Karl Rove and his "maths" spending a quarter billion dollars and still loosing badly.
You are such an idiom. And a maroon. (Just kidding, of course, but there must be a numbered Fundamental Internet Law that says that online insults of other people's intelligence always contain a misspelling of some sort.)
Fallacy 1: "Because one politician got his money from ripping off Medicare, all money in politics is corrupt." (Many other people get their money through legitimate means.)
Fallacy 2: "There is a discernable moral difference between a blogger's disproportionately large audience due to writing skill versus a rich person's disproportionately large audience due to purchasing power." (Both can only be described as morally neutral in the general case. If you're trying to "level the playing field", there is no reason to restrict it to money -- you might as well consider speaking or writing skill, physical attractiveness, etc. Science fiction has been written on the subject.)
You spoke of "egregious twisting of the intent of the 1st amendment". It's interesting -- originally voting rights were much more restricted than today. You had to be a white male, and you also had to own 50 acres of land in many states before you could vote. I'm not aware of any restriction on political donations back then, though.
No, I think I just put my finger on a fallacy on your part. You've made it very clear that it's the disproportionate influence of one person versus lesser influence of the masses of other people on elections that you can't tolerate.
But you still haven't given any reason why Sheldon Adelson's money is any different here than Famous Q. PolitiBlogger's virtual soapbox. In both cases, one person has drastically larger influence on the political debate than the masses of people around them. Why is this imbalance of power OK for Famous Q, but not for Adelson? Why? Why? Why?
OK, if it's so desirable to "level the playing field" so some people don't influence more than others, why not censor some highly influential political bloggers? Why not mandate surgically created speech impediments for the most charismatic political speakers? You still haven't gotten away from my accusation that your core goal is a bad goal. Looking at the money aspect and saying, "See! Dirty money!" doesn't change the fact that "leveling the playing field" is a bad goal to start with, and really a misunderstanding of democratic ideals.
Perhaps you're oversimplifying this. It's not that "money equals speech"; the problem is that suppressing certain kinds of donations means preventing people from "getting the word out" about something important to them, and thus prevents them from joining in unison with their peers in an act of aggregate, unison political speech. Or something.
There are a couple of problems with that. One, you seem to be saying that such a bad law as my hypothetical would have been constitutional prior to 1868. Two, if you don't have a fundamental right to support political causes with your money as a matter of political expression, then there's arguably nothing there to "equally protect". At least, I am sure that an entrenched monopoly party would find a way to suppress political donations if at all possible in the absence of strong 1st Amendment assertion of an inherent right to engage in such political activity.
"There's a plausible argument to be made that exactly zero corporations are owned by robots today "
Careful, you don't want to go down that line or reasoning.
Our own judgement will we keep about down what line of reasoning we want to go.
"...you are a somewhat under-informed parroter of left wing talking points."
You are growing increasingly shrill and defensive. Relax. I'm more of what I call a "pre-Rand" libertarian.
I don't care how you describe yourself, but it is my personal policy to become increasingly shrill and defensive when people suggest removing my 1st Amendment's protection from government control/tyranny.:p
The solution to "bad speech" is "more speech", not censorship. Corporations come and go, but governments' use of power and restriction of liberties tends to only grow and be abused in creative new ways.
OK. But you ignored and did not address my point. If it is desirable to "level the playing field" and make sure some people don't have more of a voice than others, then it should be OK to censor some political blogs, right? (Assuming we got that pesky 1st Amendment reduced in scope.)
Doesn't it undermine the entire concept of democracy if some political bloggers have wider readership (and more influence) than others? That is the core idea behind why you want to change the money flow, right? It's not ultimately about money (after all, people are free to throw their money in the gutter if they like), it's about disproportionate influence, right?
There's a plausible argument to be made that the 1st Amendment requires that a government can't make it illegal to donate money to their political opponents. There's a plausible argument to be made that exactly zero corporations are owned by robots today -- they are owned and run by people. And finally, there's a plausible argument to be made that you are a somewhat under-informed parroter of left wing talking points.
