I'm choosing to take only the subset that believes in natural selection, because that is the only scientific theory. Mixing God in, either as having created the whole thing from day 0, or having been the one who made a dinosaur evolve into birds, is just the same kind of using divine intervention instead of natural selection.
Or to put it otherwise, when you have two groups whose very distinct views are:
1. That God made an ape evolve into Adam, and
2. That natural selection and very natural factors forced that ape to evolve fast or die,
it seems to me that they're _very_ different hypotheses. Lumping them together into the same "Evolved over time: 48%" is skimming over a major distinction between the two.
It's basically like saying that there's no difference between (A) knowing how the heat pump in your air conditioner works, and (B) thinking that magical demons push the hot molecules in and the cold ones in. (As in the recent Mac Hall comic.) Hey, both say that it's an AC and it's blowing cold air in, so both are really variants of the same theory, right? It's just a way to reconcile thermodynamics with one's belief in magic and demons, right? Well, no. One is science, the other isn't a "reconciliation", it's just non-science.
So I'll stand by what I've said: only 26% believe the real science version.
And frankly, the ones who worry me the most aren't the 42% which can just stick to the religious version. Fair enough. The ones who worry me the most are precisely those who think they can mix-and-match scientific-sounding babble and religion and that the result is still science, only a little bit "reconciled". That tells me that they don't even understand what science means.
And that there's so many of _those_, now that scares me a lot more than the 42% "god made everything in 7 days" gang.
That's a very insightful point, but I don't think the USA has a monopoly on stupidity or anything. It's just that this time we have data from the USA.
You may notice for example that TFA is from "www.guardian.co.uk". There's a reason for that last part of the domain name. And if you browse through their past list of articles in the "Bad Science" category, you'll notice that most of the bad science examples they pick on are from UK tabloids, not USA ones.
And I can tell you first hand that here, that meaning in Germany, there are plenty of dumb and uneducated people too.
And you know how previously I've mentioned having some first-hand experience with the Eastern Block, before the fall of the Iron Curtain? Much as I've commended their education system as IMHO superior to the feel-good education of the western world, the flip side is that they too had their own dumb people. People who argued that the downfall of their communist system was wasting money on having engineers and economists, instead of having everyone get a hammer or a sickle and do some real work already.
So, yes, there will be a lot of variation in what the percentages are among countries, and whether the anti-science gang will be good ol' bible-thumping christians or rally around some other bogus stuff. Yes, maybe the dumb uneducated people in other countries don't rally around ID like in the USA, but they _will_ rally around some other comfortable pseudo-science and/or excuse to mock and ridicule the real science.
Of course, this is all just IMHO. I don't have hard numbers or percentages to base it on.
I must confess that I had never actually looked at his actual grades. I had heard the "well, Einstein didn't do well in school either" excuse so often, that I just took it for granted. And, alas, it would seem I've just helped perpetuate the myth.
Thanks for correcting me. I'd mod you Informative, but I can't mod answers to my own posts.
Nope, you just use a fallacy without even understanding what it means. To quote from the text on Wikipedia you linked to:
"this is a fallacy if the predicate ("putting sugar on porridge") is not actually contradictory for the accepted definition of the subject ("Scotsman"), or if the definition of the subject is silently adjusted after the fact to make the rebuttal work.
Some elements or actions are exclusively contradictory to the subject, and therefore aren't fallacies. The statement "No true vegetarian would eat a beef steak" is not fallacious because it follows from the accepted definition of "vegetarian""
Same here, lemming. "Science" and "scientist" actually do mean observing a certain mindset and methodology. Science has no absolute truth, and it has nothing that is above being a "theory". Nothing ever in science is beyond being questioned and improved, no matter how old and established it may be.
E.g., even Newton's mechanics aren't absolute, but just approximations that are good enough in a given range. If you move outside that range where the error is small enough, you need something else. E.g., relativist mechanics for high speed, and quantum mechanics for extremely low mass and/or distances.
So yes, science _is_ just as mutually-exclusive to absolute truths, as being a vegetarian is to eatin meat. So, no, that fallacy doesn't apply here.
The only thing I'd challenge is just his use of "GOOD scientists". There is no such thing as "GOOD scientists" and "BAD scientists". You're either a scientist or you aren't. The ones who have absolute unchalengeable truths and 100% certainties aren't "BAD scientists", they're just not scientists at all. They love dressing their dogma in pseudo-science babble and masquerading as "scientists" too, but they just aren't.
"It doesn't matter how overwhelmingly anybody manages to demonstrate that science, as a profession and social institution, has some significant shortcomings (many of which we could improve); you will insist on judging it in terms of your fantasy of what a "good scientist" should be, and not in terms of what scientists are in real life."
I haven't seen any overwhelming demonstration so far, other than some bullshit rants from people that don't even understand what science is. I see a bunch of quacks and charlatans trying to redefine science to mean some bullshit fantasy that they're comfortable fighting against.
And I've yet to see any scientists actually rejecting a logical way to improve. The ones I see rejected are bullshit "improvements" aimed at destroying and perverting it into yet another obedient servant to someone's pet dogma or into marketting for someone's snake-oil.
Invariably it's based on such bullshit, massive ignorance, and fallacies as:
- "It's just a theory!" Classic example of a Verbal Fallacy: it plays on the two different meanings of the word "theory".
- "But science doesn't have the definitive answers to everything!" Yes, of course, by the very definition of science. But that doesn't mean that any bullshit based on _no_ verifiable evidence or logic is automatically equal.
- "But science doesn't describe the real universe, it describes an idealized one." No, actually it does study and describe the real one. What all those idealizations are about is just knowing your intended margin of error, and what influences are too small to get you outside that or even not an influence at all. (E.g., if you're calculating how many hours a train needs between Washington DC and LA at 200 mph, you can safely ignore the train's colour.) But then we'll do an actual experiment and see if that idealization describes reality well enough. If not, it's time to start ignoring less factors or come up with a different theory.
- "But science is just another religion! It's all about believing all those theories and laws instead!" Nope, it's all about reproductible, verifiable evidence to those. Noone asks you to unconditionably believe that the theory of gravit
"Evolution is something the church gave up on decades ago, and the rest of the world knows is fact- but the American press feels "Intelligent Design" deserves presentation on equal grounds and parrots the President when he says it deserves "consideration"."
Well, actually here's a link to a poll that contradicts the "the rest of the world knows is fact" assertion:
It's scary, really. Basically only 26% of those polled actually believed Darwin. (Ranging from 27% among the whites to as low as 14% among the blacks.)
To make ignorance even scarier, even in this group, 15% of them said that life existed from day 0 and never changed, and 10% said evolution was guided by some supreme being. Makes me wonder if they even have a clue wtf they're talking about, if they think "evolution" means life staying unchanged.
So, anyway, now let's subtract those 25% (10% + 15%, since both are really are creationists or ID fans in disguise) from that 26% group, and you're left with 26 * 0.75 = 19.5% who actually do believe in the real evolution theory. That's it. Less than 1 person in 5.
So with all due respect, I'd challenge that assertion that "everyone else knows evolution is a fact". It may be so for you and me and our equally nerdy, educated friends, but if we're talking the bulk of the population, less than 1 in 5 are anywhere _near_ sharing that point of view.
Also 64% supported teaching Intelligent Design in schools.
So basically when the press is giving ID equal opportunity, rest assured that it's not just for Dubya's sake. It's really cattering to those 80.5% who actually do believe in creationism or ID, or those 64% who are obviously ignorant enough to not be able to tell the difference between science and pseudo-science babble.
Seriously, whenever I start thinking that maybe we nerds are just elitist with our snotty attitude about the ignorant, uneducated masses... such a study comes along and proves it in hard numbers and percentages that we _are_ right, after all. The majority really _is_ that dumb and uneducated.
1. It's not about articles written by actual scientists, and not about articles published in real scientific journals. It's the mainstream media that makes a mockery of science.
2. There is a group that seems to be on a crusade to present science as just hocus-pocus babble, as some new religion where self-serving high-priests spout obfuscated nonsense, and where if you asked 10 different scientists about any topic you'd get 11 different conflicting theories.
The article blames it on humanities students, but personally I think that's pointing the finger at the wrong group. In my personal limited observation -- but bear in mind that it's no scientific sample or anything, and generally it's just "IMHO" -- it's just a case of the dumb and uneducated feeling a _need_ to drag everyone back to their level, and articles that catter to that dumb and uneducated majority.
