Parallel software is mastered, often, only by those who put up huge designed-in fences to partition software. That or those who run languages with innate safety but wasteful and non-pipelined code. We've finally tapped the Moore well too long.
Analysis tools, code-that-analyses code accurately, will finally need to get off the ground if we're going to get out of this gap. Otherwise, we're just going to see hundreds to thousands of hardware-supported, virtualized, inefficient pseudo-threads and tons of message passing analogies.
Shared memory contention is a hardware-solved problem at this level of integration. Shared memory code never lives up to its possible speed in most programming, except for the OS.
I'm entering grad school for this. There's more funding than there are students! Let's get on it!
Re:Education decaying into retold legends of glory
on
Why We Fight
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· Score: 1
[oy this is getting to be old usenet length. I removed some context.]
I think you may have misinterpreted my statements.
I'll grant that that may be possible. Holding on to "Morals are confusing
and irrelevant to games" and "Media drive the feelings of revulsion felt by
anyone" would be very difficult. Well you hold on to the second one.
If you took my statement as a whole, you would see that I was attempting
to explain the business decision behind not implementing this type of
scoring system. It's a touchy subject for alot of people.
I think you're being Touchy. You can see obvious huge huge
morality decisions in the very design and structure of GTA and Half-Life and
many other games (increasing in number). No one in that sphere is not
already weighing in on what they think is fascinating to imagine and what
they don't consider relevant to simulate. More games give more chances to
destroy than to create anything.
Now, I can easily grant how tough it is to write code to express a complex
novel, a philosphically intense exploration or a morally high-minded
adventure of tough-to-solve salvations for all your rescued victims.
Big explosions, bullet trajectories, dead prostitute ragdolls are easier
to code... but only as much easier as any type of morally questionable
issue. Porn. Executions. Gossip/Lies. Many things are easier.
The issue isn't how tough it is to make or how common "mental junk
food" is or will be. The issue is how much starts to give children (and
adults) diabetes. Frybread baked by Native Americans (due to free US flour
and fat) is very yummy.. and was intended to be a staple.. but it is
satisfyingly empty of nutrition and effectively ends many of these people's
lives in obesity and heart attacks. So much for the "easiest solution" to a
problem of feeding destitute Indians. It kills them.. but it was intended
to be a great solution. The US had to take helping feed a rejected people more
seriously.
Game designers' decisions are taking their toll because they're showing off
an isolated culture that is (beginning to) believe their own games'
well-delivered illusory sensations of power and independence.
Someone who dares to say killing prostitutes is personally distasteful to
publish fantasies about shouldn't so deeply offend you in return.
Disliking wonton murder is not so controversial as you may fear. Don't
impose silence on the discussion of fantasy-stories' effects because you
feel its taboo to discuss.
The media makes it amazing and shocking, that's my stance. Very few
events are actually shocking or amazing.....
Just because the media report it doesn't mean they made it that way.
Maybe you're a bit too numb a half billion people's worth of significant
news. CNN doesn't play it up.. it filters it down and we're becoming
numb-er... and numb-er... and numb-er. Why? Because no perspective over
a half-billion people's time and space is added.. but merely the pizazz of
intensity. Why were we hearing about Ms. Natalee Holloway in Bermuda so
much? Intensity of a missing pretty blond.. picked from the filter.
The difference I find interesting is that you don't consider Movies and
Books and Games any different than the news. News merely filters down
to get its heinous/porn/gossipy high with a little or lot of spin to help
viewers feel comfortable. Story-writers can construct a world to order
entirely out of spin with no nub of reality at all... and then they satiate us
with nothing but their single feeling. It's on demand dementia! "Pure
feeling" with only polygon counts to limit its intensity for games.
My point being: game designers and story writers have to account for the
effects of their fantasy medium... not their ease of coding and a high
thrills-per-fps (which is what their shareholders demand).
The difference with video games is the interactivity. That element
is scary to alot of peop
Re:Education decaying into retold legends of glory
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Why We Fight
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· Score: 1
You have no clue what your talking about do you? The reason games don't attempt to score things on a moral basis is because the media would have a shit fit if games took that trend.
I genuinely remain surprised that you (who may, in principle, support GTA: *) are worried about controversy. What a strange world you live in that the media makes you so worried about opinions!! A moment earlier you find it unmoving if someone pops their fifth prostitute to get their money back. It must be purest hypocrisy. You don't care about media controversy and you appear to worry only about the shock and surprise among your own group. That group (like many I've known) finds morals a taboo subject. That's what it appears you fear breaking.
What moral set are you using? Who decides the weight of those moral choices? What's immoral? These are matters that to this day have not been agreed upon, and you want a scoring system based on it? Ridiculous.
The funny thing is how offended morally you would be when you have real crimes done against you. Maybe you don't subscribe to some complex victimless-crime monitoring system. Still, trust me... the endless arguments of "There's no real morality at all" are a solid source of laughter for me. Hypocrisy unending! Everyone maintains morality codes, often nearly the exact same ones as their friends. Morality codes form politics.
[ Disagreement doesn't mean non-existance. Some have vague respect for similar people and some follow a strict code of conduct but very few act only on nothing but self-impulse. Not you. Those folks don't discuss others' philosophical failings on Slashdot. ]
Anyway... Just because fringe elements differ doesn't mean you aren't totally deep in your own group's religion. In fact... denying there is core morality is a kinda of tribal passphrase these days. You're quite the conformist.
The media will latch onto any angle they can get to sell advertising. If that means they will crucify video games one minute for being to violent and teaching our children to kill, and they will crucify them the next for attempting to force a moral ruleset on them. You cannot win that fight. And companies looking for a profit don't want to pick it.
Truly bizarre. You act like anything at all can get media time. Isn't it obvious that the media reports on something "amazing" or at least "shocking"?? Maybe they do so because video games genuinely represent a departure from everyday practice, life, trust, culture and even may remind people of very real and very scary times of history. People worry about both extremes (censorship and pushing immoral culture) and this surprises you? Your own morality is really getting imposed over all else here.. and you only see one worry of the two, right?
Everyone does know it's a game. Just becuase someone takes the metaphor seriously doesn't mean that they will actually go out and kill everyone who disagrees with them. Rational people don't do that.