Let's put it a different way. Suppose a Republican president comes to power with Republicans in both legislative houses, and it becomes the law of the land that nobody can donate to a Democratic party or politician. Donating money to Democrats is now illegal. So... we all know that is "not OK", but why exactly is it "not OK"?
The answer lies in the freedoms guaranteed by the 1st Amendment, whether you like the "money=speech" idea or not. Tell me why I'm wrong, please!
You're certainly entitled to your opinion. Whatever term you use, it's clear that you want to let the government take away our "freedom to spend our own money to get the word out about something". That means less freedom. Maybe you're happy with that, because governments never, ever abuse their position when given leeway to curtail personal freedoms?
Blogs (and the internet, for the most part still) are fairly democratic institutions.
I think you define "democratic" differently than I do.
Using cash to drown out the majority of voices is tyranny. A more egregious twisting of the intent of the 1st amendment I cannot imagine.
Using the government to outlaw political movies, political blogs (that cost money to operate), newspapers, etc. is exactly contrary to the intent of the 1st Amendment. I would say that you are a very confused individual. Or perhaps merely naive, if you expect that only roses and happiness will result from such a loss of freedom as you advocate.
Your goal is to level the playing field so that some individuals do not have more influence than others on elections. Have you considered the idea of censoring political blogs? Some bloggers have widely disproportionate influence, and by throttling their readership (perhaps by a government controlled internet filter occasionally injecting 404's), together we could take the "celebrity blogger" influence out of politics and level the playing field.
...or would you recognize that as a gross abuse of free speech, much like your plan to make political donations illegal? Seriously, why don't you stop trying to undermine the 1st Amendment?
You start out saying that you have no real programming experience, but at the end say that you feel like you have a good foundation to build on. I think that is a contradiction. Serious game development benefits tremendously from a deep knowledge of computer science, and you are likely to struggle to accomplish much without a solid foundation in programming.
With that said, I suggest you download Unity3D and play around with it. You can do a lot purely visually, and knock yourself out with as much C# scripting as you feel like doing. In my opinion, it's both a low barrier to entry and a great option for you to quickly put together something much more than the OpenGL/DirectX equivalent of Hello World.
Disclosure: I am currently developing a cross platform MonoGame based game written in C#.
Unsurprisingly, you misunderstood my point. It wasn't about males competing against other males -- I emphasized that programming is often a solitary and non-social activity. If anything, the coder is banging his/her head against their own computer, and locking horns with their own program and operating system until they make it do what they want it to do.
Becoming a top tier programmer is not an exercise in testosterone-infused males one-upping one another, but it is about dedicating yourself to doing something difficult and time consuming that most people have no interest in because they would think it a waste of time. In that (carefully qualified) sense, I think my analogy works. Some of the males are out there completely consumed with an activity that the vast majority of females find completely uninteresting as a personal pursuit. I'm asking the question of whether testosterone is often instrumental in "digging deeper", whether we're talking about programming computers or digging for dinosaurs in the back yard. Be cautious about jumping to conclusions for politically correct reasons. Testosterone is a real thing, and biology doesn't care about political correctness. Remember the deer.:)
If you have reasonable aptitude and work hard, you would need a bizarre string of bad luck not to be successful in America today. I'm not defining success as "Bill Gates success" but rather as "work at a nice job and live in a nice house success". There is no need to punish anybody for their skin color over what people of the same skin color did in past centuries. People need to stop complaining and demanding handouts, turn off the TV, get up off their behinds, and work for success.
I have no problem if people want to invent new programming languages, including for the humorous goal of solving the problem of there being too many programming language (kind of like Laurence Lessig raising money for a political campaign to reduce the raising of money for political campaigns). New language created by a woman? Sounds great, but nothing new in our industry (Grace Hopper).
Not fond of the "bro" culture moniker, as I don't consider either myself, or those programmers I most respect, as having anything to do with such. I would refer you once again to my original post and the "lone coder" phenomenon.
