Something that is common on games programming websites (such as Gamedev) is someone with no industry experience, or even programming ability, wanting to make their own game - either assuming a company will pick it up, or wanting to start their own company.
They tell us how they have a great "idea" for a game. They want programmers to work for them; we ask what they will contribute, and it's "ideas". We tell them that it's like someone with no experience in car design saying they have a great idea for a car, and expecting a company to make it. Typically they want to make a complex game, and most popular of all, it's MMORPGs - so not only do you have the complexities of making a game, but also all the troubles of running a server.
Misleading articles such as this make me sad - promoting that ideas are important, and an idea is all it takes to get funding, and get into the business. No doubt this will encourage more people to post "I have great idea for a game, I wanna make a MMORPG".
I'm sure most of us had money-making ideas when we were 12. Some of us pulled it off when we were older, some of us didn't. But there's nothing special about ideas.
I wouldn't call height a merit. Have you heard of people being commended for their excellent achievement in height?
You misunderstand "merit". It isn't some narrow thing like that, it means "ability required". What's required in one job is different to another job. You are taking the "A quality deserving praise or approval" definition too literally - try "Superior quality or worth; excellence".
An astronaut who can fit into the spaceship does have greater merit than one who can't.
You may choose one restaurant over another, in a discriminatory fashion; nothing illegal about that: I might choose a sit-down restaurant over a fast-food joint purely because fast-food joints in general have poorer service or not the atmosphere I am looking for - and yet I have never been in THAT fast-food joint, so I am being discriminate. Discrimination in itself is completely legal and expected.
You are correct that not all discrimination is illegal - I was just pointing out that this example isn't discrimination in the first place.
Your fast food example is indeed discrimination. But suppose you avoided it because you had visited the restaurant? Or supposing it wasn't a judgement on service, but because you wanted the style and food that you know the fast food restaurant hasn't got? (I don't have to actually try out the McDonald's to know everything about it - just like a company can rely on interviews or grades rather than employing them first.) These cases are not discrimination.
It's completely legal, and expected, that you discriminate in the hiring process. I try to discriminate against stupid people, for example.
Your definition says:
rather than on individual merit
So if a maximum height was required (i.e., part of "merit"), and you discounted someone based on their individual height, that would not be discrimination. Just as not hiring a stupid person, if not being stupid was necessary for the job, would be discrimination.
Discrimination would be not hiring men on the basis that men are taller on average.
Rapists don't commit rape because they want sex, they commit it out of lust for power and violence.
Actually it's a myth that most cases involve random strangers attacking women, or involve violence - in many if not most cases, it involves people who know each other, things like "date rape". Now I guess it's possible that these people are going out with women on dates, and then just hoping that the woman turns them down. But what happens if the woman does want sex? "Oh sorry, I'm not interested after all, I only wanted the power and violence. Goodbye". That seems rather ludicrous to me.
Why is it unreasonable for a company to say that they're unwilling to promote bad grades?
If a company said that, that might be fair enough - but here it looks like the company didn't want to do that. The manager went ahead and refused to sell games to some kids, and the company decided they didn't want that.
The "monopoly" part is nearly inevitable -- people want a standard. Just like hardly anybody cares about the HD-DVD/Bluray format war except that there will be a winner so that they can go buy the right device to play new movies, most people didn't own computers in the early 80's because there was such a wide choice and your entire investment was truly obsolete in a few years. Own a Commodore 64? Too bad, Commodore's new and better computer, the Amiga, doesn't run the software, or even have a compatible disk drive. Same with Apple, TI, Atari, etc.
But that was IBM who achieved that with the PC, not Microsoft.
Also it wasn't just the PC - other continual platforms sprung up in the 80s (e.g., Mac, Amiga).
Regarding your other comments - just because Windows is what allowed most people to access the Internet doesn't mean that they wouldn't have done so, had Microsoft not existed. Given the history of computing, and the many other platforms that existed, this is highly unlikely.
What if there had been no Microsoft and instead the market was divided between, say, Apple, Atari, Amiga, BeOS, OS/2 (though OS/2 was arguably IBM's response to Microsoft Windows).
