That would maybe be relevant if the anti-GM stance had anything to do with their being unnatural. But, hey, it's easier to bravely mow down strawmen than address what they're actually saying, right?
The main objections to GM actually has to do with:
1. Those crops being actually engineered to produce their own pesticides. E.g., about 60% of the corn cultivated in the USA has a gene copied from bacillus thuringiensis which produces essentially a pesticid. (Other plants get it too.)
The resulting plant will essentially be marinated in that pesticide, since just about every cell in it produces some. It's not stuff you can get rid of by just washing your veggies before eating them.
Is that pesticide that harmless when eaten in high quantities by humans? That's a good question. Monsanto's tests say so, tests by Greenpeace show it causes liver damage in rats. Neither is exactly unbiased, but I see no reason to trust the former to be honest, any more than I would the latter.
But at any rate, its being natural has _nothing_ to do with it. Of course it's "natural", since it comes from a bacterium. But that doesn't make it either automatically good, nor automatically bad. Hemlock is natural too, but I wouldn't want that gene added to grain.
2. Those crops being engineered to resist ridiculously high levels of Roundup and other herbicides. Again, the net result is that the actual food you buy at the supermarket afterwards will also contain high quantities of that kind of stuff.
Even if you handwave the herbicide-resistance gene as natural, the herbicide itself isn't. And at any rate, there are good reasons to not want it in your system anyway.
3. They are causing genuine ecological and economic problems world-wide.
Etc.
But yeah, let's pretend instead that it's just about "natural" vs "unnatural". It's easier that way. No need to do the boring parts like, dunno, actually reading what they're saying or doing some research on the topic. We can skip directly to the sounding all smart and doing the "hur hur, silly people not knowing what natural means" circle-jerk dance.
What helped bacteria get so resistant to antibiotics so quickly, was horizontal gene transfer. Bacteria exchange short loops of DNA from one bacterium to another, even across entirely different species. So once one bacterium had that advantage, suddenly a lot more bacteria than its descendants started to have the same resistance. So you don't just have MRSA, but also antibiotic-resistant TBC and a few others by now.
And it's the _same_ genes that confer resistance to the same antibiotics. Convergent evolution would have produced different combinations in different species, or even in different batches of the same bacterium which developed it independently. But that's largely not the case.
The biggest pain in the butt isn't evolution, is horizontal gene transfer.
And in the case of Roundup-resistance, what we're seeing in those super-weeds isn't just some freak other gene that also blocks Roundup, but basically a verbatim copy of Monsanto's gene. What we're seeing is horizontal gene transfer again.
And if you had read my previous message, we also have a pretty darned good idea about _how_ that kind of thing happens. There's an entire class of bacteria whose very survival depends on transferring genes from one plant to another. It's mostly genes which cause a root tumour in which said bacteria thrive, but essentially it can be loaded with any payload you wish. (That's _how_ the GM companies transfer for example a pesticide producing gene from a non-plant species to grain.) And occasionally it can on its own transfer a bit more, or the wrong segment.
Actually, it's not like that at all. If you want to find out what's in a vaccine, it's usually right on the label. If you're concerned that the mercury in thiomersal in that vaccine will turn your kid autistic, nobody is hiding from you whether or not there's thiomersal in that vial.
Besides, since you accuse the anti-GM of having some far-left anti-corporatist agenda, wouldn't it make sense to propose to let the free market solve it?
But the concept of a free market is based on some key concepts, one of which is: perfectly informed buyers. No, really. It would be fun if all the Austrian school proponents (mostly libertarians) and the other right-wingers actually read what it says instead of just the bulleted propaganda points. That's the key assumption behind the idea that the market will sort out good from bad: the buyers actually know all aspects of it, and make an informed choice which to buy.
If a product's or company's survival depends on keeping the public uninformed, on people not knowing they got product X instead of the Y they wanted, that's a more gross violation of the very idea of free market than any far-left proponents ever went.
So you're telling me... what? That unlike those "far-left anti-corporatists", you're just against the free market? Or that it's only good until it gets in the way of the corporations, and then you're better off just bending over and trusting them to lube you first?
Just to make it clear what one aspect of those super-weeds is: if you're a farmer that doesn't use GM crops, if those spread to your field, then the weeds are much more resistant to herbicides than the actual crops. Your choice to plant anything else than what at least has the same genes just went down the drain right there. I don't think it's entirely fair to force that kind of a situation upon anyone.
1. Umm, being no worse than stuff already considered harmful, is hardly making anything good. Especially since it's not as an alternative to, but effectively in addition to. It's like saying that kicking someone in the nuts is OK, because he would have suffered worse in a car accident and he obviously doesn't mind risking that every day. Sorry, it doesn't work that way.
2. The risks to people are but a small aspect of it. The breeding super-weeds was even on Slashdot recently. Given that agrobacteria which transfer genes between plants exist in the wild -- and in fact that's how the GM gang is doing it in the first place -- it was just a matter of time until weeds started appearing with the exact same genes for producing pesticides or resisting herbicides that the GM crops have. Now they have actually been found. Now what?
3. In the same vein, some GM crops have already driven some harmful or even beneficial insects and worms nearly exitinct in some places, because frankly the pesticides they produce aren't the most discriminating ones. We're far from figuring out the DNA that encodes a more narrow action pesticides, and basically all that happens is copying some existing genes from bacteria and the like. The spread of those genes even to weeds now, well, you can see where that is going.
4. I don't remember Monsanto giving any starving people any crops. Would be nice if they were that charitable, but they aren't. On the contrary the crops they sell are sterile, so you have to buy another truckload of seeds next year. So basically you'll have to do better than that if you want to paint the GM guys as the knights in shiny armour and the protesters as some kind of villains.
5. Carb free bread? How do you think that might happen? To wit, there are two ways the plants store energy for the sprout in the seed. One is starch, which only some grasses do (grain being a grass) and oil which most plants use because it has higher energy density. And even if you converted grain to have an oily seed instead of starchy ones (though you probably wouldn't want to eat that kind of "bread" anyway), there's the issue of the cellulose inherent in plant cell walls. It's a polymer of sugar too, and cooked it ends up absorbed as carbs. So, what, your great hope for GM crops is to produce a BS fantasy bread? You might as well wish for the lembas bread from LOTR or Dwarven war bread from Discworld then.
Basically, please, while there is a case to be made for GM crops, that kind of uninformed regurgitating talking points and making stuff up simply isn't it.
It's not just about one company. Really, seeing in the summary the the ATX given as some kind of universal thing makes me smirk. Sure, it works like that if you build your own PC or get a beige box built for you by some mom and pop shop. But try upgrading a Dell or a HP or a few others, and you may or may not have a nasty surprise. Off the top of my head one even went as far as to reverse two pins on the connector, so you instantly fry the mobo or the source if you try replacing either yourself. And non-standard size PSUs are more common than you'd think.
So basically if it'll be anything like the PSU situation, well, you'll have notebook power supply that so standard that it works in everything except a brand name notebook. Opps, wait, that's almost all notebooks.
Honestly, good luck in trying to get most big companies to play nice with standards, unless they're fighting uphill against a de facto monopoly. Then they'll want open standards all right, so they can get access to the fat juicy pool of users in that guy's walled garden. But otherwise, they each want you in their own walled garden and are not going to put a big fat hole in the wall, which is what an open standard is to walled gardens.
Starting the auto attack and then twiddling your thumbs may work at the levels included in the trial, but won't get you far past level 4 or so. Sorry, I won't say WoW is perfect or anything, but even basic combat is _far_ more complex than the bore that was, say, Champions Online. I'm not saying it's _hard_, but it does tend to keep one busy rather than just watching the character auto-attack.
