Don't we already have examples of skeletons that are mixtures of Neandertal and Cro-Magnon features?
Also note that Cro-magnons had skull shapes somewhat similar to Neandertals (prognathous, low-browed, pronounced eyebrow ridges), although they had larger cranial capacity than contemporary H. S. sapiens; and they had the same kind of stature as Neandertals. Intermarriage/interbreeding between the two species would not have been inconceivable, and would not have needed all that much alcohol.
As to inter-fertility, isn't it genus, not species, that tends to be the barrier?
A more solid style of construction wouldn't hurt, either. I remember that a famous anthropology joke/thought-experiment in the '70s -- "Body Ritual Among the Nacirema" -- spoke of how most Nacerima buildings were wattle-and-daub, and that's hardly an exaggeration. If we built with brick or stone, we'd have better insulation right there; brick is the low-budget version of semi-subterranean building. (The high-budget version wouldn't hurt either, but it's surprisingly expensive to dig a hole in the ground.)
The other pitfall that you illustrate is that user-created content is a minefield of IP violations. All of your examples except the one people are commenting on could probably get a game shut down, or at least forced to defend itself legally; I seem to recall hearing about this happening to Little Big Planet, and the same problem even crops up with Spore. Its creature-, building-, and vehicle-creators are hardly easy to use, but it has a whole package of Nintendo content (a Wii-controller-shaped factory, a Bob-omb spaceship, etc.), and I myself created a herbivorous boar-person species that was basically Ganon with his serial numbers filed off and minus sixty or eighty extra pounds. (Named and tagged as such, of course...)
This was before I opted for Spore ornithology instead, creating cranes, swans and the like... but even there, I was creating creatures from an existing setting, only I was using the Audubon Guide instead of Hyrule. Birds are probably public-domain by now (assuming "life of the author" doesn't count resurrection), but the same point holds -- these are not original creations.
There was a double layer of irony in the particular case of Spore -- zealous IP protection for a bottled incitement to IP violations...
Correction -- in my comment above, I'd meant Stardock, with the piracy numbers for Demigod. (The same situation occurred with indie darling World of Goo.)
"You wish you could lower your price and gain sales. Well, there's one thing you can do that will not lower your sales at all, and will probably raise them: drop the DRM."
You heard about what happened to Paradox, didn't you?
You are the kind of person who makes it hard for reasonable opponents of Obama to so much as hold their heads up in public!
More seriously and less Scottishly, this is a very good idea. Read _Achilles in Vietnam_ to learn more about PTSD, and you'll see the point. Remember the need for cameraderie mentioned above; PTSD sufferers need to be able to communicate, and this is the most convenient way. Controlled reenactment of battlefield events would be a very useful addition, as a key part of PTSD treatment is learning to overcome and work past the traumatizing event, but this is a real step forward. Heck, the military acknowledging that PTSD so much as _exists_ is a real step forward.
Also remember that the military is managing to look after itself reasonably well under this administration. We should be very glad that Obama's tsars don't have much interest in the army, and thus he's left Gates in office...
By your logic, there was nothing wrong with Guantanamo Bay.
The right answer is not to dive into the ethically dubious (or the ethically outrageous, in the case of using torture); it's to look for the solution that works best, not the solution that sounds scariest. CCTVs are security theater with particularly creepy overtones; sustained police foot patrols are a better way of helping grandmothers, and anyone else. See also my comment just below, linking to Dalrymple on the lack of police commitment.
Theodore Dalrymple's opinion on the matter is that the police in England just don't bother to solve most crimes -- hardly even to investigate them. That their cameras do such a horrible job of helping criminal investigations shouldn't be a surprise, then; technology is only useful if it's used.
On the other hand, it's merciful that this kind of technology is not used. Privacy is an important thing, and it's not at all true that the only people who have cause to desire it are those who have something to hide; and as to controlling crime, it's foot patrols that work, not surveillance.