The article itself skirts with that answer when it says that those articles treat you like you're dumb and couldn't possibly understand any real scientific terminology or statistics. Well, bingo. Because they're written for people who don't, and who _want_ some positive reinforcement that the muck of mediocrity (and sub-mediocrity) is cool- That any kind of academic achievement, humanities included, is (A) just some nonsense techno-bable, (B) irrelevant in the real world, (C) a scam, and usually (D) all the above.
And a lot of publications are basically just prom-queens. They'll print what sells. That means what their intended audience wants to hear. If that audience wants to hear that the nerds they mocked in school still didn't really achieve anything, and nowadays are a bunch of quacks and witch-doctors bickering over whose techno-babble religion is better, they'll publish just that.
(Before I go any further, let me mention though that by "education", I don't only mean strictly school. I also mean, in fact even _especially_ mean studying on your own, above and beyond just sitting and daydreaming in class. So if you've made the effort to learn something and improve yourself, even without an university degree, you're _not_ the category I'm talking about.)
And outside magazines, it gets even worse. Every single example is taken out of context and polished into shining proof that education is irrelevant, and sitting on your ass in front of the TV is just as good. Examples you occasionally see even on slashdot include:
- Start with the fact IQ test results are irrelevant for a lot of jobs, and indeed many would even question if they measure "intelligence", or that something as complex as the many aspects of human intelligence can be squeezed into a single number. But then extrapolate it to mean that _intelligence_ as such as irrelevant to any real jobs, or indeed a _handicap_ in the real world.
(In the words of a Slashdot poster in a recent post, the less intelligent have more other (presumably better) advantages, like empathising better with each other, since they're the majority. And, I quote, "So the next time, someone praised you for being intelligent and well-off....just bear these in mind.....seriously, it may not be a good thing in my not-so-honorable opinion;P")
- Take some speech of someone rich and successful, e.g., Steve Jobs, and cut out of context the part where he mentioned he quit college. But conveniently ommit that he also says that he went to study on his own the things that interested him. So we're talking someone who still worked hard at improving himself, _not_ an example of a couch-potato that made it bigger.
Or even going as far as making up a fake speech of such a successful person where he calls college students losers again and again. (See the fake Larry Ellison speech being occasionally waved around.)
- That some prominent scientific figure, e.g., Einstein seems to be the favourite poster child, didn't do that well in school either, so it's ok for us to sleep in maths and physics classes too. But conveniently mi
Nope, nerds have always existed, but only in the second half of the 20'th century it's become unfashionable to be one.
Probably the apogee of nerddom was ancient Greece, where a full third of the population were full time nerds between wars. (In wars, they also served as soldiers.) I'm pretty sure it didn't put them outside the reproduction pool, because that were all the free males in their society. If those didn't reproduce, you'd be left with only the slaves after one generation.
Between that and, say, the explosion of arts, philosophy and sciences in the 19'th century, we're talking some thousands of years in a row when it was actually cool to be educated and to _think_. It also offered some very clear survival advantages.
The problem was being able to afford it, not being uncool to be one. Hence the explosion in the 19'th century, when it started being affordable for more and more people.
The broken culture in which learning is uncool, and being a skinny airhead or a dumb jock are the only real achievements, is a 20'th century invention. With less and less actual penalties or risks for being uneducated and/or stupid, it became more and more viable to set one's target very very low. Why bother learning for college, when you can survive just as well on a McDonalds or WalMart wage? So unsurprisingly, most people did set their aim low and hit even lower.
And the culture changed to reflect just that majority point of view: aiming any higher isn't worth the effort, and if you do make the effort, there must be something wrong with your head.
That's all. That's the anomaly, and it's not periodic.
No, there is no "Mother Nature" who shuns nerds, other than as a methaphor. If you reproduce faster, evolution favors you, if not not. That's it. There is noone (other than maybe your potential gf/bf) going "ooh, this guy might do eco damage, let's not let him reproduce."
In fact, au contraire, the humans which _did_ reproduce are those who survived the ice age by causing thousands of species, mamoths included, to go extinct. If there is a "Mother Nature", it actually favoured the most ruthless and destructive bastards back then.
But that's the whole point: "back then." Selection factors existed that just don't exist any more. I'm not blaming it on socialism or anything. It's just the very same economic factors that allow us to live better than our ancestors, that also allow people to survive that wouldn't have some 5000 years ago.
Life used to be harsh and challenging, and oportunities to die were aplenty. Being smart enough to avoid them was a very clear advantage. I don't necessarily mean "smart" in the "nerd studying ancient scrolls" way (and definitely not as in strictly the IQ number), but even simply smart enough to figure out a good hiding place when bandits raided your village, or whatever.
Being smart or dumb also greatly affected your chances to move up or down the social pyramid. E.g., if you tried being a trader, knowing some maths and the ability to learn new languages could make all the difference in the world between bankruptcy and one day even buying a nobility title. (There's a reason why it was the phoenicians that invented the alphabet: they needed to transcribe stuff in all languages of the people they did business with.) E.g., being able and ambitious enough to learn the Egyptian or Chinese symbols, almost automatically granted you a much safer and easier life as a scribe.
These moves between social strata were a lot more meaningful back then. E.g., moving from peasant to scribe actually made a difference in your chances of survival. The next time a drought hit, you would no longer be among those that starved to death. E.g., being a _successful_ mechant almost doubled your life expectancy.
Now however, we're at the point where being a heart surgeon, sure, gives you more money and luxuries, but you don't risk starving to death as a janitor either. See his neighbour.
Now I'm not saying it's a bad thing. I very much like having today's luxuries instead of the harsh natural selection that was the norm 1000 years ago. And I certainly don't wish anyone to starve to death or have any other of the misfortunes that were the norm back then. I'm just saying that a change _did_ happen, and a very real selection factor _did_ disappear.
So, yes, nowadays with the guaranteed survival of everyone, and the broken culture it spawned where learning anything or showing any signs of intelligence is uncool, you're right: "So the next time, someone praised you for being intelligent and well-off....just bear these in mind.....seriously, it may not be a good thing in my not-so-honorable opinion;P" But that hasn't always been the case.
The 75 GXP's flagship was simply the worst of the lot, but having had two lower capacity IBM hard drives die on me at the time within months of the purchase... well, it would take a lot of work to convince me that it was something isolated to the 5 platter model.
The popular theory at the time was that it was the drives manufactured in Hungary which had a high failure rate. Again, it wasn't limited to the 5 platter model, nor to the 75 GXP. The 60 GXP line had almost as many complaints.
(I wouldn't know if the "made in Hungary" theory was true. It could be that simply that the drives were badly designed, and that factory just produced most of those models.)
I'm pretty sure that if it was only the 5 platter model, we would have noticed "hmm... they're all the same capacity" as the common factor back then, instead of going on such speculations.
It's not whether I like it or not (as I've said, I don't even play it any more), and it's not like it doesn't have its own real problems (yes, it has its own, completely different, problems.)
But you're making some specific claims as if they were hard facts, on issues you're simply not informed enough to talk about. They're just stuff you assume, imagine or extrapolate from completely unrelated games and genres. (E.g., that since stealing CD keys works in Counter-Strike, it surely must work in WoW too. When it clearly doesn't.)
If you know some _real_ problems, please do post them, because it might help someone decide if they want to try the game or not. I actually like reading about the negative parts of a game too, because there are already thousands of review sites giving me the rose-tinted-glasses version.
But the scoop is that I'd like to hear the _real_ issues, from someone who's actually played the game. Purely imaginary issues are just noise drowning any useful signal. I don't care if it's pro- or anti- that game. It's just noise and no signal as long as you haven't even seen the game you're talking about. That's all.
Actually, I'm not even playing WoW any more, but I find it surrealistic to basically extrapolate "WoW is a MMO, some other MMOs have been ruined by cheats and hacks, therefore WoW is ruined by cheats and hacks too." It's a textbook fallacy. It's as bogus as saying "Need For Soeed is a computer game, some computer games are FPS, therefore NFS is a FPS."
The thing about keyloggers again, you're extrapolating things you know from other games (e.g., FPS games where that CD key is your only identification) to something where that doesn't even work at all. It doesn't matter if you get my WoW key by trojans, keyloggers or I gave it to you, you just can't start another account with that key. Ever. Period.
As I've said, please complain about things you've actually experienced. This talking out the rear end based on assumptions and blanket extrapolations is getting tiresome.
"Unless this person is Bill Kendrick, who is an excellent coder besides his lack of creativity in the art department, the code skills follow the effort in the art."