Why do you assume that one of those wouldn't have achieved the dominance in place of Windows? It's an interesting question, but independent of Microsoft's presence - you might as well ask "What if even with Microsoft around, instead the market was divided between them and a load of others".
Linus would probably have been an Amiga or BeOS fanboy and wouldn't have been forced to write Linux.
The presence of the Amiga didn't stop Linus writing Linux, so I don't see why the lack of Microsoft would have changed this; if anything, fewer platforms would be more incentive to write a new one. And BeOS came much later than Linux.
Through Bill Gate's sheer ruthlessness Microsoft incidentally created an ubiquitous hardware platform
IBM, not Microsoft.
Which, arguably, incidentally allowed Google to standardize on massive numbers of cheap, industrial standard computers running Linux instead of more expensive, proprietary computers with a proprietary operating system; i.e. Apple, Amiga, Atari or BeOS.
In their day, those systems weren't necessarily more expensive (that was the reason I got the Amiga rather than a PC back then). And even if you prefer open platforms, you would still have the IBM PC - which had other operating systems to run on it.
Just to put this into perspective, the pair of Mars rovers cost NASA $820 million.
Pathfinder cost $280 million, which would be a better comparison. Presumably landing on the Moon is much easier, due to lower gravity?
Frankly, I don't think $30 million is enough.
Read the FAQ that you quoted. The point is that companies are willing to spend a lot more than the prize money (and even if you think a 1919 prize isn't relevant, how about the 2004 X Prize that was also mentioned?) So no, $30 million won't cover it, but it will be a reasonable sum of money towards the cost.
As to what companies get out of this - well, what do Google get out of it for starters?
Actually another cost/hassle is that it needs a decent aerial (http://www.freeview.co.uk says "Aerial upgrade may be required." in the small print). I'm not sure if it would be feasible for people like me who only have the TV's built in aerial (I rent, so can't exactly go sticking one up on the roof).
Another point is that you need the boxes per-TV, so the cost per household would typically be more.
Especially when you consider that on the world wide spectrum, going from pure communism to pure fascism, even the conservatives in the US are fairly liberal. Our subset of the entire spectrum isn't a very long vector.
The bigger problem is that it's not a one-dimensional vector at all. I'm not aware of any meaningful scale that has communism at one end, and fascism at the other. You have the economic scale of communism to laissez-faire capitalism, and yes even capitalist America still has a lot of Government controls, welfare and state-controlled parts of the market (defence, education). You have the scale from fascism/authoritarianism to liberalism, and yes considering the US Constitution, and the lack of rights in many parts of the world, the US is obviously much more liberal than many places. There's also the point that conservative vs liberal is strictly speaking yet another scale, to do with whether people oppose or allow change; it's probably harder to rate where the US stands on this issue.
I'll admit publicly that, while quite ecumenical and tolerant towards others, I don't really think there have been any new religious ideas of significant value in, say, 2,000-ish years.
I agree - and I was wondering what it meant by that. I presume it means the way that religion changes, for example, Christians accepting evolution, or same-sex marriage.
Well, they probably had them fill out a questionnaire and figured out which way they lean.
But you still have the problem of pigeon-holing people into either conservative or liberal, when the terms can mean many different things.
And yes, "liberal" and "conservative" are subjective titles, but mainly because each is a spectrum characteristic. They're varying degrees of liberalism and conservatism.
The problem is that people's views can't really be put on a one dimensional spectrum to begin with.
The article headline conflates liberal/conservative with left-wing/right-wing; the Slashdot summary conflates this with Democrat/Republican. In reality, people have a range of different views on a range of different topics.
You're privileging intent over consequences. It is of very little comfort to the victims of racism that most of the very real racism that they are subjected to comes from people with perfectly good intentions
If people are being racist, then I agree that that is bad no matter what their intent (and I'm well aware of people who use criticism of Islam as a cover for racism). But my point is that if they are criticising religion, it is not racist to start with. Racism is bad - but I also dislike it that people play the "racism" everytime they get offended by something said about their beliefs.
Do you have evidence that this group is a cover for racism?
Agreed - and I'm amused that the poster thought Slashdot would be a good place to get support, given the strong anti-censorship leaning of this place! (And it's not like people tend to be supporters of religion on the whole, either...)
