Saddam is evil, ignore the fact that the US put him in power to begin with
The US did not put Saddam in power; if you read history, he saw an opportunity to grab power and took it. Saddam is a lot more of a self-made man than most people give him credit for. The US supported him because they needed some power in the area, and he was good at holding onto power (= keeping a stable government.)
The number of people who could live in Earth orbit (including the moon) in the near future is rather limited; I'd worry more about extra growth on Earth. The whole system needs reworking to handle sites on Mars and elsewhere, which have several minute long latencies; quite likely there will be seperate address systems on each side and a limited bridge, rather than a complete redesign of Internet systems. Or maybe there will be a complete redesign of systems, and IPv6 will be replaced in the process, but not due to a lack of addresses.
You really don't need that many bits to address every atom in the universe. If humans start to need that many address, then something's gone wrong in the allocation or stupid in the usage. If a devices plans to use lots and lots of address, you spray the developers with the water bottle or hit them with the rolled up newspaper; they'll find a better design then.
I am willing to pay a little more for things that I need if my money is going to "stay local". For this reason, I don't shop at Walmart and, instead, give business to the local "mom and pop" concern.
Local "mom and pop" concern? How many of those do you really see? Albertsons and IGA (on the grocery side), Hastings (on the book side) and Best Buy and Circuit City (on the DVD/electronics side) are hardly more local than Wal-Mart is. I've never seen half-decent selections of those things at a local store.
Two western countries that do not have freedom of speech are France and Germany and yet the Internet seems to be doing just fine in both countries.
Freedom of speech is not black and white. No country provides absolute freedom of speech. France and Germany have fairly strong guarentees of freedom of speech enshrined in law, and pointing the primary exception to freedom of speech in those countries hardly changes that.
You would never have heard of Julia without Mandelbrot (unless you have an advanced degree in mathematics; I'm working on my masters and his name has never come up in class.) Julia sets were considered exceptions that the advanced mathematician had to know about to prevent them from screwing up his proof. Mandelbrots are interesting subjects of study on their own self, so interesting that the general public knows about them and they inspire future mathematicians. Without computers, there would be no kids exploring fractals.
But it could be done, there is always a way without a computer.
We didn't really discover fractals until we had computers. To solve a 100x50 grid of complex numbers, squaring them for a two hundred iterations each is a million multiplications. And that would get you the outer impression of the Mandelbrot, but if one didn't know of fractals, one might even miss that it was self-affine at that level. To get that point would be superhuman; to investigate further would defintely need a computer.
What is consciousness? Where is consciousness? [...]
You have a lot of (non-rhetorical) questions; why don't you have any answers? What's interesting about a lot of questions without answers? If I have an answer to a mathematical or scientific question, I can get other people to check my answer and if they disagree, give me logical reasons why. How do I know if I have the correct answer to one of your questions, if there is no consensus on the simpliest of the questions that have been studied for millenia?
To answer your earlier question, imagine an enlightened being takes up medicine or even psychology. If enlighenment is in fact real, and I'll always take the only realistic stance -- the agnostic stance -- imagine how much more effective in understanding the basic things that pain us, injure us, please us and upset us he'll be able to apply to his discipline.
But he can't really help the physical parts. (Which do exist, and if you don't believe it you can try going without food or drink for a few weeks.) So perhaps scientists do understand something better than your "enlightened".
And frankly, you make a lot of assumptions about enlightenment. If we live in a Lovecraftean world, then the enlightened would be less able to deal with reality then normal people. All the "enlightened" people in that case would just be those that created a useful set of lies.
Science is interesting because there is a real world, and we mostly agree on what it's like. Handwave death all you want, but people generally agree on when people are dead, and that they don't want to die and that they don't want their family to die. Scientists help them. Your people don't.
People have been asking your questions since the beginning of time, and so far they haven't agreed on answers. I'd say your questions are less interesting, then.
Why not cite his own explaination of his homophobia?
The repeated use of the phrase "homo-facists" proves that (a) he's not the tolerant, mild homophobe he claims to be, and (b) he's entirely right about the extremes not liking the middle. It's much easier to make his attack against "homo-facists" then tolerant, mild, homosexuals.
