Taking money can also be somewhat more subtle than "ok, it will cost you 30 silvers for a 95% score".
For example, in traditional printed media, advertising money was always a big set of shackles. The "if you don't give us 95% or more, we'll not advertise in your magazine" threat was around in various shapes for as long as there were reviews magazines, and some caved in big time.
I remember, for example, that back in the 80's some game magazines even let big publishers write their own shameless advertising as a review... and I only started to suspect something's fishy when one had given itself 115% score.
Others do it for the previews and free material to review. Being a review magazine or site puts one in a very tight spot, because you depend on having stuff to review and _preview_. No freebies to review, no reviews, no site. In a nutshell, it's the worst kind of conflict of interest: the same guys you're supposed to honestly review and grade, are the guys who control your air supply and can tighten the noose around your neck any time they stop liking you.
Even if you were rich and bought all the stuff to review (though that's a _lot_ of money), previews can still make or break your popularity. If you review games and you're the only site who has no clue what's EA's _next_ game gonna be like, you're fucked. If you're a hardware review site and are the only one who has no clue what nVidia is up to until the card actually hit the shelves (i.e., up to 6 months even after launch), you're just irrelevant.
And, yeah, both only work for big players. If Trident came and said "we'll only send you our next graphics card to review if you promise to make it look good", chances are you'd laugh them out of the office.
In fact, the side effect of being in the pocket of the big players, is that a lot of sites proceed to shaft the smaller players as some kind of "look, we can still give bad grades too!" proof. Some of the sites and magazines that caved in, at least then just shifted their whole band to the high end, and everyone equally gets grades between 90% and 100%, or between 4 and 5 stars. But I can think of some at least in the game reviews arena who figured out they still have a reputation to build, and proceeded to have to demolish some obscure or indie game regularly, to show that they can give low grades too. They're impartial like that. You better trust them that EA's review actually earned a 95% score, 'cause, look, they also gave some minor player a 15% this month!
So going at one of those pretending to be a minor player looking to buy a review, well, duh, of course won't work.
Actually, probably Slashdot has slightly less of it than RL on the whole, and a lot less than _some_ other groups. E.g., half the high school kids live, breathe and dress 100% by peer consensus. I guess we're already used to not being the most popular kid.
That said, I don't consider karma whoring to be just related to groupthink, it _is_ groupthink with a number attached to it. Here you can actually see your popularity rating number, but the underlying phenomenon is very much the same. But replace it with more fuzzy guesswork metrics like "how many people like me?", or "how many like me more than that other prom queen candidate?", or "am I allowed at the popular kids' table yet?", or "how close am I to being perceived as an upstanding pillar of the community by the neighbours?", and you have essentially the same mechanism and the same behaviour IRL too.
Well, that was a most unfortunate fuck-up indeed. I sorta started with "before the cold war" and switched to "after WW2" in mid-flight, and brain-farts happen.
I will however assume that most people do have the mental power to read more than one line. In which case they'd notice I'm talking about events that happened in the late 40's and early 50's, and which are background info to the "let's bomb the russians" banner-waving. Hence the events I'm talking about can't happen earlier than the 50's, right?
Heh. Dude, relax, I didn't say that _everyone_ is a SFV. (Stupid Fashion Victim.) I just said that the phenomenon does exist, some people _do_ care more about whether they'll get positive "karma" than about what they really want to say.
Occasionally you don't even have to guess. Occasionally you run into messages making an outright fuss over "why did I get modded down when this other guy got modded up?" or spelling out the ever popular "if you disaggree with me, I'll mod you down Overrated!" impotent's revenge. You don't even have to guess, those people are very overt about their actually caring how their post was perceived, rather than whether it was accurate, or actually thinking that some childish mod-revenge is actually some form of punishment. In their little prom-queen mind, yeah, they taught someone a lesson by modding them down. That'll teach him. It's not just silly, it's outright comical.
That's the phenomenon I'm railing against.
And I consider such people to be just the noise in the signal-to-noise ratio. They rarely offer some new signal, they just parrot whatever point of view they perceive as popular.
That's my "problem" with the moderation system. For each goatse link or genuine troll that got modded down (although I've seen goatse links modded up too), they created 2-3 guys adding noise just for instant popularity reasons. It's nothing but a new kind of troll, in the end. The classic troll gets attention by posting some baiting and counting the response, the new troll posts something just for the karma boost and counts his attention by the mod score. But both are in the end just noise in the rational conversation.
And having more than one camp doesn't really solve the underlying problem that much. Having the choice between camps A, B and C, sure, it's a bit more diverse and flexible than having just one. But it still straightjackets the choices between A, B and C, when sometimes the real answer is "none of the above."
At any rate:
- do I say that everyone on/. is a karma-whore? Good grief, no. Or I should hope not.
- do I claim that it's a/. specific problem? No, certainly not. It's a much more general problem. You'll notice that I gave examples dating well before the existence of/. or the Internet.
- does anyone accuse you personally? No, not really. I can't be arsed to read your message history and judge if you're a groupthink victim or not. And it's none of my business anyway. So no need to preemptively go on the defensive.
I mean the French also had translations of "Achtung: Panzer", and were nevertheless genuinely surprised when they got hit upside the head with a verbatim implementation of that.
Learning from history also doesn't always save you from doing the same mistake, or a brand new and original mistake.
E.g., WW2 was based on the idea that you can still just invade someone for resources, and that super-powers will just side with whoever happens to be the enemy of their enemy. Hitler bet on the fact that the UK would still be stuck on the enmity with France that had last since the 100 year war, and that the alliance between the two in WW1 was only a fluke. If history just repeat itself, the UK _should_ have joined the Axis and helped gain some colonial territory at the expense of France. Unfortunately for him (and fortunately for everyone else) the times had changed.
E.g., the plan to invade Russia was based on the idea that any country will just throw the hands up when it lost half its army and the enemy is at the doorstep of their capital. Napoleon in Russia was an exception indeed, but that's just the thing: it was an exception. Everyone else, including France and Denmark right in WW2 just threw their hands up in that situation. Denmark, for example, didn't even fight as much as France, and more or less just pulled an "ok, ok, we surrender, just don't bomb our civilians!" Historically, Russia _should_ have capitulated there, but somehow it didn't. It came as a genuine surprise to Germany that, contrary to all expectations and history, the USSR just kept on fighting even after it lost a million soldiers in the first sucker-punch. Then it lost another million and it still kept on fighting. And so on.
E.g., historically noone should have given a damn about Japan attacking China or, as Hitler hoped, the USSR. Throughout the 19'th century and early 20'th century, noone gave a damn about China, other than as a captive market to be carved up between the great powers. Japan had actually gained the status of civilized nation, and then of great power, based on... you guess, being aggressive enough in Asia _and_ beating the seven shades of shit out of tsarist Russia's fleet. The 19'th century powers actually respected an aggressive imperialist, and Japan had passed that test with flying colours: it had shown the whole world that it has just as much ruthlessness, balls and military might as any European power.
So historically, everyone should have just nodded, smiled and maybe sent some congratulations notes as Japan went and carved yet another slice of China for itself. (It had already taken Manchukuo in 1931, and noone gave a damn.) Unfortunately for them, though, again, the times had changed, and the western world had gotten tired of eternal warfare. Noone appreciated Japanese aggression any more, and appreciated stuff like the Nanking massacre a lot less. That course of action eventually put them in conflict with everyone else. Worse yet, with the guys which controlled Japan's oil supply.
For that matter, historically, Japan should have continued the historical trend of trying to grab more power at the expense of Russia. That was how they had gotten their great power status in the first place, after all. Which should have tied enough of Stalin's army in the east, so Germany can go for the throat. Unfortunately Japan made an early try and, other than maybe managing to help convince Stalin to sign the Ribentropp-Molotov pact so he can move more army there, only managed to get smacked hard. So they focused their attention to the south instead, effectively helping set the Axis on the course to fighting the USA too.
Etc.
History is a fun thing. You can always find enough examples of why something should work, and then enough other examples of why it didn't;)
If you're a russian expatriate, you might be interested in this little fact: right before WW2, there were a _lot_ of voices in the USA advocating _carpet-bombing_ the USSR with nukes preemptively. Just, you know, because they happen to be a _potential_ adversary.
What stopped them was when the USSR finally got their own nukes and you couldn't bomb them without getting bombed right back.
Just to put things into perspective: The USSR had until that point behaved like a pretty loyal ally. Sure, they had some different ideas about the economy, and securing their own sphere of influence, but by and large they were still grateful for the help in WW2. They stopped when they were told to stop, and stuff like that.
E.g., the reason why today there is a North Korea and a South Korea is because the USSR got asked by the allies to declare war on Japan after it's done with Germany. The USSR had little to gain there, but it honoured its treaty obligations. So it did take Manchuria from Japanese (dealing quite a bit of economic damage to Japan), and handed it over to China. And then proceeded to take Korea from Japan too. So the USA got a bit scared and asked Stalin to stop at the 38'th parallel. Noone actually expected that Stalin would actually stop at the 38'th parallel, but again, the guy actually did what his allies wanted, and actually stopped there.
E.g., a little known fact is that on 10 March 1952, Stalin actually proposed to let Germany reunite, if the result stays neutral (i.e., doesn't join either block.) It was the western powers that refused that.
