There are other problems with the research. Much of it is based upon the level of aggressive play witnessed amongst boys after playing. Have you ever watched boys playing when they're having fun? They get wound up and boisterous! They pounce and hit! Apparently, this was the researchers first encounter with human children...
The other problem is that they measure mind state immediately after playing a game, but this does not indicate a permanent change in temperment, only a temporary shift in mode. I used to find that at the end of exams, I was spacy and even a bit clumsy--does this mean that exams make you stupid?
Good idea, but the split somehow has to be voluntary. The reason that crowded servers get more crowded is that a friend invites you to join him on the server he is already on--but he's been playing for a year, so the server is already crowded. Migration by individual choice has to be allowed, so that whole guilds can wander over. For that matter, people should be allowed to migrate to any lightly populated server when theirs gets crowded--and they should be allowed to take all their stuff, because if you don't allow that, no one will move.
Go back a bit along the ancestral tree and what you hit isn't considered human, but is considered (like us) one of the great apes. So, no, we aren't descended from any of the currently existing apes, but we are descended from apes, because we are apes.
Your point is incredibly anal anyway, and to the creationist/evolutionist argument, pretty much irrelevant. Creationists argue that species never change, and that we are exactly the way God made us.
A philosophy of science professor of mine once said that there are about 250 people in the world who understood or cared about what he did. It is possible that such work will eventually yield something which will contribute towards significant breakthroughs, but it seemed to me that what he was doing was probably pointless. If what you are doing has little or no chance of impact on ordinary people's lives at any future point, even through research based on yours, that's a hobby.
The aggravating thing about this is that, being the strong proponent of science that he was, the decline in the public understanding and support of science was the very thing that I believe he should have been addressing. 'Pop' scientists make it easier for quiet scientists to get funding, by impressing upon ordinary people, who vote, pay taxes, and make donations, just how valuable science is. And no, they don't enter the public eye because they crave attention. Most enter it because they are the more sociable type, and get frustrated by the staggering public ignorance they encounter in trying to do their research, which cuts funding for valuable research while pissing billions away on fantasies like Reagan's Star Wars program, and Bush's Missile Defense. Popular scientists do the song and dance so that the rest don't have to waste all their time performing as dancing bears for politicians and beaurocrats.
Popularization of science used to be done as a matter of course in school, magazines, the media, and even in comic books, where so many of the heroes were scientists themselves (nearly all of Stan Lee's heroes were scientists, or were groups that included a scientist.) You can even see it in old standards like the Hardy Boys, where evidence and deductive reasoning were stressed over blind acceptance of the common view. Somehow, this changed in the 70's, and scientists themselves began to step in to fill the void. One of the reasons that America is slipping in science standings is that science is no longer presented to young people as a desirable career. Someone has to carry that torch.
As it is, we have a population that is largely ignorant of the scientific method, leaving them susceptible to junk science and junk religion, lining the pockets of con artists, and rendering laymen largely incapable of making sound decisions on matters where science can or should have something to say. This affects education, politics, technology, economics, and even law, which relies on a method very much like the scientific method to arrive at decisions. In short, we are losing our ability to think. This is catastrophic for any society that wishes to remain a democracy--it's no accident that many of the people who founded American democracy also did scientific research. This is the level of intellectual engagement required, at least amongst the elite, to sustain a democracy.
It has already been made, and it's called Blade Runner. Gibson was working on Neuromancer when the film came out, and he came out of the theatre buzzing. It was exactly the world he envisioned for Neuromancer.
Well, Bloomberg is pretty anal. Banning smoking in New York? There's something vaguely blasphemous about that--I remember a scene in Sex in the City where Carrie goes to a backlot of New York to escape the politically correct Nazis and have a smoke in peace. Yeah, I know smoking is bad for you, but it might be better to ban fast food joints--a recent New York Times article (genital dimensions required) talked about the skyrocketing incidence of diabetes in New York. Diabetes rips your body apart, causing chronic health problems for decades (at least smoking tends to kill quickly.) The implications for public health costs and readiness are staggering. Of course, the advance of diabetes, and its causes, require a bit more subtle consideration, something a knee-jerk PC type like Bloomberg is not particularly adept at...