That's assuming that such an initiative is a reasonable approach to recruit students (of any gender) into programming. If the whole thing is just a dog and pony show then we won't learn anything useful at all.
find out whether it's the "girls don't code because computers require testosterone to operate"
That is a weird hypothesis and is not what I said above.
or whether it's "girls don't code because boy coders are, on average, idiots who can't deal with girls."
I agree that misogyny exists, as our fine Slashdot trolls demonstrated above; but I disagree that it is the cause of girls not getting into programming, for the reasons I described in my post. You are certainly entitled to your own opinion.
I don't blame misogyny for girls not getting into programming, because I don't think computer programming is necessarily characterized by social interaction. The lone "cowboy[/cowgirl] coder" is much more of the norm than our zealous gender imbalance adjusters think.
When I was getting into programming in the 90's I certainly didn't rely on anybody else's affirmation -- I learned how to program sitting by myself at my computer(s) with very little in the way of two way communication with the outside world. I realize it's not the 90's anymore, but the argument that says you have to have a vibrant Twitter presence and go to local programmer meetups to be a coder today is, quite frankly, hogwash. It's about the code, friend.
Here's another theory that I will probably be flamed for -- maybe girls don't get into programming as often for the same reason that female deer don't bash heads against each other as often as the males do. Maybe it boils down to testosterone. Males of many species have an impulsive drive to accomplish certain things, and in humans' case this is largely independent of intellectual aptitude. Yes, girls are smart. Many could be good programmers. But do they want to? Are they driven to? Am I (at least partially) driven to my peculiar lifestyle of being glued to a screen and eschewing much social interaction because of testosterone? ("Yeah, you'd like to _think_ so" I can hear my naysayer naysaying.) But these are questions I honestly ask.
Slashdot Mirror
Karl Rove and his "maths" spending a quarter billion dollars and still loosing badly.
You are such an idiom. And a maroon. (Just kidding, of course, but there must be a numbered Fundamental Internet Law that says that online insults of other people's intelligence always contain a misspelling of some sort.)
Fallacy 1: "Because one politician got his money from ripping off Medicare, all money in politics is corrupt."
(Many other people get their money through legitimate means.)
Fallacy 2: "There is a discernable moral difference between a blogger's disproportionately large audience due to writing skill versus a rich person's disproportionately large audience due to purchasing power."
(Both can only be described as morally neutral in the general case. If you're trying to "level the playing field", there is no reason to restrict it to money -- you might as well consider speaking or writing skill, physical attractiveness, etc. Science fiction has been written on the subject.)
You spoke of "egregious twisting of the intent of the 1st amendment". It's interesting -- originally voting rights were much more restricted than today. You had to be a white male, and you also had to own 50 acres of land in many states before you could vote. I'm not aware of any restriction on political donations back then, though.
No, I think I just put my finger on a fallacy on your part. You've made it very clear that it's the disproportionate influence of one person versus lesser influence of the masses of other people on elections that you can't tolerate.
:p
But you still haven't given any reason why Sheldon Adelson's money is any different here than Famous Q. PolitiBlogger's virtual soapbox. In both cases, one person has drastically larger influence on the political debate than the masses of people around them. Why is this imbalance of power OK for Famous Q, but not for Adelson? Why? Why? Why?
Very unconvinced over here....
OK, if it's so desirable to "level the playing field" so some people don't influence more than others, why not censor some highly influential political bloggers? Why not mandate surgically created speech impediments for the most charismatic political speakers? You still haven't gotten away from my accusation that your core goal is a bad goal. Looking at the money aspect and saying, "See! Dirty money!" doesn't change the fact that "leveling the playing field" is a bad goal to start with, and really a misunderstanding of democratic ideals.
Perhaps you're oversimplifying this. It's not that "money equals speech"; the problem is that suppressing certain kinds of donations means preventing people from "getting the word out" about something important to them, and thus prevents them from joining in unison with their peers in an act of aggregate, unison political speech. Or something.
