There are attempts at that - but the same protocol that lets me block ads, also lets me block scripts that react negatively to adblockers. And sites that go full-on-war on adblockers tend to find themselves quickly diminished in the effort - much like draconian DRM in software.
It's always been somewhat rare for a website to be reliably profitable on its own, except for the hosters/developers being directly paid. The main advantage is the low costs, and the potential for a larger audience. Even with that potential, making money from just traffic is difficult, and it's only going to get harder, as content production grows ever-more-common, and those marketing dollars grow more diluted.
Annoyance at one's audience, for not wanting to be influenced by your third-party advertising isn't productive. It's always the difficulty in providing value as a middle-man aggregator.
On occasion, I'll disable adblocking on sites like the Escapist, when I find I'm using sufficient bandwidth or visiting them regularly enough, and I find that their advertising is filtered in an acceptable way, like with Penny Arcade. Most gaming websites do NOT fit those descriptions, and I keep the adblocker up.
As for wishing adblockers would not visit your site - that's more a problem with the design of the web. You're serving information, and people are free to request it as long as you offer it. There's no limits put in place to serve a business model by just serving resources...
Many do indeed try to make money injecting third party messages into their users streams to help pay for things - but as the generations of web-users learn more about the web, they also learn how to use tools to filter signal from noise.
Information about games has never been a rare thing - I've been a gaming journalist (for a small website), and worked for several gaming companies (as programmer on many internationally-sold games) - I can empathize about the difficulty in turning interest into a reliable living. Customer expectations and tolerances will and do change constantly. Most companies will NOT make it past a limited window of profitability.
There's just too much content to follow out there to bend to the desires of everyone who would advertise to me. I have the tools, and I will use them almost all the time. I do care about your plight - but I've been burnt by too many ads to drop my defenses without consideration and a sense of meaningful honor on the part of the site operators.
Otherwise, I feel ZERO shame in blocking your ads, and using the shared open protocol to request the information you make available.
I fully support adblock plus - It's a fully transformative experience compared to browsing without it. Pages load quicker, load without the random long-pauses from faulty ad servers, and from not having to traverse dozens of servers just for a small amount content.
That, and your view is uncluttered with intentionally misleading images, many kinds of annoying sound and images, and countless script-based frustrations that advertisers are ever-increasingly willing to push on their prospective customers.
Simply put, AdBlockers do an amazing job at helping me retain some minimal level comfort that humanity can sometimes retain some motivations greater than misleading manipulation - even if you have to filter your view to extensively to see that sometimes.
I'm the sort of guy who can't personally empathize with chemical escapism (our time in reality is far too limited as it is for my tastes, and there's far too much to explore) - but really, it just seems complete insanity to expect to help anything by denying it as harshly as we do to others, at least in the US.
The best path would seem to be to defuse the need, and eliminate the allure, rather than spend such a huge percentage of our shared wealth on prisons and enforcement, all while simply breeding worse problems.
There's endless pits of dependency - the harsh 'solutions' of endless punishment only seem to dig the holes into deeper, stranger territory - spreading the drug problem into endless splinters.
As a non-drug-user in general, I'm sick of paying the hidden tax of an inefficient drug policy. I'd rather have open drug use and pity the over-users, rather than have to pay for such an abnormally high portion of our population to remain in jail, contributing greatly to the ruin of our economy.
When I worked a bit at EA, as a gameplay programmer on the Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2010 project, one of the things I worked on the scripting/event/audio system that makes the announcers react to the player's actions.
The main task of such an event engine is, working with a finite pool of reactions, it knows what it has said over a given time period, and tuning it so it doesn't repeat a phrase too often, and using it to fill as much 'empty air' as we can while it hasn't reached an annoying threshold.
The problem in that case, of course is that we only got to record so many responses with a professional voice actor, and only so much room on the disc.
With a news response engine, you wouldn't have it respond to everything - you'd have a very specific class of stories used to patch holes, the kind that is already nearly automatic already. Grabbing retweets, say "this person said this about this person", send it to an editor for review, then use it to fill gaps in a web page layout.
