Personally I think you should always put you conclusion first. That way the reader reads it, sees a whole shitload of text beneath, decides their too lazy to read it, and thus takes the default position of assuming you position is correct. That way you win. On slashdot this is sometimes called not RTFA.
On a greater note, we have no interest in doing your your homework for you. And if your post did have a conclusion I didn't bother reading it cause it wasn't in the first paragraph.
Come on, we are looking at the same ppl who reported that the space shuttle columbia was travelling at 9 times the speed of light when it cracked up. It was on CNN so it must be true...
At my college, journalism is an easy major - aka. you'd have to be retarded to get less than a 4.0 in it, the average journalism student is more interested in the college lifestyle (drinking your way through college so that at the end of it you wonder where the time went cause you don't remember the last four years, having more than sex than a trailer trash hoe), and if you had a cent for every iq point, the entire sum of their iqs together wouldn't get you a hamburger at MickeyD's. Then when they get out, its all about who you know, not what you know. In other words they get a rich uncle to get them on the air. Is anyone at all suprised to learn that the media is now as dumb as posts?
Biotech is at least 10 years away from being a mainstream field. Not to mention that the people who lost those computer jobs won't be getting those biotech joibs. Look at the field - you need at least 8 years of education and experience to go anywhere in it. You know anyone with a phd in it or getting on in it? Then you don't know anyone who will be working in he biotech field. Optics is cool but it can only absorb so many people. Both fields are also not going to be developed here. Too many regulations on biotech, optical engineers are cheaper in india. Both research fields can be outsourced. The only job in optics that would be here is already done - its called laying fiber optic cable and it was done in the 90's.
Just becuase you can write doesn't make you a good writer. If your newphew also knows how to do some simple operations, would you let him perform brain surgery on you? Heck why go to the doctors at all? We all know how to take care of our own diseases...
Remember that money itself is based on social agreement. You only have the right to wealth becuase our siocieties recognize your claim to that wealth. If you use it in ways that we don't like, we may have to cease recognize those claims. In pratical terms this means if you screw the population to the point were they know they are being royally screwed you end up with revolution. That is the one of the problems with captialism - it doesn't recognize that the market and wealth are not the only environments that business has an effect in. Capitalism is a philosphy that determines what occurs in a market but neglects to figure in the mobs it creates willing to burn it down. Greed drives the market but it also inflames the mob.
"The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime."
That is actually incorrect. Our captalist economy, our materialistic drives, and our demands for more and more actually didn't come into vogue until the roman empire. Prior to that there was business, bartering in mesopotamia, the economic competition between the art sellers of athens and corinth that drove the athenians onto the world stage, but by and large the greed we suffer from didn't start out of the slime. It started with those ingenious romans who went insane with making more and more money. Unfortunatly their materialism also ultimately destroyed first their ethics, then their culture, and finally their civilization.
Its not bad for the global economy in the long term. It may not be good for us in either the short or long term. Yes, india and china will be better off, but since wealth is ultimately finite (even on a universal level there are only so many resources), the more slices we have to cut from the pie the smaller each our piece will be. As stated in snow crash - from the view point of the pakistani brick layer this is great but from our viewpoint it is terrible.
Yeah, going to be real fun sitting back and having fun in the second dark ages. Afterall, we have the largest and most effective military in the world. We aren't paying so they can sit on their asses. We aren't paying forieng aid for nothing. The world is largely stable becuase we pay for that stability. Half the world is scared to go to war namely becuase they know we have no problems putting a couple carriers off their shore and bombing them into the stone age if they screw around. Without our military, the UN is just a league of nations with little if any power. If we fall, so does much of the world. Half the third world will break out in simulatenous revolutions if we don't keep propping up the gov't we support. The Saudi royals will collapse and Arabia will fall to the islamic hard liners. South America will be overtaken completely by the drug lords. China will take over most of asia for who is to stop them? Europe is only a shadow of its former glory. The british will probably put up a good fight and the germans may be able to stick around but on the whole, if you think the world is bad now, just wait. China will undoubtfully take our place as the most powerful nation on earth and unlike us would be willing to use that power. Peace would be replaced by anarchy. It would be an unparalled disaster for europe as well as america.
You would do well to remember the old saying: better the devil you know, then the one you don't.
Yeah, didn't yeah hear about the guy who played GTA3 too much. One day he just decided he had to stop after finding himself veering his car into a park cause he thought it would be a great short cut. After awhile, you stop play MMORPGS online, but you do't start playing real life, you start playing the MMORPG's there.
