Now *that* is a little exaggerated. Seriously, surely I'm not the only one, even on Slashdot, who sees a slight difference in scale between a theoretical comprimise on abortion and a particular OS licensing other people's patents. Abortion has a slightly larger impact, you know, on a slightly larger number of people, and I _don't_ just mean the ones who would've otherwise been produced by the non-"terminated" pregnancies...
"OIL LENS: hufuf oil held in static tension by an enclosing force field within a viewing tube as part of a magnifying or other light-manipulation system. Because each lens element can be adjusted individually one micron at a time, the oil lens is considered the ultimate in accuracy for manipulating visual light." -- DUNE, "Terminology of the Imperium."
This is right up there with those relatively small, sealed nuclear reactors, IMHO. Neat.
Is anyone else here heartily sick of Rockstar's "Sell Games by Moral Panic" strategy yet?
All the more so since, judging from Manhunt at least, it really doesn't seem to have much of an effect on sales; a good Rockstar game sells well, a bad one sells poorly, and the furor raised over all of them doesn't make much of a difference at the cash register. What it _does_ do is create a horrible reputation for the game industry as a whole. Just once, I'd like to see them do something _not_ designed to give Hillary Clinton a heart attack...
Certainly, at least not within North America. How did that make FF6 popular, though?
They were being discussed afterwards; FF6 gave RPGs a sort of foothold in the zeitgeist, which 7 was able to popularize.
As for FF6 imitators -- I'm not that familiar with PS and PS2 RPGs, but something like Skies of Arcadia or Wild ARMs or Star Ocean strikes me as much more closely related to 6 than 7, particularly through not having the distinctive features of 7, mini-games up the wazoo and a near-future-anime setting.
And why the extremely insulting tone? I had no intention of trolling or rudeness; a response like "nice attempt at revisionist history, but I'm going to have to call you on it," along with the rest of your snide remarks, strikes me as rather unnecessary...
(Also, I don't want to continue this much further -- I know perfectly well that these sorts of conversations look bad on a Slashdot user profile, and hardly help karma... And regardless, I think we mostly agree on the question of Square's decline; the conversation is going OT fast, so... Truce?)
And no one _within_ hardcore gaming circles was talking about them prior to FF6. Notice the large number of FF6 imitators on the Playstation and PS2? FF7 was certainly more noticed outside the "gamerverse" -- that size of advertising campaign will do it every time -- but if not for 6 (and probably Chrono Trigger as well), Sony wouldn't have used Square as a stick to beat Nintendo with...
I quite agree that he hardly grew up with Final Fantasy. FF6, not 7, was the game that popularized RPGs; this makes all the difference in the world...
I suspect he knows much less about the gaming world than he thinks he does, given that he allegedly owned "an extremely old SuperNintendo system with Mario 2..."
You do realize that I was making an argument, don't you? And that it's an argument not often made on Slashdot, meaning that I needed to be thorough? I suggest that you, or Mr. Nygard, explain to me how I should've written it shorter and still made the same points convincingly.
(Yes, I do realize that the parent of this article is a bit of a joke. Suffice to say that I'm setting out to break the ironimeter...)
evolve your target planet where your game is to take place
Are you sure this is sarcastic? After all, if George Lucas had followed this advice, we would never have seen Naboo...
keep running the evolution software until your required habitats form
Hey, it saves design effort, you don't have to manually think up alien analogues to terrestrial flora and fauna -- which takes one heck of a lot of time, and tends to run the designer out of names pretty quickly, not to mention producing (to pick on this post's official target) those ridiculous Nabooese lifeforms. Don't knock it 'till you've tried it -- an evolutionary model would never have produced those preposterously large fish.:)
grow some simulated babies and in a simulation of the particular culture of your required characters and find those who are right and agree to be in your game
You left out "simulate the development of the culture," which is another good idea: no more one-note alien civilizations, religions that span whole species, species that span whole religions, and the like. Plus, you can tack on a UI and pause it for turns, and you've got... Sid Meier's Civilization! The only problem is processor power...:)
or you could just build complicated decision trees that fool the gamer into seeing what he wants to see for considerably less input than modelling the whole universe.
