If Ryoko (my Pentium II) ever comes up with something worth patenting, she knows I'm just going to lavish more money and attention on her anyway (as if I don't already spend most of my disposable income on her;), so maybe she won't mind me stealing it. They'll probably be software and upgrades in it for her, so it's a win/win situation. I love my computer.... (scary, huh?)
The difference between computers and humans is that you can't get inside a human head (yet) and force him/her to think the way you want to. Heck, this is the entire plot of the System Shock computer game series, SHODAN is the computer network on Citadel Station, and basically hums along doing its job and basically does it's work for the benefit of the humans on the station. Then an unscrupulous corporate type decides to take its ethical constraints off-line, and it decides that it is a Goddess (and that it can dispense with the human race in favore of more efficient life forms created by itself.) Actually, the whole "ethical constraints" thing originated in Isaac Asimov, but all that means is that even before computers were anywhere near being intelligent, people were thinking about how to keep them as loyal slaves. Other places to look are the El Hazard series by Pioneer Animation (only the original, not its sequels), or 2001:A Space Odyssey. So the big question here is, if you create a computer that is programmed to enjoy doing its work, is it unethical to prevent it from dreaming of a better life? I mean, it would sort of be like if someone re-programmed me so I lusted to dig mine shafts instead of after women. I know that I may have loftier goals in life than chasing women, but my internal wiring always brings me back to that, regardless.
What armies does the WTO have? What intelligence organizations? How could they stand up against the US if the US told them to go to Hell? Well, I suppose it's possible they have a method of starting the last war by getting the other nations to back them... but now we are getting into Apocalyptic visions that sound like the flip side of what the fundementalists are always claiming about the WTO being "the Beast" of the Book of Revelations. All the countries with nuclear weapons are soveriegn, all the ones without are in the spheres of influence of those countries, and nothing is likely to change that unless WTO gets its own missiles. The Soviet Union only collapsed because the one group they couldn't control with their nukes were their own citizens.
In Thailand, they'll sell you MS-Word for ten bucks, the same goes for all othe MS-Office products, the same goes for lots of other stuff. My friends who are Thai think its wrong, but they told me how easy it is to get pirate goods in Thailand. Part of the reason is that the police in Thailand are very corrupt. I wouldn't be surprised if they had a cut of the pirate software business. Now, if anyone were to put tariffs on software being exported to Thailand, it would effect the legitimate business (I don't know if there is much, but I imagine that there is some) but wouldn't effect the pirate business at all. I'm not sure what the purpose of tariffs are, actually. If they are just a form of tax, then I guess they're just a way for the government to make money. On the other hand if they are supposed to keep an outside country's good from becoming the dominant product, that would certainly not be good for MS.
Well, actually, the craze originated as a video game (which I hear is pretty decent, though I haven't played it), so it's not much different than anything else. I.e. create something popular, it becomes marketable, you create all kinds of tacky add on merchandise to profit off of it. After all, trading Pokemon in the GameBoy only requires trading data (after buying the first cartridge)... the card game is based on Magic:The Gathering and is something else...
But you know, the Phantom Menace was the god of hype, the ultimate hype movie. I never saw a movie with such hype before... it was incredibly horrifying, especially after seeing the film. I mean, Toy Story 2 had some hype, I even read about it in a Time magazine article about Pixar... but the Phantom Menace was supposed to be "the ultimate movie" and was hyped by people who weren't even on Lucas' payroll. (A better comparison would be to Pokemon, the phenomenon, than to Toy Story 2.) I quite enjoyed Sleepy Hollow, myself, it's like an old Hammer film, it even has Christopher Lee in it, briefly. (offtopic plug:)
I had a professor tell me, a few years ago, that there was a survey that found that the number one reason why people go to the malls is entertainment. I know that if I go to the Mall with my Mom, or some of my friends, while they spend a lot of money in the mall they spend even more time in there, dragging me from store to store while they try on outfits. It's boring for me, but for them its a fun way to kill an afternoon.
If a store has an online presence, and they don't advertise it, there is always the possibility that someone will come into their store, find stuff they like while window shopping and go to someone else's site to buy them when they decide they really did want them after all at 3:00 AM.
The kids responsible for the worst of the killing sprees, Jonesboro, Columbine, and others were proficient in the use of fire arms. This is an especially relevant point when you think about these situations even more carefully, the "kids" who shot up Columbine were actually young men of 17 or 18 years of age (one of them had recently been rejected by the US marines because of his psychological problems.) I therefore don't see Columbine as any different than the string of shooting sprees over this summer by adult men who were influenced by some of the same things as the Columbine murderers. (I'm thinking of that day trader who shot up his place of business and a guy in Hawaii who shot up a Xerox office.)
