So, how do you feel about the whole DeCSS "all programs are speech" argument? I can understand why one would want to draw a distinction between speech and some sort of "executable information"--information that exists purely as a tool for machines--but the concept seems destined to be troublesome. Eventually computers will be able to understand natural language--I might be able to just tell a computer "create a game called 'Kill the Hatians' in which the player is told to do just that, dropped into a Hatian community, given lots of guns, and awarded points based on how many Hatians they kill." If computers existed that could create a game based on such a description with no further human intervention, would my ironically delivered passage continue to be protected speech? Are any of these protected speech?
I'm also reminded of the Supreme Court striking down a bin on virtual child porn, as well. Both the court and common sense seperate real crimes from virtual crimes.
Heh, remember when it was conservatives who were skeptical of government power? Bill Clinton announcing "the era of big government is over" in response to his party losing control of the House and Senate? A crazy Gingrich/Limbaugh revolution of anti-government fury, culminating in the Oklahoma City bombing by right winger McVeigh?
Now suddenly they're all NeoMcCarthyists. What happened?
The new slavery is robotics. The number of manufacturing jobs has been decreasing globally--there's room for fewer and fewer people at the bottom or even the middle of the pyramid. Ideally, this would mean a Larger Pyramid--room for almost everyone in the world at the middle levels, new unimagined levels for today's top of the pyramid. But somehow reality interferes.
We do import a tremendous number of natural resources, but in many cases there are domestic resources we could use instead--like coal instead of oil.
Of course it would take time to transition to such an economy, there would be a large short term drop in standard of living, but properly managed the pain could be managed, and within a few years we should be at least as good as we are now. This wouldn't be great, but it'd be doable.
The real problem is that somehow an excess of cheap labor has become a bad thing. It shouldn't be this way. It's crazy that one half of the world can't find a job while the other half goes dies for lack of needed products--somehow supply needs to be linked up to demand. When I stop and think about, the standard claim that America was stronger in the 1950s because Europe was blown to bits is mind boggling--yes it's certainly true, but it's a product of the way we've arranged our economy rather than a fundamental truth of the physical world.
Come on, read the other posts here, everyone else is talking about reasons to own an XBox instead of another system or even as well as another system. Reasons to own video game systems in general are fairly disingenous.
Let me ask you this--when you finish playing the game, are you a better person than you were when you started? If not, I consider it passive. Now, if you're an 8 year old, understanding how a video game works probably enhances your logical abilities. If you're a 30 year old addicted to building level 50 characters in Everquest, I doubt that enhances any of your cognitive abilities.
So, yes, I exaggerate, but not really that much...
I agree that America has an unsustainable credit bubble--I credit this to supply side attempts to stimulate the economy by encouraging borrowing rather than using Keynesian economics. In this particular economy, people must borrow to maintain their standard of living--but if instead we had more government transfers from rich to poor, or more government spending on domestic projects, we could increase the velocity of money without debt. No, things at WalMart might not be so cheap, we wouldn't have as many fancy computers and HDTVs, but fewer people might go without health care.
In fact, I don't consider it inevitable that America's standard of living has to decline. If we completely closed down the border to all foreign trade to achieve complete autarky, after a decade of building more coal and nuclear plants, as well as electric cars to make up for a complete lack of oil, then there would be no reason America's standard of living has to decline (unless we run out of coal a lot sooner than expected.) Whatever is physically possible should be economically possible, and with increasing technology it is certainly physically possible to produce a higher standard of living than Americans currently recieve.
I certainly don't think that is the best solution, but it exists as an alternative that globalists must argue against--if a world with Internation Trade cannot be made at least as good (for Americans) as the world without International Trade, then you can't expect Americans to go along with it without some sort of mass deception. Many credit Franklin Roosevelt with saving Capitalism by betraying it--without the anti-market New Deal, Socialism would have taken over the United States. Starvation trumps ideology every time. I suspect that the future survival of globalism in American economic policy needs an anti-globalist to take charge.
