The three axis of abnormal psychology illustrate what happens when attitudes towards such things as escapism become a reflex to any and all contact with others
You haven't played a real RPG, then.
The game was based on contact with others; it's a fundamental aspect of finding people, getting together on a regular basis, and "working" towards a common goal.
I don't give two bits about how "unpleasant" your life may be, or what you consider the proper judge of "unpleasant" to be. (Christ Allmighty, I used "unpleasant", not "hard", "difficult", or any other substantial complaint! Leave my language alone!)
The point is, excerising any skill makes humans better at it. FPS games give better visual acuity and electronic response. Chess improves forethought. Baseball improves speed and athletic ability. And real RPGs improve social skills, basic math skills, and creativity / inspiration.
i thought slashdot was all about giving everyone a chance to be heard
Nope. It's about being a community. The various add-ons since the site began (Mod, MM, logged-in users, Friend/Foe, etc) have all been towards that end.
And, really, a subscriber only has a _chance_ to be heard quicker. Everyone else can still comment, and be heard as well as they ever could.
do you consider someone who pays money to be automatically courteous? perhaps you are a subscriber?
I'm not a subscriber--and courtesy doesn't emanante from the person footing the expense, it's extended to them.
but don't give them the ability to have their voices heard any louder than a regular joe.
Why not?/. already gives those with UIDs a louder voice than the anonymous coward; why shouldn't those who help pay for the site get a louder voice?
In RL, courtesy gives the host a slightly louder voice in a topic of conversation (especially one with thousdands of participants.) No reason the same can't be true on/.
You can 'play' at being someone, or you can 'be' someone.
When you're "being" someone, you have to deal with life and all its unplesantness.
When you're "roleplaying", you're relaxing and enjoying an intellectual escapist activity. If you're going to play games and want to boost social skills, or just find recreation that's less mind-numbing than "find the key, open the door", try an RPG.
No one ever said to game at the expense of life. Recreation is a subset of life, and anyone who tells you otherwise is probably a bitter cynic.
It's understandable for marketeers and Microsoft to say 'software product' as a euphemism for 'computer program', but do hackers have to start doing it as well?
An OS is needed to run the computer.
A computer is used to run programs, that actually do directly useful stuff.
"middleware" exists, which helps the OS, programs, and other hardware get along.
All of the above are "software products." It may be slightly imprecise, but no more than the distinction between "truck," "car", and "van."
I can understand players getting mad at this, but at the same time, it's just a game, and if individual users themselves are considering legal action, they really need to shut down the computer and go outside for a while.
Consider the reaction of thirty adults who rent a stadium to play a sport, and then have that stadium game interrupted.
Or consider the effect of disrupting the superbowl.
Or consider the result of walking up to folk playing chess in the park and overturning the board.
In each case, legal action is both warranted and acceptable. Same thing for hacking a game server which is being actively used; even moreso if it's a private server or a fee-to-play server.
Still, I digress. Its pretty wacky to think what things will be like in 877 years. I mean, look at what has happened since *gets out calculator, 'cause its late and I'm tired* the year of our Lord 1126? The most sophisticated weapon was the longbow, and the french actually use to put up a fight. The Church reigned supreme etc. So much has changed, and todays world would seem bonkers to folk from back then. Hmm, reading this back, I must be tired. Its all so damn obvious.
Actually, not a heck of a lot has happened. A few empires fell, a few empires rose, the language adapted...
But the changes wrought in the last 800 years, technology aside, are nothing compared to the changes of the 800 years before that--or the 800 years before THAT.
The pace of change is slowing down, on a social, linquistic, and cultural level, mostly thanks to our improved technology.
I fully expect English to be, if not dominant, a viable and recognizable language in 800 years. Maybe mixed a bit with Chinesse, but still a recognizable language.
Sort of like Black Ops. Of course all the operations you hear about were failures, by definition. This does not mean that there are successes, but one would wonder why it was such a popular thing for governments if it had a 100% failure rate.
One would think that, as the documentation becomes declassified, the Ops would be of historic interest at the very least.
The whole concept of plausible deniability ("if the President doesn't know, he can't say") is kind of an insult to the office--kind of a "if he knew about it, he'd say no" thing.
