Are you kidding? Companies reinvent themselves all the time, sometimes not even for good reason. Especially when a new boss comes around, he just _has_ to piss on everything to mark his territory. Whole processes get turned on their head just because the new guy has to show vision and initiative.
To it, Caldera went from an obscure Linux distribution, to a major proponent of Linux standardization, to buying the SCO name and reinventing itself as an expensive Unix vendor, then to the litigation clown we all love to hate. Volkswagen went through a phase of trying to reinvent itself as a luxury executive automobile maker. (Yeah, 'cause executives so wanted to drive a car made by someone called "People's Car" and associated with the el-cheapo old Beetle.) Sun went from "Linux ftl, proprietary lock in FTW", to "Ok, ok, we love open source. No, seriously." With an embarassing schizophrenic phase in between, where they'd say one in the morning and the other in the same day's evening. With an even more crazy stint of trying to just convince everyone to fight against MS, instead of telling them why they should buy a Sun server. Coke had the New Coke episode, which although it worked spectacularly in their favour in the end (something they hadn't foreseen, much less planned), but involved one of the most absurd changes to their main product out of nowhere. Etc, etc, etc.
Now some of those stunts paid off, some were outright retarded, and some just settled into something everyone forgot about.
And for each executive who earned his big bucks through some visionary change, there were a lot which just got lucky against all odds and in spite of doing something clueless (see New Coke again), and a lot which just siphoned tens of millions per year in salary and stock options while sending the company circling the drain. But I digress.
Anyway, I'd praise those who actually did a good change, not change generally. Change is easy. Cut one of your legs and put on a peg leg. That's change. And people do that kind of idiotic change all the time, either privately or at the helm of some company or division. Figuring out something that works well, now that is harder and more worthy of praise.
I think the hedgehog has nothing to do with it
on
The Evolution of Sega
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I don't think the hedgehog has anything to do with it. The top factors in console wars, from what I can tell are:
1. Fanboyism. I swear some people should have been born dogs, the way they must dedicate their life to some Master.
2. Us-vs-them mentalities. If you can't have both consoles, you already have a criterion by which to divide the world into an "us" camp and a "they" camp. 'Nuff said.
3. Probably actually the root of both above: Cognitive dissonance. People tend to be the most rabid in either defending or attacking something, when that position is the least easy to defend or makes no sense. And again, a lot of people couldn't have both, either because mommy doesn't buy both, or because they can't justify to themselves buying both. But in the willy-waving contest that a status-based culture is, they don't want to admit something like "well, I'm kinda tempted by game X too, but I can't afford console Y too". That kind of admission is, essentially, an admission of failure. Not many people are going to admit _that_. So they rebuild the whole mental model into something that's actually a proclamation of being some kind of elite. E.g., "pfft, game X sucks, console Y sucks, heck everything that company does is pure shit, and only idiots fall for their hype."
It's just a function of the mammal brain to try to keep the model consistent. (See the recent experiment with monkeys.) Where Mother Nature failed though, was foreseeing that humans will base their whole status, self-esteem or "face" on some notions being a priori, unquestionably true. And if one notion is beyond questioning, something _else_ will have to give. If someone's model is based on "I'm t3h 31337" or "my decisions are right, dammit" (e.g., the decision to buy console A instead of console B), and some memory or situation challenges that, they'll rewrite some other piece of history or reality to make the model consistent again.
You can see all 3 at work, or various perversions thereof, in any other such situation. PC vs consoles, PC vs Mac, 3dfx fanboys vs nVidiots (as both sides fondly called each other back then), and a bunch of others. Not saying that _all_ such arguments are bunk, far from it, but I _am_ under the distinct impression that the most rabid fanboys are putting up that unmovable faith show more to keep themselves convinced than for the benefit of the readers.
So, anyway, to get back to Sega, they ceased to be the "enemy", the moment they weren't competition any more. In all 3 aspects, it made no sense to be against Sega any more.
Fanboyism: Sega wasn't one of the choices for a fanboy's Master any more. In fact, it became an orthogonal choice entirely. So there was no need any more to be against it if you chose Sony or Nintendo instead.
Us-vs-Them: Ditto. You could be one of Sony's or Nintendo's faithful, and still play a Sega game. It became a lot harder to draw a neat line where Sega falls in the "them" camp.
Cognitive Dissonance: well, there was no more need to justify why not buy a Sega console and play, say, PSO. You could just get PSO on the GameCube or XBox or whatever. There was no more need to plug a leaky mental model with a "Sega sucks" bandaid. And thus no need to defend that fragile bandaid at all cost, lest the whole edifice come crashing down around your ears.
Agree wholeheartedly. But if you're gonna take the creation metaphorically, then why take the deity literally...
So don't. My argument was merely that we can't prove that _a_ god can't possibly exist.
Plus, you'll notice that my beardie-nerd-in-the-sky example isn't literally the christian god, although it is very loosely based on it.
The creator of a simulation is still restrained *as regards the simulation* by the parameters of that simulation. A human being, obviously, is not restrained literally by his or her creating an online avatar, but he or she *is* constrained in his or her ability to act with that avatar inside that particular virtual world by the rules governing avatars.