Hopefully, when the graphics stagnate, cookie cutter games will become cheaper. I rarely spend fifty for a game anymore, instead spending ten dollars a year or two later. There is a huge market for that tyep of thing. Come up with some solid games that have okay grahics (remembering the grahics comaprision wil be almost nill between cutting edge and okay), sell em cheap, and profit. Diakatana was a waste at fifty but a bargain at $3 and not that bad considering i was playing it 3 years after it came out.
"If all the games go massive multiplayer, won't those themes also be come standard and people will complain about seeing the new games all before, just with different places, guns, bikinis?"
Yep, we are going to have to to do something drastic to add novelty to games. Girls, I am afraid your going to have to lose the bikinis. Desperate geeks of the world unite!
"The arguments remind me of conversations I heard at lunch in junior high!"
I claimed the console game industry would be dead by now when I was in junior high. I now hear my firends younger brothers who are in junior high claiming the computer game industry won't be around in 10 years. The fact is no one knows what the future might hold. You can only make perdictions based on what you know exist and must by necessity ignore any possible innovations that might pop up between now and then. You must also assume the market won't adapt - ie. carry current trends to their logical extremes. In doing so, you find everything is dying becuase you failed to take into account that everything has a life of its own.
"You see, there was a video game industry apocalypse once before, in the early 80's. The market was flushed down the toilet by a putrid swirl of bad Atari games, players realizing that Hot Dog Maze was just Pac-Man with different colors. They didn't abandon the Atari 2600 in favor of something better. They abandoned it in favor of not playing video games."
And yet the players still swamped the arcades - something the president of Nintendo realized before releasing his NES onto the American market. The problem with the Atari was not that all the games stagnated. There was still innovation, even in the 1983-1984. The problem was cartridge glut. No one could find those great games under the mounds of useless trash. Everyone could make games for the Atari and everyone did - even ppl who had no right making video games (Colgate anyone?). That is one of the reasons why the magazine Nintendo Power and the Nintendo License was so mind-boggingly important. It was an assurance of quality. Now we have the Internet. You are truely gutsy for buying games now without looking for reviews first. We have a similiar environment to 1983 now, but the difference is we can tell what is good/crap. As such, his analogy to the 80's fails. Just becuase we are mired knee deep in trash doesn't mean we will see a similiar crash.
On a greater note, there is just something about video games that keep pulling people back. I still go back and play Mario 3. I still spend hours on end sometimes playing Keystone Kapers and Laser Blast. It is more than just the novelty that draws people to games. It is more than just something to do. It is an experience that transcends your current reality. As the author said, it allows you to be Luke Skywalker - but just becuase you don't want to permantely be Luke Skywalker does not mean that no one will ever replay the game. The games keep bringing people back. While I agree with him that in fact the market for 'Buy this game cause we have modeled dust particles' is going to die, the whole market won't. Games that are good and inventive will still survive. A lot of companies will drop out, no doubt. But the ones like Nintendo that can still be inventive with gameplay and still bring about a great experience will still go on.
As for the movie analysis, there is a difference he hasn't taken into account. The Internet. Not only can we have games that involve ppl in stories but we have games that can involve people in stories with their friends. When you add the fact that not only you but your friend can play, the possibilities grow exponentially larger. Look at WoW and Everquest. They may not even be games anymore. Rather they are environments the user can interact in. You don't get the same with a movie. With a movie you are forcefed the producers/directors vision of what he wants you to see. With games you get a choice. You get to skip shit you don't like and focus on stuff you do like. And with the birth of the Internet, those choices will multiple with future games, not decline. And the 'online gmers' he talks about are by far a minority in my experience. I know a lot of people that play games online just for fun and not becuase they have a need to boost their self esteem by zerg rushing noobs. In addition, with improving AI's we also are losing the predicatble games. The Future? In one game, the opponent may be down a hall, in another he may have moved a different direction. We are quickly moving away from bound points and set patrol paths. In the future, you will be attacking units of enemies, not just pre defined defenses. Take a look at the plans for Thief 3 if you don't believe me.
In additon, if his analogy was true, we would have never watched movies as long as we have. Afterall, there are only so many romances you can watch, only so many war movies right. The novely of seeing them on the screen should have worn off and left us all back with our books. So why hasn't it? Hollywood and books gives us experiences that are different and hence they both can exist together. T
I'm pretty sure the percentage comapred to hwo much is still in the middel east is in in the single digits. If I remember correctly, it comes out to be %2 or so. Put simply, we could use the entire alaskan oil reserve in a single years (or 3 at most) if we relied soley on it.