There are a couple of problems with that. One, you seem to be saying that such a bad law as my hypothetical would have been constitutional prior to 1868. Two, if you don't have a fundamental right to support political causes with your money as a matter of political expression, then there's arguably nothing there to "equally protect". At least, I am sure that an entrenched monopoly party would find a way to suppress political donations if at all possible in the absence of strong 1st Amendment assertion of an inherent right to engage in such political activity.
"There's a plausible argument to be made that exactly zero corporations are owned by robots today "
Careful, you don't want to go down that line or reasoning.
Our own judgement will we keep about down what line of reasoning we want to go.
"...you are a somewhat under-informed parroter of left wing talking points."
You are growing increasingly shrill and defensive. Relax. I'm more of what I call a "pre-Rand" libertarian.
I don't care how you describe yourself, but it is my personal policy to become increasingly shrill and defensive when people suggest removing my 1st Amendment's protection from government control/tyranny. :p
The solution to "bad speech" is "more speech", not censorship. Corporations come and go, but governments' use of power and restriction of liberties tends to only grow and be abused in creative new ways.
Because money is not speech.
OK. But you ignored and did not address my point. If it is desirable to "level the playing field" and make sure some people don't have more of a voice than others, then it should be OK to censor some political blogs, right? (Assuming we got that pesky 1st Amendment reduced in scope.)
Doesn't it undermine the entire concept of democracy if some political bloggers have wider readership (and more influence) than others? That is the core idea behind why you want to change the money flow, right? It's not ultimately about money (after all, people are free to throw their money in the gutter if they like), it's about disproportionate influence, right?
There's a plausible argument to be made that the 1st Amendment requires that a government can't make it illegal to donate money to their political opponents. There's a plausible argument to be made that exactly zero corporations are owned by robots today -- they are owned and run by people. And finally, there's a plausible argument to be made that you are a somewhat under-informed parroter of left wing talking points.
Let's put it a different way. Suppose a Republican president comes to power with Republicans in both legislative houses, and it becomes the law of the land that nobody can donate to a Democratic party or politician. Donating money to Democrats is now illegal. So... we all know that is "not OK", but why exactly is it "not OK"?
The answer lies in the freedoms guaranteed by the 1st Amendment, whether you like the "money=speech" idea or not. Tell me why I'm wrong, please!
That's easy. A blog is speech. Money isn't.
You're certainly entitled to your opinion. Whatever term you use, it's clear that you want to let the government take away our "freedom to spend our own money to get the word out about something". That means less freedom. Maybe you're happy with that, because governments never, ever abuse their position when given leeway to curtail personal freedoms?
Blogs (and the internet, for the most part still) are fairly democratic institutions.
I think you define "democratic" differently than I do.
Using cash to drown out the majority of voices is tyranny. A more egregious twisting of the intent of the 1st amendment I cannot imagine.
Using the government to outlaw political movies, political blogs (that cost money to operate), newspapers, etc. is exactly contrary to the intent of the 1st Amendment. I would say that you are a very confused individual. Or perhaps merely naive, if you expect that only roses and happiness will result from such a loss of freedom as you advocate.
Your goal is to level the playing field so that some individuals do not have more influence than others on elections. Have you considered the idea of censoring political blogs? Some bloggers have widely disproportionate influence, and by throttling their readership (perhaps by a government controlled internet filter occasionally injecting 404's), together we could take the "celebrity blogger" influence out of politics and level the playing field.
...or would you recognize that as a gross abuse of free speech, much like your plan to make political donations illegal? Seriously, why don't you stop trying to undermine the 1st Amendment?
I don't assume anything about that post, except the cluelessness/trollfulness of the poster.
To reinforce this: Building your own engine is a great way to fall into a trap that you won't escape for years if not decades.
Hahahaha - I resemble that remark!
You start out saying that you have no real programming experience, but at the end say that you feel like you have a good foundation to build on. I think that is a contradiction. Serious game development benefits tremendously from a deep knowledge of computer science, and you are likely to struggle to accomplish much without a solid foundation in programming.