Exactly, because all of these technologies tie into where the game industry is almost certainly going, allowing Sony to already be in place as these innovations come into the mainstream. This means that they will not only have a strong grip on the console market, but they will also win the format and distribution war. As someone who works in the industry, I can tell you that Sony knows exactly what they are doing.
They're not preventing use of the trademark (RTFA). They want it used strictly in the way it's supposed to be used in war--not, for example, as a disguise for your covert ops to penetrate enemy defenses, etc. They don't want it portrayed in any way that can be viewed as a threat, making them look like a viable target.
And whether people respect it as such now, the ideal that they're going for is that people don't attack medics for humanitarian reasons. They would at least like to get the soldier home alive, even if he can't fight anymore.
The system will be cracked, just like every copy protection scheme is now. Eventually they'll give up on the DRM and just make it cheap enough that it's easier just to pay for it. The market will eventually foil all their little schemes.
And I'll be damned if I'm going to give every game I own permission to access the internet, unless I'm actually playing on the internet. This is just too much of a security risk, especially for content downloaded from the net.
The absence of absolutes means that one can assume a stance of complete skepticism. This is not a serious position, but it is used in what I call the 'post-modernist dodge' which goes something like this: "Well, really, everything is just opinion. You can't prove it beyond doubt, so that's just your opinion..." Annoying enough when used in philosophical arguments, but infuriating when used, say, to disable scientific reasoning in defense of something like the occult, or pseudo-science. The worst part, though, is that this line of argument is now being used by fundamentalists to attack science and advance their own beliefs.
What fanatics practice is not faith, but superstition. Faith is simply an attitude of trust and optimism--it accepts uncertainty but refuses to be paralyzed by it. By accepting their definition of faith, you have already conceded the first round of the argument with the very people you seem to be arguing with. That's how religion is making so much headway: by defining the terms of discussion and getting others to accept those definitions. How many other battles have you already unknowingly conceded?
And by not understanding what motivates people to believe these things, you are hitting them precisely where their armor is thickest. They've been called weak and stupid before--that doesn't faze them at all. These are the easy arguments. They've been prepared specifically for them. But call them an idolator, and tell them they're violating the first three commandments, and suddenly they actually have to think...
The funny thing about all this is that they don't understand idolatry.
Idolatry amounts to worshipping an image of something, mistaking an image for something real, or worshipping a false god. In primitive cultures, to have a name or image of something is to understand and control it--sympathetic magic. This is why the ancient Hebrews could not speak the name Jehovah, and why the Holy of Holies in the Temple of Jerusalem was empty (upon entering it, the Romans concluded that the Jews were atheists.)
But this has a more sophisticated meaning--since God is infinite, any representation of God is limited and must be recognized as such. Thus, no image, book, historical personage, or idea may be worshipped, as no work of human hands or idea comprehended by the human mind is final and perfect. There is no God but God. But even if Mohammed is his prophet, Mohammed is still just a man, and an image of him cannot be blasphemy because he is not God. The blasphemy here is the Imam's claim that the cartoons are blasphemy--this is the idolatry of Mohammed.
Moderate Christians recognize that literal fundamentalism is Bibliolatry, and some even recognize that much of Christanity itself is marred by Christolatry. Both replace God as the central object of worship with something that merely represents God. The first three commandments are simply rewordings of the same ban against this type of idolatry, and yet, it is probably the single most common form of worship in all the dominant religions.
One last note: to say that God is infinite and that no representation of God is final is essentially a different way of phrasing the central thesis of science. You cannot have a final proof of a theory, though you may have more or less accurate working hyphotheses. Much of what leads the religious astray is the arrogant desire for certainty. But according to all religions, only God gets to be certain. Human beings are not permitted absolutes. We need faith because we have to accept doubt. We call our best knowledge theory, because we must admit that we can never be certain.
Hmmmm... I saw the cartoons and they were a helluva lot milder than most cartoons featuring Christ and making fun of Christians. A couple of them are just straight drawings without any joke, and some of them don't even feature actual drawings of Mohammed. By Western standards for satire these cartoons were actually respectful.
As for being an attempt to generate publicity and sensationalism, no one even noticed the damn things until a propaganda campaign was launched in the middle east about a month ago which began with three drawings that were not in the newspaper, and whose source cannot be identified, but which were blatantly offensive. These are the drawings that have them rioting in the streets, but no one even knows where they came from!
