And here's the kicker about opium: the reason that opium became so widespread amongst Asians was that the British were selling it in China. In fact, they went to war with China (the Opium wars) to force the opium into Chinese ports.
Well, bye, you probly don't want to outsourcin' to the east coast, then. There's folks out there sound like welshmen on acid! And lard thunderin' Jesus, lets not even mention Ottawa valley twang...
Try making a satirical comic book with characters that bear any resemblance to Disney characters. You will be bankrupted by spurious lawsuits.
Try making any movie or television show critical of conservative christians, or even at odds with their 'values'. It's no accident that the main networks are about to roll out the most boring programming line-up in the history of American television.
Try working in any business related to music, publishing, or games, and you will feel the power of Wal Mart to dictate the content of what you make.
If you think there is no suppression of free speech in capitalism, it's only because you've gotten used to it. I would rather have Josef Goebbels censored than Joss Whedon.
After the revolution, everything will be better.How many times have we heard this one before? You want to start a revolution? Well, we'd all love to see the plan.
If you want a working alternative, you have to build it before you tear down the old one. The new system, if it works, will simply push out the old by disuse.
Eliminate the old without something to replace it, and you will quickly discover in hardest way imaginable just how much government interference is required to make your way of living possible. Revolutions really only work when they are the forceful recognition of an already existing situation (as in the American Revolution.) Change through revolution is a very ugly business. Look at the French and Russian revolutions.
Intelligence is raw computing/problem solving power, absorbtion, and processing. Good, but it makes things easy, and can make you lazy. Still, I wish there was a lot more of it around. I'm getting tired of uncomprehending frowns.
God protect me (and I'm an atheist!) from social neanderthals--those intellectual bullies who are the only ones who know something simply because they are incapable of communicating it! Any person, regardless of how brilliant, who cannot work with others is not worth the chair he occupies. Homo Sapiens won over the other, stronger humanoid varients simply because we were able to form long and stable relationships, which manifested as trade routes and shared and accumulated knowledge. For even if I have knowledge of all things, and can perform the most complex mathematical proofs in my head without effort, without love I am nothing. My advice: find the most exotic wildflower you can find, as different from yourself as possible, and fall madly in love with her. Make her your muse, and whether she ever returns your affections or not, never stop loving her, though you move on. Repeat. In this way others who are different from yourself will become part of you, and you will span the dimensions of humanity.
The last is wisdom. The smartest person I ever knew killed himself shortly after he turned 30. He lacked wisdom. He could write brilliantly, that was his passion, but he had nothing to say. Wisdom is born of love, but persists even when you are alone. It lies at the base of all religion, but religion is only a means, not the end. When the Bhudda holds up the lotus flower, mystics of all traditions smile, nod, and walk away--those that remain will haggle over the wording of the sermon. To those that know, no words are neccessary; to those who don't, no words will suffice. The true way cannot be spoken. This you must figure out for yourself--and you must never stop searching until you do! And anyone who tells you differently, and offers to explain it all to you, is trying to sell you something.
Just a side note on this: there has never been, nor is there ever likely to be, a communist state. Communism was a pipe dream in which, suddenly, everyone would magically overcome their greed and selfishness and contribute as much as they could, taking only what they needed. Apparently all that was needed for this to come about was that you had to overthrow the current system and let the 'communists' take over.
The reality was that communism served as a bullfighter's cape to the dictators that espoused it--it distracted their opponents, and wowed the crowd. By obsessing on communism, McCarthy, Reagan, and all the rest did exactly what Stalin (clever, evil bastard that he was) wanted them to do. They wasted their energies fighting ghosts and ignored the real enemy: Stalinism. The ethics of communism were stolen directly from Christianity via the writings of Feuerbach: to the Russians, who were indoctrinated in communist ideology, the talk of the evils of communism had all the appeal of someone saying that all kittens are ugly and must be strangled. The right wing allowed the Stalinists to define the terms of the debate. But the 'communist' states were simply totalitarian regimes whose character was determined by the reigning despot. Had the Americans attacked the Stalinists on these terms, they would have kicked out their ideological underpinnings, made them a lot less attractive to western intellectuals, and attacked the root of their support amongst the Russian people, who might have gotten fed up with them 20 years before they did.
There is something similar going on here. The pieces are still up in the air, but Bin Laden and his imitators are hacking Islam, turning it into yet another red cape to distract the Bull and thrill the crowd.
And it's working. The Bull is goring everyone but the bullfighter.
IBM's only interest in software is to have a free code base to run on their actual product--the hardware. They don't want to sell an OS, and they don't want to buy one either. Their interest is in keeping it free in order to limit their overhead. IBM got sick of having to shell out cash to Microsoft on every box they sold. The other hardware manufacturers have the same motivation. The point of Linux, for all of them, has always been that it is free and open. Anything else just doesn't fit their business model.
