Citing Shadow of the Colossus as an example of why we don't need innovation is confused. SotC doesn't have a huge list of asterisks on the back of the box (you know, *Multiplayer! *Online Player! *User Modications! *Physics simulator!). Nonetheless, SotC stands out from the pack. SotC's innovation was omission--like it's wikipedia entry says, "The game is unusual within the action-adventure genre in that there are no towns or dungeons to explore, no characters with which to interact, and no enemies to defeat other than the colossi." It was unusual because of what wasn't there. Well-designed simplicity is innovation.
If you just re-worded this rant to be against adding stuff for the sake of adding stuff instead of against innovation, then it would been making a rather insightful point. As it is, it's just flamebait.
Maybe you didn't like Mirror's Edge, but whatever problems it has are unique problems. Citing it as an example of what's wrong with the industry is deeply obtuse.
How can you make this statement, and miss the BLISTERINGLY obvious conclusion that your Operating System is also a means, not an end?
Good question. Answer: I didn't. I wrote the following:
To the extent that Linux does have a problem here, it's an insufficient number of vendors selling pre-configured Linux consumer devices. But that's less a matter of Linux lacking hardware support and more a matter of Linux applications lagging behind. If your applications meet the customer's needs, then any customer worth worrying about will find the hardware required to run your software.
Note how I anticipated your "Pro Tip". But thanks!
I am, in other words, smart and rational enough to purchase hardware to suit my software. You just don't like the fact that my choice of software, for which I purchased the hardware, was not the same software you troll for.
Apparently YOU don't like that choice, because you're the one complaining about Linux's hardware support, indicating a that you weren't smart or rational enough to purchase hardware to suit the software. I'm perfectly willing to admit (as I did in my original post) that Linux's features might be lacking in one way or another.
And there's the brutal the irony of Linux zealots. I could show this thread of discussion to 100 people who indicate a willingness to try Linux, and the behavior of the linux zealots alone would be enough to turn 99 of them away from it forever.
And I could sure your comment and my response to 100 people and 99 of them would agree that your concerns were idiotic. Note that I'm no Linux zealot, I'm using Windows. I'm just an anti-idiot zealot. And your post was idiocy. Linux has problems. They just don't include the one non-problem you happened to be thinking of.
Generic comment questioning the species of your parentage.
Please also view accompanying hand gesture.
This is all the victory I need. Lashing out in such an infantile manner just means that your subconscious agrees with me.
I am consistently told by Linux-using friends that I should "absolutely be using Linux instead", that all Linux software is inherently superior, etc. Yet when trying to install any of the various Linux/MythTV flavors, I've consistently found all sorts of problems. The ATi Remote Wonder doesn't work well for most of them. The recording software either doesn't work at all, or is "spotty at best." Video playback quality is lower.
But see, this isn't Linux's problem. The number of users like you--smart/patient enough to be able to install their own operating system, not smart/rational enough to purchase hardware to suit their software rather than the other way around (hardware is a means, not an end)--is really small. They are not the primary or even significant barrier to Linux adoption, and it would do Linux little or no good to care more about them. As another poster noted jokingly, Mac OS X only runs on the shiniest of hardware, and frankly in some ways Linux's support for older hardware is better than Vista's. Microsoft and Apple made billions not giving a damn about you, so you shouldn't expect Linux to give a damn about you either. Next time be smarter in picking your hardware.
Yeah, "not my problem" and "not my fault" aren't necessarily the same thing, but in your narrow circumstances, they are. To the extent that Linux does have a problem here, it's an insufficient number of vendors selling pre-configured Linux consumer devices. But that's less a matter of Linux lacking hardware support and more a matter of Linux applications lagging behind. If your applications meet the customer's needs, then any customer worth worrying about will find the hardware required to run your software.
A better example of the phenomenon you're referring to would be support for proprietary data formats (e.g. Microsoft Office). It's not free software's fault that the proprietary software companies intentionally made this difficult. But it is free software's problem.