It's called the Wedge Strategy. The purpose of it is precisely that--to destroy the naturalistic world view that science is based upon. This is old news. Support for this effort is coming from fundamentalists of all origins, including Muslims.
This is basically an urban legend--bad science orignating with the anti-abortion lobby which is now being encouraged by organisation friendly to that cause, including the Bush administration.
Yes, I've tried all the other Ensemble games, but Age of Kings plays really woodenly after playing Age of Mythology--too much micro-management. This isn't as obvious in single player, but it becomes painfully obvious in mutliplayer. I have several groups of friends who like to play multi-player RTS's, and they all dropped AoK like a hot potato when AoM came out. And the latest Age of Empires hasn't impressed us much either.
It's also gotten to the point that the upgrade in technology is no longer worth the money. Who cares whether the poly count is twice what it was? The original Duke Nukem is still the one of the best multiplayer shooters out there, and the fact that it used sprites didn't really matter--it's just so damn funny, and there are so many ways to frag people. I imagine that sports games are even more pointless. The gameplay probably hasn't improved in 10 years, so why buy another? And for multiplayer RTS, I haven't seen anything that improves on Age of Mythology with the Titans expansion--it has the perfect balance of complexity and simplicity.
At a certain point, the next version is pretty much pointless. You already have the game, and the pretty pictures don't really add much to gameplay--in fact, sometimes they get the gameplay just right, and you can't improve upon it. At this point, the genre is finished. Time to move on.
Personally, I'd like to see something that's more of a detective game than a shooter (hopefully with clues that make sense.) I'd love to see a game where you actually lose points for shooting someone. But that, of course, would not follow the formula.
At the time, I didn't realize that Dell's support staff had already been outsourced to India. I had no idea that it was going to end up there.
And how is a message I sent abusive to the service guy? I was writing to Dell telling them that companies can't get away with paying their support staff peanuts. So the message was intended as ammunition given to someone who probably already had the same opinion--and it was a complaint, not about Dell, but about another company (um...did you even read my post?) Of course, since the guy was already working in India for peanuts, it was too late...
And no, they didn't delete it. I got a response back the next day.
Funny thing was, I was having trouble with a Netgear router they sold me, and when I searched around on the web to references to it, I found a lot of people complaining that Netgear had overseas helpline people who obviously knew nothing about routers, but were just sitting there with the manual. I wrote to Dell to ask whether I could return it, and mentioned that one of the reasons was that Netgear had on their service line "people who knew nothing about the product because, like most offshore help, they weren't paid enough to be able to buy one themselves."
I wonder what effect this had on the Indian help desk person who got it...
I played a female character in EQ, and it creeped me out...people treated me as a girl, and I felt odd receiving the affection. So I canned the character and never played another female in any MMORPG till City of Heroes, which is a lot more campy. Nobody on COH seems to assume that if the toon is a female, the player is a female. And some classes and character concepts just seem to demand females. My female characters in WoW were undead, so no pulchritude there.
It's also a lot nicer looking at a female character running in a tight suit in COH.:) Mind you, I usually go for the look that suits the character best, so only one of my female toons wears a skintight outfit. The rest wear armor or skirts. As for the "lingerie" look, I created one character to show some friends how the character design works, and they picked metallic lingerie. The look is getting old really fast.
Yeah, okay, I play too many RPG's. Hey, I work in game industry. Arguably, it's work related...
Re:Glad this wasn't settled out of court
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RIM - The Whole Story
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· Score: 3, Insightful
At some point, the right of industry--that is, the willingness of someone to take an idea and bring it to fruition, must be respected. Consider this: for any sufficiently complex technological device, literally thousands of technological ideas are involved in creating it and making it work. The cost of researching each and every one of these ideas and innovations to make sure that you aren't stepping on anyone else's toes would be prohibitive for a new company. This burden will continue to grow as new products become more complex; eventually, only companies with large war chests, like IBM and Microsoft, will be able to attempt anything. If this is the requirement placed upon innovation, then all innovation will soon cease, and we will end up with a collection of companies that produce nothing, but who squat on innovation and wait for someone with the guts to actually go out and do it. Then they swoop in with lawyers, kill the company, and feed on the corpse.