But then you'd still have to balance the rate of repetition of such types of news stories - which is a game of novelty and adaptive tuning.
It's certainly possible - but given the company, I expect it to be used for a while with lots of embarrassing things the editors miss showing up, until the marketing crew discovers they can use it to inject advertising messages into news stream. This input from several sources gaming the system will lead to it becoming useless over time, leading to it eventually being reinvented independently several times.
Meanwhile, Fox news will become a 24/7 lottery news channel - you too can become rich! They'll put parts of a lottery number in each commercial, then have the exact same news hosts as now tell people about how much you have to gain, using traditional conservative talking points to bolster the appeal.
MSNBC? They'll just keep selling airtime to infomercials when they can - they've already become the costs-nothing-to-produce-prison-shows channel.
Perhaps this is false nostalgia - but even from reading history with the gilded age and robber barons, I don't seem to remember a time when industries were so, well, unafraid of being called on their bullshit.
I mean - yeah, the meat industry has had bouts of defending deadly safety conditions leading to not infrequent outbreaks and deaths, and the tobacco industry flexed historic levels of political and legal muscle lying about their products and covering up science they knew to be true for decades - but they really did seem to at least fear being caught in a direct lie.
It just doesn't seem that the music industry even cares about what they're saying - they just mix accusation, whole new concepts of honorable ownership they just made up a sentence ago, and blatant grabs for control as if it were a newly uncovered biblical virtue, and they the new prophet.
The rhetoric borders on empire, or isolated dictatorship in terms of brazen doublethink-style selective "morality" that just amounts to everything belonging to them, under all circumstances.
There's opportunistic jerks in all groups - it's kind of an intrinsic part of everything from game theory to classic social power studies in psychology - it's a basic part of how we explore and interact with eachother.
It's just crazy that in so many nations, so much of the population ends up standing aside, so these particular jerks can be such horrible bastards on such a constant basis, and they're still allowed to buy themselves such a voice in and over our lives - right to the heart of the houses of power.
They're a small parasitic part of the music industry - not a very big industry in the first place. Most other industries dwarf them. Why are they allowed to keep ramping things up seemingly without limit? At what point does this Napoleon meet his Waterloo?
In other discussions I've seen, the assumption seems to be that the first game that betrays expectations will doom the whole system.
I don't think that's true - this isn't an investment cycle, but more a method of pre-purchasing that cuts the last link that was tying small game makers to publishers - seen money for projects.
Collapse isn't inevitable - but I do see some interesting circumstances occurring as Kickstarter is forced to pull funding from some projects, or resulting in empty demo games with no plans for completion.
The idea is still critical though - a mechanism for the potential audience of an entertainment product to freely contribute to the seed money for that product. It will certainly be some rocky challenges ahead - but the core idea will survive, and I think will result in a lot of positive alternatives to insular corporate planning.
It's also a great alternative to the centralized planned culture of nations like France, so intent on protecting an elusive cultural ideal, they approach stagnation at times.
It's a great third way - a way with its own problems, but much to add compared to the extremes of strict corporate planning and liberal cultural protectionism.
I mean, of course most adults, anywhere, won't know how to take advantage of a computing engine or how it can help their child (even if they had explicit instructions). I kind of thought half the idea was to open a path for some of the children to find something special after tinkering with that little box.
The idea that you can automate something isn't something that just occurs to everyone. The young are most able to see something repetitive or annoying, and decide to figure out how to use a tool in a new way to make their lives less lame.
Those young people grow up, and start to see how they can do that to a lot more around them. They start to use resources in ways that would be seen as completely impractical just to automate more things... and change the country completely.
Yeah - the teachers and other adults aren't going to be 'creatively' using these things for much - because they're busy providing minimal resources however they can. Creativity takes time, something they almost never have anymore.
The adults teach the children by showing them the wrong ways to do things.
If you generate them statically (as videos), then all someone has to do is what they're already doing - put up a site with some fake content, and ask users to go through "their" capcha, telling them the human answer to that particular video, and making an index of videos to answers.
If you generate the videos dynamically, well, it won't be very scalable, because it's going to take too much processing time per user. Might work well for occasionally verifying expensive content, and it might be more useful in the future - but networks (at least in the US) take a long time to improve, on the scale of hard drive improvements, so you're bottlenecked there too.