Mein Kampf is just a book, y'know. The Qu'uran is just a set of poetic writings. Rational people would never try to take over the world. Wait.. it takes rationality to even try it!!
It is the highest joke that you feel no real moral code exists for some and yet at the same time you feel "Rational people" are everywhere. Your word "Rational" is a stealth replacement for "Morally stable". Morally stable people are in short supply in many parts of the world... and times of history... because they don't just "exist" naturally to keep us all safe in our beds. Morality shifts in dreadful directions (regretted later) when people believe a lie long enough. Those ships long moored in a calm lagoon would be well advised by those who have seen a real hurricane.
Rome didn't fall because the actors were putting on violent or Facist plays. It fell because a small handful of power weilders tried to manipulate the whole for thier own gain - and that mentality did not come from a
Re:Education decaying into retold legends of glory
on
Why We Fight
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· Score: 1
Moral relativity and cultural relativism is alive and well in the 21st century where the winners decide what history is and who is evil and who is saintly. If you deny it, then you might as well gouge your own eyes out and be blind for the rest of your life.
Moral relativity has always existed, but has tracked more against the backdrop of traditions and isolated groups who have to consider more than one person inside their group. All those traditions have similarities. There exist stupid moral traditions, insipidly selfish traditions, even genocidal traditions. Even so, most traditions that survived have no delusions of solipsism or personal realities. The belief that you are all that exists... or all that is significant... requires technological artificial propping up (and a prosperous society) to be so deluded.
A good earthquake, hurricane or revolution... and it all comes crashing down. (Of course... for the revolution part, you could just almost maintain it if you were on the winning side... until the purges under a new dictator).
What I'm saying is that we're artificially supporting a bizarre extension of this philosophy back into the netherworlds of caveman stupidity, Internet and libraries be damned. Everyone has believed stupid legends of glory and self-importance.. but everyone around a campfire, lying to each other about glorious stories, didn't have access to real records. We supposedly have education to help us... but it appears lessons of history are being tossed aside because "All is possibly true today and I will pick what I like". Say Hi to the Sophists again.
Don't discount Nietzsche, he was right about a lot of things that people are afraid of to know as the truth. And god agrees with him...
Mr. Sneeze was certainly a deep thinker, but he (like many in the 1800s) constantly reacted to his environment instead of considering its implications. He's like postmodern academia: fighting the endless battle against modern academia.. and so on. He just fought against the State/Church like Freud did later on. You cannot end up in Nilhilism and declare you found something new. Pure willpower and freedom were new for him. They are not new to us and anarchy is nothing fascinating nor holy. Constructing a definition of core humanity on vague feelings of despair and shock and a declaration to live somehow.... well it works only for certain audiences. His type will appear again and again, but they aren't innovatively comprehensive in what they explain: they just punt certain questions into the Void.
A practical attempt at a life philosophy has to get out of the 1800s.. and yet be relevant to an aborigine back in 4000 B.C.
Education decaying into retold legends of glory...
on
Why We Fight
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· Score: 1
Isn't it clear from TFA that we do have an innately creative slice of our society that now perceives an absolute fantasy.... (not unlike retelling war-stories generations later) to be real? Not only that... but they perceive themselves (as kings of every game they've played) as morally pure and wise??
It's logical, as he saw it! Not a single game *I've* ever seen has declared its sim-king to be morally skilled by a moral maze of moral obstacles... maximizing the goodness of all at the sacrifice of the fewest violations of principles. Such a game would even notice that those principles are later enacted by every single sim-citizen left alive as they learn of what is done in seats of power. [Hint: Death camps hardly qualify as good morality.]
All I'm saying is that every society suffers from shallow, mindless, compassionless culture that is often defended (here) as harmless. Now the fruits are falling off the tree in larger numbers (Columbine). The game industry needs to find a book somewhere (SOMEWHERE) and realize what exists outside a gun's barrel... what the consequences are for asking everyone to enjoy being a Barbarian for an hour. Rome falls.
Don't give me the bullshit that "Everyone Knows Its A Game". The evidence is mounting high right in that article that more than a few take the metaphor very seriously... and our current political shift... blowing off debt and lives without care... show it is growing indeed. Shallow, mindless politics from shallow mindless ethics.
The game industry (oh how direly important compared to, say, vaccines)... has apparently added to the numbness flowing from Hollywood and yet it doesn't even have depth in its plots! All the games referred to are huge, complex body count simulation systems to tell a story. Even wasting your life watching live sports has some credit toward seeing someone obey the rules properly or not.
So we are now back to a society with mutated glory-stories around a camp fire. Stories have always been told with many many many bodies forgotten because of one half-accurate hero who almost did something amazing (by luck). In old times, though, that lead to dreaming of thousands of Tutsis dead, thousands of Jews dead, thousands of Arabs. Legends built-to-order are dangerous things to rely on.... because they are too fun to listen to.
Everyone calls the stuff "crack", and walks away from the joystick without a real chemical addiction, but the question is what foundation of education is cracking? Aren't we experimenting with very old and very addictive illusions and lies that every history book admits (even after rewriting) always fails? Every society that experimented with fascism explodes into blazing ego and suffering that is retold for generations and generations of people.
Oh.. I forgot.. 10 years is a generation in computer years. I guess we need a fascist dictator every 30 years now to keep remembering?
When scientists finally get down deep into our brains and find the part that evolution put there.. .... the part that determines if other humans were in need of help or mercy..... ...and in modern technology-aided man (maybe more than previous barbaric "civilizations")...
.... we could find it was efficiently burnt away to neural ashes long ago. Numbed by suppression (scientifically proven, btw).
Who is left motivated to notice any pain but their own? Won't even that be suitably ignored by drugs?
They came for the jews, but I was not a jew.
They came for the gays, but I was never gay.
They came for the dissidents, but I never thought about politics.
Then they came for me to do terrible things... and no one was left to stop them.
Many societies fantasize about many things: superiority, greedy domination, dehumanization, self-imposed ignorance. Whenever the dam breaks in history you'll see the longest-thought/planned fantasies are usually the most horrific chapters of real history.
Stop me when you see the pattern. The problem is getting tougher.
We abstracted out the machine-dependent opcode models and unintuitive math calculations.
We abstracted out stack locations and global locations.
We abstracted out dynamic memory and filesystems.