Writing skills can also vary greatly -- and you can see people rather proudly showing their inability to form a sentence or to write any words longer than two syllables ("omg lol u r teh sux!").
That's a completely grammatical sentence in the dialect it is spoken. All it shows is that the author wasn't trying to communicate in standard formal English. Linguist studies have shown that poorly educated low-class people tend to have a near-perfect command of their language, even if that language is not the standard formal dialect. Language is an instinct; everyone without brain damage speaks their native language grammatically.
Due to their highly honed awareness, they are able to acertain more in a ten minute period about the laws of life than ten scientists could over the course of a hundred years.
Then why didn't they cure polio or smallpox? Why didn't they invent some way to keep juvenile diabetics alive? Why don't they invent someway to cure them now? If they know so much about the laws of life, why don't they use them for the good of humanity?
This is personal; I've had a close friend ripped from the world at a young age by a cruel disease. Scientists did every damn thing they could to keep here alive, and failed. Where the fuck were your "higher order human beings" then?
The French did not exact any price from America for this assistance, they did it all on the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity.
The French did it to exact payment from Britian for the French-Indian war and various other disputes over the years. The principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity were held by the opponents of the rulers of France who cut off the ruler's heads a few years later.
Outside the United States there is a universal cry of vive la France! Stand up for the universal principles of liberty, equality and fraternity.
You mean the people who armed the cruel dictator Hussein? France was the third largest seller of weapons to Iraq that enabled it to attack Iranians, Kurds and Kwaitis. (After Russian and China; the US, who gets blamed for arming Hussein, is quite a way's down the list. And the fact that Hussein was a cruel dictator is a fact, and is independent of how you feel about the war in Iraq.)
I'm also quite sure that the Algerians are crying "Viva la France!" How about the rest of France's colonial empire?
It's easy to make the issues black and white, but that's absurd. It only encourages the pro-America chauvanists to start ranting about how America is completely evil and France is great.
Re:Okay, I need to come out and say this..
on
Bad Science Awards
·
· Score: 1
He feels wonderful, has very few symptoms, and happens to feel his health is greater than before he found out.
So he stopped smoking and drinking, got a healthy diet, a daily multivitamin, started exercising, and got a positive outlook on life. That's on the recommended list for any disease. The drugs, even if they had no pharmacutical value, helped via the placebo effect. And sometimes stuff happens. Medicine is not an exact science, and diseases like AIDS and cancer can sometimes spontaneously regress, for one reason or another.
you'll start seeing nutrition and natural remedies coming back a lot in this drug society..
Whether they come back or not has little to do with whether they work. I don't know of a doctor who would not prescribe three healthy meals a day, exercise, and a positive outlook on life for all their patients. As for natural remedies...
MGN3 Immunofin Colostrum CCA30 Chlorophyll and a potent multivitamin
hardly classify as natural remedies. You wouldn't take the pill, if it was part of a normal human diet (i.e. natural for humans to eat.) And all those have been processed and extracted. It's all the same chemical at the end, except for the fact that non-FDA regulated companies have little influence to keep impurities low and keep the amount of active ingredient stable.
I have a Master's in physics. I try to be careful to apply the scientific method when dealing with unknown subjects. Frankly, homeopathy works. Before you criticize, I am as baffled by it as you are. There is no reason it should work, but it does. And yes, there are studies. But because it is 'kooky', it is rejected out-of-hand.
The person who successfully followed up on the physics of it would get a Nobel prize. Why not you?
If you're talking about something that blatently violates physical law as we know it, it takes some serious proof that it works. We're talking about violating stuff that's been known for a century and been tested in such dramatic tests as nuclear weapons and came through with flying colors.
Homeopathic medicine, on the other hand, is good for stuff that placebo medicines are good for: stuff that isn't really serious and goes away anyway. If it turned out that homeopathic medicines cured diabetes or cancer, then people would pay attention. Homeopathic medicine needs large rigorous studies to contradict everything we know about modern chemistry, not small studies that turn up nothing and poorly handled studies that turn up results easily explainable by the placebo effect.
Science is simply a self-consistent closed system that models the real world.