In fact, now that you mention it, I'm guessing Statesman also only played the trial of any other MMO out there.
Console games sell for a lot more than PC games. And they sell for that price long after the game has been released. PC games, in comparison, get reduced in price pretty fast.
Yes and no.
1. A lot of the price difference actually goes to Sony or MS or whatever, not to the devs. So, basically, if you just wanted to make another layer of publisher wealthy, by all means, that's an advantage. Otherwise, no.
2. It depends on the games. If you do a mindless PC FPS with no story, yes, expect to see it in the bargain bin within two months. But really popular games go down in price a lot slower, and may actually outlive an also-ran console game. Basically don't compare some console star that stayed expensive long, like Gran Turismo 2, to Deer Hunter <insert year>.
E.g., at a quick look on amazon.de, The Sims 3 is still at 30 Euro, which basically means it lost, what, only a third of the price? And we're talking about a game that's slightly over a year old.
The Sims 2 is still at 20 Euro, and we're talking about a 5 year old game FFS. (And the collector's edition is still listed at 53 Euro.) Even the existence of a sequel still didn't drop its price that much. Also, I'm talking just the base game, not bundles with some expansion packs or anything.
And both don't take into account that still both sell premium DLC, which never dropped in price at all, or that your average The Sims player bought half a dozen expansion packs at nearly full game price. Heck, even some of the The Sims 2 expansion packs still sell for like 30 Euro, in spite of being 3 year old expansion packs to a 5 year old game!
Heck, even The Sims 1 Deluxe edition (read: with the first two EPs) still sells for 23 Euro, and it's a 10 year old game.
Dragon Age Origins still is listed for anywhere between 30 and 45 Euro, and it's nearing 1 year old. (Granted, you can get it cheaper on some Steam promotions, but still.) It also sold over a million dollars worth of DLC and is still going strong.
And then there's MMO stuff. Blizzard's WoW still rakes in the same monthly subscription fee from each player as on launch day, so basically it's like selling you a new game every 3 months. To each of its over ten million players. For a game over 5 years old, it's not bad at all.
Etc.
Basically it depends on the game. If you make an Unreal Tournament 3, damn right it goes straight into bargain bin fast. If you do better than that, you do better than that.
It's not exactly that simple. Whether split-screen gaming is a good idea or not, isn't as simple as just whether it's a PC or a Wii. It also depends on the type of the game.
E.g., if you want to just give another person a controller while you play most Final Fantasy incarnations and derivatives, well, good luck with that. Best I've even seen done was basically that someone can control a party member in combat, but are otherwise just sitting there getting bored when you just run around and talk to all the villagers or grind some minigame.
No kidding. In roughly the same timeframe, Doom 3 sold 3.5 times more copies and was a major commercial success. There are maybe better examples, but I'm picking one that's close enough to the same straight FPS market segment. I never understood how come the supposed problems of the PC market -- you know, not as many gaming PCs as consoles, everyone pirates it, etc -- only affected UT3 but not Doom 3.
Dunno, I'm one of those who never allowed Steam anywhere near my computer (but I'm not going to turn it into a rant about DRM for now) and it still seems to me like I've had no shortage of PC stuff to play.
The "right games" always sold, anyway. WoW still wipes the floor with any of the over-simplified button-masher MMOs that were built to be good for consoles too, for example. The Sims sold 16 million copies. The latest incarnation, The Sims 3, sold about 8 million copies as of mid 2009. And we're talking without the sequels, expansions, stuff packs, and premium DLC haircuts that EA sells like hot cakes in the meantime.
By comparison Epic's "Gears Of War" only sold 5 million copies. And that was one of the top bestselling games for the XBox.
Really, I don't get the 'OMG, consoles are where teh monies are' meme. Don't get me wrong, 5 million copies isn't peanuts or anything, and I can see why someone would want some of that market _too_. But the keyword is "too". Dumping PC gaming as some kind of lost cause seems weird to me. When you compare the top selling PC and console games side by side, the notion that PC gaming is just some kind of drop in the bucket and everyone is pirating it anyway, just doesn't seem to hold any water. WoW alone has more than two active subscriptions for every copy that Gears Of War sold, and probably leads 4 to 1 in copies sold.
Or maybe it's just that if you're Epic Megagames and all you can offer is a rehash of the 1999 UT franchise, and strictly confined to the increasingly overcrowded no-brainer FPS market... well, maybe piracy and number of PC gamers weren't their biggest actual problem.
Not sure what your point is. A diamond can burn too, so basically, yes, you can get that energy back that way at least. Given the same amount of oxygen and the same amount of resulting CO2, the difference in energy released in burning 1kg of diamonds and 1kg of graphite will reflect exacly the difference in their bonding energy.
Practically all forms of storing energy in molecular bonds can have that energy released by chemical means, one way or another. E.g., hydrazine requires a lot of energy to produce, and then you get that energy back when it decomposes back into nitrogen, hydrogen and ammonia.
In this case the energy is put into those bonds by mechanical compression, rather than some endothermic chemical reaction, but basically it's the same principle. You just have a more high-tech form of hydrazine, basically.
Honestly, I don't know why so many people seem to get stuck at the compression part, as if ideal gas compression and decompression were the only things _possibly_ applicable here.
Dunno... If you need 1000000x the energy, but the result can be detonated and actually release more energy per kilo than a nuke (and a cloud of atomic fluoride is just icing on the cake too), the military would drool all over it. In fact, someone probably already came in his pants reading this news.
To put it into perspective, the Manhattan Project has cost the equivalent of 20 billion 1996 dollars. (Or about 30 billion in todays dollars.) The power used by the Oak Ridge facility alone to separate the uranium that went into one of the bombs (the other was plutonium) used 10% of the total electricity produced in the USA at the time.
Compared to the modest yield of the first nukes, they genuinely pumped orders of magnitude more energy in, than they got out.
I use both Linux and Windows since the 90's, and in fact I'm writing this in Mozilla on a SuSE 11.2 machine. I'm anything but new to most of the common tasks in Linux. Yet I found myself increasingly dual-booting to Windows even in my Linux fanboy years, and by now I only use Linux for web browsing and work stuff.
For a start, probably not a fault of Linux per se, but Novel sure did a great job of dispelling the myth of OSS being stable and bug-free. I used to be a fan of SuSE, well, mostly because that was the first distro I used for my "OMG, I'm going Linux and thumbing my nose at MS" years. (Yeah, I was younger and dumber.) And old loves die hard, as they say. But 11.2 is a fucking mess. Half the time it can't even shut down properly and ends up just logging me out instead. (I can only assume it has some kind of race condition, the way it's unpredictable.) Once in a dozen logins, it seems to get a brainfart and get a screwed up colour scheme instead of what I selected. The toolbars seem to crash and restart every time I exit Opera. Evolution regularly locks up when I try to open an attachment. (They sure copied that feel of MS products, huh?)
Granted, that's with Gnome. I wouldn't know if it works better with KDE.
It also doesn't help that even some common tasks seem to be crippled. E.g., they removed every single codec, so basically you can't even play some music on the headphones while you work. Granted, they can be downloaded separately... if you're the kind of user who understands that kind of thing, and if you don't happen to be separated by a proxy from the Internet. (Another thing they seem to have broken, although it worked in previous versions.)
It's the kind of distro that'll put a normal user off Linux for good, briefly. I wonder if they're at least getting paid by MS for that.