Every president we've ever had has been able to keep secrets. The CIA kills them if they can't. (j/k)
Not to doubt the evils of the great satan Microsoft...
but is there a real case of "plausible deniability" on record? We all know what it means, and we all can see its plausible use to hide government projects--but has it ever been used, by anyone?
(Besides which, I doubt that politicians need to honestly not know to be able to deny something. They're professional liars, after all...)
Firstly, and most importantly, it's imprecise and overdone. Sometimes you don't want to count an entire document--sometimes you just want to count how long a single paragraph is, or a few phrases. Or a page or two. (And, at least in 1.1b, it's way off--OoO just counted a 17k word paste as 101 words.)
Secondly, and this is the really annoying part--it's buried. The standard location for word count is under the Tools menu, near the Spelling (and grammar) functions are. Spellcheck, Thesaurus, and Hypenation are all there--why not Word Count?
You don't use it, so you won't push it--but I do use it, and so do many others. OoO's word count is not up to par--which is sad, really, as it's the last (latest) major roadblock to me switching over.
Although I do believe that some of it was almost too obscure. I mean one line by Smith changes nearly the whole equation of what will happen in the future
You probably don't even know who Wittgenstein is and somehow you make claims about knowing philosophy.
Believe it or not, philosiphy is not limited to the words of dead men.
I note that you can't summarize the work. It doesn't have to be one line--take twenty, take a hundred.
Its building a system of thought through logic. Maybe you think you can just make claims without proper backing and this is philosophy... well you'd be dead wrong.
"Proper backing?"
I can make all the claims I want, and defend them as well as I please. If you think that there's a good book written that illustrates your point, summarize it, and, provided I can find the budget, I'll read the darn thing.
But I'm not going to waste my time reading a dead man's words (or even an eccentric living man's--or a woman's) if those who hold them up as a good example can't even state what they mean.
This is a modern fallacy, and one which you appear to be a victim of. Real philosophy *is* difficult to understand & arduous. If you don't believe me, go and read some.
Philosiphy, like religion, is not a book. It is an idea that is simple to state, and very intricate in its ramifications.
It is not a workout. It is not building a rocket. It's simply structured thought applied to oneself, with the veralization of belief and the justification of assumption.
Summarize Wittgenstein's "Tractatus", and I'll read it. If you can't summarize it, then you really have missed the point--plus it's probably a bad book.
I look foward to your display of philisophical understanding.
Oh, and:
I'm sure you sincerely believe that, in the same sense that a 13 year old NSync fan believes that Justin Timberlake is the greatest singer that ever lived.
By that boy's standard of quality, Justin IS the greatest singer who ever lived. If we use an objective measurement of "greatness" we tend to find that opera singers are the "greatest"--and they're not all that great in the democratically subjective sense.
A lot of high-brow material is like that. If you quantifiy what is "great" you find that obscure material that no one really likes comes out on top.
Real philosophy is boring, arduous, difficult to read and difficult to understand.
Ah, so it's only "real philosophy" if it's taught badly?
The Matrix, and various other push-media, can cut down their undermessage as much as they want; as long as people think about it, and this thinking causes them to evaluate (or re-evaluate) their positions, then it's as credible as any philopsiphy out there.
Its not there to show you that reality is an illusion therefore you should quit your job and try to jump off buildings.
You're missing the point. The Matrix, within the story, is just a plot device, as is the super-powers that operatives have therein. However, the perspective of these supermen gives a great platform for voicing obersvation and philosiphy that applies to all of us normal folk.
There has to be a point where we stop analysing things... I think even Freud himself admitted that sometimes a Cigar is just a Cigar.
I never said that there wasn't.
However, when the cigar is shaped like a certain anatomical object, used in a way popularized by a certain ex-president, and manufactured by a maker of "adult goods" and sold at merchants of the same--then it's foolish to simply say "it's just a cigar."
This says a lot about our modern society. The original Matrix was a very good movie that played the "things are not what they seem" angle beautifully. The second Matrix film was a series of plastic action sequences designed for or taken from the video game, linked by a bizarre and fragmented plot, and populated with characters who acted like cardboard and sounded like cliches of themselves.
You're right--it does say a lot about modern society. Most of us can't see a point unless it's spoon fed to us.