Duly noted, and as I was saying somewhere else, he won't be _literally_ omnipotent. There are some restrictions, some of which you've correctly noted.
But as someone who's been a coder on a MUD and nearly managed to program another one from scratch (before getting bored and giving up), I can assure you that those restrictions are more loose than you have to think. The rules governing avatars are very very loose, when you're the one who wrote those rules and can change them on a whim.
Plus there's a lot of stuff you can do by simply editing files online or offline, completely unconstrained by the limitations of an avatar. If you want to create, say, a talking sword, just fire up your favourite text editor and program one. Or if you want to raise the sea level to above Mt Everest to wipe humanity, I doubt you'll be using your in-game avatar for that. Why would you? Instead of wondering how you can make your avatar able to command the sea, just open up an editor and code that change. Most of my building was done that way.
Funnily, you'll notice that the christian god never made an avatar, so he wasn't constrained by that anyway. He's adamant that no, you can't see his face. He can do all sorts of miraculous stuff in the world, but you can never see _him_. It would very much fit a god _outside_ our universe.
Mind you, I'm not saying you should believe in one, much less which one. Just that, as idle intellectual exercises go, being the coder and admin of an online world gives you quite a bit of freedom and power. (Though if anyone will want to play your game, that's another good question.)
And if we were to extend the programming metaphor, if a creator/designer were to write himself up a world, he or she is still constrained by the relative power, expressiveness, and syntax of the language by which the world is written.
Indeed, but to some extent it's again not that much of a limit. As someone who's started from assembly and went through two dozen languages or so (about half as idle curiosity only), I'd say as long as it's Turing-complete (for the pedants: in the loose sense, without also requiring infinite memory), you can find a way around its limitations.
And, pointedly, this argument isn't happening in a vacuum (with hypothetical religions and hypothetical deities) but with actual posited deities of actual religions.
Actually, mine was just a hypothetical exercise. Pretty much just saying that _a_ god could exist, and the programmer example was just one of the possible examples. Whether it also fits any particular religion, is no longer my concern.
Many of whom, I feel compelled to point out, argue that they are *consistent* and *do not alter their mind/decisions*. Which blows all to hell the fun intellectual exercise of a God who decides one day to change the rules.
I don't know any god like that, but then it's been a decade since I've read a bit on the history of religions.
The christian God, for example, _did_ change his mind repeatedly. One moment he's against pork, the next moment he changes his mind about it 'cause he wants to feed Peter. One moment he's still pissed of
Well, allegedly some dude and his wife saw the flood first hand. Some other dudes, in fact, a whole people, were fed by mysteriously appearing food for 40 years. Yet other dudes could swear they saw Jesus walk on water and raise the dead and cure the sick.
On yet another hand, other dudes, in fact a whole coalition of them, claim they fought under the magical walls of Troy and personally swung swords and shot arrows against a guy whose skin was tougher than the finest bronze weapons they had. Some people supposedly witnessed the pretty amazing feats of the son of Zeus.
And yet more disturbingly, the Swedish medieval army saw Odin in person as late as the early 13'th century AD. In fact, supposedly he personally led the charge of the Swedish cavalry at the Battle of Lena. And we also have the testimony of the village smith who shod Sleipnir (Odin's 8-legged horse) the previous night. That's supposedly seven to ten thousand Swedes, and up to eighteen thousand Danes who saw him.
Now whether you want to believe them, and which set of them at that, that's another question. A better one in fact.
Very much so, indeed. I'm not saying you should believe in a god (it only encourages them;), much less in which. Just that people can't really make the popular claims of "science proves god doesn't exist" or "science puts limits on what a god can do."
Basically, the only real justifiable position in my book is agnosticism, rather than rabid atheism. We don't know who dun it, or if anyone dun it. Maybe it was the Invisible Pink Unicorn. Maybe it was your cat. I'd keep my eyes on the little furry barstard, just in case he wants to nerf us any time soon;)
1. You can hear a CRT TV because of the line sync frequency is actually very much in the audible spectrum. I don't know of anything even remotely similar for cell phones.
2. More importantly: they invariably _can't_ detect cell phones in a double blind test. That's really the damning bit.
Such shenanigans would count as 'massive deception'. [...] That kind of behaviour makes God a liar and a fraud, which is not the kind of thing most theists like to believe in.
If we're talking about the God of Judaism and Christianity, he's the same guy who gave commandments like "Thou shalt not kill" and "You shall not covet your neighbours house; you shall not covet your neighbours wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbour."... while leading the same people to Palestine to kill the original inhabitants of it and take their land. The promised land wasn't exactly empty, you see.
It's also the guy who commanded Abraham to sacrifice his son, just to see if he'd actually do it. Then it turns out it was just one hell of a practical joke.
And that's not even getting into more philosophical discussions about the world he created and how it set the stage and created the necessity for most of the sins he then condemned.
He's not that nice a guy. So a bit of deceit wouldn't really stand out, in all that.