Then there's the ever present library hell. E.g., you can't just download and install Winamp like on Windows. Downloading and trying to compile, say, XMMS off Freshmeat quickly runs into the fact that the libraries aren't the versions it expects, and the ones it expects don't seem to compile on an x64 system without some editing. Sorry, but that's one aspect that Windows got a lot better.
It also doesn't help that the defaults at least in SuSE are to exclude everything that isn't strictly needed for the minimal set of apps it wants to install. If you're Joe Clueless and didn't know to go and check more checboxes, you're in for some swearing very very soon.
Then there are the interface issues. Everyone seems to just love writing their own widgets, while MS thankfully seems to do that only in IE, and working like everyone else's so the user can focus on the actual problem instead of the interface seems to be anathema.
E.g., to pick an example other than GIMP for a change, I recently tried my hand at Blender. I was trying to make some weapons for Dragon Age. The whole GUI seems to make a point of not working like Windows, Gnome _or_ KDE, regardless of what system you run it on. The menus, the load dialogs, everything works differently and everything becomes something to struggle with instead of just using your existing skills. (And again you run into library hell if you have an older system.)
And let me qualify that: the whole idea of a common user architecture is that it's not just "I'm used to program X instead of program Y," but that you can learn program X and then carry at least some of those skills over to program Y too. We're talking at least stuff like the menus working the same, the right click doing the same general thing, and stuff like that.
Then come the various little annoyances/surprises like that if you import a.obj which has UV coordinates already, you still have to tell it to UV-unwrap. Or for that matter that following the tutorials and assigning a material only works for when you render, but otherwise the texture is held and set in a totally different place, and basically if you want any chance of WYSIWYG you have to set it in both places.
Not as much a Linux problem per se, but a case of now understanding why some people still buy 3D Studio Max or at least Milkshape instead of the amazingly free OSS alternative.
1. If a rectangular pile of bricks or a folded sheet of paper are art (and I might be calling them crap, but I sure as heck won't deny their being "art") and even "shit can be beautiful if the light hits it right", then basically who's Ebert to say that a game isn't art? Exactly why is the same "shit" art when it's on canvas, but stops being art when it's interactive "shit" that's been pixel-shaded, bump-mapped, parallax-mapped and placed in the right light?
2. So basically if FF7 invoked an emotional reaction (it really sucked to lose Aeris) _and_ an intellectual reaction (why couldn't I use a Phoenix Dawn anyway?), it's art, right? If Tetris gets me thinking about the futility of fighting against the inevitable, it's art, right? If Chucky Egg got me thinking of it as a symbolism for class struggle, it's art, right? (Ok, I didn't say the connections my mind makes are _sane_, but it really did get me thinking, you know?;) Heck, City Of Heroes and City Of Villains often got me thinking about the very nature of good and evil, and that's the deep shit as philosophy goes.
Heck, most games with a moral compass get me thinking about the (not so) subtle difference between "evil" and "stonking stupidity", and how many game designers seem unable to tell the difference between them. They range between "you're only evil if you mass-murder half your own peasants and alienate any possible ally" (e.g., Black and White) to basically "you're the apex of evil if you actually did try to save your peasants from a calamity, but were too unskilled to succeed." (e.g., Black and White.) The stereotype of the manipulative and scheming evil which actually builds up alliances and maintains a good PR, although a standard trope in cinema, seems to never have dawned upon most RPG makers. Or when it did, it's only for the antagonist, not for the player's actions.
But, anyway, if it did get me thinking about all that, it must be art, right?:p
So, does Hans Memling's Last Judgment Triptych look like art to him? After all, it's got nasty stuff like demons throwing some people into fire. Or all the other medieval and renaissance depictions of hell? Some make Doom or Painkiller seem tame by comparison.
Oh, I am aware of Ebert's argument that it's not art if you participate in any way, and basically it's such a blatant No True Scotsman fallacy, that I didn't even think it merited being addressed much.
But if anyone feels that it has to be addressed: having such choices isn't even something video-games only. E.g., since another answer mentioned Manet's Olympia, I'm reminded of another famous nude and arguably the first to present a naked woman as just a naked woman and not some Venus or such: Goya's La Maja Desnuda. (The Naked Maja.) But the funny thing is, Goya also painted an otherwise identical painting of the same woman, in the same pose, on the same bed, only clothed this time: La Maja Vestida. (The Clothed Maja.) Basically you have the choice of the same woman clothed or naked.
Granted, it's only one choice, but it's still not much less than the choices you get in, say, a Japanese dating simulator.
Would someone's getting the choice to buy one or the other (I assume it must have been offered for sale at one point or another) make it non-art? I think even Ebert isn't prepared to call Goya's paintings not art.
While that certainly has merits, and we could discuss artistic currents more in depth for the rest of the afternoon, I think it doesn't change my main points. If deviating from prescribed art forms to paint a prostitute for pure erotic value is still art (and nobody would call Manet non-art), surely deviating to include an interactive element wouldn't be any worse.
That said, though:
1. I don't think Duchamp intended even that, judging by his actual interviews. He didn't try to question what is art and what isn't, and test boundaries, or whatever. He literally says that he wanted to destroy it all. His message was basically, "art is crap".
2. Well, for better or worse, that has become the dominant current in modern art. While technically dadaism is not _all_ of it, it has at least influenced all the other aspects of it in the graphical arts.
3. Well, I've been in teams in MMOs or generally online games which would qualify as dadaism, and made me question what is a raid, after all:p
E.g., the blaster (mage) pulls with an area-effect spell, and gets insta-killed, then complains that the tank should have gotten them off him in the about 0.5 seconds it took him to faceplant. The main healer appears bunnyhopping from a side corridor (WTF was she doing in another direction than the rest of the team?), screaming "help!" and pursued by an angry mob of NPCs. The secondary healer is busy pretending he's a mage and doing pitiful damage with his attacks, and never even heals himself. Seriously, having to bandage a "healer" when I'm one of the melee DPS-ers, is enough to make me question a lot of things. Another guy is running against a wall. And after the wipe is complete, the tank suddenly pipes up with, "soz, was afk. back now.":p
Heck, I'll be the first to bemoan it myself, and I thought the tone of my post would make it pretty clear that I'm not exactly a fan of modern art. But nevertheless it _is_ called art, and the vast majority of the population seems to have no problem with that. Whatever meaning the word "art" has nowadays, obviously it _does_ include stuff like a signed urinal or a flickering TV in an empty room.
It's just as close-minded on your part to dismiss them peremptorily as it is for them dismiss the original claim.
Not quite sure what you mean there, so I can't comment much. I'm certainly not dismissing the idea that 99% of modern art is garbage. (And the other 1% is savagely panned by critics for not being modern enough.) But nevertheless the common meaning of the word "art" nowadays does include them.
Since when did something have to be "good enough" to be art? I think that would come as a surprise to Duchamp and the whole modern art establishment he had spawned.
For whoever doesn't know the story, the whole modern art phenomenon started in 1917 with a guy called Marcel Duchamp, who signed an urinal and sent it to an art gallery under the title "Fountain."
It was not the first of Duchamp's "readymades", basically just objects he found and signed, but otherwise didn't even make or anything. The first was a found bicycle wheel he signed and displayed under the name "Bicycle Wheel" in 1913. Sometimes he at least used funny names for them, like titling a shovel "Prelude To A Broken Arm" in 1915, others were like that Bicycle Wheel. But the urinal is what became famous and redefined art.
The funny thing is that Duchamp spells it out in interviews, some even much much later, that he just wanted to destroy "art". He found the whole establishment to be little more than a circle-jerk clique (not his exact words, but the general gist of it) and obsessed with form above and beyond anything else. He wanted to destroy it all. His urinal was supposed to convey the message, basically, "your work is worth as much as this urinal to me."