Islam is a religion that's perceived through a racial lens in the USA.
You make a good point - though it depends on what the group in question actually promotes. On the one hand, people talk about Islam in a racist sense (e.g., accusing them of immigrants coming to live here, or based on what they look like). However, other times it is specifically about religion. The text for the Facebook group says:
The Quran contains many lies and threats. Islam is false, no god exists, and someone should say that loud and clear. Heaven and hell are fables, prayer is a waste of time, and angels and jinn are obviously mythology. This is not a group against Muslims. They have it bad enough. If you doubt that go to Palestine. If you hate Muslims or are here to harrass them or promote your religion, go away. Muslims can be and usually are peaceful and respectful. The best thing for the whole world is a rejection of all religions and a renewed discovery of the love for humanity and naturalism. Fuck Christianity and Judaism as well. These religions are just as false and have a variety of disadvantages. There are other groups devoted to each of these false ideologies. Here is one devoted to religion in general: http://unm.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2225572075 and here is one for Christianity: http://unm.facebook.com/group.php?gid=5857745671
Which to me seems clearly about Islam as a religion, not a race (especially noting that they hold the same views towards other religions - in my experience, those who say they dislike Muslims when actually they are being racist are people who have nothing against Christianity).
Now, whether some people use this group to push racist views, I don't know, but on the whole this seems to be an anti-religion group. Just because some anti-Islam views are actually racist, doesn't mean that criticisms specific to the religion Islam are racist (another example would be the cartoon controversy - this was not a racist issue, despite often being reported as such).
Facebook is in a unique position here. If they start vetting groups based on "hate speech" or some other term, they will be accused of pandering to a bunch of whiney liberal bitches, resulting in a loss of popularity, and therefore, ad revenue. However, if they continue to allow these groups, the whiney liberal bitch types will whine to the advertisers, resulting in pulled ads, and lost revenue....
Liberal? I don't think that word means what you think it means. I wouldn't call people calling for censorship "liberal".
The thing here is these groups don't own Facebook. So doesn't Facebook have the right to criticize and or protest this hate speech be removing it?
This strawman keeps cropping up. No one is claiming that sites like Facebook don't have a right to put up what it likes.
However, we are free to decide which situation we would prefer: an online "user" site where material is removed if it offends anyone, or the advertisers - or an online site where this does not happen. I, and presumably the OP, prefer the latter. Which do you prefer?
I think it's clear that the vast majority of 2 million articles are going to be cruft/meaningless/niche articles - that's going to be true in any encyclopedia, because I doubt you could come up with 2 million notable "meaningful" topics (although as an aside, I do sometimes find episode articles useful or vaguely interesting, I can't be the only one).
Also I'm not sure the divide is whether it's fiction or not - I would expect there to be articles on subjects such as Star Trek (not necessarily every episode) and Harry Potter - meanwhile, there's cruft in non-fiction (e.g., an article for every single Macintosh model that's been released - the article count gets boosted just like it does with episode articles).
It would be useful though to know what the ratio is in different areas: e.g., fiction, science, etc.
It's true that the article count is pretty meaningless though for these reasons. Better counts may be the number of Featured Articles, or the progress that's been made on core topics.
You might want to take lemmata on controversial subjects like Palestine and the Evolution with a grain of salt,
Actually, giving it a quick glance, I don't see any reason for there to be significant problems with the evolution article? Thankfully, NPOV doesn't mean "let the Creationists get equal say", and I suspect attempts to work in a pro-ID viewpoint would get reverted.
And again, in my experience there are some far more annoying Firefox fans, who insist everyone must use it, even those who were happily using a non-IE solution long before Firefox existed. OTOH, Opera users just happily use it, and were using it long before Firefox was around. They might try to convince IE users to switch to it, but no more so than what Firefox users do.
Slashdot Mirror
Something that is common on games programming websites (such as Gamedev) is someone with no industry experience, or even programming ability, wanting to make their own game - either assuming a company will pick it up, or wanting to start their own company.
They tell us how they have a great "idea" for a game. They want programmers to work for them; we ask what they will contribute, and it's "ideas". We tell them that it's like someone with no experience in car design saying they have a great idea for a car, and expecting a company to make it. Typically they want to make a complex game, and most popular of all, it's MMORPGs - so not only do you have the complexities of making a game, but also all the troubles of running a server.