One of the petroleum derived products is fertilizers. These fertilizer have had a significant role in raising the yeild of crops around the world. Without them, we'll see a drop in yeild and possibly shortages or even famines. We had a population of something like a billion or two people before we started using the fertilizers (and other farming methods, etc.). Our population growth is largely dependent on that progress. You have to grow, refigerate, and move to market vast quatities of food. If you don't you get shortages, famines, riots, and instability. People won't fight a war cause they can't drive arounda s much but they will if they aren't getting enough to eat.
The problem is we don't just use oil in cars for transportation. Petroleum based products are used in everything from plastic manufacturing to fertilizer. That's the real concern. We could all go back to steam engines if it was only the problem of transportation (though we would have to build a massive rail infastructure due to the falling off of trucking and the deteriotating state of our railroads) but what are you going to do about the significantly lower crop yields and the rising price of hundreds of other products? No one really knows how much our great food surplus is due to petroleum based fertilizers but consider this - before we began using them, the world's population was only a billion or so ppl. Now it is 6 billion. If we suddenly have a drop we coudl see rising food prices etc. leading to food riots and all other kinds of non-niceties. Adding the whole end of civilization Fallout senario where the world starts fighting over the last remaining resources on Earth and you get the picture.
Within a year of playing it he'll be asking out girls every single night - even multiple girls at the same time. You'll have invented a monster. that is the secret I think to creating socail skill - you have to give them a reason. In most peoples cases it is undoubtfully sex (or want of it). Get the kid a girlfriend and he'll straighten out in not time. (I'm assuming the kid is actually old enough to have a girlfriend and a real relationship.)
Slashdot Mirror
Dallas. And I'm 22.
Now I can fit twice as much porn on the dvds I burn.
You can also try JR the homeless bum who sleeps near city hall. Hear he sells laptops out of this old suitcase he carries around with him...
Personally I think you should always put you conclusion first. That way the reader reads it, sees a whole shitload of text beneath, decides their too lazy to read it, and thus takes the default position of assuming you position is correct. That way you win. On slashdot this is sometimes called not RTFA.
On a greater note, we have no interest in doing your your homework for you. And if your post did have a conclusion I didn't bother reading it cause it wasn't in the first paragraph.
The Terrorists we will always have with us, but you will not always have a good deal on dell laptops.
Come on, we are looking at the same ppl who reported that the space shuttle columbia was travelling at 9 times the speed of light when it cracked up. It was on CNN so it must be true...
At my college, journalism is an easy major - aka. you'd have to be retarded to get less than a 4.0 in it, the average journalism student is more interested in the college lifestyle (drinking your way through college so that at the end of it you wonder where the time went cause you don't remember the last four years, having more than sex than a trailer trash hoe), and if you had a cent for every iq point, the entire sum of their iqs together wouldn't get you a hamburger at MickeyD's. Then when they get out, its all about who you know, not what you know. In other words they get a rich uncle to get them on the air. Is anyone at all suprised to learn that the media is now as dumb as posts?
Biotech is at least 10 years away from being a mainstream field. Not to mention that the people who lost those computer jobs won't be getting those biotech joibs. Look at the field - you need at least 8 years of education and experience to go anywhere in it. You know anyone with a phd in it or getting on in it? Then you don't know anyone who will be working in he biotech field. Optics is cool but it can only absorb so many people. Both fields are also not going to be developed here. Too many regulations on biotech, optical engineers are cheaper in india. Both research fields can be outsourced. The only job in optics that would be here is already done - its called laying fiber optic cable and it was done in the 90's.
Just becuase you can write doesn't make you a good writer. If your newphew also knows how to do some simple operations, would you let him perform brain surgery on you? Heck why go to the doctors at all? We all know how to take care of our own diseases...
Remember that money itself is based on social agreement. You only have the right to wealth becuase our siocieties recognize your claim to that wealth. If you use it in ways that we don't like, we may have to cease recognize those claims. In pratical terms this means if you screw the population to the point were they know they are being royally screwed you end up with revolution. That is the one of the problems with captialism - it doesn't recognize that the market and wealth are not the only environments that business has an effect in. Capitalism is a philosphy that determines what occurs in a market but neglects to figure in the mobs it creates willing to burn it down. Greed drives the market but it also inflames the mob.