But funnily that's not what the art world understood. The art world suddenly found itself trying to imitate the unconventionalism and shock value of that urinal. And it's been in that rut ever since.
And funnily enough everyone seems to still don't get what Duchamp actually did there, even if you show them an interview where he says it himself. E.g., I remember an interview with Michael Craig where he explains that Duchamp actually wanted to show that even everyday objects can be beautiful and art. (No, he didn't.)
In the meantime we have a fine arts establishment where a stack of bricks is called art. A tent made of PVC tubes is art. A set of 4 folded and straightened sheets of paper is called art. (No, really, I've actually seen exactly and literally that in someone's private collection.) A glass of water on a shelf is art. Or a hack like Hirst can pay someone else to put a grid of random coloured dots on a rectangle, sign it and not only get it called art, but be acclaimed for it. (Here's one sample of his 300+ pictures made of dots: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/08/Hirst-LSD.jpg.) A rectangular box made of sheet metal can be called art. A flickering TV in an empty room can be called art. A crucifix in a jar of piss can be called art.
We're in a world where calling someone's work "pretty" is the most grievous insult you can get away with in front of a professor, in some arts colleges. But it is an insult and use it only if you want to make an enemy. Nowadays you don't want "pretty", you want "thought provoking", and "original", and such.
So Ebert is, what, telling me that it isn't art because it's completely unlike what he calls art? Has he checked with the aforementioned modern art establishment? Because it seems to me like that being different is exactly what would make it "art" there.
(And I've played plenty of games which fit the "thought provoking" criterion too. But then I'm the kind of guy easily provoked in that aspect. E.g., Chucky Egg provoked much thought about the struggle of the working class against the oppressor chickens.;))
Heck, probably the best example is another painting I've seen in someone's private collection. Essentially it looked like a screenshot of Tetris. No, literally. I'm not exaggerating. Yes, I know what "literally" means. I mean it. It looked not just sorta like Tetris, but exactly like a screenshot of Tetris. Well, except for the part that in actual Tetris two rows should have been removed because they were full, but obviously on the painting they hadn't been. I wonder if it was supposed to be symbolic of the unfairness of life or something;)
So basically, let me get that straight: _that_ is art, or so I'm told, but Ebert tells me that if it were actually animated as a game of Tetris, it wouldn't be art any more? Why? It's the same image.
The fact that they only mention "jobs" without distinction for what job level or type, and can include arts and communication skills majors in the same statistics make me think it might be a more mundane aspect to it than "CS graduates are less employable."
More likely, some 17% of CS graduates are holding out for some programming job or higher, whereas an arts or women's studies graduate quickly comes to terms with getting a job as a receptionist or even a McDonald's job. It's not hard to notice that there are very few jobs as, say, an anthropologist studying the natives on some fabulous vacation island, or as some deluxe lobbyist for women's equality in Washington. And even if one still clings to that delusion in the long run, it's pretty obvious that another source of income will be needed until such a job becomes available.
Basically in fact a lot of the CS graduates are simply competing for a very specific slice of the employment market, with a much smaller pool of jobs. And most likely are actually _more_ employable on that slice, and no less employable than an arts or anthropology graduate in the kind of McDonald's jobs most of those will get.
And that is also not taking into account that a lot of CS and EE graduates actually have an even narrower slice in mind. E.g., most want a job making computer games, and precious few want one of those boring jobs that involve databases and java and writing unit tests. Or the elder gods forbid, maintaining a cobol program on some mainframe. Not only that has driven down wages in the games industry, but there still simply aren't half as many jobs as people who want them. A lot will spend those 6 months or a large part thereof, still hoping that Blizzard or Epic or Id will hire them, and inflate that unemployment number.
And then there are those who think they're so smart, that anything short of directly starting as senior architect and/or a 6 figure starting wage, is waay below them and in fact outright demeaning. 'Cause, you know, their mommy always told them they're so smart, and besides they wrote the most compact bubble-sort in college, _and_ had a submission to the obfuscated C contest too. So they know all about how your programs should be made, obviously. And they even used "emerge" to compile a Gentoo distro once, which makes them practically kernel hackers, right? Needless to say, some of those inflate the unemployment figure too.
While I can understand or at least guess the rationale behind it, it does break immersion every time it happens. Suddenly the game rules have temporarily changed to something completely different. It's like suddenly entering a room where you walk on the ceiling, or clicking on a link and on that site alone you have the toolbar browser on the bottom and the URL field disabled.
It's stuff you notice because it's different from what you've been conditioned to do without even thinking any more. The whole game I've essentially learned that if someone is wounded, I hit the heal spell. And not just in that game, but in every game I've played or could control a healer.
And I've already suspended disbelief in a reality where magic works and is an integral part of. We're not even talking Tolkien like worlds where there are two mages total, and they cast nothing more useful than making a staff's tip glow, but worlds where mages and clerics are a dime a dozen and every peasant goes to one when he has the sniffles. And if somehow you don't have one around, you could have been run through and had an arm lopped off, and one night of good sleep will fix that too. And suddenly all that doesn't work like that any more, and I have to suspend disbelief in why it doesn't work in this particular situation.
And sometimes it really works by neither RL nor normal game rules. E.g., in Dragon Age Origins, when you meet that guy who basically gives you the quest to buy the Return To Ostagar DLC. (Yeah, they took nickel-and-diming the players that far. Now you have NPCs in the game telling you to fork over more RL money. And don't get me started on how much _that_ breaks suspension of disbelief.) That guy has been run through an left for dead, but he neither just stays unconscious RL-like, nor can be healed as per the normal game rules. You can revive him well enough to have a long and coherent conversation, but not well enough to actually stay alive.
And, you know, I'm starting to find it lazy. They could always find some in game explanation for why that guy can't be healed. E.g., in Persona when they have to poke one of your characters unhealable, they actually have the bad guy prepare a spear that causes unhealable wounds.
It's not even something outlandish. People actually believed that kind of thing IRL about various "magical" wepons. E.g., about the Crocea Mors sword of Julius Caesar. Any wound from it, no matter how superficial, kills. Or Persona essentially uses the Holy Lance in that role. (I've said "prepare" it previously, in that the setup of the game is basically reality by consensus. If enough people believe something, then it is real. So if you could get enough people to believe that you have the Holy Lance, then that spear _is_ the Holy Lance.)
Heck, historically people believed all sorts of bogus stuff about various pieces of weaponry. We have good weapons, evil weapons, weapons that can't be sheathed back unless they tasted blood, etc. And those were people who would have had more reason to doubt it. In a game where we're already conditioned to suspend disbelief, how hard would it be to have some makeshift explanation for why that wound can't be healed.
Or poison, now that's a low hanging fruit. Some special rare poison that can't be healed except by extraordinary means. Heck, it's the whole setup for Silverthorn, so if it was good enough for a novel, it must work in a game too, right?
Sorry,two wrongs don't make a right. Plus, spare me the BS please. He's not proposing to deny you gay marriage or anything, he's just just saying basically that compensating that tax for one particular slice is still leaving out a whole other lot of slices which, for all practical purposes, are just as married.
It seems strange to me to see reactions basically boiling down to "booyah, now it's your turn to suck it up." Unless he is one of those that actually did anything against you in the first place, two wrongs just don't make a right.
And basically you're trying to prove what? That gays can be just as much self-centered pricks as the fundies on the other side? We already knew that. After all the most vehement anti-gay preachers turned out to _be_ gay.