Stalin was a bad guy, but in regards to the western powers he was _not_ at the moment the enemy. The USSR was in fact still by and large an ally of the USA, a member of the alliance that had just won WW2.
Even the later degrading into Cold War was slightly more a result of USA brinkmanship games than of USSR's doing any evil. The western capitalist world had gotten its panties in a knot at the idea of communism and became obsessed with opposing and thwarting the USSR at every step. The USSR was treated as the enemy, complete with violating their airspace daily, which helped deteriorate diplomatic relations very very fast.
I'm not saying that to defend Stalin or communism, I'm saying it to put it into perspective who did those guys want to nuke: an _ally_.
Without the USSR developping a counter-threat quickly, chances are you wouldn't even be here to brag about being a russian expatriate. Unless you immigrated some time in the 50's, you or your parents might well now be casualties in a statistic, because someone preemptively nuked Russia wholesale.
A missile shield turns all that right on its head. If the USA had a shield back then, it would have nuked Russia by now. The moment one side is immune to retaliation, it can threaten the other side with impunity, or even make good on those threats.
At any rate, maybe that little historical detail is why Putin is now getting his own underwear in a knot.
it matters because if you have good rep on slashdot, chances are you're not a complete mumpty. On the other hand, if you have a dreadful karma on slashdot, you'll be saying the same old pants on other sites too.
Bullshit. Good karma on Slashdot just means you fit the views of the other guys _here_. It doesn't mean you automatically are right, or that you have anything useful to contribute to any other community.
The world is really divided into groups like that. The same guy can be the most popular guy on an "omg, we love kittens" board, and a total plonker on a dog lovers' board. The same guy can be the most popular guy on a fundamentalist christian "OMG, science is evil, let's teach kids Intelligent Design" message board, but I can think of a lot of sites (probably even Slashdot) where he'd get modded down. The same guy can be the #1 community idol on a white supremacist board by just posting "omg, it's us who's the oppressed minority" drivel, but, let's just say, I doubt that the blacks and asians will find him equally enlightening. Someone could get to be the apex of popularity on some libertarian board by just promoting the view that everyone should fend for themselves already, give us the wild west days back, but try to preach that to the Amish and you'll find that that's the very thing they are _against_. And try preaching that to some real economists, and you'll get your economic pseudo-science based on novels laughed at. Etc.
Even the style of the discourse can diverge massively. The kind of "I'm right and everyone else is an idiot, because I can go on and on for 5 pages about it" message that gets +5 Insightful on/., tends to not be really appreciated in the real world, where some more leaway for the others' views is expected. There's a reason most nerds are marginalized in the real world. And it would be outright laughable on a science collaboration effort, where the focus is on what authoritative sources or reproductible experiments you can quote, and not on hubris and sophistry. Etc.
Basically karma on/. just means you fit the socially-dysfunctional group we are. No more, no less. Don't delude yourself that it makes you the authoritative source that everyone else should listen to and take notes.
All your achievement here is that you found a group who thinks along the same lines. No more, no less. It's _not_ validation and proof that you're right about everything and should get people on all boards, on all topics, to listen to your enlightening views.
Yes and no. You make it sound like it's a failure of armour, or that it lost the race, if it doesn't stop _everything_. But ever since some bronze age guy strapped a piece of metal to his chest, the goal was _not_ to be 100% invulnerable.
See, being invulnerable is too impractical. It makes you way too slow for a start. The goal is to, on the average, survive 1-2 glancing hits before a well aimed shot finally takes you out. That's already advantage enough.
Tanks and artillery shells are such an example. Tanks are not even designed to resist plunging artillery fire at all. The top armour is ridiculously thin, so even a 30mm gun from above can penetrate it. (Why do you think the A10 has that gun?)
Tanks against long range artillery are just supposed to be immune to shrapnel, since the probability of being hit by a howitzer shell is pretty low. So you just take that risk instead of making a 200 ton tank that can resist it... at the expense of being a large slow target. Tanks are supposed to resist hits from other tanks, and even then it's acceptable if _some_ penetrate.
Even tanks against tanks, the side and back armour is actually much thiner than the front armour, so eventually you will show a side to the enemy that can be penetrated. Or you'll get hit by aviation, anti-tank mines, whatever. Even the KV-1 or Matilda in WW2, which were damn close to invulnerable to the tank guns of that time, could still be killed eventually. You can't be completely immune, ever, and even trying would make you slow and expensive too. So noone even tries.
It's more of a bang per buck question than even imagining that you're invulnerable. It took 4 Shermans to kill a Tiger in WW2, but that was actually good bang per buck, because the 4 Shermans cost less to produce and to ship than it took the Germans to produce 1 Tiger. It may seem callous, but look at which side won the war. So you really try to figure out a good compromise, not go for invulnerability.
And historically the same happened before tanks too. The plate armour on renaissance knights, for example, wasn't invulnerable either, except to missiles. The lance for example, had the _massive_ momentum of a knight and horse behind that steel tip, so there was no realistic way to stop it except a stone wall. So noone even tried to be armoured enough to stop that.
The closest we've ever been to invulnerable, were the ironclads of the 19'th century, before the guns caught up. They were almost immune to each others' guns, but even those were still vulnerable to ramming, torpedoes (back then an explosive on a long pole), mines, etc.
Nukes are a whole new problem, because even one getting through can still do a _lot_ of damage. But that's basically a new problem, rather than "see, armour against guns lost too." Armour against guns works perfectly well for _that_ class of problems. It didn't lose by any reckoning.
Now I don't know about America vs the rest of the world -- sitcoms aren't documentaries -- but it seems to me that by the time in a household the toilet seat's a major reason for screaming at each other, they have a big problem. That's already a dysfunctional family, and the toilet seat is just a symptom of it. Either one of them is a complete control freak (which still doesn't make it a fun marriage) or already thoroughly dislikes the other, if such details get blown out of proportion as yet another proof that the other sucks.
Which I suppose is one reason why it's used so much by dramas and sitcoms. Nothing says "geeze, these two can barely stand each other" as a good ol' quarrel over the position of the toilet seat.
At any rate, IMHO the toilet seat isn't the problem, it's a symptom of a bigger problem. Addressing the symptom will solve about as much as taking two aspirins solves a toothache: going to a dentist might be a better long term solution.
I was going to post much the same thing, so it's refreshing to see someone else thinking that way.
The thing about Slashdot's karma is that it creates groupthink. As you've said, too many people care about it instead of just posting what they think. So they post what they perceive to be the popular opinion, even if that's not what they really think, or even if it's contrary to what they really think.
Frankly, I think groupthink is a bigger problem than even the goatse links. Groupthink is where rational information exchange dies. If you look at the worst bible-thumping communities, or at rabid theocracies, or at the worst excesses of history, and some of its biggest mistakes too, almost all were based on groupthink. Take a million people who individually think "jeez, X is stupid and evil" and put them in a big group where they think that everyone else is fundamentally and rabidly pro-X... and watch them all start chest-thumping for the very thing they secretly despise. Just to get brownie points with the rest of the gang.
When a whole village went and cheered about one of them being burned at the stake as a witch (for bonus points when everyone knew it's a bogus charge and the real reason is something like: widow without sons inherits some land, some rich guy wants her land), that was groupthink. "OMG, I can't let the other ones even think I'm not a rabid fundie. Why, my popularity would go down."
At the risk of tempting Goodwin's law (although it's not a comparison): when a few million Germans cheered about invading the USSR, that was groupthink too. "OMG, I can't let the others think I'm not patriotic."
And in our own times, when you look at such things as bible-thumping communities, or at the broken high-school culture where being smart is uncool and being an airhead is the apex of fashion... guess what? That's groupthink too. Once the ball got rolling, even kids who do understand that their future job does depend on it... still go and insult the nerd, because that's what brings them karma points with the rest of the group.
So, to cut a long story short, I actually _don't_ want that kind of global karma. I actually _want_ people to come forth and say what they think, and not what they think would be popular in that community. I want people to actually come forth and say stuff like "this war is bogus" or "the PATRIOT act is unconstitutional" and not devolve into sheep thinking "OMG, I can't have it follow me for the rest of my life that I'm not patriotic or that maybe I have something to hide". Even if it's something as unimportant as a games forum, I actually want people to come forth and tell me the bad parts about it, so I can make an informed decision. I don't want more of them to think "OMG, if I say anything bad, I'll come out as a troll." Etc.
And the point is? Sorry to disappoint some people, but noone really owes you anything just because you're waving an OSS banner.
Seriously, have a look through the GPL sometime, or read RMS's rhethoric about freedom of speech and such. The idea was that noone can steal _your_ code and put it in a closed source program. Ok, so the GPL 1 and 2 went a bit further and demanded the source and rights to whatever code _they_ contributed to that program too, but I figure it's a fair trade. I show you mine, if I you show me yours. GPL 3 is already treading on grounds some of us consider borderline, but still, ok. But none of them says you have a right to everything _else_ someone wrote or touched.
If Novell wants to sell some of its own documentation to MS, in exchange for whatever they wish, that's that. It's their docs, they can give it to whoever they want, or to noone whatsoever. Just because Novell also has a linux distro, doesn't mean you suddenly have a sacred right to everything else they have.