Jonesboro is more complicated, because the killers were so young. I do indeed think that the Jonesboro killers were too young to fully understand the consequences of their actions, I think all kids of that age are. However, the fact is that firearms should be kept away from children in this age group. I don't say that because most will go on killing sprees, a more common danger will be the one who tries to twirl the gun like a movie cowboy and ends up shooting himself. If the kids in the Jonesboro murders hadn't been incredible proficient at all aspects of firearms and their effective use, the massacre wouldn't have happened. It actually amazes me that those kids were as calculating and efficient as they were, to pick off school children from a safe distance using a high powered rifle with a telescopic site. I would expect a kid who was influenced by the idea he was going to play a real life video game to run into the school, guns blazing... the two at Jonesboro were just trying to be efficient murderers, not recreate Doom. It's like that movie, The Bad Seed brought to life.
When I was a kid, I had an active imagination. I never slept with the lights out because I was scared of the dark. I loved my Atari 800 and the games for it, like the original Castle Wolfenstien.
Sometimes I would even imagine being able to get back at people who picked on me at school, (I think every kid does.) But that was as far as it went (well, that and a few fist fights, I'll admit). I never took my Dad's police revolver (I never even imagined doing it. I mostly imagined things like robot armies and aliens.:) to school. I was afraid to even touch it, because my parents had instilled a healthy fear of the weapon in me. I guess what I'm trying to say is, if you give a kid a gun somebody may die, no matter what the other details of his life are.
Well, good informative or entertaining articles are a start. I got a Linux magazine recently (Maximum Linux) it came with a copy of Mandrake on a CD-Rom (cool! I have a _slow_ Internet connection, to slow for downloading.), and I liked the articles. If all the computer magazines disappear tommorrow, I'll know how to make money... by publishing a computer magazine. I wouldn't expect _boring_ computer magazines to sell, though... maybe the venerable PC Computing needs better writers?
..that the people behind the religious fanaticism which is the real Millenium problem, don't catch wind of the whole "You fools, it's 2001 that's the new Millenium." Because they'll think, "Oh, goody another year to consolidate our power." Remember, Left Behind was a best seller before NBC announced its contribution to uninformed Apocalyptic hysteria. Besides which, didn't Pope Gregory (who I assume most non-Catholic Christian Apocalyptic Cultists would consider a tool of the Anti-Christ) eliminate a certain amount of time from the calender? Maybe it's the Eastern Orthodox new year that's going to be the Day of Judgement....
What's your opinion of the US Government death squads sent in to silence the researchers and guards at the Black Mesa Research facility in the game Half-Life? (The bad guys throughout most of the game.) Do you think if the members of the American media were capable of really understanding games that they would see Half-Life as evil, dangerously subversive, etc. for suggesting that the US government would be willing to use its armed forces against its citizens if it was necessary to keep its secrets? Oh... and what's your take on the mod, Opposing Force in which you play a member of the death squad? (Although as I understand it, Opposing Force has a complicated story which is more than just "Cool, I get to be one of the bad guys"... though that, of course, is what I thought when I first saw it...)
CDTV and the prospect of multimedia were revelations for [Nolan] Bushnell [creator of Pong, founder of Atari], who had founded the first wave of the video game business with the belief that it would lead to new ways of learning. He said he had felt disappointed with his progeny--- "not quite the guilt that Robert Oppenheimer felt, but guilt nonetheless... Video games have not fulfilled the promise that I envisioned," he said, "The repetitive, mindless violence that you see on video games right now is not anything I want to be associated with. I don't know how to put it more kindly. I think it's s---." But CDTV, he added, "will finally interweave education and fun."--Game Over, David Sheff, pg. 375
Remind me if I ever invent anything remotely influential that I shouldn't turn on it and say how evil it is. (I mean, unless I invent a Death Ray or something.) I think it makes the person look really, really silly. In this case, it strikes me as two things:
1. Sour Grapes: The person complaining: "I was supposed to be in charge of video games/tv/etc. forever and ever. How come other people are in charge of them now instead of me?" 2. Knocking a competing product: When the corporate multimedia (ugh!) craze hit, it wasn't lost on me that a lot of heavy weights in the video game industry were out of touch and hated the media they were fortunate enough to be in control of. There was a theory in Next Generation magazine that these people created "multimedia entertainments" (which they didn't want people to think of as games, Heaven forfend!) so they could be a poor man's Hollywood producer and get backrubs from starlets and all the other perks of being a Hollywood type.
The multimedia phase, which was mostly bad movies with limited interactivity, was touted as "edutainment." I.e. productive entertainment. It ruined the SegaCD, we got too few games like Lunar:Eternal Blue and too many like Night Trap (starring the late Dana Plato) and Make your own Music Video. But it was like the people who ran the industry were hypnotized, "We'll just keep making these horrible movies packaged as games and people will learn to like them." This philosophy lasted all the way up to the introduction of the Saturn! Of course, these people all eventually got their come-uppance, but we were all very lucky that they never regained absolute control over the industry like they had at the time of the first video game crash, B.N. (before Nintendo). Why is it that anti-entertainment productivity nonsense like this always leads to horror? Could it be that people with limited imaginations envy the imaginative among us, and seek to destroy them by belittling their work?