Amazon didn't know that it was still under copyright in the US, and didn't have the rights to sell it. When they discovered their mistake, they took it back -- removing the books and refunding the buyers' money. Damages paid to rights-holders are given to compensate for the fact that the violator can't remove every copy of the infringing product they sold; but in this case, they were able to. If this was anything except 1984, this wouldn't have been news at all.
"Smooth Moos" was launched around 1995 -- but the product has so little Internet presence that I think it's pretty much Pepsi's Holiday Special. Coke, beware: you're not Genghis Khan.
I like the idea (and I find myself wondering just how many weapons the game developers have cached:) ), but I think it makes the mistake of assuming that games are sold based on the quality of their story, level design, and the like. I would be among the first to say they should be, but it doesn't seem most games are written that way -- better models and graphics engines are still the competitive focus. This made sense during the growth period of graphics, the late 1990s, but it's less viable now -- it's like late-industrializing countries touting their modernity by building steel refineries and aluminum plants. Graphics are stable now, and the marginal cost for the next step of benefits is higher -- I believe someone on this mentions that _The Chronicles of Riddick_ is about as advanced of graphics as he'd really need in the presence of good content elsewhere -- and game developers need to focus a great deal more on other elements, on quality of storyline and gameplay above all, and less on polygon count. There's precedent for this kind of reinvention to match the new paradigm, too: remember how U.S. Steel is known for the quality of its blog software, and General Motors runs the most popular and profitable search engine on the planet?
(I know I'm late on this -- past the first page -- so it's likely this won't accomplish all that much. Still, it's worth a shot...)
What if the Boy Scouts wanted to exclude homosexuals from leadership, not because they're a bunch of meanies and discriminating arbitrarily is what bunches of meanies do, but because homosexuality has so frequently meant pedastry, especially prior to the 20th century?
Off the top of my head: the 17th-century French traveller Chardin (cited in Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life) observed that in Persia there were three sexes, and many men were homosexual with young boys; after the conquest of Cyprus, the Ottomans sent the young son as well as the daughter of the governor to the Sultan's harem; and to give an example closer to home, for the Greeks and Romans homosexuality almost always meant "with a boy." Indeed, their repression of women meant that love was almost exclusively between men and boys (cf. Plato's Phaedro 73d). I'm also reminded of that one interminable Roman novel with the hopelessly crass noveau-riche who serves counterfeit Optimian, does a dress rehersal of his own funeral at a dinner party, and proudly has an epitath that he was worth however many million sesterces and never heard a philosopher. (Although obviously, pedastry was not his only fault -- and just as obviously, he was fictional, but it's not the major concepts but the things mentioned off-handedly -- like this character's pedastry -- that are likeliest to be reliably historical. Anyone familiar with A History of Private Life or the Annales School knows exactly what I'm talking about.) (Note also: I omit discussions of the Far East and India here mostly because I don't know many details offhand, but anyone who wants to Wikipedia Mori Ranmaru can be my guest.)
So based on this kind of pattern -- possibly mirrored in the present day by the precipitate fall in the age of consent in, say, the Netherlands -- I'd say that the BSA was acting prudently. Pedophilia is not universal among homosexuals, but it's a darned sight more common than it is in heterosexuals, at least judging by history. (Another phenomenon that could be an example of sublimated homosexual pedastry: boys' choirs, and the castrati of early-modern Europe.)
Copper is expensive and generally high-demand, but the penny is made primarily from zinc -- a less valuable and more abundant metal. Has the price of zinc behaved similarly recently?
(I'm not a numismatologist or however you pronounce it, nor a commodities trader, but I know it could be a possibility. What's zinc used for, also? The only things that come to mind for me are US pennies and trace additives to breakfast cereals...;))
Did anyone else read that as something like "Allivant Formaxis Isapsis"? Am I the only one whose Greek is sufficiently mediocre to not always read an English "X" as a Greek letter "Chi"?:P
(In other words, yes, stupid, but remember the "white and black" PSP ads, or the mock-graffiti? Being surprised as Sony doing something underhanded to market the PSP is like being surprised that the bright yellow thing came up again this morning...)