Slashdot Mirror
That would maybe be relevant if the anti-GM stance had anything to do with their being unnatural. But, hey, it's easier to bravely mow down strawmen than address what they're actually saying, right?
The main objections to GM actually has to do with:
1. Those crops being actually engineered to produce their own pesticides. E.g., about 60% of the corn cultivated in the USA has a gene copied from bacillus thuringiensis which produces essentially a pesticid. (Other plants get it too.)
The resulting plant will essentially be marinated in that pesticide, since just about every cell in it produces some. It's not stuff you can get rid of by just washing your veggies before eating them.
Is that pesticide that harmless when eaten in high quantities by humans? That's a good question. Monsanto's tests say so, tests by Greenpeace show it causes liver damage in rats. Neither is exactly unbiased, but I see no reason to trust the former to be honest, any more than I would the latter.
But at any rate, its being natural has _nothing_ to do with it. Of course it's "natural", since it comes from a bacterium. But that doesn't make it either automatically good, nor automatically bad. Hemlock is natural too, but I wouldn't want that gene added to grain.
2. Those crops being engineered to resist ridiculously high levels of Roundup and other herbicides. Again, the net result is that the actual food you buy at the supermarket afterwards will also contain high quantities of that kind of stuff.
Even if you handwave the herbicide-resistance gene as natural, the herbicide itself isn't. And at any rate, there are good reasons to not want it in your system anyway.
3. They are causing genuine ecological and economic problems world-wide.
Etc.
But yeah, let's pretend instead that it's just about "natural" vs "unnatural". It's easier that way. No need to do the boring parts like, dunno, actually reading what they're saying or doing some research on the topic. We can skip directly to the sounding all smart and doing the "hur hur, silly people not knowing what natural means" circle-jerk dance.
Again, it's not that simple.
What helped bacteria get so resistant to antibiotics so quickly, was horizontal gene transfer. Bacteria exchange short loops of DNA from one bacterium to another, even across entirely different species. So once one bacterium had that advantage, suddenly a lot more bacteria than its descendants started to have the same resistance. So you don't just have MRSA, but also antibiotic-resistant TBC and a few others by now.
And it's the _same_ genes that confer resistance to the same antibiotics. Convergent evolution would have produced different combinations in different species, or even in different batches of the same bacterium which developed it independently. But that's largely not the case.
The biggest pain in the butt isn't evolution, is horizontal gene transfer.
And in the case of Roundup-resistance, what we're seeing in those super-weeds isn't just some freak other gene that also blocks Roundup, but basically a verbatim copy of Monsanto's gene. What we're seeing is horizontal gene transfer again.
And if you had read my previous message, we also have a pretty darned good idea about _how_ that kind of thing happens. There's an entire class of bacteria whose very survival depends on transferring genes from one plant to another. It's mostly genes which cause a root tumour in which said bacteria thrive, but essentially it can be loaded with any payload you wish. (That's _how_ the GM companies transfer for example a pesticide producing gene from a non-plant species to grain.) And occasionally it can on its own transfer a bit more, or the wrong segment.
Actually, it's not like that at all. If you want to find out what's in a vaccine, it's usually right on the label. If you're concerned that the mercury in thiomersal in that vaccine will turn your kid autistic, nobody is hiding from you whether or not there's thiomersal in that vial.
Besides, since you accuse the anti-GM of having some far-left anti-corporatist agenda, wouldn't it make sense to propose to let the free market solve it?
But the concept of a free market is based on some key concepts, one of which is: perfectly informed buyers. No, really. It would be fun if all the Austrian school proponents (mostly libertarians) and the other right-wingers actually read what it says instead of just the bulleted propaganda points. That's the key assumption behind the idea that the market will sort out good from bad: the buyers actually know all aspects of it, and make an informed choice which to buy.
If a product's or company's survival depends on keeping the public uninformed, on people not knowing they got product X instead of the Y they wanted, that's a more gross violation of the very idea of free market than any far-left proponents ever went.
So you're telling me... what? That unlike those "far-left anti-corporatists", you're just against the free market? Or that it's only good until it gets in the way of the corporations, and then you're better off just bending over and trusting them to lube you first?
Just to make it clear what one aspect of those super-weeds is: if you're a farmer that doesn't use GM crops, if those spread to your field, then the weeds are much more resistant to herbicides than the actual crops. Your choice to plant anything else than what at least has the same genes just went down the drain right there. I don't think it's entirely fair to force that kind of a situation upon anyone.
1. Umm, being no worse than stuff already considered harmful, is hardly making anything good. Especially since it's not as an alternative to, but effectively in addition to. It's like saying that kicking someone in the nuts is OK, because he would have suffered worse in a car accident and he obviously doesn't mind risking that every day. Sorry, it doesn't work that way.
2. The risks to people are but a small aspect of it. The breeding super-weeds was even on Slashdot recently. Given that agrobacteria which transfer genes between plants exist in the wild -- and in fact that's how the GM gang is doing it in the first place -- it was just a matter of time until weeds started appearing with the exact same genes for producing pesticides or resisting herbicides that the GM crops have. Now they have actually been found. Now what?
3. In the same vein, some GM crops have already driven some harmful or even beneficial insects and worms nearly exitinct in some places, because frankly the pesticides they produce aren't the most discriminating ones. We're far from figuring out the DNA that encodes a more narrow action pesticides, and basically all that happens is copying some existing genes from bacteria and the like. The spread of those genes even to weeds now, well, you can see where that is going.
4. I don't remember Monsanto giving any starving people any crops. Would be nice if they were that charitable, but they aren't. On the contrary the crops they sell are sterile, so you have to buy another truckload of seeds next year. So basically you'll have to do better than that if you want to paint the GM guys as the knights in shiny armour and the protesters as some kind of villains.
5. Carb free bread? How do you think that might happen? To wit, there are two ways the plants store energy for the sprout in the seed. One is starch, which only some grasses do (grain being a grass) and oil which most plants use because it has higher energy density. And even if you converted grain to have an oily seed instead of starchy ones (though you probably wouldn't want to eat that kind of "bread" anyway), there's the issue of the cellulose inherent in plant cell walls. It's a polymer of sugar too, and cooked it ends up absorbed as carbs. So, what, your great hope for GM crops is to produce a BS fantasy bread? You might as well wish for the lembas bread from LOTR or Dwarven war bread from Discworld then.
Basically, please, while there is a case to be made for GM crops, that kind of uninformed regurgitating talking points and making stuff up simply isn't it.
It's not just about one company. Really, seeing in the summary the the ATX given as some kind of universal thing makes me smirk. Sure, it works like that if you build your own PC or get a beige box built for you by some mom and pop shop. But try upgrading a Dell or a HP or a few others, and you may or may not have a nasty surprise. Off the top of my head one even went as far as to reverse two pins on the connector, so you instantly fry the mobo or the source if you try replacing either yourself. And non-standard size PSUs are more common than you'd think.
So basically if it'll be anything like the PSU situation, well, you'll have notebook power supply that so standard that it works in everything except a brand name notebook. Opps, wait, that's almost all notebooks.
Honestly, good luck in trying to get most big companies to play nice with standards, unless they're fighting uphill against a de facto monopoly. Then they'll want open standards all right, so they can get access to the fat juicy pool of users in that guy's walled garden. But otherwise, they each want you in their own walled garden and are not going to put a big fat hole in the wall, which is what an open standard is to walled gardens.
Starting the auto attack and then twiddling your thumbs may work at the levels included in the trial, but won't get you far past level 4 or so. Sorry, I won't say WoW is perfect or anything, but even basic combat is _far_ more complex than the bore that was, say, Champions Online. I'm not saying it's _hard_, but it does tend to keep one busy rather than just watching the character auto-attack.