It's not railing against gender stereotypes as such, it's just saying that most computer games for little girls are just plain old not fun. Maybe gender stereotypes exist, who knows, but what I'm saying is that they're not as simple as what the game developpers assume.
In other words, if little girls like animals, so be it, make an interesting game with animals then. But the keyword should still be: interesting.
Just so it doesn't look like pure railing against it, here's my constructive 2c for the day: a good example of a "doll" game is... The Sims. There are a lot of different scenarios you can enact, and lots of constraints and interdependencies to deal with. It may not be the kind of game you'd play as an adult (although it outsold any other genre even to adults), but it's really re-creating what that playing with dolls was all about back then. And you can dress them up too, if you want to. It's really one big virtual doll house, and well done at that.
(Bit of a shame it went so sex-themed in The Sims 2, though. That one I really wouldn't recommend for a small kid.)
That's just one example, but I'm sure the same can be applied to any other kind of game. Sure, a game for kids can be spared the dramas and plots within plots some adults are suckers for, but it doesn't mean it has to be dumbed down into oblivion. It can still offer lots of stuff to do, and lots of stuff to experiment with.
Kids enjoy fun things more than boring ones? Get outta here.
Nah, that much is obvious to everyone.
The story is actually that what grown ups think as a fun kid game, isn't actually fun for kids. The story isn't kids dislike boring game. The story is, basically, "yeah, but some grown ups thought that those boring games would be the apex of entertainment for junior." If you will, the story is about the disconnect between (A) what kids really _are_ like, and (B) how their parents imagine them.
Imagine, if you will, being 10 years old and basically someone coming over and telling you, "I just painted the fence. Wanna come watch the paint dry? I bet it'll be hours of fun for someone your age." Worse yet, they actually believe that.
The problem is, almost everyone grows up and proceeds to forget that they were children too, and what it really was like. They flip to some imaginary world where kids are stupid simpletons. Which just isn't true.
Yes, especially in the 3-4 years of life the kid doesn't even have all neurons yet, and later doesn't have all the data yet. Yes, they're still wired until puberty to follow mommy around and learn by playing. But they're not brain-dead. (And not half as blissfully care-free as most adults think, either, btw.) And learning by playing is slightly more complex than just being entertained by _any_ simplistic stuff.
Playing with dolls is pretty much enacting "what if" scenarios with those props. They're not the most intricate scenarios, but they do involve some neurons firing. They involve some creativity, at the very least. (You have to think up the script in real time.) They also exercise the memory (what did I see mommy/Buggs Bunny/whatever doing in that situation?) and some critical thinking (would it really go that way?). It's more like playing chess against yourself for practice, than just being entertained by anything whatsoever that involves dolls.
That's what most people who come up with kid games have forgot. They think that just dropping some cartoon character or franchise doll in a game is all that's needed to make a game fun for kids, and that it has to be stripped of anything that involves any thinking at that.
And then there are the games for little _girls_, which actually go one step further in dumbing it down. Everyone seems to be dead sure that little girls are too stupid to even understand more complex stuff than dressing up Barbie or becoming prom queen in 5 dialogues. Or if not too stupid, surely girls don't have other interests and can't be motivated to follow any other plots, right?
Well, actually, wrong. Even in the countries where they do eventually flip to pretending to be an airhead, it happens at puberty. Girls in elementary school still dream of being a chemist, a teacher, an astronaut, whatever, just like boys do. Only in high school the culture becomes distorted into, basically, "being popular is everything, being smart is outright uncool".
And it does so for both genders, anyway, so no need to single one out as the simpletons. Just as girls flip into trying to be the popular airhead, boys flip into trying to be the popular dumb jock.
At any rate, making a game for a 10 year old girl based on how you perceive 16 year old girls, is just a dud for both. It's missing what the 10 year old is actually interested in (she's still wired as a kid, i.e., to follow mommy and to learn), and it's too dumbed down for the 16 year old. Heck, most are too dumbed down even for the 10 year old.
Briefly: people would do well to actually ask the kids if they find a game fun, instead of basing the whole design and testing on adults and their mis-conceptions about kids.
It doesn't really have much to do with the books, except milking the license, sadly. And even then I'm not even sure if they were aiming at milking the books or milking the movies.
Basically it's "Generic Fantasy MMO #1027" with a middle earth theme. And with the signature characters used as little more than merchandising exercises. Same as printing them on a t-shirt, really. It just hopefully allows some fans to think "OMG, I met Gandalf personally and he saved me in the tutorial dungeon", and makes the rest of us think, "wtf, why is he here in the first place? Doesn't he have more important things to do?"
Also, you can't kill any signature characters anyway, so don't get your hopes too high.
Well, that's sorta my problem with it, too. Although I'd summarize it in a more damning phrase: they copied all they could from WoW, without even understanding what they copy, what details made it work on WoW, and generally how to do it well.
The examples you gave are accurate, and probably more important on their own, but just to illustrate why I'd summarize it like that:
Take for example the content pack. It boasts (at least the announcement did) an epic raid for level 30's. Excuse me? Raids in WoW are at the max level for several reasons, two of which being (A) because there actually are that many characters of that level around, and (B) because it's a final time sink for all those. Even leaving aside the aspect that _very_ few people would describe the WoW massive raids as fun, there's the aspect of where the heck will you find that many members at mid-level? In most games (COH being the notable difference) it's a problem finding even 4 more people for a normal team, and WoW itself largely turned into a Massively Single-Player Online RPG lately at any level but the max. And it's telling that Blizzard itself reduced the size of raids in the expansion pack, because gathering and coordinating a whole company is just non-fun for most people.
But it's that kind of thing that tells me that they're just copying blindly, without even making any effort (or being able) to understand what they're copying. You can almost picture a dysfunctional "WoW is popular, WoW has raids, therefore people love raids. I know, we'll be more popular if we have more raids and earlier raids!" train of thought.
The same applies to almost everything else, including the things you've mentioned. They copied the titles from other games (e.g., EQ2), but couldn't even be arsed to figure out how to display them well. They copied the crafts from earlier EQ2 again, too bad none of them understood why EQ2 changed that, or how to balance the resources. Etc.
Just so noone gets me wrong, I'm not against ripping off other games per se. Most games copy from each other and WoW itself didn't invent much new, it just polished existing elements. But that's just the rub. Blizzard took the time to understand what they're doing, and try to get it right. These guys are just doing some minimal-effort copying, without even trying to get it right, without understanding what they're doing, and without any obvious plan.
For that matter, how about not clicking OR copy-and-pasting?
I mean, think about it. If it's your bank, you already know it's URL anyway, you probably even have it bookmarked. Why on Earth would anyone need to follow a link from some dodgy email to go log in to their bank? No, bloody seriously.
Let's try to think like the most clueless user for a moment, and actually believe that my bank wants me to log in to verify I still exist. Well, ok. I already have a bookmark to the bank, I'll go log in there.
Ah, but maybe they want me to enter some code or whatnot. Well, ok, then the bank will have a link somewhere in its menu for that. Banks existed for quite a while, debatably the first proto-bank were the knights Templar. At any rate, they existed long before emails and wouldn't make clicking on an email link their only option. What if someone forgot their email password, for example? If they want some extra data from me, then (A) they'll also send a snail mail letter, and (B) at any rate the form would be available from the normal site too.
Or how about picking up the phone and asking my bank if there is some problem?
Basically, yeah, I'm left scratching my head as to why _is_ an anti-phishing plugin needed at all. If you got someone educated enough about phishing that they'll actually go and download a plugin, then how about just educating them to not do their banking via email links? There, problem solved.
Erk. Trust me, you don't want stun bombs in an airplane.
Unlike the false impression that games leave people with, a flashbang is still an explosive device and it can still maim, cripple, even kill. It's a lot less lethal than a proper grenade, but you still don't want to throw it at someone's feet. And throwing it in a crowd is probably the most irresponsible thing I've ever read.
Not to mention that the bad guys would have to look at it anyway to have any effect. SWAT troops throw it right in the doorway for example, on the assumption that the bad guys would be looking at the door when it gets kicked in. (And also because of the previous paragraph: probably noone will be on top of it when it blows.) If it rolls under a seat, you haven't solved much.
I for one can say that Eliza actually improved my social life a lot. You just need to realize that you can do just that in a conversation too.
Are you stuck in a conversation with a zealot ranting about how BSD is better than Linux, or why Gentoo sucks compared to the Gay Penguin distro? Have to listen to someone ranting about what subtle differences make Manowar the greatest band ever, and Metalica just a bunch of soulless sell-outs? Have to nod through as your GF goes on at great lengths as to what should some soap-opera character do, or such? Stuck with a co-worker ranting every single day, for two years straight, about doing the same things in the same fucking CounterStrike map you've never heard of?
Well, ok, so there's the easy "if you don't talk to me ever again, I will refrain from breaking both your legs, cutting your balls with a rusty saw, and shoving them so far up your ass you'll gag" way out, but bear with me anyway;)
The other way is to realize that you too can go through a whole conversation by just rephrasing what they've said.