Dude, no offense, but I hope you do realize that artistic talent and coding talent are _completely_ unrelated skills. Most coders I know, myself included, are awful at drawing anything, and viceversa people who have a love and skill for arts, tend to be less interested in coding or Linux.
Like any skill that takes not only natural talent, but also lots of practice, _very_ few people are interested equally in both and spend equal time pracing both. There are only so many hours in a day, and someone interested in coding will spend those coding, not drawing.
So judging someone's coding skill by how well they draw is just bogus. It's like judging someone's ability to drive by their skill at poker, or viceversa. It's simply unrelated skills.
So, yes, a lot of freeware or OSS games have sucky art, because that's the best that a coder could whip up. Coder nerds are many, artists interested in working for free to stick it to MS or to make a statement about how evil IP is, are very very few. Unless you're willing to pay someone, and as a lone coder making a freeware game you probably don't want to pay for it, yeah, you're stuck with whatever sucky graphics you can whip-up in Gimp.
Well, ok, I'll give WoW that. It does have farming, though you probably realize that you don't really have to compete with that. The only way you'd end up in direct competition with those is if you too planned to sell gold on eBay, but I'm thinking you didn't.
What you accused it of, however is rampant cheating, cracking, and scamming. I can tell you firsthand that it's not the case.
The quip about having access to lots of CD keys, I'm not even sure what to make of it. They have access to the keys they bought, and that's that. Even if you told someone your CD key (but not many people are stupid enough to do that), once you've already used it to open an account, it's not usable again. So it would be of exactly zero use to anyone.
Look, I'm not saying you should play WoW or whatever. If it's not your favourite genre, fair enough, you're better off playing something else.
Noone's forcing you to play it, so you don't have to invent completely bogus problems to talk your way out. Just don't play it if you don't want to, and that's that.
Or to put it otherwise, no offense, but please stick to stuff you've actually played and problems you've actually experienced when you want to complain about something. You're so far off the mark, that it's like reading someone complaining about sniper-camping in Leisuresuit Larry, or about the selection of racing cars in Quake 3.
Well, honestly, try Planetside for the perfect counter-example to that.
E.g., in Planetside, there is no money, hence no farming or stealing or whatever. (You're a soldier, you get your equipment for free from your base. But because you're a soldier, you can only get equipment you're certified for. Your "assets" are your certifications, which noone can steal from you, farm, or sell on ebay.)
Now I'm not saying it's necessarily your genre or that you should join PS. I'm just saying that it's an example that not all games have to be clones of the exact same loot-farming model. Yes, _most_ MMOs are essentially very unoriginal, and repeat the exact same mistakes and problems, I won't disaggree with you there. But just saying that it's possible to come up with something different, and at least one game did just that.
As for WoW... methinks you're massively exaggerating about cheating or cracking. I don't think there's been one single cheat so far that allowed one to edit, dupe or whatever items. (Yes, one fake duping cheat with blatantly photoshopped "screenshots" is being waved around, except it's just that: a photoshopped fake that never worked.) Scamming or stealing also just don't work in any form or shape in WoW, and there is no bloody way to be TK-ed either. You'd have to explicitly accept a duel to get attacked by someone on the same side.
Now Diablo, that had a ton of cheats, which I think is what gave you those ideas about Blizzard. But WoW is a very different beast.
Of course, it's still a click-fest treadmill, fair enough. But that's about it. That's the only thing that matches from your rant about it.
"Right to free speech only has to do with the government?"
Here's the actual text of the first amendment
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."
So there you go. It mentions "Congress" and making laws very very clearly. So unless someone gets a law through Congress to prevent you from talking, they are _not_ violating it.
So just as a quick list that I wish more of your kind finally got through their skulls, in no particular order:
- people being offended by your retarded insults and/or ignoring you, are _not_ violating your first amendment rights (unless they're members of the Congress and pass a law for it)
- getting moderated/banned/deleted/etc on a board is _not_ violating your freedom of speech
- getting banned from a game, board, IRC channel or whatever, is _not_ a first amendment violation.
- freedom of press applies to those who own the press (including there newer media, such as forums, boards, IRC, in-game communication, etc.)
- the _only_ one you're guaranteed a right to petition for redress is the government. No more. It doesn't give you the same rights in regard to forum moderators, IRC ops, game support people, other players, etc.
As I've said: learn your rights well, because otherwise you'll lose them, and not even know you had them to start with.
Heh. You really want to prove beyond all doubt that you're a retard, right? No, you go read those court cases. Libel and slander are not covered by your "right to free speech".
Show me _one_ case, where private speech between two private parties involved that amendment. _One_.
No, you learn to read. Because you show the typical mark of the ignorant redneck: being raised on the idea that "freedom of speech" means the right to troll and throw fits in public, and that it applies to everything _except_ the government.
Learn your constitution, dude, because that's how you'll lose those precious rights: by not even knowing what they are, and from whom were you supposed to defend them from.
As for the rest of the insults, heh. Maybe I'd mind them if they didn't come from someone like you. As it is, they're just somewhat funny.
Especially the thrashing and foaming at the mouth about "political corectness." Riight. So yet another retard who's too dysfunctional to function in society (to the point of not even being able to deal with people exchanging email addresses around him), rants and raves against political corectness. Not even original. Dude, there is no political correctness or incorectness involved. You're just yet another broken dysfunctional loser, that's all.
Let me get this straight. Those players' great crime against humanity, and reason enough for you to call them "stupid broads" and "idiots" and claim that they "drove all the good players away" is that:
- they tried to keep in touch with you. Even when they weren't on your team!
- people were even exchanging email addresses!
Well, gee. Dude, let me take back what I've said before. I owe Statesman an apology. It's not COH, it _is_ you, after all. You're just a sad little idiot whiner. The kind that needs to blame others for his own faults and problems, and put others down to mask his own insecurities.
No, I'm not saying you should be social or extroverted. But if you feel insulted and need to lash back just because people were social around you in a MMO, you have problems. Go see a shrink, for your own good. Or get a life. Put down the crack pipe, and join a 12 step program. Whatever gets you back in touch with reality.
As for the whole rant about your "right to free speech" to call people "stupid broads", get a clue, little ignorant. Read that ammendment and see what it actually says. Because it cracks me up to see ignorant idiots like you waving their "right to free speech" around without even knowing what it says.
Here's a clue: like the rest of the constitution it's about your relationship to the government. That's all. It doesn't say anyone should listen to your retarded 13 year old tantrums on private property. And NCSoft's servers or bulletin boards _are_ private property. Unless you're playing on a government-owned server or posting on a government-owned board, you don't have _any_ of those rights.
It's not "political correct bs", it's just that you're a little whiny ignorant low-life. You disgust me profoundly.
"However, the CONTROLS for the DS are vastly superiour. How can you compare an analog stick with a complete touchscreen?"
I can compare them quite easily, and actually like the gamepad controls more.
E.g., because I don't need to switch focus all the time between the main screen and a gimmick touch-screen to play a game, I can just look at and concentrate on the main screen. I find it helps with suspension of disbelief a _lot_.
E.g., I also find holding a gamepad to be more comfortable than Nintendo's design.
E.g., best of all: I don't have to put up with games that were never designed for a stylus to start with, but added some retarded "draw a symbol now quick" gimmick, just for gimmick's sake. (And presumably also because some marketroid at Nintendo told them to.)
The fact is, the games I play don't need a stylus (nor a mouse.) Car racing games, for example, work with a thumbstick far better than with a second touch-screen gimmick. Jump-and-run games (a la Castlevania), ditto, just need directions and a jump button. (Adding some "quick, switch your eyes to the other screen and draw some retarded symbol" gimmick is just that: a gimmick I could easily do without. Happily too.)
Then again, I don't play FPS much, and definitely not on a portable. Dunno, maybe DS's design is any good for those. I wouldn't know or care. For everything else, no thanks, I'll take a normal gamepad instead.
The size of the market and number of consoles sold has already been covered, but here's another free clue for you: not only does the EU produce more games than the USA, but the UK alone produces more games. So the drop in the bucket in game creation is the USA. _You_ are the folks which aren't too creative in the gaming arena.
Want to know some games that helped sell the USA-made XBox? KOTOR and Jade Empire, made by Bioware, a company from Canada. Fable, made by Lionhead, a company from the UK.
You know, here's some friendly advice: you're not even doing the USA any favour by displaying such massive ignorance. I'm sure most Americans are actually intelligent people. The problem is that what we from the rest of the world see is the "patriotic" ignorant rednecks, spouting such idiocies online.
