Plenty of other people think that science is compatible with religion and spirituality because they address different concerns.
Tell that to Darwin, who the Anglican Church just now apologized to. Where were the critics that said "science is compatible with religion and spirituality" when the fathers of modern science were all discredited or killed for their beliefs? There is a current (and ongoing) war going on between religious people and science in the US because there are still many more people who believe that science is incompatible with religion. It's a real issue. Science goes directly against current religious beliefs in a lot of ways, and in every instance, after decades or centuries pass, religion has to change to accomodate it. This is the only reason why you could sit right now and say "science is compatible with religion" because your religion has changed in order to accomodate modern scientific advances. "God didn't create the earth like it says in the bible, he created the system that made it possible for the earth to be created!" Eventually, science will shine a light on all of the little dark crevices that religion hides in. We CAN know certain things that are explained in the bible. We CAN know where our inherent morality comes from, we CAN know how the universe was created and how long it took. Religion can only attempt to fill in those questions before they're proven by science, but every step along the way in trying to prove them is blocked by the zealots of religion who try and hold on to every dark crevice they still have left with every ounce of their being.
And yes, I read too much Dawkins and Harris... but they're better than the alternative. I actually learn something from those books. I think it's a sad state of affairs that I went through my whole public school education and didn't know anything about evolution until I got interested in it myself. The extent of my education on probably the most influential discovery in human history was "Oh, and humans came from monkeys."
but the people paying for uploading those bits to you (the net radio providers) certainly care if you're consuming bits that much.
yeah, but those people WANT you to use those bits because that means you're listening to their station. If they have a problem with it, they could easily take their station offline. Or are you talking about ISPs? Of course they care. They want you to pay 50 bucks a month so you could check your e-mail and nothing else.
who the hell listens to internet radio for 8 hours every single day in a month?If you're considering listening while at the office, that's not bandwidth you should be concerned about so that's gone. The only people we have left using that kind of bandwidth are radio junkies who need some kind of noise playing all the time and who work from home/are unemployed. That's not a very big market, and to a person who needs to listen to that much radio, 30 GB out of 250GB per month (taking the recent Comcast announcement) isn't that much.
He was never a very good pilot. He crashed 5 planes, and was only where he was in the Naval Academy because of his daddy. He graduated 5th from last in his class. I'll make fun of a war hero who abuses his "war hero" status as a means of getting into office, and his "achievement" of crashing and becoming a POW doesn't make him eligible to make decisions on foreign policy, technology, economy, etc. He might deserve my sympathy for being tortured for 5 years in a prison camp, but he certainly doesn't deserve my vote for it.
Another thing, can he fly a fighter jet now? This was when he was in his 20s! He doesn't have the mental capacity to remember his geography and always gets Sunni/Shiite/Al Qaeda confused. He can't even remember what his positions are from interview to interview. No, I don't think he has the mental capacity to use Google Mail anymore.
As others have pointed out, people are looking at the 80s games with rose colored glasses. A lot of those games really sucked. Another thing to note is that those games are very easy to recreate, so of course they're still recreated. Stuff like Pac-Man and Frogger are games that you could make in a weekend by reading a tutorial in a C++ book - and those original games had 1 programmer working on them start to finish. Try recreating GTA4 in 20 years time. It's still going to take a lot of time and money just like it did the first time. The game mechanics are complex, there's fairly strong AI. Comparing the gameplay mechanics between that and Pac-Man is apples and oranges. There are a bunch of gameplay mechanics in current games all working together. Each of those gameplay mechanics will survive long into the future, being copies from generation to generation in the games that people are gonna make. You could say that we're still playing Wolfenstein 3D 16 years after it originally came out in the form of any current FPS game. The innovations that each game incorporates should be the things that are judged whether they will stand the test of time. Not the games themselves, which are getting too complicated.
If you want an analogy, look at the movie industry. We're not seeing remakes of Casablanca every couple of years, but we are seeing elements from Casablanca that have been integrated into the language of cinema - even long after the average moviegoer wouldn't know a Casablanca reference if they saw one.
This is really old news. I think I even read about in a Richard Dawkins book from the 80s. Daniel Dennette goes into it further in Breaking the Spell. You could say pretty much all of our beliefs have evolved and have some links, however minor, to our tribal origins. Religion and superstition are very closely linked. Religion is a group of superstitions that have been combined and given a back story. There are a lot of examples of how religious morality is linked to good evolutionary qualities, so it stands to reason that the superstitions that tribes had have turned into the modern incarnations of religion and other superstitions.