And I think that a swing too far in the opposite direction would be just as harmful as the (current) swing in the direction of extreme patentism (hah, I just made up a word).
I doubt it. I wonder how many research dollars are spent chasing "easy in hindsight" ideas that would fail to be discovered if patents wouldn't cover them. I suspect that most of the research money that is spent with the expectation of future patent revenue goes toward chasing ideas that are too complicated to look easy even in retrospect--stuff involving fancy math, chemistry, biology, physics, etc. Surely, even with no patent system, Amazon would still spend just as much money trying to make their site as usable as possible, and one-click ordering would still have been "invented". The drive to achieve a temporary advantage over your competition is probably a better incentive than our broken and arbitrary patent system.
I trust that you'll admit that there's a difference between
The price of a rent is dictated essentially by what the tenant can pay - it bears no relation to the cost to the landlord of renting the property.
and
If your income is in the form of rent, and your Wurbles cost more, you'll charge more rent.
Really, I'm not sure there's much point going on with the rest of your post. I'm not sure why you call yourself an economist, you don't really have an economic model in mind, you're just playing words games. What you say simply isn't coherent enough to be disproven.
Rent is a different kettle of fish. Competition between businesses in the marketplaces is pretty effective, but competition between landlords is pretty weak. Landlords more or less hold a monopoly over their tenants. Monopolies charge the highest prices the market can bear. Wurbles and rent are not comparable; they operate differently.
Competition between landlords depends on the market. But I agree they'll charge the highest price the market can bear. That price has absolutely nothing to do with the landowner's bills.
But all this means is that the cost of doing business has aritifically risen. No extra actual *value* has been created.
"Value" doesn't have to be "created" for something to be more valuable. The Wurble-worker's labor without immigration is more valuable in the sense that if we lived in a barter economy he or she could trade an hour of labor for a larger basket of goods. Like that Twilight Zone episode where one guy forces another to trade bars of gold for sips from a canteen--sometimes a shortage makes things more valuable.
Wages rise elsewhere because for their given skill set, workers expect the appropriate renumeration.
The supply curves of labor-hours will generally shift left as prices climb, but demand curves will be all over the place. Some will shift left, some right. Some fields get higher wages, some get lower wages.
If your income is in the form of rent, and your Wurbles cost more, you'll charge more rent.
You're contradicting Ricardo, aren't you? You'll charge whatever people will pay to use your land.
If your income is in the form of profit, and your Wurbles cost more, you'll increase what you charge, to make more profit.
Your supply and demand curves will shift depending on what your product is. You may make more or less profit afterwards.
Your analysis is broken in countless ways, but here's a big one. We aren't just raising wages for Wurble-workers, we're reducing the number of Wurble-workers. (Or actually, failing to artificially increase the number). That makes each Wurble-workers more valuable to the economy. All the other workers and firms may raise their prices, but it's not necessarily rational for them to do so--in fact, a shortage or Wurble-producing workers could cause a surplus of Wurble-retail workers, Wurble-processing factories, and land on which we could build Wurble-processing factories.
If you're arguing that an increase in wages cancels itself out due to increased prices, you're not living in reality. Obviously, there's a lot of people who earn income from sources other than wages. Increasing wages just redistributes money from those folks to wage earners. Whether that's a good idea or not is debatable. But it's a choice to be made, and if you don't see it I'm afraid that means your economic knowledge isn't very deep.
You're a slashdot reader. Of course you see a distinction there. You're atypical. You will see and treat these two as different because you understand the internals of the system. My little sister who wants to share her travel photos with me doesn't. The highschool english teacher that lives next door to me and wants to get in invitation to our upcoming barbecue doesn't. The Montana farmer getting his first computer to manage his heavy equipment doesn't. My grandmother who wants to see how my cat is recovering from surgery doesn't.
Those are all examples of people who want to share or at least aren't hiding the information in question. Maybe slashdotters are the only ones who see a difference between the desktop and the web, but even two-year olds see a difference between mine and theirs.