With that said, I suggest you download Unity3D and play around with it. You can do a lot purely visually, and knock yourself out with as much C# scripting as you feel like doing. In my opinion, it's both a low barrier to entry and a great option for you to quickly put together something much more than the OpenGL/DirectX equivalent of Hello World.
Disclosure: I am currently developing a cross platform MonoGame based game written in C#.
I would say that this AC was either trolling or clueless about software optimization.
male competitiveness.
Unsurprisingly, you misunderstood my point. It wasn't about males competing against other males -- I emphasized that programming is often a solitary and non-social activity. If anything, the coder is banging his/her head against their own computer, and locking horns with their own program and operating system until they make it do what they want it to do.
:)
Becoming a top tier programmer is not an exercise in testosterone-infused males one-upping one another, but it is about dedicating yourself to doing something difficult and time consuming that most people have no interest in because they would think it a waste of time. In that (carefully qualified) sense, I think my analogy works. Some of the males are out there completely consumed with an activity that the vast majority of females find completely uninteresting as a personal pursuit. I'm asking the question of whether testosterone is often instrumental in "digging deeper", whether we're talking about programming computers or digging for dinosaurs in the back yard. Be cautious about jumping to conclusions for politically correct reasons. Testosterone is a real thing, and biology doesn't care about political correctness. Remember the deer.
If you have reasonable aptitude and work hard, you would need a bizarre string of bad luck not to be successful in America today. I'm not defining success as "Bill Gates success" but rather as "work at a nice job and live in a nice house success". There is no need to punish anybody for their skin color over what people of the same skin color did in past centuries. People need to stop complaining and demanding handouts, turn off the TV, get up off their behinds, and work for success.
/steps off soapbox
I have no problem if people want to invent new programming languages, including for the humorous goal of solving the problem of there being too many programming language (kind of like Laurence Lessig raising money for a political campaign to reduce the raising of money for political campaigns). New language created by a woman? Sounds great, but nothing new in our industry (Grace Hopper).
Not fond of the "bro" culture moniker, as I don't consider either myself, or those programmers I most respect, as having anything to do with such. I would refer you once again to my original post and the "lone coder" phenomenon.
The good news is
That's assuming that such an initiative is a reasonable approach to recruit students (of any gender) into programming. If the whole thing is just a dog and pony show then we won't learn anything useful at all.
find out whether it's the "girls don't code because computers require testosterone to operate"
That is a weird hypothesis and is not what I said above.
or whether it's "girls don't code because boy coders are, on average, idiots who can't deal with girls."
Maybe chill a little? You sound upset.
I agree that misogyny exists, as our fine Slashdot trolls demonstrated above; but I disagree that it is the cause of girls not getting into programming, for the reasons I described in my post. You are certainly entitled to your own opinion.
I don't blame misogyny for girls not getting into programming, because I don't think computer programming is necessarily characterized by social interaction. The lone "cowboy[/cowgirl] coder" is much more of the norm than our zealous gender imbalance adjusters think.
When I was getting into programming in the 90's I certainly didn't rely on anybody else's affirmation -- I learned how to program sitting by myself at my computer(s) with very little in the way of two way communication with the outside world. I realize it's not the 90's anymore, but the argument that says you have to have a vibrant Twitter presence and go to local programmer meetups to be a coder today is, quite frankly, hogwash. It's about the code, friend.
Here's another theory that I will probably be flamed for -- maybe girls don't get into programming as often for the same reason that female deer don't bash heads against each other as often as the males do. Maybe it boils down to testosterone. Males of many species have an impulsive drive to accomplish certain things, and in humans' case this is largely independent of intellectual aptitude. Yes, girls are smart. Many could be good programmers. But do they want to? Are they driven to? Am I (at least partially) driven to my peculiar lifestyle of being glued to a screen and eschewing much social interaction because of testosterone? ("Yeah, you'd like to _think_ so" I can hear my naysayer naysaying.) But these are questions I honestly ask.
Ask as a non-AC and I'd be happy to engage in conversation. Cheers!