Misleading articles such as this make me sad - promoting that ideas are important, and an idea is all it takes to get funding, and get into the business. No doubt this will encourage more people to post "I have great idea for a game, I wanna make a MMORPG".
I'm sure most of us had money-making ideas when we were 12. Some of us pulled it off when we were older, some of us didn't. But there's nothing special about ideas.
I wouldn't call height a merit. Have you heard of people being commended for their excellent achievement in height?
You misunderstand "merit". It isn't some narrow thing like that, it means "ability required". What's required in one job is different to another job. You are taking the "A quality deserving praise or approval" definition too literally - try "Superior quality or worth; excellence".
An astronaut who can fit into the spaceship does have greater merit than one who can't.
You may choose one restaurant over another, in a discriminatory fashion; nothing illegal about that: I might choose a sit-down restaurant over a fast-food joint purely because fast-food joints in general have poorer service or not the atmosphere I am looking for - and yet I have never been in THAT fast-food joint, so I am being discriminate. Discrimination in itself is completely legal and expected.
You are correct that not all discrimination is illegal - I was just pointing out that this example isn't discrimination in the first place.
Your fast food example is indeed discrimination. But suppose you avoided it because you had visited the restaurant? Or supposing it wasn't a judgement on service, but because you wanted the style and food that you know the fast food restaurant hasn't got? (I don't have to actually try out the McDonald's to know everything about it - just like a company can rely on interviews or grades rather than employing them first.) These cases are not discrimination.
It's completely legal, and expected, that you discriminate in the hiring process. I try to discriminate against stupid people, for example.
Your definition says:
rather than on individual merit
So if a maximum height was required (i.e., part of "merit"), and you discounted someone based on their individual height, that would not be discrimination. Just as not hiring a stupid person, if not being stupid was necessary for the job, would be discrimination.
Discrimination would be not hiring men on the basis that men are taller on average.
Rapists don't commit rape because they want sex, they commit it out of lust for power and violence.
Actually it's a myth that most cases involve random strangers attacking women, or involve violence - in many if not most cases, it involves people who know each other, things like "date rape". Now I guess it's possible that these people are going out with women on dates, and then just hoping that the woman turns them down. But what happens if the woman does want sex? "Oh sorry, I'm not interested after all, I only wanted the power and violence. Goodbye". That seems rather ludicrous to me.
Why is it unreasonable for a company to say that they're unwilling to promote bad grades?
If a company said that, that might be fair enough - but here it looks like the company didn't want to do that. The manager went ahead and refused to sell games to some kids, and the company decided they didn't want that.
I fail to see why this story is news.
The "monopoly" part is nearly inevitable -- people want a standard. Just like hardly anybody cares about the HD-DVD/Bluray format war except that there will be a winner so that they can go buy the right device to play new movies, most people didn't own computers in the early 80's because there was such a wide choice and your entire investment was truly obsolete in a few years. Own a Commodore 64? Too bad, Commodore's new and better computer, the Amiga, doesn't run the software, or even have a compatible disk drive. Same with Apple, TI, Atari, etc.
But that was IBM who achieved that with the PC, not Microsoft.
Also it wasn't just the PC - other continual platforms sprung up in the 80s (e.g., Mac, Amiga).
Regarding your other comments - just because Windows is what allowed most people to access the Internet doesn't mean that they wouldn't have done so, had Microsoft not existed. Given the history of computing, and the many other platforms that existed, this is highly unlikely.
What if there had been no Microsoft and instead the market was divided between, say, Apple, Atari, Amiga, BeOS, OS/2 (though OS/2 was arguably IBM's response to Microsoft Windows).
Why do you assume that one of those wouldn't have achieved the dominance in place of Windows? It's an interesting question, but independent of Microsoft's presence - you might as well ask "What if even with Microsoft around, instead the market was divided between them and a load of others".
Linus would probably have been an Amiga or BeOS fanboy and wouldn't have been forced to write Linux.
The presence of the Amiga didn't stop Linus writing Linux, so I don't see why the lack of Microsoft would have changed this; if anything, fewer platforms would be more incentive to write a new one. And BeOS came much later than Linux.