That old line-item veto didn't really make sense. One could imagine the two parties negotiating to some compromise in which each party get's something they like, then it gets sent to the White House and the President only keeps the part he likes. It's the same problem with the "signing statements" of recent presidents--it makes no sense that the President can both make changes to a bill and sign it into law before Congress gets a chance to evaluate his changes. It would be just as bad as if Congress could amend the bill after the President signed it.
In the past year or so I've heard talk of a new "line-item veto" that would submit the new altered bill back to Congress to vote yay-or-nay on without additional amendments--that seems to me like a good idea, as long as the Senate filabuster rules apply the same way to that process as to the original bill.
"No security" simply isn't a useful concept. At first glance it seems simply like a Hobbesian "Warre of all against all" in which no order is possible, but obviously some level of order is required for technological progress. The absolute absence of security implies the absence of predictability, of science, of capability, and of life. Other some new order would emerge--either dystopic or utopic--or life would simply cease. How could "no security" be a sustainable situation? Only if life could somehow continue to exist in complete equilibrium at maximum entropy. "No security" just seems like a way of saying "I have no idea what the hell will happen", but that's not a very profitable thing for a futurist to say, is it?
I dunno, but I do know that every dime we spent on the Space Shuttle was an absolute waste of money. As was most of the money we spent on weapons. You're talking about hundreds of billions or maybe trillions of dollars spent making the world a better place.
To hell with Mid-East Peace. I'm talking freaking Singularity here.
Billions and billions of dollars have been spend trying to "fix our own messed up planet". This was exactly the reasoning that got the budgets for Apollo 19 and Apollo 20 cancelled.
And has the world not improved since then? The Soviets are gone, nuclear annihilation is less likely, democracy is more widespread, life expectancies in the developed world are higher, the global economy is vastly larger, technology is far more advanced. That fantastic heavy life capability is worthless unless you've got something worth lifting. Better to wait a few decades when we can put self-replicating robots on the moon and build the colony and all the solar power collectors Earth would need without getting moondust under our finger nails.
You expect consistency where there is no reason (other than in your expectations) for there to be any.
Given that rating systems are supposed to express meaning to consumers, consumer expectation should be reason enough. And how would ESRB and MPAA be considered competitors. If they rated the same media, yes, they would be competitors, but since they each stay isolated in their own field the existence of either seems like a vast anti-trust violation, no more or less so if they happen to talk to one and another.
A more reasonable argument would be that the MPAA would sue the ESRB if it copied their standards.
<i>The only place to enforce that "media-is-media" ratings consistency is government, and that's the LAST thing any sane consumer or producer wants.</i>
If the government ratings were voluntary just like ESRB and MPAA ratings are now, then I fail to see the disadvantage.
Which unfortunately makes me either (or maybe both) an ass for thinking "everyone else" are just plain stupid,
Yeah, that's definitely the vibe I'm getting. Look, I'll probably buy the console, and I *LIKE* the fact that Nintendo is trying to appeal outside the "hard core" audience, I'm just tired of all this Scott McClellan, Baghdad Bob spin away from the fact that this name is, prima facie, bizarre, combined with the strange sort of holier-than-thou posture adopted by everyone arguing for it--like they don't even like the name (you yourself claim to like Revolution better) but they just want to be better than everyone else. There's even a strange orwellian attempt to pretend that other console names or even the iPod once looked as weird as Wii.
The console seems to have social gaming in mind, and that the name of the console is so awkward--that it makes me feel like an idiot when it's name passes my lips--can't be good for word of mouth advertizing.
The potty-mouth interpretations of the name are common for a reason that goes beyond immaturity--if you give people ambiguous, bizarre sequences of letters or sounds, any offensive or shocking meaning is going to tend to come to mind first. It's the same phenomenon as when a musician sings overly poetic or dada-ish lyrics, and the listener's brain latches onto some humorous reinterpretation. "...the girl with colitis goes by.", "...excuse me while I kiss this guy"--everyone has a collection of those wrong-songs, and Nintendo seems to have wrong-songed themselves.
