Or maybe people other people just don't spend a lot of time getting bent out of shape over the death of someone they didn't know and to whom they had no connection.
Personally I find it just as distasteful to make insincere public expressions of sorrow over something that actually doesn't affect you at all because "it's what you're supposed to do" or because you want to show all the other random anonymous slashdotters what a sensitive and caring person you are.
Clearly you don't know much about visual effects. Integrating effects into a shaky-cam shot is far, far harder than doing it with a locked-off or smoothly moving camera.
This week's Quirks and Quarks http://www.cbc.ca/quirks has a feature on several different theories of abiogenesis, from ideas of life beginning around geothermal vents to hypotheses about life beginning in ice.
All of your points boil down to 'it's more convenient to have a car'. Well, great, nobody disputes this. But a lot of people are coming to realize that we are willing to put up with a certain amount of inconvenience if it means lowering pollution and reducing our cultural lust for oil.
- I don't have to live within walking distance of my job (inside Baltimore City) with 1000 people all trying to squeeze into the same building (due to lack of living space/overpopulation).
Nice hyperbole. Anyway, you can live outside of the city center without owning a car. I live way outside of Vancouver, but I work downtown. I take transit. It actually takes me *less* time to get to work than people who drive the same distance, because of traffic and parking. I can read a book or play Advance Wars DS while I ride. I don't pay for fuel, insurance, maintenance, or for a parking space that costs as much per month as a small apartment. And I don't live in a Dickensian blockhouse with 1000 other people; I live in a nice, large apartment, in a quiet building, in a wooded suburb.
- Instead we can spread out to the countryside and find plenty of room to breathe & live like human beings instead of ants (crawling on top of one another).
See above.
- Instead of having to walk to the local market every day, I can buy a whole month's worth of food in a single trip, thanks to my car. That saves time and lets me pursue other hobbies.
There are a lot of places in the world where their cuisine and culture are based around buying fresh food and cooking it themselves. I know this is a foreign concept to a lot of people, but there are advantages to eating food you prepare from fresh ingredients rather than preprocessed and/or frozen food.
That aside, I'm still able to go grocery shopping without owning a car. Shop locally, and walk more. It won't kill you.
- On weekends I can go visit my parents or friends... something which would be impossible w/o a car. (There's train service, but it takes half a day to travel just 60 miles. The train is inconvenient.)
There are some times when having a car (or access to a car) is more or less necessary for what we want to do. I'm involved in the local astronomy club, and I have a large reflector telescope that I like to haul out to the dark-sky sites near where I live. Since I don't own a car and have no intention of owning a car, I joined a car co-op. It lets me do the things I need a car for (moving, picking up furniture, taking the cats to the vet, astronomy) without having to actually buy one.
Vehicles aren't inherently evil. There are lots of good reasons for using one. But don't pretend you *need* a car.
There should be no conflict with the idea of evolution and religion. There is simply no need for them to be at odds.
When you have two positions (science vs. religion), based on diametrically opposed systems of thought (reason vs. faith), reaching contradictory conclusions about the way the universe works (physical processes vs. magic), how can they not be at odds? I keep hearing feel-good platitudes about how science and religion can coexist peacefully, but I don't see how when their spheres of influence overlap and each teaches that the other is completely wrong. If one person tells you that 1+1=2, and another person is telling you that 1+1=9, they are going to be at odds. One of them is wrong. And when there's as much at stake as the reason vs. superstition debate that seems to have taken over American politics, pretending the conflict doesn't exist is foolish.
And leave your 'Science teaches how, and religion teaches why' at home, please. Science is happy to leave moral questions alone, but religion can't seem to keep its fingers out of questions of empirical knowledge. This current debate is proof of that.
Every time any story about a MMOG hits Slashdot, there are people who feel like they have to come on here and tell everyone how they just can't understand how someone would be foolish enough to pay a subscription for a game, as though people who play WoW or similar are just too stupid to realize they are being taken to the cleaners.
The fact is, MMOGs offer an experience that you simply can not get with any other type of game. I play Eve Online, a seriously hardcore PvP game, where the penalties for "dying" are real: you lose the ship you were flying, and you have to go earn enough money somehow to build a new one. More expensive ships, obviously, are more capable, so there's always a risk/reward calculus at work. Do you spend a ton of money to get a more capable ship, at risk of having it blown up and suffering that much greater a loss?