Hybrid tricks (layering static video) end up the same as static with a little analysis.
I'd say this falls in place with automated phonecall techniques as a somewhat expensive and annoying way of verifying 'humanity'.
Yet another 3rd world reaction to the eternal pornographic issue - my deity is larger than yours.
Reminds me of one of my favorite Carl Sagan quotes:
How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant'? Instead they say, 'No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.' A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.
Even the religions with science in the name ("Christian Science" and "Scientology") are profoundly against freedom of inquiry, except where it is used to glorify their mythology. This story kind of backs up the whole "our god is a little god, we must coddle it" approach.
Usually, moves like these are pushed as in the interests of large corporate interests - but as far as I can understand the only company interests this will actually serve will be law firms and a few confused entertainment groups that don't mind acting like public villains to punish their potential customers.
The whole thing just looks like a big legal clusterfuck - where everyone demands everyone else pull everything from the internet. The net effect will just be a huge drain on the economy, as even more resources are spent on useless legal back-and-forths, and everyone gets even more nervous before being able to accomplish something businesswise in the world.
The net effect should mostly be to deepen the recession, force more consolidation with a smaller pool of useful resources for everyone, and push more business out of the US.
It just doesn't make sense - why would any lawmaker be interested in lowering the economic tides for everyone, further stalling a huge and important part of our economic recovery just for the sake of a very small number of companies without much actual money?
From a moral perspective it makes no sense - which is what I usually expect - but even from a sociopathic perspective of gathering resources at all costs, it makes no sense.
The IT (in US terms, not technical professions in general) guys are there to enable everyone else to interact. They aren't given much power - only what is minimally needed to give everyone else what they want.
I can empathize with your typical IT guy attitude - you strive to help every day, and do help a lot of people - but end up seeing the same self-inflicted wounds over and over again. At some point, the only way to meaningfully care for people is to take a zen attitude, point them to resources, and accept that most will refuse to take even the simplest steps towards understanding how things break as they misuse them.
And you have to rely on humor over time. The net appearance may be 'aloof' - but it's difficult to help the sometimes aggressively and willfully ignorant often looking to place blame and not end up with the eyebrow-raised incredulous look coming up.
It would be lovely if we could all have a Carl Sagan friendly sage look about us in every difficulty - but we won't. Even Carl Sagan probably looked perturbed and sarcastic at some points along the way - same with Gandhi and Mother Theresa too.
I'm a huge proponent of the scientific method, am completely pro-science, especially against psuedoscience... but I completely understand why simple logic would prevent most folks from entering a proper science degree, once they've gotten a chance to digest the extent what lies before them.
It's not the math. It's not the science. It's not the hard work.
It's the fact that they will have no control over their life, in the field that has precious few opportunities, and seems to amount to grueling busywork 90+% of the time.
Either that, or end up as an industry scientist, with some rather nasty ethical consequences in many cases.
In many cases, it would be the love of science that would keep many from rationally choosing to bet their lives in the very limited and dwindling pool of opportunities available in the field(s) now. Not that there isn't research that desperately needs to be done - it just isn't economically feasible to do big things, so you'd just end up a researcher performing tasks for people unable to really progress science much. You'd be wasting your limited existence serving goals that don't help.
At least that's how it looks from the outside.
Get industry to fund real research again, shift university funding to actual general research, and clean up the "Intellectual Property" mess that stifles research, and there would be a rational path to more progress of the sciences - until then, it really does seem a poor wager to bet your life on.
Expect to see EXTREMELY large executive bonuses come December.
It is a system that makes sense in one way - shareholders simply want maximized return on money, and shareholders in amalgam play the role of idiots without an interest in future of the company willing to pay money for a stake and a vote.
So, in return for promise of transforming the company in an idiotic direction that sounds good from the perspective of shareholder marketing, the shareholders then provide bonuses to the management.
Thus solving the problem once and for all. ONCE AND FOR ALL.
Really? Really?! An advertizing conglomerate naming themselves, "Lijit?!"