RIM made the thing, NTP didn't. RIM assumed the risks, the marketing and production costs, built the infrastructure, and filled in all the other gaps that were required to make the product a reality. RIM did indulge in lawsuits against patent violators, but these were for patents employed in an existing product, to defend a market that they had created, and investments which NTP made no contribution to. RIM did 99.9% of the work. If NTP gets anything, it should be a small interest in RIM, not a crippling sum which will devastate RIM and warn all future innovators that really, the effort to actually make something just isn't worth the trouble.
And if we live in fear of litigation to the point that we simply won't bother to produce anything, rest assured that the Asian tigers will suffer no such qualms. They will build it, they will sell it in markets which care nothing about our patents, while we slowly sink into irrelevance, and when they do come here, they will have the war chests required to defend their products. When that day comes, all our carefully guarded patents will be outdated and worthless, and we will find ourselves in the position of a third world country wishing that we could make all the cool stuff that they do.
The very fact that the time of the event is chosen by the criminal and not you is what makes the difference. He knows that trouble is about to happen, because he is the one initiating it. You don't. And in the absence of "safer targets"--which is what you will have if everyone is armed--the criminals will gear up, as they do in L.A. when they fight each other.
I wouldn't brag about the crime rates in Texas, by the way. Violent crime in Texas is one of the highest of any State(6th), and in fact, one of the highest in the Western World. Drops in the crime rate have happened in all states, due to changes in demographics, as the number of young males ages 17 to 30 have declined as a percentage of the population. This is not because of gun policy, which has not really changed in Texas. The consistently high rate of violent crime is more indicative of the results of the gun policy there.
The fact is that scientists are just as rabid retards concerning evolution as the id/creationalists are.
They loose objectivity and scream "I AM A STUPID IDIOT" to the masses of people as they intimidate and stick their collective tounge out at the very people who are interested in really understanding it.
Science is not about you. It's not about your feelings, or about what you want to believe, or about being sensitive to what you think. It's an all-out battleground, a free market of ideas, and if scientists talk to you that way, its because they talk to each other that way. It's not personal. Science is all about evidence and sound reasoning that works with that evidence, and the people who practice it care so much about this that they get very pissed off when somebody ignores the evidence and spouts nonsense.
So, to all those people who are greatly offended by the brusque tone of scientists, get over yourselves. There are more important things in this world than your tender little ego. And really, that's what this whole debate is about; people don't want to believe that they are descended from monkeys, and ultimately, from worms, because it offends their pride. And if these people really were interested in learning, they would overcome their pride and learn.
Still another datapoint is that when British criminals break into a home, it appears that they prefer to make certain the residents are in the home.
You should cite the source for a claim like this--this is very hard to believe. Why would a burglar want to run the risk of additional charges of assault, kidnapping (which is what detaining someone from contacting the police is), and deliberately seek out witnesses to his crime? This increases the expected jail time by a factor of ten, and dramatically increases the chances of being caught and prosecuted. And if this is true, it contradicts everything in your post, proving that criminals are completely irrational.
Not unless that law abiding majority always get the drop on the bad guys--and since they aren't the ones who are planning to go out and kill people, it's the guy intending to commit murder who has the element of surprise. And he'll be the one wearing body armor, and he won't be with his kids, or carrying anything, or not paying attention, as you might well be. You're just living your life. He's the one who's psyched and prepared.
So, give guns to everyone, and you automatically confer an advantage on the criminal. If you happen to be alone, that's all he needs to kill you and get away with it. Your chances of winning are very slim.
I can't figure out if this is political correctness from the left (exploitation of women, oh no!) or political correctness from the right (naked women, oh no!) Then again, I'm not sure there's really much of a difference. If you can shame somebody for something which is pretty much natural and inevitable--desire for sex--you've pretty much got them by the balls. I'm getting sick of all of it. The Super Bowl crowd get completely spun out over the glimpse of a tit. Meanwhile the opening of the Athens games included a portrayal of the ancient Greek gods, including a bare-breasted Hecate holding aloft a live snake in each hand. Nice to see that there are still adults in some parts of the world...
My problem is that I would actually be there for the games (yeah, I know, serious geek.) How much is the upscale stripper going to know about the technical details? But E3 is a party. Automobile adds have included babes for decades. Game distributors think that games are for male adolescents, so they're targetting that market. Granted, they should expand their markets, but I am getting so damn sick of the damn kiddie police. Maybe if the authorities grow up a bit, so will the marketers...
