Yeah, if smoking was so dangerous, we'd be having 438,000 premature deaths a year cause by smoking, that is 1 in 5 deaths. Oh, wait, I'm told that's exactly what's happening.
Well, golly, I've got a very small chart in a spreadsheet. And you're suggesting that I could dynamically update that chart? Wow! I would never have thought of that! Truly a breakthrough that must have taken years of research and is totally worth a patent.
Would you mind pointing out the actual hypocrisy that you're perceiving? Let me see if I understand you: "1. You enjoy the benefits of oil. 2. You don't want people to die to ensure cheap access to that oil. 3. Therefore you're a hypocrite." I'm completely missing how 1 and 2 lead to 3. Isn't it possible that I want to pay more for oil? Or that I want our country to work to eliminate our dependence on oil? Or I believe that fighting for the oil is actually a terrible way to accomplish our goals? Why, if I enjoy the benefits of oil, must I accept sending our military abroad to fight for it?
Do you actually have a point, or are you just enjoying pretending to have won a point against them filthy city dwellin' lib'ruls?
In my mind there was simply no way you could hold a branch and make it do that -- the branch itself wanted to do it, and did it.
"I couldn't figure it out, so it must be magic" is pheromone that hucksters and charlatans can't resist. If you replace "magic" with "God," you end up with the Creationist/Intelligent Design movement.
It is not incredibly easy to be skeptical. We're human beings, we're fundamentally wired to respond emotionally to each other, to trust each other, to yield to peer pressure, to seek out patterns even where they don't exist. This creates a rich soil for con artists to sow their seeds. If skepticism is so incredibly easy, why do the overwhelming majority of human beings follow one of a variety of organized religions? Why do so many superstitions survive? Why do we have Enron, Bernie Madoff, the tech bubble, or the clusterfuck that is the current financial crisis?
The simple fact of the matter is that the pins on the US plug are so short that by the point it is far enough out of the socket to expose enough of the pins to touch them with your fingers, it's unplugged.
That may be the goal, but I can assure you it's possible to give yourself a shock if you're sloppy and wrap your fingers over the plug while removing it. I can say this from personal experience. The plug in question was not especially long or otherwise unusual. The socket was in an apartment build around 2000, so it should reasonably have been modern and standard.
Right. Lots of corporations are going to look at my fair use content and think, "Well, it's probably fair use, so let's put our necks on the line for user #3,734,173." Hah! No. Pull first, ask questions later. It's the rational thing for most businesses to do. Maybe you can find a company who will stand up for you, but will they serve your other needs? When the DMCA notice shows up, will they chicken out?
I like the idea of the takedown provisions, but there are two serious flaws: One there is a mandatory 10 day waiting period if the person served notice files counter-notice. Have a few day window where you want an information blackout, like sale information for Black Friday? File the notice 8 or so days before and you're pretty much guaranteed it will be offline for the window. No, upon receiving counter-notice the provider should be required to promptly restore access. The person filing counter-notice is putting themselves on the line by doing so, so there is liability.
The second fault is that bad notices are basically never prosecuted. "Oops, I made a mistake" is a valid defense, so there is lots of incentive to be sloppy. By being sloppy you can practically pull down material that you want down but legally can't insist upon, and save yourself the work of properly assessing infringement. There should be a sliding scale of fines for making a mistake. Keep it really cheap on the low end, maybe even free, but if you show a habit of filing overturned claims you should be paying your victims for their time and suffering.
Oh noes! My pixels are too big! My graphics aren't 3d enough!
I'm sure Nintendo is weeping over your suffering. Or perhaps they're weeping because they got a papercut while diving into their enormous pile of money.
A big chunk of the DS audience is outside of the 18-35 male demographic. It's the 40+ year old women and others. People whose eyes are starting to strain a bit looking at that little screen. People who don't follow the cutting edge of game technology. These are the people who complain that their new computer's text is "too small" and would rather run the computer in 800x600 instead of just using the "Large Fonts" option. (Understandably, since so much software fails when you enlarge the font size. (PS to Apple's Windows iTunes team: kiss my ass.)) These people also aren't clamoring for better 3d. When they're not using their DS, they're playing Snood, Bejeweled, and the Flash game of the week. The DS is delivering a stream of entertaining distractions for them. You're like the people looking down their nose at Flash games; while you're enjoying the high ground, millions of people are busy enjoying themselves.