I don't know what it is about the USA and retards spewing their mouth all over the Internet. As I've said, I assume there must be just as many percent retards as everywhere else. The difference that the USA has _loud_ retards. They just _have_ to post something online that isn't just offensive to the rest of the world, but is utterly stupid and uninformed too.
So here's the friendly advice: if you're that patriotic and proud of your country, stop making it look bad online. Read some actual information before spewing such idiocies on an open forum.
Some people are looking for MMOs, some people aren't. A MMORPG isn't a substitute for a SP RPG, any more than a FPS is a substitute for an adventure game, or than crossword puzzles are a substitute for watching football. Nor viceversa. They're just different genre.
So your experience with WoW is probably typical for someone who's into MMORPGs, but not typical at all for someone who's not interested in that genre.
Will you switch games? Chances are eventually you will. Everything gets old after a while.
Yes, you have a "time investment" in WoW, you have an "investment" in your guild and all, and that's actually what the publishers are banking on. That's what keeps people around long after the game itself has become more boring than watching paint dry and less fun than root canal. The illusion that it's some "investment" or "property" they just have to hang on to, and that they can't just throw away. But eventually even that's not enough any more.
Or at least that's most people do. Most plans by MMORPG makers are made around people staying an average of 6 months in a game. Some stay longer, some leave after the "free" month, but half a year is sorta where the tip of the Gauss curve is.
At any rate, it still doesn't mean much to us who aren't into that genre to start with. It's just another genre, not a replacement for everything else. FPS didn't replace (SP) RPGs, and RTS didn't replace simulations. The same happens with MMOs.
First of all, in any other game, I'd say "it's not them, it's you". If you think that a MMO means everyone being there just to shut up and get you xp, and god forbid that they ever dare take a 10 seconds break to talk or exchange email addresses instead of grinding to get you T3H L33T XP... it's you who are in the wrong genre, not them.
If it were any other game, I'd say even nastier things, because in that message you embody everything I despise in MMO player. But it's COH.
And here's the scoop: it's not them, it's (probably) not you, it's COH that turns people into misanthropic sociopaths. I know it turned even me from socializer to avoiding other players. No, let me rephrase that: turned me to hate the very idea of even being in the same square mile as another player.
COH has a thoroughly screwed up balance, and a thoroughly screwed up way of matching instance content to team size. For a few builds (e.g., post-level-30 fire tanks) the only reason to take anyone in the group is to make the game spawn more enemies, while for a lot of others simply being in a group gets you killed. (E.g., try being in an 8 person group as a SR scrapper. No, really. The enemy level goes up and they start hitting through your defenses all the time.)
A lot of other choices are there which again, might benefit one person in the group, but get everyone else wiped out repeatedly. E.g., the difficulty slider. A high level fire tank's auras and burn patches always hit and he has no dodge-based defenses, so higher level enemies just mean more xp. But for others it means a swift death. You can get one-shot by those enemies. (E.g., SR scrappers again or woe to the Blaster that caught any aggro.)
Etc.
I won't go here through the whole mile-long list, but there are a _lot_ of things in COH that seem to be designed just to create conflicts inside a group, or to make it actually harder to finish a mission as a group for some builds. Even if not as such, it actually needs everyone to work _perfectly_ together, have _exactly_ the right build for that group, and make no mistakes ever. Every single mistake in a large group is thrown back in your face and could mean a group wipe. (Which again, tends to create "you all suck, I could have done this alone faster and safer" kind of conflicts.)
For me it had gotten to the point where soloing was what got me good XP, while grouping just got me killed and into XP debt. I started actually avoiding other players because of that.
Try some other game sometimes, e.g., WoW. It might help you get over the misanthropic fit. It sure helped me.
It might help you understand that that pent up frustration isn't really because the COH players are any worse, but it's purely a result of COH's own design faults. The exact same players work _much_ better as a group in WoW (or EQ2 or whatever) than in COH. Unlike COH, I've never regretted taking an extra group member in WoW, or joining a random pickup group. An extra group member in WoW may at most be not much help, but, unlike COH, the game will never turn him/her into a pure liability or "filler".
Also, WoW doesn't make you choose between a pure group build, or a purely solo build, or something piss-poor at both. (Cue the never-ending "healer vs offender" and "tankers without taunt" flame-wars on COH's boards.) That's just another source of conflict just doesn't exist.
Or take kill-stealing, since whining about it was constant theme in COH. In WoW it just isn't a problem, once you realize that other players just can't cost you any xp or loot there. If you've landed a first blow on an NPC, there's _nothing_ another player can cost you there. If they come and kill the NPC for you, eh, you still got the kill, the xp and the loot.
Again, I'm not claiming that people in WoW are smarter or anything. It's just that while Cryptic built a whole bunch of causes for conflict between players in their game, Blizzard's design choices help avoid it.
The "only graphics matter" mentality was mostly pushed by marketting, than ever being a reality among gamers.
Quick, what's the most played online FPS? Well, according to GameSpy, it's _still_ CounterStrike. It half a decade old, and still more people play it than several of the newer games combined. CS, to borrow a MacHall expression, pretty much looked like classic ass at release. Yet it quickly got 1000 times more players than SOF or SOF2 with their photo-realistic gore. It made a _lot_ of people give up on their newer and more photo-realistic games, and go out and buy HL just to play CS.
Quick, which MMO game has more subscribers?
A) EverQuest 2, with its photo-realistic graphics, several shaders used on every pixel, and insane polygon counts, or
B) WoW, whose graphics are frankly cartoonish (not ugly, but cartoonish), lower polycount, and I don't think it even uses shaders for anything but water?
Well, the answer is right in the summary. WoW currently has 10 times more subscribers than EQ2 at its peak. For all its eye candy, many EQ2 players nowadays describe it as "like playing Morrowind, except you meet another player now and then." That's how low the population got.
So no, gamers never really had graphics as the only criterion. Lower graphics quality games with good gameplay routinely outsell crap whose only merit are the graphics.
That only graphics and screenshots matter, was just a publisher's dream that the marketroids tried to push upon us. They _wanted_ us to care only about graphics and shiny weapon models, because that's the _cheap_ part. Spending a year testing and tweaking the gameplay and balance to be just right is much more expensive than photographing a brick wall in higher resolution.
And more importantly graphics were the _guaranteed_ part. Businessmen hate risk. You can just say "ok, I want 1024x1024 textures this time", and get exactly that. Gameplay is still not completely understood yet even by the top league designers. And the rest are even worse. They seem to love repeating mistakes that were already explained all over the place by Will Wright, Brian Reynolds, and other good designers. Yet every year someone comes and repeats one of them, thinking he's the epitome of originality.
So the publishers _really_ wanted us to turn into mindless zombies that buy only for screenshots and hype. But if you look at what actually sold and what didn't, hype and screenshots only did so much.
Well, I'm listening to pretty aggressive heavy metal music. I like the kind where it actually has a melody and clear lyrics, rather than just a growl karaoke, though. I'm talking about stuff like Slayer's Antichrist or Manowar's Fight Until We Die.
(No, I'm not a psycho. I'm a mild-mannered introvert IRL, and have an approach to life that can be best described as "lawful good". I also prefer a calm, if possible story-driven game, and spent more time in The Sims or Creatures 3 than in all FPSes combined. I do like fast aggressive music, though.)
It can energize and pump me up, yeah. I certainly type code faster when I listen to that stuff. But that's not really _why_ I like it.
It certainly doesn't soothe or relax me. (When I want to _relax_, I turn it off.) It's not expressing myself, since as I've said, I'm more like stereotypical paladin material than the homicidal psycho those lyrics would express. I never sing along, if anything because it would probably scare the shit out of the neighbours or co-workers if they heard me singing cheerfully about gutting someone and feeding their body to wolves;) It's also not quite the kind you can dance to. I suppose I could mosh, but that eventually gives me a headache, so I never was much into it. Etc.
True, the made up game idea sounds like a great idea. There's no way that a bot would actually understand the rules and play by them. I like that idea.
I've already done a whole disertation about it in another answer, so I won't repeat it here. But let's just say: please go and read that question again.
It's not "what music do you like?", it's the monumental stupidity of "why do you like music?" Listing the bands you like would _not_ answer that question. (In fact, if anyone answered that one with the list of their favourite bands, _then_ I'd suspect they might be a bot that just triggered on the word "music" and spewed the completely wong answer.)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm choosing to take only the subset that believes in natural selection, because that is the only scientific theory. Mixing God in, either as having created the whole thing from day 0, or having been the one who made a dinosaur evolve into birds, is just the same kind of using divine intervention instead of natural selection.