Is that guy going on about how "emerge" sucks compared to the "bend-over-and-take-it" script in his favourite Gay Penguin distro? Never fear, just wait for the right moment to feed that bit right back at him. Sooner or later he'll give you some excuse to say, "Yeah, well, that's why emerge sucks compared to bend-over-and-take-it" or "well, duh, with bend-over-and-take-it it would have went much better" right back at him. Do it right, and he'll think he's found the perfect guy, who shares all his opinions to the letter.
Do remember though Eliza has the problem that it does it (A) immediately, and (B) quite unskilled at getting it to be a grammatically-correct sentence, much less one that makes sense. You can do better. For starters, don't feed them their own stuff back immediately. Throw a little delay in the feedback loop. Especially make sure that 10 seconds have elapsed. The short term memory buffer on most humans is 8 seconds, and it's good to have a bit of a margin, just in case.
Well, all the more reason to learn from the mistakes of the past, don't you think? Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it. And it would be a shame to have to blow the death star again.
Not to mention other historical stuff that doesn't necessarily need repeating. Like Napoleon's wars, for example. Marching in a column with flintlock muskets is just no longer hip, you know. Or like assassinating Caesar. The poor guy suffered enough the first time, I see no reason to be mean and put him through that again. Etc.
Exactly where do you see a false dillema? No, seriously, quotes about possible logical fallacies are good and fine, but you must first establish that a logic error has actually been commited.
The logic I'm proposing is along the lines of:
- _if_ there's such an axis and the curve looks like that (i.e., with a single dip below zero), then the "uncanny valley" zone is basically an interval
- if two points are part of the same interval, then a point in the middle is part of that interval too. (E.g., taking the interval [0.5..0.9], if 0.6 is in that interval and 0.8 is in that interval, then so is 0.7.)
- point X is in that interval (e.g., X = The Spirits Within.)
- point Y is in that interval (e.g., Y = EQ2)
- point Z is between X and Y (e.g., Z = Oblivion. It does have both better models and better animations than EQ2, yet far worse than The Spirits Within.)
- then point Z should be in that Uncanny Valley interval too
- worse yet, because of the shape of that curve, Z can't end up looking better/less-disturbing than either X or Y, if both X and Y are inside that dip below zero.
And yet that's false. Z actually looks a hell of a lot better, and trips people's suspension of disbelief a lot less.
If you can find a genuine logic error in the above, please do let me know.
And that, in a nutshell, is the problem with the whole Uncanny Valley _bullshit_. It's easy to hand-pick examples that confirm whatever you wish, and it's easy to hand-wave any single example as to why it should fall inside or outside of it by itself. It becomes hard when you start noticing that any two points you choose, you can pick a counter-example in the middle which doesn't act that way.
The whole Uncanny Valley bullshit is itself based on two fallacies, since you brought those up:
1. Biased Sample. You can pretend to prove anything if you're free to hand-pick only the examples that confirm it.
2. Not as much a logical as a mathematical fallacy: being fuzzy enough to be able to redefine the curve as to explain anything you want explained. Any single example you can choose, someone can (and will) handwave and massage its position or the shape of the curve to justify that it really fits their preconception. Since you can't put a clear number and say "zombies are 75.61% realistic", it just allows people to handwave where they should be placed to confirm an unproven preconception.
It's a pity that the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy name is already taken, because it's pretty much the perfect illustration of what the proponents of the Uncanny Valley bullshit constantly do. Any single point you choose, they can just use a ton of sophistry and handwaving to move the point or the curve to explain it. It's literally painting the target around the bullet hole, instead of honestly testing a hypothesis.
3. Often using a Inconsistent Comparison or an Incomplete Comparison fallacy to create the illusion of that unidimensional scale where one doesn't exist. Every single example is judged by whatever different criterion fits the preconception, avoiding the aspects which would make it a lot harder to squeeze in a single variable.
Well, I'm attacking just that stupid handwaving, and especially number 2. I'm using two points to freakin' anchor that curve already and show that a third can't possibly fit it.
Actually, here's a better question: How many americans were killed in terrorist attacks in the year _before_ 9/11? Exactly zero.
Saying "we haven't had other attacks since then" just begs for the "see? so our paranoid security works!" answer. The fact is, there weren't that many before either. Sure, 9/11 was most unfortunate, but it was by and large a one time event.
- train your stormtroopers so they can hit a man sized target at 100 ft distance
- don't have your war droids depend on a centralized node that, when destroyed, would disable the whole army
- make sure there are no vents leading directly to your death star's reactor, no matter how hard or unlikely to hit they are
- fun as it may be, and sure as you may be that he's a complete bastard, don't send a father to torture his daughter and duel his son. They might end up working together against you. Also, if you've decided to replace him with his son, don't tell it to his face.
- don't make yourself hated by whole populations in the first place. Destroying whole planets just to show you can, is actually pretty bad PR. It's bad for your tax income too. Noone will rise in rebellion or send suicide bombers against you for just treating them right and creating employment.
- make sure the doors, especially prison doors or doors to critical command rooms, can't be opened by shooting the control panel. And generally, security means everything should fail in the way that is the least of a security problem. Losing electricity should cause the door bolts to lock the door (e.g., they're on springs that push them to the locked state, and you need current to pull them open), not unlock it.
- for that matter, and according to the same principle, a damaged reactor should tend to shut down, not blow up. There's a reason 20'th century nuclear reactors need current to keep the moderator rods out, and get to shut down if they lose that current
- control consoles don't have much of a reason to explode when the ship takes a hit in some point half a mile away. You may need that console again, and trained specialist officers that operate them are expensive to replace too
- invest in some shielding technology, or at least armour. The Mitsubishi A6M Zero fared poorer than you'd think with only speed and maneuverability as its only defenses, and got shot by airplanes which could take a whole clip and keep flying. The TIE fighter is just repeating an existing mistake. Don't do it.
And generally, read the evil overlord's list already.
No offense, but have you actually read those? Heck, _can_ you read? Because after flipping through it a little, most of that stuff is along the lines of "don't do X, we'll kill you if you do X." Where X can be incest, rape, etc. It's fucking stupid to present a "don't do incest" commandment as "instructions on how to do incest."
I know that baiting christians is a popular sport, and I have indulged in a bit of that too at times, but the thing is: you have to end up looking like you're the smart one, and they're the illogical ones. If you just manage to look like a rabid retard who can't even read or follow the most simple logic, sad to say, you may have missed the whole point of that sport.
I still call bull. I was one of those who quoted the Uncanny Valley left and right, but, sorry, I'm more and more convinced that it's so much bullshit it could fertilize a few acres. There is no one-dimension axis measuring likeness to human.
E.g., let's take two sets of models which were both in the "uncanny valley" if it exists. On one end you have the extremely detailed models of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, and on the other the models of EQ2 which a _lot_ of people described as "lifeless", "sterile" or other such euphemisms. I'm one of those. In fact I'd call them just disturbingly wrong, the kind where your subconscious keeps snapping out of suspension of disbelief screaming "that's not a tree!" and "that's not a human!" If an uncanny valley exists, then they're in the uncanny valley too, right?
Then something that falls in between those two points should be in the uncanny valley too, right?
Well, wrong. Oblivion for example was a lot easier to swallow than either, although detail-level-wise it's between the two.
That's called a Reductio ad absurdum proof, where assuming X leads to the false conclusion Y.
Furthermore, if you've actually read the Uncanny Valley theory, the examples used are blatantly bogus hand-waving. E.g., yes, a zombie is disturbing, but it's bogus to claim that it's purely for aesthetic or "how much it resembles humans" reasons. There's a whole bunch of cultural and emotional meaning tied to that, and claiming that it trips people's fears just because of the "uncanny valley" effect, is like claiming that you fear a car coming at you just because the headlights look sorta uncanny like eyes.
And again, you can do a reductio ad absurdum there. The Undead in WoW are the most disturbing visually, the characters in Spirits Within are uncanny valley too, so something in between should be in the Uncanny Valley too. Yet the Wow humans and elves are considered the races that look good.
In fact the zombies are the perfect counter-example all by themselves. If lowering realism moves something out of the uncanny valley (e.g., lower polycount characters in games are less disturbing than the characters in The Spirits Within), then it should do the same for zombies. It doesn't. They're still repulsive even at Quake 1 polycounts.
Or if slight imperfections like in Spirits Within, or details like teeth on a vampire, are what makes them disturbing via an Uncanny Valley effect... then how about pointy ears on elves? Shouldn't Legolas cause the same effect? Well, bummer, he doesn't.
Etc, etc, etc.
The Uncanny Valley is one of those things that makes sense only as long as you don't actually use your brains.
Yes, there are all sorts of ways in which being different or acting not-right can trip people's suspension of disbelief. That much is obvious. But there is no single dimension measuring it, and no single Uncanny Valley graph. There are thousands of factors which can be right or awfully wrong or somewhere in between, and thousands of fears, beliefs, expectations that can be tripped by it. You can't take the average and use it as the X axis for an uncanny valley graph, because even if the average is 99% right (hence the whole should be on the right side of the valley), one single detail (e.g., "omg, they're zombies") which can be disturbing on its own.
E.g., The Spirits Within wasn't just "a littel off", it had outright bad acting. That's what tripped people's suspension of disbelief. There was no uncanny valley effect, no overall being just a little off, it's just what you'd get with human actors acting badly.