I've been working as a game programmer for a while now, and most of us keep math textbooks handy. And it isn't just the standard equations or methods--you may have to work out derivations and proofs. You often have to break computations down so that terms that will remain constant within a loop or call are calculated once, and do only what you need in the inner loop. There are also variations on standard methods which are approximations, but much faster and good enough for your purposes. What you end up can be radically different from anything in a math textbook, and unrecognizeable without a lot of comments.
Ronald Reagan said, "Why should we fund intellectual curiousity?" The reason should now be abundantly clear for everyone.
Creation science is both a cause and an effect of American intellectual decline. There are disturbing parallels between the rise of literalist Christianity in America and in Rome. In Rome, Christianity started as mysticism, mutated into a malignant populist movement suspicious of intelligence and learning, and ended up destroying the very knowledge needed to sustain the empire (the burning of the Great Library of Alexandria was but one of the atrocities committed.) Barbarism took the empire from within.
Someone should tell that chimp in the White House that the big military he likes to beat people with is entirely dependent of America being the first to discover things. You cannot be technologically superior if you don't have the science.
The written history of the Jews (which Christians call the Old Testament) was compiled during their exile in Babylon, with the intent of solidifying the Jewish identity against absorbtion by the Babylonians. As such, it made many exagerated claims about Israel's military prowess, to instill a sense of nationalistic pride. But no one has ever found any evidence of great wars or the exodus. In this case, lack of evidence is evidence--as one Biblical archeologist put it, "If it had actually happened, we would have found something." So the vast conquests probably amounted to a few tribal skirmishes. But hell, the Trojan war was a tribal skirmish. The rest is myth. We do know that the Jewish tribes probably originated in Egypt (though probably not as slaves), because most of the myths in the Old Testament are almost exact copies of older Egyptian myths (as is Christianity.)
Judaism is not and never has been a triumphalist religion. It does not proseletize and has no interest in converting others unless they become affiliated by marriage. It is first and formost a tribal religion providing an ancestral memory. To this end, it has been wildly successful, and has avoided most of the excesses of the triumphalist religions, Islam and Christianity.
As for Noah's Ark, this too is a much older myth predating Judaism (Atlantis is one version of it.) The story of the flood may have a historical basis; at the end of the last ice age, the melting of European glaciers flooded the Mediterranean Sea until a natural barrier collapsed. The water flooded the Black Sea in a massive rush, with water levels rising hundreds of feet in a matter of months. There is evidence that this displaced a lot of people living on the shores of the Black Sea. The flood myth may have originated with this event.
All ya pansy coders out there with your ooh-so-bloody-fancy optimized compilers and step through debuggers...when I started codin', there were only 1's and 0's...and we couldn't afford the 1's!
The solution for television advertisers? Make the ad worth watching. There were some Thermasilk ads out a couple years ago that I actually taped! Make a piece of art with your name on it that's so damn good that people will actually stop fast forwarding to watch it.
As for spam, it has nothing to do with paying for the internet, it's theft of bandwidth worth millions of dollars, and it's now using viruses to pry open people's machines. It's interesting that he mentions Romania. A lot of viruses are written there. The Blaster virus was most likely intended to set up proxies for spam generation, and is partly responsible for the computer problems that led to the big blackout in the northeast last summer.
Yes, he did have a big part--and they've already shown the shire being torn apart in the Mirror of Galadriel. A bit late to cut him out now!
What I can't figure out is why they would cut the breaking of Saruman's staff and Frodo on the Stairs to Cirith Ungol, and then waste 5 minutes in that completely unnecessary sequence with Aragorn falling into the river and another 5 minutes dragging Frodo to Osgiliath--neither of which add a damn thing to the story and don't occur in the book! They don't even add to character development; the whole Osgiliath thing actually takes the development of Frodo and Faramir in a completely wrong direction. The Two Towers was a slow book with really only three major events happening: The awakening of Rohan, the Fall of Saruman, and Frodo entering Mordor. Somehow, they managed to miss two of those, but I had assumed they were going to use them in the third movie.
Looks like they may have screwed it up after all...
The picture he draws is of a bunch of home hobbyists just throwing code into the pot. OSS has a long heritage of careful design and consideration that goes back to Bell labs and K&R, and it was not built for free: it was built largely by companies that needed it for their own uses and wanted other people to use the same code for the purposes of interoperability, or because they needed the code to do something else that WAS their main product.
What I see when I work with Unix and Linux is a system designed with engineering principles in mind, not just for the bottom line. With Microsoft, engineering principles and sound design are constantly being compromised by marketing strategy. Those who have to work with it often run into vaporware extensions that don't work but were put there to ward off the competition. A good example of this is the DirectX network calls, which almost sunk several games because the game developers were counting on them to provide their game connectivity, only to discover at a late stage that they had to write their own from scratch! And everyone who has ever worked on a commercial piece of software knows that, usually, the thing ships when the money runs out, not when it's done.
I'll take a piece of software written off the clock, thank you very much. At least I know that they shipped it when it was done.