Or to put it otherwise, when you have two groups whose very distinct views are:
1. That God made an ape evolve into Adam, and
2. That natural selection and very natural factors forced that ape to evolve fast or die,
it seems to me that they're _very_ different hypotheses. Lumping them together into the same "Evolved over time: 48%" is skimming over a major distinction between the two.
It's basically like saying that there's no difference between (A) knowing how the heat pump in your air conditioner works, and (B) thinking that magical demons push the hot molecules in and the cold ones in. (As in the recent Mac Hall comic.) Hey, both say that it's an AC and it's blowing cold air in, so both are really variants of the same theory, right? It's just a way to reconcile thermodynamics with one's belief in magic and demons, right? Well, no. One is science, the other isn't a "reconciliation", it's just non-science.
So I'll stand by what I've said: only 26% believe the real science version.
And frankly, the ones who worry me the most aren't the 42% which can just stick to the religious version. Fair enough. The ones who worry me the most are precisely those who think they can mix-and-match scientific-sounding babble and religion and that the result is still science, only a little bit "reconciled". That tells me that they don't even understand what science means.
And that there's so many of _those_, now that scares me a lot more than the 42% "god made everything in 7 days" gang.
That's a very insightful point, but I don't think the USA has a monopoly on stupidity or anything. It's just that this time we have data from the USA.
You may notice for example that TFA is from "www.guardian.co.uk". There's a reason for that last part of the domain name. And if you browse through their past list of articles in the "Bad Science" category, you'll notice that most of the bad science examples they pick on are from UK tabloids, not USA ones.
And I can tell you first hand that here, that meaning in Germany, there are plenty of dumb and uneducated people too.
And you know how previously I've mentioned having some first-hand experience with the Eastern Block, before the fall of the Iron Curtain? Much as I've commended their education system as IMHO superior to the feel-good education of the western world, the flip side is that they too had their own dumb people. People who argued that the downfall of their communist system was wasting money on having engineers and economists, instead of having everyone get a hammer or a sickle and do some real work already.
So, yes, there will be a lot of variation in what the percentages are among countries, and whether the anti-science gang will be good ol' bible-thumping christians or rally around some other bogus stuff. Yes, maybe the dumb uneducated people in other countries don't rally around ID like in the USA, but they _will_ rally around some other comfortable pseudo-science and/or excuse to mock and ridicule the real science.
Of course, this is all just IMHO. I don't have hard numbers or percentages to base it on.
I must confess that I had never actually looked at his actual grades. I had heard the "well, Einstein didn't do well in school either" excuse so often, that I just took it for granted. And, alas, it would seem I've just helped perpetuate the myth.
Thanks for correcting me. I'd mod you Informative, but I can't mod answers to my own posts.
Nope, you just use a fallacy without even understanding what it means. To quote from the text on Wikipedia you linked to:
"this is a fallacy if the predicate ("putting sugar on porridge") is not actually contradictory for the accepted definition of the subject ("Scotsman"), or if the definition of the subject is silently adjusted after the fact to make the rebuttal work.
Some elements or actions are exclusively contradictory to the subject, and therefore aren't fallacies. The statement "No true vegetarian would eat a beef steak" is not fallacious because it follows from the accepted definition of "vegetarian""
Same here, lemming. "Science" and "scientist" actually do mean observing a certain mindset and methodology. Science has no absolute truth, and it has nothing that is above being a "theory". Nothing ever in science is beyond being questioned and improved, no matter how old and established it may be.
E.g., even Newton's mechanics aren't absolute, but just approximations that are good enough in a given range. If you move outside that range where the error is small enough, you need something else. E.g., relativist mechanics for high speed, and quantum mechanics for extremely low mass and/or distances.
So yes, science _is_ just as mutually-exclusive to absolute truths, as being a vegetarian is to eatin meat. So, no, that fallacy doesn't apply here.
The only thing I'd challenge is just his use of "GOOD scientists". There is no such thing as "GOOD scientists" and "BAD scientists". You're either a scientist or you aren't. The ones who have absolute unchalengeable truths and 100% certainties aren't "BAD scientists", they're just not scientists at all. They love dressing their dogma in pseudo-science babble and masquerading as "scientists" too, but they just aren't.
"It doesn't matter how overwhelmingly anybody manages to demonstrate that science, as a profession and social institution, has some significant shortcomings (many of which we could improve); you will insist on judging it in terms of your fantasy of what a "good scientist" should be, and not in terms of what scientists are in real life."
I haven't seen any overwhelming demonstration so far, other than some bullshit rants from people that don't even understand what science is. I see a bunch of quacks and charlatans trying to redefine science to mean some bullshit fantasy that they're comfortable fighting against.
And I've yet to see any scientists actually rejecting a logical way to improve. The ones I see rejected are bullshit "improvements" aimed at destroying and perverting it into yet another obedient servant to someone's pet dogma or into marketting for someone's snake-oil.
Invariably it's based on such bullshit, massive ignorance, and fallacies as:
- "It's just a theory!" Classic example of a Verbal Fallacy: it plays on the two different meanings of the word "theory".
- "But science doesn't have the definitive answers to everything!" Yes, of course, by the very definition of science. But that doesn't mean that any bullshit based on _no_ verifiable evidence or logic is automatically equal.
- "But science doesn't describe the real universe, it describes an idealized one." No, actually it does study and describe the real one. What all those idealizations are about is just knowing your intended margin of error, and what influences are too small to get you outside that or even not an influence at all. (E.g., if you're calculating how many hours a train needs between Washington DC and LA at 200 mph, you can safely ignore the train's colour.) But then we'll do an actual experiment and see if that idealization describes reality well enough. If not, it's time to start ignoring less factors or come up with a different theory.
- "But science is just another religion! It's all about believing all those theories and laws instead!" Nope, it's all about reproductible, verifiable evidence to those. Noone asks you to unconditionably believe that the theory of gravit
"Evolution is something the church gave up on decades ago, and the rest of the world knows is fact- but the American press feels "Intelligent Design" deserves presentation on equal grounds and parrots the President when he says it deserves "consideration"."
Well, actually here's a link to a poll that contradicts the "the rest of the world knows is fact" assertion:
Natural selection fighting to survive in the US
It's scary, really. Basically only 26% of those polled actually believed Darwin. (Ranging from 27% among the whites to as low as 14% among the blacks.)
To make ignorance even scarier, even in this group, 15% of them said that life existed from day 0 and never changed, and 10% said evolution was guided by some supreme being. Makes me wonder if they even have a clue wtf they're talking about, if they think "evolution" means life staying unchanged.
So, anyway, now let's subtract those 25% (10% + 15%, since both are really are creationists or ID fans in disguise) from that 26% group, and you're left with 26 * 0.75 = 19.5% who actually do believe in the real evolution theory. That's it. Less than 1 person in 5.
So with all due respect, I'd challenge that assertion that "everyone else knows evolution is a fact". It may be so for you and me and our equally nerdy, educated friends, but if we're talking the bulk of the population, less than 1 in 5 are anywhere _near_ sharing that point of view.
Also 64% supported teaching Intelligent Design in schools.
So basically when the press is giving ID equal opportunity, rest assured that it's not just for Dubya's sake. It's really cattering to those 80.5% who actually do believe in creationism or ID, or those 64% who are obviously ignorant enough to not be able to tell the difference between science and pseudo-science babble.
Seriously, whenever I start thinking that maybe we nerds are just elitist with our snotty attitude about the ignorant, uneducated masses... such a study comes along and proves it in hard numbers and percentages that we _are_ right, after all. The majority really _is_ that dumb and uneducated.
As TFA pointed out:
;P")
1. It's not about articles written by actual scientists, and not about articles published in real scientific journals. It's the mainstream media that makes a mockery of science.
2. There is a group that seems to be on a crusade to present science as just hocus-pocus babble, as some new religion where self-serving high-priests spout obfuscated nonsense, and where if you asked 10 different scientists about any topic you'd get 11 different conflicting theories.
The article blames it on humanities students, but personally I think that's pointing the finger at the wrong group. In my personal limited observation -- but bear in mind that it's no scientific sample or anything, and generally it's just "IMHO" -- it's just a case of the dumb and uneducated feeling a _need_ to drag everyone back to their level, and articles that catter to that dumb and uneducated majority.