If you have a self-consistent closed system that models the real world exactly, how can it not be true? There is a spoon, and if science can predict what's going to happen to that spoon correctly, then science is true.
But when we have the state forcing science education combined with a common assumption that the real world is the scientific model, we have a problem.
Even in your theory, the problem is what the students bring to the table. And who are you to compel that they have a different philosophical model of the world? You would demand that they not be educated because their education happens to reinforce their philosophy which you disagree with?
It's entirely possible that science is entirely incorrect, even though it describes how things work correctly.
If it describes how things work correctly, then it is correct, ipso facto.
Newton described gravity as having a mysterious "gravitational force" towards objects. We know that it is totally wrong since it was accurate only most of the time.
We know that it's partially correct, because its answers are usually close to the real ones. It's only useful in that it's partially correct.
In any case, the scientific model is the precise equations, not the "mysterious 'gravitational force'" words we use to describe it.
I tell them, "The models used in physics are *useful*. Are they true? I have no idea. And I don't care."
They aren't useful, unless you accept that they are, in some sense, true. If they aren't true, and that ball we just dropped wasn't real, then the models are useless and possibly even harmful.
It's a copout; science is only useful because it's true according to some model of reality. If you're working from a different model of reality, it isn't useful. It wouldn't be such a hot topic if it was true in so many models of reality, and hence the points where it disagrees with that model calls that model into question.
Where is that? Every public university I know of permits non-student use of the library; out of the three I know, NWOSU, UNLV, OSU, and OU, OSU will give you a limited library card if you live in the area, UNLV also demands a credit card number, OU wants $70 a year, and NWOSU only gives them to students; but that's to carry books out of the library. All of them permit non-students to use the library.
DP probably isn't threatened either - they just shift focus to books that are not in the Harvard collection to avoid duplication of effort.
Are they really going to provide proofread texts? A novel might only take a couple hours to process, but math is going to take hand markup, and some of the more complex critical editions are a bear. Even at only 2 hours a book (and that's not including scanning time), 4 million volumes adds up to 8 million man-hours or a million man-days. At seven bucks an hour that's 56 million dollars. I expect we'll get scans and OCR, but no hand work; there will still be a place for DP. In fact, we'll be better off, with a huge source of scans to work from.
You just described my entire point, yet missed it completely!
You may have intended to write that blogs aren't news, but that's not what you wrote.
If you blog, good for you. If you read blogs because, for some reason, you find them entertaining, good for you. I don't grudge you either of those points.
Originally... But the vast majority of it? Absolute, useless drivel. Angsty teens writing about how unfair the world seems, or bad poetry, or banal commentary on meaningless daily minutiae, or even all of the above. I'd rather watch Fox than such crap.
[...] Whatever. Just play the game and STFU.
You mean, good for you, in shut the fuck up sense?
NOT news. Drivel. No matter how you spin it, someone talking about their daily events (short of near-miraculous luck) simply does not matter. One more boring person living through a typical day in their meaningless life.
And you spend your typical days in your meaningless life here. How pathetic. It may not be news, but the people at the other end are real people living out lives that may be very important to them and those around them.
Your arrogant condesention is evil; the attitude that they're merely boring people with meaningless lives drives cruel dictators and savage serial killers and contemptous assholes, none of whom ever make the world the live in a better place.
I was asking about the distinction between being screwed by luck where none of your moves matter and never getting to play.
Well there is one difference - time wasted.
I don't quite understand why that's a difference.
I can live with a little bit of luck in a game, but 100% luck makes the game a total waste of my time since I have no input. Fluxx, from the rules, felt like it would be that way, and the example case where I tried playing it confirmed, and exceeded my expectations that it would be all luck and no player input. What's the point in that?
Ah! We get to the heart of the issue. There is strategy involved, about when to play which card. But little of it's long-term, and it's easy to win or lose on pure luck. The cards are colorful (in a literary sense) and there is enough strategy to keep it interesting for some people. But, yes, it's very much a luck driven game, where an completely unforeseen victory can happen when someone draws the wrong card is forced to play it. That reason for not wanting to play Fluxx, I understand completely
Don't shift the subject. "Knocked out early" is not the same thing as "knocked out before participating".