Seriously, this is a false dichotomy. The alternatives for a game setting are not "The Super-Matrix" and "A Finite-State Machine." The fact that the Halo series is trying to model things in a manner closer to reality is an extremely good thing. Did you notice this article, which included that argument? (Second heading, "Why Natural Might Be Better.")
So maybe he was preaching to the choir, and got a little too free with his lingo. Replace "conservative" (what he wrote) with "hide-bound traditionalist" (what everyone was thinking) and his criticism essentially mirror yours regarding "American fundamentalism."
The problem is that he seems to assume that all conservatives are hide-bound traditionalists. Not to mention that the areas in which these traditionalists are hide-bound are constant in all societies...
Ha! That's my favorite line. You don't have the time? How much time did you just spend on that monologue? Holy cats! It doesn't seem like you are actually interested in a discussion--and if you are, great, here I am, but try a little brevity next time.
Well, I just wrote an elephantine article establishing that your generalization was less than fully accurate, which as you correctly guess, did in fact consume an immense amount of time. However, I judged that the argument would gain little for including a discussion of, say, Confuscianism as well, and I was getting just a bit tired of writing at that point, so I decided to bow out of that possible track of discussion. It's not as if I was trying to dodge something that would have destroyed my argument.
I don't know where you presumed I have a thesis that proclaims faith doesn't have a place.
In the Red-Versus-Blue dichotomy (yes, the Halo machinima reference is perfectly intentional), "Faith" is something much more strongly associated with Reds, unless you mean the rather vague spirituality characteristic of, say, The Next Generation -- which is "a place" for religion in the sense of "putting it in its place," and again feels like trying to have it both ways.
Actually, what it feels like is a sort of folk memory of the Socratic dialogue at the end of Will Durant's The Story of Civilization where Voltaire and the Pope of his era -- Innocent VIII, if I recall rightly -- discuss the merits of religion in social affairs, and Voltaire loses. (In fact, the dialogue is a bit anachronistic; by the time he died, Voltaire had returned to Catholicism, and would have agreed with the Pope heartily, but it's a Socratic dialogue. The point is the expression of an argument, not the accurate depiction of its characters.)
You spent a lot of words talking around something I didn't say.
I was concerned with proving two points. First, that the model for "conservatives" which you evoked by mentioning Haliburton and the recent election does not, in fact, describe all opponents of, say, Roddenbery's view of the world. Second, that even those who it does describe are not explicitly opposed to 'progress,' however it may be defined, so much as destructively disinterested.
If you'd like to know what I think about that I'll be happy to tell you: thankfully our country is free and structured in such a way to allow folks to have the faiths of their choosing.
You know, one could say that this is a fault... After all, if a religion purports to describe the world, it either describes it in an accurate manner, or in an inaccurate one, and it is better to know how the world operates than to not know and think you do.:)
Of course, this opens a whole new can of worms, and I'm not going to advocate the argument any more than, say, the adoption of the Highland clan system in the United States, or the reinstitution of polygamy following John Milton's argument. Still, all three of these are interesting arguments, and although they have considerable flaws at the very bottom of them, are still worth contemplating.
(The most obvious refutation of forcible conversions, at least to Christianity or a similar religion, is that conversion is meaningless if secured under threat of force...)
However, as I did say, faith does not invent rocket ships. It can give comfort while you are stuck in on--and that's great.
Assuming I have the sense of this right, this statement can be made more assertive: "Faith is inferior to something which does invent rocket ships, or, for that matter, to something which more reliably gives comfort while aboard them." The main problems with this statement are the unqualified use of "faith" and "something which invents rocket ships," not to mention the idea that the whole role of religion is to make one feel better, so I set out to disambiguate, a bit defensively on account of the vituperative
I emphatically agree. This statement is painfully over-generalized, and he clearly assumes he's "preaching to the choir."
To begin with, he accepts the "Red versus Blue" dichotomy of modern America as normative for the entirity of human history. True, this is a very American sort of thing to do, but that doesn't mean it's any more defensible. Accordingly, I'll begin by demonstrating that not all conservatives in history act like Reds, and subsequently move on to discuss the true motives behind the group which he does, rather ineffectually, manage to hit with his remark. They're not nearly as simple as he thinks.
