Exactly. I still play DOOM all the time too (helped along by thousands of 3rd party maps, and when those get stale, there's always SLIGE). Why? because run-and-gun remains fun. If the graphics suck -- well, I don't care. I'm used to 'em, and my imagination fills in any blanks well enough.
Conversely, storylines and cutscenes get tired after you've seen 'em a couple times -- it's like a rerun of some TV show that wasn't really all that creative in the first place.
And how many people install that "lots of other Microsoft software" so often that WGA has to check up on it twice a month?
A: almost nobody. Normal user behaviour is to install a few major apps early in the PC's working life, then after that the only new installs are occasional games or tax software updates.... which by their very nature are very seldom M$ products.
And even if every piece of software out there was from M$, there's no reason to check more than ONCE for any given program. Or does that initially-legit copy of Office somehow become pirated from one week to the next?
There are THOUSANDS of amateur-made DOOM levels that are better than the original DOOM1/2 maps -- more artistic, more atmospheric, more thematic, more internally coherent, more fun to play over and over. Eternal and Memento Mori leap to mind; beyond that... too many to list.
Yeah, there are karky amateur-made maps too, but they're in the minority.
[And I say that with a wide array of maps fresh in my mind, since I still play DOOM every day... but almost never the default maps.]
Personally, I think he's correct -- why else would WGA suddenly become a "required" part of any update?
Furthermore, why should WGA ever need to confirm that a copy is legit more than ONCE? if a given install was legit last week, how could it possibly become pirated next week?
I'm talking about the issue of the kid needing to have something and somewhere of their OWN, where they can do stupid kid things (not harmful stuff, but stuff like play with a toad without being told not to touch the icky thing, etc.) without adult censure, and keep stupid kid things (rocks, special toys, whatever) without being forced to share. It's these small privacies that let a kid know they're a PERSON, with their own inherent value.
This has nothing to do with sensible parental inquiries about where you're going tonight and which movie you're seeing, or which friends you hang out with. In fact, kids allowed to have their own private space are much more sharing about the rest of their lives, as they don't feel FORCED to sneak just to have that one tiny thing that's wholly their own.
And just because you're viewing the world from a mature perspective doesn't prevent nor negate the joy of playing in a mud puddle, if you feel the urge.
I'm 51, and despite all my mature attitudes [g] I still swing around the corner pole EVERY time I go to the post office, and I don't care who sees me do it. I watch ants. I examine interesting pebbles. I dig in the dirt (okay, so we call it "gardening" -- but it's still fundamentally digging in the dirt).
I agree entirely, especially the parent post's contention that kids aren't allowed to just go be kids anymore, without adult supervision. Omighod, what if junior fell off his bike and skinned a knee? or worse yet, made up his own games that don't profit some corporation??
As to maturity being something you gain by practice, this goes along with my contention that the most important thing you can give your kids isn't love, or security, or anything else; it's PRIVACY. Privacy implies trust; that is, acknowledgment that the child is a thinking person (not just an extension of the parent) and the faith that he can make, or at least LEARN to make intelligent decisions without mommy and daddy hanging over his shoulder 100% of the time. (Which is why I also contend that home schooling is child abuse -- the homeschooled kid is NEVER out from under parental supervision, NEVER gets to just go be a kid or learn from the supervision of OTHER adults; this ultimately is VERY stressful to the kid.)
Another point that makes me thing TFA's author doesn't know much about kids, or maturity for that matter... kids like the world set in stone and completely immutable, and to a kid, change means "throw away everything that came before, and do something completely different" (ever notice that when a kid changes hobbies, they typically THROW AWAY all artifacts from their old hobby?)
Kids also want everything to be black or white, and cannot cope with shades of grey.
The flexibility to deal with change and to comprehend "all the colours of life" is a MATURE skill, NOT a "childish" behaviour.
I've noticed the same problem of a growing immaturity level in supposedly-mature adults. I attribute it to a whole generation that has never had to interact with the Real World (note that we now have a 3rd generation away from the farm, which I think is a critical factor -- they don't even have grandparents who know about "the old ways" and doing things for themselves like it or not.) -- Very much what you're saying, in fact.