The DS has been a phenomenally well managed product. It continues to move systems and games, blowing the PSP out of the water. Some people are frustrated because as "real" gamers they feel all gaming systems should target them. Sorry, if you're a "real" gamer, you're not really the target market. (What's a "real" gamer? Owning an Xbox360 or PS3 is a good clue. Thinking that "real" or "hardcore" applies to you but not other people is solid evidence. Having this discussion at all pretty much cinches it) I'm okay with not being "for" me; I enjoy my DS as something different from my more involved and expensive console and PC gaming.
You're a pretty good driver, right? You can fiddle with the radio, adjust the temperature, even safely drink coffee while driving. However, have you looked at your fellow drivers? They're idiots! You see them poking away at their Blackberry at 75 MPH, weaving back and forth while juggling things in their car, being completely oblivious to surrounding traffic as they scream at their passengers. My parents had a tree badly damaged when a neighbor hit it while fiddling with the radio while pulling out of the driveway!
Cars are dangerous. When someone fucks up property can be damaged and innocent people are sometimes injured or killed. As such, I damn well want laws to try and reign in the idiots, since sometimes it's my property or my life on the line. Going after people for reckless driving isn't nearly as good. Part of the reason people get sloppy is because the overwhelming majority of the time nothing bad happens; they don't so much as creep out of their lane. The first time anyone may discover that the idiot in the car next to you can't safely talk on the phone and drive is when they hit another car. You can bust them for reckless driving then, but I'd rather they didn't hit me in the first place. If this means I need to suffer the terrible oppression of not being able to legally talk on the phone while I drive, I'm willing to accept that. Somehow the founding fathers failed to enshrine your right to talk on the phone while driving into the constitution. It's not an inalienable right. Get the fuck over yourself and accept this amazingly minor infringement on your freedom for the betterment of society as a whole.
Oh, well, if everyone is doing it, it must be okay!
If I find a series of strange loopholes that ultimately mean that anyone with a four-digit Slashdot ID pays no income taxes, would you just shrug and tell people to quit being indignant? Wouldn't you want to publicize it so that the loopholes were closed, or the benefits extended to everyone (or if you're just a dick, yourself)? Part of the point of identifying, publicizing, and complaining about Microsoft's use of the system is to get it changed. Furthermore, there is evidence that Microsoft is actually breaking the law, that they're simultaneously claiming to be headquartered in two different states. It may not be true, it bears investigation.
It's alright, I don't really pay taxes either, I just pass it on to my employer in the form of higher salary demands.
Come to think of it, no one actually pays taxes, they just factor taxes in to their expenses and increase their prices. It's like the being your own grandfather time-travel paradox. Now that I've noticed it, the paradox will destroy the world!
If Washingtonians don't like it they can change the laws. Then watch as MS moves jobs overseas or to other states.
This small detail, repeated thousands of times across the economy, really captures how much capitalism sucks. Corporations are relatively mobile and can chase after the best financial opportunities. Individual people are not. At the very least, people have pesky things like friends and family they like to stay near. For many people moving across the state may be financially infeasible. If you need to care for children or elderly parents or a family member with a severe disability, it may be impossible to follow a job. If the job moves to another country, it may be impossible to follow that job. So we all bow down to the powerful corporations and enter a race to the bottom. Eventually corporations will simply not pay taxes at all, all while enjoy most of the benefits of "personhood."
Sadly that's probably the best we can hope for. I find it especially sad that some people are cheering this on like it's a good thing.
Besides, why do you think you should be allowed to use the software or game if you haven't paid the author what he is asking for it?
Why do you think authors should be allowed to punch customers in the nuts with impunity?
Oh you don't? Then perhaps you shouldn't put words into his mouth. He never said you should be allowed to use a software in violation of copyright. He is simply suggesting that the world is more complex than some on On-Noes-Piracy side claim.
I'm with you! How dare these people that I don't pay, who give away their creations, source included, not focus on the specific tasks I care about? What is with these layout volunteers working on whatever happens to tickle their fancy? Why aren't the paid employees all focusing on one particular project, adding manpower to a slow software project is guaranteed to make it faster! The internets are serious business, and I don't have time for this!
I saw we get together and refuse to pay another dollar for any Mozilla products until they comply with our demands!