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There are other problems with the research. Much of it is based upon the level of aggressive play witnessed amongst boys after playing. Have you ever watched boys playing when they're having fun? They get wound up and boisterous! They pounce and hit! Apparently, this was the researchers first encounter with human children...
The other problem is that they measure mind state immediately after playing a game, but this does not indicate a permanent change in temperment, only a temporary shift in mode. I used to find that at the end of exams, I was spacy and even a bit clumsy--does this mean that exams make you stupid?
Good idea, but the split somehow has to be voluntary. The reason that crowded servers get more crowded is that a friend invites you to join him on the server he is already on--but he's been playing for a year, so the server is already crowded. Migration by individual choice has to be allowed, so that whole guilds can wander over. For that matter, people should be allowed to migrate to any lightly populated server when theirs gets crowded--and they should be allowed to take all their stuff, because if you don't allow that, no one will move.
Go back a bit along the ancestral tree and what you hit isn't considered human, but is considered (like us) one of the great apes. So, no, we aren't descended from any of the currently existing apes, but we are descended from apes, because we are apes.
Your point is incredibly anal anyway, and to the creationist/evolutionist argument, pretty much irrelevant. Creationists argue that species never change, and that we are exactly the way God made us.
A philosophy of science professor of mine once said that there are about 250 people in the world who understood or cared about what he did. It is possible that such work will eventually yield something which will contribute towards significant breakthroughs, but it seemed to me that what he was doing was probably pointless. If what you are doing has little or no chance of impact on ordinary people's lives at any future point, even through research based on yours, that's a hobby.
The aggravating thing about this is that, being the strong proponent of science that he was, the decline in the public understanding and support of science was the very thing that I believe he should have been addressing. 'Pop' scientists make it easier for quiet scientists to get funding, by impressing upon ordinary people, who vote, pay taxes, and make donations, just how valuable science is. And no, they don't enter the public eye because they crave attention. Most enter it because they are the more sociable type, and get frustrated by the staggering public ignorance they encounter in trying to do their research, which cuts funding for valuable research while pissing billions away on fantasies like Reagan's Star Wars program, and Bush's Missile Defense. Popular scientists do the song and dance so that the rest don't have to waste all their time performing as dancing bears for politicians and beaurocrats.
Popularization of science used to be done as a matter of course in school, magazines, the media, and even in comic books, where so many of the heroes were scientists themselves (nearly all of Stan Lee's heroes were scientists, or were groups that included a scientist.) You can even see it in old standards like the Hardy Boys, where evidence and deductive reasoning were stressed over blind acceptance of the common view. Somehow, this changed in the 70's, and scientists themselves began to step in to fill the void. One of the reasons that America is slipping in science standings is that science is no longer presented to young people as a desirable career. Someone has to carry that torch.
As it is, we have a population that is largely ignorant of the scientific method, leaving them susceptible to junk science and junk religion, lining the pockets of con artists, and rendering laymen largely incapable of making sound decisions on matters where science can or should have something to say. This affects education, politics, technology, economics, and even law, which relies on a method very much like the scientific method to arrive at decisions. In short, we are losing our ability to think. This is catastrophic for any society that wishes to remain a democracy--it's no accident that many of the people who founded American democracy also did scientific research. This is the level of intellectual engagement required, at least amongst the elite, to sustain a democracy.
It has already been made, and it's called Blade Runner. Gibson was working on Neuromancer when the film came out, and he came out of the theatre buzzing. It was exactly the world he envisioned for Neuromancer.
Well, Bloomberg is pretty anal. Banning smoking in New York? There's something vaguely blasphemous about that--I remember a scene in Sex in the City where Carrie goes to a backlot of New York to escape the politically correct Nazis and have a smoke in peace. Yeah, I know smoking is bad for you, but it might be better to ban fast food joints--a recent New York Times article (genital dimensions required) talked about the skyrocketing incidence of diabetes in New York. Diabetes rips your body apart, causing chronic health problems for decades (at least smoking tends to kill quickly.) The implications for public health costs and readiness are staggering. Of course, the advance of diabetes, and its causes, require a bit more subtle consideration, something a knee-jerk PC type like Bloomberg is not particularly adept at...
The more you can do with it, the better.