(Hey, you! Yeah, you who hasn't seen the movie yet! Skip this damn post!)
The second movie's plot makes perfect sense, but only if you realize that it's a semi-reversal of the thrust of the first movie. The One questions his role, and finds out that he is a false prophet. The undercurrent is both the same as the first one ("reality is not what you know") and opposite ("you're free of the machines--but only superficially.")
Go back and watch the movie again; hell, just listen to it, and ignore the "plastic action scenes" if you can't get past them.
I'm really tired of people equating the Matrix with christianity. I think it's a disservice to the movie to compare it with a thousand pages of confused hallucinogenic gibberish.
You're probably a troll, but...
Christianity is more than just the bible. The central tenets of Christianity are dripping in the Matrix--both in-story and out-of-story, The One was modeled amazingly after Christ.
We'll have to wait until the last movie to see if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but The Matrix without a doubt draws as much from Christianity as it does any other source.
Repeat after me, "The Matrix is a plot device, There is no deep philisophical meaning."
Bullocks.
EVERY great story, from Shakesphere to Comic Books, is great because it says something. The Matrix has as much a "philisophical meaning" as anything else that's ever been written--that is to say, the authors mean it to say something, and they pull it off with a fair bit of success.
Just because you're biased against movies doesn't mean that the Matrix isn't "deep." The fact that professional philosiphers can discuss the Matrix with a straight face should be enough to wipe away any prejudice against movies.
Slashdot Mirror
The three axis of abnormal psychology illustrate what happens when attitudes towards such things as escapism become a reflex to any and all contact with others
You haven't played a real RPG, then.
The game was based on contact with others; it's a fundamental aspect of finding people, getting together on a regular basis, and "working" towards a common goal.
I don't give two bits about how "unpleasant" your life may be, or what you consider the proper judge of "unpleasant" to be. (Christ Allmighty, I used "unpleasant", not "hard", "difficult", or any other substantial complaint! Leave my language alone!)
The point is, excerising any skill makes humans better at it. FPS games give better visual acuity and electronic response. Chess improves forethought. Baseball improves speed and athletic ability. And real RPGs improve social skills, basic math skills, and creativity / inspiration.
i thought slashdot was all about giving everyone a chance to be heard
Nope. It's about being a community. The various add-ons since the site began (Mod, MM, logged-in users, Friend/Foe, etc) have all been towards that end.
And, really, a subscriber only has a _chance_ to be heard quicker. Everyone else can still comment, and be heard as well as they ever could.
do you consider someone who pays money to be automatically courteous? perhaps you are a subscriber?
I'm not a subscriber--and courtesy doesn't emanante from the person footing the expense, it's extended to them.
but don't give them the ability to have their voices heard any louder than a regular joe.
/. already gives those with UIDs a louder voice than the anonymous coward; why shouldn't those who help pay for the site get a louder voice?
/.
Why not?
In RL, courtesy gives the host a slightly louder voice in a topic of conversation (especially one with thousdands of participants.) No reason the same can't be true on
You can 'play' at being someone, or you can 'be' someone.
When you're "being" someone, you have to deal with life and all its unplesantness.
When you're "roleplaying", you're relaxing and enjoying an intellectual escapist activity. If you're going to play games and want to boost social skills, or just find recreation that's less mind-numbing than "find the key, open the door", try an RPG.
No one ever said to game at the expense of life. Recreation is a subset of life, and anyone who tells you otherwise is probably a bitter cynic.
It's understandable for marketeers and Microsoft to say 'software product' as a euphemism for 'computer program', but do hackers have to start doing it as well?
An OS is needed to run the computer.
A computer is used to run programs, that actually do directly useful stuff.
"middleware" exists, which helps the OS, programs, and other hardware get along.
All of the above are "software products." It may be slightly imprecise, but no more than the distinction between "truck," "car", and "van."
Y'know, CRPGs have a tendency of leading to REAL RPGs, where you, y'know, roleplay. With other people.
And doing this does help make you smarter, as it's an inherently intellectual activity easily on par with, oh, the crap that Mensa pushes.
I can understand players getting mad at this, but at the same time, it's just a game, and if individual users themselves are considering legal action, they really need to shut down the computer and go outside for a while.