Perhaps we no longer have a mass culture. Now that youth sits behind computer screens rather than in front of tv screens, everything's fragmented and the decade simply can't be summed up in the simple way like the other decades. After 9/11 it seemed like this decade would be the pendulum swinging back over from irony and cynicism, but that sure didn't last.
Huh. It makes a scary amount of sense if you think about it--like this decade is just a giant "nought"--a cultural void, a tremendous anticlimax compared to the apocalypse/utopia that everyone imagined the future would be. I think I've probably heard that before, I guess it just never caught on over here for lack of whimsy tolerance or something.
I purchased the original KH, I loved the graphics and I really want to explore all the Disney worlds--but, by the time I got to that Tarzan level, I just got sick of wandering around lost in the forest with a camera system that made various jumping puzzles really annoying. Maybe KHII is different, but I'd just like to report at least one sale of of KH was not in fact due to it being fun to play. It was fun to watch. Not fun to play.
I'll likely buy this console as well. But I do not look forward to this name. For the very simple reason that it's awkward to tell people about. If they haven't already heard of Wii, you can forget about--you'll immediately sound like either someone who doesn't understand the concept of pronouns or some kind of pervert. I think the pervert response will actually be more common that people realize--when you are given a set of sounds to interpret that has multiple possible meanings, the shocking meanings are going to draw more of your attention.
In any event, if you tell someone you're going to play Wii, the urine/pronoun blur will color their interpretation of you. You then explain what Wii is, but now you're the sort of dork who has to explain everything he says. Awkwardness, poor grammar, and perversion are all now associated with you.
You'll even have to spell it! Double-ewe-eye-eye! (Dubya, aye aye?!! OMG SUBLIMINAL MESSAGE Wii: it's a uniter, not a divider)
And if this console is supposed to focus on social interaction, any added difficultly in word of mouth advertising seems like a huge liability. The problem is mitigated assuming Nintendo advertising of the Wii brand is omnipresent, but I'm not sure advertising has ever been the primary way people are introduced to new games. Especially for regular people--the games famous for appealing to non-gamers--from Tetris to The Sims, from Nintendogs to Bejewled, from WoW to DDR, tended, I think, to spread more by word of mouth than by massive advertising campaigns. Any game, even the simplest, is a bigger time sink than a tv show or a movie or a flavor of soda, and so those who are least "hard-core" about games are the ones who most rely on other people they trust to point out when something worth their attention comes along.
I remember back in the nineties people would wonder what they would call this decade. We never did find a good name for it, and so therefore we never refer to it--I never hear anyone refer to this decade as a cultural unit. Awkwardness is a powerful cultural disincentive--awkward ideas don't last. And ideas like "I play Wii and you should too!" or "We should play Wii!" are spatially sound but aurally awkward. People will likely end up saying something like "Nintendo Wii" or "the Wii system" or "Wii gaming" or some other unauthorized set of disambiguation sounds when necessary in non-games contexts. It's one thing to have a product name that people can make jokes about, but in this case the jokes could conceivably cloud understanding.
Is it really still true that Biologists have no idea about programming? That seems like the direction you'd want to solve this problem from--it's gotta be way easier to teach a biologist some SQL than it is to teach a programmer to be a biologist.
Perhaps you are correct that her detractors are misquoting her. But she was still wrong. By her logic, you could just as easily say "there are no human beings"--there are just human tissues. Brain tissues (of both the left and right brain) pretend as though they're actually doing work, but actually anything done by a "human being" is really done by some muscle tissue or internal organ.
This is of course nonsense. Human beings exist--and what makes them human beings is not just the sum of their cells, but the way in which those cells are organized into a thing that thinks and acts. Without that, you've just got a disgusting pile of sticky, bloody gunk with 46 chromosomes.
Likewise, society is more than just the people and families that make it up--it is also the relationships between them. Their shared goals, their mutual trust, their common empathy. Just like the arrangement of cells in the body, the arrangement of people in a society enables it accomplish goals--build trains, win wars, heal the sick, etc. Without society, you've just got Somalia.