"The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime."
That is actually incorrect. Our captalist economy, our materialistic drives, and our demands for more and more actually didn't come into vogue until the roman empire. Prior to that there was business, bartering in mesopotamia, the economic competition between the art sellers of athens and corinth that drove the athenians onto the world stage, but by and large the greed we suffer from didn't start out of the slime. It started with those ingenious romans who went insane with making more and more money. Unfortunatly their materialism also ultimately destroyed first their ethics, then their culture, and finally their civilization.
Its not bad for the global economy in the long term. It may not be good for us in either the short or long term. Yes, india and china will be better off, but since wealth is ultimately finite (even on a universal level there are only so many resources), the more slices we have to cut from the pie the smaller each our piece will be. As stated in snow crash - from the view point of the pakistani brick layer this is great but from our viewpoint it is terrible.
You know the actual developers never make more money, just the CEO. The more they cut the cost to develope games, the more yachts the CEO can buy.
"I can't wait to see the US going down in flames"
Yeah, going to be real fun sitting back and having fun in the second dark ages. Afterall, we have the largest and most effective military in the world. We aren't paying so they can sit on their asses. We aren't paying forieng aid for nothing. The world is largely stable becuase we pay for that stability. Half the world is scared to go to war namely becuase they know we have no problems putting a couple carriers off their shore and bombing them into the stone age if they screw around. Without our military, the UN is just a league of nations with little if any power. If we fall, so does much of the world. Half the third world will break out in simulatenous revolutions if we don't keep propping up the gov't we support. The Saudi royals will collapse and Arabia will fall to the islamic hard liners. South America will be overtaken completely by the drug lords. China will take over most of asia for who is to stop them? Europe is only a shadow of its former glory. The british will probably put up a good fight and the germans may be able to stick around but on the whole, if you think the world is bad now, just wait. China will undoubtfully take our place as the most powerful nation on earth and unlike us would be willing to use that power. Peace would be replaced by anarchy. It would be an unparalled disaster for europe as well as america.
You would do well to remember the old saying: better the devil you know, then the one you don't.
Yeah, didn't yeah hear about the guy who played GTA3 too much. One day he just decided he had to stop after finding himself veering his car into a park cause he thought it would be a great short cut. After awhile, you stop play MMORPGS online, but you do't start playing real life, you start playing the MMORPG's there.
Hopefully, when the graphics stagnate, cookie cutter games will become cheaper. I rarely spend fifty for a game anymore, instead spending ten dollars a year or two later. There is a huge market for that tyep of thing. Come up with some solid games that have okay grahics (remembering the grahics comaprision wil be almost nill between cutting edge and okay), sell em cheap, and profit. Diakatana was a waste at fifty but a bargain at $3 and not that bad considering i was playing it 3 years after it came out.
Come on man. Duke Nukem Forever anticaption will keep the media around for well into the next century.
"If all the games go massive multiplayer, won't those themes also be come standard and people will complain about seeing the new games all before, just with different places, guns, bikinis?"
Yep, we are going to have to to do something drastic to add novelty to games. Girls, I am afraid your going to have to lose the bikinis. Desperate geeks of the world unite!
"The arguments remind me of conversations I heard at lunch in junior high!"
I claimed the console game industry would be dead by now when I was in junior high. I now hear my firends younger brothers who are in junior high claiming the computer game industry won't be around in 10 years. The fact is no one knows what the future might hold. You can only make perdictions based on what you know exist and must by necessity ignore any possible innovations that might pop up between now and then. You must also assume the market won't adapt - ie. carry current trends to their logical extremes. In doing so, you find everything is dying becuase you failed to take into account that everything has a life of its own.
"You see, there was a video game industry apocalypse once before, in the early 80's. The market was flushed down the toilet by a putrid swirl of bad Atari games, players realizing that Hot Dog Maze was just Pac-Man with different colors. They didn't abandon the Atari 2600 in favor of something better. They abandoned it in favor of not playing video games."
And yet the players still swamped the arcades - something the president of Nintendo realized before releasing his NES onto the American market. The problem with the Atari was not that all the games stagnated. There was still innovation, even in the 1983-1984. The problem was cartridge glut. No one could find those great games under the mounds of useless trash. Everyone could make games for the Atari and everyone did - even ppl who had no right making video games (Colgate anyone?). That is one of the reasons why the magazine Nintendo Power and the Nintendo License was so mind-boggingly important. It was an assurance of quality. Now we have the Internet. You are truely gutsy for buying games now without looking for reviews first. We have a similiar environment to 1983 now, but the difference is we can tell what is good/crap. As such, his analogy to the 80's fails. Just becuase we are mired knee deep in trash doesn't mean we will see a similiar crash.