Thanks, but I've already got $100 bucks. I earned it at my job, where I do productive work for 8 hours a day. I think I'll donate $50 to the Libertarian party (to prevent people like you from making their "suggestions" into laws) and spend the other half on Half-Life: Opposing Force. People who read books are wasting time + resources (trees and massive rooms to store their books)=money. If you aren't interested enough in books to be doing something useful with them, then go up on someone's roof and clean the rotting leaves out of their gutters for a buck, or play a shareware computer game on a legacy computer not connected to a network (there are some fun ones made with the text based Adventure Game Toolkit). Of course unlike you and Mr. Gradgrind (um.. Charles Dickens' Hard Times in case you find fiction to be a waste of time) I find the call of "productivity, always productivity" to be the creed of tyrants. So tonight, I think I'll read some De Camp or Heinlein, who always understood blustering fools fairly well.... Oh! And the most productive way to spend time is to help people without expecting compensation for it, like when I sold candy for charity this summer... but then, that's probably lost on someone as socially myopic as you.
AOL is like Nintendo. Right now, AOL is saying "Oh, how horrible. These violent games are harming our children. Oh, for shame... the horror, the horror." If their rating or banning of games leads people to jump ship from their accursed network in large numbers, the way Nintendo's censorship of the original Mortal Kombat (a shallow game, but sort of funny in a Pythonesque way, I thought at the time. Of course, I've only played it one/two times, tops...) caused people to jump ship to Sega, they will give the customers what they want. Hence, just as Mortal Kombat II was just as gruesome on Nintendo as it was on Sega, AOL won't let everybody quit them so they can play Half-Life over on Microsoft Network. As to the sims issue: Just about any useful knowledge can be applied to war in some way. Sims are used by police and the military (my Dad participated in a sim which was overseen by some CIA types in case the sixties riots turned into a full scale revolution), which was run between two rooms using an intercom system, a map and a board with markers representing police, rioters and civilians. Of course, my Dad was a police captain in a large Northeastern city, so it may have been useful for him... he had to run the police all the time. (Though it was only a 2 day seminar... in CA of all places, at least he got a trip out of it). I may like sims (well, I like some though not many) but they aren't very useful to me because I have no troops:) However, it must be said that all this stuff about games being "killing simulators" started because of a man Lt. Col. David Grossman, whose wacky ideas involve American soldiers being brainwashed into zombie killing machines by eeevil games like Doom, but its OK because the troops are controlled by their superior officers. (An idea I find insulting to the soldiers of the US armed forces, both in its lack of truthfulness and the malevolence of its content if such an absurd idea were true.) However, when the evil profiteers at id (or wherever, they like to pick on id in particular) release these games on civilian children, it turns them into mindless uncontrolled killing machines. Unfortunately, the ravings of this lunatic have been picked up with an uncritical eye by much of the press, but we need to consider the original source. The article on sims? Typical of a myopic political point of view that probably doesn't understand that a true lover of sims might enjoy playing as Vietnam during the Vietnam war, not because of sympathy for the Viet Cong but for the intellectual exercise of winning a war with a presumably weaker force that was fighting on its own turf. I think most sim gamers are interested in both sides of a conflict from a tactical perspective, and leave Gung Ho jingoism for when they play FPS's like Duke Nukem 3D. If this is left out of sim games, then maybe it is to prevent an outcry from ignorant US journalists who will say, "Look, it's a game where you get to play as Nazi Germany. This is a pro-Nazi game!" (or, if you prefer "Oh look, you get to play as Vietnam, they're trying to brainwash our kids into being godless commies!"), rather than a reflection of the desires of either the sim makers or their customers. Of course, sim games had their origins on sandtables and tabletops, and required two players (or creative solitare rules) so in the original "Battle of the Bulge" type games, one player had to be the Nazi's and one the Allies. I would imagine that for online sims, the same thing would have to be true. Any online sim gamers with comments? (My experience of war sims is limited to games like Shining Force... I'm afraid;)
Some Christians, though, aren't motivated by fear.
They're motivated by evil.
Often they act as leaders of the other Christians you are talking about, the ones motivated by fear.
I see quite a few "Christians" like that around, and they'll continue to act this way as long as the majority of people don't say, "I don't care what you claim to believe, you are an evil monster by any objective measure."
Anyone who wants a specific example? Rudy Lopez, a street preacher at the University of South Florida who spends his time calling passing women whores if their skirts are too short (or if they appear attractive to him in a way that upsets his sexual maladjustment.). He's been the center of a little First Amendment ruckus... apparently he got upset that his right to intimidate and harrass campus women on their way to class was being violated. Of course, I'm sure he'd love to censor South Park.
Please don't judge us all by what the monsters say. I feel bad for you, and for her, and I think there have been a whole lot of stupid, insensitive and evil comments made about this. Unfortunately, that's the way some people are in this modern world, too many in my opinion. This is just a particularly egregious example of people looking at people as data and not as people. Anyway, I hope that you'll be able to deal with this, and God... I wish there weren't people like this around...