It also overlooks the problem of expectations. The Spirits Within is wrong because you expect them to be human, Toy Story or Oblivion aren't because you expect them to be respectively toys or NPCs in a computer game. You have different sets of expectations for them.
Aesop's Fables (since they keep getting mentioned as Uncanny Valley effect exam
Slashdot Mirror
Taking money can also be somewhat more subtle than "ok, it will cost you 30 silvers for a 95% score".
For example, in traditional printed media, advertising money was always a big set of shackles. The "if you don't give us 95% or more, we'll not advertise in your magazine" threat was around in various shapes for as long as there were reviews magazines, and some caved in big time.
I remember, for example, that back in the 80's some game magazines even let big publishers write their own shameless advertising as a review... and I only started to suspect something's fishy when one had given itself 115% score.
Others do it for the previews and free material to review. Being a review magazine or site puts one in a very tight spot, because you depend on having stuff to review and _preview_. No freebies to review, no reviews, no site. In a nutshell, it's the worst kind of conflict of interest: the same guys you're supposed to honestly review and grade, are the guys who control your air supply and can tighten the noose around your neck any time they stop liking you.
Even if you were rich and bought all the stuff to review (though that's a _lot_ of money), previews can still make or break your popularity. If you review games and you're the only site who has no clue what's EA's _next_ game gonna be like, you're fucked. If you're a hardware review site and are the only one who has no clue what nVidia is up to until the card actually hit the shelves (i.e., up to 6 months even after launch), you're just irrelevant.
And, yeah, both only work for big players. If Trident came and said "we'll only send you our next graphics card to review if you promise to make it look good", chances are you'd laugh them out of the office.
In fact, the side effect of being in the pocket of the big players, is that a lot of sites proceed to shaft the smaller players as some kind of "look, we can still give bad grades too!" proof. Some of the sites and magazines that caved in, at least then just shifted their whole band to the high end, and everyone equally gets grades between 90% and 100%, or between 4 and 5 stars. But I can think of some at least in the game reviews arena who figured out they still have a reputation to build, and proceeded to have to demolish some obscure or indie game regularly, to show that they can give low grades too. They're impartial like that. You better trust them that EA's review actually earned a 95% score, 'cause, look, they also gave some minor player a 15% this month!
So going at one of those pretending to be a minor player looking to buy a review, well, duh, of course won't work.
Actually, probably Slashdot has slightly less of it than RL on the whole, and a lot less than _some_ other groups. E.g., half the high school kids live, breathe and dress 100% by peer consensus. I guess we're already used to not being the most popular kid.
That said, I don't consider karma whoring to be just related to groupthink, it _is_ groupthink with a number attached to it. Here you can actually see your popularity rating number, but the underlying phenomenon is very much the same. But replace it with more fuzzy guesswork metrics like "how many people like me?", or "how many like me more than that other prom queen candidate?", or "am I allowed at the popular kids' table yet?", or "how close am I to being perceived as an upstanding pillar of the community by the neighbours?", and you have essentially the same mechanism and the same behaviour IRL too.
Just IMHO.
Well, that was a most unfortunate fuck-up indeed. I sorta started with "before the cold war" and switched to "after WW2" in mid-flight, and brain-farts happen.
I will however assume that most people do have the mental power to read more than one line. In which case they'd notice I'm talking about events that happened in the late 40's and early 50's, and which are background info to the "let's bomb the russians" banner-waving. Hence the events I'm talking about can't happen earlier than the 50's, right?
Heh. Dude, relax, I didn't say that _everyone_ is a SFV. (Stupid Fashion Victim.) I just said that the phenomenon does exist, some people _do_ care more about whether they'll get positive "karma" than about what they really want to say.
/. is a karma-whore? Good grief, no. Or I should hope not.
/. specific problem? No, certainly not. It's a much more general problem. You'll notice that I gave examples dating well before the existence of /. or the Internet.
Occasionally you don't even have to guess. Occasionally you run into messages making an outright fuss over "why did I get modded down when this other guy got modded up?" or spelling out the ever popular "if you disaggree with me, I'll mod you down Overrated!" impotent's revenge. You don't even have to guess, those people are very overt about their actually caring how their post was perceived, rather than whether it was accurate, or actually thinking that some childish mod-revenge is actually some form of punishment. In their little prom-queen mind, yeah, they taught someone a lesson by modding them down. That'll teach him. It's not just silly, it's outright comical.
That's the phenomenon I'm railing against.
And I consider such people to be just the noise in the signal-to-noise ratio. They rarely offer some new signal, they just parrot whatever point of view they perceive as popular.
That's my "problem" with the moderation system. For each goatse link or genuine troll that got modded down (although I've seen goatse links modded up too), they created 2-3 guys adding noise just for instant popularity reasons. It's nothing but a new kind of troll, in the end. The classic troll gets attention by posting some baiting and counting the response, the new troll posts something just for the karma boost and counts his attention by the mod score. But both are in the end just noise in the rational conversation.
And having more than one camp doesn't really solve the underlying problem that much. Having the choice between camps A, B and C, sure, it's a bit more diverse and flexible than having just one. But it still straightjackets the choices between A, B and C, when sometimes the real answer is "none of the above."
At any rate:
- do I say that everyone on
- do I claim that it's a
- does anyone accuse you personally? No, not really. I can't be arsed to read your message history and judge if you're a groupthink victim or not. And it's none of my business anyway. So no need to preemptively go on the defensive.
Erk, I meant "right after". Dunno how it ended up that way. Sorry.
Same as everyone else, then? :P
;)
I mean the French also had translations of "Achtung: Panzer", and were nevertheless genuinely surprised when they got hit upside the head with a verbatim implementation of that.
Learning from history also doesn't always save you from doing the same mistake, or a brand new and original mistake.
E.g., WW2 was based on the idea that you can still just invade someone for resources, and that super-powers will just side with whoever happens to be the enemy of their enemy. Hitler bet on the fact that the UK would still be stuck on the enmity with France that had last since the 100 year war, and that the alliance between the two in WW1 was only a fluke. If history just repeat itself, the UK _should_ have joined the Axis and helped gain some colonial territory at the expense of France. Unfortunately for him (and fortunately for everyone else) the times had changed.
E.g., the plan to invade Russia was based on the idea that any country will just throw the hands up when it lost half its army and the enemy is at the doorstep of their capital. Napoleon in Russia was an exception indeed, but that's just the thing: it was an exception. Everyone else, including France and Denmark right in WW2 just threw their hands up in that situation. Denmark, for example, didn't even fight as much as France, and more or less just pulled an "ok, ok, we surrender, just don't bomb our civilians!" Historically, Russia _should_ have capitulated there, but somehow it didn't. It came as a genuine surprise to Germany that, contrary to all expectations and history, the USSR just kept on fighting even after it lost a million soldiers in the first sucker-punch. Then it lost another million and it still kept on fighting. And so on.
E.g., historically noone should have given a damn about Japan attacking China or, as Hitler hoped, the USSR. Throughout the 19'th century and early 20'th century, noone gave a damn about China, other than as a captive market to be carved up between the great powers. Japan had actually gained the status of civilized nation, and then of great power, based on... you guess, being aggressive enough in Asia _and_ beating the seven shades of shit out of tsarist Russia's fleet. The 19'th century powers actually respected an aggressive imperialist, and Japan had passed that test with flying colours: it had shown the whole world that it has just as much ruthlessness, balls and military might as any European power.
So historically, everyone should have just nodded, smiled and maybe sent some congratulations notes as Japan went and carved yet another slice of China for itself. (It had already taken Manchukuo in 1931, and noone gave a damn.) Unfortunately for them, though, again, the times had changed, and the western world had gotten tired of eternal warfare. Noone appreciated Japanese aggression any more, and appreciated stuff like the Nanking massacre a lot less. That course of action eventually put them in conflict with everyone else. Worse yet, with the guys which controlled Japan's oil supply.
For that matter, historically, Japan should have continued the historical trend of trying to grab more power at the expense of Russia. That was how they had gotten their great power status in the first place, after all. Which should have tied enough of Stalin's army in the east, so Germany can go for the throat. Unfortunately Japan made an early try and, other than maybe managing to help convince Stalin to sign the Ribentropp-Molotov pact so he can move more army there, only managed to get smacked hard. So they focused their attention to the south instead, effectively helping set the Axis on the course to fighting the USA too.
Etc.
History is a fun thing. You can always find enough examples of why something should work, and then enough other examples of why it didn't
If you're a russian expatriate, you might be interested in this little fact: right before WW2, there were a _lot_ of voices in the USA advocating _carpet-bombing_ the USSR with nukes preemptively. Just, you know, because they happen to be a _potential_ adversary.
What stopped them was when the USSR finally got their own nukes and you couldn't bomb them without getting bombed right back.
Just to put things into perspective: The USSR had until that point behaved like a pretty loyal ally. Sure, they had some different ideas about the economy, and securing their own sphere of influence, but by and large they were still grateful for the help in WW2. They stopped when they were told to stop, and stuff like that.