What people seem to miss is that a Role Playing Game is not a Wargame. It may have simulation elements, but it's - at its roots - a narrative game.
RPGs are a continuum from strongly wargame (e.g. Twilight 2000, Shadowrun) to pure storytelling (e.g. The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Prime Time Adventures). For extra complexity most RPGs span a wide range of that continuum, most spanning a much wider range than the rules really support (e.g. D&D). Players of more tactical RPGs revel in careful research, planning, and execution, with the acceptable risk that dumb luck could kill everyone five minutes in leading to a profoundly crappy story. Fans of more storytelling focused RPGs are happy to sacrifice a bit of plausibility if it's what the story calls for. And it's all good. As role-playing gamers we need to be more accepting of other valid play styles; we're too small of a community to get into pointless debate over which one is correct or better. The real rule zero isn't, "The GM is always right," it's "If you're all having fun, it's right."
This means that at some point the Referee (or DM or whatever you call him/her) will want to "cheat", hopefully in favour of the players, or more specifically "in favour of a good story".
Assuming your goal is to end up with a "good" story for whatever your standard is, if the GM occasionally has to "cheat," perhaps you should be looking to a different RPG. If a bad roll will hurt your story, why are you making the roll in the first place? By and large the idea that a GM might need to fudge a result for the betterment of the story is a side effect of using the wrong rules. (Of course, the dominance of D&D and to a lesser extent other games makes it easy to end up using the wrong rules.)
If we take that the "A Quick Primer for Old School Gaming" is reasonably representative of a sizable number of OD&D fans, it is surprising how little coverage Tunnels & Trolls gets. By the standards of the "Quick Primer," T&T stomps OD&D all over, but it doesn't get the love. It makes me suspect that the old-school movement is more dominated by nostalgia than they care to admit.
(There is also really interesting work done on rules light systems since then, much of it in the "indie games" space. If you're looking for, say, compelling stories, games like Shock: Social Science Fiction, My Life With Master, and The Mountain Witch deliver with extremely light rules systems.)
I've always thought it was a shame that Rembrandt didn't have access to Photoshop; it would have enabled him to make higher quality art. And the quality of Bach's work really suffered since he lacked access to synthesizers and theremins. And I guess Casablanca is pretty good, but clearly its quality suffered for lacking the options of widescreen, color, and 3d.
"...and give Nintendo's developers the power to bring higher quality games to the platform."
Any developer that thinks the thing stopping them from delivering higher quality games is more powerful graphics hardware has no hope of delivering high quality games.
Gosh, you've got a whole anecdote of data! How could I possibly argue against that?
Maybe some people say Lynn is a traitor, or that you're lying. I won't. I'll trust that you've recounted the story reasonably accurately, and that Lynn was honest both with you and herself. People leave majors all the time because they find them boring.
The point isn't that every woman who leaves or never enters engineering or computer science is driven by sexism. Anyone arguing that is arguing nonsense; many men leave or never enter the fields. The argument is that there is a pervasive sexism that is influencing them. Some may be overt, but much is background. You're essentially arguing that women don't like engineering because they're women. Perhaps that is some portion of it, but for it to be such a radical change seems implausible. There is a strong boy-club culture. I've seen it to varying levels at every technical job I've had. It's ranged from as wildly inappropriate as jokes about hiring women to do "under the desk" work to the pervasive and easy to overlook like telling someone to "man up," "have some balls," or "don't get your panties in a bunch." It can as minor as entering an office for an interview and meeting the entirely male staff. (Mind you, that's not sexism, but that doesn't mean it won't be daunting.) Surely some women will be perfectly skilled technically, but not quite able to put up with the culture and find themselves driven out. Surely some women, when exposed to this early on will decide to not enter the field in the first place. Some will pass this message on to their daughters, perhaps in subtle ways like also being a bit strained when discussing the possibility of being an engineer.
To argue that women are massively underrepresented in engineering fields solely because women are uninterested on some biological level is to simultaneously argue that women are somehow perfectly rational beings, completely influenced by others.
As it is, I'll see your anecdote and raise you another. I know an M. She's armed with a BS in Computer Science, and works in the field. She likes the work, but she's now pursuing a degree in Law. Why? Because she's tired of the constant background level of sexism she faces working in CS. Nothing overt; no sex jokes, no offensive language. It's subtle but pervasive things. I regrettably cannot remember most of the list of things she mentioned, but the one she called out was repeatedly finding herself at the center point of a semicircle of men when at a technical conference. She found herself not wanting to attend technical conferences because she always found herself subtly being treated not as a peer, but as a potential date.