Exactly, because all of these technologies tie into where the game industry is almost certainly going, allowing Sony to already be in place as these innovations come into the mainstream. This means that they will not only have a strong grip on the console market, but they will also win the format and distribution war. As someone who works in the industry, I can tell you that Sony knows exactly what they are doing.
They're not preventing use of the trademark (RTFA). They want it used strictly in the way it's supposed to be used in war--not, for example, as a disguise for your covert ops to penetrate enemy defenses, etc. They don't want it portrayed in any way that can be viewed as a threat, making them look like a viable target.
And whether people respect it as such now, the ideal that they're going for is that people don't attack medics for humanitarian reasons. They would at least like to get the soldier home alive, even if he can't fight anymore.
The system will be cracked, just like every copy protection scheme is now. Eventually they'll give up on the DRM and just make it cheap enough that it's easier just to pay for it. The market will eventually foil all their little schemes.
And I'll be damned if I'm going to give every game I own permission to access the internet, unless I'm actually playing on the internet. This is just too much of a security risk, especially for content downloaded from the net.
The absence of absolutes means that one can assume a stance of complete skepticism. This is not a serious position, but it is used in what I call the 'post-modernist dodge' which goes something like this: "Well, really, everything is just opinion. You can't prove it beyond doubt, so that's just your opinion..." Annoying enough when used in philosophical arguments, but infuriating when used, say, to disable scientific reasoning in defense of something like the occult, or pseudo-science. The worst part, though, is that this line of argument is now being used by fundamentalists to attack science and advance their own beliefs.
What fanatics practice is not faith, but superstition. Faith is simply an attitude of trust and optimism--it accepts uncertainty but refuses to be paralyzed by it. By accepting their definition of faith, you have already conceded the first round of the argument with the very people you seem to be arguing with. That's how religion is making so much headway: by defining the terms of discussion and getting others to accept those definitions. How many other battles have you already unknowingly conceded?
And by not understanding what motivates people to believe these things, you are hitting them precisely where their armor is thickest. They've been called weak and stupid before--that doesn't faze them at all. These are the easy arguments. They've been prepared specifically for them. But call them an idolator, and tell them they're violating the first three commandments, and suddenly they actually have to think...
The funny thing about all this is that they don't understand idolatry.
Idolatry amounts to worshipping an image of something, mistaking an image for something real, or worshipping a false god. In primitive cultures, to have a name or image of something is to understand and control it--sympathetic magic. This is why the ancient Hebrews could not speak the name Jehovah, and why the Holy of Holies in the Temple of Jerusalem was empty (upon entering it, the Romans concluded that the Jews were atheists.)
But this has a more sophisticated meaning--since God is infinite, any representation of God is limited and must be recognized as such. Thus, no image, book, historical personage, or idea may be worshipped, as no work of human hands or idea comprehended by the human mind is final and perfect. There is no God but God. But even if Mohammed is his prophet, Mohammed is still just a man, and an image of him cannot be blasphemy because he is not God. The blasphemy here is the Imam's claim that the cartoons are blasphemy--this is the idolatry of Mohammed.
Moderate Christians recognize that literal fundamentalism is Bibliolatry, and some even recognize that much of Christanity itself is marred by Christolatry. Both replace God as the central object of worship with something that merely represents God. The first three commandments are simply rewordings of the same ban against this type of idolatry, and yet, it is probably the single most common form of worship in all the dominant religions.
One last note: to say that God is infinite and that no representation of God is final is essentially a different way of phrasing the central thesis of science. You cannot have a final proof of a theory, though you may have more or less accurate working hyphotheses. Much of what leads the religious astray is the arrogant desire for certainty. But according to all religions, only God gets to be certain. Human beings are not permitted absolutes. We need faith because we have to accept doubt. We call our best knowledge theory, because we must admit that we can never be certain.
Hmmmm... I saw the cartoons and they were a helluva lot milder than most cartoons featuring Christ and making fun of Christians. A couple of them are just straight drawings without any joke, and some of them don't even feature actual drawings of Mohammed. By Western standards for satire these cartoons were actually respectful.
As for being an attempt to generate publicity and sensationalism, no one even noticed the damn things until a propaganda campaign was launched in the middle east about a month ago which began with three drawings that were not in the newspaper, and whose source cannot be identified, but which were blatantly offensive. These are the drawings that have them rioting in the streets, but no one even knows where they came from!