Kids, and everyone else, for that matter, are most heavily influenced by those around them. There is nothing nearly so strong as the contagion of ideas created by physical proximity and interaction with others. Video games and media simply do not generate the type of bond required to exert a strong influence on behaviour--unless they are the only influence--in other words, unless the kids are socially isolated, with little or no family or corrective influence. This can only happen if the parents either can't be bothered to pay attention to their kids, or simply don't have the time due to other commitments, usually job related. And classrooms with fifty pupils in them, where the teacher can't even remember half of the kids names, don't help the situation either.
So if a kid is shooting at other people or property, it is either because this is what he was taught by his parents, or because his parents exert so little influence over him that even the weakest prevailing breeze can bend him this way or that. So maybe the parents are at fault, or maybe the parents are just never there because their economic situation requires them to commute five hours a day to work for another twelve hours. And usually they do it to provide for their children.
And yet the very people who so often cry in outrage against the media for it's effects on children will not speak a word on behalf of the working poor, and have little or no concern for education. If they want family values, maybe they should serve Mammon a little less and the God they claim to serve a little more.
Thanks for the link. I've been looking for something on the reward schedules of MMORPG's. I've always thought that Everquest was based upon a gambling reward system, which is why I quit it from sheer boredom.
Nothing bores me more than gambling. I once went to a casino and bought ten dollars in quarters for a slot machine. I couldn't wait for the quarters to run out...in fact, I was slightly annoyed when it gave me back a few more (although I would have been quite happy if it had dropped twenty dollars in quarters, as this would have given me a chance to 'quit while I was ahead.') In Everquest, as soon as I perceived that success was based more upon luck than strategy, I couldn't stand the thought of logging on again. And the random reward schedules of crafting made crafting a complete waste of time for me. In fact, the only thing that held me on as long as it did was the fun I had playing with others.
The point of this is that the gambling reward system only works with a segment of the population. I want a reward system tied entirely to direct application of strategy. If there is a rare item, I want to be able to go through a series of steps which are guaranteed to produce it, subject only to events which are the direct, reproducible consequences of my own or other's actions. I have no interest in sitting around waiting for the rare spawn to drop the rare item. I would rather spend three hours hunting a common animal, to collect a sufficient number of pelts to give to an NPC to get the item (which always drop and are always of uniform quality,) than sit around for three hours at the mercy of a random number generator.
The curious thing about Everquest's exploitation of this reward system is that the business model is flawed. The players pay by the month, not by the hour. Why force players to play compulsively for hours (which increases log-in time, bandwidth, server, and maintenance requirements--and therefore, overhead) rather than allow them to derive enjoyment from playing for 5 or 10 hours a week? Why not have a system of intentions which would allow characters to perform repetitious actions (i.e. crafting) while the player is offline? If real-time, offline persistent intentions counted, the rewards of playing would be greater the longer a character persists (number of months the account is open, which is the schedule by which Sony actually gets paid.)
Compulsive gambling appeals only to a small segment of the population. The rest of us find it as exciting as watching grass grow (I call it 'Trial by Boredom!') Lose the gambling reward schedule, tie consequence directly to action, and you might have something I'd be willing to play.
Censorship is a lot like alcohol prohibition--it buries the problem in a place where no one sees it, and creates an underground that no one knows about until it's too late. If you think that censorship works, keep in mind that publishers used to go to great lengths to piss off the prudes in Boston so that they could put "Banned in Boston" on the cover of their books. And Alcoholics Anonymous was formed at the height of prohibition.
Just because someone never tells anyone he's wants to kill the president doesn't mean he's not going to do it. Let them talk in the open where others can hear them and have a chance of correcting their views, instead of stewing in the basement like Raskalnikov before skulking off to do the deed. We do have laws against hate literature in Canada, and they're a mixed bag--they often give the racists a national pulpit (in court) to spout their venom, where everyone can hear them.
America, by the way, does not have laws against hate literature. There is actually no legal way to shut down Neo-Nazis, and the government seems strangely blase about right wing extremists, even though they have a long history of terrorism and have committed more acts on terrorism on American soil than any other faction (uh huh, that's what burning a cross on your neighbour's lawn is.) The law being applied here is a rather vague, anti-terrorist law which can be applied to any dissident group. The choice of who it gets aimed at is discretionary. The question, and the danger, is: at whose discretion?
The thesis is fairly simple: don't confuse your conceptualization for the thing with the thing itself. Our models are representations of reality, not the reality represented. The arrow flies and hits the target--the divisions of time and space between are in your mind. They make it easier for us to model the world, but they are not the world.
Now, if we can only get economists, psychologists, and political scientists to understand this...
And once they get a free copy or two, what happens after, once they've gotten rid of their linux systems? I'm reminded of of drug dealers, or the baby food tests in India. Mothers stopped producing milk, and when the handouts stopped, the children starved. The same will happen to charities who take these handouts. They will become dependent on M$ software and formats, and be forced to pay for upgrades and further licences. There is nothing charitable about this.