Consider the reaction of thirty adults who rent a stadium to play a sport, and then have that stadium game interrupted.
Or consider the effect of disrupting the superbowl.
Or consider the result of walking up to folk playing chess in the park and overturning the board.
In each case, legal action is both warranted and acceptable. Same thing for hacking a game server which is being actively used; even moreso if it's a private server or a fee-to-play server.
Still, I digress. Its pretty wacky to think what things will be like in 877 years. I mean, look at what has happened since
*gets out calculator, 'cause its late and I'm tired*
the year of our Lord 1126? The most sophisticated weapon was the longbow, and the french actually use to put up a fight. The Church reigned supreme etc. So much has changed, and todays world would seem bonkers to folk from back then. Hmm, reading this back, I must be tired. Its all so damn obvious.
Actually, not a heck of a lot has happened. A few empires fell, a few empires rose, the language adapted...
But the changes wrought in the last 800 years, technology aside, are nothing compared to the changes of the 800 years before that--or the 800 years before THAT.
The pace of change is slowing down, on a social, linquistic, and cultural level, mostly thanks to our improved technology.
I fully expect English to be, if not dominant, a viable and recognizable language in 800 years. Maybe mixed a bit with Chinesse, but still a recognizable language.
Seeing as how the law that the DMCA enacted is part of Title 17 USC, and copyright infringement is a part of Title 17, that sort of makes sense.
But it's also kind of like equating stealing someone's mail with sending pipe bombs. Sure, both are mail fraud, but...
Sort of like Black Ops. Of course all the operations you hear about were failures, by definition. This does not mean that there are successes, but one would wonder why it was such a popular thing for governments if it had a 100% failure rate.
One would think that, as the documentation becomes declassified, the Ops would be of historic interest at the very least.
The whole concept of plausible deniability ("if the President doesn't know, he can't say") is kind of an insult to the office--kind of a "if he knew about it, he'd say no" thing.
Every president we've ever had has been able to keep secrets. The CIA kills them if they can't. (j/k)
You filed a bug, right? I know complaining is easier, but that won't get things fixed.
I'll see if I can reproduce the bug at home, and then vote for the bug.
Thanks for the reminder.
Not to doubt the evils of the great satan Microsoft...
but is there a real case of "plausible deniability" on record? We all know what it means, and we all can see its plausible use to hide government projects--but has it ever been used, by anyone?
(Besides which, I doubt that politicians need to honestly not know to be able to deny something. They're professional liars, after all...)
There are two problems with that.
Firstly, and most importantly, it's imprecise and overdone. Sometimes you don't want to count an entire document--sometimes you just want to count how long a single paragraph is, or a few phrases. Or a page or two. (And, at least in 1.1b, it's way off--OoO just counted a 17k word paste as 101 words.)
Secondly, and this is the really annoying part--it's buried. The standard location for word count is under the Tools menu, near the Spelling (and grammar) functions are. Spellcheck, Thesaurus, and Hypenation are all there--why not Word Count?
You don't use it, so you won't push it--but I do use it, and so do many others. OoO's word count is not up to par--which is sad, really, as it's the last (latest) major roadblock to me switching over.
Although I do believe that some of it was almost too obscure. I mean one line by Smith changes nearly the whole equation of what will happen in the future
Which line, exactly?
You probably don't even know who Wittgenstein is and somehow you make claims about knowing philosophy.
Believe it or not, philosiphy is not limited to the words of dead men.
I note that you can't summarize the work. It doesn't have to be one line--take twenty, take a hundred.
Its building a system of thought through logic. Maybe you think you can just make claims without proper backing and this is philosophy... well you'd be dead wrong.
"Proper backing?"
I can make all the claims I want, and defend them as well as I please. If you think that there's a good book written that illustrates your point, summarize it, and, provided I can find the budget, I'll read the darn thing.
But I'm not going to waste my time reading a dead man's words (or even an eccentric living man's--or a woman's) if those who hold them up as a good example can't even state what they mean.
Ok, then.
Give me an example of a story with depth. Not a psychological text, but a real, honest-go-goodness story.
This is a modern fallacy, and one which you appear to be a victim of. Real philosophy *is* difficult to understand & arduous. If you don't believe me, go and read some.
