Bowling for Columbine doesn't actually say there are more guns per capita in Canada. In fact, it gives no relatives statistics at all. Moore simply lists off numbers without respect to the sizes of the countries generating those numbers.
Bowling for Columbine is not edutainment, it's just entertainment.
I really want to believe, because I am of the philosophy that my workstation should not be sullied by games. However I just don't see it: it'll be years before online console gaming matures to the point where online PC gaming is now. And as we all know: if you're playing with yourself, it's called "masturbation".
The zip-file version of Scorched3D works in non-fullscreen (didn't test fs) under wine-20021031 (Debian/testing) however the fonts are unreadable. I'd do further testing, but trying to quit froze my Xwindows, so I've had enough of that.:)
The reason I appreciate Half-Life mods so much is that they don't require frequent hardware and software purchases. In effect, the Half-Life engine is a virtual console such that I can guarantee that if I can run it, I can run any new mod that comes out. UT and Quake are constantly competing for the mod community's attention, all while coming out with a new version every few years.
I'm more interested in game-play than chrome and stability over features. (Great example of a sequal that failed on both: Tribes 2.) What I'd love more than anything is a scalable or modular game engine so that hardware fanatics can keep upgrading to get more polygons, but I can play happily with my wireframes. I don't think this is an unreasonable request considering that game makes don't seem to be as deep in bed with video card mfg. as Microsoft is with Intel.
So if I'm making a bagillion dollars a year but only buy the necessities I don't pay [m]any taxes? Great, so now all my money is locked up in investments instead of stimulating the economy! Isn't one of the main arguments against income tax that it encourages saving over spending?
Apparently they plan on taxing the hell out of property owners. (They didn't say there would be no corporate tax, just that they'd hit property owners first.) Oh, and huge import tariffs.
Actually, according to the World Bank's Corruption Index, Canada scores a 9.2, making it the 5th least corrupt country in the world; compare to the US's 7.5, making it the 16th least.
You have an excellent point that there are three different forms of addiction which should be regarded as very different:
Psychological (eg: gaming)
Physical (eg: coffee)
Combined (eg: smoking)
Combined and Physical addictions tend to be narcotics-related and tend to be understood in a simplistic way by non-addicts. But the war on drugs hasn't had a new twist since the rise of ecstacy in North America; fighting drug addiction cannot hope to attract the funding or media attention it once did. So now purely psychological addictions are en vogue.
I'm not suggesting that some addictions should be left untreated, but it is important to keep their power in mind when making judgements about the sufferers. Right now the hot addiction in Canada is gambling. Should I feel as sorry for someone who goes through mood swings when they stop gambling as someone whose heart stops when they go off heroin? Should I wish the government to devote equally proportional tax dollars to each? Should I spend as much of my time worrying and learning about each?
Being a "starving" graduate student myself, I never understood where students get the money do to things like 4-day road trips and the rest of the zany things that this hunt requires. Must have something to do with old money at UofC. Mind you, I also can't imagine living in the opulant frat houses as-seen-on-TV. Perhaps there really is something to the cost-of-living divide between Canada and the US. I guess I better increase my minimum bribe amount for the next course I TA...
I believe the true link between Computer Science and English Literature / Creative Writing is that both are lacking in academic merit.
CS, at least the way it's taught around here, is basically the bastard child of Mathematics and Engineering -- lacking the rigour of either. It's mostly populated by students who either didn't get the memo that Commerce makes more $ or don't have the necessary social skills. And the rest of the students went into it because they want to make video games or they decided that it was time to stop using their 1337 5k1llz for evil.
From the opposite side of the coin, English has evolved into much more meaningful disciplines like Cultural Studies without completely killing off the original species. So now students who aren't actually interested in the societal questioning of the real liberal arts can get a degree for reading lots of books. Or if you think you're a good writer but realise that you'll never be good enough to do it in the wild, you can get a degree in creative writing. Never mind that almost none of the successful writers working today wasted their time with such a hypocratic undertaking.
