I think MMOGs short-circuit something very, very important. As human beings, we have mechanisms that keep us from stagnating. If we sit in one spot for hours on end, we get bored. But MMOGs are a behaviorist's wet dream, providing a complex system of goals, rewards, whatever it takes to keep the player online for as long as possible. Some people can do this and not fuck up their lives. somecannot.
A friend of a friend who got hooked on Everquest wound up losing custody of her child (under six years old, I think) because she couldn't be bothered to take care of of it---the game was more important. That frightens me.
If we don't get human contact, we die. Literally, we die. (Look at prisoners kept in solitary confinement for months or years in the early days of prisons---their bodily needs are taken care of, but they lose the will to live.) Well, some people can become hermits, but most people can't.
If we didn't go to such lengths to short-circuit these mechanisms---like boredom---the Hikikomori would have to leave their rooms. It's a dead end, and it's self-destructive.
And that's why, despite enjoying Warcraft III immensely, I will never touch World of Warcraft.
I know! How dare those left-wing activist judges perform a judicial coup to place a hardline fundie in power! Or Eldred v. Ashcroft a huge giveaway to corporate interests! Damn those lefties!
"Fundamentalist", in general usage, refers to Christian Fundamentalists---the largest and most visible group that self-labels that way. Don't be difficult.
That's a really interesting way of looking at it; I knew little to nothing of network architecture in those days, so I just remember BBS's. Nothing about larger networking. (Well, maybe FIDONet.)
I want to use that "the average American internet user uses $1 a year of USA backbone traffic" statistic. Do you have a source?
I agree with a sibling poster; IP multicast would be a wonderful windfall for distribution, putting at least some of the power back in the hands of the little fella. (Not to mention making Bittorrent a dozen times more powerful.)
But no one will buy their silly services now that they can just use the raw bandwidth. Right? Right? This is why ISPs don't provide NNTP servers any more.
ImageMagick is under its own license, but I don't think you're going to run into any trouble using the ImageMagick library in your application. The 'image library' issue is a red herring.
Indeed! I never got 'got' anime or D&D, despite some of my friends going on and on about how wonderful it was. I guess it goes to show that we're not all one big homogeneous demographic.
(Then again, every one of my geek friends loved "Firefly".)
Did You Know that hentai is a teensy piece of the anime market in Japan, but a huge whorebanging chunk of the anime market in America? Fun fact!
They make the tentacle porn for pervy Americans. No, I don't know why we don't make it here ourselves. But I know that the place for tentacle rape is conservative, Christian Amerikkka, as you say, Mr. Cube.
I suppose "seized some major online distribution servers" sounds better than "nicked about a thousand bucks worth of equipment from some joe who never saw a dime from all the evil, evil crime he did.
Besides, busting down some dorks' doors must be a whole lot easier than running around after, y'know, violent people.
This one, yes? I can only assume that it was produced before Gutenberg started using alternate encodings for its texts. They're still not using Unicode, I don't think, which is why Greek gets transliterated (tau-epsilon-chi becomes "tekh" or something like that, for instance). A few books use Unicode, and many HTML versions use the HTML entity equivalents. Non-english text could, alas, be better. But it's a technical restriction---this is why Gutenberg proofs texts that are all or almost all in the Latin alphabet. It's not sloppiness; it's a technical limitation. I suppose when they get Unicode support running on PGDP, they'll redo some of these. I hope.
Slashdot does allow ISO 8859-1, though---ÿáý for àçcêñts, I suppose.
Holy crap, I've been living a lie. I wonder how many times I've used that word.
Thanks; now I'm going to have to remember to kick myself whenever I start saying "longetivity" instead of "longevity". If I don't keep an eye on myself, I'll be saying "irregardless" any day now.
"Massive massive editing errors"? Holy shit! Can you point out one of these massive massive errors? Or are you possibly referring to errors which were in the original text, which the Project explicitly refuses to correct, since their stated goal is to preserve the original author's intent, even if that original author couldn't spell?