In fact, now that you mention it, I'm guessing Statesman also only played the trial of any other MMO out there.
Yes and no.
1. A lot of the price difference actually goes to Sony or MS or whatever, not to the devs. So, basically, if you just wanted to make another layer of publisher wealthy, by all means, that's an advantage. Otherwise, no.
2. It depends on the games. If you do a mindless PC FPS with no story, yes, expect to see it in the bargain bin within two months. But really popular games go down in price a lot slower, and may actually outlive an also-ran console game. Basically don't compare some console star that stayed expensive long, like Gran Turismo 2, to Deer Hunter <insert year>.
E.g., at a quick look on amazon.de, The Sims 3 is still at 30 Euro, which basically means it lost, what, only a third of the price? And we're talking about a game that's slightly over a year old.
The Sims 2 is still at 20 Euro, and we're talking about a 5 year old game FFS. (And the collector's edition is still listed at 53 Euro.) Even the existence of a sequel still didn't drop its price that much. Also, I'm talking just the base game, not bundles with some expansion packs or anything.
And both don't take into account that still both sell premium DLC, which never dropped in price at all, or that your average The Sims player bought half a dozen expansion packs at nearly full game price. Heck, even some of the The Sims 2 expansion packs still sell for like 30 Euro, in spite of being 3 year old expansion packs to a 5 year old game!
Heck, even The Sims 1 Deluxe edition (read: with the first two EPs) still sells for 23 Euro, and it's a 10 year old game.
Dragon Age Origins still is listed for anywhere between 30 and 45 Euro, and it's nearing 1 year old. (Granted, you can get it cheaper on some Steam promotions, but still.) It also sold over a million dollars worth of DLC and is still going strong.
And then there's MMO stuff. Blizzard's WoW still rakes in the same monthly subscription fee from each player as on launch day, so basically it's like selling you a new game every 3 months. To each of its over ten million players. For a game over 5 years old, it's not bad at all.
Etc.
Basically it depends on the game. If you make an Unreal Tournament 3, damn right it goes straight into bargain bin fast. If you do better than that, you do better than that.
It's not exactly that simple. Whether split-screen gaming is a good idea or not, isn't as simple as just whether it's a PC or a Wii. It also depends on the type of the game.
E.g., if you want to just give another person a controller while you play most Final Fantasy incarnations and derivatives, well, good luck with that. Best I've even seen done was basically that someone can control a party member in combat, but are otherwise just sitting there getting bored when you just run around and talk to all the villagers or grind some minigame.
No kidding. In roughly the same timeframe, Doom 3 sold 3.5 times more copies and was a major commercial success. There are maybe better examples, but I'm picking one that's close enough to the same straight FPS market segment. I never understood how come the supposed problems of the PC market -- you know, not as many gaming PCs as consoles, everyone pirates it, etc -- only affected UT3 but not Doom 3.
Dunno, I'm one of those who never allowed Steam anywhere near my computer (but I'm not going to turn it into a rant about DRM for now) and it still seems to me like I've had no shortage of PC stuff to play.
The "right games" always sold, anyway. WoW still wipes the floor with any of the over-simplified button-masher MMOs that were built to be good for consoles too, for example. The Sims sold 16 million copies. The latest incarnation, The Sims 3, sold about 8 million copies as of mid 2009. And we're talking without the sequels, expansions, stuff packs, and premium DLC haircuts that EA sells like hot cakes in the meantime.
By comparison Epic's "Gears Of War" only sold 5 million copies. And that was one of the top bestselling games for the XBox.
Really, I don't get the 'OMG, consoles are where teh monies are' meme. Don't get me wrong, 5 million copies isn't peanuts or anything, and I can see why someone would want some of that market _too_. But the keyword is "too". Dumping PC gaming as some kind of lost cause seems weird to me. When you compare the top selling PC and console games side by side, the notion that PC gaming is just some kind of drop in the bucket and everyone is pirating it anyway, just doesn't seem to hold any water. WoW alone has more than two active subscriptions for every copy that Gears Of War sold, and probably leads 4 to 1 in copies sold.
Or maybe it's just that if you're Epic Megagames and all you can offer is a rehash of the 1999 UT franchise, and strictly confined to the increasingly overcrowded no-brainer FPS market... well, maybe piracy and number of PC gamers weren't their biggest actual problem.
Not sure what your point is. A diamond can burn too, so basically, yes, you can get that energy back that way at least. Given the same amount of oxygen and the same amount of resulting CO2, the difference in energy released in burning 1kg of diamonds and 1kg of graphite will reflect exacly the difference in their bonding energy.
Practically all forms of storing energy in molecular bonds can have that energy released by chemical means, one way or another. E.g., hydrazine requires a lot of energy to produce, and then you get that energy back when it decomposes back into nitrogen, hydrogen and ammonia.
In this case the energy is put into those bonds by mechanical compression, rather than some endothermic chemical reaction, but basically it's the same principle. You just have a more high-tech form of hydrazine, basically.
Honestly, I don't know why so many people seem to get stuck at the compression part, as if ideal gas compression and decompression were the only things _possibly_ applicable here.
Dunno... If you need 1000000x the energy, but the result can be detonated and actually release more energy per kilo than a nuke (and a cloud of atomic fluoride is just icing on the cake too), the military would drool all over it. In fact, someone probably already came in his pants reading this news.
To put it into perspective, the Manhattan Project has cost the equivalent of 20 billion 1996 dollars. (Or about 30 billion in todays dollars.) The power used by the Oak Ridge facility alone to separate the uranium that went into one of the bombs (the other was plutonium) used 10% of the total electricity produced in the USA at the time.
Compared to the modest yield of the first nukes, they genuinely pumped orders of magnitude more energy in, than they got out.
I use both Linux and Windows since the 90's, and in fact I'm writing this in Mozilla on a SuSE 11.2 machine. I'm anything but new to most of the common tasks in Linux. Yet I found myself increasingly dual-booting to Windows even in my Linux fanboy years, and by now I only use Linux for web browsing and work stuff.
For a start, probably not a fault of Linux per se, but Novel sure did a great job of dispelling the myth of OSS being stable and bug-free. I used to be a fan of SuSE, well, mostly because that was the first distro I used for my "OMG, I'm going Linux and thumbing my nose at MS" years. (Yeah, I was younger and dumber.) And old loves die hard, as they say. But 11.2 is a fucking mess. Half the time it can't even shut down properly and ends up just logging me out instead. (I can only assume it has some kind of race condition, the way it's unpredictable.) Once in a dozen logins, it seems to get a brainfart and get a screwed up colour scheme instead of what I selected. The toolbars seem to crash and restart every time I exit Opera. Evolution regularly locks up when I try to open an attachment. (They sure copied that feel of MS products, huh?)
Granted, that's with Gnome. I wouldn't know if it works better with KDE.
It also doesn't help that even some common tasks seem to be crippled. E.g., they removed every single codec, so basically you can't even play some music on the headphones while you work. Granted, they can be downloaded separately... if you're the kind of user who understands that kind of thing, and if you don't happen to be separated by a proxy from the Internet. (Another thing they seem to have broken, although it worked in previous versions.)
It's the kind of distro that'll put a normal user off Linux for good, briefly. I wonder if they're at least getting paid by MS for that.
Then there's the ever present library hell. E.g., you can't just download and install Winamp like on Windows. Downloading and trying to compile, say, XMMS off Freshmeat quickly runs into the fact that the libraries aren't the versions it expects, and the ones it expects don't seem to compile on an x64 system without some editing. Sorry, but that's one aspect that Windows got a lot better.