Both degrees are for people who don't like reality but want to pretend they can be successful. Both are for people who can't produce work that normal people can understand. Both practices consist of little more than mental masturbation.
The beauty of recursion is something as natural and poetic as music to me.
Actually I just finished a grad-level course in Denotational Semantics of Programming Languages, and if there's one thing I learned, it's that:
Recursion is ugly
It's shocking how much complexity recursion adds to the mathematical description of a programming language. When I first learned functional programming I thought "this is so beautiful, it's just like mathematics". Well yeah, except that mathematical functions don't have to do anything! Recursion is such a pain in the ass, I think I'm going to avoid writing programs that use it on esthetic grounds.
Mind you, the only thing uglier (much uglier) than recursion is local variables...and I think I have to choose one.:)
Some of us well versed in "mathematical sense" know that multiplication and division are inverse relations on the natural numbers. Given a quantity y and downward scaling fact z you can calculate "z times less than y" by dividing y by z.
Oh wait, were you just being a pedantic troll? I'm sorry to mistake you as a dumbass.
Remember back when you could choose to download large files in one chunk or in floppy-sized portions? Often even if you didn't intend to put them on a floppy you'd get the split version if you didn't trust your network connection -- or if you didn't have time to download the whole thing. Today we have rsync -- isn't it a Good Thing (TM)?
For audio being able to download partial files or skrink a file isn't a big deal because the files rarely get huge (if it's long, it's probably voice and therefore can be compressed to hell), but for video this is a big deal. I won't go into the applications, just read a bunch of the other posts and 1,$s/audio/video/g* but notice how much more sense they make when you're talking about things that barely fit onto a single DVD now. For example: imagine watching streaming video that, once it's downloaded at a minimum acceptable quality, starts to improve while you're still in the middle of watching it (or even while it's sitting on your HD and your computer doesn't have anything better to do).
Asides from any practical benefits, bitrate peeling introduces the concept of a file storing multiple, modular representations -- which is certainly as profound as moving metadata inside of files.
* That's replace all copies of "audio" with "video" for the vi-impared.
Even when AltaVista reached the peak of its whoring, it at least marked the ads. And Google has demonstrated that even ads that are blaringly obvious as ads work. Therefore, I'd at least like to be notified when a/. story was paid. It can be really subtle, perhaps only if you click on the story, but I'd still like to know.
Would you be willing to receive your local newspaper for free if one of the news stories on the front page was an ad (and you didn't know which one)?
Oh I'd certainly agree that multiplayer games need rules (MUSHes are pathetic). However until recently, The Sims has been single-player. Do you follow rules when you day dream? How about when you masturbate*? Or do you have to because your evil id keeps shooting your superego's favourite doll with an Invisible Super Mighty Gun (TM)?
* That's all single-player non-puzzle games are, after all.
Re:What about bitter/loner Sims?
on
Virtual Simerica
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I have two alternative answers to that:
The only thing American society hates more than an intellectual is a loner. (Go watch Bowling for Columbine.)
Due to Metcalfe's Law (ie: people only will join the Online service if it's a party), loners do not contribute as much to Maxim's bottom line.
In the article Wright says that the game is designed to encourage the kind of behaviour that Maxim appreciates in society -- this would actually be scary if a significant portion of the population started playing it... But what I'm really looking forward to is seeing what kinds of bots people can get away with.
Unlike dolls it requires less imagination and imposes more contraints. This is why adults like to play it: their imaginations are dead and they can't fathom living in a world without rules and regulations. Rather than being a game where you can live out your fantasies, as you might expect from something like this, you get to do chores (read: "micromanage") instead.
As another poster has pointed out: most of the replay value in The Sims, at least among real gamers, is from hacking it. Just think how much more they'd prefer a graphical MOO? Now that it's online, and therefore [hopefully?] hack-resistant, the most geeks will see in it is a means to pick up chicks. (As PC Accelerator did so long ago...)