E.g., the reason why today there is a North Korea and a South Korea is because the USSR got asked by the allies to declare war on Japan after it's done with Germany. The USSR had little to gain there, but it honoured its treaty obligations. So it did take Manchuria from Japanese (dealing quite a bit of economic damage to Japan), and handed it over to China. And then proceeded to take Korea from Japan too. So the USA got a bit scared and asked Stalin to stop at the 38'th parallel. Noone actually expected that Stalin would actually stop at the 38'th parallel, but again, the guy actually did what his allies wanted, and actually stopped there.
E.g., a little known fact is that on 10 March 1952, Stalin actually proposed to let Germany reunite, if the result stays neutral (i.e., doesn't join either block.) It was the western powers that refused that.
Stalin was a bad guy, but in regards to the western powers he was _not_ at the moment the enemy. The USSR was in fact still by and large an ally of the USA, a member of the alliance that had just won WW2.
Even the later degrading into Cold War was slightly more a result of USA brinkmanship games than of USSR's doing any evil. The western capitalist world had gotten its panties in a knot at the idea of communism and became obsessed with opposing and thwarting the USSR at every step. The USSR was treated as the enemy, complete with violating their airspace daily, which helped deteriorate diplomatic relations very very fast.
I'm not saying that to defend Stalin or communism, I'm saying it to put it into perspective who did those guys want to nuke: an _ally_.
Without the USSR developping a counter-threat quickly, chances are you wouldn't even be here to brag about being a russian expatriate. Unless you immigrated some time in the 50's, you or your parents might well now be casualties in a statistic, because someone preemptively nuked Russia wholesale.
A missile shield turns all that right on its head. If the USA had a shield back then, it would have nuked Russia by now. The moment one side is immune to retaliation, it can threaten the other side with impunity, or even make good on those threats.
At any rate, maybe that little historical detail is why Putin is now getting his own underwear in a knot.
Bullshit. Good karma on Slashdot just means you fit the views of the other guys _here_. It doesn't mean you automatically are right, or that you have anything useful to contribute to any other community.
The world is really divided into groups like that. The same guy can be the most popular guy on an "omg, we love kittens" board, and a total plonker on a dog lovers' board. The same guy can be the most popular guy on a fundamentalist christian "OMG, science is evil, let's teach kids Intelligent Design" message board, but I can think of a lot of sites (probably even Slashdot) where he'd get modded down. The same guy can be the #1 community idol on a white supremacist board by just posting "omg, it's us who's the oppressed minority" drivel, but, let's just say, I doubt that the blacks and asians will find him equally enlightening. Someone could get to be the apex of popularity on some libertarian board by just promoting the view that everyone should fend for themselves already, give us the wild west days back, but try to preach that to the Amish and you'll find that that's the very thing they are _against_. And try preaching that to some real economists, and you'll get your economic pseudo-science based on novels laughed at. Etc.
Even the style of the discourse can diverge massively. The kind of "I'm right and everyone else is an idiot, because I can go on and on for 5 pages about it" message that gets +5 Insightful on
Basically karma on
All your achievement here is that you found a group who thinks along the same lines. No more, no less. It's _not_ validation and proof that you're right about everything and should get people on all boards, on all topics, to listen to your enlightening views.
Yes and no. You make it sound like it's a failure of armour, or that it lost the race, if it doesn't stop _everything_. But ever since some bronze age guy strapped a piece of metal to his chest, the goal was _not_ to be 100% invulnerable.
See, being invulnerable is too impractical. It makes you way too slow for a start. The goal is to, on the average, survive 1-2 glancing hits before a well aimed shot finally takes you out. That's already advantage enough.
Tanks and artillery shells are such an example. Tanks are not even designed to resist plunging artillery fire at all. The top armour is ridiculously thin, so even a 30mm gun from above can penetrate it. (Why do you think the A10 has that gun?)
Tanks against long range artillery are just supposed to be immune to shrapnel, since the probability of being hit by a howitzer shell is pretty low. So you just take that risk instead of making a 200 ton tank that can resist it... at the expense of being a large slow target. Tanks are supposed to resist hits from other tanks, and even then it's acceptable if _some_ penetrate.
Even tanks against tanks, the side and back armour is actually much thiner than the front armour, so eventually you will show a side to the enemy that can be penetrated. Or you'll get hit by aviation, anti-tank mines, whatever. Even the KV-1 or Matilda in WW2, which were damn close to invulnerable to the tank guns of that time, could still be killed eventually. You can't be completely immune, ever, and even trying would make you slow and expensive too. So noone even tries.
It's more of a bang per buck question than even imagining that you're invulnerable. It took 4 Shermans to kill a Tiger in WW2, but that was actually good bang per buck, because the 4 Shermans cost less to produce and to ship than it took the Germans to produce 1 Tiger. It may seem callous, but look at which side won the war. So you really try to figure out a good compromise, not go for invulnerability.
And historically the same happened before tanks too. The plate armour on renaissance knights, for example, wasn't invulnerable either, except to missiles. The lance for example, had the _massive_ momentum of a knight and horse behind that steel tip, so there was no realistic way to stop it except a stone wall. So noone even tried to be armoured enough to stop that.
The closest we've ever been to invulnerable, were the ironclads of the 19'th century, before the guns caught up. They were almost immune to each others' guns, but even those were still vulnerable to ramming, torpedoes (back then an explosive on a long pole), mines, etc.
Nukes are a whole new problem, because even one getting through can still do a _lot_ of damage. But that's basically a new problem, rather than "see, armour against guns lost too." Armour against guns works perfectly well for _that_ class of problems. It didn't lose by any reckoning.
Now I don't know about America vs the rest of the world -- sitcoms aren't documentaries -- but it seems to me that by the time in a household the toilet seat's a major reason for screaming at each other, they have a big problem. That's already a dysfunctional family, and the toilet seat is just a symptom of it. Either one of them is a complete control freak (which still doesn't make it a fun marriage) or already thoroughly dislikes the other, if such details get blown out of proportion as yet another proof that the other sucks.
Which I suppose is one reason why it's used so much by dramas and sitcoms. Nothing says "geeze, these two can barely stand each other" as a good ol' quarrel over the position of the toilet seat.
At any rate, IMHO the toilet seat isn't the problem, it's a symptom of a bigger problem. Addressing the symptom will solve about as much as taking two aspirins solves a toothache: going to a dentist might be a better long term solution.
I was going to post much the same thing, so it's refreshing to see someone else thinking that way.
The thing about Slashdot's karma is that it creates groupthink. As you've said, too many people care about it instead of just posting what they think. So they post what they perceive to be the popular opinion, even if that's not what they really think, or even if it's contrary to what they really think.
Frankly, I think groupthink is a bigger problem than even the goatse links. Groupthink is where rational information exchange dies. If you look at the worst bible-thumping communities, or at rabid theocracies, or at the worst excesses of history, and some of its biggest mistakes too, almost all were based on groupthink. Take a million people who individually think "jeez, X is stupid and evil" and put them in a big group where they think that everyone else is fundamentally and rabidly pro-X... and watch them all start chest-thumping for the very thing they secretly despise. Just to get brownie points with the rest of the gang.
When a whole village went and cheered about one of them being burned at the stake as a witch (for bonus points when everyone knew it's a bogus charge and the real reason is something like: widow without sons inherits some land, some rich guy wants her land), that was groupthink. "OMG, I can't let the other ones even think I'm not a rabid fundie. Why, my popularity would go down."
At the risk of tempting Goodwin's law (although it's not a comparison): when a few million Germans cheered about invading the USSR, that was groupthink too. "OMG, I can't let the others think I'm not patriotic."
And in our own times, when you look at such things as bible-thumping communities, or at the broken high-school culture where being smart is uncool and being an airhead is the apex of fashion... guess what? That's groupthink too. Once the ball got rolling, even kids who do understand that their future job does depend on it... still go and insult the nerd, because that's what brings them karma points with the rest of the group.
So, to cut a long story short, I actually _don't_ want that kind of global karma. I actually _want_ people to come forth and say what they think, and not what they think would be popular in that community. I want people to actually come forth and say stuff like "this war is bogus" or "the PATRIOT act is unconstitutional" and not devolve into sheep thinking "OMG, I can't have it follow me for the rest of my life that I'm not patriotic or that maybe I have something to hide". Even if it's something as unimportant as a games forum, I actually want people to come forth and tell me the bad parts about it, so I can make an informed decision. I don't want more of them to think "OMG, if I say anything bad, I'll come out as a troll." Etc.
And the point is? Sorry to disappoint some people, but noone really owes you anything just because you're waving an OSS banner.
Seriously, have a look through the GPL sometime, or read RMS's rhethoric about freedom of speech and such. The idea was that noone can steal _your_ code and put it in a closed source program. Ok, so the GPL 1 and 2 went a bit further and demanded the source and rights to whatever code _they_ contributed to that program too, but I figure it's a fair trade. I show you mine, if I you show me yours. GPL 3 is already treading on grounds some of us consider borderline, but still, ok. But none of them says you have a right to everything _else_ someone wrote or touched.
If Novell wants to sell some of its own documentation to MS, in exchange for whatever they wish, that's that. It's their docs, they can give it to whoever they want, or to noone whatsoever. Just because Novell also has a linux distro, doesn't mean you suddenly have a sacred right to everything else they have.
It's not railing against gender stereotypes as such, it's just saying that most computer games for little girls are just plain old not fun. Maybe gender stereotypes exist, who knows, but what I'm saying is that they're not as simple as what the game developpers assume.