The simulation is slipping - any matrix-style super-reality engineers out there, you really should tighten this down. It's becoming WAY too obvious this is a wicked parody of some other reality!
Whenever I want to throw together a really quick internal tool, and there isn't a really obvious template program I can use, the.Net framework really is great for: - drawing up a few texboxes and buttons - adding a property.settings var so it'll remember its state between uses - adding a bit of codebehind, doing some interactive debugging (change code as its running) - then sending it to the user and going through an iteration or two of quick fixes before adding it to our toolset.
Yes, you can do the same with most languages, but it really is enticing to use when you just want a quick tool created.
1. Tradition-keeping 2. Protection of the already powerful 3. Fiercely challenging new ideas
However conservatism changes with its constituents, and across different nations, this core of conservatism tends to be in direct opposition to the changes brought about by science.
What support of science in conservative circles usually means is: Science has made us strong, we should support what science has done to make us strong, but oppose anything else it may do.
So yes, we may see some support for an HPV vaccine with more conservatives if this view becomes more common, and I hope it does - but the interests of the already powerful is still what matters, not wherever the scientific method leads.
Past performance IS a proper indication of how the future will be, if everything stays as expected. But reality is rarely fully what we expect it to be.
Defending against known threats is certainly part of the task of securing something - but the other part is observing what makes up the thing you're defending, and looking for weaknesses, and from that how to react when those weaknesses are exploited. Not doing the last bits is one of the very bad parts of groupthink, complacency.
One of the best ways to develop groupthink? Pretend that everything you're doing is a crucial secret, and cut yourself off the entire outside world - and thus never invite outside input to help you adapt to anything new.
Obscurity works by default - because it's all about protecting your precious secret from any experimentation. But once it becomes important to someone to test your secret, your obscurity is a very limited defense.
Depends on what knowledge the parents consider 'forbidden'. Might be the lesser of evils for the child to attempt to use their "boxing buddy" (non-sexual blow-up figure) to allow them to see the science channels - but I'd expect a LOT of very interesting variations on that story.
Better yet - using a conveniently available blow-up doll would be wonderfully ironic. Using the forbidden creepy doppelganger to access forbidden knowledge.:^)
ALWAYS in conflict? ALWAYS? To anyone who has ever been part of the educational system, and has gotten used to taking multiple choice tests, the word "ALWAYS" when applied to something like science/religion is a big red flag.
Finding that 15% agree with an "always" statement in that context is rather an amazing find.
Ask the question in terms of "overwhelming frequency" or some other next-to-absolutist statement, and you'll get more honest answers. But this report on the study, at least, only presented the "ALWAYS(15)/SOMETIMES(70)/NEVER(15)" range, which doesn't seem useful at all.
With the statement presented, and the specific granularity of statements allowed, this seems more like quote-mining to minimize the perception of conflict than an honest study.
This is the turf you choose to defend, BethSoft? The word 'scrolls'?
You do realize that the whole 'elder scrolls' part of your fiction is ancillary at BEST, right? Virtually all of the written works are contained in proper books, and the idea of history scrolls as important is left to the occasional sidequest - it's mostly a holdover title.
You do realize that this whole fight is literally a big developer gunning down on a small independent developer making a freaking collectable card battle game variant?
Even if you win, you're just going to look like a complete jackass, in a field that depends on you looking like somewhat decent people when you're trying to sell fantasy worlds to gamers.
This is not the fight to have, not the opponent to defeat, and not a good way to spend your money or life.
Wake up, you're making a horrible mistake, and you can't win this kind of fight, a fight only you seem to want to have.
Slashdot Mirror
There are attempts at that - but the same protocol that lets me block ads, also lets me block scripts that react negatively to adblockers. And sites that go full-on-war on adblockers tend to find themselves quickly diminished in the effort - much like draconian DRM in software.
It's always been somewhat rare for a website to be reliably profitable on its own, except for the hosters/developers being directly paid. The main advantage is the low costs, and the potential for a larger audience. Even with that potential, making money from just traffic is difficult, and it's only going to get harder, as content production grows ever-more-common, and those marketing dollars grow more diluted.