The "bizzare [sic] formatting system" Gutenberg uses is Plain Vanilla ASCII for a reason---longetivity. They say it better than I could; read their rationale. They're more interested in making the text stable for the long term, than in compiling it for your device-of-the-week. Besides, as other users have pointed out, you can, with little to moderate effort, derive your proprietary format from the ASCII plaintext.
When was the last time you used PG? 1985? They have over 16,000 etexts, with more being added every day---how is this falling "far short"? What great and towering public-domain works does their catalog lack?
The translations suck horribly because Gutenberg has to rely on public domain versions. Since translations are copyrightable, the translation must have been written pre-1923, which kinda cuts down on the available material.
Petition your congresscritter for a saner copyright term if you want Gutenberg to have access to newer, better translations.
There's good stuff on there. If you don't like the chub, don't look behind the cut when you see thenewwavechick or whatever; wait for i_like_sharks to post again. Not to mention that they have a policy now about wang-warnings on the cuts. Or, if you're allergic to even the possibility that wang may be lurking behind an unclicked cut, there's always show_your_pussy.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm stone deaf, you insensitive clod!
See The Virtual Skinner Box, an essay on Everquest (but really about MMOGs in general) written from a behaviorist perspective.
--grendel drago
I think MMOGs short-circuit something very, very important. As human beings, we have mechanisms that keep us from stagnating. If we sit in one spot for hours on end, we get bored. But MMOGs are a behaviorist's wet dream, providing a complex system of goals, rewards, whatever it takes to keep the player online for as long as possible. Some people can do this and not fuck up their lives. some cannot.
A friend of a friend who got hooked on Everquest wound up losing custody of her child (under six years old, I think) because she couldn't be bothered to take care of of it---the game was more important. That frightens me.
If we don't get human contact, we die. Literally, we die. (Look at prisoners kept in solitary confinement for months or years in the early days of prisons---their bodily needs are taken care of, but they lose the will to live.) Well, some people can become hermits, but most people can't.
If we didn't go to such lengths to short-circuit these mechanisms---like boredom---the Hikikomori would have to leave their rooms. It's a dead end, and it's self-destructive.
And that's why, despite enjoying Warcraft III immensely, I will never touch World of Warcraft.
I know! How dare those left-wing activist judges perform a judicial coup to place a hardline fundie in power! Or Eldred v. Ashcroft a huge giveaway to corporate interests! Damn those lefties!
--grendel drago
I can't wait to get rid of all those damned graven images! And outlawing Sunday overtime! Err, Saturday overtime if you're Jewish.
--grendel drago
"Fundamentalist", in general usage, refers to Christian Fundamentalists---the largest and most visible group that self-labels that way. Don't be difficult.
--grendel drago
That's a really interesting way of looking at it; I knew little to nothing of network architecture in those days, so I just remember BBS's. Nothing about larger networking. (Well, maybe FIDONet.)
I want to use that "the average American internet user uses $1 a year of USA backbone traffic" statistic. Do you have a source?
I agree with a sibling poster; IP multicast would be a wonderful windfall for distribution, putting at least some of the power back in the hands of the little fella. (Not to mention making Bittorrent a dozen times more powerful.)
But no one will buy their silly services now that they can just use the raw bandwidth. Right? Right? This is why ISPs don't provide NNTP servers any more.
--grendel drago
ImageMagick is under its own license, but I don't think you're going to run into any trouble using the ImageMagick library in your application. The 'image library' issue is a red herring.
--grendel drago
Indeed! I never got 'got' anime or D&D, despite some of my friends going on and on about how wonderful it was. I guess it goes to show that we're not all one big homogeneous demographic.
(Then again, every one of my geek friends loved "Firefly".)
--grendel drago
Did You Know that hentai is a teensy piece of the anime market in Japan, but a huge whorebanging chunk of the anime market in America? Fun fact!
They make the tentacle porn for pervy Americans. No, I don't know why we don't make it here ourselves. But I know that the place for tentacle rape is conservative, Christian Amerikkka, as you say, Mr. Cube.