When did Slashdot's audience turn from nerds (a category of people that, on the whole, love science and the benefits that science has brought us) into science deniers willing to grant fringe arguments equal validity to the work of dedicated scientists?
But nobody complains about sexism in HHD - they just accept the fact few men are interested in that field. The same is true in engineering.
Clearly girls just don't want to be engineers. It couldn't possibly have anything to do with a long history of being male dominated with a resulting "boys club" attitude that leads to "innocent" and pervasive sexist attitudes. Such an attitude, if it existed, certainly wouldn't drive away women who would be fine engineers but have a low tolerance for such abuse (while no such matching barrier exists for men with a low tolerance for abuse). It also couldn't possible lead to encouraging a small number of genuinely sexist men to actively do so, refusing suitable female applicants. That family members and friends may damn the idea of their girls growing up to be engineers with things like, "Well, I guess you could be an engineer" has no impact at all.
Nope. Girls just don't want to be engineers. Must be something about their genetics.
(As for HHD, nursing, or whatever other field you care to drag up, feel free to swap out the appropriate genders above and pretend I said that as well.)
Nice false equivalency. First, escalating the comparison to rape to seek out an emotional response. Second, comparing hundreds of people making thousands of comments in which a subset were asshats to a situation in which one person's acceptable behavior is irrelevant to their commission of a grievous crime.
Like the idiotic dog crap brownies story, you're making an irrational, emotional argument. Your only cleverness is being emotionally manipulative to try and convince people to stop rationally thinking and agree with you blindly.
There are human beings who suck. They're racist, sexist, classist, ablist, and a host of other ists. We can work over generations to change people's minds so that people appreciate that sexism is wrong on a gut level. But we're not going to entirely wipe it out in our lifetimes. There is going to be background sexism. The goal is to get that background level low enough that we can, by and large, cope and move on. Perhaps 0.1% isn't low enough, but the point is reasonable: there is an acceptable level. There has to be, because the other option is to spend all of our resources uselessly pursuing the impossible.
I am curious about the equivalence of women developers and strawberries. I certainly wouldn't want a cake that was 50% strawberries as at some point it stops being cake. Should I infer that we want to keep women to maybe 5-10% of the development community?
First, none of the information we've been presented with suggests any complaints about unauthorized installation of a program. Second, "installation" is a fuzzy area. If I visit a web site with a Flash or Java applet and it ends up in the cache, have I installed an unauthorized program? What about some JavaScript in a web page? How about embedded in a PDF, as some PDF forms are implemented that way? You download and arguably install programs simply by browsing the web! Excel is Turing complete, even without Visual Basic; is my complex spreadsheet an installation of a program? What if I move up to actually using Visual Basic? Visual Basic in Microsoft Office has enough capability to implement a program that screen scrapes a web page and either saves the results locally or submits them to another site; would that be okay?
Companies like federal level laws because they tend to include a "Local laws are hereby no longer valid." It lets them focus on lobbying a single group of people who are frequently completely unconnected from the problems at hand. Does a Senator from Texas really know what's best for New York? Does the Representative representing Chicago know what's best for Wyoming?
I'm not prepared to press local autonomy flat to extra grease for the wheels of capitalism.
Those boobs can't even come up with consistent sentencing for crimes....
I'm very thankful we don't have consistent sentencing for crimes across states. People are going to have very different opinions about what things are crimes, and how harshly they should be punished. There are several states whose sentencing I consider grossly immoral. My solution is easy: I don't move there. Presumably people who like the sentencing guidelines and rules in those states think I come from a state with wildly inappropriate guidelines. They're free to stay the hell out of my state; we like it this way.
"My inner cynic wants to say 'tough, it's their fault if they produce some bland over-processed generic drivel,'" says the woman who wrote this bland, over-processed, generic drivel for her own essay. "Word count: 447. Couldn't have done it in less." What an amazing coincidence that her essay needed 447 out of 500 words. It didn't need 505 and she had to make it worse by cutting good stuff, and she didn't need 200 but felt obligated to pad it out. Truly amazing.