Microsoft blew last generation on the RPG front, but this time around, they've got an exclusive arrangement with Sakaguchi, Uematsu, and Amano; with that particular brain trust, well, I think it's hard to say they're not trying...
(Note: No, Amano isn't -- I don't *think* -- directly connected with Mistwalker, but there was an article on this very news-service a few days ago mentioning that he's still in close contact with Sakaguchi. Story by 1up or someone, IIRC.)
A true point, but the standards in games -- so far -- are lower. There aren't any 'highbrow' games yet, if 'highbrow' means 'rival of Macbeth'... I was thinking almost exclusively of KQ6, in fairness -- a game which I think is worthy of considerable recognition, for sheer atmosphere if nothing else. Of course, whether quality of technique makes something qualify as "highbrow" is a subject that can be (that *is*, correction) discussed interminably with neither a meaningful conclusion nor productive results...
So, in conclusion: Touché. (Though I stand by the thesis that "laughably inappropriate" is, well, laughingly inappropriate -- and I don't think Twain deserves the honor of "highbrow" status either.:) And is my stress mark facing the right way?)
And back to game development. Better to *do* than to *theorize about*, particularly in a wildly under-explored form of storytelling that's been around about thirty years... a lesson that Adams really ought to take to heart. He's a man with good ideas -- why is his resumé mostly Madden?
Slashdot Mirror
Those neo-Nazis -- we should cleanse our racial stock of this inferior material!
(Sorry for replying to the spam, but this was too good to pass up.)
Don't we already have examples of skeletons that are mixtures of Neandertal and Cro-Magnon features?
Also note that Cro-magnons had skull shapes somewhat similar to Neandertals (prognathous, low-browed, pronounced eyebrow ridges), although they had larger cranial capacity than contemporary H. S. sapiens; and they had the same kind of stature as Neandertals. Intermarriage/interbreeding between the two species would not have been inconceivable, and would not have needed all that much alcohol.
As to inter-fertility, isn't it genus, not species, that tends to be the barrier?
A more solid style of construction wouldn't hurt, either. I remember that a famous anthropology joke/thought-experiment in the '70s -- "Body Ritual Among the Nacirema" -- spoke of how most Nacerima buildings were wattle-and-daub, and that's hardly an exaggeration. If we built with brick or stone, we'd have better insulation right there; brick is the low-budget version of semi-subterranean building. (The high-budget version wouldn't hurt either, but it's surprisingly expensive to dig a hole in the ground.)
The other pitfall that you illustrate is that user-created content is a minefield of IP violations. All of your examples except the one people are commenting on could probably get a game shut down, or at least forced to defend itself legally; I seem to recall hearing about this happening to Little Big Planet, and the same problem even crops up with Spore. Its creature-, building-, and vehicle-creators are hardly easy to use, but it has a whole package of Nintendo content (a Wii-controller-shaped factory, a Bob-omb spaceship, etc.), and I myself created a herbivorous boar-person species that was basically Ganon with his serial numbers filed off and minus sixty or eighty extra pounds. (Named and tagged as such, of course...)
This was before I opted for Spore ornithology instead, creating cranes, swans and the like... but even there, I was creating creatures from an existing setting, only I was using the Audubon Guide instead of Hyrule. Birds are probably public-domain by now (assuming "life of the author" doesn't count resurrection), but the same point holds -- these are not original creations.
There was a double layer of irony in the particular case of Spore -- zealous IP protection for a bottled incitement to IP violations...
Correction -- in my comment above, I'd meant Stardock, with the piracy numbers for Demigod. (The same situation occurred with indie darling World of Goo.)
"You wish you could lower your price and gain sales. Well, there's one thing you can do that will not lower your sales at all, and will probably raise them: drop the DRM."