To begin with, to defend another group which he explicitly goes after in this post -- and which is extremely often attacked by Americans of whatever ideology, courtesy of the extremely successful propaganda of Elizabeth I -- the Catholic Church.
His casual complaints about Copernicus and Galileo show that he knows extremely little about the history of astronomy. The ancient Greeks -- well, apart from crochety old Plato -- acknowledged that the world was round; Aristotle certainly said it, and there was another Greek scientist -- his name escapes me at the moment -- who managed to get a reasonably accurate calculation of the diameter of the Earth.
Galileo's case is one of the most badly obfuscated in history. Cardinal Cajetan, the Inquisitor who arranged to have him arrested, was not the whole leadership of the Catholic Church, and was certainly not acting on behalf of it. Moreover, he was a Platonist: a rather crude philosophy, characterized by getting matters of religion and matters of everything else rather badly confused. (It underlies most modern Protestantism, and was the only game in Christendom until about the 11th century.)
There was another, if anything more conservative, philosophy in the Catholic Church at that time, which has become its official philosophy: Thomism, the adaption of Aristotelianism by Thomas Aquinas. To paraphrase Chesterton, Aquinas observed that faith is superior to everything, but reason is superior to everything else, and in its own sphere is superior to faith. The Jesuits were to become the definiative embodiment of this philosophy, and made considerable scientific and social advances. I forget how many observatories they built; they often served as diplomats; their system of pedagougy was excellent, even if it misfired and produced Voltaire, and one could even say that they were the real inventors of the Montressori method. (Whether or not that's a good thing is left to the reader's discretion...)
The only things they were interested in "holding people back" from were things which they knew were harmful -- and which have been confirmed as harmful quite nicely by psychologists, the Freudian and Jungian schools in particular. I need hardly add that much of Jungian psychology, apart from the borderline-mystical business, was anticipated by Aristotelian and Thomistic psychology about seven centuries earlier.
So, to return to Galileo... Most of the Church hierarchy was unaware of what was going on, just as most of the American legal system is unaware of a particular case being heard in a given court circuit. Of course, Galileo came to no physical harm, although he was placed under house arrest; this is no refutation of the fact that Cajetan acted like an idiot, and the Church was at fault for letting him, but just in case you thought he was tortured or something...
The Catholic Church's conduct in the aftermath of the controversy is also interesting, and certainly puts the lie to any attempt to enroll it in the number of "conservatives always trying to hold people back"; analyzing the competing models of Copernicus and Tycho Brahe, the Church hierarchy, influenced by Brahe's demonstration that the as-yet-unobserved phenomenon of stellar parallax as the only piece of evidence which could prove Copernicus' model and disprove his own, decided that there was not yet enough information to rule on the matter -- and, one
Shame on all of us really, for hunting these creatures to near extinction, like the dinosaurs.
Hmm... Well, if humanity hunted the dinosaurs to near extinction, as your post implies, I suppose this means we didn't hunt them to complete extinction, which implies that there are still dinosaurs around today -- and that there were a lot more dinosaurs back in Cro-Magnon times.
I've long suspected that the proper way to handle game AI, and game development in general, is to model things in a manner as similar to the real world as possible... It's also nice to finally have a self-preservation instinct in game enemies...
Does anyone know if Far Cry used a similar approach? Its AI struck me as very close to Halo's in a lot of ways. (Then again, the whole game was like that...)
And is the server messed up, or is this a first post?:)
Of course Ada doesn't cover the Web! That's what Java does! You can see that plain as day, just look around Websites; you can see a whole lot of "Adascript" and "Ada Runtime Environment" out there, can't you?
Jeez, only in America would we need a court to tell us something this obvious...:)
Dang it, Asimov was right!
on
Port-A-Nuke
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
'Way back when I first read the Foundation trilogy, I thought all the talk about portable fission reactors powering individual factories and starships and force-fields and hand weapons was, well, silly. Surely we'd be using fusion or fuel cells or antimatter or something by then. More importantly, surely a nuclear reactor couldn't scale down far enough to be portable.