They're more an exemplar than an idol. Here's a fat, dumpy, goofy guy grinning like an idiot. Not all wise, all knowing, all powerful, just content. That's the whole point. You don't have to be perfect. Anybody who tells you you do is trying to sell you something. The advertising industry sells us billions of dollars of crap by convincing us that we are nothing without it. They manufacture consent by manufacturing inadequacy--and they learned this from our religious leaders.
I recently heard a lecture by a muslim theologian who stated that Islam and Christianity are both Triumphalist religions. Hearing that scared the crap out of me. It means that adherents to these religions will always consider their faiths to have the final word, and the lazier amongst them will take this as an excuse to look no further. Curiosity, debate, pluralism, adaptive change, and tolerance can all be dispensed with if you already know everything. This is a critical flaw, one we cannot afford in a world where a single weapon can kill more people than Ghengis Khan did in his whole life. True, Westerners raised in Christianity will look at the statue of the Bhudda and try to see the Messiah, but that's our own neurosis, not Bhuddism's.
The decision to drop the bomb on the Japanese was made because, under the Japanese political system, there was no way for them to surrender. This was an unnacceptable outcome, a disgrace to the Emperor. The most important thing in the world to them was that the Emperor not lose face. The Japanese had held back close to one third of their forces for defense of mainland Japan, with the intent of fighting a long, bloody, and drawn out war against Americans that would have lasted years and killed millions. The casualties and horror of that war would have made Hiroshima look like a minor traffic accident. The Japanese wanted to force a stalemate--and avoid surrender--at ANY cost. The Allies just wanted to go home. But to go home, you need unconditional surrender...otherwise, you've won only the first round, not the war.
So they dropped two nukes, bang bang, to make it look like they had a stockpile of them and this was the beginning of the end, in which all Japan would be reduced to a scorched smoking ruin. They only had the two, but the Japanese didn't know that, and couldn't know that. The prospect was unthinkable, and so the Emperor was forced to do the unthinkable to prevent it: surrender.
We make the mistake of believing that everyone thinks like we do, that all cultures are essentially like ours. They aren't. I doubt that even the Japanese today can grasp how single minded the people of Imperial Japan were. Living in a pluralistic democracy, we certainly cannot grasp it. The stories of kamikaze pilots and hermit soldiers who waited 15 years after the war for orders that never came are all true.
A friend of mine bought a 486 33Mhz at a time when they were the ultimate bleeding edge, all tricked out with the best video and sound he could buy. He wasn't rich at the time either--he got it on a two year installment plan, but he loved it, and named it Betty. Six months after he bought it, there was fire in his building, a small three story walkup with a pizza place on the main floor. He had to leave everything inside, and he watched in horror as smoke and sparks poured out of the room with the computer in it--and fire hoses poured water in. When he was able to get back in the next day, all the disks in the shelf above the computer were partially melted, and the computer and monitor had icicles on them (yes, it was winter.) He brought it over to a friend's place, took it apart and let it dry for three days, and then put it in the bathtub and turned it on, just in case it caught fire when the power hit it. The only thing that was wrong was that the hard disk needed reformatting. For 12 years he had this scorched, smoke stained PC (it went from light beige to dark brown in the fire) that ran like a swiss watch. Eventually it was relegated to a Red Hat Firewall, and he just retired it last year and passed it on, still working.
What I don't understand is the business model. Obsessive play pushes up the overhead, requiring more bandwidth, servers, customer support, etc. If, for example, you could log intentions for your character (train these skills, make these items, travel to this city) and log off, the company would still have the subscription income at a fraction of the cost. Processing would be limited for a lot of the game to elapsed time calculations, which could be farmed out to the client, and you could still have fun with the occasional adventure--play when you want to, not when the game, apparently, requires it.
You would think they would be going to great lengths to implement anti-addictive features. Like myself, everyone I know who quit the game did so because of the time requirements. No more monthly fees for Sony, and these people gave their accounts away, so they lost retail sales as well. If they dropped the play time needed to advance, requiring characters to train and make items offline (more realistic), and facilitated mini-quests and soloing, they could make even more money without pissing people off. Nine months of intermittent play to produce a top level character makes a helluva lot more business sense than two months of obsessive burnout play, after which the player deletes his account and hands off the box in disgust. And two months is the time most players take to get fed up with EQ.
Nah, single player games won't die. You can save games, play for short interludes (something very hard to do with MMORPG's), replay the good bits, and try alternate paths. Besides, MMORPG's are, after all, pretty much a single genre--an FPS with different weapons. Besides, the online games like EQ still rely on crappy AI for opponents--in fact, the AI is even crappier, since the servers cannot handle the load of good AI for huge numbers of monsters. The player vs player aspect of EQ is marginal.
Slashdot Mirror
And here's the kicker about opium: the reason that opium became so widespread amongst Asians was that the British were selling it in China. In fact, they went to war with China (the Opium wars) to force the opium into Chinese ports.