And I think the article's author has his causes backward... the "never done being educated" thing is a SYMPTOM, not a cause, and it's been there for anyone to observe as far back as universities have existed. It's simply EASIER now for those wired that way to stay in the coccoon, since non-3rd-world countries now have pretty much universal higher education.
That too. If we could recreate the fervor of the Cold War, without the military implications, the potential for growth of knowledge is huge. The Cold War was about survival in the face of a known enemy; a moon colony would be about survival in the face of a known hostile environment. In both cases, there's a good idea what might be thrown at us and how we needed to combat it, and that leads to finding solutions NOW (not piddlefucking around til the funding runs out, like seems to be the current method), which can then be expanded into useful stuff for non-colony uses -- just as a big chunk of what is now everyday-use tech started life as military research.
So.... yeah, it would probably be the best thing to happen to us in the coming century, since we'd be forced into growing our knowledge base.
Well, not exactly. There are other issues much more severe than just losing muscle mass and strength. When you lose bone density, you become very susceptible to broken bones, and a slight bump could be sufficient to shatter your spine or your hip. Effectively, you'd suffer from osteoporosis.
Also, seriously abnormal changes in the blood/bone calcium balance (which is dynamic, not static) can lead to heart failure, neurological problems, arthritis in the smaller joints, etc.
Yeah, but for every miner there are going to be half a dozen support people, doing the sort of jobs the miners can't do or don't have time to do for themselves, like maintain the biosphere, doctor their hurts, etc, etc. And those support people WON'T be doing hard physical work all day.
Someone above suggested wearing weights, possibly as part of one's everyday clothing. That's probably the simplest and most practical solution to ensure a constant level of exercise just from everyday movement; after all, it needs no more preparation than strapping on the same sort of weight belts folks use for exercise here on Earth.
The weights are probably a better idea anyway, since that may help exert more-earthlike stresses on colonists' bones, thus more closely simulating Earth gravity. This is important, given that we already know that extended periods in low gravity do nasty things to your bone density. Not to mention that you'd be sorry if you came back to Earth and found you no longer had the physical strength just to carry around your own Earth-normal body weight.
Also, weights aren't dependent on prepared surfaces (not likely to find those at the bottom of a mine!), only on what you can wear and carry with you no matter where you go.
Not only that, but a great deal of Earth's environmental pressure comes from having too many people and not enough places to put them. Spread 'em out a bit, and there's less pressure to *use up* every square foot of habitable land.
Yeah, colonizing the other planets isn't an instant solution, but as you point out, it very likely is THE longterm solution for reducing man's pressure against the environment (always remembering that even man's activities are a "natural" environmental pressure, since we DID evolve here and aren't an introduced species).
Fact is, one big reason so many formerly "empty" areas (such as the SoCal high desert) are being ravaged by development, is because these people have nowhere else to go. There are too many people and not enough places to put them.
If we have use of multiple planets, we have more places to go, and people need not spread onto every square foot of habitable land. So the effect is to PRESERVE more of these marginally-habitable but also unique areas, like the Mojave Desert and the Grand Canyon, and even the Sea of Tranquility -- because we won't NEED to use up every open space just to lead reasonably comfortable lives.
Yes, this is oversimplified into sheer supply and demand, but ultimately that is THE market force we have to cope with, and the one thing Earth has no more supply of is land. If we want to keep supply and demand balanced, we need more supply (in this case, another planet).
[At least, so long as zero population growth is a pipe dream]
Not only that, but sooner or later we're going to meet those Little Green Men From Alpha Centauri, and it would behoove us to be in a position approaching equal footing, or at least not looking like something that belongs in a zoo for quaint cultures.
The notion that other spacegoing species will be "peaceful" is sheer bunkum -- exploration is by its very nature a function of aggression (that is, the desire to spread one's own species) and as such will run roughshod over any noncompetitive species.
"...the race to the moon. That wasn't funded by capitalism... rather it was funded by a government actually interested in seeing man progress..."
Well, to be accurate, it was driven by the Cold War and the perceived need to be the first to gain a foothold on any potential military advantage.
As the Cold War petered out, so did gov't interest in space -- from a program that pioneered to another planet and planned to go beyond that, it was reduced to a program that mainly repeated earthbound experiments while in orbit.