Apparently, I was wrong. This is, of course, not exactly a portable reactor, but it's a massive step in that direction, probably the portable-reactor equivalent of those floating iron artillery barges in the Crimean War, or perhaps the CSS Virginia (Merrimack for all you Yankees and furriners out there)...
Well, in related news, with the announcement of "portable" nuclear reactors, we're about two technologies -- FTL space travel and energy weapons -- away from technological parity with the Galactic Empire, and if I remember rightly, the U.S. Army's working on the energy-weapon half. Actually, given that we've got computers and they don't, maybe we're better... although we don't have "atom-blasts capable of destroying a planet" quite yet. (Nor would we really want them. After all, at present you could only use them once.:D )
Current SF writers should learn a lesson from this -- the predictive skill of science fiction is really not what it's cracked up to be. Try to imagine new technologies when writing a story -- don't just extrapolate present trends, lest you end up like dear old Issac!:)
Of course, given what the article's about, perhaps ending up with Asimov's predictive skill isn't so bad after all?
And it's the 5% that are used once in the history of Windows that have the most annoyance potential...
I suspect that American development traditions just might not include about half of the API, but it might be useful if anyone ever bothers with it. I say "American" because My Favorite Program (tm), _Cossacks_, uses just enough relatively obscure system calls that Wine fails miserably to install it.
This seems to me to be a trend in all software development these days: to give most users most of what they want, doing the easy 90% of the project (which consumes the first 90% of the time), and then leaving the difficult 10% of the project (which consumes the _next_ 90% of the time) unattempted.
Granted, in WINE's case, they have a pair of really good excuses: they're aiming at a (rapidly!) moving target, and they have no employees, only volunteers. So, I don't blame them too much, although it annoys me that I'm currently dual-booting Windows 98 (for DOS games)and 2000 (for Visual Studio) when there's a Windows emulator (err, "compatibility layer") already under production in Linux-land.
Of course, other groups don't have reasons for slipshod development. Microsoft is, or at least used to be, very bad about this (see: MSN Search, although I think they're learning). To some extent the commercial Linux developers are guilty of the same, and it was especially characteristic of Unix way back when it started...
Yes, the city near Innsmouth was the one I had in mind; I didn't have the text of _Shadow over Innsmouth_ handy (danged college!) and so couldn't remember the name.
"[The game's features include a d]iverse array of levels from quaint towns to alien locations, including Deep One City". I _hope_ they mean R'leyh and just got the name horribly wrong, or else that they mean that city that the German submarine stumbled across... (Never mind how one is supposed to be doing much of anything on the bottom of the Atlantic with 1920s technology.)
If the fish-things are supposed to be Deep Ones, they have the skin coloration all wrong -- "their predominant colour was a greyish-green, though they had white bellies," to quote the Lovecraft Online Archive linked to via their website. Not diarrhea-brown. Besides, they're only Deep Ones. Mi-go or Elder Things or Nightgaunts are _infinetely_ more interesting...
Why do I get the impression that the designers just wanted an excuse to clone _Resident Evil_, only snobbishly? It's not a very impressive-looking game, if one can judge from its promotional materials...
Gratuitously offensive content is content which seems to exist only for itself, not to prove or establish some larger point. Pornography, for example, would be gratuitous sexual content, while a story which happened to include nudity -- or, for that matter, happened to include sexual intercourse; Clan of the Cave Bear comes to mind -- would not be. Similarly for violence: Vader cutting off Luke's hand is a qualitatively different matter from your character in Manhunt cutting off a gangster's head with a machete.
Of course, I agree with you that it can be hard to determine when and if something is present for a reason other than just itself. Ultimately, I think that it has to be judged by a fellow-author, and one without strong feelings one way or the other regarding the content at hand. In short, some things (Manhunt) are clearly gratuitously violent -- including violence because it's fun, and not for the sake of the story, for social commentary, etc.; others (The Empire Strikes Back) are not... and then there's the huge grey area -- The Running Man and the like...
Slashdot Mirror
Now *that* is a little exaggerated. Seriously, surely I'm not the only one, even on Slashdot, who sees a slight difference in scale between a theoretical comprimise on abortion and a particular OS licensing other people's patents. Abortion has a slightly larger impact, you know, on a slightly larger number of people, and I _don't_ just mean the ones who would've otherwise been produced by the non-"terminated" pregnancies...