You weren't "knocked out before participating". The game was over before you participated. You weren't sitting to the side; at any point you could have been called on to play.
So in a night's game playing, there were a couple minutes where a game was going on that you weren't participating. The point was, that in many games, you can end up sitting for hours not participating. The metagame is more important than the game.
I don't see a distinction. That's the problem. I wasn't really participaying in a game if I never had a say in the setup, and I never really had a turn.
That wasn't the distinction I was asking about. I was asking about the distinction between being screwed by luck where none of your moves matter and never getting to play. If Luck isn't a lady in one hand of spades or hearts or poker, then you forget and go on to the next hand. If one game of Fluxx you don't get to participate, you toss the cards in and go on to the next. It's not like you wasted a lot of time.
BTW, I've never seen this happen in the couple dozen games of Fluxx I've played. Playing a game once doesn't really give you a feel, especially if you get screwed by Luck in that game.
You got screwed by the cards; it can happen in any card game.
False. Re-read the post. My cards were irrelevant. I never had a turn.
I didn't say your cards, I said the cards.
In fact in MOST games, card or otherwise it is 100% impossible to lose before your first opportunity to act as a player of some sort.
It could happen in Uno or Magic: the Gathering; would you refuse to play those games because of that?
In fact, Fluxx is better than many games in this sense. There's many games--Monopoly, Nuclear Proliferation, multi-player Magic: the Gathering, Rail Baron, etc.--where you can get knocked out of the game early on, and in long games you may be sitting on your hands for hours watching other people play. If a Fluxx game continues for long enough, you'll get to play.
I don't entirely understand your feelings here. In many short games, you can quickly lose and there was nothing you could do about it. So you play another round or two. In a lot of games, you can have bad luck and never get to do anything that matters. I don't understand the distinction you feel between that, and not playing at all.
It's other industrialized nations with mandatory universal public schooling that are beating the States,
The UK and Germany do not have mandatory universal schooling in the same sense that the US does. The UK and Germany triage a good percentage of their students at 8th grade, sending them to vocational schools. If they are comparing the German Gymansium to the American high school, that's apples to oranges.
Slashdot Mirror
Saddam is evil, ignore the fact that the US put him in power to begin with
The US did not put Saddam in power; if you read history, he saw an opportunity to grab power and took it. Saddam is a lot more of a self-made man than most people give him credit for. The US supported him because they needed some power in the area, and he was good at holding onto power (= keeping a stable government.)
What happens when we move beyond the earth?
The number of people who could live in Earth orbit (including the moon) in the near future is rather limited; I'd worry more about extra growth on Earth. The whole system needs reworking to handle sites on Mars and elsewhere, which have several minute long latencies; quite likely there will be seperate address systems on each side and a limited bridge, rather than a complete redesign of Internet systems. Or maybe there will be a complete redesign of systems, and IPv6 will be replaced in the process, but not due to a lack of addresses.
You really don't need that many bits to address every atom in the universe. If humans start to need that many address, then something's gone wrong in the allocation or stupid in the usage. If a devices plans to use lots and lots of address, you spray the developers with the water bottle or hit them with the rolled up newspaper; they'll find a better design then.
I am willing to pay a little more for things that I need if my money is going to "stay local". For this reason, I don't shop at Walmart and, instead, give business to the local "mom and pop" concern.
Local "mom and pop" concern? How many of those do you really see? Albertsons and IGA (on the grocery side), Hastings (on the book side) and Best Buy and Circuit City (on the DVD/electronics side) are hardly more local than Wal-Mart is. I've never seen half-decent selections of those things at a local store.
Two western countries that do not have freedom of speech are France and Germany and yet the Internet seems to be doing just fine in both countries.
Freedom of speech is not black and white. No country provides absolute freedom of speech. France and Germany have fairly strong guarentees of freedom of speech enshrined in law, and pointing the primary exception to freedom of speech in those countries hardly changes that.
You would never have heard of Julia without Mandelbrot (unless you have an advanced degree in mathematics; I'm working on my masters and his name has never come up in class.) Julia sets were considered exceptions that the advanced mathematician had to know about to prevent them from screwing up his proof. Mandelbrots are interesting subjects of study on their own self, so interesting that the general public knows about them and they inspire future mathematicians. Without computers, there would be no kids exploring fractals.