Annoyance at one's audience, for not wanting to be influenced by your third-party advertising isn't productive. It's always the difficulty in providing value as a middle-man aggregator.
Ryan Fenton
On occasion, I'll disable adblocking on sites like the Escapist, when I find I'm using sufficient bandwidth or visiting them regularly enough, and I find that their advertising is filtered in an acceptable way, like with Penny Arcade. Most gaming websites do NOT fit those descriptions, and I keep the adblocker up.
As for wishing adblockers would not visit your site - that's more a problem with the design of the web. You're serving information, and people are free to request it as long as you offer it. There's no limits put in place to serve a business model by just serving resources...
Many do indeed try to make money injecting third party messages into their users streams to help pay for things - but as the generations of web-users learn more about the web, they also learn how to use tools to filter signal from noise.
Information about games has never been a rare thing - I've been a gaming journalist (for a small website), and worked for several gaming companies (as programmer on many internationally-sold games) - I can empathize about the difficulty in turning interest into a reliable living. Customer expectations and tolerances will and do change constantly. Most companies will NOT make it past a limited window of profitability.
There's just too much content to follow out there to bend to the desires of everyone who would advertise to me. I have the tools, and I will use them almost all the time. I do care about your plight - but I've been burnt by too many ads to drop my defenses without consideration and a sense of meaningful honor on the part of the site operators.
Otherwise, I feel ZERO shame in blocking your ads, and using the shared open protocol to request the information you make available.
Ryan Fenton
I fully support adblock plus - It's a fully transformative experience compared to browsing without it. Pages load quicker, load without the random long-pauses from faulty ad servers, and from not having to traverse dozens of servers just for a small amount content.
That, and your view is uncluttered with intentionally misleading images, many kinds of annoying sound and images, and countless script-based frustrations that advertisers are ever-increasingly willing to push on their prospective customers.
Simply put, AdBlockers do an amazing job at helping me retain some minimal level comfort that humanity can sometimes retain some motivations greater than misleading manipulation - even if you have to filter your view to extensively to see that sometimes.
Ryan Fenton
Why have an article about how revolutionary the 'visual grammar' of the layout is, if you aren't going to show any examples of how it's different?
Ryan Fenton
I'm the sort of guy who can't personally empathize with chemical escapism (our time in reality is far too limited as it is for my tastes, and there's far too much to explore) - but really, it just seems complete insanity to expect to help anything by denying it as harshly as we do to others, at least in the US.
The best path would seem to be to defuse the need, and eliminate the allure, rather than spend such a huge percentage of our shared wealth on prisons and enforcement, all while simply breeding worse problems.
There's endless pits of dependency - the harsh 'solutions' of endless punishment only seem to dig the holes into deeper, stranger territory - spreading the drug problem into endless splinters.
As a non-drug-user in general, I'm sick of paying the hidden tax of an inefficient drug policy. I'd rather have open drug use and pity the over-users, rather than have to pay for such an abnormally high portion of our population to remain in jail, contributing greatly to the ruin of our economy.
Ryan Fenton
When I worked a bit at EA, as a gameplay programmer on the Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2010 project, one of the things I worked on the scripting/event/audio system that makes the announcers react to the player's actions.
The main task of such an event engine is, working with a finite pool of reactions, it knows what it has said over a given time period, and tuning it so it doesn't repeat a phrase too often, and using it to fill as much 'empty air' as we can while it hasn't reached an annoying threshold.
The problem in that case, of course is that we only got to record so many responses with a professional voice actor, and only so much room on the disc.
With a news response engine, you wouldn't have it respond to everything - you'd have a very specific class of stories used to patch holes, the kind that is already nearly automatic already. Grabbing retweets, say "this person said this about this person", send it to an editor for review, then use it to fill gaps in a web page layout.
But then you'd still have to balance the rate of repetition of such types of news stories - which is a game of novelty and adaptive tuning.
It's certainly possible - but given the company, I expect it to be used for a while with lots of embarrassing things the editors miss showing up, until the marketing crew discovers they can use it to inject advertising messages into news stream. This input from several sources gaming the system will lead to it becoming useless over time, leading to it eventually being reinvented independently several times.