The article itself skirts with that answer when it says that those articles treat you like you're dumb and couldn't possibly understand any real scientific terminology or statistics. Well, bingo. Because they're written for people who don't, and who _want_ some positive reinforcement that the muck of mediocrity (and sub-mediocrity) is cool- That any kind of academic achievement, humanities included, is (A) just some nonsense techno-bable, (B) irrelevant in the real world, (C) a scam, and usually (D) all the above.
And a lot of publications are basically just prom-queens. They'll print what sells. That means what their intended audience wants to hear. If that audience wants to hear that the nerds they mocked in school still didn't really achieve anything, and nowadays are a bunch of quacks and witch-doctors bickering over whose techno-babble religion is better, they'll publish just that.
(Before I go any further, let me mention though that by "education", I don't only mean strictly school. I also mean, in fact even _especially_ mean studying on your own, above and beyond just sitting and daydreaming in class. So if you've made the effort to learn something and improve yourself, even without an university degree, you're _not_ the category I'm talking about.)
And outside magazines, it gets even worse. Every single example is taken out of context and polished into shining proof that education is irrelevant, and sitting on your ass in front of the TV is just as good. Examples you occasionally see even on slashdot include:
- Start with the fact IQ test results are irrelevant for a lot of jobs, and indeed many would even question if they measure "intelligence", or that something as complex as the many aspects of human intelligence can be squeezed into a single number. But then extrapolate it to mean that _intelligence_ as such as irrelevant to any real jobs, or indeed a _handicap_ in the real world.
(In the words of a Slashdot poster in a recent post, the less intelligent have more other (presumably better) advantages, like empathising better with each other, since they're the majority. And, I quote, "So the next time, someone praised you for being intelligent and well-off....just bear these in mind.....seriously, it may not be a good thing in my not-so-honorable opinion
- Take some speech of someone rich and successful, e.g., Steve Jobs, and cut out of context the part where he mentioned he quit college. But conveniently ommit that he also says that he went to study on his own the things that interested him. So we're talking someone who still worked hard at improving himself, _not_ an example of a couch-potato that made it bigger.
Or even going as far as making up a fake speech of such a successful person where he calls college students losers again and again. (See the fake Larry Ellison speech being occasionally waved around.)
- That some prominent scientific figure, e.g., Einstein seems to be the favourite poster child, didn't do that well in school either, so it's ok for us to sleep in maths and physics classes too. But conveniently mi
Nope, nerds have always existed, but only in the second half of the 20'th century it's become unfashionable to be one.
Probably the apogee of nerddom was ancient Greece, where a full third of the population were full time nerds between wars. (In wars, they also served as soldiers.) I'm pretty sure it didn't put them outside the reproduction pool, because that were all the free males in their society. If those didn't reproduce, you'd be left with only the slaves after one generation.
Between that and, say, the explosion of arts, philosophy and sciences in the 19'th century, we're talking some thousands of years in a row when it was actually cool to be educated and to _think_. It also offered some very clear survival advantages.
The problem was being able to afford it, not being uncool to be one. Hence the explosion in the 19'th century, when it started being affordable for more and more people.
The broken culture in which learning is uncool, and being a skinny airhead or a dumb jock are the only real achievements, is a 20'th century invention. With less and less actual penalties or risks for being uneducated and/or stupid, it became more and more viable to set one's target very very low. Why bother learning for college, when you can survive just as well on a McDonalds or WalMart wage? So unsurprisingly, most people did set their aim low and hit even lower.
And the culture changed to reflect just that majority point of view: aiming any higher isn't worth the effort, and if you do make the effort, there must be something wrong with your head.
That's all. That's the anomaly, and it's not periodic.
No, there is no "Mother Nature" who shuns nerds, other than as a methaphor. If you reproduce faster, evolution favors you, if not not. That's it. There is noone (other than maybe your potential gf/bf) going "ooh, this guy might do eco damage, let's not let him reproduce."
;P" But that hasn't always been the case.
In fact, au contraire, the humans which _did_ reproduce are those who survived the ice age by causing thousands of species, mamoths included, to go extinct. If there is a "Mother Nature", it actually favoured the most ruthless and destructive bastards back then.
But that's the whole point: "back then." Selection factors existed that just don't exist any more. I'm not blaming it on socialism or anything. It's just the very same economic factors that allow us to live better than our ancestors, that also allow people to survive that wouldn't have some 5000 years ago.
Life used to be harsh and challenging, and oportunities to die were aplenty. Being smart enough to avoid them was a very clear advantage. I don't necessarily mean "smart" in the "nerd studying ancient scrolls" way (and definitely not as in strictly the IQ number), but even simply smart enough to figure out a good hiding place when bandits raided your village, or whatever.
Being smart or dumb also greatly affected your chances to move up or down the social pyramid. E.g., if you tried being a trader, knowing some maths and the ability to learn new languages could make all the difference in the world between bankruptcy and one day even buying a nobility title. (There's a reason why it was the phoenicians that invented the alphabet: they needed to transcribe stuff in all languages of the people they did business with.) E.g., being able and ambitious enough to learn the Egyptian or Chinese symbols, almost automatically granted you a much safer and easier life as a scribe.
These moves between social strata were a lot more meaningful back then. E.g., moving from peasant to scribe actually made a difference in your chances of survival. The next time a drought hit, you would no longer be among those that starved to death. E.g., being a _successful_ mechant almost doubled your life expectancy.
Now however, we're at the point where being a heart surgeon, sure, gives you more money and luxuries, but you don't risk starving to death as a janitor either. See his neighbour.
Now I'm not saying it's a bad thing. I very much like having today's luxuries instead of the harsh natural selection that was the norm 1000 years ago. And I certainly don't wish anyone to starve to death or have any other of the misfortunes that were the norm back then. I'm just saying that a change _did_ happen, and a very real selection factor _did_ disappear.
So, yes, nowadays with the guaranteed survival of everyone, and the broken culture it spawned where learning anything or showing any signs of intelligence is uncool, you're right: "So the next time, someone praised you for being intelligent and well-off....just bear these in mind.....seriously, it may not be a good thing in my not-so-honorable opinion
The 75 GXP's flagship was simply the worst of the lot, but having had two lower capacity IBM hard drives die on me at the time within months of the purchase... well, it would take a lot of work to convince me that it was something isolated to the 5 platter model.
The popular theory at the time was that it was the drives manufactured in Hungary which had a high failure rate. Again, it wasn't limited to the 5 platter model, nor to the 75 GXP. The 60 GXP line had almost as many complaints.
(I wouldn't know if the "made in Hungary" theory was true. It could be that simply that the drives were badly designed, and that factory just produced most of those models.)
I'm pretty sure that if it was only the 5 platter model, we would have noticed "hmm... they're all the same capacity" as the common factor back then, instead of going on such speculations.
It's not whether I like it or not (as I've said, I don't even play it any more), and it's not like it doesn't have its own real problems (yes, it has its own, completely different, problems.)
But you're making some specific claims as if they were hard facts, on issues you're simply not informed enough to talk about. They're just stuff you assume, imagine or extrapolate from completely unrelated games and genres. (E.g., that since stealing CD keys works in Counter-Strike, it surely must work in WoW too. When it clearly doesn't.)
If you know some _real_ problems, please do post them, because it might help someone decide if they want to try the game or not. I actually like reading about the negative parts of a game too, because there are already thousands of review sites giving me the rose-tinted-glasses version.
But the scoop is that I'd like to hear the _real_ issues, from someone who's actually played the game. Purely imaginary issues are just noise drowning any useful signal. I don't care if it's pro- or anti- that game. It's just noise and no signal as long as you haven't even seen the game you're talking about. That's all.
Actually, I'm not even playing WoW any more, but I find it surrealistic to basically extrapolate "WoW is a MMO, some other MMOs have been ruined by cheats and hacks, therefore WoW is ruined by cheats and hacks too." It's a textbook fallacy. It's as bogus as saying "Need For Soeed is a computer game, some computer games are FPS, therefore NFS is a FPS."
The thing about keyloggers again, you're extrapolating things you know from other games (e.g., FPS games where that CD key is your only identification) to something where that doesn't even work at all. It doesn't matter if you get my WoW key by trojans, keyloggers or I gave it to you, you just can't start another account with that key. Ever. Period.
As I've said, please complain about things you've actually experienced. This talking out the rear end based on assumptions and blanket extrapolations is getting tiresome.
"Unless this person is Bill Kendrick, who is an excellent coder besides his lack of creativity in the art department, the code skills follow the effort in the art."