I'm not even sure globalism is best for the rest of the world. The end result isn't just America as Brazil, but the Enitre World as Brazil. A few super rich people scattered throughout the world will own an entire planet of an ever dwindling number of sweatshops, which they slowly replace with robot factories until everyone but those few people starves to death. In an absolute sense, the majority of the world's people might have a somewhat higher standard of living, for a time. But in a relative sense, the centralization of economic power leads to the centralization of political power--and Pure Capitalism becomes Feudalism.
If the entire world could somehow be managed on Keynsian principles--in which a World Government would ensure that poor workers in developing countries had enough cash to purchase products from developed countries, so that sufficient demand existed for every worker everywhere to improve the global standard of living, then globalism and increasing productivity would be increase the living standards of all people on Earth. But no sufficiently trustworthy world government has been found.
A few things you're forgetting: India and Europe both heavily subsidize health care and education--which are probably the two largest factors in the high cost of labor in the United States. These countries are actually practicing crypto-protectionism--government intervention to reduce to price of exported products with social programs for workers. To blame American workers when foreign governments give their workers unfair advantages is a disgusting lie.
With the massive American trade deficit (which will eventually annihilate our economy, which will make life suck for you whether or not your job goes to India before that happens), one would expect the value of the dollar to fall. But Asian banks have been proping up the value of the dollar by buying United States Treasury bonds, to encourage more exports to America. This is great for Americans who have lots of money and property and don't need to work for a living--it means fantastically cheap products at WalMart. It makes life suck for you if you have to work for a living. Once again, foreign government intervention screwing over American workers. Free trade has nothing to do with free markets!
Not too mention that Americans are expected to compete with workers who are restrained by American laws--no environmental standards in factories, no minimum wage laws, nothing. Why on Earth did we pass these laws if we aren't going to enforce them for all products that can be purchased on American shelves? So even American government policy encourages jobs to go overseas. (No, I'm not suggesting we eliminate the regulations--I just think we should enforce them for all products bought in America.)
So it isn't a free market at all. It's a market in which foreign fiscal and treasury policies are forcing American jobs overseas and American regulations produce an unfair disincentive to build factories here. Basically, every other government says "Screw America!" and the U.S. doesn't give a shit as long as a few key corporations get rich. Repeat after me: Globalism has nothing to do with free markets or capitalism.
The other insanity in your post is that you think workers (you say programmers, but all workers are just as screwed over by anti-market globalism as programers. Michigan is hurting a lot worse than Silicon Valley.) are going to just acquiesce to these changes just because you keep saying the magic words "free market". Repeat after me People need to eat, and will do whatever it takes to ensure they get food and shelter. If you tell people that there is no way for them to meet their needs within the free market, they have no choice but to destroy the free market! Why do you think those lobbyists always succeeded in argiculture and auto manufacture? Because no one cares about maintaining the global competitiveness of jobs that are going overseas anyway. Thank heavens that those lobbyists are always able to shut up fools like you--America would be vastly poorer than we are now if we purchased every last one of our cars and vegetables overseas.
History is clear on this. There is no example of a great empire that maintained growing trade deficits indefinitely. There are many Empires that have fallen because they gave away all of their gold for luxury and consumer goods for the middle class--see Spain and Britain. The Chinese sell us DVD players we throw away next year, and buy industrial capital to make themselves economically stronger indefinitely. If this continues, China will be stronger than the entire Western World--and then, because some American leaders upheld their narrow and simplistic view of Capitalism, we will lose something much more precious--Democracy.
Please name a console game that wouldn't be better if developed to take advantage of the superior capabilities of a properly equipped PC.
The problem is that it's so damn complicated to know whether you have a properly equipped PC or not. It used to be just a matter of Processor and Memory. Now you need a graphics card that supports the specific feature set that the game requires. Explaining to users why a GeForce 4 MX won't run Deus Ex 2 while a GeForce 3 will, for example, is a pain in the ass. (The GeForce 3 doesn't do a good job of it, which is odd because it should be about as good as the XBox's Nvidia card.)
How many PC games actually used the shader technology that XBox games used at launch? Not many, because they simply couldn't count on enough users having that technology. Even today, more than 2 years later, users moan in confusion at their supposedly fast machines being unable to play the latest games.