The threat of losing, permanently, the money you have had to work hard to earn in Eve is what gives it the flavor you don't get elsewhere. When I fly a ship into combat or try to sneak a hauler full of loot through a hostile area, I get an adrenaline rush like nothing else I've ever experienced while playing a video game. It's that feeling, fueled by the ruthless interaction with other real-life players, that keeps me paying my $15/month for my subscription.
Now tell me how I can get this same experience playing Animal Crossing on my DS, and why I'm a fool for paying a subscription to an online game.
I'm a member of a car-sharing co-op in Vancouver, BC, Canada. Provided there are structures in place to make vandals and people who abuse the cars pay up for their actions, there's no reason something like this couldn't work just fine. The proof-of-concept is already working in many cities around the world.
Is there really such a lack of worthwhile ideas in the world that somebody thought a *Sonic the Hedgehog* RPG was a good idea? Why are videogame producers so terrified of working on original ideas, set in original settings, with original characters? Sonic the Hedgehog as a concept is so light on story, the whole idea is ridiculous. This is such blatant cashing-in it's laughable.
Of course there are certain dues to be paid and experience to be gained, for anyone working in a creative field. My point is that his statement highlights a larger issue within the artform, which is that most of the creative time and energy of people making video games, movies, and television shows is spent working on rehashes of rehashes of old properties that were developed by someone else a decade ago.
Why isn't *every* project "wholly original", with sequels the rare exception rather than the overwhelming rule? Because it's hard to come up with new ideas? No, there are thousands of people out there, people working right now for Nintendo and every other game or motion picture company, with great and compelling ideas, who would love a chance to develop their stories. The reason they don't see the light of day is a lack of imagination and courage on the part of producers.
In short, I agree with what you said, I think we are just talking at tangents to each other.
Caveat: I'm an animator working at a studio where there are two main projects going right now: one a TV show based on a video game, and one a TV show based on a collectible card game (!). There are so many good ideas out there waiting to be born, it's ridiculous for so many people to devote so much of themselves to soulless, copy-cat projects.
"Aunoma also hopes to venture into new territory and create a wholly original game at some point in his career."
That's a pretty shameful statement on the current state of the 'art' in videogames. I suppose it's a natural result of the big-business nature of videogame and movie making, but the number of 'safe' sequels being churned out is frankly embarassing. Show some guts people and take a chance or two. Our culture will thank you for it.
Being depressed for a week over dropping an inert piece of metal on the floor is more perverse than getting a charge out of watching one great piece of engineering chew up another, in my humble opinion...
Try Rockbox (www.rockbox.org). It's a free, open-source replacement for the ipod's firmware that allows you to do all sorts of things not possible with the original firmware, like drag a music file to your ipod in Windows Explorer and then listen to it. Rockbox has its flaws too, but I dislike Itunes and the original Ipod firmware so much that I changed it to Rockbox within hours of buying my Ipod and haven't regretted it since.
Wrong. The bible can't be taken as the infinite and infallible knowledge of God, but simply dumbed down to the level of a bronze-age human. There are too many statements in there that are simply factually incorrect. And further, the bible fails even as an allegorical lesson in ethics. How many intelligent, modern humans think that stoning a child to death is appropriate punishment for disobedience? Do you? The bible *commands* you to stone your child to death if it is disobedient. No sane human thinks this sounds like a good idea, which tells you that an average five-year-old human has a better moral sense than God. Sure there are some decent moral lessons in the bible, but you can't pick and choose, not if you want to maintain that the bible is a good source of morals.
So which makes more sense:
a) the bible is a (direct or indirect) record of the teachings of an infallible, morally pure supernatural being - but it contains a bunch of terrible moral lessons - but the bad ones weren't put there by God - but the rest were! - and only some old guy can tell us which ones to follow and which ones to disregard even if he isn't capable of or willing to follow the same precepts himself;
or
b) the bible was written by a bunch of primitive humans and reflects their prejudices and superstitions.
You can't be intellectually honest with yourself and feel good about believing in the bible, either as a factual history or as an allegorical moral lesson.
Hooray, another breathless story about a non-event in WoW. Here's a hint, guys: this sort of thing happens every day, in every MMORPG. Meanwhile, the continued success and acclaim of Eve Online goes unreported on Slashdot, despite yesterday having won 4 of 7 of MMORPG.com's top awards, including Best Graphics (which really are several notches above the competition), Best Company (2 *free*, major content expansions last year, and another one forthcoming), Best PvP (how many other games actually give you butterflies in the stomach from *traveling*?), and the big one, Favourite Game.
Seriously, what else do they need to do to get attention here? Add big-titted space elves?