I admire Bill Gates in some ways. I just hate the products he makes, but he's a worthy adversary. It's one of these situations where I can see an elder statesmen in an opposing party, I disagree with his views and his ruthlessness in pushing them, but I don't hate him. In Bill's case, he pushes his software in anti-competitive ways using unethical tactics and also pushes the idea that computers should be "idiot boxes" where the user has very little control of the OS. But again, I don't hate him, I don't even particularly dislike him. Anyone who calls themselves a Christian, though, and delights in human death and suffering is not a Christian at all. But they have much more to fear from God than from me. It's hard not to feel anger, even hatred for people who espouse sick and evil beliefs and claim the support of a just God. However, I know it is wrong to hate even people like that, which is why wrath is one of the seven deadly sins. "Woe unto thee, scribes and pharisees. For thou art like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness."--Jesus Christ, the Bible, King James' Edition
There is something wierd about anyone claiming to be a serious computer user (i.e. someone who claims to love computers) who doesn't play games. I mean, I always think of people who can't play games as people who couldn't use a computer very well. So... it strikes me that you may be a "frivilous database administrator" because you see computers purely in terms of work and never something that can be used for fun. Of course, the other possibility is that your whole life is your work and you never do anything for fun at all... in which case you are probably a rather dull person. Here's a tip for you: no one has ever overclocked their computer so they could run Oracle at lightening speeds.... Incidentally, the Anonymous Coward who posted the original post I'm replying to, "Serious Gamer," (not visible unless your viewing at level 0 or lower) posted a "flame bait" post, moderators advised to moderate him/her down.
Where have all the retail quality text-adventures gone? Remember when the biggest thrill in life was reading your copy of the New Zork Times (until those fascists at the New York Times made them change it to the Status Line) to see what the latest from Infocom was? Of course, my all time favorite text adventure was Enchanter, but it's a close cousin of Zork. Oh well, I guess I'll have to write my own... using TADS! (The Text Adventure Development System) It's really cool!
Probably the best way to get Project Gutenburg recognition would be to have classics professors mention it in their classes. Hmm, next time I see my cousin ( a Greek and Latin professor ) I'll suggest the idea to him.
As a pro-space travel kind of guy, I'm a little disturbed by the thought that I see in this article: that the Space Age is passe. Hey! In my opinion, the Space Age hasn't happened yet! We didn't look at the telegraph and call the Old West the Information Age, did we? We humans have taken our first few faltering steps into space. We haven't gotten very far, and we've gone in space ships that haven't been very good or reliable (it amazes me that we haven't had more disasters with them.) The Space Age was not the 60's, even though the people in the 60's thought it was. (I'm sure some people in the 1860's thought the telegraph was the be all and end all of information technology.) The Space Age will be when the average person can travel from one planet to the other. I'm hoping for an Interstellar Age (I'm not sure it is possible), but I think we will eventually have a Planetary Colonization Age. I hope so, at least. The reason why the Space Age, the real one, hasn't happened yet is that human technology hasn't reached the point where this kind of travel is easily within reach. Eventually, we'll get there, and if it is to be sooner rather than later we have to hear less discoraging talk about the Space Age as a "dead vision of the future."
It's just part of the dance, or rather the soap opera "Bill Gates vs. Justice." Will Bill Gates manage to use his vast fortune and influence in American society to defeat his enemies? Since Al Gore isn't likely to come out and say, "Mr. Gates, I'll do everything in my power to make sure that Microsoft regains its pre-eminance as America's premier software monopoly", or its opposite in front of cameras and mikes, it's what's going on in back rooms and behind closed doors that matters. Is George Bush or Al Gore cutting a secret deal with Bill Gates that will allow a harsh ruling to be no more that a slap on the rist penalty? That's something we may never know, but I'd bet Gates is trying to cut such a deal. Bill Gates went into this trial as someone who didn't expect to lose, hence his open contempt for the legal proceedings (i.e. statements such as "Microsoft shouldn't be judged by people who didn't pass High School physics," etc.). So, it's possible there has been some influence peddling going on, but chances are, we'll never know about it. In fact, Gates reminds me of John Gotti in this one way, they were both men who seemed to think they were invulnerable to court proceedings. Gotti thought he could buy off any court, maybe Gates believes the same thing.
The Republicans are currently in charge of both houses of Congress and have much influence on the Supreme Court. They threw away their ideas of reduced government and decided to rather go for being morality police (after they got rid of the libertarian thorn in their side, Newt Gingrich.) A new presidential administration would mean Republicans, but new people accross the board will mean Democrats in most of these positions. Of course as far as I'm concerned Republicans and Democrats are wings of the same party (I point out I was a loyal Republican voter until the post-Columbine assault on pop culture showed me what their real agenda was) so I'm a Libertarian now. The Republicans say they are for reduced government, but their actions are otherwise. Add film, tv, and gaming to the list of unconstitutionally targetted industries (again, the need to "protect our children"), and recognize that in this case it is big government Republicans holding the razor. How are they going to create these new enforcement bodies? By raising taxes of course, that's the only way government pays for new programs. If you value Liberty, don't vote for Republicans or Democrats.