"OIL LENS: hufuf oil held in static tension by an enclosing force field within a viewing tube as part of a magnifying or other light-manipulation system. Because each lens element can be adjusted individually one micron at a time, the oil lens is considered the ultimate in accuracy for manipulating visual light." -- DUNE, "Terminology of the Imperium."
This is right up there with those relatively small, sealed nuclear reactors, IMHO. Neat.
With heart attack or without?
Is anyone else here heartily sick of Rockstar's "Sell Games by Moral Panic" strategy yet?
All the more so since, judging from Manhunt at least, it really doesn't seem to have much of an effect on sales; a good Rockstar game sells well, a bad one sells poorly, and the furor raised over all of them doesn't make much of a difference at the cash register. What it _does_ do is create a horrible reputation for the game industry as a whole. Just once, I'd like to see them do something _not_ designed to give Hillary Clinton a heart attack...
Certainly, at least not within North America. How did that make FF6 popular, though?
They were being discussed afterwards; FF6 gave RPGs a sort of foothold in the zeitgeist, which 7 was able to popularize.
As for FF6 imitators -- I'm not that familiar with PS and PS2 RPGs, but something like Skies of Arcadia or Wild ARMs or Star Ocean strikes me as much more closely related to 6 than 7, particularly through not having the distinctive features of 7, mini-games up the wazoo and a near-future-anime setting.
And why the extremely insulting tone? I had no intention of trolling or rudeness; a response like "nice attempt at revisionist history, but I'm going to have to call you on it," along with the rest of your snide remarks, strikes me as rather unnecessary...
(Also, I don't want to continue this much further -- I know perfectly well that these sorts of conversations look bad on a Slashdot user profile, and hardly help karma... And regardless, I think we mostly agree on the question of Square's decline; the conversation is going OT fast, so... Truce?)
And no one _within_ hardcore gaming circles was talking about them prior to FF6. Notice the large number of FF6 imitators on the Playstation and PS2? FF7 was certainly more noticed outside the "gamerverse" -- that size of advertising campaign will do it every time -- but if not for 6 (and probably Chrono Trigger as well), Sony wouldn't have used Square as a stick to beat Nintendo with...
I quite agree that he hardly grew up with Final Fantasy. FF6, not 7, was the game that popularized RPGs; this makes all the difference in the world...
I suspect he knows much less about the gaming world than he thinks he does, given that he allegedly owned "an extremely old SuperNintendo system with Mario 2..."
You do realize that I was making an argument, don't you? And that it's an argument not often made on Slashdot, meaning that I needed to be thorough? I suggest that you, or Mr. Nygard, explain to me how I should've written it shorter and still made the same points convincingly.
Dealing with Enterprise tech? Easy. When all else fails...
REVERSE THE POLARITY!
Oh, wrong Enterprise...
No, "Starfleet-enabled."
(Yes, I do realize that the parent of this article is a bit of a joke. Suffice to say that I'm setting out to break the ironimeter...)
:)
:)
evolve your target planet where your game is to take place
Are you sure this is sarcastic? After all, if George Lucas had followed this advice, we would never have seen Naboo...
keep running the evolution software until your required habitats form
Hey, it saves design effort, you don't have to manually think up alien analogues to terrestrial flora and fauna -- which takes one heck of a lot of time, and tends to run the designer out of names pretty quickly, not to mention producing (to pick on this post's official target) those ridiculous Nabooese lifeforms. Don't knock it 'till you've tried it -- an evolutionary model would never have produced those preposterously large fish.
grow some simulated babies and in a simulation of the particular culture of your required characters and find those who are right and agree to be in your game
You left out "simulate the development of the culture," which is another good idea: no more one-note alien civilizations, religions that span whole species, species that span whole religions, and the like. Plus, you can tack on a UI and pause it for turns, and you've got... Sid Meier's Civilization! The only problem is processor power...
or you could just build complicated decision trees that fool the gamer into seeing what he wants to see for considerably less input than modelling the whole universe.