We abstracted out file devices and (UNIX) device/network access.
We abstracted out physical memory limits and actual addresses.
We abstracted out OS identity and permissions.
We abstracted out virtual machine vs. real machine.
In modern times ('90s), recently, we've...
We've abstracted out location/platform of viewer for a document and GUI-widget scripts
We've re-re-re-abstracted out implementation platforms... because standards that are in place are still many and they suck.
We've abstracted (some languages) automated memory management one level better.. dynamically.
We've half-abstracted (some languages) GUI-setup/GUI-widget and GUI-operations code
Umm. We're starting to pick low-hanging fruit if you ask me. We will not proceed farther until we address what we sweat over working on:
We have not abstracted out automated API-use and correct use
We have not abstracted out automated parallelization and network-separated splitting of tasks
We have not (fully) abstracted out GUI/browser-setup code from widget-simulation and user-operation code [interdependencies are not automatically handled]
And of course....
We have not abstracted out everything not necessary to accurately determine the minimum amount needed to convey a functional output from input.
Until 90% of the programming is essentially a library of "compiler hints" that get some code to work in the proper balance of optimisation, we have no choice but to spew an endless surf of compiler-required arbitrary drool-proof-paper decisions that we can barely keep in our skulls.
In sum.. we need to automate the hard parts of programming without errors. That's all. (Hint: we're not done yet.)
The Big Lie technique was *exactly* what Hitler used to spread ridiculous claims that no one could easily disprove ("Germans are suffering in Poland, we invade"), and that no one could easily call them what they were: lies.
If sources are all that are presented without analysis, set up in a fight of loudness, we literally have teams to root for and no concept of the possible lies and inconsistent fantasies one may have and the other may not.
"Reality TV News". Incredibly cheap. Easy to commentate. Easy to "not get into trouble" but at its core it caustic: opinions and fantasies are given equal time with facts and failures, hoping they will "sort themselves out".
Some exists in the Other Party, but big examples are obvious. A commentator said that Bush and others now have just left one word off the PR concept of "Plausible Deniability". It doesn't need to be Plausible anymore. Iraq. Budget concerns. Health costs. Going to Mars without any money. Ignoring Korea and claiming "action."
Of course, most of all, Science is treated as a "opinion field" instead of a factual discipline of proof-required self-censoring societies.
The 'Let Some Other Defenseless Bleeding Heart Unconnected Fool Pay for All That Niceness' party
The 'Your Personal Reality Is Whatever You Seek It To Be**' party.
** Except for Ancient Crimes of Your Ancestors Against Pretty Scenery, Femino-Shamanic Peoples or Fuzzy Animals, (Fascist!).
The choice is clear: "Realistic", barbaric, near-xenophobic selfishness and police state or a shapeless and self-hypocritical never-ending expensive journey through a Hemp-based GDP of zero.
Two of your websites refer to the kooky "studies", from the oil experts of the world: modern russia!
Wanna invest in empty, poor, russian steppes!?
SURE YOU DO!
Read the nice article, American. Ignore the lack of Russian development of said oil for the last 50-80 years (which would easily have fixed many of their huge energy woes). Digging deeper was what they were good at! Someone's apparently selling us sheep oil.
Abiotic oil is not possible from imaginary methane underground. Methane is impossible to bond with unless you oxidize it (oxygen) or rip away its hydrogens in some other way (without letting them re-join the carbon) and it's very light (rises) and its very very likely *not* sitting in rock solution, as an unoxidized carbon source near the pure silica mantle.
Oil is not "cooled" methane or propane. Geesh! what a rip! You have to cook up long molecules from more complex carbon soup. Gases occur because they couldn't get cooked! The natural gas we pump out has risen above the oil because they were formed around the same time and don't slowly go from one form to the other. You'd never find them togther if fluid temperature changed one into the other.
Besides, the proportion of carbon in the unruly methane gas is much smaller than the goo that was buried under tar pits and other sedimentary formations. Methane is hydrogen-rich and carbon-poor compared to coal and crude oil. Ergo: one don't magically all change to the other over eons.
Simply said, we (made of carbon) are the scum of the earth: carbon forms and compounds of *every* type are light and do not flow anywhere but up when buried deep. Even when compressed over eons with silica compounds, they still always come from the surface. (Obviously shows in coal, more common than oil!) So there's no magic springs of texas tea going to appear from 10000 miles deep oil wells. All the oil that was formed 60 million years ago has risen as high as it can, or sprung out already as tar sands.
Okay. Here's a simple test: do endless methane flares spew out of deep-fault (or any) volcanos? Nice pictures in Nat'l Geographic? NO!
Methane was in the atmosphere like every other gaseous carbon compound when the earth was formed. Gooey carbon chains were formed when that carbon in methane stuck to rocks in the form of algae and stuff that ate it. Carbon is light stuff!
(sigh) End lecture.
Kids these days!
Believing anything if a buck ad from unproven science in spam tells them to believe Uncle Bush and the Happy Endless Drillers,
(hint: who are losing investment $$ due to no new reserves.)
[Crawls back into hut and straps on tinfoil hat
to prevent the TV from eating his brain too.]
Religion is suppresed because writers are ignorant
on
Game with God
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· Score: 5, Interesting
There's been a big vacuum in the world of sci-fi / fantasy with religious overtones ever since the modern age of thought began back in the 1920s with Freud and the concept of "wishes" as a basis for fiction and dreams.
C.S. Lewis and (to a point) Tolkien did much to show that religious themes can easily coexist with fiction. The endless "let's try it from scratch" 60s put a bit of a kabosh on that... experimenting in ideas of myth-religion without knowing how much they repeated in old fiction.
Frankly, I see "religion" is actually present in many many spheres... but a new establishment has arrived. It's just the pop-psyche (i.e. Oprah) plus bits-of-new-age psuedoscience that we've had tons of in the 20th century. (practice X does Y for your spiritual Z condition, take two and call me in the morning).
Religion in Babylon 5, for example, was one of the first beginnings of a good treatment in mass media... because believers at least showed some positive though vague devotion as part of a plot (monks at one point, and the Minbari otherwise).
Most scifi religion is incredibly shallow and made for outsiders, with the constant drum of "Hey man, don't get all religious about stuff cuz it all looks the same to us." moral-of-the-story.