Meanwhile, Fox news will become a 24/7 lottery news channel - you too can become rich! They'll put parts of a lottery number in each commercial, then have the exact same news hosts as now tell people about how much you have to gain, using traditional conservative talking points to bolster the appeal.
MSNBC? They'll just keep selling airtime to infomercials when they can - they've already become the costs-nothing-to-produce-prison-shows channel.
Ryan Fenton
Perhaps this is false nostalgia - but even from reading history with the gilded age and robber barons, I don't seem to remember a time when industries were so, well, unafraid of being called on their bullshit.
I mean - yeah, the meat industry has had bouts of defending deadly safety conditions leading to not infrequent outbreaks and deaths, and the tobacco industry flexed historic levels of political and legal muscle lying about their products and covering up science they knew to be true for decades - but they really did seem to at least fear being caught in a direct lie.
It just doesn't seem that the music industry even cares about what they're saying - they just mix accusation, whole new concepts of honorable ownership they just made up a sentence ago, and blatant grabs for control as if it were a newly uncovered biblical virtue, and they the new prophet.
The rhetoric borders on empire, or isolated dictatorship in terms of brazen doublethink-style selective "morality" that just amounts to everything belonging to them, under all circumstances.
There's opportunistic jerks in all groups - it's kind of an intrinsic part of everything from game theory to classic social power studies in psychology - it's a basic part of how we explore and interact with eachother.
It's just crazy that in so many nations, so much of the population ends up standing aside, so these particular jerks can be such horrible bastards on such a constant basis, and they're still allowed to buy themselves such a voice in and over our lives - right to the heart of the houses of power.
They're a small parasitic part of the music industry - not a very big industry in the first place. Most other industries dwarf them. Why are they allowed to keep ramping things up seemingly without limit? At what point does this Napoleon meet his Waterloo?
Ryan Fenton
In other discussions I've seen, the assumption seems to be that the first game that betrays expectations will doom the whole system.
I don't think that's true - this isn't an investment cycle, but more a method of pre-purchasing that cuts the last link that was tying small game makers to publishers - seen money for projects.
Collapse isn't inevitable - but I do see some interesting circumstances occurring as Kickstarter is forced to pull funding from some projects, or resulting in empty demo games with no plans for completion.
The idea is still critical though - a mechanism for the potential audience of an entertainment product to freely contribute to the seed money for that product. It will certainly be some rocky challenges ahead - but the core idea will survive, and I think will result in a lot of positive alternatives to insular corporate planning.
It's also a great alternative to the centralized planned culture of nations like France, so intent on protecting an elusive cultural ideal, they approach stagnation at times.
It's a great third way - a way with its own problems, but much to add compared to the extremes of strict corporate planning and liberal cultural protectionism.
Ryan Fenton
I mean, of course most adults, anywhere, won't know how to take advantage of a computing engine or how it can help their child (even if they had explicit instructions). I kind of thought half the idea was to open a path for some of the children to find something special after tinkering with that little box.
The idea that you can automate something isn't something that just occurs to everyone. The young are most able to see something repetitive or annoying, and decide to figure out how to use a tool in a new way to make their lives less lame.
Those young people grow up, and start to see how they can do that to a lot more around them. They start to use resources in ways that would be seen as completely impractical just to automate more things... and change the country completely.
Yeah - the teachers and other adults aren't going to be 'creatively' using these things for much - because they're busy providing minimal resources however they can. Creativity takes time, something they almost never have anymore.
The adults teach the children by showing them the wrong ways to do things.
Ryan Fenton
If you generate them statically (as videos), then all someone has to do is what they're already doing - put up a site with some fake content, and ask users to go through "their" capcha, telling them the human answer to that particular video, and making an index of videos to answers.
If you generate the videos dynamically, well, it won't be very scalable, because it's going to take too much processing time per user. Might work well for occasionally verifying expensive content, and it might be more useful in the future - but networks (at least in the US) take a long time to improve, on the scale of hard drive improvements, so you're bottlenecked there too.
Hybrid tricks (layering static video) end up the same as static with a little analysis.