See, that's the problem with shows that build up a lot of backstory...if you haven't watched the first four seasons, you have no idea what's going on. (This problem has been noted in other mega-arc-based shows, such as Andromeda.) SFC wants shows that suck more people in (and get them watching SFC).
So what kinds of shows don't suffer from this problem? What tips could we give to producers to allow their fandom to continuously expand? Can we abstract a quality that long-lived SciFi shows have?
I'm sitting here on my beautiful, instantly up-to-date Debian box with a terminal open to a Solaris production server. Now I'm sure there's some way to get the binary distribution of Apache to install, but I'm not sure I'll be able to actually figure it out in less time then it would take me to configure and compile the source. Of course who knows how long that will take if I have to hunt down the Solaris packages for all those "useless" tools like a C compiler that aren't installed by default.
Yes, my 31337 h4x0r friends, this is one box that won't ever be secure until I convince the boss that SPARCs should be running Linux.
How much do you know about electronics? If not much: where'd you get your wire from? Like are you saying you just threw everything together and it worked great?
Now as someone who's actually ran into problems with range in a wireless LAN project where the funding was tight, I'm afraid I'm going to have to deflate your joke: building an antenna at home is a bit more complicated than duct taping a piece of stereo wire to a Pringles can. IANAEE so I don't know exactly why, but the piece of wire you use is under some pretty tight specs:
You've got to have the right adapter, which will set you back more than the Pringles, and once you've bought one it probably won't work with any other product.
You need a wire that is shielded, highly conductive, and the right length.
You need to poke the wire into the can at exactly the right point and the right amount in.
IOW: if you want to make it completely from scratch, first you need an expensive adapter. Then you need a diploma in Electrical Technology. After that, if you're lucky, you can make it work. BION, I never got that farthest node connected...
Damn straight! One of the biggest problems with Java is how types are arbitrarily built-in or not. I'm tired of wrapping my ints in Integers just so I can use them in collections and then getting their value when I need to do some math. Mind you, there'd be no problem if operators were overloaded so that I could just use Integer from start to finish. But of course with a built-in String class, there's less pressure for Java to support operator overloading (just as non-native strings encouraged the creation of C++ templates).
Slashdot Mirror
Just goes to show that the commercial versions aren't necessarily any better than the open source version...
Bowling for Columbine doesn't actually say there are more guns per capita in Canada. In fact, it gives no relatives statistics at all. Moore simply lists off numbers without respect to the sizes of the countries generating those numbers.
Bowling for Columbine is not edutainment, it's just entertainment.
I really want to believe, because I am of the philosophy that my workstation should not be sullied by games. However I just don't see it: it'll be years before online console gaming matures to the point where online PC gaming is now. And as we all know: if you're playing with yourself, it's called "masturbation".
The zip-file version of Scorched3D works in non-fullscreen (didn't test fs) under wine-20021031 (Debian/testing) however the fonts are unreadable. I'd do further testing, but trying to quit froze my Xwindows, so I've had enough of that. :)
The reason I appreciate Half-Life mods so much is that they don't require frequent hardware and software purchases. In effect, the Half-Life engine is a virtual console such that I can guarantee that if I can run it, I can run any new mod that comes out. UT and Quake are constantly competing for the mod community's attention, all while coming out with a new version every few years.
I'm more interested in game-play than chrome and stability over features. (Great example of a sequal that failed on both: Tribes 2.) What I'd love more than anything is a scalable or modular game engine so that hardware fanatics can keep upgrading to get more polygons, but I can play happily with my wireframes. I don't think this is an unreasonable request considering that game makes don't seem to be as deep in bed with video card mfg. as Microsoft is with Intel.
So if I'm making a bagillion dollars a year but only buy the necessities I don't pay [m]any taxes? Great, so now all my money is locked up in investments instead of stimulating the economy! Isn't one of the main arguments against income tax that it encourages saving over spending?
Apparently they plan on taxing the hell out of property owners. (They didn't say there would be no corporate tax, just that they'd hit property owners first.) Oh, and huge import tariffs.