It also doesn't help that the defaults at least in SuSE are to exclude everything that isn't strictly needed for the minimal set of apps it wants to install. If you're Joe Clueless and didn't know to go and check more checboxes, you're in for some swearing very very soon.
Then there are the interface issues. Everyone seems to just love writing their own widgets, while MS thankfully seems to do that only in IE, and working like everyone else's so the user can focus on the actual problem instead of the interface seems to be anathema.
E.g., to pick an example other than GIMP for a change, I recently tried my hand at Blender. I was trying to make some weapons for Dragon Age. The whole GUI seems to make a point of not working like Windows, Gnome _or_ KDE, regardless of what system you run it on. The menus, the load dialogs, everything works differently and everything becomes something to struggle with instead of just using your existing skills. (And again you run into library hell if you have an older system.)
And let me qualify that: the whole idea of a common user architecture is that it's not just "I'm used to program X instead of program Y," but that you can learn program X and then carry at least some of those skills over to program Y too. We're talking at least stuff like the menus working the same, the right click doing the same general thing, and stuff like that.
Then come the various little annoyances/surprises like that if you import a .obj which has UV coordinates already, you still have to tell it to UV-unwrap. Or for that matter that following the tutorials and assigning a material only works for when you render, but otherwise the texture is held and set in a totally different place, and basically if you want any chance of WYSIWYG you have to set it in both places.
Not as much a Linux problem per se, but a case of now understanding why some people still buy 3D Studio Max or at least Milkshape instead of the amazingly free OSS alternative.
Fine by me, but my point basically still stands:
1. If a rectangular pile of bricks or a folded sheet of paper are art (and I might be calling them crap, but I sure as heck won't deny their being "art") and even "shit can be beautiful if the light hits it right", then basically who's Ebert to say that a game isn't art? Exactly why is the same "shit" art when it's on canvas, but stops being art when it's interactive "shit" that's been pixel-shaded, bump-mapped, parallax-mapped and placed in the right light?
2. So basically if FF7 invoked an emotional reaction (it really sucked to lose Aeris) _and_ an intellectual reaction (why couldn't I use a Phoenix Dawn anyway?), it's art, right? If Tetris gets me thinking about the futility of fighting against the inevitable, it's art, right? If Chucky Egg got me thinking of it as a symbolism for class struggle, it's art, right? (Ok, I didn't say the connections my mind makes are _sane_, but it really did get me thinking, you know?;) Heck, City Of Heroes and City Of Villains often got me thinking about the very nature of good and evil, and that's the deep shit as philosophy goes.
Heck, most games with a moral compass get me thinking about the (not so) subtle difference between "evil" and "stonking stupidity", and how many game designers seem unable to tell the difference between them. They range between "you're only evil if you mass-murder half your own peasants and alienate any possible ally" (e.g., Black and White) to basically "you're the apex of evil if you actually did try to save your peasants from a calamity, but were too unskilled to succeed." (e.g., Black and White.) The stereotype of the manipulative and scheming evil which actually builds up alliances and maintains a good PR, although a standard trope in cinema, seems to never have dawned upon most RPG makers. Or when it did, it's only for the antagonist, not for the player's actions.
But, anyway, if it did get me thinking about all that, it must be art, right? :p
So, does Hans Memling's Last Judgment Triptych look like art to him? After all, it's got nasty stuff like demons throwing some people into fire. Or all the other medieval and renaissance depictions of hell? Some make Doom or Painkiller seem tame by comparison.
I actually knew someone who stayed unemployed for a long time because he only wanted to do game design. So it's not just imagination, sadly.
Oh, I am aware of Ebert's argument that it's not art if you participate in any way, and basically it's such a blatant No True Scotsman fallacy, that I didn't even think it merited being addressed much.
But if anyone feels that it has to be addressed: having such choices isn't even something video-games only. E.g., since another answer mentioned Manet's Olympia, I'm reminded of another famous nude and arguably the first to present a naked woman as just a naked woman and not some Venus or such: Goya's La Maja Desnuda. (The Naked Maja.) But the funny thing is, Goya also painted an otherwise identical painting of the same woman, in the same pose, on the same bed, only clothed this time: La Maja Vestida. (The Clothed Maja.) Basically you have the choice of the same woman clothed or naked.
Granted, it's only one choice, but it's still not much less than the choices you get in, say, a Japanese dating simulator.
Would someone's getting the choice to buy one or the other (I assume it must have been offered for sale at one point or another) make it non-art? I think even Ebert isn't prepared to call Goya's paintings not art.
While that certainly has merits, and we could discuss artistic currents more in depth for the rest of the afternoon, I think it doesn't change my main points. If deviating from prescribed art forms to paint a prostitute for pure erotic value is still art (and nobody would call Manet non-art), surely deviating to include an interactive element wouldn't be any worse.
That said, though:
1. I don't think Duchamp intended even that, judging by his actual interviews. He didn't try to question what is art and what isn't, and test boundaries, or whatever. He literally says that he wanted to destroy it all. His message was basically, "art is crap".
2. Well, for better or worse, that has become the dominant current in modern art. While technically dadaism is not _all_ of it, it has at least influenced all the other aspects of it in the graphical arts.
3. Well, I've been in teams in MMOs or generally online games which would qualify as dadaism, and made me question what is a raid, after all :p
E.g., the blaster (mage) pulls with an area-effect spell, and gets insta-killed, then complains that the tank should have gotten them off him in the about 0.5 seconds it took him to faceplant. The main healer appears bunnyhopping from a side corridor (WTF was she doing in another direction than the rest of the team?), screaming "help!" and pursued by an angry mob of NPCs. The secondary healer is busy pretending he's a mage and doing pitiful damage with his attacks, and never even heals himself. Seriously, having to bandage a "healer" when I'm one of the melee DPS-ers, is enough to make me question a lot of things. Another guy is running against a wall. And after the wipe is complete, the tank suddenly pipes up with, "soz, was afk. back now." :p
If that's not dadaism, I don't know what is ;)
Heck, I'll be the first to bemoan it myself, and I thought the tone of my post would make it pretty clear that I'm not exactly a fan of modern art. But nevertheless it _is_ called art, and the vast majority of the population seems to have no problem with that. Whatever meaning the word "art" has nowadays, obviously it _does_ include stuff like a signed urinal or a flickering TV in an empty room.
Not quite sure what you mean there, so I can't comment much. I'm certainly not dismissing the idea that 99% of modern art is garbage. (And the other 1% is savagely panned by critics for not being modern enough.) But nevertheless the common meaning of the word "art" nowadays does include them.
Since when did something have to be "good enough" to be art? I think that would come as a surprise to Duchamp and the whole modern art establishment he had spawned.
For whoever doesn't know the story, the whole modern art phenomenon started in 1917 with a guy called Marcel Duchamp, who signed an urinal and sent it to an art gallery under the title "Fountain."
It was not the first of Duchamp's "readymades", basically just objects he found and signed, but otherwise didn't even make or anything. The first was a found bicycle wheel he signed and displayed under the name "Bicycle Wheel" in 1913. Sometimes he at least used funny names for them, like titling a shovel "Prelude To A Broken Arm" in 1915, others were like that Bicycle Wheel. But the urinal is what became famous and redefined art.
The funny thing is that Duchamp spells it out in interviews, some even much much later, that he just wanted to destroy "art". He found the whole establishment to be little more than a circle-jerk clique (not his exact words, but the general gist of it) and obsessed with form above and beyond anything else. He wanted to destroy it all. His urinal was supposed to convey the message, basically, "your work is worth as much as this urinal to me."