When I was a kid, schools stopped everything else to let us watch every manned flight as it was broadcast on live TV. In fact that was the principal use made of the TVs that entered most classrooms in the early 1960s. It was new and exciting and we all wanted to be astronauts. I don't think that excitement will return until someone commits to developing a lunar colony, and starts the actual process of making it a reality that today's kids can aspire to as a career.
Number of chromosomes influences not so much whether they can interbreed (that can happen anyway if the total array isn't TOO different) but rather, whether the offspring are fertile or not. And even then it's not 100% -- frex, there have been a few fertile mules. But as a general rule, mammals (and AFAIK, birds) don't successfully crossbreed outside their own genus.
But the further you get away from mammals, the fuzzier it gets. Frex, plants do all sorts of freaky things with chromosomes (and may have one, two, three, or four sets, and maybe more for all I know), and can occasionally crossbreed within the same family, not just within the same genus as with mammals.
Dogs and wolves (and coyotes) can interbreed freely, and will do so given opportunity. The offspring are fertile without qualification.
Dogs and foxes can and (rarely) do mate, but there are seldom offspring, and to my understanding any such offspring are sterile, like a mule (offspring of a horse and a donkey).
That's a very good thought -- after all, if you don't want to be associated with someone in Real Life, you don't hold them hostage, do you? Of course not. You show them the door and wash your hands of them.
As to the ICANN rules, does anyone know what presently applies, if anything? if there ARE no rules about it, that needs to be fixed, or other registrars will soon discover similar tricks.
As it is... I've been a godaddy customer for a long time, but this behaviour has me rethinking that relationship.
I second that. I have a bunch of domains with Godaddy, but my more recent domains have been reg'd with 1&1.
I've had 1&1's "free preview" webhosting package for almost 3 years now, and when the freebie runs out I'll be a paying customer, because the price is right, everything works, and REAL HUMANS WITH A CLUE answer support emails. Yeah, it takes a couple days sometimes, but it's worth a little wait to get genuinely useful support.
And since 1&1 is the largest webhosting company in the world, and is always priced at the low end, yet still has Real Humans back there somewhere -- it's obvious that "a huge company with low prices" is no excuse for shitty service.
That's exactly what I meant -- IBM is a very broad company, that being the nature of "business machines". Computers and such came late to IBM's party... come to think of it, that woulda been about the time of IBM's Great Stock Price Dive. (Wish I had my IBM stock back. Oh well!)
I remember punchcards... we fed 'em to my high school's IBM-1620 by the truckload. It was a Big Upgrade when we got a paper-tape reader!
Tho I think what they have in mind is more like this:
There's a mildly silly ad that runs on a smalltime local TV station, for a local used-car dealership. The ad is of local make and isn't polished, but it's pleasantly funny, enough so to remain amusing through multiple viewings. More importantly, it's entertaining enough that when I had someone over watching TV and the ad came on, instead of going off to get a beer, I told them, "Hey, watch this funny ad!"
So even tho I'm not likely to become a customer, the advertiser got one more viewer *through* me -- simply because their ad is entertaining enough that I *wanted* to point it out to someone else. Which means one more person who knows their business exists, and for all I know may eventually become a customer.
"What about kids who post pictures of themselves doing drugs on their myspace -- why can't they get treated as felons."
I know a kid who posted photos of himself doing something like that. Except... it wasn't real. It was staged, as a silly joke. He wasn't doing the proscribed activity at all, just faking it for the camera.
See, that's the problem with using something like Myspace as "evidence". You can't be sure it's real. The evidence is by its very nature "hearsay" and therefore should be inadmissable in court.
Tho I wouldn't put it past lawmakers to eventually legislate away the "hearsay" protection, given the current political climate -- where (as the WA law demonstrates) even Bad Thoughts can be a felony.
Actually, trying to prosecute a newspaper is probably the best thing that could happen for getting this new law overturned -- big newspapers generally have house lawyers whose job is to defend the paper against legal challenges of whatever sort, not to mention a handy built-in publicity mechanism. So... bring 'em on, and let freedom of speech do its thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. I still play DOOM all the time too (helped along by thousands of 3rd party maps, and when those get stale, there's always SLIGE). Why? because run-and-gun remains fun. If the graphics suck -- well, I don't care. I'm used to 'em, and my imagination fills in any blanks well enough.