Even that only started from the 50s and earlier when tons of minor religious divisions mirrored ethnic/cultural ones (i.e. blacks, whites, immigrants etc..). I knew one old lady who declared the One thing she knew about her Presbyterian church was that she wasn't Baptist. Yikes. That has always scared authors.
Anyway the writing can only occur when religion is handled in a fashion that doesn't get everyone spooked about the loudest minorities involved. Someone's got to stop caring about Pat Robertson and yet still know who Jesus (or Bhudda) was without a minor "survey of religions" class.
Besides, atheism/materialism keeps framing the discussion (e.g. Babylon 5 came down to assuming all "gods" were advanced races) and that forms a rift on how much you're even allowed to describe beliefs. It's tough to write plot about followers of God X or Y when the author makes clear that they're idiots doing something for no purpose or reason except the cuteness of "blind" idealism.
What's gotta happen is that some story writer somewhere has to first avoid the swashbuckling loot-and-horde-and-kill plot. Secondly they need to leave mystery about something Bigger having a role in the story instead of mere science-and-discovery explaining it all by the last 5 minutes.
If it's "universal harmony" that someone deals with (i.e. Ultima V) so be it, but if its God in any fashion it makes the plot and reality of behavior much richer. Yes it makes NPCs *much* more complex... and a score isn't just "gold" or "life" anymore. Deal! I want to see that happen.
We're at the effective top for polygon counts anyway. Someone has to *THINK* that fiction matters someday in a game.
That whole thing has set back computer science quite a bit. It's very silly to use only one example and say *all* programs cannot be proven/analyzed.
Godel's proof is merely a way to show that no one *complete* program can decode the operation of all other programs... and his reasoning was, in summary.. pretty simple.
The first program might be hidden inside the second one and thus it can be programmed to act essentially with all the smarts of the first... and can trap it in a loop. The checker can become manipulated by a cloned version of itself basically. (Its more complex than this, but the real thign is mostly the same).
It's sad how many CS students walk out with a permenant aversion to program analysis tools.
We have to admit several things to make sense of this trend.
Industries do not "become more efficient" as much as they simply shrink due to needing less effort.
The few people who own industries/production do not feel the pinch of losing a market for their services. They like low prices.
The ability of an economy to generate goods effectively is not equal to its ability to generate Consumers (i.e. numbers of people to benefit from cheap goods).
Shrinking industries never immediately produce expansion elsewhere unless one was labor-starved.
Currently no industry at all in the first world is labor-starved because the stone-age jobs are gladly taken by our new-immigrant neighbors and friends.
What part of "Europe and Japan in unemployment crunch" haven't you read in the news?
The conclusion is obvious: unless some new labor-intensive industry (which somehow escapes automation) is ready in the wings there is no Superman(tm) ready to save us all. Capitalism requires you (1) distinguish yourself by finding or making a niche that is vulnerable to your filling and (2) defend yourself once you have found that niche, and lastly Capitalism requires that you (3) distract people away from new goods or services that may undo yours.
The only room left forward is for #1 and the only room for labor markets to go is "up" (i.e. more edumacation). Simply said, until we have a mass subsidization of higher and higher education we have no hope of harnessing more and more people and wealth will follow the differential equations until we have a class schism.
Personally I feel the whole aim of society should be either work-or-learn and the learn part should not require endless payback in the future (i.e. student loans with heinous totals). We'll never be able to pay millions of mediocre poets and violin players to make a Utopia, but if they're learning and generating a better society for themselves... they stabilize overproduction and pay it back in beauty.
because (*DUH*) they are like reality one might think that simulating moral issues will appear too. Thinking we are "in" the "imaginary" world vs. the "real" world is to forget that we can project ANYTHING symbolically anywhere... wooly mammoth up to Osama Bin Hidin'.
Morality is something mixed directly with all other interactions with other humans, and even with our own potential in our future. If we like a real simulation, we like our freedom to act within it.. and that suddenly is moral. ALmost *ALL* stories of any type compose moral issues and themes... even the idea of "exploration/testing-the-taboo" is in no-thinking-zone pr0n.
To claim anything else about our interests is to play dumb when you choose one story/experience over another. "Everyone's different" is just another form of "sez you" but the truth is inane style-less games or bad movies or lame plots are generally repulsive to a large majority of people (unless some "get the joke" or like a jaunty little take on the world.. which I *would* say is highly subjective.)
We like things being Realistic ("I was really there!") and all the rest so that we can feel like we are living in the new place/way. We're fond of living in the real world... we just like to bend the rules and explore in ways that give us a Health-Recharge just by bumping into an object on the floor. That sensation is not a myth. We want to fly... live forever... be invulnerable... save others... love the-most-beautiful XYZ. Those needs are all *BASED* in the real world first.
Myth is based in the real world: ergo... morality is a part of any type of myth.
THe question is what it means if you truly enjoy utterly horrible (genuinely, not merely by your social norms) morality and never ask yourself "Why do I enjoy this?".
The moral world has a landscape all its own.. and it's self-deceptive to treat it like a effect-free theme-park. Just ask folks who lived just south of me, two students of Columbine. They loved the immersion because it was "real" and loved the real things they dreamed they could do.
There are many more examples and "That person was insane" is just an excuse for sloppy philosophy. 'Insanity' chages with each decade, each myth, each movie, each FPS.
And you show stunning ignorance in the nature of the new economy. The first world is not an isolated set of Jeffersonian economies. That's something called "the third world". Dependent on subsistance farming, the vagaries of an unhelpful/nonexistant government, and "personal ingenuity" which must be re-learned every single generation.
Obviously you have ideals about independence but the lessons of today's economy are simple: cooperation within only a homestead or even a village or tribal community is excellent and morally impressive but genuinely unproductive and incredibly unstable in ways. It promotes a horrid level of intolerance and isolation. Consider Yugoslavia to realize what isolation and self-dependence (ethnically) produces.
The technique of self-specialization, economic interdependence and innovative "niche-carving" for an economy is the rule in the first world and it combines technology with incredible resources from utterly diverse cultures and diverse economies. It promotes understanding of truly remote and different cultures as they must cooperate. Think of them when you sip a mocha (the national milk/feed economy, coffee-from-Columbia, caocao-from-Brazil etc..).