It's called the Wedge Strategy. The purpose of it is precisely that--to destroy the naturalistic world view that science is based upon. This is old news. Support for this effort is coming from fundamentalists of all origins, including Muslims.
This is basically an urban legend--bad science orignating with the anti-abortion lobby which is now being encouraged by organisation friendly to that cause, including the Bush administration.
This one was debunked a while ago.
Yes, I've tried all the other Ensemble games, but Age of Kings plays really woodenly after playing Age of Mythology--too much micro-management. This isn't as obvious in single player, but it becomes painfully obvious in mutliplayer. I have several groups of friends who like to play multi-player RTS's, and they all dropped AoK like a hot potato when AoM came out. And the latest Age of Empires hasn't impressed us much either.
It's also gotten to the point that the upgrade in technology is no longer worth the money. Who cares whether the poly count is twice what it was? The original Duke Nukem is still the one of the best multiplayer shooters out there, and the fact that it used sprites didn't really matter--it's just so damn funny, and there are so many ways to frag people. I imagine that sports games are even more pointless. The gameplay probably hasn't improved in 10 years, so why buy another? And for multiplayer RTS, I haven't seen anything that improves on Age of Mythology with the Titans expansion--it has the perfect balance of complexity and simplicity.
At a certain point, the next version is pretty much pointless. You already have the game, and the pretty pictures don't really add much to gameplay--in fact, sometimes they get the gameplay just right, and you can't improve upon it. At this point, the genre is finished. Time to move on.
Personally, I'd like to see something that's more of a detective game than a shooter (hopefully with clues that make sense.) I'd love to see a game where you actually lose points for shooting someone. But that, of course, would not follow the formula.
At the time, I didn't realize that Dell's support staff had already been outsourced to India. I had no idea that it was going to end up there.
And how is a message I sent abusive to the service guy? I was writing to Dell telling them that companies can't get away with paying their support staff peanuts. So the message was intended as ammunition given to someone who probably already had the same opinion--and it was a complaint, not about Dell, but about another company (um...did you even read my post?) Of course, since the guy was already working in India for peanuts, it was too late...
And no, they didn't delete it. I got a response back the next day.
Funny thing was, I was having trouble with a Netgear router they sold me, and when I searched around on the web to references to it, I found a lot of people complaining that Netgear had overseas helpline people who obviously knew nothing about routers, but were just sitting there with the manual. I wrote to Dell to ask whether I could return it, and mentioned that one of the reasons was that Netgear had on their service line "people who knew nothing about the product because, like most offshore help, they weren't paid enough to be able to buy one themselves."
I wonder what effect this had on the Indian help desk person who got it...
I played a female character in EQ, and it creeped me out...people treated me as a girl, and I felt odd receiving the affection. So I canned the character and never played another female in any MMORPG till City of Heroes, which is a lot more campy. Nobody on COH seems to assume that if the toon is a female, the player is a female. And some classes and character concepts just seem to demand females. My female characters in WoW were undead, so no pulchritude there.
:) Mind you, I usually go for the look that suits the character best, so only one of my female toons wears a skintight outfit. The rest wear armor or skirts. As for the "lingerie" look, I created one character to show some friends how the character design works, and they picked metallic lingerie. The look is getting old really fast.
It's also a lot nicer looking at a female character running in a tight suit in COH.
Yeah, okay, I play too many RPG's. Hey, I work in game industry. Arguably, it's work related...
At some point, the right of industry--that is, the willingness of someone to take an idea and bring it to fruition, must be respected. Consider this: for any sufficiently complex technological device, literally thousands of technological ideas are involved in creating it and making it work. The cost of researching each and every one of these ideas and innovations to make sure that you aren't stepping on anyone else's toes would be prohibitive for a new company. This burden will continue to grow as new products become more complex; eventually, only companies with large war chests, like IBM and Microsoft, will be able to attempt anything. If this is the requirement placed upon innovation, then all innovation will soon cease, and we will end up with a collection of companies that produce nothing, but who squat on innovation and wait for someone with the guts to actually go out and do it. Then they swoop in with lawyers, kill the company, and feed on the corpse.