Did somebody on the Slashdot story selection board get podded in beta or something?
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, aside from all the crimes this kid committed, what were his crimes?!
Or maybe people other people just don't spend a lot of time getting bent out of shape over the death of someone they didn't know and to whom they had no connection. Personally I find it just as distasteful to make insincere public expressions of sorrow over something that actually doesn't affect you at all because "it's what you're supposed to do" or because you want to show all the other random anonymous slashdotters what a sensitive and caring person you are.
Who was just suggesting that people be 'attacked/bombed/killed'? Fuckwit.
Learn what the term 'ad-hominem' means before trying to use it. You clearly have no idea.
Maybe the relevance is that a prole in Orwell's 1984 has at least one right that people in our modern culture do not.
Clearly you don't know much about visual effects. Integrating effects into a shaky-cam shot is far, far harder than doing it with a locked-off or smoothly moving camera.
Whoever tagged this story 'correlationisnotcausation' is a fucking idiot. You're not as smart as you think you are.
This week's Quirks and Quarks http://www.cbc.ca/quirks has a feature on several different theories of abiogenesis, from ideas of life beginning around geothermal vents to hypotheses about life beginning in ice.
Because Card's opinions are always so rational and worth listening to.
Unless you built a rigid hollow structure and 'filled' it with vacuum. Hydrogen is the lightest element but it's still not as light as nothing.
Nice hyperbole. Anyway, you can live outside of the city center without owning a car. I live way outside of Vancouver, but I work downtown. I take transit. It actually takes me *less* time to get to work than people who drive the same distance, because of traffic and parking. I can read a book or play Advance Wars DS while I ride. I don't pay for fuel, insurance, maintenance, or for a parking space that costs as much per month as a small apartment. And I don't live in a Dickensian blockhouse with 1000 other people; I live in a nice, large apartment, in a quiet building, in a wooded suburb.
See above.
There are a lot of places in the world where their cuisine and culture are based around buying fresh food and cooking it themselves. I know this is a foreign concept to a lot of people, but there are advantages to eating food you prepare from fresh ingredients rather than preprocessed and/or frozen food.
That aside, I'm still able to go grocery shopping without owning a car. Shop locally, and walk more. It won't kill you.
There are some times when having a car (or access to a car) is more or less necessary for what we want to do. I'm involved in the local astronomy club, and I have a large reflector telescope that I like to haul out to the dark-sky sites near where I live. Since I don't own a car and have no intention of owning a car, I joined a car co-op. It lets me do the things I need a car for (moving, picking up furniture, taking the cats to the vet, astronomy) without having to actually buy one.
Vehicles aren't inherently evil. There are lots of good reasons for using one. But don't pretend you *need* a car.
When you have two positions (science vs. religion), based on diametrically opposed systems of thought (reason vs. faith), reaching contradictory conclusions about the way the universe works (physical processes vs. magic), how can they not be at odds? I keep hearing feel-good platitudes about how science and religion can coexist peacefully, but I don't see how when their spheres of influence overlap and each teaches that the other is completely wrong. If one person tells you that 1+1=2, and another person is telling you that 1+1=9, they are going to be at odds. One of them is wrong. And when there's as much at stake as the reason vs. superstition debate that seems to have taken over American politics, pretending the conflict doesn't exist is foolish.
And leave your 'Science teaches how, and religion teaches why' at home, please. Science is happy to leave moral questions alone, but religion can't seem to keep its fingers out of questions of empirical knowledge. This current debate is proof of that.
Answer: Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!
Every time any story about a MMOG hits Slashdot, there are people who feel like they have to come on here and tell everyone how they just can't understand how someone would be foolish enough to pay a subscription for a game, as though people who play WoW or similar are just too stupid to realize they are being taken to the cleaners.
The fact is, MMOGs offer an experience that you simply can not get with any other type of game. I play Eve Online, a seriously hardcore PvP game, where the penalties for "dying" are real: you lose the ship you were flying, and you have to go earn enough money somehow to build a new one. More expensive ships, obviously, are more capable, so there's always a risk/reward calculus at work. Do you spend a ton of money to get a more capable ship, at risk of having it blown up and suffering that much greater a loss?
The threat of losing, permanently, the money you have had to work hard to earn in Eve is what gives it the flavor you don't get elsewhere. When I fly a ship into combat or try to sneak a hauler full of loot through a hostile area, I get an adrenaline rush like nothing else I've ever experienced while playing a video game. It's that feeling, fueled by the ruthless interaction with other real-life players, that keeps me paying my $15/month for my subscription.