Well, bye, you probly don't want to outsourcin' to the east coast, then. There's folks out there sound like welshmen on acid! And lard thunderin' Jesus, lets not even mention Ottawa valley twang...
Try making a satirical comic book with characters that bear any resemblance to Disney characters. You will be bankrupted by spurious lawsuits.
Try making any movie or television show critical of conservative christians, or even at odds with their 'values'. It's no accident that the main networks are about to roll out the most boring programming line-up in the history of American television.
Try working in any business related to music, publishing, or games, and you will feel the power of Wal Mart to dictate the content of what you make.
If you think there is no suppression of free speech in capitalism, it's only because you've gotten used to it. I would rather have Josef Goebbels censored than Joss Whedon.
After the revolution, everything will be better.How many times have we heard this one before? You want to start a revolution? Well, we'd all love to see the plan.
If you want a working alternative, you have to build it before you tear down the old one. The new system, if it works, will simply push out the old by disuse.
Eliminate the old without something to replace it, and you will quickly discover in hardest way imaginable just how much government interference is required to make your way of living possible. Revolutions really only work when they are the forceful recognition of an already existing situation (as in the American Revolution.) Change through revolution is a very ugly business. Look at the French and Russian revolutions.
There is intelligence, compassion, and wisdom.
Intelligence is raw computing/problem solving power, absorbtion, and processing. Good, but it makes things easy, and can make you lazy. Still, I wish there was a lot more of it around. I'm getting tired of uncomprehending frowns.
God protect me (and I'm an atheist!) from social neanderthals--those intellectual bullies who are the only ones who know something simply because they are incapable of communicating it! Any person, regardless of how brilliant, who cannot work with others is not worth the chair he occupies. Homo Sapiens won over the other, stronger humanoid varients simply because we were able to form long and stable relationships, which manifested as trade routes and shared and accumulated knowledge. For even if I have knowledge of all things, and can perform the most complex mathematical proofs in my head without effort, without love I am nothing. My advice: find the most exotic wildflower you can find, as different from yourself as possible, and fall madly in love with her. Make her your muse, and whether she ever returns your affections or not, never stop loving her, though you move on. Repeat. In this way others who are different from yourself will become part of you, and you will span the dimensions of humanity.
The last is wisdom. The smartest person I ever knew killed himself shortly after he turned 30. He lacked wisdom. He could write brilliantly, that was his passion, but he had nothing to say. Wisdom is born of love, but persists even when you are alone. It lies at the base of all religion, but religion is only a means, not the end. When the Bhudda holds up the lotus flower, mystics of all traditions smile, nod, and walk away--those that remain will haggle over the wording of the sermon. To those that know, no words are neccessary; to those who don't, no words will suffice. The true way cannot be spoken. This you must figure out for yourself--and you must never stop searching until you do! And anyone who tells you differently, and offers to explain it all to you, is trying to sell you something.
Just a side note on this: there has never been, nor is there ever likely to be, a communist state. Communism was a pipe dream in which, suddenly, everyone would magically overcome their greed and selfishness and contribute as much as they could, taking only what they needed. Apparently all that was needed for this to come about was that you had to overthrow the current system and let the 'communists' take over.
The reality was that communism served as a bullfighter's cape to the dictators that espoused it--it distracted their opponents, and wowed the crowd. By obsessing on communism, McCarthy, Reagan, and all the rest did exactly what Stalin (clever, evil bastard that he was) wanted them to do. They wasted their energies fighting ghosts and ignored the real enemy: Stalinism. The ethics of communism were stolen directly from Christianity via the writings of Feuerbach: to the Russians, who were indoctrinated in communist ideology, the talk of the evils of communism had all the appeal of someone saying that all kittens are ugly and must be strangled. The right wing allowed the Stalinists to define the terms of the debate. But the 'communist' states were simply totalitarian regimes whose character was determined by the reigning despot. Had the Americans attacked the Stalinists on these terms, they would have kicked out their ideological underpinnings, made them a lot less attractive to western intellectuals, and attacked the root of their support amongst the Russian people, who might have gotten fed up with them 20 years before they did.
There is something similar going on here. The pieces are still up in the air, but Bin Laden and his imitators are hacking Islam, turning it into yet another red cape to distract the Bull and thrill the crowd.
And it's working. The Bull is goring everyone but the bullfighter.
IBM's only interest in software is to have a free code base to run on their actual product--the hardware. They don't want to sell an OS, and they don't want to buy one either. Their interest is in keeping it free in order to limit their overhead. IBM got sick of having to shell out cash to Microsoft on every box they sold. The other hardware manufacturers have the same motivation. The point of Linux, for all of them, has always been that it is free and open. Anything else just doesn't fit their business model.
Let me get this straight. They claim that they couldn't send people their royalties because they had lost touch with them.
How the hell do you lose someone like Bowie?
They obviously weren't trying very hard...