In fact, in contrary to holding back the industry, I think the XBox actually propels it forward. How many developers would actually bother with shader technology if the XBox didn't create a large pool of users they could count on marketing it to?
I still think PC Online gaming is better because of the potential to create mods. Computers are tools for creativity, consoles are tools for passive time-killing.
Really, there's no such thing as a game that runs on both GBA and GCN--just because a game has the same name doesn't mean it's actually the same game. It's less of a port, more of a sharing of trademarks.
Um, the post you're replying to is real. It's part of the "real world". Somehow I suspect that the New York Post has a greater image problem than Take Two Interactive...
View this article if you must, but it's become all too common for everyone to write articles intended to piss off a great subset of people online in order to drive hits to their site. Please do not reward this silliness--remember to use proxomitron, junkbuster, whatever your favorite tool is for depriving these folks of the fruit of their agitations.
I call it PS1 now, but you must have been awfully insightful if you were calling it that before the PS2 was even released. Lots and lots of people on the internet called it PSX, which will make any web searches for PSX return confusing results.
The question is, when computers become powerful enough that we can create non-arbitrary adventure games--the designer creates a world of characters controlled by realistic AIs and the story emerges from interaction between player and AI, will we still call such games Adventure games? Or will that genre be long dead by the time this happens?
I nearly wrote a rant about how assinine a name 'Adventure' is for this genre that really means 'ass backwards dream logic'. But that's not the point.
I'm disappointed--that's a pretty brilliant way to both define the category of games and exactly what's wrong with them. When an adventure game stops using Bizarro World logic and bases itself on clearly defined, predictable rules, it becomes a Puzzle game instead of an Adventure game. Which is why RPGs and action games with Adventure elements have taken a lot of the space that Adventure games once enjoyed--players want to explore new worlds with interesting stories, but they hate having the game designer's arbitrary whims inflicted upon them unpredictably at every turn.
Please build such an island so that the rest of us on planet Earth can take advantage of your completely autistic and easily-manipulated society. Thank you.
Ah, who am I kidding--I'd probably end up being one of the suckers on the island just like you. I'm pretty sure there are lots of islands just as you describe, their just locked in universities and labs.
Is it possible that the sphere of science and technology has expanded so much since the Benthamites that one actually could enjoy a healthy and creative life, full of symbolic meaning and structure, in pure science and technology? Music and literature are awesome, I wouldn't want to live on Super Technocrat Island of Technofun as proposed here, but given that humanity survived for millions of pre-historic years without music, literature, or science, it seems probable that one could survive with one of the three.
Why does pokemon break the rules? Because it appealed to a widely different play base that was not interested in the original produce at all.
Hmm. This point could be even more pertinent to MMO than to CCGs--surely there are more similarities between Pokemon and Magic than there are between Everquest and The Sims Online.
Surely more people would want to be president of SimNation than mayor of SimCity, no?
The real reason is that a video game based on elections wouldn't give you the opportunity to propose genuinely new ideas to solve problems--the best you could hope for would be to occupy a typical place somewhere on the standard left/right spectrum--boring. Computers just aren't good enough to simulate new political ideas.
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If this is true, you should applaud special interest lobby groups from bringing the dollars the democracy that is Sacred Capitalism into Congress.
I'm also reminded of the Supreme Court striking down a bin on virtual child porn, as well. Both the court and common sense seperate real crimes from virtual crimes.
Now suddenly they're all NeoMcCarthyists. What happened?
We do import a tremendous number of natural resources, but in many cases there are domestic resources we could use instead--like coal instead of oil.
Of course it would take time to transition to such an economy, there would be a large short term drop in standard of living, but properly managed the pain could be managed, and within a few years we should be at least as good as we are now. This wouldn't be great, but it'd be doable.
The real problem is that somehow an excess of cheap labor has become a bad thing. It shouldn't be this way. It's crazy that one half of the world can't find a job while the other half goes dies for lack of needed products--somehow supply needs to be linked up to demand. When I stop and think about, the standard claim that America was stronger in the 1950s because Europe was blown to bits is mind boggling--yes it's certainly true, but it's a product of the way we've arranged our economy rather than a fundamental truth of the physical world.
Hmm, I suppose it's the difference between running on EITHER system or BOTH systems--my bad.