Seriously, this is a false dichotomy. The alternatives for a game setting are not "The Super-Matrix" and "A Finite-State Machine." The fact that the Halo series is trying to model things in a manner closer to reality is an extremely good thing. Did you notice this article, which included that argument? (Second heading, "Why Natural Might Be Better.")
So maybe he was preaching to the choir, and got a little too free with his lingo. Replace "conservative" (what he wrote) with "hide-bound traditionalist" (what everyone was thinking) and his criticism essentially mirror yours regarding "American fundamentalism."
The problem is that he seems to assume that all conservatives are hide-bound traditionalists. Not to mention that the areas in which these traditionalists are hide-bound are constant in all societies...
Ha! That's my favorite line. You don't have the time? How much time did you just spend on that monologue? Holy cats! It doesn't seem like you are actually interested in a discussion--and if you are, great, here I am, but try a little brevity next time.
:)
Well, I just wrote an elephantine article establishing that your generalization was less than fully accurate, which as you correctly guess, did in fact consume an immense amount of time. However, I judged that the argument would gain little for including a discussion of, say, Confuscianism as well, and I was getting just a bit tired of writing at that point, so I decided to bow out of that possible track of discussion. It's not as if I was trying to dodge something that would have destroyed my argument.
I don't know where you presumed I have a thesis that proclaims faith doesn't have a place.
In the Red-Versus-Blue dichotomy (yes, the Halo machinima reference is perfectly intentional), "Faith" is something much more strongly associated with Reds, unless you mean the rather vague spirituality characteristic of, say, The Next Generation -- which is "a place" for religion in the sense of "putting it in its place," and again feels like trying to have it both ways.
Actually, what it feels like is a sort of folk memory of the Socratic dialogue at the end of Will Durant's The Story of Civilization where Voltaire and the Pope of his era -- Innocent VIII, if I recall rightly -- discuss the merits of religion in social affairs, and Voltaire loses. (In fact, the dialogue is a bit anachronistic; by the time he died, Voltaire had returned to Catholicism, and would have agreed with the Pope heartily, but it's a Socratic dialogue. The point is the expression of an argument, not the accurate depiction of its characters.)
You spent a lot of words talking around something I didn't say.
I was concerned with proving two points. First, that the model for "conservatives" which you evoked by mentioning Haliburton and the recent election does not, in fact, describe all opponents of, say, Roddenbery's view of the world. Second, that even those who it does describe are not explicitly opposed to 'progress,' however it may be defined, so much as destructively disinterested.
If you'd like to know what I think about that I'll be happy to tell you: thankfully our country is free and structured in such a way to allow folks to have the faiths of their choosing.
You know, one could say that this is a fault... After all, if a religion purports to describe the world, it either describes it in an accurate manner, or in an inaccurate one, and it is better to know how the world operates than to not know and think you do.
Of course, this opens a whole new can of worms, and I'm not going to advocate the argument any more than, say, the adoption of the Highland clan system in the United States, or the reinstitution of polygamy following John Milton's argument. Still, all three of these are interesting arguments, and although they have considerable flaws at the very bottom of them, are still worth contemplating.
(The most obvious refutation of forcible conversions, at least to Christianity or a similar religion, is that conversion is meaningless if secured under threat of force...)
However, as I did say, faith does not invent rocket ships. It can give comfort while you are stuck in on--and that's great.
Assuming I have the sense of this right, this statement can be made more assertive: "Faith is inferior to something which does invent rocket ships, or, for that matter, to something which more reliably gives comfort while aboard them." The main problems with this statement are the unqualified use of "faith" and "something which invents rocket ships," not to mention the idea that the whole role of religion is to make one feel better, so I set out to disambiguate, a bit defensively on account of the vituperative
I emphatically agree. This statement is painfully over-generalized, and he clearly assumes he's "preaching to the choir."
To begin with, he accepts the "Red versus Blue" dichotomy of modern America as normative for the entirity of human history. True, this is a very American sort of thing to do, but that doesn't mean it's any more defensible. Accordingly, I'll begin by demonstrating that not all conservatives in history act like Reds, and subsequently move on to discuss the true motives behind the group which he does, rather ineffectually, manage to hit with his remark. They're not nearly as simple as he thinks.