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If Ryoko (my Pentium II) ever comes up with something worth patenting, she knows I'm just going to lavish more money and attention on her anyway (as if I don't already spend most of my disposable income on her ;), so maybe she won't mind me stealing it. They'll probably be software and upgrades in it for her, so it's a win/win situation.
I love my computer.... (scary, huh?)
The difference between computers and humans is that you can't get inside a human head (yet) and force him/her to think the way you want to. Heck, this is the entire plot of the System Shock computer game series, SHODAN is the computer network on Citadel Station, and basically hums along doing its job and basically does it's work for the benefit of the humans on the station. Then an unscrupulous corporate type decides to take its ethical constraints off-line, and it decides that it is a Goddess (and that it can dispense with the human race in favore of more efficient life forms created by itself.) Actually, the whole "ethical constraints" thing originated in Isaac Asimov, but all that means is that even before computers were anywhere near being intelligent, people were thinking about how to keep them as loyal slaves. Other places to look are the El Hazard series by Pioneer Animation (only the original, not its sequels), or 2001:A Space Odyssey.
So the big question here is, if you create a computer that is programmed to enjoy doing its work, is it unethical to prevent it from dreaming of a better life? I mean, it would sort of be like if someone re-programmed me so I lusted to dig mine shafts instead of after women. I know that I may have loftier goals in life than chasing women, but my internal wiring always brings me back to that, regardless.
What armies does the WTO have? What intelligence organizations? How could they stand up against the US if the US told them to go to Hell?
Well, I suppose it's possible they have a method of starting the last war by getting the other nations to back them... but now we are getting into Apocalyptic visions that sound like the flip side of what the fundementalists are always claiming about the WTO being "the Beast" of the Book of Revelations. All the countries with nuclear weapons are soveriegn, all the ones without are in the spheres of influence of those countries, and nothing is likely to change that unless WTO gets its own missiles. The Soviet Union only collapsed because the one group they couldn't control with their nukes were their own citizens.
In Thailand, they'll sell you MS-Word for ten bucks, the same goes for all othe MS-Office products, the same goes for lots of other stuff. My friends who are Thai think its wrong, but they told me how easy it is to get pirate goods in Thailand. Part of the reason is that the police in Thailand are very corrupt. I wouldn't be surprised if they had a cut of the pirate software business. Now, if anyone were to put tariffs on software being exported to Thailand, it would effect the legitimate business (I don't know if there is much, but I imagine that there is some) but wouldn't effect the pirate business at all. I'm not sure what the purpose of tariffs are, actually. If they are just a form of tax, then I guess they're just a way for the government to make money. On the other hand if they are supposed to keep an outside country's good from becoming the dominant product, that would certainly not be good for MS.
On the other hand, if you are a person who enjoys seeing adult heads, there is always Sleepy Hollow. (I couldn't resist....)
Well, actually, the craze originated as a video game (which I hear is pretty decent, though I haven't played it), so it's not much different than anything else. I.e. create something popular, it becomes marketable, you create all kinds of tacky add on merchandise to profit off of it. After all, trading Pokemon in the GameBoy only requires trading data (after buying the first cartridge)... the card game is based on Magic:The Gathering and is something else...
But you know, the Phantom Menace was the god of hype, the ultimate hype movie. I never saw a movie with such hype before... it was incredibly horrifying, especially after seeing the film. I mean, Toy Story 2 had some hype, I even read about it in a Time magazine article about Pixar... but the Phantom Menace was supposed to be "the ultimate movie" and was hyped by people who weren't even on Lucas' payroll. (A better comparison would be to Pokemon, the phenomenon, than to Toy Story 2.) :)
I quite enjoyed Sleepy Hollow, myself, it's like an old Hammer film, it even has Christopher Lee in it, briefly. (offtopic plug
If a store has an online presence, and they don't advertise it, there is always the possibility that someone will come into their store, find stuff they like while window shopping and go to someone else's site to buy them when they decide they really did want them after all at 3:00 AM.
The kids responsible for the worst of the killing sprees, Jonesboro, Columbine, and others were proficient in the use of fire arms. This is an especially relevant point when you think about these situations even more carefully, the "kids" who shot up Columbine were actually young men of 17 or 18 years of age (one of them had recently been rejected by the US marines because of his psychological problems.) I therefore don't see Columbine as any different than the string of shooting sprees over this summer by adult men who were influenced by some of the same things as the Columbine murderers. (I'm thinking of that day trader who shot up his place of business and a guy in Hawaii who shot up a Xerox office.)