Now tell me how I can get this same experience playing Animal Crossing on my DS, and why I'm a fool for paying a subscription to an online game.
I'm a member of a car-sharing co-op in Vancouver, BC, Canada. Provided there are structures in place to make vandals and people who abuse the cars pay up for their actions, there's no reason something like this couldn't work just fine. The proof-of-concept is already working in many cities around the world.
Is there really such a lack of worthwhile ideas in the world that somebody thought a *Sonic the Hedgehog* RPG was a good idea? Why are videogame producers so terrified of working on original ideas, set in original settings, with original characters? Sonic the Hedgehog as a concept is so light on story, the whole idea is ridiculous. This is such blatant cashing-in it's laughable.
Of course there are certain dues to be paid and experience to be gained, for anyone working in a creative field. My point is that his statement highlights a larger issue within the artform, which is that most of the creative time and energy of people making video games, movies, and television shows is spent working on rehashes of rehashes of old properties that were developed by someone else a decade ago.
Why isn't *every* project "wholly original", with sequels the rare exception rather than the overwhelming rule? Because it's hard to come up with new ideas? No, there are thousands of people out there, people working right now for Nintendo and every other game or motion picture company, with great and compelling ideas, who would love a chance to develop their stories. The reason they don't see the light of day is a lack of imagination and courage on the part of producers.
In short, I agree with what you said, I think we are just talking at tangents to each other.
Caveat: I'm an animator working at a studio where there are two main projects going right now: one a TV show based on a video game, and one a TV show based on a collectible card game (!). There are so many good ideas out there waiting to be born, it's ridiculous for so many people to devote so much of themselves to soulless, copy-cat projects.
That's a pretty shameful statement on the current state of the 'art' in videogames. I suppose it's a natural result of the big-business nature of videogame and movie making, but the number of 'safe' sequels being churned out is frankly embarassing. Show some guts people and take a chance or two. Our culture will thank you for it.
Being depressed for a week over dropping an inert piece of metal on the floor is more perverse than getting a charge out of watching one great piece of engineering chew up another, in my humble opinion...
You might want to reexamine your priorities
Try Rockbox (www.rockbox.org). It's a free, open-source replacement for the ipod's firmware that allows you to do all sorts of things not possible with the original firmware, like drag a music file to your ipod in Windows Explorer and then listen to it. Rockbox has its flaws too, but I dislike Itunes and the original Ipod firmware so much that I changed it to Rockbox within hours of buying my Ipod and haven't regretted it since.
you have nothing to hide. Right? Right?
"Let us resist the politicization of science" ...writes a professional politician in an article about a scientific subject.
Cripes.
Wrong. The bible can't be taken as the infinite and infallible knowledge of God, but simply dumbed down to the level of a bronze-age human. There are too many statements in there that are simply factually incorrect. And further, the bible fails even as an allegorical lesson in ethics. How many intelligent, modern humans think that stoning a child to death is appropriate punishment for disobedience? Do you? The bible *commands* you to stone your child to death if it is disobedient. No sane human thinks this sounds like a good idea, which tells you that an average five-year-old human has a better moral sense than God. Sure there are some decent moral lessons in the bible, but you can't pick and choose, not if you want to maintain that the bible is a good source of morals.
So which makes more sense:
a) the bible is a (direct or indirect) record of the teachings of an infallible, morally pure supernatural being - but it contains a bunch of terrible moral lessons - but the bad ones weren't put there by God - but the rest were! - and only some old guy can tell us which ones to follow and which ones to disregard even if he isn't capable of or willing to follow the same precepts himself;
or
b) the bible was written by a bunch of primitive humans and reflects their prejudices and superstitions.
You can't be intellectually honest with yourself and feel good about believing in the bible, either as a factual history or as an allegorical moral lesson.
I don't know how you could hear somebody say that and think there's a lack of creativity in the video game industry...
Hooray, another breathless story about a non-event in WoW. Here's a hint, guys: this sort of thing happens every day, in every MMORPG. Meanwhile, the continued success and acclaim of Eve Online goes unreported on Slashdot, despite yesterday having won 4 of 7 of MMORPG.com's top awards, including Best Graphics (which really are several notches above the competition), Best Company (2 *free*, major content expansions last year, and another one forthcoming), Best PvP (how many other games actually give you butterflies in the stomach from *traveling*?), and the big one, Favourite Game.
Seriously, what else do they need to do to get attention here? Add big-titted space elves?
Did somebody on the Slashdot story selection board get podded in beta or something?