On a greater note, there is just something about video games that keep pulling people back. I still go back and play Mario 3. I still spend hours on end sometimes playing Keystone Kapers and Laser Blast. It is more than just the novelty that draws people to games. It is more than just something to do. It is an experience that transcends your current reality. As the author said, it allows you to be Luke Skywalker - but just becuase you don't want to permantely be Luke Skywalker does not mean that no one will ever replay the game. The games keep bringing people back. While I agree with him that in fact the market for 'Buy this game cause we have modeled dust particles' is going to die, the whole market won't. Games that are good and inventive will still survive. A lot of companies will drop out, no doubt. But the ones like Nintendo that can still be inventive with gameplay and still bring about a great experience will still go on.
As for the movie analysis, there is a difference he hasn't taken into account. The Internet. Not only can we have games that involve ppl in stories but we have games that can involve people in stories with their friends. When you add the fact that not only you but your friend can play, the possibilities grow exponentially larger. Look at WoW and Everquest. They may not even be games anymore. Rather they are environments the user can interact in. You don't get the same with a movie. With a movie you are forcefed the producers/directors vision of what he wants you to see. With games you get a choice. You get to skip shit you don't like and focus on stuff you do like. And with the birth of the Internet, those choices will multiple with future games, not decline. And the 'online gmers' he talks about are by far a minority in my experience. I know a lot of people that play games online just for fun and not becuase they have a need to boost their self esteem by zerg rushing noobs. In addition, with improving AI's we also are losing the predicatble games. The Future? In one game, the opponent may be down a hall, in another he may have moved a different direction. We are quickly moving away from bound points and set patrol paths. In the future, you will be attacking units of enemies, not just pre defined defenses. Take a look at the plans for Thief 3 if you don't believe me.
In additon, if his analogy was true, we would have never watched movies as long as we have. Afterall, there are only so many romances you can watch, only so many war movies right. The novely of seeing them on the screen should have worn off and left us all back with our books. So why hasn't it? Hollywood and books gives us experiences that are different and hence they both can exist together. T
I'm pretty sure the percentage comapred to hwo much is still in the middel east is in in the single digits. If I remember correctly, it comes out to be %2 or so. Put simply, we could use the entire alaskan oil reserve in a single years (or 3 at most) if we relied soley on it.
One of the petroleum derived products is fertilizers. These fertilizer have had a significant role in raising the yeild of crops around the world. Without them, we'll see a drop in yeild and possibly shortages or even famines. We had a population of something like a billion or two people before we started using the fertilizers (and other farming methods, etc.). Our population growth is largely dependent on that progress. You have to grow, refigerate, and move to market vast quatities of food. If you don't you get shortages, famines, riots, and instability. People won't fight a war cause they can't drive arounda s much but they will if they aren't getting enough to eat.
The problem is we don't just use oil in cars for transportation. Petroleum based products are used in everything from plastic manufacturing to fertilizer. That's the real concern. We could all go back to steam engines if it was only the problem of transportation (though we would have to build a massive rail infastructure due to the falling off of trucking and the deteriotating state of our railroads) but what are you going to do about the significantly lower crop yields and the rising price of hundreds of other products? No one really knows how much our great food surplus is due to petroleum based fertilizers but consider this - before we began using them, the world's population was only a billion or so ppl. Now it is 6 billion. If we suddenly have a drop we coudl see rising food prices etc. leading to food riots and all other kinds of non-niceties. Adding the whole end of civilization Fallout senario where the world starts fighting over the last remaining resources on Earth and you get the picture.
Just imagine it: Major Leaguers with bats chasing down lawyers. GTA only with not so innocent civilians...
We all knew it would happen. All your base could not belong to M$ for long....
Leisure Suit Larry.
Within a year of playing it he'll be asking out girls every single night - even multiple girls at the same time. You'll have invented a monster. that is the secret I think to creating socail skill - you have to give them a reason. In most peoples cases it is undoubtfully sex (or want of it). Get the kid a girlfriend and he'll straighten out in not time. (I'm assuming the kid is actually old enough to have a girlfriend and a real relationship.)