Jonesboro is more complicated, because the killers were so young. I do indeed think that the Jonesboro killers were too young to fully understand the consequences of their actions, I think all kids of that age are. However, the fact is that firearms should be kept away from children in this age group. I don't say that because most will go on killing sprees, a more common danger will be the one who tries to twirl the gun like a movie cowboy and ends up shooting himself. If the kids in the Jonesboro murders hadn't been incredible proficient at all aspects of firearms and their effective use, the massacre wouldn't have happened. It actually amazes me that those kids were as calculating and efficient as they were, to pick off school children from a safe distance using a high powered rifle with a telescopic site. I would expect a kid who was influenced by the idea he was going to play a real life video game to run into the school, guns blazing... the two at Jonesboro were just trying to be efficient murderers, not recreate Doom. It's like that movie, The Bad Seed brought to life.
When I was a kid, I had an active imagination. I never slept with the lights out because I was scared of the dark. I loved my Atari 800 and the games for it, like the original Castle Wolfenstien.
Sometimes I would even imagine being able to get back at people who picked on me at school, (I think every kid does.) But that was as far as it went (well, that and a few fist fights, I'll admit). I never took my Dad's police revolver (I never even imagined doing it. I mostly imagined things like robot armies and aliens. :) to school. I was afraid to even touch it, because my parents had instilled a healthy fear of the weapon in me. I guess what I'm trying to say is, if you give a kid a gun somebody may die, no matter what the other details of his life are.
Well, good informative or entertaining articles are a start. I got a Linux magazine recently (Maximum Linux) it came with a copy of Mandrake on a CD-Rom (cool! I have a _slow_ Internet connection, to slow for downloading.), and I liked the articles.
If all the computer magazines disappear tommorrow, I'll know how to make money... by publishing a computer magazine. I wouldn't expect _boring_ computer magazines to sell, though... maybe the venerable PC Computing needs better writers?
..that the people behind the religious fanaticism which is the real Millenium problem, don't catch wind of the whole "You fools, it's 2001 that's the new Millenium." Because they'll think, "Oh, goody another year to consolidate our power." Remember, Left Behind was a best seller before NBC announced its contribution to uninformed Apocalyptic hysteria.
Besides which, didn't Pope Gregory (who I assume most non-Catholic Christian Apocalyptic Cultists would consider a tool of the Anti-Christ) eliminate a certain amount of time from the calender? Maybe it's the Eastern Orthodox new year that's going to be the Day of Judgement....
When I heard Reiner was going to be in Y2K:the Movie, I told him, "I'm laughing already." But then he replied, grimly, "It's not a comedy"
What's your opinion of the US Government death squads sent in to silence the researchers and guards at the Black Mesa Research facility in the game Half-Life? (The bad guys throughout most of the game.) Do you think if the members of the American media were capable of really understanding games that they would see Half-Life as evil, dangerously subversive, etc. for suggesting that the US government would be willing to use its armed forces against its citizens if it was necessary to keep its secrets? Oh... and what's your take on the mod, Opposing Force in which you play a member of the death squad? (Although as I understand it, Opposing Force has a complicated story which is more than just "Cool, I get to be one of the bad guys"... though that, of course, is what I thought when I first saw it...)
Remind me if I ever invent anything remotely influential that I shouldn't turn on it and say how evil it is. (I mean, unless I invent a Death Ray or something.) I think it makes the person look really, really silly. In this case, it strikes me as two things:
1. Sour Grapes: The person complaining: "I was supposed to be in charge of video games/tv/etc. forever and ever. How come other people are in charge of them now instead of me?"
2. Knocking a competing product: When the corporate multimedia (ugh!) craze hit, it wasn't lost on me that a lot of heavy weights in the video game industry were out of touch and hated the media they were fortunate enough to be in control of. There was a theory in Next Generation magazine that these people created "multimedia entertainments" (which they didn't want people to think of as games, Heaven forfend!) so they could be a poor man's Hollywood producer and get backrubs from starlets and all the other perks of being a Hollywood type.
The multimedia phase, which was mostly bad movies with limited interactivity, was touted as "edutainment." I.e. productive entertainment. It ruined the SegaCD, we got too few games like Lunar:Eternal Blue and too many like Night Trap (starring the late Dana Plato) and Make your own Music Video. But it was like the people who ran the industry were hypnotized, "We'll just keep making these horrible movies packaged as games and people will learn to like them." This philosophy lasted all the way up to the introduction of the Saturn!
Of course, these people all eventually got their come-uppance, but we were all very lucky that they never regained absolute control over the industry like they had at the time of the first video game crash, B.N. (before Nintendo).
Why is it that anti-entertainment productivity nonsense like this always leads to horror? Could it be that people with limited imaginations envy the imaginative among us, and seek to destroy them by belittling their work?
Thanks, but I've already got $100 bucks. I earned it at my job, where I do productive work for 8 hours a day. I think I'll donate $50 to the Libertarian party (to prevent people like you from making their "suggestions" into laws) and spend the other half on Half-Life: Opposing Force.