To remain in a cave is to fully depend on all that you alone know and nothing more.. because "college" itself requires vast cooperation. Each generation has only the ability, alone, to construct its own world.. and isolation usually prevails if larger scales of cooperation don't exist. Name it "government" or don't but a more mindless bias will show if you don't mind trade but do mind governmental structures that promote trade and stability.
To your and others credit, certainly the ability to be accountable to a local society, the ability to never need to fight competition, to fight for your own economic market (yourself/friends) is nice... but it is often a horrible burden in all but the best natural resources. Very few of us can manufacture all of diapers, baby food, the books for schools and the houses to safely protect children from the cold. When you depend only on yourself then you live like those in remote Africa.
In any case.. your insistent defiance shows it is you who should find yourself ignorant... because you are very likely much more interdependent than you even imagine and have likely gained your faddish perspective from many very self-gratifying hypocrites who did not understand grander scales of population and economy and who published their ideals, gaining adherents, through the same channels they probably despise.
So listen even-handedly to the talking monkeys in your pillow just as much as the BBC.
Respectfully spoken, but that attitude itself has led to the misinformation cheerleaders like Rushie and many other folks who have left their senses because "everything is biased, so let's do it with style." In my view, this even moreso has contributed to the utter failure of the American Left in making its case. "Bias is everywhere, but The Right Wing is SOOO UNFAIIIR AND WIERD!!!"
Just realize that > 1% bias is not equal to the preponderance of %80 propoganda coming out of some sources. Sources should show some rationalist backbone and then people can both listen to them and believe a few things that aren't mere opinions... no matter what everyone wants them to be "spun" into.
[irony] Down With Slogan-Filled Nilhilism [/irony]
Slashdot Mirror
Analysis tools, code-that-analyses code accurately, will finally need to get off the ground if we're going to get out of this gap. Otherwise, we're just going to see hundreds to thousands of hardware-supported, virtualized, inefficient pseudo-threads and tons of message passing analogies.
Shared memory contention is a hardware-solved problem at this level of integration. Shared memory code never lives up to its possible speed in most programming, except for the OS.
I'm entering grad school for this. There's more funding than there are students! Let's get on it!
I think you may have misinterpreted my statements.
I'll grant that that may be possible. Holding on to "Morals are confusing and irrelevant to games" and "Media drive the feelings of revulsion felt by anyone" would be very difficult. Well you hold on to the second one.
If you took my statement as a whole, you would see that I was attempting to explain the business decision behind not implementing this type of scoring system. It's a touchy subject for alot of people.
I think you're being Touchy. You can see obvious huge huge morality decisions in the very design and structure of GTA and Half-Life and many other games (increasing in number). No one in that sphere is not already weighing in on what they think is fascinating to imagine and what they don't consider relevant to simulate. More games give more chances to destroy than to create anything.
Now, I can easily grant how tough it is to write code to express a complex novel, a philosphically intense exploration or a morally high-minded adventure of tough-to-solve salvations for all your rescued victims. Big explosions, bullet trajectories, dead prostitute ragdolls are easier to code... but only as much easier as any type of morally questionable issue. Porn. Executions. Gossip/Lies. Many things are easier.
The issue isn't how tough it is to make or how common "mental junk food" is or will be. The issue is how much starts to give children (and adults) diabetes. Frybread baked by Native Americans (due to free US flour and fat) is very yummy.. and was intended to be a staple .. but it is
satisfyingly empty of nutrition and effectively ends many of these people's
lives in obesity and heart attacks. So much for the "easiest solution" to a
problem of feeding destitute Indians. It kills them.. but it was intended
to be a great solution. The US had to take helping feed a rejected people more
seriously.
Game designers' decisions are taking their toll because they're showing off an isolated culture that is (beginning to) believe their own games' well-delivered illusory sensations of power and independence.
Someone who dares to say killing prostitutes is personally distasteful to publish fantasies about shouldn't so deeply offend you in return. Disliking wonton murder is not so controversial as you may fear. Don't impose silence on the discussion of fantasy-stories' effects because you feel its taboo to discuss.
The media makes it amazing and shocking, that's my stance. Very few events are actually shocking or amazing.....
Just because the media report it doesn't mean they made it that way. Maybe you're a bit too numb a half billion people's worth of significant news. CNN doesn't play it up.. it filters it down and we're becoming numb-er ... and numb-er... and numb-er. Why? Because no perspective over
a half-billion people's time and space is added .. but merely the pizazz of
intensity. Why were we hearing about Ms. Natalee Holloway in Bermuda so
much? Intensity of a missing pretty blond.. picked from the filter.
The difference I find interesting is that you don't consider Movies and Books and Games any different than the news. News merely filters down to get its heinous/porn/gossipy high with a little or lot of spin to help viewers feel comfortable. Story-writers can construct a world to order entirely out of spin with no nub of reality at all... and then they satiate us with nothing but their single feeling. It's on demand dementia! "Pure feeling" with only polygon counts to limit its intensity for games.
My point being: game designers and story writers have to account for the effects of their fantasy medium... not their ease of coding and a high thrills-per-fps (which is what their shareholders demand).
The difference with video games is the interactivity. That element is scary to alot of peop
You have no clue what your talking about do you? The reason games don't attempt to score things on a moral basis is because the media would have a shit fit if games took that trend.
I genuinely remain surprised that you (who may, in principle, support GTA: *) are worried about controversy. What a strange world you live in that the media makes you so worried about opinions!! A moment earlier you find it unmoving if someone pops their fifth prostitute to get their money back. It must be purest hypocrisy. You don't care about media controversy and you appear to worry only about the shock and surprise among your own group. That group (like many I've known) finds morals a taboo subject. That's what it appears you fear breaking.
What moral set are you using? Who decides the weight of those moral choices? What's immoral? These are matters that to this day have not been agreed upon, and you want a scoring system based on it? Ridiculous.
The funny thing is how offended morally you would be when you have real crimes done against you. Maybe you don't subscribe to some complex victimless-crime monitoring system. Still, trust me... the endless arguments of "There's no real morality at all" are a solid source of laughter for me. Hypocrisy unending! Everyone maintains morality codes, often nearly the exact same ones as their friends. Morality codes form politics.