That said, Thatcher is right that people are better off solving their own problems, it's better to contibue a fix than whine about known OSS problems, and if I accidentally cut myself my cells are better off healing themselves than waiting for help from the central nervous system (though I'll try to apply a bandaid and disinfectant if I think of it--no promises little guys, just hang in there and ward off infection as best as you can).
But action at the tissue level should not preclude actions at the individual level, nor should action at the individual level preclude action at the social level.
Slashdot Mirror
Citing Shadow of the Colossus as an example of why we don't need innovation is confused. SotC doesn't have a huge list of asterisks on the back of the box (you know, *Multiplayer! *Online Player! *User Modications! *Physics simulator!). Nonetheless, SotC stands out from the pack. SotC's innovation was omission--like it's wikipedia entry says, "The game is unusual within the action-adventure genre in that there are no towns or dungeons to explore, no characters with which to interact, and no enemies to defeat other than the colossi." It was unusual because of what wasn't there. Well-designed simplicity is innovation.
If you just re-worded this rant to be against adding stuff for the sake of adding stuff instead of against innovation, then it would been making a rather insightful point. As it is, it's just flamebait.
Maybe you didn't like Mirror's Edge, but whatever problems it has are unique problems. Citing it as an example of what's wrong with the industry is deeply obtuse.
How can you make this statement, and miss the BLISTERINGLY obvious conclusion that your Operating System is also a means, not an end?
Good question. Answer: I didn't. I wrote the following:
To the extent that Linux does have a problem here, it's an insufficient number of vendors selling pre-configured Linux consumer devices. But that's less a matter of Linux lacking hardware support and more a matter of Linux applications lagging behind. If your applications meet the customer's needs, then any customer worth worrying about will find the hardware required to run your software.
Note how I anticipated your "Pro Tip". But thanks!
I am, in other words, smart and rational enough to purchase hardware to suit my software. You just don't like the fact that my choice of software, for which I purchased the hardware, was not the same software you troll for. Apparently YOU don't like that choice, because you're the one complaining about Linux's hardware support, indicating a that you weren't smart or rational enough to purchase hardware to suit the software. I'm perfectly willing to admit (as I did in my original post) that Linux's features might be lacking in one way or another. And there's the brutal the irony of Linux zealots. I could show this thread of discussion to 100 people who indicate a willingness to try Linux, and the behavior of the linux zealots alone would be enough to turn 99 of them away from it forever. And I could sure your comment and my response to 100 people and 99 of them would agree that your concerns were idiotic. Note that I'm no Linux zealot, I'm using Windows. I'm just an anti-idiot zealot. And your post was idiocy. Linux has problems. They just don't include the one non-problem you happened to be thinking of. Generic comment questioning the species of your parentage. Please also view accompanying hand gesture. This is all the victory I need. Lashing out in such an infantile manner just means that your subconscious agrees with me.
But see, this isn't Linux's problem. The number of users like you--smart/patient enough to be able to install their own operating system, not smart/rational enough to purchase hardware to suit their software rather than the other way around (hardware is a means, not an end)--is really small. They are not the primary or even significant barrier to Linux adoption, and it would do Linux little or no good to care more about them. As another poster noted jokingly, Mac OS X only runs on the shiniest of hardware, and frankly in some ways Linux's support for older hardware is better than Vista's. Microsoft and Apple made billions not giving a damn about you, so you shouldn't expect Linux to give a damn about you either. Next time be smarter in picking your hardware.
Yeah, "not my problem" and "not my fault" aren't necessarily the same thing, but in your narrow circumstances, they are. To the extent that Linux does have a problem here, it's an insufficient number of vendors selling pre-configured Linux consumer devices. But that's less a matter of Linux lacking hardware support and more a matter of Linux applications lagging behind. If your applications meet the customer's needs, then any customer worth worrying about will find the hardware required to run your software.