I'd say this falls in place with automated phonecall techniques as a somewhat expensive and annoying way of verifying 'humanity'.
Ryan Fenton
Yet another 3rd world reaction to the eternal pornographic issue - my deity is larger than yours.
Reminds me of one of my favorite Carl Sagan quotes:
How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant'? Instead they say, 'No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.' A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.
Even the religions with science in the name ("Christian Science" and "Scientology") are profoundly against freedom of inquiry, except where it is used to glorify their mythology. This story kind of backs up the whole "our god is a little god, we must coddle it" approach.
Ryan Fenton
I'm quite confused about who this serves.
Usually, moves like these are pushed as in the interests of large corporate interests - but as far as I can understand the only company interests this will actually serve will be law firms and a few confused entertainment groups that don't mind acting like public villains to punish their potential customers.
The whole thing just looks like a big legal clusterfuck - where everyone demands everyone else pull everything from the internet. The net effect will just be a huge drain on the economy, as even more resources are spent on useless legal back-and-forths, and everyone gets even more nervous before being able to accomplish something businesswise in the world.
The net effect should mostly be to deepen the recession, force more consolidation with a smaller pool of useful resources for everyone, and push more business out of the US.
It just doesn't make sense - why would any lawmaker be interested in lowering the economic tides for everyone, further stalling a huge and important part of our economic recovery just for the sake of a very small number of companies without much actual money?
From a moral perspective it makes no sense - which is what I usually expect - but even from a sociopathic perspective of gathering resources at all costs, it makes no sense.
Ryan Fenton
The IT (in US terms, not technical professions in general) guys are there to enable everyone else to interact. They aren't given much power - only what is minimally needed to give everyone else what they want.
I can empathize with your typical IT guy attitude - you strive to help every day, and do help a lot of people - but end up seeing the same self-inflicted wounds over and over again. At some point, the only way to meaningfully care for people is to take a zen attitude, point them to resources, and accept that most will refuse to take even the simplest steps towards understanding how things break as they misuse them.
And you have to rely on humor over time. The net appearance may be 'aloof' - but it's difficult to help the sometimes aggressively and willfully ignorant often looking to place blame and not end up with the eyebrow-raised incredulous look coming up.
It would be lovely if we could all have a Carl Sagan friendly sage look about us in every difficulty - but we won't. Even Carl Sagan probably looked perturbed and sarcastic at some points along the way - same with Gandhi and Mother Theresa too.
Better aloof than full on BOFH.
Ryan Fenton
Elder's Scrolls games are timeless experiences for their bugs and exploits as much as for their gameplay. Here's a simply wonderful example:
A beutiful expoit
Ryan Fenton
I'm a huge proponent of the scientific method, am completely pro-science, especially against psuedoscience... but I completely understand why simple logic would prevent most folks from entering a proper science degree, once they've gotten a chance to digest the extent what lies before them.
It's not the math. It's not the science. It's not the hard work.
It's the fact that they will have no control over their life, in the field that has precious few opportunities, and seems to amount to grueling busywork 90+% of the time.
Either that, or end up as an industry scientist, with some rather nasty ethical consequences in many cases.
In many cases, it would be the love of science that would keep many from rationally choosing to bet their lives in the very limited and dwindling pool of opportunities available in the field(s) now. Not that there isn't research that desperately needs to be done - it just isn't economically feasible to do big things, so you'd just end up a researcher performing tasks for people unable to really progress science much. You'd be wasting your limited existence serving goals that don't help.
At least that's how it looks from the outside.
Get industry to fund real research again, shift university funding to actual general research, and clean up the "Intellectual Property" mess that stifles research, and there would be a rational path to more progress of the sciences - until then, it really does seem a poor wager to bet your life on.
Ryan Fenton
Expect to see EXTREMELY large executive bonuses come December.
It is a system that makes sense in one way - shareholders simply want maximized return on money, and shareholders in amalgam play the role of idiots without an interest in future of the company willing to pay money for a stake and a vote.
So, in return for promise of transforming the company in an idiotic direction that sounds good from the perspective of shareholder marketing, the shareholders then provide bonuses to the management.