To begin with, to defend another group which he explicitly goes after in this post -- and which is extremely often attacked by Americans of whatever ideology, courtesy of the extremely successful propaganda of Elizabeth I -- the Catholic Church.
His casual complaints about Copernicus and Galileo show that he knows extremely little about the history of astronomy. The ancient Greeks -- well, apart from crochety old Plato -- acknowledged that the world was round; Aristotle certainly said it, and there was another Greek scientist -- his name escapes me at the moment -- who managed to get a reasonably accurate calculation of the diameter of the Earth.
Galileo's case is one of the most badly obfuscated in history. Cardinal Cajetan, the Inquisitor who arranged to have him arrested, was not the whole leadership of the Catholic Church, and was certainly not acting on behalf of it. Moreover, he was a Platonist: a rather crude philosophy, characterized by getting matters of religion and matters of everything else rather badly confused. (It underlies most modern Protestantism, and was the only game in Christendom until about the 11th century.)
There was another, if anything more conservative, philosophy in the Catholic Church at that time, which has become its official philosophy: Thomism, the adaption of Aristotelianism by Thomas Aquinas. To paraphrase Chesterton, Aquinas observed that faith is superior to everything, but reason is superior to everything else, and in its own sphere is superior to faith. The Jesuits were to become the definiative embodiment of this philosophy, and made considerable scientific and social advances. I forget how many observatories they built; they often served as diplomats; their system of pedagougy was excellent, even if it misfired and produced Voltaire, and one could even say that they were the real inventors of the Montressori method. (Whether or not that's a good thing is left to the reader's discretion...)
The only things they were interested in "holding people back" from were things which they knew were harmful -- and which have been confirmed as harmful quite nicely by psychologists, the Freudian and Jungian schools in particular. I need hardly add that much of Jungian psychology, apart from the borderline-mystical business, was anticipated by Aristotelian and Thomistic psychology about seven centuries earlier.
So, to return to Galileo... Most of the Church hierarchy was unaware of what was going on, just as most of the American legal system is unaware of a particular case being heard in a given court circuit. Of course, Galileo came to no physical harm, although he was placed under house arrest; this is no refutation of the fact that Cajetan acted like an idiot, and the Church was at fault for letting him, but just in case you thought he was tortured or something...
The Catholic Church's conduct in the aftermath of the controversy is also interesting, and certainly puts the lie to any attempt to enroll it in the number of "conservatives always trying to hold people back"; analyzing the competing models of Copernicus and Tycho Brahe, the Church hierarchy, influenced by Brahe's demonstration that the as-yet-unobserved phenomenon of stellar parallax as the only piece of evidence which could prove Copernicus' model and disprove his own, decided that there was not yet enough information to rule on the matter -- and, one
Shame on all of us really, for hunting these creatures to near extinction, like the dinosaurs.
Hmm... Well, if humanity hunted the dinosaurs to near extinction, as your post implies, I suppose this means we didn't hunt them to complete extinction, which implies that there are still dinosaurs around today -- and that there were a lot more dinosaurs back in Cro-Magnon times.
Um...
Seriously, if you're going to engage in Green humanity-bashing, at least check that you're using the right stick.
I've long suspected that the proper way to handle game AI, and game development in general, is to model things in a manner as similar to the real world as possible... It's also nice to finally have a self-preservation instinct in game enemies...
:)
Does anyone know if Far Cry used a similar approach? Its AI struck me as very close to Halo's in a lot of ways. (Then again, the whole game was like that...)
And is the server messed up, or is this a first post?
Philistine!
Of course Ada doesn't cover the Web! That's what Java does! You can see that plain as day, just look around Websites; you can see a whole lot of "Adascript" and "Ada Runtime Environment" out there, can't you?
:)
Jeez, only in America would we need a court to tell us something this obvious...
'Way back when I first read the Foundation trilogy, I thought all the talk about portable fission reactors powering individual factories and starships and force-fields and hand weapons was, well, silly. Surely we'd be using fusion or fuel cells or antimatter or something by then. More importantly, surely a nuclear reactor couldn't scale down far enough to be portable.