But it could be done, there is always a way without a computer.
We didn't really discover fractals until we had computers. To solve a 100x50 grid of complex numbers, squaring them for a two hundred iterations each is a million multiplications. And that would get you the outer impression of the Mandelbrot, but if one didn't know of fractals, one might even miss that it was self-affine at that level. To get that point would be superhuman; to investigate further would defintely need a computer.
What is consciousness? Where is consciousness? [...]
You have a lot of (non-rhetorical) questions; why don't you have any answers? What's interesting about a lot of questions without answers? If I have an answer to a mathematical or scientific question, I can get other people to check my answer and if they disagree, give me logical reasons why. How do I know if I have the correct answer to one of your questions, if there is no consensus on the simpliest of the questions that have been studied for millenia?
To answer your earlier question, imagine an enlightened being takes up medicine or even psychology. If enlighenment is in fact real, and I'll always take the only realistic stance -- the agnostic stance -- imagine how much more effective in understanding the basic things that pain us, injure us, please us and upset us he'll be able to apply to his discipline.
But he can't really help the physical parts. (Which do exist, and if you don't believe it you can try going without food or drink for a few weeks.) So perhaps scientists do understand something better than your "enlightened".
And frankly, you make a lot of assumptions about enlightenment. If we live in a Lovecraftean world, then the enlightened would be less able to deal with reality then normal people. All the "enlightened" people in that case would just be those that created a useful set of lies.
Science is interesting because there is a real world, and we mostly agree on what it's like. Handwave death all you want, but people generally agree on when people are dead, and that they don't want to die and that they don't want their family to die. Scientists help them. Your people don't.
People have been asking your questions since the beginning of time, and so far they haven't agreed on answers. I'd say your questions are less interesting, then.
Why not cite his own explaination of his homophobia?
The repeated use of the phrase "homo-facists" proves that (a) he's not the tolerant, mild homophobe he claims to be, and (b) he's entirely right about the extremes not liking the middle. It's much easier to make his attack against "homo-facists" then tolerant, mild, homosexuals.
Writing skills can also vary greatly -- and you can see people rather proudly showing their inability to form a sentence or to write any words longer than two syllables ("omg lol u r teh sux!").
That's a completely grammatical sentence in the dialect it is spoken. All it shows is that the author wasn't trying to communicate in standard formal English. Linguist studies have shown that poorly educated low-class people tend to have a near-perfect command of their language, even if that language is not the standard formal dialect. Language is an instinct; everyone without brain damage speaks their native language grammatically.
Due to their highly honed awareness, they are able to acertain more in a ten minute period about the laws of life than ten scientists could over the course of a hundred years.
Then why didn't they cure polio or smallpox? Why didn't they invent some way to keep juvenile diabetics alive? Why don't they invent someway to cure them now? If they know so much about the laws of life, why don't they use them for the good of humanity?
This is personal; I've had a close friend ripped from the world at a young age by a cruel disease. Scientists did every damn thing they could to keep here alive, and failed. Where the fuck were your "higher order human beings" then?
The French did not exact any price from America for this assistance, they did it all on the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity.
The French did it to exact payment from Britian for the French-Indian war and various other disputes over the years. The principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity were held by the opponents of the rulers of France who cut off the ruler's heads a few years later.
Outside the United States there is a universal cry of vive la France! Stand up for the universal principles of liberty, equality and fraternity.
You mean the people who armed the cruel dictator Hussein? France was the third largest seller of weapons to Iraq that enabled it to attack Iranians, Kurds and Kwaitis. (After Russian and China; the US, who gets blamed for arming Hussein, is quite a way's down the list. And the fact that Hussein was a cruel dictator is a fact, and is independent of how you feel about the war in Iraq.)
I'm also quite sure that the Algerians are crying "Viva la France!" How about the rest of France's colonial empire?
It's easy to make the issues black and white, but that's absurd. It only encourages the pro-America chauvanists to start ranting about how America is completely evil and France is great.
He feels wonderful, has very few symptoms, and happens to feel his health is greater than before he found out.