College admission essays are bullshit. Ones that ask for biography are doubly so. Like the interview question, "What is your greatest weakness?", responding with honesty is usually the wrong policy. Instead you build up a carefully honed lie designed to impress the interviewer. There is no benefit to this for anyone involved.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, if smoking was so dangerous, we'd be having 438,000 premature deaths a year cause by smoking, that is 1 in 5 deaths. Oh, wait, I'm told that's exactly what's happening.
Well, golly, I've got a very small chart in a spreadsheet. And you're suggesting that I could dynamically update that chart? Wow! I would never have thought of that! Truly a breakthrough that must have taken years of research and is totally worth a patent.
Would you mind pointing out the actual hypocrisy that you're perceiving? Let me see if I understand you: "1. You enjoy the benefits of oil. 2. You don't want people to die to ensure cheap access to that oil. 3. Therefore you're a hypocrite." I'm completely missing how 1 and 2 lead to 3. Isn't it possible that I want to pay more for oil? Or that I want our country to work to eliminate our dependence on oil? Or I believe that fighting for the oil is actually a terrible way to accomplish our goals? Why, if I enjoy the benefits of oil, must I accept sending our military abroad to fight for it?
Do you actually have a point, or are you just enjoying pretending to have won a point against them filthy city dwellin' lib'ruls?
"I couldn't figure it out, so it must be magic" is pheromone that hucksters and charlatans can't resist. If you replace "magic" with "God," you end up with the Creationist/Intelligent Design movement.
It is not incredibly easy to be skeptical. We're human beings, we're fundamentally wired to respond emotionally to each other, to trust each other, to yield to peer pressure, to seek out patterns even where they don't exist. This creates a rich soil for con artists to sow their seeds. If skepticism is so incredibly easy, why do the overwhelming majority of human beings follow one of a variety of organized religions? Why do so many superstitions survive? Why do we have Enron, Bernie Madoff, the tech bubble, or the clusterfuck that is the current financial crisis?
That may be the goal, but I can assure you it's possible to give yourself a shock if you're sloppy and wrap your fingers over the plug while removing it. I can say this from personal experience. The plug in question was not especially long or otherwise unusual. The socket was in an apartment build around 2000, so it should reasonably have been modern and standard.
Right. Lots of corporations are going to look at my fair use content and think, "Well, it's probably fair use, so let's put our necks on the line for user #3,734,173." Hah! No. Pull first, ask questions later. It's the rational thing for most businesses to do. Maybe you can find a company who will stand up for you, but will they serve your other needs? When the DMCA notice shows up, will they chicken out?
I like the idea of the takedown provisions, but there are two serious flaws: One there is a mandatory 10 day waiting period if the person served notice files counter-notice. Have a few day window where you want an information blackout, like sale information for Black Friday? File the notice 8 or so days before and you're pretty much guaranteed it will be offline for the window. No, upon receiving counter-notice the provider should be required to promptly restore access. The person filing counter-notice is putting themselves on the line by doing so, so there is liability.
The second fault is that bad notices are basically never prosecuted. "Oops, I made a mistake" is a valid defense, so there is lots of incentive to be sloppy. By being sloppy you can practically pull down material that you want down but legally can't insist upon, and save yourself the work of properly assessing infringement. There should be a sliding scale of fines for making a mistake. Keep it really cheap on the low end, maybe even free, but if you show a habit of filing overturned claims you should be paying your victims for their time and suffering.
Oh noes! My pixels are too big! My graphics aren't 3d enough!
I'm sure Nintendo is weeping over your suffering. Or perhaps they're weeping because they got a papercut while diving into their enormous pile of money.
A big chunk of the DS audience is outside of the 18-35 male demographic. It's the 40+ year old women and others. People whose eyes are starting to strain a bit looking at that little screen. People who don't follow the cutting edge of game technology. These are the people who complain that their new computer's text is "too small" and would rather run the computer in 800x600 instead of just using the "Large Fonts" option. (Understandably, since so much software fails when you enlarge the font size. (PS to Apple's Windows iTunes team: kiss my ass.)) These people also aren't clamoring for better 3d. When they're not using their DS, they're playing Snood, Bejeweled, and the Flash game of the week. The DS is delivering a stream of entertaining distractions for them. You're like the people looking down their nose at Flash games; while you're enjoying the high ground, millions of people are busy enjoying themselves.
