smart people working for them, but any strongly hierarchical system will end up with blind spots that originate at the top and are perpetuated throughout the system. The psychologists do what they're told, same as anyone else. They find what they're told to look for.
Military, Intelligence, and police forces usually don't have the tightest grip on reality themselves. Most police forces still believe in lie detectors, and many consult psychics. The CIA gave us MK-Ultra, remote viewing, and the tin foil hat, and to this day the U.S. military is paying soldiers to sit in a room and try to think their way through a wall. They probably picked this up from the KGB, who were the largest wholesale distributers of woo-woo science on the planet. The psychological tests the IDF is using probably falls into this category. If they actually worked, there would be no such thing as double agents...
I have to agree with this: if the job is driving you crazy, you pretty much have to quit. I worked at one company that was so disfunctional that a lot of people came out of it damaged--paranoid, burnt out, with bad work habits, and with egos either so over-inflated or badly broken that they were useless to any employer for a couple years afterwards. Some of the people who worked there crashed and burned spectacularly in their next job and ended up unemployed for a while.
I've seen this in other places since, people in jobs that are no-win situations, which literally drive them to drink. The boss or the environment just has some toxic psychological effect, and the worst part is that it's hard for the person to tell if its them or the job until some time afterwards. This usually happens when someone higher up doesn't actually want the job to be done (and ensures that it can't be, while the person trying to do it takes the blame,) or when the employee's immediate supervisor is scapegoating the person to make themselves look better. In both cases, the real problem is hidden, because the manager creating the problem always does so covertly. This is a helluva lot more common in large organisations (private or public) than you might think.
But this is a whole different ballgame than just personal tool preferences--these kinds of situations can trash your career or sanity.
I have to agree. The Mac has traditionally been the machine that just gets out of your way and gets the job done. The fiddle factor on the PC has always been a major time sink. And admit it folks, we like Linux because everything is hands on. Now OS X has a true Unix under the hood, making it the OS of choice for the expert as well as the non-techie.