I've been working as a game programmer for a while now, and most of us keep math textbooks handy. And it isn't just the standard equations or methods--you may have to work out derivations and proofs. You often have to break computations down so that terms that will remain constant within a loop or call are calculated once, and do only what you need in the inner loop. There are also variations on standard methods which are approximations, but much faster and good enough for your purposes. What you end up can be radically different from anything in a math textbook, and unrecognizeable without a lot of comments.
Ronald Reagan said, "Why should we fund intellectual curiousity?" The reason should now be abundantly clear for everyone.
Creation science is both a cause and an effect of American intellectual decline. There are disturbing parallels between the rise of literalist Christianity in America and in Rome. In Rome, Christianity started as mysticism, mutated into a malignant populist movement suspicious of intelligence and learning, and ended up destroying the very knowledge needed to sustain the empire (the burning of the Great Library of Alexandria was but one of the atrocities committed.) Barbarism took the empire from within.
Someone should tell that chimp in the White House that the big military he likes to beat people with is entirely dependent of America being the first to discover things. You cannot be technologically superior if you don't have the science.
The written history of the Jews (which Christians call the Old Testament) was compiled during their exile in Babylon, with the intent of solidifying the Jewish identity against absorbtion by the Babylonians. As such, it made many exagerated claims about Israel's military prowess, to instill a sense of nationalistic pride. But no one has ever found any evidence of great wars or the exodus. In this case, lack of evidence is evidence--as one Biblical archeologist put it, "If it had actually happened, we would have found something." So the vast conquests probably amounted to a few tribal skirmishes. But hell, the Trojan war was a tribal skirmish. The rest is myth. We do know that the Jewish tribes probably originated in Egypt (though probably not as slaves), because most of the myths in the Old Testament are almost exact copies of older Egyptian myths (as is Christianity.)
Judaism is not and never has been a triumphalist religion. It does not proseletize and has no interest in converting others unless they become affiliated by marriage. It is first and formost a tribal religion providing an ancestral memory. To this end, it has been wildly successful, and has avoided most of the excesses of the triumphalist religions, Islam and Christianity.
As for Noah's Ark, this too is a much older myth predating Judaism (Atlantis is one version of it.) The story of the flood may have a historical basis; at the end of the last ice age, the melting of European glaciers flooded the Mediterranean Sea until a natural barrier collapsed. The water flooded the Black Sea in a massive rush, with water levels rising hundreds of feet in a matter of months. There is evidence that this displaced a lot of people living on the shores of the Black Sea. The flood myth may have originated with this event.
All ya pansy coders out there with your ooh-so-bloody-fancy optimized compilers and step through debuggers...when I started codin', there were only 1's and 0's...and we couldn't afford the 1's!
The solution for television advertisers? Make the ad worth watching. There were some Thermasilk ads out a couple years ago that I actually taped! Make a piece of art with your name on it that's so damn good that people will actually stop fast forwarding to watch it.
As for spam, it has nothing to do with paying for the internet, it's theft of bandwidth worth millions of dollars, and it's now using viruses to pry open people's machines. It's interesting that he mentions Romania. A lot of viruses are written there. The Blaster virus was most likely intended to set up proxies for spam generation, and is partly responsible for the computer problems that led to the big blackout in the northeast last summer.
People died because of that blackout.
This has got to stop.
Yes, he did have a big part--and they've already shown the shire being torn apart in the Mirror of Galadriel. A bit late to cut him out now!
What I can't figure out is why they would cut the breaking of Saruman's staff and Frodo on the Stairs to Cirith Ungol, and then waste 5 minutes in that completely unnecessary sequence with Aragorn falling into the river and another 5 minutes dragging Frodo to Osgiliath--neither of which add a damn thing to the story and don't occur in the book! They don't even add to character development; the whole Osgiliath thing actually takes the development of Frodo and Faramir in a completely wrong direction. The Two Towers was a slow book with really only three major events happening: The awakening of Rohan, the Fall of Saruman, and Frodo entering Mordor. Somehow, they managed to miss two of those, but I had assumed they were going to use them in the third movie.
Looks like they may have screwed it up after all...
The picture he draws is of a bunch of home hobbyists just throwing code into the pot. OSS has a long heritage of careful design and consideration that goes back to Bell labs and K&R, and it was not built for free: it was built largely by companies that needed it for their own uses and wanted other people to use the same code for the purposes of interoperability, or because they needed the code to do something else that WAS their main product.
What I see when I work with Unix and Linux is a system designed with engineering principles in mind, not just for the bottom line. With Microsoft, engineering principles and sound design are constantly being compromised by marketing strategy. Those who have to work with it often run into vaporware extensions that don't work but were put there to ward off the competition. A good example of this is the DirectX network calls, which almost sunk several games because the game developers were counting on them to provide their game connectivity, only to discover at a late stage that they had to write their own from scratch! And everyone who has ever worked on a commercial piece of software knows that, usually, the thing ships when the money runs out, not when it's done.