The DS has been a phenomenally well managed product. It continues to move systems and games, blowing the PSP out of the water. Some people are frustrated because as "real" gamers they feel all gaming systems should target them. Sorry, if you're a "real" gamer, you're not really the target market. (What's a "real" gamer? Owning an Xbox360 or PS3 is a good clue. Thinking that "real" or "hardcore" applies to you but not other people is solid evidence. Having this discussion at all pretty much cinches it) I'm okay with not being "for" me; I enjoy my DS as something different from my more involved and expensive console and PC gaming.
You're a pretty good driver, right? You can fiddle with the radio, adjust the temperature, even safely drink coffee while driving. However, have you looked at your fellow drivers? They're idiots! You see them poking away at their Blackberry at 75 MPH, weaving back and forth while juggling things in their car, being completely oblivious to surrounding traffic as they scream at their passengers. My parents had a tree badly damaged when a neighbor hit it while fiddling with the radio while pulling out of the driveway!
Cars are dangerous. When someone fucks up property can be damaged and innocent people are sometimes injured or killed. As such, I damn well want laws to try and reign in the idiots, since sometimes it's my property or my life on the line. Going after people for reckless driving isn't nearly as good. Part of the reason people get sloppy is because the overwhelming majority of the time nothing bad happens; they don't so much as creep out of their lane. The first time anyone may discover that the idiot in the car next to you can't safely talk on the phone and drive is when they hit another car. You can bust them for reckless driving then, but I'd rather they didn't hit me in the first place. If this means I need to suffer the terrible oppression of not being able to legally talk on the phone while I drive, I'm willing to accept that. Somehow the founding fathers failed to enshrine your right to talk on the phone while driving into the constitution. It's not an inalienable right. Get the fuck over yourself and accept this amazingly minor infringement on your freedom for the betterment of society as a whole.
Oh, well, if everyone is doing it, it must be okay!
If I find a series of strange loopholes that ultimately mean that anyone with a four-digit Slashdot ID pays no income taxes, would you just shrug and tell people to quit being indignant? Wouldn't you want to publicize it so that the loopholes were closed, or the benefits extended to everyone (or if you're just a dick, yourself)? Part of the point of identifying, publicizing, and complaining about Microsoft's use of the system is to get it changed. Furthermore, there is evidence that Microsoft is actually breaking the law, that they're simultaneously claiming to be headquartered in two different states. It may not be true, it bears investigation.
It's alright, I don't really pay taxes either, I just pass it on to my employer in the form of higher salary demands.
Come to think of it, no one actually pays taxes, they just factor taxes in to their expenses and increase their prices. It's like the being your own grandfather time-travel paradox. Now that I've noticed it, the paradox will destroy the world!
This small detail, repeated thousands of times across the economy, really captures how much capitalism sucks. Corporations are relatively mobile and can chase after the best financial opportunities. Individual people are not. At the very least, people have pesky things like friends and family they like to stay near. For many people moving across the state may be financially infeasible. If you need to care for children or elderly parents or a family member with a severe disability, it may be impossible to follow a job. If the job moves to another country, it may be impossible to follow that job. So we all bow down to the powerful corporations and enter a race to the bottom. Eventually corporations will simply not pay taxes at all, all while enjoy most of the benefits of "personhood."
Sadly that's probably the best we can hope for. I find it especially sad that some people are cheering this on like it's a good thing.
Why do you think authors should be allowed to punch customers in the nuts with impunity?
Oh you don't? Then perhaps you shouldn't put words into his mouth. He never said you should be allowed to use a software in violation of copyright. He is simply suggesting that the world is more complex than some on On-Noes-Piracy side claim.
I'm with you! How dare these people that I don't pay, who give away their creations, source included, not focus on the specific tasks I care about? What is with these layout volunteers working on whatever happens to tickle their fancy? Why aren't the paid employees all focusing on one particular project, adding manpower to a slow software project is guaranteed to make it faster! The internets are serious business, and I don't have time for this!
I saw we get together and refuse to pay another dollar for any Mozilla products until they comply with our demands!
Preach it, brother! Gay marriage is a new right that changes what marriage means, exactly like woman's suffrage would be a new right that changes what sufferage means!