So he stopped smoking and drinking, got a healthy diet, a daily multivitamin, started exercising, and got a positive outlook on life. That's on the recommended list for any disease. The drugs, even if they had no pharmacutical value, helped via the placebo effect. And sometimes stuff happens. Medicine is not an exact science, and diseases like AIDS and cancer can sometimes spontaneously regress, for one reason or another.
you'll start seeing nutrition and natural remedies coming back a lot in this drug society..
Whether they come back or not has little to do with whether they work. I don't know of a doctor who would not prescribe three healthy meals a day, exercise, and a positive outlook on life for all their patients. As for natural remedies...
MGN3
Immunofin
Colostrum
CCA30
Chlorophyll
and
a potent multivitamin
hardly classify as natural remedies. You wouldn't take the pill, if it was part of a normal human diet (i.e. natural for humans to eat.) And all those have been processed and extracted. It's all the same chemical at the end, except for the fact that non-FDA regulated companies have little influence to keep impurities low and keep the amount of active ingredient stable.
I have a Master's in physics. I try to be careful to apply the scientific method when dealing with unknown subjects. Frankly, homeopathy works. Before you criticize, I am as baffled by it as you are. There is no reason it should work, but it does. And yes, there are studies. But because it is 'kooky', it is rejected out-of-hand.
The person who successfully followed up on the physics of it would get a Nobel prize. Why not you?
If you're talking about something that blatently violates physical law as we know it, it takes some serious proof that it works. We're talking about violating stuff that's been known for a century and been tested in such dramatic tests as nuclear weapons and came through with flying colors.
Homeopathic medicine, on the other hand, is good for stuff that placebo medicines are good for: stuff that isn't really serious and goes away anyway. If it turned out that homeopathic medicines cured diabetes or cancer, then people would pay attention. Homeopathic medicine needs large rigorous studies to contradict everything we know about modern chemistry, not small studies that turn up nothing and poorly handled studies that turn up results easily explainable by the placebo effect.
Science is simply a self-consistent closed system that models the real world.
If you have a self-consistent closed system that models the real world exactly, how can it not be true? There is a spoon, and if science can predict what's going to happen to that spoon correctly, then science is true.
But when we have the state forcing science education combined with a common assumption that the real world is the scientific model, we have a problem.
Even in your theory, the problem is what the students bring to the table. And who are you to compel that they have a different philosophical model of the world? You would demand that they not be educated because their education happens to reinforce their philosophy which you disagree with?
It's entirely possible that science is entirely incorrect, even though it describes how things work correctly.
If it describes how things work correctly, then it is correct, ipso facto.
Newton described gravity as having a mysterious "gravitational force" towards objects. We know that it is totally wrong since it was accurate only most of the time.
We know that it's partially correct, because its answers are usually close to the real ones. It's only useful in that it's partially correct.
In any case, the scientific model is the precise equations, not the "mysterious 'gravitational force'" words we use to describe it.
I tell them, "The models used in physics are *useful*. Are they true? I have no idea. And I don't care."
They aren't useful, unless you accept that they are, in some sense, true. If they aren't true, and that ball we just dropped wasn't real, then the models are useless and possibly even harmful.
It's a copout; science is only useful because it's true according to some model of reality. If you're working from a different model of reality, it isn't useful. It wouldn't be such a hot topic if it was true in so many models of reality, and hence the points where it disagrees with that model calls that model into question.
Where is that? Every public university I know of permits non-student use of the library; out of the three I know, NWOSU, UNLV, OSU, and OU, OSU will give you a limited library card if you live in the area, UNLV also demands a credit card number, OU wants $70 a year, and NWOSU only gives them to students; but that's to carry books out of the library. All of them permit non-students to use the library.
DP probably isn't threatened either - they just shift focus to books that are not in the Harvard collection to avoid duplication of effort.
Are they really going to provide proofread texts? A novel might only take a couple hours to process, but math is going to take hand markup, and some of the more complex critical editions are a bear. Even at only 2 hours a book (and that's not including scanning time), 4 million volumes adds up to 8 million man-hours or a million man-days. At seven bucks an hour that's 56 million dollars. I expect we'll get scans and OCR, but no hand work; there will still be a place for DP. In fact, we'll be better off, with a huge source of scans to work from.