A better example of the phenomenon you're referring to would be support for proprietary data formats (e.g. Microsoft Office). It's not free software's fault that the proprietary software companies intentionally made this difficult. But it is free software's problem.
I doubt it. I wonder how many research dollars are spent chasing "easy in hindsight" ideas that would fail to be discovered if patents wouldn't cover them. I suspect that most of the research money that is spent with the expectation of future patent revenue goes toward chasing ideas that are too complicated to look easy even in retrospect--stuff involving fancy math, chemistry, biology, physics, etc. Surely, even with no patent system, Amazon would still spend just as much money trying to make their site as usable as possible, and one-click ordering would still have been "invented". The drive to achieve a temporary advantage over your competition is probably a better incentive than our broken and arbitrary patent system.
The price of a rent is dictated essentially by what the tenant can pay - it bears no relation to the cost to the landlord of renting the property.
and
If your income is in the form of rent, and your Wurbles cost more, you'll charge more rent.
Really, I'm not sure there's much point going on with the rest of your post. I'm not sure why you call yourself an economist, you don't really have an economic model in mind, you're just playing words games. What you say simply isn't coherent enough to be disproven.
Competition between landlords depends on the market. But I agree they'll charge the highest price the market can bear. That price has absolutely nothing to do with the landowner's bills.
But all this means is that the cost of doing business has aritifically risen. No extra actual *value* has been created.
"Value" doesn't have to be "created" for something to be more valuable. The Wurble-worker's labor without immigration is more valuable in the sense that if we lived in a barter economy he or she could trade an hour of labor for a larger basket of goods. Like that Twilight Zone episode where one guy forces another to trade bars of gold for sips from a canteen--sometimes a shortage makes things more valuable.
Wages rise elsewhere because for their given skill set, workers expect the appropriate renumeration.
The supply curves of labor-hours will generally shift left as prices climb, but demand curves will be all over the place. Some will shift left, some right. Some fields get higher wages, some get lower wages.
You're contradicting Ricardo, aren't you? You'll charge whatever people will pay to use your land.
If your income is in the form of profit, and your Wurbles cost more, you'll increase what you charge, to make more profit.
Your supply and demand curves will shift depending on what your product is. You may make more or less profit afterwards.
Your analysis is broken in countless ways, but here's a big one. We aren't just raising wages for Wurble-workers, we're reducing the number of Wurble-workers. (Or actually, failing to artificially increase the number). That makes each Wurble-workers more valuable to the economy. All the other workers and firms may raise their prices, but it's not necessarily rational for them to do so--in fact, a shortage or Wurble-producing workers could cause a surplus of Wurble-retail workers, Wurble-processing factories, and land on which we could build Wurble-processing factories.
If you're arguing that an increase in wages cancels itself out due to increased prices, you're not living in reality. Obviously, there's a lot of people who earn income from sources other than wages. Increasing wages just redistributes money from those folks to wage earners. Whether that's a good idea or not is debatable. But it's a choice to be made, and if you don't see it I'm afraid that means your economic knowledge isn't very deep.
Those are all examples of people who want to share or at least aren't hiding the information in question. Maybe slashdotters are the only ones who see a difference between the desktop and the web, but even two-year olds see a difference between mine and theirs.
You have a point about the apps, but who plays games on PCs anymore?
That old line-item veto didn't really make sense. One could imagine the two parties negotiating to some compromise in which each party get's something they like, then it gets sent to the White House and the President only keeps the part he likes. It's the same problem with the "signing statements" of recent presidents--it makes no sense that the President can both make changes to a bill and sign it into law before Congress gets a chance to evaluate his changes. It would be just as bad as if Congress could amend the bill after the President signed it.
In the past year or so I've heard talk of a new "line-item veto" that would submit the new altered bill back to Congress to vote yay-or-nay on without additional amendments--that seems to me like a good idea, as long as the Senate filabuster rules apply the same way to that process as to the original bill.