In other words, if little girls like animals, so be it, make an interesting game with animals then. But the keyword should still be: interesting.
Just so it doesn't look like pure railing against it, here's my constructive 2c for the day: a good example of a "doll" game is... The Sims. There are a lot of different scenarios you can enact, and lots of constraints and interdependencies to deal with. It may not be the kind of game you'd play as an adult (although it outsold any other genre even to adults), but it's really re-creating what that playing with dolls was all about back then. And you can dress them up too, if you want to. It's really one big virtual doll house, and well done at that.
(Bit of a shame it went so sex-themed in The Sims 2, though. That one I really wouldn't recommend for a small kid.)
That's just one example, but I'm sure the same can be applied to any other kind of game. Sure, a game for kids can be spared the dramas and plots within plots some adults are suckers for, but it doesn't mean it has to be dumbed down into oblivion. It can still offer lots of stuff to do, and lots of stuff to experiment with.
Nah, that much is obvious to everyone.
The story is actually that what grown ups think as a fun kid game, isn't actually fun for kids. The story isn't kids dislike boring game. The story is, basically, "yeah, but some grown ups thought that those boring games would be the apex of entertainment for junior." If you will, the story is about the disconnect between (A) what kids really _are_ like, and (B) how their parents imagine them.
Imagine, if you will, being 10 years old and basically someone coming over and telling you, "I just painted the fence. Wanna come watch the paint dry? I bet it'll be hours of fun for someone your age." Worse yet, they actually believe that.
The problem is, almost everyone grows up and proceeds to forget that they were children too, and what it really was like. They flip to some imaginary world where kids are stupid simpletons. Which just isn't true.
Yes, especially in the 3-4 years of life the kid doesn't even have all neurons yet, and later doesn't have all the data yet. Yes, they're still wired until puberty to follow mommy around and learn by playing. But they're not brain-dead. (And not half as blissfully care-free as most adults think, either, btw.) And learning by playing is slightly more complex than just being entertained by _any_ simplistic stuff.
Playing with dolls is pretty much enacting "what if" scenarios with those props. They're not the most intricate scenarios, but they do involve some neurons firing. They involve some creativity, at the very least. (You have to think up the script in real time.) They also exercise the memory (what did I see mommy/Buggs Bunny/whatever doing in that situation?) and some critical thinking (would it really go that way?). It's more like playing chess against yourself for practice, than just being entertained by anything whatsoever that involves dolls.
That's what most people who come up with kid games have forgot. They think that just dropping some cartoon character or franchise doll in a game is all that's needed to make a game fun for kids, and that it has to be stripped of anything that involves any thinking at that.
And then there are the games for little _girls_, which actually go one step further in dumbing it down. Everyone seems to be dead sure that little girls are too stupid to even understand more complex stuff than dressing up Barbie or becoming prom queen in 5 dialogues. Or if not too stupid, surely girls don't have other interests and can't be motivated to follow any other plots, right?
Well, actually, wrong. Even in the countries where they do eventually flip to pretending to be an airhead, it happens at puberty. Girls in elementary school still dream of being a chemist, a teacher, an astronaut, whatever, just like boys do. Only in high school the culture becomes distorted into, basically, "being popular is everything, being smart is outright uncool".
And it does so for both genders, anyway, so no need to single one out as the simpletons. Just as girls flip into trying to be the popular airhead, boys flip into trying to be the popular dumb jock.
At any rate, making a game for a 10 year old girl based on how you perceive 16 year old girls, is just a dud for both. It's missing what the 10 year old is actually interested in (she's still wired as a kid, i.e., to follow mommy and to learn), and it's too dumbed down for the 16 year old. Heck, most are too dumbed down even for the 10 year old.
Briefly: people would do well to actually ask the kids if they find a game fun, instead of basing the whole design and testing on adults and their mis-conceptions about kids.
It doesn't really have much to do with the books, except milking the license, sadly. And even then I'm not even sure if they were aiming at milking the books or milking the movies.
Basically it's "Generic Fantasy MMO #1027" with a middle earth theme. And with the signature characters used as little more than merchandising exercises. Same as printing them on a t-shirt, really. It just hopefully allows some fans to think "OMG, I met Gandalf personally and he saved me in the tutorial dungeon", and makes the rest of us think, "wtf, why is he here in the first place? Doesn't he have more important things to do?"
Also, you can't kill any signature characters anyway, so don't get your hopes too high.
Well, that's sorta my problem with it, too. Although I'd summarize it in a more damning phrase: they copied all they could from WoW, without even understanding what they copy, what details made it work on WoW, and generally how to do it well.
The examples you gave are accurate, and probably more important on their own, but just to illustrate why I'd summarize it like that:
Take for example the content pack. It boasts (at least the announcement did) an epic raid for level 30's. Excuse me? Raids in WoW are at the max level for several reasons, two of which being (A) because there actually are that many characters of that level around, and (B) because it's a final time sink for all those. Even leaving aside the aspect that _very_ few people would describe the WoW massive raids as fun, there's the aspect of where the heck will you find that many members at mid-level? In most games (COH being the notable difference) it's a problem finding even 4 more people for a normal team, and WoW itself largely turned into a Massively Single-Player Online RPG lately at any level but the max. And it's telling that Blizzard itself reduced the size of raids in the expansion pack, because gathering and coordinating a whole company is just non-fun for most people.
But it's that kind of thing that tells me that they're just copying blindly, without even making any effort (or being able) to understand what they're copying. You can almost picture a dysfunctional "WoW is popular, WoW has raids, therefore people love raids. I know, we'll be more popular if we have more raids and earlier raids!" train of thought.
The same applies to almost everything else, including the things you've mentioned. They copied the titles from other games (e.g., EQ2), but couldn't even be arsed to figure out how to display them well. They copied the crafts from earlier EQ2 again, too bad none of them understood why EQ2 changed that, or how to balance the resources. Etc.
Just so noone gets me wrong, I'm not against ripping off other games per se. Most games copy from each other and WoW itself didn't invent much new, it just polished existing elements. But that's just the rub. Blizzard took the time to understand what they're doing, and try to get it right. These guys are just doing some minimal-effort copying, without even trying to get it right, without understanding what they're doing, and without any obvious plan.
For that matter, how about not clicking OR copy-and-pasting?
I mean, think about it. If it's your bank, you already know it's URL anyway, you probably even have it bookmarked. Why on Earth would anyone need to follow a link from some dodgy email to go log in to their bank? No, bloody seriously.
Let's try to think like the most clueless user for a moment, and actually believe that my bank wants me to log in to verify I still exist. Well, ok. I already have a bookmark to the bank, I'll go log in there.
Ah, but maybe they want me to enter some code or whatnot. Well, ok, then the bank will have a link somewhere in its menu for that. Banks existed for quite a while, debatably the first proto-bank were the knights Templar. At any rate, they existed long before emails and wouldn't make clicking on an email link their only option. What if someone forgot their email password, for example? If they want some extra data from me, then (A) they'll also send a snail mail letter, and (B) at any rate the form would be available from the normal site too.
Or how about picking up the phone and asking my bank if there is some problem?
Basically, yeah, I'm left scratching my head as to why _is_ an anti-phishing plugin needed at all. If you got someone educated enough about phishing that they'll actually go and download a plugin, then how about just educating them to not do their banking via email links? There, problem solved.
Erk. Trust me, you don't want stun bombs in an airplane. Unlike the false impression that games leave people with, a flashbang is still an explosive device and it can still maim, cripple, even kill. It's a lot less lethal than a proper grenade, but you still don't want to throw it at someone's feet. And throwing it in a crowd is probably the most irresponsible thing I've ever read. Not to mention that the bad guys would have to look at it anyway to have any effect. SWAT troops throw it right in the doorway for example, on the assumption that the bad guys would be looking at the door when it gets kicked in. (And also because of the previous paragraph: probably noone will be on top of it when it blows.) If it rolls under a seat, you haven't solved much.
I for one can say that Eliza actually improved my social life a lot. You just need to realize that you can do just that in a conversation too.
;)
Are you stuck in a conversation with a zealot ranting about how BSD is better than Linux, or why Gentoo sucks compared to the Gay Penguin distro? Have to listen to someone ranting about what subtle differences make Manowar the greatest band ever, and Metalica just a bunch of soulless sell-outs? Have to nod through as your GF goes on at great lengths as to what should some soap-opera character do, or such? Stuck with a co-worker ranting every single day, for two years straight, about doing the same things in the same fucking CounterStrike map you've never heard of?
Well, ok, so there's the easy "if you don't talk to me ever again, I will refrain from breaking both your legs, cutting your balls with a rusty saw, and shoving them so far up your ass you'll gag" way out, but bear with me anyway
The other way is to realize that you too can go through a whole conversation by just rephrasing what they've said.
Is that guy going on about how "emerge" sucks compared to the "bend-over-and-take-it" script in his favourite Gay Penguin distro? Never fear, just wait for the right moment to feed that bit right back at him. Sooner or later he'll give you some excuse to say, "Yeah, well, that's why emerge sucks compared to bend-over-and-take-it" or "well, duh, with bend-over-and-take-it it would have went much better" right back at him. Do it right, and he'll think he's found the perfect guy, who shares all his opinions to the letter.