[ Disagreement doesn't mean non-existance. Some have vague respect for similar people and some follow a strict code of conduct but very few act only on nothing but self-impulse. Not you. Those folks don't discuss others' philosophical failings on Slashdot. ]
Anyway... Just because fringe elements differ doesn't mean you aren't totally deep in your own group's religion. In fact... denying there is core morality is a kinda of tribal passphrase these days. You're quite the conformist.
The media will latch onto any angle they can get to sell advertising. If that means they will crucify video games one minute for being to violent and teaching our children to kill, and they will crucify them the next for attempting to force a moral ruleset on them. You cannot win that fight. And companies looking for a profit don't want to pick it.
Truly bizarre. You act like anything at all can get media time. Isn't it obvious that the media reports on something "amazing" or at least "shocking"?? Maybe they do so because video games genuinely represent a departure from everyday practice, life, trust, culture and even may remind people of very real and very scary times of history. People worry about both extremes (censorship and pushing immoral culture) and this surprises you? Your own morality is really getting imposed over all else here.. and you only see one worry of the two, right?
Everyone does know it's a game. Just becuase someone takes the metaphor seriously doesn't mean that they will actually go out and kill everyone who disagrees with them. Rational people don't do that.
Mein Kampf is just a book, y'know. The Qu'uran is just a set of poetic writings. Rational people would never try to take over the world. Wait.. it takes rationality to even try it!!
It is the highest joke that you feel no real moral code exists for some and yet at the same time you feel "Rational people" are everywhere. Your word "Rational" is a stealth replacement for "Morally stable". Morally stable people are in short supply in many parts of the world... and times of history... because they don't just "exist" naturally to keep us all safe in our beds. Morality shifts in dreadful directions (regretted later) when people believe a lie long enough. Those ships long moored in a calm lagoon would be well advised by those who have seen a real hurricane.
Rome didn't fall because the actors were putting on violent or Facist plays. It fell because a small handful of power weilders tried to manipulate the whole for thier own gain - and that mentality did not come from a
Moral relativity has always existed, but has tracked more against the backdrop of traditions and isolated groups who have to consider more than one person inside their group. All those traditions have similarities. There exist stupid moral traditions, insipidly selfish traditions, even genocidal traditions. Even so, most traditions that survived have no delusions of solipsism or personal realities. The belief that you are all that exists ... or all that is significant... requires technological artificial propping up (and a prosperous society) to be so deluded.
A good earthquake, hurricane or revolution... and it all comes crashing down. (Of course... for the revolution part, you could just almost maintain it if you were on the winning side... until the purges under a new dictator).
What I'm saying is that we're artificially supporting a bizarre extension of this philosophy back into the netherworlds of caveman stupidity, Internet and libraries be damned. Everyone has believed stupid legends of glory and self-importance.. but everyone around a campfire, lying to each other about glorious stories, didn't have access to real records. We supposedly have education to help us... but it appears lessons of history are being tossed aside because "All is possibly true today and I will pick what I like". Say Hi to the Sophists again.
Don't discount Nietzsche, he was right about a lot of things that people are afraid of to know as the truth. And god agrees with him...
Mr. Sneeze was certainly a deep thinker, but he (like many in the 1800s) constantly reacted to his environment instead of considering its implications. He's like postmodern academia: fighting the endless battle against modern academia.. and so on. He just fought against the State/Church like Freud did later on. You cannot end up in Nilhilism and declare you found something new. Pure willpower and freedom were new for him. They are not new to us and anarchy is nothing fascinating nor holy. Constructing a definition of core humanity on vague feelings of despair and shock and a declaration to live somehow.... well it works only for certain audiences. His type will appear again and again, but they aren't innovatively comprehensive in what they explain: they just punt certain questions into the Void.
A practical attempt at a life philosophy has to get out of the 1800s.. and yet be relevant to an aborigine back in 4000 B.C.
It's logical, as he saw it! Not a single game *I've* ever seen has declared its sim-king to be morally skilled by a moral maze of moral obstacles... maximizing the goodness of all at the sacrifice of the fewest violations of principles. Such a game would even notice that those principles are later enacted by every single sim-citizen left alive as they learn of what is done in seats of power. [Hint: Death camps hardly qualify as good morality.]
All I'm saying is that every society suffers from shallow, mindless, compassionless culture that is often defended (here) as harmless. Now the fruits are falling off the tree in larger numbers (Columbine). The game industry needs to find a book somewhere (SOMEWHERE) and realize what exists outside a gun's barrel... what the consequences are for asking everyone to enjoy being a Barbarian for an hour. Rome falls.
Don't give me the bullshit that "Everyone Knows Its A Game". The evidence is mounting high right in that article that more than a few take the metaphor very seriously... and our current political shift... blowing off debt and lives without care... show it is growing indeed. Shallow, mindless politics from shallow mindless ethics.
The game industry (oh how direly important compared to, say, vaccines)... has apparently added to the numbness flowing from Hollywood and yet it doesn't even have depth in its plots! All the games referred to are huge, complex body count simulation systems to tell a story. Even wasting your life watching live sports has some credit toward seeing someone obey the rules properly or not.
So we are now back to a society with mutated glory-stories around a camp fire. Stories have always been told with many many many bodies forgotten because of one half-accurate hero who almost did something amazing (by luck). In old times, though, that lead to dreaming of thousands of Tutsis dead, thousands of Jews dead, thousands of Arabs. Legends built-to-order are dangerous things to rely on.... because they are too fun to listen to.
Everyone calls the stuff "crack", and walks away from the joystick without a real chemical addiction, but the question is what foundation of education is cracking? Aren't we experimenting with very old and very addictive illusions and lies that every history book admits (even after rewriting) always fails? Every society that experimented with fascism explodes into blazing ego and suffering that is retold for generations and generations of people.
Oh.. I forgot.. 10 years is a generation in computer years. I guess we need a fascist dictator every 30 years now to keep remembering?
Who is left motivated to notice any pain but their own? Won't even that be suitably ignored by drugs?
They came for the jews, but I was not a jew.
They came for the gays, but I was never gay.
They came for the dissidents, but I never thought about politics.
Then they came for me to do terrible things... and no one was left to stop them.