But funnily that's not what the art world understood. The art world suddenly found itself trying to imitate the unconventionalism and shock value of that urinal. And it's been in that rut ever since.
And funnily enough everyone seems to still don't get what Duchamp actually did there, even if you show them an interview where he says it himself. E.g., I remember an interview with Michael Craig where he explains that Duchamp actually wanted to show that even everyday objects can be beautiful and art. (No, he didn't.)
In the meantime we have a fine arts establishment where a stack of bricks is called art. A tent made of PVC tubes is art. A set of 4 folded and straightened sheets of paper is called art. (No, really, I've actually seen exactly and literally that in someone's private collection.) A glass of water on a shelf is art. Or a hack like Hirst can pay someone else to put a grid of random coloured dots on a rectangle, sign it and not only get it called art, but be acclaimed for it. (Here's one sample of his 300+ pictures made of dots: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/08/Hirst-LSD.jpg.) A rectangular box made of sheet metal can be called art. A flickering TV in an empty room can be called art. A crucifix in a jar of piss can be called art.
We're in a world where calling someone's work "pretty" is the most grievous insult you can get away with in front of a professor, in some arts colleges. But it is an insult and use it only if you want to make an enemy. Nowadays you don't want "pretty", you want "thought provoking", and "original", and such.
So Ebert is, what, telling me that it isn't art because it's completely unlike what he calls art? Has he checked with the aforementioned modern art establishment? Because it seems to me like that being different is exactly what would make it "art" there.
(And I've played plenty of games which fit the "thought provoking" criterion too. But then I'm the kind of guy easily provoked in that aspect. E.g., Chucky Egg provoked much thought about the struggle of the working class against the oppressor chickens.;))
Heck, probably the best example is another painting I've seen in someone's private collection. Essentially it looked like a screenshot of Tetris. No, literally. I'm not exaggerating. Yes, I know what "literally" means. I mean it. It looked not just sorta like Tetris, but exactly like a screenshot of Tetris. Well, except for the part that in actual Tetris two rows should have been removed because they were full, but obviously on the painting they hadn't been. I wonder if it was supposed to be symbolic of the unfairness of life or something ;)
So basically, let me get that straight: _that_ is art, or so I'm told, but Ebert tells me that if it were actually animated as a game of Tetris, it wouldn't be art any more? Why? It's the same image.
The fact that they only mention "jobs" without distinction for what job level or type, and can include arts and communication skills majors in the same statistics make me think it might be a more mundane aspect to it than "CS graduates are less employable."
More likely, some 17% of CS graduates are holding out for some programming job or higher, whereas an arts or women's studies graduate quickly comes to terms with getting a job as a receptionist or even a McDonald's job. It's not hard to notice that there are very few jobs as, say, an anthropologist studying the natives on some fabulous vacation island, or as some deluxe lobbyist for women's equality in Washington. And even if one still clings to that delusion in the long run, it's pretty obvious that another source of income will be needed until such a job becomes available.
Basically in fact a lot of the CS graduates are simply competing for a very specific slice of the employment market, with a much smaller pool of jobs. And most likely are actually _more_ employable on that slice, and no less employable than an arts or anthropology graduate in the kind of McDonald's jobs most of those will get.
And that is also not taking into account that a lot of CS and EE graduates actually have an even narrower slice in mind. E.g., most want a job making computer games, and precious few want one of those boring jobs that involve databases and java and writing unit tests. Or the elder gods forbid, maintaining a cobol program on some mainframe. Not only that has driven down wages in the games industry, but there still simply aren't half as many jobs as people who want them. A lot will spend those 6 months or a large part thereof, still hoping that Blizzard or Epic or Id will hire them, and inflate that unemployment number.
And then there are those who think they're so smart, that anything short of directly starting as senior architect and/or a 6 figure starting wage, is waay below them and in fact outright demeaning. 'Cause, you know, their mommy always told them they're so smart, and besides they wrote the most compact bubble-sort in college, _and_ had a submission to the obfuscated C contest too. So they know all about how your programs should be made, obviously. And they even used "emerge" to compile a Gentoo distro once, which makes them practically kernel hackers, right? Needless to say, some of those inflate the unemployment figure too.
While I can understand or at least guess the rationale behind it, it does break immersion every time it happens. Suddenly the game rules have temporarily changed to something completely different. It's like suddenly entering a room where you walk on the ceiling, or clicking on a link and on that site alone you have the toolbar browser on the bottom and the URL field disabled.
It's stuff you notice because it's different from what you've been conditioned to do without even thinking any more. The whole game I've essentially learned that if someone is wounded, I hit the heal spell. And not just in that game, but in every game I've played or could control a healer.
And I've already suspended disbelief in a reality where magic works and is an integral part of. We're not even talking Tolkien like worlds where there are two mages total, and they cast nothing more useful than making a staff's tip glow, but worlds where mages and clerics are a dime a dozen and every peasant goes to one when he has the sniffles. And if somehow you don't have one around, you could have been run through and had an arm lopped off, and one night of good sleep will fix that too. And suddenly all that doesn't work like that any more, and I have to suspend disbelief in why it doesn't work in this particular situation.
And sometimes it really works by neither RL nor normal game rules. E.g., in Dragon Age Origins, when you meet that guy who basically gives you the quest to buy the Return To Ostagar DLC. (Yeah, they took nickel-and-diming the players that far. Now you have NPCs in the game telling you to fork over more RL money. And don't get me started on how much _that_ breaks suspension of disbelief.) That guy has been run through an left for dead, but he neither just stays unconscious RL-like, nor can be healed as per the normal game rules. You can revive him well enough to have a long and coherent conversation, but not well enough to actually stay alive.
And, you know, I'm starting to find it lazy. They could always find some in game explanation for why that guy can't be healed. E.g., in Persona when they have to poke one of your characters unhealable, they actually have the bad guy prepare a spear that causes unhealable wounds.
It's not even something outlandish. People actually believed that kind of thing IRL about various "magical" wepons. E.g., about the Crocea Mors sword of Julius Caesar. Any wound from it, no matter how superficial, kills. Or Persona essentially uses the Holy Lance in that role. (I've said "prepare" it previously, in that the setup of the game is basically reality by consensus. If enough people believe something, then it is real. So if you could get enough people to believe that you have the Holy Lance, then that spear _is_ the Holy Lance.)
Heck, historically people believed all sorts of bogus stuff about various pieces of weaponry. We have good weapons, evil weapons, weapons that can't be sheathed back unless they tasted blood, etc. And those were people who would have had more reason to doubt it. In a game where we're already conditioned to suspend disbelief, how hard would it be to have some makeshift explanation for why that wound can't be healed.
Or poison, now that's a low hanging fruit. Some special rare poison that can't be healed except by extraordinary means. Heck, it's the whole setup for Silverthorn, so if it was good enough for a novel, it must work in a game too, right?
Nobody said not to balance. All that the OP was saying is that it still leaves a bunch of the population for which nothing is balanced.
Sorry,two wrongs don't make a right. Plus, spare me the BS please. He's not proposing to deny you gay marriage or anything, he's just just saying basically that compensating that tax for one particular slice is still leaving out a whole other lot of slices which, for all practical purposes, are just as married.
It seems strange to me to see reactions basically boiling down to "booyah, now it's your turn to suck it up." Unless he is one of those that actually did anything against you in the first place, two wrongs just don't make a right.
And basically you're trying to prove what? That gays can be just as much self-centered pricks as the fundies on the other side? We already knew that. After all the most vehement anti-gay preachers turned out to _be_ gay.