Dude, no offense, but I hope you do realize that artistic talent and coding talent are _completely_ unrelated skills. Most coders I know, myself included, are awful at drawing anything, and viceversa people who have a love and skill for arts, tend to be less interested in coding or Linux.
Like any skill that takes not only natural talent, but also lots of practice, _very_ few people are interested equally in both and spend equal time pracing both. There are only so many hours in a day, and someone interested in coding will spend those coding, not drawing.
So judging someone's coding skill by how well they draw is just bogus. It's like judging someone's ability to drive by their skill at poker, or viceversa. It's simply unrelated skills.
So, yes, a lot of freeware or OSS games have sucky art, because that's the best that a coder could whip up. Coder nerds are many, artists interested in working for free to stick it to MS or to make a statement about how evil IP is, are very very few. Unless you're willing to pay someone, and as a lone coder making a freeware game you probably don't want to pay for it, yeah, you're stuck with whatever sucky graphics you can whip-up in Gimp.
Well, ok, I'll give WoW that. It does have farming, though you probably realize that you don't really have to compete with that. The only way you'd end up in direct competition with those is if you too planned to sell gold on eBay, but I'm thinking you didn't.
What you accused it of, however is rampant cheating, cracking, and scamming. I can tell you firsthand that it's not the case.
The quip about having access to lots of CD keys, I'm not even sure what to make of it. They have access to the keys they bought, and that's that. Even if you told someone your CD key (but not many people are stupid enough to do that), once you've already used it to open an account, it's not usable again. So it would be of exactly zero use to anyone.
Look, I'm not saying you should play WoW or whatever. If it's not your favourite genre, fair enough, you're better off playing something else.
Noone's forcing you to play it, so you don't have to invent completely bogus problems to talk your way out. Just don't play it if you don't want to, and that's that.
Or to put it otherwise, no offense, but please stick to stuff you've actually played and problems you've actually experienced when you want to complain about something. You're so far off the mark, that it's like reading someone complaining about sniper-camping in Leisuresuit Larry, or about the selection of racing cars in Quake 3.
Well, honestly, try Planetside for the perfect counter-example to that.
E.g., in Planetside, there is no money, hence no farming or stealing or whatever. (You're a soldier, you get your equipment for free from your base. But because you're a soldier, you can only get equipment you're certified for. Your "assets" are your certifications, which noone can steal from you, farm, or sell on ebay.)
Now I'm not saying it's necessarily your genre or that you should join PS. I'm just saying that it's an example that not all games have to be clones of the exact same loot-farming model. Yes, _most_ MMOs are essentially very unoriginal, and repeat the exact same mistakes and problems, I won't disaggree with you there. But just saying that it's possible to come up with something different, and at least one game did just that.
As for WoW... methinks you're massively exaggerating about cheating or cracking. I don't think there's been one single cheat so far that allowed one to edit, dupe or whatever items. (Yes, one fake duping cheat with blatantly photoshopped "screenshots" is being waved around, except it's just that: a photoshopped fake that never worked.) Scamming or stealing also just don't work in any form or shape in WoW, and there is no bloody way to be TK-ed either. You'd have to explicitly accept a duel to get attacked by someone on the same side.
Now Diablo, that had a ton of cheats, which I think is what gave you those ideas about Blizzard. But WoW is a very different beast.
Of course, it's still a click-fest treadmill, fair enough. But that's about it. That's the only thing that matches from your rant about it.
"Right to free speech only has to do with the government?"
Here's the actual text of the first amendment
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."
So there you go. It mentions "Congress" and making laws very very clearly. So unless someone gets a law through Congress to prevent you from talking, they are _not_ violating it.
So just as a quick list that I wish more of your kind finally got through their skulls, in no particular order:
- people being offended by your retarded insults and/or ignoring you, are _not_ violating your first amendment rights (unless they're members of the Congress and pass a law for it)
- getting moderated/banned/deleted/etc on a board is _not_ violating your freedom of speech
- getting banned from a game, board, IRC channel or whatever, is _not_ a first amendment violation.
- freedom of press applies to those who own the press (including there newer media, such as forums, boards, IRC, in-game communication, etc.)
- the _only_ one you're guaranteed a right to petition for redress is the government. No more. It doesn't give you the same rights in regard to forum moderators, IRC ops, game support people, other players, etc.
As I've said: learn your rights well, because otherwise you'll lose them, and not even know you had them to start with.
Heh. You really want to prove beyond all doubt that you're a retard, right? No, you go read those court cases. Libel and slander are not covered by your "right to free speech".
Show me _one_ case, where private speech between two private parties involved that amendment. _One_.
No, you learn to read. Because you show the typical mark of the ignorant redneck: being raised on the idea that "freedom of speech" means the right to troll and throw fits in public, and that it applies to everything _except_ the government.
Learn your constitution, dude, because that's how you'll lose those precious rights: by not even knowing what they are, and from whom were you supposed to defend them from.
As for the rest of the insults, heh. Maybe I'd mind them if they didn't come from someone like you. As it is, they're just somewhat funny.
Especially the thrashing and foaming at the mouth about "political corectness." Riight. So yet another retard who's too dysfunctional to function in society (to the point of not even being able to deal with people exchanging email addresses around him), rants and raves against political corectness. Not even original. Dude, there is no political correctness or incorectness involved. You're just yet another broken dysfunctional loser, that's all.
Let me get this straight. Those players' great crime against humanity, and reason enough for you to call them "stupid broads" and "idiots" and claim that they "drove all the good players away" is that:
- they tried to keep in touch with you. Even when they weren't on your team!
- people were even exchanging email addresses!
Well, gee. Dude, let me take back what I've said before. I owe Statesman an apology. It's not COH, it _is_ you, after all. You're just a sad little idiot whiner. The kind that needs to blame others for his own faults and problems, and put others down to mask his own insecurities.
No, I'm not saying you should be social or extroverted. But if you feel insulted and need to lash back just because people were social around you in a MMO, you have problems. Go see a shrink, for your own good. Or get a life. Put down the crack pipe, and join a 12 step program. Whatever gets you back in touch with reality.
As for the whole rant about your "right to free speech" to call people "stupid broads", get a clue, little ignorant. Read that ammendment and see what it actually says. Because it cracks me up to see ignorant idiots like you waving their "right to free speech" around without even knowing what it says.
Here's a clue: like the rest of the constitution it's about your relationship to the government. That's all. It doesn't say anyone should listen to your retarded 13 year old tantrums on private property. And NCSoft's servers or bulletin boards _are_ private property. Unless you're playing on a government-owned server or posting on a government-owned board, you don't have _any_ of those rights.
It's not "political correct bs", it's just that you're a little whiny ignorant low-life. You disgust me profoundly.
"However, the CONTROLS for the DS are vastly superiour. How can you compare an analog stick with a complete touchscreen?"
I can compare them quite easily, and actually like the gamepad controls more.
E.g., because I don't need to switch focus all the time between the main screen and a gimmick touch-screen to play a game, I can just look at and concentrate on the main screen. I find it helps with suspension of disbelief a _lot_.
E.g., I also find holding a gamepad to be more comfortable than Nintendo's design.
E.g., best of all: I don't have to put up with games that were never designed for a stylus to start with, but added some retarded "draw a symbol now quick" gimmick, just for gimmick's sake. (And presumably also because some marketroid at Nintendo told them to.)
The fact is, the games I play don't need a stylus (nor a mouse.) Car racing games, for example, work with a thumbstick far better than with a second touch-screen gimmick. Jump-and-run games (a la Castlevania), ditto, just need directions and a jump button. (Adding some "quick, switch your eyes to the other screen and draw some retarded symbol" gimmick is just that: a gimmick I could easily do without. Happily too.)
Then again, I don't play FPS much, and definitely not on a portable. Dunno, maybe DS's design is any good for those. I wouldn't know or care. For everything else, no thanks, I'll take a normal gamepad instead.
The size of the market and number of consoles sold has already been covered, but here's another free clue for you: not only does the EU produce more games than the USA, but the UK alone produces more games. So the drop in the bucket in game creation is the USA. _You_ are the folks which aren't too creative in the gaming arena.
Want to know some games that helped sell the USA-made XBox? KOTOR and Jade Empire, made by Bioware, a company from Canada. Fable, made by Lionhead, a company from the UK.
You know, here's some friendly advice: you're not even doing the USA any favour by displaying such massive ignorance. I'm sure most Americans are actually intelligent people. The problem is that what we from the rest of the world see is the "patriotic" ignorant rednecks, spouting such idiocies online.