I'll take a piece of software written off the clock, thank you very much. At least I know that they shipped it when it was done.
Kids, and everyone else, for that matter, are most heavily influenced by those around them. There is nothing nearly so strong as the contagion of ideas created by physical proximity and interaction with others. Video games and media simply do not generate the type of bond required to exert a strong influence on behaviour--unless they are the only influence--in other words, unless the kids are socially isolated, with little or no family or corrective influence. This can only happen if the parents either can't be bothered to pay attention to their kids, or simply don't have the time due to other commitments, usually job related. And classrooms with fifty pupils in them, where the teacher can't even remember half of the kids names, don't help the situation either.
So if a kid is shooting at other people or property, it is either because this is what he was taught by his parents, or because his parents exert so little influence over him that even the weakest prevailing breeze can bend him this way or that. So maybe the parents are at fault, or maybe the parents are just never there because their economic situation requires them to commute five hours a day to work for another twelve hours. And usually they do it to provide for their children.
And yet the very people who so often cry in outrage against the media for it's effects on children will not speak a word on behalf of the working poor, and have little or no concern for education. If they want family values, maybe they should serve Mammon a little less and the God they claim to serve a little more.
Thanks for the link. I've been looking for something on the reward schedules of MMORPG's. I've always thought that Everquest was based upon a gambling reward system, which is why I quit it from sheer boredom.
Nothing bores me more than gambling. I once went to a casino and bought ten dollars in quarters for a slot machine. I couldn't wait for the quarters to run out...in fact, I was slightly annoyed when it gave me back a few more (although I would have been quite happy if it had dropped twenty dollars in quarters, as this would have given me a chance to 'quit while I was ahead.') In Everquest, as soon as I perceived that success was based more upon luck than strategy, I couldn't stand the thought of logging on again. And the random reward schedules of crafting made crafting a complete waste of time for me. In fact, the only thing that held me on as long as it did was the fun I had playing with others.
The point of this is that the gambling reward system only works with a segment of the population. I want a reward system tied entirely to direct application of strategy. If there is a rare item, I want to be able to go through a series of steps which are guaranteed to produce it, subject only to events which are the direct, reproducible consequences of my own or other's actions. I have no interest in sitting around waiting for the rare spawn to drop the rare item. I would rather spend three hours hunting a common animal, to collect a sufficient number of pelts to give to an NPC to get the item (which always drop and are always of uniform quality,) than sit around for three hours at the mercy of a random number generator.
The curious thing about Everquest's exploitation of this reward system is that the business model is flawed. The players pay by the month, not by the hour. Why force players to play compulsively for hours (which increases log-in time, bandwidth, server, and maintenance requirements--and therefore, overhead) rather than allow them to derive enjoyment from playing for 5 or 10 hours a week? Why not have a system of intentions which would allow characters to perform repetitious actions (i.e. crafting) while the player is offline? If real-time, offline persistent intentions counted, the rewards of playing would be greater the longer a character persists (number of months the account is open, which is the schedule by which Sony actually gets paid.)
Compulsive gambling appeals only to a small segment of the population. The rest of us find it as exciting as watching grass grow (I call it 'Trial by Boredom!') Lose the gambling reward schedule, tie consequence directly to action, and you might have something I'd be willing to play.
Censorship is a lot like alcohol prohibition--it buries the problem in a place where no one sees it, and creates an underground that no one knows about until it's too late. If you think that censorship works, keep in mind that publishers used to go to great lengths to piss off the prudes in Boston so that they could put "Banned in Boston" on the cover of their books. And Alcoholics Anonymous was formed at the height of prohibition.
Just because someone never tells anyone he's wants to kill the president doesn't mean he's not going to do it. Let them talk in the open where others can hear them and have a chance of correcting their views, instead of stewing in the basement like Raskalnikov before skulking off to do the deed. We do have laws against hate literature in Canada, and they're a mixed bag--they often give the racists a national pulpit (in court) to spout their venom, where everyone can hear them.
America, by the way, does not have laws against hate literature. There is actually no legal way to shut down Neo-Nazis, and the government seems strangely blase about right wing extremists, even though they have a long history of terrorism and have committed more acts on terrorism on American soil than any other faction (uh huh, that's what burning a cross on your neighbour's lawn is.) The law being applied here is a rather vague, anti-terrorist law which can be applied to any dissident group. The choice of who it gets aimed at is discretionary. The question, and the danger, is: at whose discretion?
The thesis is fairly simple: don't confuse your conceptualization for the thing with the thing itself. Our models are representations of reality, not the reality represented. The arrow flies and hits the target--the divisions of time and space between are in your mind. They make it easier for us to model the world, but they are not the world.
Now, if we can only get economists, psychologists, and political scientists to understand this...