If the dark skinned avatar and the light skinned avatar are exactly the same except for their skin tone, and there's a measurable difference between how people react to the same situation between the 2 avatars, then there is racial bias.
If you want to compare it to a car analogy, it's more like an insurance policy on your car. You can put up to 3 drivers on the policy, and it costs extra for more drivers. Here's my experience with the DRM - I bought the game. It asked for a serial number when I was installing. I put in the serial number, and ran the game. I have no need to install it on 15 different machines, and I don't think I'm gonna be installing the game every time I upgrade my computer, which is once every 2 - 3 years. I will probably never run into any issues with the DRM. If your analogy of the car is correct, my use of the car in its intended fashion is severely hindered if I can't park it anywhere but my garage, whereas the DRM on Spore doesn't severely hinder my experience in playing the game in its intended fashion.
Pirated copies that likely wouldn't have resulted in sales, anyway.
It seems to me that having such a hated DRM scheme, there will be MORE piraters who wouldn't have bought the game anyway download the pirate version based on the principle of it. And since it's already cracked, people who WOULD have paid for it are going to be downloading the pirated version. This just seems like such a lose/lose scenario for EA. Why wouldn't they immediately pull the DRM from the game via a patch and apologize to their customers? Having such a low Amazon review score will probably cost EA millions of dollars in lost sales from people who normally wouldn't know anything about the DRM.
I doubt a human saw the bill as it was printed, packaged and mailed all automatically.
Which makes it even easier for a computer to compare a person's previous bills with the one he's currently racking up and notice that the current bill is twice as large, and then notify the user. This bill is not twice as large. It's 200 times as large, and that makes it even more egregious that ATT doesn't have the software in place to notify a person that their usage is wildly different than what's come before.
Would you mind if your credit card is stolen and someone goes out and spends $20k on it, but you aren't informed until the bill comes? Of course you would! People did! That's why there are systems in place that will warn you when your credit card is being overused.
A lot of the students you want to teach evolution to will automatically reject it since they believe that Creationism is how they got on the earth. If you want to get through to those kids who have been told their whole lives that it's about evolution vs creationism and those godless scientists want to throw the truth out of their classroom, the best way to do it is by introducing creationism right alongside evolution and showing why creationism is not science, and evolution is the only viable theory we have because of the evidence. Otherwise, creationist kids will just go home and continue believing in creationism because their view of the world has been censored out of their schools.
Sorry, but the Mac ads do say stuff. Every single one of the ads mentions a feature that differentiates between the 2 products, and it does so by humanizing the company, being clever, and NOT being technical all at the same time. It's a brilliant marketing campaign.
When a marketing campaign has to have you "understand what they're going for," then it's a failure. It doesn't talk about anything related to the company, and when it does it's for 10 seconds and completely non-specific. There is no difference between this ad This ad was bound to fail among the linux community no matter what it was, but I didn't think it was gonna be as bad as it was.
Microsoft has gotten a lot of shit the past few years over Vista. My girlfriend who is as far from a techie as you can get told me she doesn't want Vista because she heard it was bad. They addressed the problem of Vista getting bad press by insulting their target audience with the Mojave campaign, and now they've failed with an ad that doesn't say anything or get anyone excited about anything. This wasn't humanizing the company, it's the equivalent of an old nerdy guy trying to ingratiate himself to a younger crowd by calling them "dude" and thinking he's being cool.
Over 20 years ago, Apple targeted IBM with their Big Brother ad. Now, 2 decades later, Apple is taking on the Big Brother vibe with their constricting Developer EULAs and vendor lock-outs. If you ask anybody on the street, though, Apple is still the new cool kid in town because they know how to advertise and make a brand image - or at least hire the people who do.
Doesn't Google run these things past their lawyers?
Who do you think writes these things? A lawyer's job is to protect their client. That usually includes making air-tight EULAs that take away all of the rights of the person agreeing to them so they don't have grounds to sue for something or other later on.
I've been using Chrome and I'm both happy and disappointed. It's an awesome browser, very fast, very responsive, has great features and the tabs are amazing and work exactly how I wish Firefox did. But why the hell does it have a problem playing flash video? Isn't this one of the first things people would try to do on it? Flash video either freezes a few frames into the video, or if it plays it doesn't play with sound. Even YOUTUBE, a GOOGLE owned company doesn't work with Chrome.
There are a bunch of complaints talking crap about the first person view and that you could shoot stuff in real-time, but what's the problem? Fallout as an RPG wasn't a very good one. Fallout was a great game because of the different choices in ways to solve missions, the character development, but most of all the story and art direction. This looks like it's heading in the right way in terms of story and art direction so why is everyone bitching about the first person nature? First Person is more immersive than a top-down isometric view which is exactly what Fallout needs to drive the story and plot to higher levels. So who cares if the fighting system doesn't have the little move points per round? As far as I remember, that was the part of the game that was panned by the critics.