Conversely, storylines and cutscenes get tired after you've seen 'em a couple times -- it's like a rerun of some TV show that wasn't really all that creative in the first place.
And how many people install that "lots of other Microsoft software" so often that WGA has to check up on it twice a month?
A: almost nobody. Normal user behaviour is to install a few major apps early in the PC's working life, then after that the only new installs are occasional games or tax software updates.... which by their very nature are very seldom M$ products.
And even if every piece of software out there was from M$, there's no reason to check more than ONCE for any given program. Or does that initially-legit copy of Office somehow become pirated from one week to the next?
There are THOUSANDS of amateur-made DOOM levels that are better than the original DOOM1/2 maps -- more artistic, more atmospheric, more thematic, more internally coherent, more fun to play over and over. Eternal and Memento Mori leap to mind; beyond that... too many to list.
Yeah, there are karky amateur-made maps too, but they're in the minority.
[And I say that with a wide array of maps fresh in my mind, since I still play DOOM every day... but almost never the default maps.]
Ed Foster already wrote an article speculating on whether WGA is in fact being used to forcibly sunset WinXP.
3 /50236
See http://www.gripe2ed.com/scoop/story/2006/6/27/054
Personally, I think he's correct -- why else would WGA suddenly become a "required" part of any update?
Furthermore, why should WGA ever need to confirm that a copy is legit more than ONCE? if a given install was legit last week, how could it possibly become pirated next week?
I'm talking about the issue of the kid needing to have something and somewhere of their OWN, where they can do stupid kid things (not harmful stuff, but stuff like play with a toad without being told not to touch the icky thing, etc.) without adult censure, and keep stupid kid things (rocks, special toys, whatever) without being forced to share. It's these small privacies that let a kid know they're a PERSON, with their own inherent value.
This has nothing to do with sensible parental inquiries about where you're going tonight and which movie you're seeing, or which friends you hang out with. In fact, kids allowed to have their own private space are much more sharing about the rest of their lives, as they don't feel FORCED to sneak just to have that one tiny thing that's wholly their own.
And just because you're viewing the world from a mature perspective doesn't prevent nor negate the joy of playing in a mud puddle, if you feel the urge.
:)
I'm 51, and despite all my mature attitudes [g] I still swing around the corner pole EVERY time I go to the post office, and I don't care who sees me do it. I watch ants. I examine interesting pebbles. I dig in the dirt (okay, so we call it "gardening" -- but it's still fundamentally digging in the dirt).
No smart remarks about my second childhood...
I agree entirely, especially the parent post's contention that kids aren't allowed to just go be kids anymore, without adult supervision. Omighod, what if junior fell off his bike and skinned a knee? or worse yet, made up his own games that don't profit some corporation??
As to maturity being something you gain by practice, this goes along with my contention that the most important thing you can give your kids isn't love, or security, or anything else; it's PRIVACY. Privacy implies trust; that is, acknowledgment that the child is a thinking person (not just an extension of the parent) and the faith that he can make, or at least LEARN to make intelligent decisions without mommy and daddy hanging over his shoulder 100% of the time. (Which is why I also contend that home schooling is child abuse -- the homeschooled kid is NEVER out from under parental supervision, NEVER gets to just go be a kid or learn from the supervision of OTHER adults; this ultimately is VERY stressful to the kid.)
Another point that makes me thing TFA's author doesn't know much about kids, or maturity for that matter... kids like the world set in stone and completely immutable, and to a kid, change means "throw away everything that came before, and do something completely different" (ever notice that when a kid changes hobbies, they typically THROW AWAY all artifacts from their old hobby?)
Kids also want everything to be black or white, and cannot cope with shades of grey.
The flexibility to deal with change and to comprehend "all the colours of life" is a MATURE skill, NOT a "childish" behaviour.
I've noticed the same problem of a growing immaturity level in supposedly-mature adults. I attribute it to a whole generation that has never had to interact with the Real World (note that we now have a 3rd generation away from the farm, which I think is a critical factor -- they don't even have grandparents who know about "the old ways" and doing things for themselves like it or not.) -- Very much what you're saying, in fact.