Through Bill Gate's sheer ruthlessness Microsoft incidentally created an ubiquitous hardware platform
IBM, not Microsoft.
Which, arguably, incidentally allowed Google to standardize on massive numbers of cheap, industrial standard computers running Linux instead of more expensive, proprietary computers with a proprietary operating system; i.e. Apple, Amiga, Atari or BeOS.
In their day, those systems weren't necessarily more expensive (that was the reason I got the Amiga rather than a PC back then). And even if you prefer open platforms, you would still have the IBM PC - which had other operating systems to run on it.
Just to put this into perspective, the pair of Mars rovers cost NASA $820 million.
Pathfinder cost $280 million, which would be a better comparison. Presumably landing on the Moon is much easier, due to lower gravity?
Frankly, I don't think $30 million is enough.
Read the FAQ that you quoted. The point is that companies are willing to spend a lot more than the prize money (and even if you think a 1919 prize isn't relevant, how about the 2004 X Prize that was also mentioned?) So no, $30 million won't cover it, but it will be a reasonable sum of money towards the cost.
As to what companies get out of this - well, what do Google get out of it for starters?
Actually another cost/hassle is that it needs a decent aerial (http://www.freeview.co.uk says "Aerial upgrade may be required." in the small print). I'm not sure if it would be feasible for people like me who only have the TV's built in aerial (I rent, so can't exactly go sticking one up on the roof).
Another point is that you need the boxes per-TV, so the cost per household would typically be more.
Especially when you consider that on the world wide spectrum, going from pure communism to pure fascism, even the conservatives in the US are fairly liberal. Our subset of the entire spectrum isn't a very long vector.
The bigger problem is that it's not a one-dimensional vector at all. I'm not aware of any meaningful scale that has communism at one end, and fascism at the other. You have the economic scale of communism to laissez-faire capitalism, and yes even capitalist America still has a lot of Government controls, welfare and state-controlled parts of the market (defence, education). You have the scale from fascism/authoritarianism to liberalism, and yes considering the US Constitution, and the lack of rights in many parts of the world, the US is obviously much more liberal than many places. There's also the point that conservative vs liberal is strictly speaking yet another scale, to do with whether people oppose or allow change; it's probably harder to rate where the US stands on this issue.
I'll admit publicly that, while quite ecumenical and tolerant towards others, I don't really think there have been any new religious ideas of significant value in, say, 2,000-ish years.
I agree - and I was wondering what it meant by that. I presume it means the way that religion changes, for example, Christians accepting evolution, or same-sex marriage.
but if I wanted to know about OSS development or Linux then I'd ask a man.
I suspect that most men would look at you blankly if you asked them about "OSS" or "Linux" - most wouldn't even know what the terms mean!
I'd ask someone that I knew to have knowledge on those topics - whatever their gender.
Well, they probably had them fill out a questionnaire and figured out which way they lean.
But you still have the problem of pigeon-holing people into either conservative or liberal, when the terms can mean many different things.
And yes, "liberal" and "conservative" are subjective titles, but mainly because each is a spectrum characteristic. They're varying degrees of liberalism and conservatism.
The problem is that people's views can't really be put on a one dimensional spectrum to begin with.
The article headline conflates liberal/conservative with left-wing/right-wing; the Slashdot summary conflates this with Democrat/Republican. In reality, people have a range of different views on a range of different topics.
You're privileging intent over consequences. It is of very little comfort to the victims of racism that most of the very real racism that they are subjected to comes from people with perfectly good intentions
If people are being racist, then I agree that that is bad no matter what their intent (and I'm well aware of people who use criticism of Islam as a cover for racism). But my point is that if they are criticising religion, it is not racist to start with. Racism is bad - but I also dislike it that people play the "racism" everytime they get offended by something said about their beliefs.
Do you have evidence that this group is a cover for racism?
Agreed - and I'm amused that the poster thought Slashdot would be a good place to get support, given the strong anti-censorship leaning of this place! (And it's not like people tend to be supporters of religion on the whole, either...)
Islam is a religion that's perceived through a racial lens in the USA.