RPGs are a continuum from strongly wargame (e.g. Twilight 2000, Shadowrun) to pure storytelling (e.g. The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Prime Time Adventures). For extra complexity most RPGs span a wide range of that continuum, most spanning a much wider range than the rules really support (e.g. D&D). Players of more tactical RPGs revel in careful research, planning, and execution, with the acceptable risk that dumb luck could kill everyone five minutes in leading to a profoundly crappy story. Fans of more storytelling focused RPGs are happy to sacrifice a bit of plausibility if it's what the story calls for. And it's all good. As role-playing gamers we need to be more accepting of other valid play styles; we're too small of a community to get into pointless debate over which one is correct or better. The real rule zero isn't, "The GM is always right," it's "If you're all having fun, it's right."
Assuming your goal is to end up with a "good" story for whatever your standard is, if the GM occasionally has to "cheat," perhaps you should be looking to a different RPG. If a bad roll will hurt your story, why are you making the roll in the first place? By and large the idea that a GM might need to fudge a result for the betterment of the story is a side effect of using the wrong rules. (Of course, the dominance of D&D and to a lesser extent other games makes it easy to end up using the wrong rules.)
If we take that the "A Quick Primer for Old School Gaming" is reasonably representative of a sizable number of OD&D fans, it is surprising how little coverage Tunnels & Trolls gets. By the standards of the "Quick Primer," T&T stomps OD&D all over, but it doesn't get the love. It makes me suspect that the old-school movement is more dominated by nostalgia than they care to admit.
(There is also really interesting work done on rules light systems since then, much of it in the "indie games" space. If you're looking for, say, compelling stories, games like Shock: Social Science Fiction, My Life With Master, and The Mountain Witch deliver with extremely light rules systems.)
I've always thought it was a shame that Rembrandt didn't have access to Photoshop; it would have enabled him to make higher quality art. And the quality of Bach's work really suffered since he lacked access to synthesizers and theremins. And I guess Casablanca is pretty good, but clearly its quality suffered for lacking the options of widescreen, color, and 3d.
"...and give Nintendo's developers the power to bring higher quality games to the platform."
Any developer that thinks the thing stopping them from delivering higher quality games is more powerful graphics hardware has no hope of delivering high quality games.
Gosh, you've got a whole anecdote of data! How could I possibly argue against that?
Maybe some people say Lynn is a traitor, or that you're lying. I won't. I'll trust that you've recounted the story reasonably accurately, and that Lynn was honest both with you and herself. People leave majors all the time because they find them boring.
The point isn't that every woman who leaves or never enters engineering or computer science is driven by sexism. Anyone arguing that is arguing nonsense; many men leave or never enter the fields. The argument is that there is a pervasive sexism that is influencing them. Some may be overt, but much is background. You're essentially arguing that women don't like engineering because they're women. Perhaps that is some portion of it, but for it to be such a radical change seems implausible. There is a strong boy-club culture. I've seen it to varying levels at every technical job I've had. It's ranged from as wildly inappropriate as jokes about hiring women to do "under the desk" work to the pervasive and easy to overlook like telling someone to "man up," "have some balls," or "don't get your panties in a bunch." It can as minor as entering an office for an interview and meeting the entirely male staff. (Mind you, that's not sexism, but that doesn't mean it won't be daunting.) Surely some women will be perfectly skilled technically, but not quite able to put up with the culture and find themselves driven out. Surely some women, when exposed to this early on will decide to not enter the field in the first place. Some will pass this message on to their daughters, perhaps in subtle ways like also being a bit strained when discussing the possibility of being an engineer.
To argue that women are massively underrepresented in engineering fields solely because women are uninterested on some biological level is to simultaneously argue that women are somehow perfectly rational beings, completely influenced by others.
As it is, I'll see your anecdote and raise you another. I know an M. She's armed with a BS in Computer Science, and works in the field. She likes the work, but she's now pursuing a degree in Law. Why? Because she's tired of the constant background level of sexism she faces working in CS. Nothing overt; no sex jokes, no offensive language. It's subtle but pervasive things. I regrettably cannot remember most of the list of things she mentioned, but the one she called out was repeatedly finding herself at the center point of a semicircle of men when at a technical conference. She found herself not wanting to attend technical conferences because she always found herself subtly being treated not as a peer, but as a potential date.
When did Slashdot's audience turn from nerds (a category of people that, on the whole, love science and the benefits that science has brought us) into science deniers willing to grant fringe arguments equal validity to the work of dedicated scientists?