Video games offer us a passage to artistic things, but are wholly not art in themselves.
In all of your examples, you're separating the experience from the piece of art, but in video games you're referring to them as the experience. By your own definition, a video game is art in the same way a painting is art. Looking at the painting is not art, just as playing the game is not art, but the medium itself, the painting and the video game, are art.
A video game is a combination of sound, music, painting, movies, storytelling, and activities. Each of those except the last one is considered an art form. Why does adding an activity to it negate the fact that all the other things are there? To me, the whole argument seems completely silly, as there's not much difference from movies and video games but one is irrevocably considered an art form and the other isn't.
Every video game has intent of the designer. "How do I get the player to feel a certain feeling in the best possible way?" This comes across in story, level design, gameplay mechanics, art, and everything else that goes into a game. Just this fact alone should completely close the topic on whether a video game is a piece of art. This was not always the case, however.
Even if your statement is true (which I doubt, given all of the various translations of the bible on which there is a lot of argument over whether a particular translation is accurate), 1800 years ago is still 200 years more than the events depicted. Even with our modern system of communication and preservation, there are lots of informational gaps on the life and times of the founding fathers. It's hard to tell who George Washington as a person was, but within 200 years he has been elevated to a legendary status where school kids learn about his grand exploits chopping down cherry trees with one hand and giving King George the finger with the other.
Say what you will about the honor bestowed on the original testaments, but the bible spread in that time not because someone kept it in an Ark and read it every 50 years. It spread because the people that it was read to believed it and passed it along to other people, who also believed it and embellished it until it became legendary. Everyone embellishes their stories as a way of enticing people to believe and be awed. A guy who pulled in front of you on the highway in retelling becomes a guy who cuts you off, and then into a guy who came an inch away from hitting you. We do it every time. With a text that is meant to be taken seriously and followed, it becomes an even bigger issue because embellishment is half the point.
You should be doubting whether Mary ever claimed such a thing--you should be speculating that early Christians made up the story.
If you want to go as far as speculating early Christians made up the virgin birth, why not speculate that every miracle Christ performed was made up by the same people?
Slashdot Mirror
Tell that to Darwin, who the Anglican Church just now apologized to. Where were the critics that said "science is compatible with religion and spirituality" when the fathers of modern science were all discredited or killed for their beliefs? There is a current (and ongoing) war going on between religious people and science in the US because there are still many more people who believe that science is incompatible with religion. It's a real issue. Science goes directly against current religious beliefs in a lot of ways, and in every instance, after decades or centuries pass, religion has to change to accomodate it. This is the only reason why you could sit right now and say "science is compatible with religion" because your religion has changed in order to accomodate modern scientific advances. "God didn't create the earth like it says in the bible, he created the system that made it possible for the earth to be created!" Eventually, science will shine a light on all of the little dark crevices that religion hides in. We CAN know certain things that are explained in the bible. We CAN know where our inherent morality comes from, we CAN know how the universe was created and how long it took. Religion can only attempt to fill in those questions before they're proven by science, but every step along the way in trying to prove them is blocked by the zealots of religion who try and hold on to every dark crevice they still have left with every ounce of their being.
And yes, I read too much Dawkins and Harris... but they're better than the alternative. I actually learn something from those books. I think it's a sad state of affairs that I went through my whole public school education and didn't know anything about evolution until I got interested in it myself. The extent of my education on probably the most influential discovery in human history was "Oh, and humans came from monkeys."
yeah, but those people WANT you to use those bits because that means you're listening to their station. If they have a problem with it, they could easily take their station offline. Or are you talking about ISPs? Of course they care. They want you to pay 50 bucks a month so you could check your e-mail and nothing else.
who the hell listens to internet radio for 8 hours every single day in a month?If you're considering listening while at the office, that's not bandwidth you should be concerned about so that's gone. The only people we have left using that kind of bandwidth are radio junkies who need some kind of noise playing all the time and who work from home/are unemployed. That's not a very big market, and to a person who needs to listen to that much radio, 30 GB out of 250GB per month (taking the recent Comcast announcement) isn't that much.
He was never a very good pilot. He crashed 5 planes, and was only where he was in the Naval Academy because of his daddy. He graduated 5th from last in his class. I'll make fun of a war hero who abuses his "war hero" status as a means of getting into office, and his "achievement" of crashing and becoming a POW doesn't make him eligible to make decisions on foreign policy, technology, economy, etc. He might deserve my sympathy for being tortured for 5 years in a prison camp, but he certainly doesn't deserve my vote for it.