You make a good point - though it depends on what the group in question actually promotes. On the one hand, people talk about Islam in a racist sense (e.g., accusing them of immigrants coming to live here, or based on what they look like). However, other times it is specifically about religion. The text for the Facebook group says:
The Quran contains many lies and threats. Islam is false, no god exists, and someone should say that loud and clear. Heaven and hell are fables, prayer is a waste of time, and angels and jinn are obviously mythology.
This is not a group against Muslims. They have it bad enough. If you doubt that go to Palestine. If you hate Muslims or are here to harrass them or promote your religion, go away. Muslims can be and usually are peaceful and respectful.
The best thing for the whole world is a rejection of all religions and a renewed discovery of the love for humanity and naturalism.
Fuck Christianity and Judaism as well. These religions are just as false and have a variety of disadvantages. There are other groups devoted to each of these false ideologies. Here is one devoted to religion in general: http://unm.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2225572075
and here is one for Christianity: http://unm.facebook.com/group.php?gid=5857745671
Which to me seems clearly about Islam as a religion, not a race (especially noting that they hold the same views towards other religions - in my experience, those who say they dislike Muslims when actually they are being racist are people who have nothing against Christianity).
Now, whether some people use this group to push racist views, I don't know, but on the whole this seems to be an anti-religion group. Just because some anti-Islam views are actually racist, doesn't mean that criticisms specific to the religion Islam are racist (another example would be the cartoon controversy - this was not a racist issue, despite often being reported as such).
Everybody wants to go on and on about free speech. For the record, the first amendment to the US Constitution reads as follows:
And for the record, "free speech" doesn't just mean the first amendment.
I haven't see anyone going "on and on" about the first amendment.
Note that the concept of "free speech" can apply to anything. The First Amendment of the United States however applies only to the US Government.
Facebook is in a unique position here. If they start vetting groups based on "hate speech" or some other term, they will be accused of pandering to a bunch of whiney liberal bitches, resulting in a loss of popularity, and therefore, ad revenue. However, if they continue to allow these groups, the whiney liberal bitch types will whine to the advertisers, resulting in pulled ads, and lost revenue. ...
Liberal? I don't think that word means what you think it means. I wouldn't call people calling for censorship "liberal".
The thing here is these groups don't own Facebook. So doesn't Facebook have the right to criticize and or protest this hate speech be removing it?
This strawman keeps cropping up. No one is claiming that sites like Facebook don't have a right to put up what it likes.
However, we are free to decide which situation we would prefer: an online "user" site where material is removed if it offends anyone, or the advertisers - or an online site where this does not happen. I, and presumably the OP, prefer the latter. Which do you prefer?
I think it's clear that the vast majority of 2 million articles are going to be cruft/meaningless/niche articles - that's going to be true in any encyclopedia, because I doubt you could come up with 2 million notable "meaningful" topics (although as an aside, I do sometimes find episode articles useful or vaguely interesting, I can't be the only one).
Also I'm not sure the divide is whether it's fiction or not - I would expect there to be articles on subjects such as Star Trek (not necessarily every episode) and Harry Potter - meanwhile, there's cruft in non-fiction (e.g., an article for every single Macintosh model that's been released - the article count gets boosted just like it does with episode articles).
It would be useful though to know what the ratio is in different areas: e.g., fiction, science, etc.
It's true that the article count is pretty meaningless though for these reasons. Better counts may be the number of Featured Articles, or the progress that's been made on core topics.
You might want to take lemmata on controversial subjects like Palestine and the Evolution with a grain of salt,
Actually, giving it a quick glance, I don't see any reason for there to be significant problems with the evolution article? Thankfully, NPOV doesn't mean "let the Creationists get equal say", and I suspect attempts to work in a pro-ID viewpoint would get reverted.
I guess it's needed for those people who thought the new millenium started in 2000 ;)
Let me fix that for you:
You can't even quote an encyclopedia on a college paper, so why should anyone be using one?
So this makes encyclopedias useless? If you say so.
And again, in my experience there are some far more annoying Firefox fans, who insist everyone must use it, even those who were happily using a non-IE solution long before Firefox existed. OTOH, Opera users just happily use it, and were using it long before Firefox was around. They might try to convince IE users to switch to it, but no more so than what Firefox users do.