Actually, according to the World Bank's Corruption Index, Canada scores a 9.2, making it the 5th least corrupt country in the world; compare to the US's 7.5, making it the 16th least.
A half-assed summary of the platform of the Patriot Party of Canada:
Just off the top of my head, it appears they have little-to-no opinion on:
They also seem to be very pro-technology to the point where it's a panacea in some sectors.
You have an excellent point that there are three different forms of addiction which should be regarded as very different:
Combined and Physical addictions tend to be narcotics-related and tend to be understood in a simplistic way by non-addicts. But the war on drugs hasn't had a new twist since the rise of ecstacy in North America; fighting drug addiction cannot hope to attract the funding or media attention it once did. So now purely psychological addictions are en vogue.
I'm not suggesting that some addictions should be left untreated, but it is important to keep their power in mind when making judgements about the sufferers. Right now the hot addiction in Canada is gambling. Should I feel as sorry for someone who goes through mood swings when they stop gambling as someone whose heart stops when they go off heroin? Should I wish the government to devote equally proportional tax dollars to each? Should I spend as much of my time worrying and learning about each?
Being a "starving" graduate student myself, I never understood where students get the money do to things like 4-day road trips and the rest of the zany things that this hunt requires. Must have something to do with old money at UofC. Mind you, I also can't imagine living in the opulant frat houses as-seen-on-TV. Perhaps there really is something to the cost-of-living divide between Canada and the US. I guess I better increase my minimum bribe amount for the next course I TA...
I believe the true link between Computer Science and English Literature / Creative Writing is that both are lacking in academic merit.
CS, at least the way it's taught around here, is basically the bastard child of Mathematics and Engineering -- lacking the rigour of either. It's mostly populated by students who either didn't get the memo that Commerce makes more $ or don't have the necessary social skills. And the rest of the students went into it because they want to make video games or they decided that it was time to stop using their 1337 5k1llz for evil.
From the opposite side of the coin, English has evolved into much more meaningful disciplines like Cultural Studies without completely killing off the original species. So now students who aren't actually interested in the societal questioning of the real liberal arts can get a degree for reading lots of books. Or if you think you're a good writer but realise that you'll never be good enough to do it in the wild, you can get a degree in creative writing. Never mind that almost none of the successful writers working today wasted their time with such a hypocratic undertaking.
Both degrees are for people who don't like reality but want to pretend they can be successful. Both are for people who can't produce work that normal people can understand. Both practices consist of little more than mental masturbation.
The beauty of recursion is something as natural and poetic as music to me.
Actually I just finished a grad-level course in Denotational Semantics of Programming Languages, and if there's one thing I learned, it's that:
It's shocking how much complexity recursion adds to the mathematical description of a programming language. When I first learned functional programming I thought "this is so beautiful, it's just like mathematics". Well yeah, except that mathematical functions don't have to do anything! Recursion is such a pain in the ass, I think I'm going to avoid writing programs that use it on esthetic grounds.
Mind you, the only thing uglier (much uglier) than recursion is local variables...and I think I have to choose one. :)
Some of us well versed in "mathematical sense" know that multiplication and division are inverse relations on the natural numbers. Given a quantity y and downward scaling fact z you can calculate "z times less than y" by dividing y by z.
Oh wait, were you just being a pedantic troll? I'm sorry to mistake you as a dumbass.
Remember back when you could choose to download large files in one chunk or in floppy-sized portions? Often even if you didn't intend to put them on a floppy you'd get the split version if you didn't trust your network connection -- or if you didn't have time to download the whole thing. Today we have rsync -- isn't it a Good Thing (TM)?
For audio being able to download partial files or skrink a file isn't a big deal because the files rarely get huge (if it's long, it's probably voice and therefore can be compressed to hell), but for video this is a big deal. I won't go into the applications, just read a bunch of the other posts and 1,$s/audio/video/g* but notice how much more sense they make when you're talking about things that barely fit onto a single DVD now. For example: imagine watching streaming video that, once it's downloaded at a minimum acceptable quality, starts to improve while you're still in the middle of watching it (or even while it's sitting on your HD and your computer doesn't have anything better to do).