Philosiphy, like religion, is not a book. It is an idea that is simple to state, and very intricate in its ramifications.
It is not a workout. It is not building a rocket. It's simply structured thought applied to oneself, with the veralization of belief and the justification of assumption.
Summarize Wittgenstein's "Tractatus", and I'll read it. If you can't summarize it, then you really have missed the point--plus it's probably a bad book.
I look foward to your display of philisophical understanding.
Oh, and:
I'm sure you sincerely believe that, in the same sense that a 13 year old NSync fan believes that Justin Timberlake is the greatest singer that ever lived.
By that boy's standard of quality, Justin IS the greatest singer who ever lived. If we use an objective measurement of "greatness" we tend to find that opera singers are the "greatest"--and they're not all that great in the democratically subjective sense.
A lot of high-brow material is like that. If you quantifiy what is "great" you find that obscure material that no one really likes comes out on top.
No, that doesn't make it great.
It does if, sans meaning, the story's already good.
Real philosophy is boring, arduous, difficult to read and difficult to understand.
Ah, so it's only "real philosophy" if it's taught badly?
The Matrix, and various other push-media, can cut down their undermessage as much as they want; as long as people think about it, and this thinking causes them to evaluate (or re-evaluate) their positions, then it's as credible as any philopsiphy out there.
Its not there to show you that reality is an illusion therefore you should quit your job and try to jump off buildings.
You're missing the point. The Matrix, within the story, is just a plot device, as is the super-powers that operatives have therein. However, the perspective of these supermen gives a great platform for voicing obersvation and philosiphy that applies to all of us normal folk.
There has to be a point where we stop analysing things... I think even Freud himself admitted that sometimes a Cigar is just a Cigar.
I never said that there wasn't.
However, when the cigar is shaped like a certain anatomical object, used in a way popularized by a certain ex-president, and manufactured by a maker of "adult goods" and sold at merchants of the same--then it's foolish to simply say "it's just a cigar."
This says a lot about our modern society. The original Matrix was a very good movie that played the "things are not what they seem" angle beautifully. The second Matrix film was a series of plastic action sequences designed for or taken from the video game, linked by a bizarre and fragmented plot, and populated with characters who acted like cardboard and sounded like cliches of themselves.
You're right--it does say a lot about modern society. Most of us can't see a point unless it's spoon fed to us.
(Hey, you! Yeah, you who hasn't seen the movie yet! Skip this damn post!)
The second movie's plot makes perfect sense, but only if you realize that it's a semi-reversal of the thrust of the first movie. The One questions his role, and finds out that he is a false prophet. The undercurrent is both the same as the first one ("reality is not what you know") and opposite ("you're free of the machines--but only superficially.")
Go back and watch the movie again; hell, just listen to it, and ignore the "plastic action scenes" if you can't get past them.
Can't a good, fairly well-written action movie just be a good, fairly well-written action movie?
Yes, but The Matrix isn't just a good, fairly well-written action movie. It's a great, very well-written movie with meaning and action.
This isn't like we're turning The Terminator into a religion--the meanings everyone is finding in The Matrix were put there on purpose.
I'm really tired of people equating the Matrix with christianity. I think it's a disservice to the movie to compare it with a thousand pages of confused hallucinogenic gibberish.
You're probably a troll, but...
Christianity is more than just the bible. The central tenets of Christianity are dripping in the Matrix--both in-story and out-of-story, The One was modeled amazingly after Christ.
We'll have to wait until the last movie to see if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but The Matrix without a doubt draws as much from Christianity as it does any other source.
Repeat after me, "The Matrix is a plot device, There is no deep philisophical meaning."
Bullocks.
EVERY great story, from Shakesphere to Comic Books, is great because it says something. The Matrix has as much a "philisophical meaning" as anything else that's ever been written--that is to say, the authors mean it to say something, and they pull it off with a fair bit of success.
Just because you're biased against movies doesn't mean that the Matrix isn't "deep." The fact that professional philosiphers can discuss the Matrix with a straight face should be enough to wipe away any prejudice against movies.
And don't get me started on all those stupid bloggers with their today-I-stubbed-my-toe-on-a-threshold-stupid-thres holds blogs.
It strikes me that 'blogs are great for two purposes: fandom and family.