And I think the article's author has his causes backward... the "never done being educated" thing is a SYMPTOM, not a cause, and it's been there for anyone to observe as far back as universities have existed. It's simply EASIER now for those wired that way to stay in the coccoon, since non-3rd-world countries now have pretty much universal higher education.
That too. If we could recreate the fervor of the Cold War, without the military implications, the potential for growth of knowledge is huge. The Cold War was about survival in the face of a known enemy; a moon colony would be about survival in the face of a known hostile environment. In both cases, there's a good idea what might be thrown at us and how we needed to combat it, and that leads to finding solutions NOW (not piddlefucking around til the funding runs out, like seems to be the current method), which can then be expanded into useful stuff for non-colony uses -- just as a big chunk of what is now everyday-use tech started life as military research.
So.... yeah, it would probably be the best thing to happen to us in the coming century, since we'd be forced into growing our knowledge base.
Well, not exactly. There are other issues much more severe than just losing muscle mass and strength. When you lose bone density, you become very susceptible to broken bones, and a slight bump could be sufficient to shatter your spine or your hip. Effectively, you'd suffer from osteoporosis.
Also, seriously abnormal changes in the blood/bone calcium balance (which is dynamic, not static) can lead to heart failure, neurological problems, arthritis in the smaller joints, etc.
Yeah, but for every miner there are going to be half a dozen support people, doing the sort of jobs the miners can't do or don't have time to do for themselves, like maintain the biosphere, doctor their hurts, etc, etc. And those support people WON'T be doing hard physical work all day.
Someone above suggested wearing weights, possibly as part of one's everyday clothing. That's probably the simplest and most practical solution to ensure a constant level of exercise just from everyday movement; after all, it needs no more preparation than strapping on the same sort of weight belts folks use for exercise here on Earth.
Hmm. New use for chainmail shirts!
The weights are probably a better idea anyway, since that may help exert more-earthlike stresses on colonists' bones, thus more closely simulating Earth gravity. This is important, given that we already know that extended periods in low gravity do nasty things to your bone density. Not to mention that you'd be sorry if you came back to Earth and found you no longer had the physical strength just to carry around your own Earth-normal body weight.
Also, weights aren't dependent on prepared surfaces (not likely to find those at the bottom of a mine!), only on what you can wear and carry with you no matter where you go.
Not only that, but a great deal of Earth's environmental pressure comes from having too many people and not enough places to put them. Spread 'em out a bit, and there's less pressure to *use up* every square foot of habitable land.
Yeah, colonizing the other planets isn't an instant solution, but as you point out, it very likely is THE longterm solution for reducing man's pressure against the environment (always remembering that even man's activities are a "natural" environmental pressure, since we DID evolve here and aren't an introduced species).
Fact is, one big reason so many formerly "empty" areas (such as the SoCal high desert) are being ravaged by development, is because these people have nowhere else to go. There are too many people and not enough places to put them.
If we have use of multiple planets, we have more places to go, and people need not spread onto every square foot of habitable land. So the effect is to PRESERVE more of these marginally-habitable but also unique areas, like the Mojave Desert and the Grand Canyon, and even the Sea of Tranquility -- because we won't NEED to use up every open space just to lead reasonably comfortable lives.
Yes, this is oversimplified into sheer supply and demand, but ultimately that is THE market force we have to cope with, and the one thing Earth has no more supply of is land. If we want to keep supply and demand balanced, we need more supply (in this case, another planet).
[At least, so long as zero population growth is a pipe dream]
Some good discussion points made upstream, BTW.
Best in-a-nutshell all day.
Not only that, but sooner or later we're going to meet those Little Green Men From Alpha Centauri, and it would behoove us to be in a position approaching equal footing, or at least not looking like something that belongs in a zoo for quaint cultures.
The notion that other spacegoing species will be "peaceful" is sheer bunkum -- exploration is by its very nature a function of aggression (that is, the desire to spread one's own species) and as such will run roughshod over any noncompetitive species.
"...the race to the moon. That wasn't funded by capitalism... rather it was funded by a government actually interested in seeing man progress..."
Well, to be accurate, it was driven by the Cold War and the perceived need to be the first to gain a foothold on any potential military advantage.
As the Cold War petered out, so did gov't interest in space -- from a program that pioneered to another planet and planned to go beyond that, it was reduced to a program that mainly repeated earthbound experiments while in orbit.