Another thing, can he fly a fighter jet now? This was when he was in his 20s! He doesn't have the mental capacity to remember his geography and always gets Sunni/Shiite/Al Qaeda confused. He can't even remember what his positions are from interview to interview. No, I don't think he has the mental capacity to use Google Mail anymore.
You got it wrong. It's "War on TERRA" meaning war against earth.
As others have pointed out, people are looking at the 80s games with rose colored glasses. A lot of those games really sucked. Another thing to note is that those games are very easy to recreate, so of course they're still recreated. Stuff like Pac-Man and Frogger are games that you could make in a weekend by reading a tutorial in a C++ book - and those original games had 1 programmer working on them start to finish. Try recreating GTA4 in 20 years time. It's still going to take a lot of time and money just like it did the first time. The game mechanics are complex, there's fairly strong AI. Comparing the gameplay mechanics between that and Pac-Man is apples and oranges. There are a bunch of gameplay mechanics in current games all working together. Each of those gameplay mechanics will survive long into the future, being copies from generation to generation in the games that people are gonna make. You could say that we're still playing Wolfenstein 3D 16 years after it originally came out in the form of any current FPS game. The innovations that each game incorporates should be the things that are judged whether they will stand the test of time. Not the games themselves, which are getting too complicated.
If you want an analogy, look at the movie industry. We're not seeing remakes of Casablanca every couple of years, but we are seeing elements from Casablanca that have been integrated into the language of cinema - even long after the average moviegoer wouldn't know a Casablanca reference if they saw one.
This is really old news. I think I even read about in a Richard Dawkins book from the 80s. Daniel Dennette goes into it further in Breaking the Spell. You could say pretty much all of our beliefs have evolved and have some links, however minor, to our tribal origins. Religion and superstition are very closely linked. Religion is a group of superstitions that have been combined and given a back story. There are a lot of examples of how religious morality is linked to good evolutionary qualities, so it stands to reason that the superstitions that tribes had have turned into the modern incarnations of religion and other superstitions.
If the dark skinned avatar and the light skinned avatar are exactly the same except for their skin tone, and there's a measurable difference between how people react to the same situation between the 2 avatars, then there is racial bias.
If you want to compare it to a car analogy, it's more like an insurance policy on your car. You can put up to 3 drivers on the policy, and it costs extra for more drivers. Here's my experience with the DRM - I bought the game. It asked for a serial number when I was installing. I put in the serial number, and ran the game. I have no need to install it on 15 different machines, and I don't think I'm gonna be installing the game every time I upgrade my computer, which is once every 2 - 3 years. I will probably never run into any issues with the DRM. If your analogy of the car is correct, my use of the car in its intended fashion is severely hindered if I can't park it anywhere but my garage, whereas the DRM on Spore doesn't severely hinder my experience in playing the game in its intended fashion.
It seems to me that having such a hated DRM scheme, there will be MORE piraters who wouldn't have bought the game anyway download the pirate version based on the principle of it. And since it's already cracked, people who WOULD have paid for it are going to be downloading the pirated version. This just seems like such a lose/lose scenario for EA. Why wouldn't they immediately pull the DRM from the game via a patch and apologize to their customers? Having such a low Amazon review score will probably cost EA millions of dollars in lost sales from people who normally wouldn't know anything about the DRM.
Which makes it even easier for a computer to compare a person's previous bills with the one he's currently racking up and notice that the current bill is twice as large, and then notify the user. This bill is not twice as large. It's 200 times as large, and that makes it even more egregious that ATT doesn't have the software in place to notify a person that their usage is wildly different than what's come before.
Would you mind if your credit card is stolen and someone goes out and spends $20k on it, but you aren't informed until the bill comes? Of course you would! People did! That's why there are systems in place that will warn you when your credit card is being overused.
So then she takes her checks under the tablet in increments under a thousand?
A lot of the students you want to teach evolution to will automatically reject it since they believe that Creationism is how they got on the earth. If you want to get through to those kids who have been told their whole lives that it's about evolution vs creationism and those godless scientists want to throw the truth out of their classroom, the best way to do it is by introducing creationism right alongside evolution and showing why creationism is not science, and evolution is the only viable theory we have because of the evidence. Otherwise, creationist kids will just go home and continue believing in creationism because their view of the world has been censored out of their schools.
about a thousand bucks. *rimshot*
Yeah, I didn't know about this company Microsoft until this ad was posted on Slashdot. Now I'm intrigued.