Many societies fantasize about many things: superiority, greedy domination, dehumanization, self-imposed ignorance. Whenever the dam breaks in history you'll see the longest-thought/planned fantasies are usually the most horrific chapters of real history.
Stop me when you see the pattern. The problem is getting tougher.
In modern times ('90s), recently, we've...
Umm. We're starting to pick low-hanging fruit if you ask me. We will not proceed farther until we address what we sweat over working on:
And of course....
We have not abstracted out everything not necessary to accurately determine the minimum amount needed to convey a functional output from input.
Until 90% of the programming is essentially a library of "compiler hints" that get some code to work in the proper balance of optimisation, we have no choice but to spew an endless surf of compiler-required arbitrary drool-proof-paper decisions that we can barely keep in our skulls.
In sum.. we need to automate the hard parts of programming without errors. That's all. (Hint: we're not done yet.)
If sources are all that are presented without analysis, set up in a fight of loudness, we literally have teams to root for and no concept of the possible lies and inconsistent fantasies one may have and the other may not.
"Reality TV News". Incredibly cheap. Easy to commentate. Easy to "not get into trouble" but at its core it caustic: opinions and fantasies are given equal time with facts and failures, hoping they will "sort themselves out".
Some exists in the Other Party, but big examples are obvious. A commentator said that Bush and others now have just left one word off the PR concept of "Plausible Deniability". It doesn't need to be Plausible anymore. Iraq. Budget concerns. Health costs. Going to Mars without any money. Ignoring Korea and claiming "action."
Of course, most of all, Science is treated as a "opinion field" instead of a factual discipline of proof-required self-censoring societies.
Self-centeredness IS America (at least now).
** Except for Ancient Crimes of Your Ancestors Against Pretty Scenery, Femino-Shamanic Peoples or Fuzzy Animals, (Fascist!).
The choice is clear:
"Realistic", barbaric, near-xenophobic selfishness and police state or a shapeless and self-hypocritical never-ending expensive journey through a Hemp-based GDP of zero.
What a country!
Two of your websites refer to the kooky "studies", from the oil experts of the world: modern russia!
Wanna invest in empty, poor, russian steppes!? SURE YOU DO!
Read the nice article, American. Ignore the lack of Russian development of said oil for the last 50-80 years (which would easily have fixed many of their huge energy woes). Digging deeper was what they were good at! Someone's apparently selling us sheep oil.
Abiotic oil is not possible from imaginary methane underground. Methane is impossible to bond with unless you oxidize it (oxygen) or rip away its hydrogens in some other way (without letting them re-join the carbon) and it's very light (rises) and its very very likely *not* sitting in rock solution, as an unoxidized carbon source near the pure silica mantle.
Oil is not "cooled" methane or propane. Geesh! what a rip! You have to cook up long molecules from more complex carbon soup. Gases occur because they couldn't get cooked! The natural gas we pump out has risen above the oil because they were formed around the same time and don't slowly go from one form to the other. You'd never find them togther if fluid temperature changed one into the other.
Besides, the proportion of carbon in the unruly methane gas is much smaller than the goo that was buried under tar pits and other sedimentary formations. Methane is hydrogen-rich and carbon-poor compared to coal and crude oil. Ergo: one don't magically all change to the other over eons.
Simply said, we (made of carbon) are the scum of the earth: carbon forms and compounds of *every* type are light and do not flow anywhere but up when buried deep. Even when compressed over eons with silica compounds, they still always come from the surface. (Obviously shows in coal, more common than oil!) So there's no magic springs of texas tea going to appear from 10000 miles deep oil wells. All the oil that was formed 60 million years ago has risen as high as it can, or sprung out already as tar sands.
Okay. Here's a simple test: do endless methane flares spew out of deep-fault (or any) volcanos? Nice pictures in Nat'l Geographic? NO!
Methane was in the atmosphere like every other gaseous carbon compound when the earth was formed. Gooey carbon chains were formed when that carbon in methane stuck to rocks in the form of algae and stuff that ate it. Carbon is light stuff!
(sigh) End lecture.
Kids these days!
Believing anything if a buck ad from unproven science in spam tells them to believe Uncle Bush and the Happy Endless Drillers,
(hint: who are losing investment $$ due to no new reserves.)
[Crawls back into hut and straps on tinfoil hat
to prevent the TV from eating his brain too.]
C.S. Lewis and (to a point) Tolkien did much to show that religious themes can easily coexist with fiction. The endless "let's try it from scratch" 60s put a bit of a kabosh on that... experimenting in ideas of myth-religion without knowing how much they repeated in old fiction.
Frankly, I see "religion" is actually present in many many spheres... but a new establishment has arrived. It's just the pop-psyche (i.e. Oprah) plus bits-of-new-age psuedoscience that we've had tons of in the 20th century. (practice X does Y for your spiritual Z condition, take two and call me in the morning).
Religion in Babylon 5, for example, was one of the first beginnings of a good treatment in mass media... because believers at least showed some positive though vague devotion as part of a plot (monks at one point, and the Minbari otherwise).
Most scifi religion is incredibly shallow and made for outsiders, with the constant drum of "Hey man, don't get all religious about stuff cuz it all looks the same to us." moral-of-the-story.
Even that only started from the 50s and earlier when tons of minor religious divisions mirrored ethnic/cultural ones (i.e. blacks, whites, immigrants etc..). I knew one old lady who declared the One thing she knew about her Presbyterian church was that she wasn't Baptist. Yikes. That has always scared authors.
Anyway the writing can only occur when religion is handled in a fashion that doesn't get everyone spooked about the loudest minorities involved. Someone's got to stop caring about Pat Robertson and yet still know who Jesus (or Bhudda) was without a minor "survey of religions" class.
Besides, atheism/materialism keeps framing the discussion (e.g. Babylon 5 came down to assuming all "gods" were advanced races) and that forms a rift on how much you're even allowed to describe beliefs. It's tough to write plot about followers of God X or Y when the author makes clear that they're idiots doing something for no purpose or reason except the cuteness of "blind" idealism.
What's gotta happen is that some story writer somewhere has to first avoid the swashbuckling loot-and-horde-and-kill plot. Secondly they need to leave mystery about something Bigger having a role in the story instead of mere science-and-discovery explaining it all by the last 5 minutes.