You heard about what happened to Paradox, didn't you?
Well, more like a Dragunov than an AK-47...
So give the Washingtonian this much credit, he at least caught on that it was Warsaw Pact, not NATO. :)
Not that many IEDs in WOW, at least unless the dwarves have been up to something. :)
You are the kind of person who makes it hard for reasonable opponents of Obama to so much as hold their heads up in public!
More seriously and less Scottishly, this is a very good idea. Read _Achilles in Vietnam_ to learn more about PTSD, and you'll see the point. Remember the need for cameraderie mentioned above; PTSD sufferers need to be able to communicate, and this is the most convenient way. Controlled reenactment of battlefield events would be a very useful addition, as a key part of PTSD treatment is learning to overcome and work past the traumatizing event, but this is a real step forward. Heck, the military acknowledging that PTSD so much as _exists_ is a real step forward.
Also remember that the military is managing to look after itself reasonably well under this administration. We should be very glad that Obama's tsars don't have much interest in the army, and thus he's left Gates in office...
By your logic, there was nothing wrong with Guantanamo Bay.
The right answer is not to dive into the ethically dubious (or the ethically outrageous, in the case of using torture); it's to look for the solution that works best, not the solution that sounds scariest. CCTVs are security theater with particularly creepy overtones; sustained police foot patrols are a better way of helping grandmothers, and anyone else. See also my comment just below, linking to Dalrymple on the lack of police commitment.
Theodore Dalrymple's opinion on the matter is that the police in England just don't bother to solve most crimes -- hardly even to investigate them. That their cameras do such a horrible job of helping criminal investigations shouldn't be a surprise, then; technology is only useful if it's used.
On the other hand, it's merciful that this kind of technology is not used. Privacy is an important thing, and it's not at all true that the only people who have cause to desire it are those who have something to hide; and as to controlling crime, it's foot patrols that work, not surveillance.
Amazon didn't know that it was still under copyright in the US, and didn't have the rights to sell it. When they discovered their mistake, they took it back -- removing the books and refunding the buyers' money. Damages paid to rights-holders are given to compensate for the fact that the violator can't remove every copy of the infringing product they sold; but in this case, they were able to. If this was anything except 1984, this wouldn't have been news at all.
"Smooth Moos" was launched around 1995 -- but the product has so little Internet presence that I think it's pretty much Pepsi's Holiday Special. Coke, beware: you're not Genghis Khan.
I like the idea (and I find myself wondering just how many weapons the game developers have cached :) ), but I think it makes the mistake of assuming that games are sold based on the quality of their story, level design, and the like. I would be among the first to say they should be, but it doesn't seem most games are written that way -- better models and graphics engines are still the competitive focus. This made sense during the growth period of graphics, the late 1990s, but it's less viable now -- it's like late-industrializing countries touting their modernity by building steel refineries and aluminum plants. Graphics are stable now, and the marginal cost for the next step of benefits is higher -- I believe someone on this mentions that _The Chronicles of Riddick_ is about as advanced of graphics as he'd really need in the presence of good content elsewhere -- and game developers need to focus a great deal more on other elements, on quality of storyline and gameplay above all, and less on polygon count. There's precedent for this kind of reinvention to match the new paradigm, too: remember how U.S. Steel is known for the quality of its blog software, and General Motors runs the most popular and profitable search engine on the planet?
Oh, wait.
Maybe not.
(I know I'm late on this -- past the first page -- so it's likely this won't accomplish all that much. Still, it's worth a shot...)
What if the Boy Scouts wanted to exclude homosexuals from leadership, not because they're a bunch of meanies and discriminating arbitrarily is what bunches of meanies do, but because homosexuality has so frequently meant pedastry, especially prior to the 20th century?