:D )
:)
Apparently, I was wrong. This is, of course, not exactly a portable reactor, but it's a massive step in that direction, probably the portable-reactor equivalent of those floating iron artillery barges in the Crimean War, or perhaps the CSS Virginia (Merrimack for all you Yankees and furriners out there)...
Well, in related news, with the announcement of "portable" nuclear reactors, we're about two technologies -- FTL space travel and energy weapons -- away from technological parity with the Galactic Empire, and if I remember rightly, the U.S. Army's working on the energy-weapon half. Actually, given that we've got computers and they don't, maybe we're better... although we don't have "atom-blasts capable of destroying a planet" quite yet. (Nor would we really want them. After all, at present you could only use them once.
Current SF writers should learn a lesson from this -- the predictive skill of science fiction is really not what it's cracked up to be. Try to imagine new technologies when writing a story -- don't just extrapolate present trends, lest you end up like dear old Issac!
Of course, given what the article's about, perhaps ending up with Asimov's predictive skill isn't so bad after all?
And it's the 5% that are used once in the history of Windows that have the most annoyance potential...
I suspect that American development traditions just might not include about half of the API, but it might be useful if anyone ever bothers with it. I say "American" because My Favorite Program (tm), _Cossacks_, uses just enough relatively obscure system calls that Wine fails miserably to install it.
This seems to me to be a trend in all software development these days: to give most users most of what they want, doing the easy 90% of the project (which consumes the first 90% of the time), and then leaving the difficult 10% of the project (which consumes the _next_ 90% of the time) unattempted.
Granted, in WINE's case, they have a pair of really good excuses: they're aiming at a (rapidly!) moving target, and they have no employees, only volunteers. So, I don't blame them too much, although it annoys me that I'm currently dual-booting Windows 98 (for DOS games)and 2000 (for Visual Studio) when there's a Windows emulator (err, "compatibility layer") already under production in Linux-land.
Of course, other groups don't have reasons for slipshod development. Microsoft is, or at least used to be, very bad about this (see: MSN Search, although I think they're learning). To some extent the commercial Linux developers are guilty of the same, and it was especially characteristic of Unix way back when it started...
Yes, the city near Innsmouth was the one I had in mind; I didn't have the text of _Shadow over Innsmouth_ handy (danged college!) and so couldn't remember the name.
"[The game's features include a d]iverse array of levels from quaint towns to alien locations, including Deep One City". I _hope_ they mean R'leyh and just got the name horribly wrong, or else that they mean that city that the German submarine stumbled across... (Never mind how one is supposed to be doing much of anything on the bottom of the Atlantic with 1920s technology.)
If the fish-things are supposed to be Deep Ones, they have the skin coloration all wrong -- "their predominant colour was a greyish-green, though they had white bellies," to quote the Lovecraft Online Archive linked to via their website. Not diarrhea-brown. Besides, they're only Deep Ones. Mi-go or Elder Things or Nightgaunts are _infinetely_ more interesting...
Why do I get the impression that the designers just wanted an excuse to clone _Resident Evil_, only snobbishly? It's not a very impressive-looking game, if one can judge from its promotional materials...
I must have missed something. I've been playing the Cossacks games since they started coming out, and I've not seen a single advertisement...
Ack! It must all be subliminal!
Gratuitously offensive content is content which seems to exist only for itself, not to prove or establish some larger point. Pornography, for example, would be gratuitous sexual content, while a story which happened to include nudity -- or, for that matter, happened to include sexual intercourse; Clan of the Cave Bear comes to mind -- would not be. Similarly for violence: Vader cutting off Luke's hand is a qualitatively different matter from your character in Manhunt cutting off a gangster's head with a machete.
Of course, I agree with you that it can be hard to determine when and if something is present for a reason other than just itself. Ultimately, I think that it has to be judged by a fellow-author, and one without strong feelings one way or the other regarding the content at hand. In short, some things (Manhunt) are clearly gratuitously violent -- including violence because it's fun, and not for the sake of the story, for social commentary, etc.; others (The Empire Strikes Back) are not... and then there's the huge grey area -- The Running Man and the like...
IIRC, "Islamism" is a (rather clumsy) alternative term for Wahabbi -- the fundamentalist flavor of Sunni Islam followed by bin Laden. Hope that helps.