If it's "universal harmony" that someone deals with (i.e. Ultima V) so be it, but if its God in any fashion it makes the plot and reality of behavior much richer. Yes it makes NPCs *much* more complex... and a score isn't just "gold" or "life" anymore. Deal! I want to see that happen.
We're at the effective top for polygon counts anyway. Someone has to *THINK* that fiction matters someday in a game.
Matter sucks.
Or the cosmic background blows.
Take yer pick. :-D.
That whole thing has set back computer science quite a bit. It's very silly to use only one example and say *all* programs cannot be proven/analyzed.
Godel's proof is merely a way to show that no one *complete* program can decode the operation of all other programs... and his reasoning was, in summary.. pretty simple.
The first program might be hidden inside the second one and thus it can be programmed to act essentially with all the smarts of the first... and can trap it in a loop. The checker can become manipulated by a cloned version of itself basically. (Its more complex than this, but the real thign is mostly the same).
It's sad how many CS students walk out with a permenant aversion to program analysis tools.
Industries do not "become more efficient" as much as they simply shrink due to needing less effort.
The few people who own industries/production do not feel the pinch of losing a market for their services. They like low prices.
The ability of an economy to generate goods effectively is not equal to its ability to generate Consumers (i.e. numbers of people to benefit from cheap goods).
Shrinking industries never immediately produce expansion elsewhere unless one was labor-starved.
Currently no industry at all in the first world is labor-starved because the stone-age jobs are gladly taken by our new-immigrant neighbors and friends.
What part of "Europe and Japan in unemployment crunch" haven't you read in the news?
The conclusion is obvious: unless some new labor-intensive industry (which somehow escapes automation) is ready in the wings there is no Superman(tm) ready to save us all. Capitalism requires you (1) distinguish yourself by finding or making a niche that is vulnerable to your filling and (2) defend yourself once you have found that niche, and lastly Capitalism requires that you (3) distract people away from new goods or services that may undo yours.
The only room left forward is for #1 and the only room for labor markets to go is "up" (i.e. more edumacation). Simply said, until we have a mass subsidization of higher and higher education we have no hope of harnessing more and more people and wealth will follow the differential equations until we have a class schism.
Personally I feel the whole aim of society should be either work-or-learn and the learn part should not require endless payback in the future (i.e. student loans with heinous totals). We'll never be able to pay millions of mediocre poets and violin players to make a Utopia, but if they're learning and generating a better society for themselves... they stabilize overproduction and pay it back in beauty.
Either that or we could just end world hunger.
Morality is something mixed directly with all other interactions with other humans, and even with our own potential in our future. If we like a real simulation, we like our freedom to act within it.. and that suddenly is moral. ALmost *ALL* stories of any type compose moral issues and themes... even the idea of "exploration/testing-the-taboo" is in no-thinking-zone pr0n.
To claim anything else about our interests is to play dumb when you choose one story/experience over another. "Everyone's different" is just another form of "sez you" but the truth is inane style-less games or bad movies or lame plots are generally repulsive to a large majority of people (unless some "get the joke" or like a jaunty little take on the world.. which I *would* say is highly subjective.)
We like things being Realistic ("I was really there!") and all the rest so that we can feel like we are living in the new place/way. We're fond of living in the real world... we just like to bend the rules and explore in ways that give us a Health-Recharge just by bumping into an object on the floor. That sensation is not a myth. We want to fly... live forever... be invulnerable... save others... love the-most-beautiful XYZ. Those needs are all *BASED* in the real world first.
Myth is based in the real world: ergo... morality is a part of any type of myth.
THe question is what it means if you truly enjoy utterly horrible (genuinely, not merely by your social norms) morality and never ask yourself "Why do I enjoy this?".
The moral world has a landscape all its own.. and it's self-deceptive to treat it like a effect-free theme-park. Just ask folks who lived just south of me, two students of Columbine. They loved the immersion because it was "real" and loved the real things they dreamed they could do.
There are many more examples and "That person was insane" is just an excuse for sloppy philosophy. 'Insanity' chages with each decade, each myth, each movie, each FPS.
-- CH
Obviously you have ideals about independence but the lessons of today's economy are simple: cooperation within only a homestead or even a village or tribal community is excellent and morally impressive but genuinely unproductive and incredibly unstable in ways. It promotes a horrid level of intolerance and isolation. Consider Yugoslavia to realize what isolation and self-dependence (ethnically) produces.
The technique of self-specialization, economic interdependence and innovative "niche-carving" for an economy is the rule in the first world and it combines technology with incredible resources from utterly diverse cultures and diverse economies. It promotes understanding of truly remote and different cultures as they must cooperate. Think of them when you sip a mocha (the national milk/feed economy, coffee-from-Columbia, caocao-from-Brazil etc..).
To remain in a cave is to fully depend on all that you alone know and nothing more.. because "college" itself requires vast cooperation. Each generation has only the ability, alone, to construct its own world.. and isolation usually prevails if larger scales of cooperation don't exist. Name it "government" or don't but a more mindless bias will show if you don't mind trade but do mind governmental structures that promote trade and stability.
To your and others credit, certainly the ability to be accountable to a local society, the ability to never need to fight competition, to fight for your own economic market (yourself/friends) is nice... but it is often a horrible burden in all but the best natural resources. Very few of us can manufacture all of diapers, baby food, the books for schools and the houses to safely protect children from the cold. When you depend only on yourself then you live like those in remote Africa.
In any case.. your insistent defiance shows it is you who should find yourself ignorant... because you are very likely much more interdependent than you even imagine and have likely gained your faddish perspective from many very self-gratifying hypocrites who did not understand grander scales of population and economy and who published their ideals, gaining adherents, through the same channels they probably despise.
Respectfully spoken, but that attitude itself has led to the misinformation cheerleaders like Rushie and many other folks who have left their senses because "everything is biased, so let's do it with style." In my view, this even moreso has contributed to the utter failure of the American Left in making its case. "Bias is everywhere, but The Right Wing is SOOO UNFAIIIR AND WIERD!!!"
Just realize that > 1% bias is not equal to the preponderance of %80 propoganda coming out of some sources. Sources should show some rationalist backbone and then people can both listen to them and believe a few things that aren't mere opinions... no matter what everyone wants them to be "spun" into.
[irony] Down With Slogan-Filled Nilhilism [/irony]