Clearly girls just don't want to be engineers. It couldn't possibly have anything to do with a long history of being male dominated with a resulting "boys club" attitude that leads to "innocent" and pervasive sexist attitudes. Such an attitude, if it existed, certainly wouldn't drive away women who would be fine engineers but have a low tolerance for such abuse (while no such matching barrier exists for men with a low tolerance for abuse). It also couldn't possible lead to encouraging a small number of genuinely sexist men to actively do so, refusing suitable female applicants. That family members and friends may damn the idea of their girls growing up to be engineers with things like, "Well, I guess you could be an engineer" has no impact at all.
Nope. Girls just don't want to be engineers. Must be something about their genetics.
(As for HHD, nursing, or whatever other field you care to drag up, feel free to swap out the appropriate genders above and pretend I said that as well.)
Nice false equivalency. First, escalating the comparison to rape to seek out an emotional response. Second, comparing hundreds of people making thousands of comments in which a subset were asshats to a situation in which one person's acceptable behavior is irrelevant to their commission of a grievous crime.
Like the idiotic dog crap brownies story, you're making an irrational, emotional argument. Your only cleverness is being emotionally manipulative to try and convince people to stop rationally thinking and agree with you blindly.
There are human beings who suck. They're racist, sexist, classist, ablist, and a host of other ists. We can work over generations to change people's minds so that people appreciate that sexism is wrong on a gut level. But we're not going to entirely wipe it out in our lifetimes. There is going to be background sexism. The goal is to get that background level low enough that we can, by and large, cope and move on. Perhaps 0.1% isn't low enough, but the point is reasonable: there is an acceptable level. There has to be, because the other option is to spend all of our resources uselessly pursuing the impossible.
Me, I'm open to about 0.0002% of my cake being feces. It's a common FDA standard for "excreta" in a variety of foodstuffs.
I am curious about the equivalence of women developers and strawberries. I certainly wouldn't want a cake that was 50% strawberries as at some point it stops being cake. Should I infer that we want to keep women to maybe 5-10% of the development community?
First, none of the information we've been presented with suggests any complaints about unauthorized installation of a program. Second, "installation" is a fuzzy area. If I visit a web site with a Flash or Java applet and it ends up in the cache, have I installed an unauthorized program? What about some JavaScript in a web page? How about embedded in a PDF, as some PDF forms are implemented that way? You download and arguably install programs simply by browsing the web! Excel is Turing complete, even without Visual Basic; is my complex spreadsheet an installation of a program? What if I move up to actually using Visual Basic? Visual Basic in Microsoft Office has enough capability to implement a program that screen scrapes a web page and either saves the results locally or submits them to another site; would that be okay?
If only there was some way for states to get together to agree on uniform rules. Oh wait, there is: the Uniform Commercial Code and similar agreements liek the Uniform Trade Secrets Act.
Companies like federal level laws because they tend to include a "Local laws are hereby no longer valid." It lets them focus on lobbying a single group of people who are frequently completely unconnected from the problems at hand. Does a Senator from Texas really know what's best for New York? Does the Representative representing Chicago know what's best for Wyoming?
I'm not prepared to press local autonomy flat to extra grease for the wheels of capitalism.
I'm very thankful we don't have consistent sentencing for crimes across states. People are going to have very different opinions about what things are crimes, and how harshly they should be punished. There are several states whose sentencing I consider grossly immoral. My solution is easy: I don't move there. Presumably people who like the sentencing guidelines and rules in those states think I come from a state with wildly inappropriate guidelines. They're free to stay the hell out of my state; we like it this way.
"My inner cynic wants to say 'tough, it's their fault if they produce some bland over-processed generic drivel,'" says the woman who wrote this bland, over-processed, generic drivel for her own essay. "Word count: 447. Couldn't have done it in less." What an amazing coincidence that her essay needed 447 out of 500 words. It didn't need 505 and she had to make it worse by cutting good stuff, and she didn't need 200 but felt obligated to pad it out. Truly amazing.
College admission essays are bullshit. Ones that ask for biography are doubly so. Like the interview question, "What is your greatest weakness?", responding with honesty is usually the wrong policy. Instead you build up a carefully honed lie designed to impress the interviewer. There is no benefit to this for anyone involved.