When I was a kid, schools stopped everything else to let us watch every manned flight as it was broadcast on live TV. In fact that was the principal use made of the TVs that entered most classrooms in the early 1960s. It was new and exciting and we all wanted to be astronauts. I don't think that excitement will return until someone commits to developing a lunar colony, and starts the actual process of making it a reality that today's kids can aspire to as a career.
Number of chromosomes influences not so much whether they can interbreed (that can happen anyway if the total array isn't TOO different) but rather, whether the offspring are fertile or not. And even then it's not 100% -- frex, there have been a few fertile mules. But as a general rule, mammals (and AFAIK, birds) don't successfully crossbreed outside their own genus.
But the further you get away from mammals, the fuzzier it gets. Frex, plants do all sorts of freaky things with chromosomes (and may have one, two, three, or four sets, and maybe more for all I know), and can occasionally crossbreed within the same family, not just within the same genus as with mammals.
Dogs and wolves (and coyotes) can interbreed freely, and will do so given opportunity. The offspring are fertile without qualification.
Dogs and foxes can and (rarely) do mate, but there are seldom offspring, and to my understanding any such offspring are sterile, like a mule (offspring of a horse and a donkey).
I don't know about jackals.
That's a very good thought -- after all, if you don't want to be associated with someone in Real Life, you don't hold them hostage, do you? Of course not. You show them the door and wash your hands of them.
As to the ICANN rules, does anyone know what presently applies, if anything? if there ARE no rules about it, that needs to be fixed, or other registrars will soon discover similar tricks.
As it is... I've been a godaddy customer for a long time, but this behaviour has me rethinking that relationship.
I second that. I have a bunch of domains with Godaddy, but my more recent domains have been reg'd with 1&1.
I've had 1&1's "free preview" webhosting package for almost 3 years now, and when the freebie runs out I'll be a paying customer, because the price is right, everything works, and REAL HUMANS WITH A CLUE answer support emails. Yeah, it takes a couple days sometimes, but it's worth a little wait to get genuinely useful support.
And since 1&1 is the largest webhosting company in the world, and is always priced at the low end, yet still has Real Humans back there somewhere -- it's obvious that "a huge company with low prices" is no excuse for shitty service.
That's exactly what I meant -- IBM is a very broad company, that being the nature of "business machines". Computers and such came late to IBM's party... come to think of it, that woulda been about the time of IBM's Great Stock Price Dive. (Wish I had my IBM stock back. Oh well!)
I remember punchcards... we fed 'em to my high school's IBM-1620 by the truckload. It was a Big Upgrade when we got a paper-tape reader!
Tho I think what they have in mind is more like this:
There's a mildly silly ad that runs on a smalltime local TV station, for a local used-car dealership. The ad is of local make and isn't polished, but it's pleasantly funny, enough so to remain amusing through multiple viewings. More importantly, it's entertaining enough that when I had someone over watching TV and the ad came on, instead of going off to get a beer, I told them, "Hey, watch this funny ad!"
So even tho I'm not likely to become a customer, the advertiser got one more viewer *through* me -- simply because their ad is entertaining enough that I *wanted* to point it out to someone else. Which means one more person who knows their business exists, and for all I know may eventually become a customer.
"What about kids who post pictures of themselves doing drugs on their myspace -- why can't they get
q =online+gambling
treated as felons."
I know a kid who posted photos of himself doing something like that. Except... it wasn't real. It was staged, as a silly joke. He wasn't doing the proscribed activity at all, just faking it for the camera.
See, that's the problem with using something like Myspace as "evidence". You can't be sure it's real. The evidence is by its very nature "hearsay" and therefore should be inadmissable in court.
Tho I wouldn't put it past lawmakers to eventually legislate away the "hearsay" protection, given the current political climate -- where (as the WA law demonstrates) even Bad Thoughts can be a felony.
As to linking to google... one has to wonder about this law vs links of the form http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&
Actually, trying to prosecute a newspaper is probably the best thing that could happen for getting this new law overturned -- big newspapers generally have house lawyers whose job is to defend the paper against legal challenges of whatever sort, not to mention a handy built-in publicity mechanism. So ... bring 'em on, and let freedom of speech do its thing.