People who read books are wasting time + resources (trees and massive rooms to store their books)=money. If you aren't interested enough in books to be doing something useful with them, then go up on someone's roof and clean the rotting leaves out of their gutters for a buck, or play a shareware computer game on a legacy computer not connected to a network (there are some fun ones made with the text based Adventure Game Toolkit).
Of course unlike you and Mr. Gradgrind (um.. Charles Dickens' Hard Times in case you find fiction to be a waste of time) I find the call of "productivity, always productivity" to be the creed of tyrants. So tonight, I think I'll read some De Camp or Heinlein, who always understood blustering fools fairly well....
Oh! And the most productive way to spend time is to help people without expecting compensation for it, like when I sold candy for charity this summer... but then, that's probably lost on someone as socially myopic as you.
AOL is like Nintendo. Right now, AOL is saying "Oh, how horrible. These violent games are harming our children. Oh, for shame... the horror, the horror." If their rating or banning of games leads people to jump ship from their accursed network in large numbers, the way Nintendo's censorship of the original Mortal Kombat (a shallow game, but sort of funny in a Pythonesque way, I thought at the time. Of course, I've only played it one/two times, tops...) caused people to jump ship to Sega, they will give the customers what they want. Hence, just as Mortal Kombat II was just as gruesome on Nintendo as it was on Sega, AOL won't let everybody quit them so they can play Half-Life over on Microsoft Network. :) ;)
As to the sims issue: Just about any useful knowledge can be applied to war in some way. Sims are used by police and the military (my Dad participated in a sim which was overseen by some CIA types in case the sixties riots turned into a full scale revolution), which was run between two rooms using an intercom system, a map and a board with markers representing police, rioters and civilians. Of course, my Dad was a police captain in a large Northeastern city, so it may have been useful for him... he had to run the police all the time. (Though it was only a 2 day seminar... in CA of all places, at least he got a trip out of it). I may like sims (well, I like some though not many) but they aren't very useful to me because I have no troops
However, it must be said that all this stuff about games being "killing simulators" started because of a man Lt. Col. David Grossman, whose wacky ideas involve American soldiers being brainwashed into zombie killing machines by eeevil games like Doom, but its OK because the troops are controlled by their superior officers. (An idea I find insulting to the soldiers of the US armed forces, both in its lack of truthfulness and the malevolence of its content if such an absurd idea were true.) However, when the evil profiteers at id (or wherever, they like to pick on id in particular) release these games on civilian children, it turns them into mindless uncontrolled killing machines. Unfortunately, the ravings of this lunatic have been picked up with an uncritical eye by much of the press, but we need to consider the original source.
The article on sims? Typical of a myopic political point of view that probably doesn't understand that a true lover of sims might enjoy playing as Vietnam during the Vietnam war, not because of sympathy for the Viet Cong but for the intellectual exercise of winning a war with a presumably weaker force that was fighting on its own turf. I think most sim gamers are interested in both sides of a conflict from a tactical perspective, and leave Gung Ho jingoism for when they play FPS's like Duke Nukem 3D. If this is left out of sim games, then maybe it is to prevent an outcry from ignorant US journalists who will say, "Look, it's a game where you get to play as Nazi Germany. This is a pro-Nazi game!" (or, if you prefer "Oh look, you get to play as Vietnam, they're trying to brainwash our kids into being godless commies!"), rather than a reflection of the desires of either the sim makers or their customers. Of course, sim games had their origins on sandtables and tabletops, and required two players (or creative solitare rules) so in the original "Battle of the Bulge" type games, one player had to be the Nazi's and one the Allies. I would imagine that for online sims, the same thing would have to be true. Any online sim gamers with comments? (My experience of war sims is limited to games like Shining Force... I'm afraid
They're motivated by evil.
Often they act as leaders of the other Christians you are talking about, the ones motivated by fear.
I see quite a few "Christians" like that around, and they'll continue to act this way as long as the majority of people don't say, "I don't care what you claim to believe, you are an evil monster by any objective measure."
Anyone who wants a specific example? Rudy Lopez, a street preacher at the University of South Florida who spends his time calling passing women whores if their skirts are too short (or if they appear attractive to him in a way that upsets his sexual maladjustment.). He's been the center of a little First Amendment ruckus... apparently he got upset that his right to intimidate and harrass campus women on their way to class was being violated. Of course, I'm sure he'd love to censor South Park.
Please don't judge us all by what the monsters say. I feel bad for you, and for her, and I think there have been a whole lot of stupid, insensitive and evil comments made about this. Unfortunately, that's the way some people are in this modern world, too many in my opinion. This is just a particularly egregious example of people looking at people as data and not as people. Anyway, I hope that you'll be able to deal with this, and God... I wish there weren't people like this around...