Off the top of my head: the 17th-century French traveller Chardin (cited in Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life) observed that in Persia there were three sexes, and many men were homosexual with young boys; after the conquest of Cyprus, the Ottomans sent the young son as well as the daughter of the governor to the Sultan's harem; and to give an example closer to home, for the Greeks and Romans homosexuality almost always meant "with a boy." Indeed, their repression of women meant that love was almost exclusively between men and boys (cf. Plato's Phaedro 73d). I'm also reminded of that one interminable Roman novel with the hopelessly crass noveau-riche who serves counterfeit Optimian, does a dress rehersal of his own funeral at a dinner party, and proudly has an epitath that he was worth however many million sesterces and never heard a philosopher. (Although obviously, pedastry was not his only fault -- and just as obviously, he was fictional, but it's not the major concepts but the things mentioned off-handedly -- like this character's pedastry -- that are likeliest to be reliably historical. Anyone familiar with A History of Private Life or the Annales School knows exactly what I'm talking about.) (Note also: I omit discussions of the Far East and India here mostly because I don't know many details offhand, but anyone who wants to Wikipedia Mori Ranmaru can be my guest.)
So based on this kind of pattern -- possibly mirrored in the present day by the precipitate fall in the age of consent in, say, the Netherlands -- I'd say that the BSA was acting prudently. Pedophilia is not universal among homosexuals, but it's a darned sight more common than it is in heterosexuals, at least judging by history. (Another phenomenon that could be an example of sublimated homosexual pedastry: boys' choirs, and the castrati of early-modern Europe.)
Slashdot?
s/Austria/Australia/
That was extremely confusing for a moment...
But, again, there's no such thing as a copper penny, not since the 1950s or so...
Copper is expensive and generally high-demand, but the penny is made primarily from zinc -- a less valuable and more abundant metal. Has the price of zinc behaved similarly recently?
;))
(I'm not a numismatologist or however you pronounce it, nor a commodities trader, but I know it could be a possibility. What's zinc used for, also? The only things that come to mind for me are US pennies and trace additives to breakfast cereals...
Did anyone else read that as something like "Allivant Formaxis Isapsis"? Am I the only one whose Greek is sufficiently mediocre to not always read an English "X" as a Greek letter "Chi"? :P
(In other words, yes, stupid, but remember the "white and black" PSP ads, or the mock-graffiti? Being surprised as Sony doing something underhanded to market the PSP is like being surprised that the bright yellow thing came up again this morning...)
Microsoft blew last generation on the RPG front, but this time around, they've got an exclusive arrangement with Sakaguchi, Uematsu, and Amano; with that particular brain trust, well, I think it's hard to say they're not trying... (Note: No, Amano isn't -- I don't *think* -- directly connected with Mistwalker, but there was an article on this very news-service a few days ago mentioning that he's still in close contact with Sakaguchi. Story by 1up or someone, IIRC.)
A true point, but the standards in games -- so far -- are lower. There aren't any 'highbrow' games yet, if 'highbrow' means 'rival of Macbeth'... I was thinking almost exclusively of KQ6, in fairness -- a game which I think is worthy of considerable recognition, for sheer atmosphere if nothing else. Of course, whether quality of technique makes something qualify as "highbrow" is a subject that can be (that *is*, correction) discussed interminably with neither a meaningful conclusion nor productive results...
:) And is my stress mark facing the right way?)
So, in conclusion: Touché. (Though I stand by the thesis that "laughably inappropriate" is, well, laughingly inappropriate -- and I don't think Twain deserves the honor of "highbrow" status either.
And back to game development. Better to *do* than to *theorize about*, particularly in a wildly under-explored form of storytelling that's been around about thirty years... a lesson that Adams really ought to take to heart. He's a man with good ideas -- why is his resumé mostly Madden?
Am I really the only one who doesn't get why the King's Quest games would be not merely not highbrow, but "laughingly inappropriate" suggestions?
OK. :) I'm glad to hear that you're doing it consciously, but please pardon my paranoia. Here on Slashdot, you never know... :P