Sorry, but the Mac ads do say stuff. Every single one of the ads mentions a feature that differentiates between the 2 products, and it does so by humanizing the company, being clever, and NOT being technical all at the same time. It's a brilliant marketing campaign.
When a marketing campaign has to have you "understand what they're going for," then it's a failure. It doesn't talk about anything related to the company, and when it does it's for 10 seconds and completely non-specific. There is no difference between this ad This ad was bound to fail among the linux community no matter what it was, but I didn't think it was gonna be as bad as it was.
Microsoft has gotten a lot of shit the past few years over Vista. My girlfriend who is as far from a techie as you can get told me she doesn't want Vista because she heard it was bad. They addressed the problem of Vista getting bad press by insulting their target audience with the Mojave campaign, and now they've failed with an ad that doesn't say anything or get anyone excited about anything. This wasn't humanizing the company, it's the equivalent of an old nerdy guy trying to ingratiate himself to a younger crowd by calling them "dude" and thinking he's being cool.
Over 20 years ago, Apple targeted IBM with their Big Brother ad. Now, 2 decades later, Apple is taking on the Big Brother vibe with their constricting Developer EULAs and vendor lock-outs. If you ask anybody on the street, though, Apple is still the new cool kid in town because they know how to advertise and make a brand image - or at least hire the people who do.
Who do you think writes these things? A lawyer's job is to protect their client. That usually includes making air-tight EULAs that take away all of the rights of the person agreeing to them so they don't have grounds to sue for something or other later on.
I've been using Chrome and I'm both happy and disappointed. It's an awesome browser, very fast, very responsive, has great features and the tabs are amazing and work exactly how I wish Firefox did. But why the hell does it have a problem playing flash video? Isn't this one of the first things people would try to do on it? Flash video either freezes a few frames into the video, or if it plays it doesn't play with sound. Even YOUTUBE, a GOOGLE owned company doesn't work with Chrome.
Otherwise, it's been awesome.
There are a bunch of complaints talking crap about the first person view and that you could shoot stuff in real-time, but what's the problem? Fallout as an RPG wasn't a very good one. Fallout was a great game because of the different choices in ways to solve missions, the character development, but most of all the story and art direction. This looks like it's heading in the right way in terms of story and art direction so why is everyone bitching about the first person nature? First Person is more immersive than a top-down isometric view which is exactly what Fallout needs to drive the story and plot to higher levels. So who cares if the fighting system doesn't have the little move points per round? As far as I remember, that was the part of the game that was panned by the critics.
If their business model requires annoying customers and squeezing them for every dollar, then fuck them. They deserve to lose profits and die.
to the original poster:
NAPOLEOWNED! ... Sorry, had to say it.
In all of your examples, you're separating the experience from the piece of art, but in video games you're referring to them as the experience. By your own definition, a video game is art in the same way a painting is art. Looking at the painting is not art, just as playing the game is not art, but the medium itself, the painting and the video game, are art.
A video game is a combination of sound, music, painting, movies, storytelling, and activities. Each of those except the last one is considered an art form. Why does adding an activity to it negate the fact that all the other things are there? To me, the whole argument seems completely silly, as there's not much difference from movies and video games but one is irrevocably considered an art form and the other isn't.
Every video game has intent of the designer. "How do I get the player to feel a certain feeling in the best possible way?" This comes across in story, level design, gameplay mechanics, art, and everything else that goes into a game. Just this fact alone should completely close the topic on whether a video game is a piece of art. This was not always the case, however.
I'm just downloading it for the pictures.
Even if your statement is true (which I doubt, given all of the various translations of the bible on which there is a lot of argument over whether a particular translation is accurate), 1800 years ago is still 200 years more than the events depicted. Even with our modern system of communication and preservation, there are lots of informational gaps on the life and times of the founding fathers. It's hard to tell who George Washington as a person was, but within 200 years he has been elevated to a legendary status where school kids learn about his grand exploits chopping down cherry trees with one hand and giving King George the finger with the other.
Say what you will about the honor bestowed on the original testaments, but the bible spread in that time not because someone kept it in an Ark and read it every 50 years. It spread because the people that it was read to believed it and passed it along to other people, who also believed it and embellished it until it became legendary. Everyone embellishes their stories as a way of enticing people to believe and be awed. A guy who pulled in front of you on the highway in retelling becomes a guy who cuts you off, and then into a guy who came an inch away from hitting you. We do it every time. With a text that is meant to be taken seriously and followed, it becomes an even bigger issue because embellishment is half the point.
If you want to go as far as speculating early Christians made up the virgin birth, why not speculate that every miracle Christ performed was made up by the same people?