I admire Bill Gates in some ways. I just hate the products he makes, but he's a worthy adversary. It's one of these situations where I can see an elder statesmen in an opposing party, I disagree with his views and his ruthlessness in pushing them, but I don't hate him. In Bill's case, he pushes his software in anti-competitive ways using unethical tactics and also pushes the idea that computers should be "idiot boxes" where the user has very little control of the OS. But again, I don't hate him, I don't even particularly dislike him.
Anyone who calls themselves a Christian, though, and delights in human death and suffering is not a Christian at all. But they have much more to fear from God than from me. It's hard not to feel anger, even hatred for people who espouse sick and evil beliefs and claim the support of a just God. However, I know it is wrong to hate even people like that, which is why wrath is one of the seven deadly sins.
"Woe unto thee, scribes and pharisees. For thou art like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness."--Jesus Christ, the Bible, King James' Edition
There is something wierd about anyone claiming to be a serious computer user (i.e. someone who claims to love computers) who doesn't play games. I mean, I always think of people who can't play games as people who couldn't use a computer very well. So... it strikes me that you may be a "frivilous database administrator" because you see computers purely in terms of work and never something that can be used for fun. Of course, the other possibility is that your whole life is your work and you never do anything for fun at all... in which case you are probably a rather dull person.
Here's a tip for you: no one has ever overclocked their computer so they could run Oracle at lightening speeds....
Incidentally, the Anonymous Coward who posted the original post I'm replying to, "Serious Gamer," (not visible unless your viewing at level 0 or lower) posted a "flame bait" post, moderators advised to moderate him/her down.
Where have all the retail quality text-adventures gone? Remember when the biggest thrill in life was reading your copy of the New Zork Times (until those fascists at the New York Times made them change it to the Status Line) to see what the latest from Infocom was? Of course, my all time favorite text adventure was Enchanter, but it's a close cousin of Zork. Oh well, I guess I'll have to write my own... using TADS! (The Text Adventure Development System) It's really cool!
Probably the best way to get Project Gutenburg recognition would be to have classics professors mention it in their classes. Hmm, next time I see my cousin ( a Greek and Latin professor ) I'll suggest the idea to him.
As a pro-space travel kind of guy, I'm a little disturbed by the thought that I see in this article: that the Space Age is passe. Hey! In my opinion, the Space Age hasn't happened yet! We didn't look at the telegraph and call the Old West the Information Age, did we? We humans have taken our first few faltering steps into space. We haven't gotten very far, and we've gone in space ships that haven't been very good or reliable (it amazes me that we haven't had more disasters with them.) The Space Age was not the 60's, even though the people in the 60's thought it was. (I'm sure some people in the 1860's thought the telegraph was the be all and end all of information technology.) The Space Age will be when the average person can travel from one planet to the other. I'm hoping for an Interstellar Age (I'm not sure it is possible), but I think we will eventually have a Planetary Colonization Age. I hope so, at least.
The reason why the Space Age, the real one, hasn't happened yet is that human technology hasn't reached the point where this kind of travel is easily within reach. Eventually, we'll get there, and if it is to be sooner rather than later we have to hear less discoraging talk about the Space Age as a "dead vision of the future."
It's just part of the dance, or rather the soap opera "Bill Gates vs. Justice." Will Bill Gates manage to use his vast fortune and influence in American society to defeat his enemies? Since Al Gore isn't likely to come out and say, "Mr. Gates, I'll do everything in my power to make sure that Microsoft regains its pre-eminance as America's premier software monopoly", or its opposite in front of cameras and mikes, it's what's going on in back rooms and behind closed doors that matters. Is George Bush or Al Gore cutting a secret deal with Bill Gates that will allow a harsh ruling to be no more that a slap on the rist penalty? That's something we may never know, but I'd bet Gates is trying to cut such a deal. Bill Gates went into this trial as someone who didn't expect to lose, hence his open contempt for the legal proceedings (i.e. statements such as "Microsoft shouldn't be judged by people who didn't pass High School physics," etc.). So, it's possible there has been some influence peddling going on, but chances are, we'll never know about it. In fact, Gates reminds me of John Gotti in this one way, they were both men who seemed to think they were invulnerable to court proceedings. Gotti thought he could buy off any court, maybe Gates believes the same thing.
The Republicans are currently in charge of both houses of Congress and have much influence on the Supreme Court. They threw away their ideas of reduced government and decided to rather go for being morality police (after they got rid of the libertarian thorn in their side, Newt Gingrich.) A new presidential administration would mean Republicans, but new people accross the board will mean Democrats in most of these positions.
Of course as far as I'm concerned Republicans and Democrats are wings of the same party (I point out I was a loyal Republican voter until the post-Columbine assault on pop culture showed me what their real agenda was) so I'm a Libertarian now. The Republicans say they are for reduced government, but their actions are otherwise. Add film, tv, and gaming to the list of unconstitutionally targetted industries (again, the need to "protect our children"), and recognize that in this case it is big government Republicans holding the razor. How are they going to create these new enforcement bodies? By raising taxes of course, that's the only way government pays for new programs. If you value Liberty, don't vote for Republicans or Democrats.