Come on, read the other posts here, everyone else is talking about reasons to own an XBox instead of another system or even as well as another system. Reasons to own video game systems in general are fairly disingenous.
So, yes, I exaggerate, but not really that much...
In fact, I don't consider it inevitable that America's standard of living has to decline. If we completely closed down the border to all foreign trade to achieve complete autarky, after a decade of building more coal and nuclear plants, as well as electric cars to make up for a complete lack of oil, then there would be no reason America's standard of living has to decline (unless we run out of coal a lot sooner than expected.) Whatever is physically possible should be economically possible, and with increasing technology it is certainly physically possible to produce a higher standard of living than Americans currently recieve.
I certainly don't think that is the best solution, but it exists as an alternative that globalists must argue against--if a world with Internation Trade cannot be made at least as good (for Americans) as the world without International Trade, then you can't expect Americans to go along with it without some sort of mass deception. Many credit Franklin Roosevelt with saving Capitalism by betraying it--without the anti-market New Deal, Socialism would have taken over the United States. Starvation trumps ideology every time. I suspect that the future survival of globalism in American economic policy needs an anti-globalist to take charge.
I'm not even sure globalism is best for the rest of the world. The end result isn't just America as Brazil, but the Enitre World as Brazil. A few super rich people scattered throughout the world will own an entire planet of an ever dwindling number of sweatshops, which they slowly replace with robot factories until everyone but those few people starves to death. In an absolute sense, the majority of the world's people might have a somewhat higher standard of living, for a time. But in a relative sense, the centralization of economic power leads to the centralization of political power--and Pure Capitalism becomes Feudalism.
If the entire world could somehow be managed on Keynsian principles--in which a World Government would ensure that poor workers in developing countries had enough cash to purchase products from developed countries, so that sufficient demand existed for every worker everywhere to improve the global standard of living, then globalism and increasing productivity would be increase the living standards of all people on Earth. But no sufficiently trustworthy world government has been found.
With the massive American trade deficit (which will eventually annihilate our economy, which will make life suck for you whether or not your job goes to India before that happens), one would expect the value of the dollar to fall. But Asian banks have been proping up the value of the dollar by buying United States Treasury bonds, to encourage more exports to America. This is great for Americans who have lots of money and property and don't need to work for a living--it means fantastically cheap products at WalMart. It makes life suck for you if you have to work for a living. Once again, foreign government intervention screwing over American workers. Free trade has nothing to do with free markets!
Not too mention that Americans are expected to compete with workers who are restrained by American laws--no environmental standards in factories, no minimum wage laws, nothing. Why on Earth did we pass these laws if we aren't going to enforce them for all products that can be purchased on American shelves? So even American government policy encourages jobs to go overseas. (No, I'm not suggesting we eliminate the regulations--I just think we should enforce them for all products bought in America.)
So it isn't a free market at all. It's a market in which foreign fiscal and treasury policies are forcing American jobs overseas and American regulations produce an unfair disincentive to build factories here. Basically, every other government says "Screw America!" and the U.S. doesn't give a shit as long as a few key corporations get rich. Repeat after me: Globalism has nothing to do with free markets or capitalism.
The other insanity in your post is that you think workers (you say programmers, but all workers are just as screwed over by anti-market globalism as programers. Michigan is hurting a lot worse than Silicon Valley.) are going to just acquiesce to these changes just because you keep saying the magic words "free market". Repeat after me People need to eat, and will do whatever it takes to ensure they get food and shelter. If you tell people that there is no way for them to meet their needs within the free market, they have no choice but to destroy the free market! Why do you think those lobbyists always succeeded in argiculture and auto manufacture? Because no one cares about maintaining the global competitiveness of jobs that are going overseas anyway. Thank heavens that those lobbyists are always able to shut up fools like you--America would be vastly poorer than we are now if we purchased every last one of our cars and vegetables overseas.
History is clear on this. There is no example of a great empire that maintained growing trade deficits indefinitely. There are many Empires that have fallen because they gave away all of their gold for luxury and consumer goods for the middle class--see Spain and Britain. The Chinese sell us DVD players we throw away next year, and buy industrial capital to make themselves economically stronger indefinitely. If this continues, China will be stronger than the entire Western World--and then, because some American leaders upheld their narrow and simplistic view of Capitalism, we will lose something much more precious--Democracy.