Do remember though Eliza has the problem that it does it (A) immediately, and (B) quite unskilled at getting it to be a grammatically-correct sentence, much less one that makes sense. You can do better. For starters, don't feed them their own stuff back immediately. Throw a little delay in the feedback loop. Especially make sure that 10 seconds have elapsed. The short term memory buffer on most humans is 8 seconds, and it's good to have a bit of a margin, just in case.
Well, all the more reason to learn from the mistakes of the past, don't you think? Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it. And it would be a shame to have to blow the death star again.
Not to mention other historical stuff that doesn't necessarily need repeating. Like Napoleon's wars, for example. Marching in a column with flintlock muskets is just no longer hip, you know. Or like assassinating Caesar. The poor guy suffered enough the first time, I see no reason to be mean and put him through that again. Etc.
Exactly where do you see a false dillema? No, seriously, quotes about possible logical fallacies are good and fine, but you must first establish that a logic error has actually been commited.
The logic I'm proposing is along the lines of:
- _if_ there's such an axis and the curve looks like that (i.e., with a single dip below zero), then the "uncanny valley" zone is basically an interval
- if two points are part of the same interval, then a point in the middle is part of that interval too. (E.g., taking the interval [0.5..0.9], if 0.6 is in that interval and 0.8 is in that interval, then so is 0.7.)
- point X is in that interval (e.g., X = The Spirits Within.)
- point Y is in that interval (e.g., Y = EQ2)
- point Z is between X and Y (e.g., Z = Oblivion. It does have both better models and better animations than EQ2, yet far worse than The Spirits Within.)
- then point Z should be in that Uncanny Valley interval too
- worse yet, because of the shape of that curve, Z can't end up looking better/less-disturbing than either X or Y, if both X and Y are inside that dip below zero.
And yet that's false. Z actually looks a hell of a lot better, and trips people's suspension of disbelief a lot less.
If you can find a genuine logic error in the above, please do let me know.
And that, in a nutshell, is the problem with the whole Uncanny Valley _bullshit_. It's easy to hand-pick examples that confirm whatever you wish, and it's easy to hand-wave any single example as to why it should fall inside or outside of it by itself. It becomes hard when you start noticing that any two points you choose, you can pick a counter-example in the middle which doesn't act that way.
The whole Uncanny Valley bullshit is itself based on two fallacies, since you brought those up:
1. Biased Sample. You can pretend to prove anything if you're free to hand-pick only the examples that confirm it.
2. Not as much a logical as a mathematical fallacy: being fuzzy enough to be able to redefine the curve as to explain anything you want explained. Any single example you can choose, someone can (and will) handwave and massage its position or the shape of the curve to justify that it really fits their preconception. Since you can't put a clear number and say "zombies are 75.61% realistic", it just allows people to handwave where they should be placed to confirm an unproven preconception.
It's a pity that the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy name is already taken, because it's pretty much the perfect illustration of what the proponents of the Uncanny Valley bullshit constantly do. Any single point you choose, they can just use a ton of sophistry and handwaving to move the point or the curve to explain it. It's literally painting the target around the bullet hole, instead of honestly testing a hypothesis.
3. Often using a Inconsistent Comparison or an Incomplete Comparison fallacy to create the illusion of that unidimensional scale where one doesn't exist. Every single example is judged by whatever different criterion fits the preconception, avoiding the aspects which would make it a lot harder to squeeze in a single variable.
Well, I'm attacking just that stupid handwaving, and especially number 2. I'm using two points to freakin' anchor that curve already and show that a third can't possibly fit it.
Actually, here's a better question: How many americans were killed in terrorist attacks in the year _before_ 9/11? Exactly zero.
Saying "we haven't had other attacks since then" just begs for the "see? so our paranoid security works!" answer. The fact is, there weren't that many before either. Sure, 9/11 was most unfortunate, but it was by and large a one time event.
Lemme see...
- train your stormtroopers so they can hit a man sized target at 100 ft distance
- don't have your war droids depend on a centralized node that, when destroyed, would disable the whole army
- make sure there are no vents leading directly to your death star's reactor, no matter how hard or unlikely to hit they are
- fun as it may be, and sure as you may be that he's a complete bastard, don't send a father to torture his daughter and duel his son. They might end up working together against you. Also, if you've decided to replace him with his son, don't tell it to his face.
- don't make yourself hated by whole populations in the first place. Destroying whole planets just to show you can, is actually pretty bad PR. It's bad for your tax income too. Noone will rise in rebellion or send suicide bombers against you for just treating them right and creating employment.
- make sure the doors, especially prison doors or doors to critical command rooms, can't be opened by shooting the control panel. And generally, security means everything should fail in the way that is the least of a security problem. Losing electricity should cause the door bolts to lock the door (e.g., they're on springs that push them to the locked state, and you need current to pull them open), not unlock it.
- for that matter, and according to the same principle, a damaged reactor should tend to shut down, not blow up. There's a reason 20'th century nuclear reactors need current to keep the moderator rods out, and get to shut down if they lose that current
- control consoles don't have much of a reason to explode when the ship takes a hit in some point half a mile away. You may need that console again, and trained specialist officers that operate them are expensive to replace too
- invest in some shielding technology, or at least armour. The Mitsubishi A6M Zero fared poorer than you'd think with only speed and maneuverability as its only defenses, and got shot by airplanes which could take a whole clip and keep flying. The TIE fighter is just repeating an existing mistake. Don't do it.
And generally, read the evil overlord's list already.
No offense, but have you actually read those? Heck, _can_ you read? Because after flipping through it a little, most of that stuff is along the lines of "don't do X, we'll kill you if you do X." Where X can be incest, rape, etc. It's fucking stupid to present a "don't do incest" commandment as "instructions on how to do incest."
I know that baiting christians is a popular sport, and I have indulged in a bit of that too at times, but the thing is: you have to end up looking like you're the smart one, and they're the illogical ones. If you just manage to look like a rabid retard who can't even read or follow the most simple logic, sad to say, you may have missed the whole point of that sport.
I still call bull. I was one of those who quoted the Uncanny Valley left and right, but, sorry, I'm more and more convinced that it's so much bullshit it could fertilize a few acres. There is no one-dimension axis measuring likeness to human.
E.g., let's take two sets of models which were both in the "uncanny valley" if it exists. On one end you have the extremely detailed models of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, and on the other the models of EQ2 which a _lot_ of people described as "lifeless", "sterile" or other such euphemisms. I'm one of those. In fact I'd call them just disturbingly wrong, the kind where your subconscious keeps snapping out of suspension of disbelief screaming "that's not a tree!" and "that's not a human!" If an uncanny valley exists, then they're in the uncanny valley too, right?
Then something that falls in between those two points should be in the uncanny valley too, right?
Well, wrong. Oblivion for example was a lot easier to swallow than either, although detail-level-wise it's between the two.
That's called a Reductio ad absurdum proof, where assuming X leads to the false conclusion Y.
Furthermore, if you've actually read the Uncanny Valley theory, the examples used are blatantly bogus hand-waving. E.g., yes, a zombie is disturbing, but it's bogus to claim that it's purely for aesthetic or "how much it resembles humans" reasons. There's a whole bunch of cultural and emotional meaning tied to that, and claiming that it trips people's fears just because of the "uncanny valley" effect, is like claiming that you fear a car coming at you just because the headlights look sorta uncanny like eyes.
And again, you can do a reductio ad absurdum there. The Undead in WoW are the most disturbing visually, the characters in Spirits Within are uncanny valley too, so something in between should be in the Uncanny Valley too. Yet the Wow humans and elves are considered the races that look good.
In fact the zombies are the perfect counter-example all by themselves. If lowering realism moves something out of the uncanny valley (e.g., lower polycount characters in games are less disturbing than the characters in The Spirits Within), then it should do the same for zombies. It doesn't. They're still repulsive even at Quake 1 polycounts.
Or if slight imperfections like in Spirits Within, or details like teeth on a vampire, are what makes them disturbing via an Uncanny Valley effect... then how about pointy ears on elves? Shouldn't Legolas cause the same effect? Well, bummer, he doesn't.
Etc, etc, etc.
The Uncanny Valley is one of those things that makes sense only as long as you don't actually use your brains.
Yes, there are all sorts of ways in which being different or acting not-right can trip people's suspension of disbelief. That much is obvious. But there is no single dimension measuring it, and no single Uncanny Valley graph. There are thousands of factors which can be right or awfully wrong or somewhere in between, and thousands of fears, beliefs, expectations that can be tripped by it. You can't take the average and use it as the X axis for an uncanny valley graph, because even if the average is 99% right (hence the whole should be on the right side of the valley), one single detail (e.g., "omg, they're zombies") which can be disturbing on its own.
E.g., The Spirits Within wasn't just "a littel off", it had outright bad acting. That's what tripped people's suspension of disbelief. There was no uncanny valley effect, no overall being just a little off, it's just what you'd get with human actors acting badly.
It also overlooks the problem of expectations. The Spirits Within is wrong because you expect them to be human, Toy Story or Oblivion aren't because you expect them to be respectively toys or NPCs in a computer game. You have different sets of expectations for them.
Aesop's Fables (since they keep getting mentioned as Uncanny Valley effect exam