Asides from any practical benefits, bitrate peeling introduces the concept of a file storing multiple, modular representations -- which is certainly as profound as moving metadata inside of files.
* That's replace all copies of "audio" with "video" for the vi-impared.
Even when AltaVista reached the peak of its whoring, it at least marked the ads. And Google has demonstrated that even ads that are blaringly obvious as ads work. Therefore, I'd at least like to be notified when a /. story was paid. It can be really subtle, perhaps only if you click on the story, but I'd still like to know.
Would you be willing to receive your local newspaper for free if one of the news stories on the front page was an ad (and you didn't know which one)?
"We're not flying blind here, you know. This is United Systems military, not some greedy corporation." - Dr. Wren, Alien: Resurrection
Oh I'd certainly agree that multiplayer games need rules (MUSHes are pathetic). However until recently, The Sims has been single-player. Do you follow rules when you day dream? How about when you masturbate*? Or do you have to because your evil id keeps shooting your superego's favourite doll with an Invisible Super Mighty Gun (TM)?
* That's all single-player non-puzzle games are, after all.
I have two alternative answers to that:
In the article Wright says that the game is designed to encourage the kind of behaviour that Maxim appreciates in society -- this would actually be scary if a significant portion of the population started playing it... But what I'm really looking forward to is seeing what kinds of bots people can get away with.
Unlike dolls it requires less imagination and imposes more contraints. This is why adults like to play it: their imaginations are dead and they can't fathom living in a world without rules and regulations. Rather than being a game where you can live out your fantasies, as you might expect from something like this, you get to do chores (read: "micromanage") instead.
As another poster has pointed out: most of the replay value in The Sims, at least among real gamers, is from hacking it. Just think how much more they'd prefer a graphical MOO? Now that it's online, and therefore [hopefully?] hack-resistant, the most geeks will see in it is a means to pick up chicks. (As PC Accelerator did so long ago...)
See, that's the problem with shows that build up a lot of backstory...if you haven't watched the first four seasons, you have no idea what's going on. (This problem has been noted in other mega-arc-based shows, such as Andromeda.) SFC wants shows that suck more people in (and get them watching SFC).
So what kinds of shows don't suffer from this problem? What tips could we give to producers to allow their fandom to continuously expand? Can we abstract a quality that long-lived SciFi shows have?
If only we could all use decent distributions...
I'm sitting here on my beautiful, instantly up-to-date Debian box with a terminal open to a Solaris production server. Now I'm sure there's some way to get the binary distribution of Apache to install, but I'm not sure I'll be able to actually figure it out in less time then it would take me to configure and compile the source. Of course who knows how long that will take if I have to hunt down the Solaris packages for all those "useless" tools like a C compiler that aren't installed by default.
Yes, my 31337 h4x0r friends, this is one box that won't ever be secure until I convince the boss that SPARCs should be running Linux.
How much do you know about electronics? If not much: where'd you get your wire from? Like are you saying you just threw everything together and it worked great?
Now as someone who's actually ran into problems with range in a wireless LAN project where the funding was tight, I'm afraid I'm going to have to deflate your joke: building an antenna at home is a bit more complicated than duct taping a piece of stereo wire to a Pringles can. IANAEE so I don't know exactly why, but the piece of wire you use is under some pretty tight specs:
IOW: if you want to make it completely from scratch, first you need an expensive adapter. Then you need a diploma in Electrical Technology. After that, if you're lucky, you can make it work. BION, I never got that farthest node connected...
Damn straight! One of the biggest problems with Java is how types are arbitrarily built-in or not. I'm tired of wrapping my ints in Integers just so I can use them in collections and then getting their value when I need to do some math. Mind you, there'd be no problem if operators were overloaded so that I could just use Integer from start to finish. But of course with a built-in String class, there's less pressure for Java to support operator overloading (just as non-native strings encouraged the creation of C++ templates).