The problem is that it's so damn complicated to know whether you have a properly equipped PC or not. It used to be just a matter of Processor and Memory. Now you need a graphics card that supports the specific feature set that the game requires. Explaining to users why a GeForce 4 MX won't run Deus Ex 2 while a GeForce 3 will, for example, is a pain in the ass. (The GeForce 3 doesn't do a good job of it, which is odd because it should be about as good as the XBox's Nvidia card.)
How many PC games actually used the shader technology that XBox games used at launch? Not many, because they simply couldn't count on enough users having that technology. Even today, more than 2 years later, users moan in confusion at their supposedly fast machines being unable to play the latest games.
In fact, in contrary to holding back the industry, I think the XBox actually propels it forward. How many developers would actually bother with shader technology if the XBox didn't create a large pool of users they could count on marketing it to?
I still think PC Online gaming is better because of the potential to create mods. Computers are tools for creativity, consoles are tools for passive time-killing.
You may have forgotten that you are the only one discussing that, everyone else is talking about reasons to own an XBox.
Really, there's no such thing as a game that runs on both GBA and GCN--just because a game has the same name doesn't mean it's actually the same game. It's less of a port, more of a sharing of trademarks.
Um, the post you're replying to is real. It's part of the "real world". Somehow I suspect that the New York Post has a greater image problem than Take Two Interactive...
View this article if you must, but it's become all too common for everyone to write articles intended to piss off a great subset of people online in order to drive hits to their site. Please do not reward this silliness--remember to use proxomitron, junkbuster, whatever your favorite tool is for depriving these folks of the fruit of their agitations.
My point was that it's not XBox exclusive. Whether it was exclusive more than a month ago is no reason to own one now. So, what is your point?
You may have forgotten that title was not XBox exclusive.
I call it PS1 now, but you must have been awfully insightful if you were calling it that before the PS2 was even released. Lots and lots of people on the internet called it PSX, which will make any web searches for PSX return confusing results.
The question is, when computers become powerful enough that we can create non-arbitrary adventure games--the designer creates a world of characters controlled by realistic AIs and the story emerges from interaction between player and AI, will we still call such games Adventure games? Or will that genre be long dead by the time this happens?
I'm disappointed--that's a pretty brilliant way to both define the category of games and exactly what's wrong with them. When an adventure game stops using Bizarro World logic and bases itself on clearly defined, predictable rules, it becomes a Puzzle game instead of an Adventure game. Which is why RPGs and action games with Adventure elements have taken a lot of the space that Adventure games once enjoyed--players want to explore new worlds with interesting stories, but they hate having the game designer's arbitrary whims inflicted upon them unpredictably at every turn.
It would be really sweet if they put a differential GPS station in every cell phone tower...just an idea.
Ah, who am I kidding--I'd probably end up being one of the suckers on the island just like you. I'm pretty sure there are lots of islands just as you describe, their just locked in universities and labs.
Is it possible that the sphere of science and technology has expanded so much since the Benthamites that one actually could enjoy a healthy and creative life, full of symbolic meaning and structure, in pure science and technology? Music and literature are awesome, I wouldn't want to live on Super Technocrat Island of Technofun as proposed here, but given that humanity survived for millions of pre-historic years without music, literature, or science, it seems probable that one could survive with one of the three.
Why does pokemon break the rules? Because it appealed to a widely different play base that was not interested in the original produce at all. Hmm. This point could be even more pertinent to MMO than to CCGs--surely there are more similarities between Pokemon and Magic than there are between Everquest and The Sims Online.
Surely more people would want to be president of SimNation than mayor of SimCity, no? The real reason is that a video game based on elections wouldn't give you the opportunity to propose genuinely new ideas to solve problems--the best you could hope for would be to occupy a typical place somewhere on the standard left/right spectrum--boring. Computers just aren't good enough to simulate new political ideas.
That's what I meant by "globalism is illogical"--what good is a software name that only works in the USA?