--grendel drago
I suppose "seized some major online distribution servers" sounds better than "nicked about a thousand bucks worth of equipment from some joe who never saw a dime from all the evil, evil crime he did.
Besides, busting down some dorks' doors must be a whole lot easier than running around after, y'know, violent people.
--grendel drago
Man, that's harsh. At least the Gentoo people were responsive, even if some of them were unhelpful and/or rude. Do any bugs get worked on over there?
--grendel drago
I'd wager my own dear pants that that AC hasn't written a damned line of X code in his life.
--grendel drago
Way ahead of you. I guess that means that you fail it now?
This one, yes? I can only assume that it was produced before Gutenberg started using alternate encodings for its texts. They're still not using Unicode, I don't think, which is why Greek gets transliterated (tau-epsilon-chi becomes "tekh" or something like that, for instance). A few books use Unicode, and many HTML versions use the HTML entity equivalents. Non-english text could, alas, be better. But it's a technical restriction---this is why Gutenberg proofs texts that are all or almost all in the Latin alphabet. It's not sloppiness; it's a technical limitation. I suppose when they get Unicode support running on PGDP, they'll redo some of these. I hope.
Slashdot does allow ISO 8859-1, though---ÿáý for àçcêñts, I suppose.
--grendel drago
Holy crap, I've been living a lie. I wonder how many times I've used that word.
Thanks; now I'm going to have to remember to kick myself whenever I start saying "longetivity" instead of "longevity". If I don't keep an eye on myself, I'll be saying "irregardless" any day now.
--grendel drago
Maybe this is why firearms manufacturers have vague claims about "stopping power" instead of saying "WILL KILL A SCARY BLACK MAN FOR YOU, NO JOKE!".
Just a thought.
--grendel drago
Life span.
HTH.
--grendel drago
Not to mention that if you bought them all separately, you'd get free "Super Saver" shipping. It's not a very good deal at all.
--grendel drago
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. Newton's Principia Mathematica is now in PGDP in the original Latin. The Descent of Man and The Origin of Species . I'm kinda surprised that Euclid's not in there at all. Maybe a dearth of old translations?
Too bad there's not much SF in there, either. An unfortunate consequence of it being a relatively recent genre. Stupid copyright terms.
--grendel drago
"Massive massive editing errors"? Holy shit! Can you point out one of these massive massive errors?
Or are you possibly referring to errors which were in the original text, which the Project explicitly refuses to correct, since their stated goal is to preserve the original author's intent, even if that original author couldn't spell?
The "bizzare [sic] formatting system" Gutenberg uses is Plain Vanilla ASCII for a reason---longetivity. They say it better than I could; read their rationale. They're more interested in making the text stable for the long term, than in compiling it for your device-of-the-week. Besides, as other users have pointed out, you can, with little to moderate effort, derive your proprietary format from the ASCII plaintext.
Not to mention that Gutenberg provides some titles in RTF format. Or HTML, including formatting, illustration, and so on. Or that they have a whole section about reading their eBooks on PDAs.
When was the last time you used PG? 1985? They have over 16,000 etexts, with more being added every day---how is this falling "far short"? What great and towering public-domain works does their catalog lack?
--grendel drago
The translations suck horribly because Gutenberg has to rely on public domain versions. Since translations are copyrightable, the translation must have been written pre-1923, which kinda cuts down on the available material.
Petition your congresscritter for a saner copyright term if you want Gutenberg to have access to newer, better translations.
--grendel drago
It'd be nice if Wikipedia provided lighter versions of their pages, so that they didn't look like shit in Dillo.
'Cause it's pretty damn hard to read right now.
--grendel drago
There's good stuff on there. If you don't like the chub, don't look behind the cut when you see thenewwavechick or whatever; wait for i_like_sharks to post again. Not to mention that they have a policy now about wang-warnings on the cuts. Or, if you're allergic to even the possibility that wang may be lurking behind an unclicked cut, there's always show_your_pussy.
--grendel drago
Yes, they might have blogs. Or they may just be named Maddox.
--grendel drago