Thus solving the problem once and for all. ONCE AND FOR ALL.
Ryan Fenton
Really? Really?! An advertizing conglomerate naming themselves, "Lijit?!"
The simulation is slipping - any matrix-style super-reality engineers out there, you really should tighten this down. It's becoming WAY too obvious this is a wicked parody of some other reality!
Ryan Fenton
Whenever I want to throw together a really quick internal tool, and there isn't a really obvious template program I can use, the .Net framework really is great for:
- drawing up a few texboxes and buttons
- adding a property.settings var so it'll remember its state between uses
- adding a bit of codebehind, doing some interactive debugging (change code as its running)
- then sending it to the user and going through an iteration or two of quick fixes before adding it to our toolset.
Yes, you can do the same with most languages, but it really is enticing to use when you just want a quick tool created.
Ryan Fenton
The problems are many though.
Conservatism is usually an expression of:
1. Tradition-keeping
2. Protection of the already powerful
3. Fiercely challenging new ideas
However conservatism changes with its constituents, and across different nations, this core of conservatism tends to be in direct opposition to the changes brought about by science.
What support of science in conservative circles usually means is: Science has made us strong, we should support what science has done to make us strong, but oppose anything else it may do.
So yes, we may see some support for an HPV vaccine with more conservatives if this view becomes more common, and I hope it does - but the interests of the already powerful is still what matters, not wherever the scientific method leads.
Ryan Fenton
Past performance IS a proper indication of how the future will be, if everything stays as expected. But reality is rarely fully what we expect it to be.
Defending against known threats is certainly part of the task of securing something - but the other part is observing what makes up the thing you're defending, and looking for weaknesses, and from that how to react when those weaknesses are exploited. Not doing the last bits is one of the very bad parts of groupthink, complacency.
One of the best ways to develop groupthink? Pretend that everything you're doing is a crucial secret, and cut yourself off the entire outside world - and thus never invite outside input to help you adapt to anything new.
Obscurity works by default - because it's all about protecting your precious secret from any experimentation. But once it becomes important to someone to test your secret, your obscurity is a very limited defense.
Ryan Fenton
Depends on what knowledge the parents consider 'forbidden'. Might be the lesser of evils for the child to attempt to use their "boxing buddy" (non-sexual blow-up figure) to allow them to see the science channels - but I'd expect a LOT of very interesting variations on that story.
Ryan Fenton
Better yet - using a conveniently available blow-up doll would be wonderfully ironic. Using the forbidden creepy doppelganger to access forbidden knowledge. :^)
Ryan Fenton
Unplug the 360(or future console), then plug the cable into the TV, and you're back to a regular TV, no password needed.
Ryan Fenton
ALWAYS in conflict? ALWAYS? To anyone who has ever been part of the educational system, and has gotten used to taking multiple choice tests, the word "ALWAYS" when applied to something like science/religion is a big red flag.
Finding that 15% agree with an "always" statement in that context is rather an amazing find.
Ask the question in terms of "overwhelming frequency" or some other next-to-absolutist statement, and you'll get more honest answers. But this report on the study, at least, only presented the "ALWAYS(15)/SOMETIMES(70)/NEVER(15)" range, which doesn't seem useful at all.
With the statement presented, and the specific granularity of statements allowed, this seems more like quote-mining to minimize the perception of conflict than an honest study.
Ryan Fenton
This is the turf you choose to defend, BethSoft? The word 'scrolls'?
You do realize that the whole 'elder scrolls' part of your fiction is ancillary at BEST, right? Virtually all of the written works are contained in proper books, and the idea of history scrolls as important is left to the occasional sidequest - it's mostly a holdover title.
You do realize that this whole fight is literally a big developer gunning down on a small independent developer making a freaking collectable card battle game variant?
Even if you win, you're just going to look like a complete jackass, in a field that depends on you looking like somewhat decent people when you're trying to sell fantasy worlds to gamers.
This is not the fight to have, not the opponent to defeat, and not a good way to spend your money or life.
Wake up, you're making a horrible mistake, and you can't win this kind of fight, a fight only you seem to want to have.
Ryan Fenton