I don't know what it is about the USA and retards spewing their mouth all over the Internet. As I've said, I assume there must be just as many percent retards as everywhere else. The difference that the USA has _loud_ retards. They just _have_ to post something online that isn't just offensive to the rest of the world, but is utterly stupid and uninformed too.
So here's the friendly advice: if you're that patriotic and proud of your country, stop making it look bad online. Read some actual information before spewing such idiocies on an open forum.
Some people are looking for MMOs, some people aren't. A MMORPG isn't a substitute for a SP RPG, any more than a FPS is a substitute for an adventure game, or than crossword puzzles are a substitute for watching football. Nor viceversa. They're just different genre.
So your experience with WoW is probably typical for someone who's into MMORPGs, but not typical at all for someone who's not interested in that genre.
Will you switch games? Chances are eventually you will. Everything gets old after a while.
Yes, you have a "time investment" in WoW, you have an "investment" in your guild and all, and that's actually what the publishers are banking on. That's what keeps people around long after the game itself has become more boring than watching paint dry and less fun than root canal. The illusion that it's some "investment" or "property" they just have to hang on to, and that they can't just throw away. But eventually even that's not enough any more.
Or at least that's most people do. Most plans by MMORPG makers are made around people staying an average of 6 months in a game. Some stay longer, some leave after the "free" month, but half a year is sorta where the tip of the Gauss curve is.
At any rate, it still doesn't mean much to us who aren't into that genre to start with. It's just another genre, not a replacement for everything else. FPS didn't replace (SP) RPGs, and RTS didn't replace simulations. The same happens with MMOs.
First of all, in any other game, I'd say "it's not them, it's you". If you think that a MMO means everyone being there just to shut up and get you xp, and god forbid that they ever dare take a 10 seconds break to talk or exchange email addresses instead of grinding to get you T3H L33T XP... it's you who are in the wrong genre, not them.
If it were any other game, I'd say even nastier things, because in that message you embody everything I despise in MMO player. But it's COH.
And here's the scoop: it's not them, it's (probably) not you, it's COH that turns people into misanthropic sociopaths. I know it turned even me from socializer to avoiding other players. No, let me rephrase that: turned me to hate the very idea of even being in the same square mile as another player.
COH has a thoroughly screwed up balance, and a thoroughly screwed up way of matching instance content to team size. For a few builds (e.g., post-level-30 fire tanks) the only reason to take anyone in the group is to make the game spawn more enemies, while for a lot of others simply being in a group gets you killed. (E.g., try being in an 8 person group as a SR scrapper. No, really. The enemy level goes up and they start hitting through your defenses all the time.)
A lot of other choices are there which again, might benefit one person in the group, but get everyone else wiped out repeatedly. E.g., the difficulty slider. A high level fire tank's auras and burn patches always hit and he has no dodge-based defenses, so higher level enemies just mean more xp. But for others it means a swift death. You can get one-shot by those enemies. (E.g., SR scrappers again or woe to the Blaster that caught any aggro.)
Etc.
I won't go here through the whole mile-long list, but there are a _lot_ of things in COH that seem to be designed just to create conflicts inside a group, or to make it actually harder to finish a mission as a group for some builds. Even if not as such, it actually needs everyone to work _perfectly_ together, have _exactly_ the right build for that group, and make no mistakes ever. Every single mistake in a large group is thrown back in your face and could mean a group wipe. (Which again, tends to create "you all suck, I could have done this alone faster and safer" kind of conflicts.)
For me it had gotten to the point where soloing was what got me good XP, while grouping just got me killed and into XP debt. I started actually avoiding other players because of that.
Try some other game sometimes, e.g., WoW. It might help you get over the misanthropic fit. It sure helped me.
It might help you understand that that pent up frustration isn't really because the COH players are any worse, but it's purely a result of COH's own design faults. The exact same players work _much_ better as a group in WoW (or EQ2 or whatever) than in COH. Unlike COH, I've never regretted taking an extra group member in WoW, or joining a random pickup group. An extra group member in WoW may at most be not much help, but, unlike COH, the game will never turn him/her into a pure liability or "filler".
Also, WoW doesn't make you choose between a pure group build, or a purely solo build, or something piss-poor at both. (Cue the never-ending "healer vs offender" and "tankers without taunt" flame-wars on COH's boards.) That's just another source of conflict just doesn't exist.
Or take kill-stealing, since whining about it was constant theme in COH. In WoW it just isn't a problem, once you realize that other players just can't cost you any xp or loot there. If you've landed a first blow on an NPC, there's _nothing_ another player can cost you there. If they come and kill the NPC for you, eh, you still got the kill, the xp and the loot.
Again, I'm not claiming that people in WoW are smarter or anything. It's just that while Cryptic built a whole bunch of causes for conflict between players in their game, Blizzard's design choices help avoid it.
The "only graphics matter" mentality was mostly pushed by marketting, than ever being a reality among gamers.
Quick, what's the most played online FPS? Well, according to GameSpy, it's _still_ CounterStrike. It half a decade old, and still more people play it than several of the newer games combined. CS, to borrow a MacHall expression, pretty much looked like classic ass at release. Yet it quickly got 1000 times more players than SOF or SOF2 with their photo-realistic gore. It made a _lot_ of people give up on their newer and more photo-realistic games, and go out and buy HL just to play CS.
Quick, which MMO game has more subscribers?
A) EverQuest 2, with its photo-realistic graphics, several shaders used on every pixel, and insane polygon counts, or
B) WoW, whose graphics are frankly cartoonish (not ugly, but cartoonish), lower polycount, and I don't think it even uses shaders for anything but water?
Well, the answer is right in the summary. WoW currently has 10 times more subscribers than EQ2 at its peak. For all its eye candy, many EQ2 players nowadays describe it as "like playing Morrowind, except you meet another player now and then." That's how low the population got.
So no, gamers never really had graphics as the only criterion. Lower graphics quality games with good gameplay routinely outsell crap whose only merit are the graphics.
That only graphics and screenshots matter, was just a publisher's dream that the marketroids tried to push upon us. They _wanted_ us to care only about graphics and shiny weapon models, because that's the _cheap_ part. Spending a year testing and tweaking the gameplay and balance to be just right is much more expensive than photographing a brick wall in higher resolution.
And more importantly graphics were the _guaranteed_ part. Businessmen hate risk. You can just say "ok, I want 1024x1024 textures this time", and get exactly that. Gameplay is still not completely understood yet even by the top league designers. And the rest are even worse. They seem to love repeating mistakes that were already explained all over the place by Will Wright, Brian Reynolds, and other good designers. Yet every year someone comes and repeats one of them, thinking he's the epitome of originality.
So the publishers _really_ wanted us to turn into mindless zombies that buy only for screenshots and hype. But if you look at what actually sold and what didn't, hype and screenshots only did so much.
Well, I'm listening to pretty aggressive heavy metal music. I like the kind where it actually has a melody and clear lyrics, rather than just a growl karaoke, though. I'm talking about stuff like Slayer's Antichrist or Manowar's Fight Until We Die.
;) It's also not quite the kind you can dance to. I suppose I could mosh, but that eventually gives me a headache, so I never was much into it. Etc.
(No, I'm not a psycho. I'm a mild-mannered introvert IRL, and have an approach to life that can be best described as "lawful good". I also prefer a calm, if possible story-driven game, and spent more time in The Sims or Creatures 3 than in all FPSes combined. I do like fast aggressive music, though.)
It can energize and pump me up, yeah. I certainly type code faster when I listen to that stuff. But that's not really _why_ I like it.
It certainly doesn't soothe or relax me. (When I want to _relax_, I turn it off.) It's not expressing myself, since as I've said, I'm more like stereotypical paladin material than the homicidal psycho those lyrics would express. I never sing along, if anything because it would probably scare the shit out of the neighbours or co-workers if they heard me singing cheerfully about gutting someone and feeding their body to wolves
So those obvious answers just don't apply.
True, the made up game idea sounds like a great idea. There's no way that a bot would actually understand the rules and play by them. I like that idea.
I've already done a whole disertation about it in another answer, so I won't repeat it here. But let's just say: please go and read that question again.
It's not "what music do you like?", it's the monumental stupidity of "why do you like music?" Listing the bands you like would _not_ answer that question. (In fact, if anyone answered that one with the list of their favourite bands, _then_ I'd suspect they might be a bot that just triggered on the word "music" and spewed the completely wong answer.)