RIM made the thing, NTP didn't. RIM assumed the risks, the marketing and production costs, built the infrastructure, and filled in all the other gaps that were required to make the product a reality. RIM did indulge in lawsuits against patent violators, but these were for patents employed in an existing product, to defend a market that they had created, and investments which NTP made no contribution to. RIM did 99.9% of the work. If NTP gets anything, it should be a small interest in RIM, not a crippling sum which will devastate RIM and warn all future innovators that really, the effort to actually make something just isn't worth the trouble.
And if we live in fear of litigation to the point that we simply won't bother to produce anything, rest assured that the Asian tigers will suffer no such qualms. They will build it, they will sell it in markets which care nothing about our patents, while we slowly sink into irrelevance, and when they do come here, they will have the war chests required to defend their products. When that day comes, all our carefully guarded patents will be outdated and worthless, and we will find ourselves in the position of a third world country wishing that we could make all the cool stuff that they do.
The very fact that the time of the event is chosen by the criminal and not you is what makes the difference. He knows that trouble is about to happen, because he is the one initiating it. You don't. And in the absence of "safer targets"--which is what you will have if everyone is armed--the criminals will gear up, as they do in L.A. when they fight each other.
I wouldn't brag about the crime rates in Texas, by the way. Violent crime in Texas is one of the highest of any State (6th), and in fact, one of the highest in the Western World. Drops in the crime rate have happened in all states, due to changes in demographics, as the number of young males ages 17 to 30 have declined as a percentage of the population. This is not because of gun policy, which has not really changed in Texas. The consistently high rate of violent crime is more indicative of the results of the gun policy there.
The fact is that scientists are just as rabid retards concerning evolution as the id/creationalists are.
They loose objectivity and scream "I AM A STUPID IDIOT" to the masses of people as they intimidate and stick their collective tounge out at the very people who are interested in really understanding it.
Science is not about you. It's not about your feelings, or about what you want to believe, or about being sensitive to what you think. It's an all-out battleground, a free market of ideas, and if scientists talk to you that way, its because they talk to each other that way. It's not personal. Science is all about evidence and sound reasoning that works with that evidence, and the people who practice it care so much about this that they get very pissed off when somebody ignores the evidence and spouts nonsense.
So, to all those people who are greatly offended by the brusque tone of scientists, get over yourselves. There are more important things in this world than your tender little ego. And really, that's what this whole debate is about; people don't want to believe that they are descended from monkeys, and ultimately, from worms, because it offends their pride. And if these people really were interested in learning, they would overcome their pride and learn.
Still another datapoint is that when British criminals break into a home, it appears that they prefer to make certain the residents are in the home.
You should cite the source for a claim like this--this is very hard to believe. Why would a burglar want to run the risk of additional charges of assault, kidnapping (which is what detaining someone from contacting the police is), and deliberately seek out witnesses to his crime? This increases the expected jail time by a factor of ten, and dramatically increases the chances of being caught and prosecuted. And if this is true, it contradicts everything in your post, proving that criminals are completely irrational.
Not unless that law abiding majority always get the drop on the bad guys--and since they aren't the ones who are planning to go out and kill people, it's the guy intending to commit murder who has the element of surprise. And he'll be the one wearing body armor, and he won't be with his kids, or carrying anything, or not paying attention, as you might well be. You're just living your life. He's the one who's psyched and prepared.
So, give guns to everyone, and you automatically confer an advantage on the criminal. If you happen to be alone, that's all he needs to kill you and get away with it. Your chances of winning are very slim.
I can't figure out if this is political correctness from the left (exploitation of women, oh no!) or political correctness from the right (naked women, oh no!) Then again, I'm not sure there's really much of a difference. If you can shame somebody for something which is pretty much natural and inevitable--desire for sex--you've pretty much got them by the balls. I'm getting sick of all of it. The Super Bowl crowd get completely spun out over the glimpse of a tit. Meanwhile the opening of the Athens games included a portrayal of the ancient Greek gods, including a bare-breasted Hecate holding aloft a live snake in each hand. Nice to see that there are still adults in some parts of the world...
My problem is that I would actually be there for the games (yeah, I know, serious geek.) How much is the upscale stripper going to know about the technical details? But E3 is a party. Automobile adds have included babes for decades. Game distributors think that games are for male adolescents, so they're targetting that market. Granted, they should expand their markets, but I am getting so damn sick of the damn kiddie police. Maybe if the authorities grow up a bit, so will the marketers...