"No security" simply isn't a useful concept. At first glance it seems simply like a Hobbesian "Warre of all against all" in which no order is possible, but obviously some level of order is required for technological progress. The absolute absence of security implies the absence of predictability, of science, of capability, and of life. Other some new order would emerge--either dystopic or utopic--or life would simply cease. How could "no security" be a sustainable situation? Only if life could somehow continue to exist in complete equilibrium at maximum entropy. "No security" just seems like a way of saying "I have no idea what the hell will happen", but that's not a very profitable thing for a futurist to say, is it?
I dunno, but I do know that every dime we spent on the Space Shuttle was an absolute waste of money. As was most of the money we spent on weapons. You're talking about hundreds of billions or maybe trillions of dollars spent making the world a better place. To hell with Mid-East Peace. I'm talking freaking Singularity here.
Billions and billions of dollars have been spend trying to "fix our own messed up planet". This was exactly the reasoning that got the budgets for Apollo 19 and Apollo 20 cancelled.
And has the world not improved since then? The Soviets are gone, nuclear annihilation is less likely, democracy is more widespread, life expectancies in the developed world are higher, the global economy is vastly larger, technology is far more advanced. That fantastic heavy life capability is worthless unless you've got something worth lifting. Better to wait a few decades when we can put self-replicating robots on the moon and build the colony and all the solar power collectors Earth would need without getting moondust under our finger nails.
You expect consistency where there is no reason (other than in your expectations) for there to be any.
Given that rating systems are supposed to express meaning to consumers, consumer expectation should be reason enough. And how would ESRB and MPAA be considered competitors. If they rated the same media, yes, they would be competitors, but since they each stay isolated in their own field the existence of either seems like a vast anti-trust violation, no more or less so if they happen to talk to one and another.
A more reasonable argument would be that the MPAA would sue the ESRB if it copied their standards.
<i>The only place to enforce that "media-is-media" ratings consistency is government, and that's the LAST thing any sane consumer or producer wants.</i>
If the government ratings were voluntary just like ESRB and MPAA ratings are now, then I fail to see the disadvantage.
Medicine is socialist in one sense--diseases are contagious. If you have sick poor people, you will have sick rich people.
Which unfortunately makes me either (or maybe both) an ass for thinking "everyone else" are just plain stupid, Yeah, that's definitely the vibe I'm getting. Look, I'll probably buy the console, and I *LIKE* the fact that Nintendo is trying to appeal outside the "hard core" audience, I'm just tired of all this Scott McClellan, Baghdad Bob spin away from the fact that this name is, prima facie, bizarre, combined with the strange sort of holier-than-thou posture adopted by everyone arguing for it--like they don't even like the name (you yourself claim to like Revolution better) but they just want to be better than everyone else. There's even a strange orwellian attempt to pretend that other console names or even the iPod once looked as weird as Wii. The console seems to have social gaming in mind, and that the name of the console is so awkward--that it makes me feel like an idiot when it's name passes my lips--can't be good for word of mouth advertizing. The potty-mouth interpretations of the name are common for a reason that goes beyond immaturity--if you give people ambiguous, bizarre sequences of letters or sounds, any offensive or shocking meaning is going to tend to come to mind first. It's the same phenomenon as when a musician sings overly poetic or dada-ish lyrics, and the listener's brain latches onto some humorous reinterpretation. "...the girl with colitis goes by.", "...excuse me while I kiss this guy"--everyone has a collection of those wrong-songs, and Nintendo seems to have wrong-songed themselves.
Perhaps we no longer have a mass culture. Now that youth sits behind computer screens rather than in front of tv screens, everything's fragmented and the decade simply can't be summed up in the simple way like the other decades. After 9/11 it seemed like this decade would be the pendulum swinging back over from irony and cynicism, but that sure didn't last.
Huh. It makes a scary amount of sense if you think about it--like this decade is just a giant "nought"--a cultural void, a tremendous anticlimax compared to the apocalypse/utopia that everyone imagined the future would be. I think I've probably heard that before, I guess it just never caught on over here for lack of whimsy tolerance or something.