You just described my entire point, yet missed it completely!
You may have intended to write that blogs aren't news, but that's not what you wrote.
If you blog, good for you. If you read blogs because, for some reason, you find them entertaining, good for you. I don't grudge you either of those points.
Originally...
But the vast majority of it? Absolute, useless drivel. Angsty teens writing about how unfair the world seems, or bad poetry, or banal commentary on meaningless daily minutiae, or even all of the above. I'd rather watch Fox than such crap.
[...] Whatever. Just play the game and STFU.
You mean, good for you, in shut the fuck up sense?
NOT news. Drivel. No matter how you spin it, someone talking about their daily events (short of near-miraculous luck) simply does not matter. One more boring person living through a typical day in their meaningless life.
And you spend your typical days in your meaningless life here. How pathetic. It may not be news, but the people at the other end are real people living out lives that may be very important to them and those around them.
Your arrogant condesention is evil; the attitude that they're merely boring people with meaningless lives drives cruel dictators and savage serial killers and contemptous assholes, none of whom ever make the world the live in a better place.
I was asking about the distinction between being screwed by luck where none of your moves matter and never getting to play.
Well there is one difference - time wasted.
I don't quite understand why that's a difference.
I can live with a little bit of luck in a game, but 100% luck makes the game a total waste of my time since I have no input. Fluxx, from the rules, felt like it would be that way, and the example case where I tried playing it confirmed, and exceeded my expectations that it would be all luck and no player input. What's the point in that?
Ah! We get to the heart of the issue. There is strategy involved, about when to play which card. But little of it's long-term, and it's easy to win or lose on pure luck. The cards are colorful (in a literary sense) and there is enough strategy to keep it interesting for some people. But, yes, it's very much a luck driven game, where an completely unforeseen victory can happen when someone draws the wrong card is forced to play it. That reason for not wanting to play Fluxx, I understand completely
Don't shift the subject. "Knocked out early" is not the same thing as "knocked out before participating".
You weren't "knocked out before participating". The game was over before you participated. You weren't sitting to the side; at any point you could have been called on to play.
So in a night's game playing, there were a couple minutes where a game was going on that you weren't participating. The point was, that in many games, you can end up sitting for hours not participating. The metagame is more important than the game.
I don't see a distinction. That's the problem. I wasn't really participaying in a game if I never had a say in the setup, and I never really had a turn.
That wasn't the distinction I was asking about. I was asking about the distinction between being screwed by luck where none of your moves matter and never getting to play. If Luck isn't a lady in one hand of spades or hearts or poker, then you forget and go on to the next hand. If one game of Fluxx you don't get to participate, you toss the cards in and go on to the next. It's not like you wasted a lot of time.
BTW, I've never seen this happen in the couple dozen games of Fluxx I've played. Playing a game once doesn't really give you a feel, especially if you get screwed by Luck in that game.
You got screwed by the cards; it can happen in any card game.
False. Re-read the post. My cards were irrelevant. I never had a turn.
I didn't say your cards, I said the cards.
In fact in MOST games, card or otherwise it is 100% impossible to lose before your first opportunity to act as a player of some sort.
It could happen in Uno or Magic: the Gathering; would you refuse to play those games because of that?
In fact, Fluxx is better than many games in this sense. There's many games--Monopoly, Nuclear Proliferation, multi-player Magic: the Gathering, Rail Baron, etc.--where you can get knocked out of the game early on, and in long games you may be sitting on your hands for hours watching other people play. If a Fluxx game continues for long enough, you'll get to play.
I don't entirely understand your feelings here. In many short games, you can quickly lose and there was nothing you could do about it. So you play another round or two. In a lot of games, you can have bad luck and never get to do anything that matters. I don't understand the distinction you feel between that, and not playing at all.
It's other industrialized nations with mandatory universal public schooling that are beating the States,
The UK and Germany do not have mandatory universal schooling in the same sense that the US does. The UK and Germany triage a good percentage of their students at 8th grade, sending them to vocational schools. If they are comparing the German Gymansium to the American high school, that's apples to oranges.