And once they get a free copy or two, what happens after, once they've gotten rid of their linux systems? I'm reminded of of drug dealers, or the baby food tests in India. Mothers stopped producing milk, and when the handouts stopped, the children starved. The same will happen to charities who take these handouts. They will become dependent on M$ software and formats, and be forced to pay for upgrades and further licences. There is nothing charitable about this.
They're more an exemplar than an idol. Here's a fat, dumpy, goofy guy grinning like an idiot. Not all wise, all knowing, all powerful, just content. That's the whole point. You don't have to be perfect. Anybody who tells you you do is trying to sell you something. The advertising industry sells us billions of dollars of crap by convincing us that we are nothing without it. They manufacture consent by manufacturing inadequacy--and they learned this from our religious leaders.
I recently heard a lecture by a muslim theologian who stated that Islam and Christianity are both Triumphalist religions. Hearing that scared the crap out of me. It means that adherents to these religions will always consider their faiths to have the final word, and the lazier amongst them will take this as an excuse to look no further. Curiosity, debate, pluralism, adaptive change, and tolerance can all be dispensed with if you already know everything. This is a critical flaw, one we cannot afford in a world where a single weapon can kill more people than Ghengis Khan did in his whole life. True, Westerners raised in Christianity will look at the statue of the Bhudda and try to see the Messiah, but that's our own neurosis, not Bhuddism's.
The decision to drop the bomb on the Japanese was made because, under the Japanese political system, there was no way for them to surrender. This was an unnacceptable outcome, a disgrace to the Emperor. The most important thing in the world to them was that the Emperor not lose face. The Japanese had held back close to one third of their forces for defense of mainland Japan, with the intent of fighting a long, bloody, and drawn out war against Americans that would have lasted years and killed millions. The casualties and horror of that war would have made Hiroshima look like a minor traffic accident. The Japanese wanted to force a stalemate--and avoid surrender--at ANY cost. The Allies just wanted to go home. But to go home, you need unconditional surrender...otherwise, you've won only the first round, not the war.
So they dropped two nukes, bang bang, to make it look like they had a stockpile of them and this was the beginning of the end, in which all Japan would be reduced to a scorched smoking ruin. They only had the two, but the Japanese didn't know that, and couldn't know that. The prospect was unthinkable, and so the Emperor was forced to do the unthinkable to prevent it: surrender.
We make the mistake of believing that everyone thinks like we do, that all cultures are essentially like ours. They aren't. I doubt that even the Japanese today can grasp how single minded the people of Imperial Japan were. Living in a pluralistic democracy, we certainly cannot grasp it. The stories of kamikaze pilots and hermit soldiers who waited 15 years after the war for orders that never came are all true.
A friend of mine bought a 486 33Mhz at a time when they were the ultimate bleeding edge, all tricked out with the best video and sound he could buy. He wasn't rich at the time either--he got it on a two year installment plan, but he loved it, and named it Betty. Six months after he bought it, there was fire in his building, a small three story walkup with a pizza place on the main floor. He had to leave everything inside, and he watched in horror as smoke and sparks poured out of the room with the computer in it--and fire hoses poured water in. When he was able to get back in the next day, all the disks in the shelf above the computer were partially melted, and the computer and monitor had icicles on them (yes, it was winter.) He brought it over to a friend's place, took it apart and let it dry for three days, and then put it in the bathtub and turned it on, just in case it caught fire when the power hit it. The only thing that was wrong was that the hard disk needed reformatting. For 12 years he had this scorched, smoke stained PC (it went from light beige to dark brown in the fire) that ran like a swiss watch. Eventually it was relegated to a Red Hat Firewall, and he just retired it last year and passed it on, still working.
What I don't understand is the business model. Obsessive play pushes up the overhead, requiring more bandwidth, servers, customer support, etc. If, for example, you could log intentions for your character (train these skills, make these items, travel to this city) and log off, the company would still have the subscription income at a fraction of the cost. Processing would be limited for a lot of the game to elapsed time calculations, which could be farmed out to the client, and you could still have fun with the occasional adventure--play when you want to, not when the game, apparently, requires it.
You would think they would be going to great lengths to implement anti-addictive features. Like myself, everyone I know who quit the game did so because of the time requirements. No more monthly fees for Sony, and these people gave their accounts away, so they lost retail sales as well. If they dropped the play time needed to advance, requiring characters to train and make items offline (more realistic), and facilitated mini-quests and soloing, they could make even more money without pissing people off. Nine months of intermittent play to produce a top level character makes a helluva lot more business sense than two months of obsessive burnout play, after which the player deletes his account and hands off the box in disgust. And two months is the time most players take to get fed up with EQ.
Nah, single player games won't die. You can save games, play for short interludes (something very hard to do with MMORPG's), replay the good bits, and try alternate paths. Besides, MMORPG's are, after all, pretty much a single genre--an FPS with different weapons. Besides, the online games like EQ still rely on crappy AI for opponents--in fact, the AI is even crappier, since the servers cannot handle the load of good AI for huge numbers of monsters. The player vs player aspect of EQ is marginal.