I purchased the original KH, I loved the graphics and I really want to explore all the Disney worlds--but, by the time I got to that Tarzan level, I just got sick of wandering around lost in the forest with a camera system that made various jumping puzzles really annoying. Maybe KHII is different, but I'd just like to report at least one sale of of KH was not in fact due to it being fun to play. It was fun to watch. Not fun to play.
I'll likely buy this console as well. But I do not look forward to this name. For the very simple reason that it's awkward to tell people about. If they haven't already heard of Wii, you can forget about--you'll immediately sound like either someone who doesn't understand the concept of pronouns or some kind of pervert. I think the pervert response will actually be more common that people realize--when you are given a set of sounds to interpret that has multiple possible meanings, the shocking meanings are going to draw more of your attention.
In any event, if you tell someone you're going to play Wii, the urine/pronoun blur will color their interpretation of you. You then explain what Wii is, but now you're the sort of dork who has to explain everything he says. Awkwardness, poor grammar, and perversion are all now associated with you.
You'll even have to spell it! Double-ewe-eye-eye! (Dubya, aye aye?!! OMG SUBLIMINAL MESSAGE Wii: it's a uniter, not a divider)
And if this console is supposed to focus on social interaction, any added difficultly in word of mouth advertising seems like a huge liability. The problem is mitigated assuming Nintendo advertising of the Wii brand is omnipresent, but I'm not sure advertising has ever been the primary way people are introduced to new games. Especially for regular people--the games famous for appealing to non-gamers--from Tetris to The Sims, from Nintendogs to Bejewled, from WoW to DDR, tended, I think, to spread more by word of mouth than by massive advertising campaigns. Any game, even the simplest, is a bigger time sink than a tv show or a movie or a flavor of soda, and so those who are least "hard-core" about games are the ones who most rely on other people they trust to point out when something worth their attention comes along.
I remember back in the nineties people would wonder what they would call this decade. We never did find a good name for it, and so therefore we never refer to it--I never hear anyone refer to this decade as a cultural unit. Awkwardness is a powerful cultural disincentive--awkward ideas don't last. And ideas like "I play Wii and you should too!" or "We should play Wii!" are spatially sound but aurally awkward. People will likely end up saying something like "Nintendo Wii" or "the Wii system" or "Wii gaming" or some other unauthorized set of disambiguation sounds when necessary in non-games contexts. It's one thing to have a product name that people can make jokes about, but in this case the jokes could conceivably cloud understanding.
Bah! Aristotle couldn't tell a horse's head from an animal's head!
Is it really still true that Biologists have no idea about programming? That seems like the direction you'd want to solve this problem from--it's gotta be way easier to teach a biologist some SQL than it is to teach a programmer to be a biologist.
Perhaps you are correct that her detractors are misquoting her. But she was still wrong. By her logic, you could just as easily say "there are no human beings"--there are just human tissues. Brain tissues (of both the left and right brain) pretend as though they're actually doing work, but actually anything done by a "human being" is really done by some muscle tissue or internal organ.
This is of course nonsense. Human beings exist--and what makes them human beings is not just the sum of their cells, but the way in which those cells are organized into a thing that thinks and acts. Without that, you've just got a disgusting pile of sticky, bloody gunk with 46 chromosomes.
Likewise, society is more than just the people and families that make it up--it is also the relationships between them. Their shared goals, their mutual trust, their common empathy. Just like the arrangement of cells in the body, the arrangement of people in a society enables it accomplish goals--build trains, win wars, heal the sick, etc. Without society, you've just got Somalia.
That said, Thatcher is right that people are better off solving their own problems, it's better to contibue a fix than whine about known OSS problems, and if I accidentally cut myself my cells are better off healing themselves than waiting for help from the central nervous system (though I'll try to apply a bandaid and disinfectant if I think of it--no promises little guys, just hang in there and ward off infection as best as you can).
But action at the tissue level should not preclude actions at the individual level, nor should action at the individual level preclude action at the social level.