Plus, you can think of it as "storytelling" rather than "deceit", if it makes you feel any better. Same as how Blizzard tells you that Stormwind was destroyed and rebuilt once, but in WoW that never actually happened in-game. It's back story. But the new "universe" started directly with the rebuilt one. Or like when your D&D GM tells you something like "you're in a grand ballroom, in front of a festive table on which servants pile up roast boar and exotic fruits", when you can see that you're in his basement and the only food around is some cold pizza;)
If God has been intervening in the Universe, he has been doing so in such a way as to conceal his own involvement.
Actually, I don't know... if we're still talking about the same guy, I don't think he bothered making any excuses or cover-ups about breaking his own rules. He's outright proud of a miraculous genocide or two (the flood, or Sodom and Gommorah), and the list is actually much bigger.
If, for instance, he created the world in seven days in 4004 BC, then he retconned in 13.7 billion years of entirely synthetic history.
To stick to the WoW example, Blizzard created the world of Azeroth complete with a history stretching waay back to outright evolution scales. (E.g., back to the time when the elves as a species split from the trolls.) It created it full of ancient ruins, million-year-old dinosaur skeletons, and NPCs and artefacts telling stories from way before the game got actually launched. The game is, what? A couple of years old? Yet it has a history that goes thousands of years before even a line of code of it existed.
Are Blizzard a bunch of liars and frauds? (Well, ok, some disgruntled ex-WoW-players would probably say so.)
Using this thought process though means god exists in a pre-existing universe in which he creates his own, which must be bound by laws and thus he is not really all powerful.
Well, he won't be truly and literally omnipotent, that much is obvious.
On the other hand, in his created universe, he can be very, extremely, incredibly, hideously powerful. He can annihilate the whole universe instantly, any time he wants to. (You know, "rm -rf".) That's pretty damned powerful, if you ask me. He can raise mountains by clicking and dragging a piece of terrain. He can boil the seas, turn off gravity, cover a whole world in trillions of tons of extra water out of nowhere, mess with the language code just because he was bored (see the Tower of Babel episode), or almost anything else he might ever wish. In fact, for a programmer, all those miracles are actually the _easy_ stuff. Changing the sea level is boringly trivial, compared to, say, programming the AI for those critters in the first place.
Again, it won't be literally omnipotent. But it's as close to it as you can get. And it's actually a lot more powerful than most christians imagine their God to be, if you think about it. Most people have a much more limited understanding of what "omnipotent" really means.
Of course a good developer of games would put rules in place to control what he can and can't do once the game has 'gone live'. So maybe god respects the laws of physics simply because he wants to.
Well, in an ideal world that would be the case. But having played plenty of MUDs and MMOs, I also know that it can't really be taken for granted. Maybe the laws of physics stayed the same from day one. Or maybe what we see here is simply the result after a thousand patches, three expansion packs, and a dozen nerfs:P For all we know, there could be a few message boards out there where people whine about how the devs nerfed Earth Online in the Industrial Age expansion pack, and how they want the old game system back.
Another thought is the first thing the christian god did was create light, he didn't create the rules to govern how light behaved, so maybe physics has always existed, even before god did anything.
Well, you have to also think about how you'd explain it to a goat herdsman from the early Bronze Age. I mean, try explaining your old grandma how you programmed something. Now realize that she's _much_ more educated than said goat herdsman from the early Bronze Age.
I mean, heh, I can imagine it:
God: "So anyway, I say to myself, dude, nobody's going to be impressed by a black screen. You need to see something there. So I started by messing up with some old Transform And Lighting code." Moses: "Curse my feeble mortal mind, Lord, I didn't understand a word." God: "Uh, dude, you know, I needed to be able to see the world as I create it and stuff. 'Cause, you know, without it there was nothing to see." Moses: "Ah, that's why the lighting, Lord? And what was that other thing? Transform?" God: "Eh, let's leave it at light for now. You couldn't see anything before, right? I mean, without that, the whole thing doesn't even _have_ a shape." (Moses takes notes: "And the earth was without form, and void") Moses: "And you were saying something about code, my Lord? You mean, like when you write something on a strip of papyrus wrapped around a staff and..." God: "Uh, no, dude, like program code." (Gah, how do I explain it to this dude?) "Like, I told the computer... err... I told your _world_ what to do. It does exactly what I tell it to do. And I told it I wanted to see some lighting." (Moses takes notes: "And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.") Moses: "And did it please you, Lord?" God: "Heck yeah. Done myself proud, if I can say so myself." (Moses takes notes: "And God saw the light, that it was good") God: "So, anyway, then I added some shadows, just to make it pretty." (Moses takes notes: "and God divided the light from the darkness")
I'm not religious myself, but just to play the devil's advocate:
1. Belief that it's all a metaphor doesn't necessarily make one any less religious. Saint Augustine argued exactly that: that the whole genesis is a metaphor and only an idiot would take it literally. He got sanctified by the Catholic Church. So...
2. (A possible) God doesn't have to obey his own rules, or exist _inside_ the universe he created.
Think of (a possible) God in terms of, say, a game programmer. Let's say you're this uber genius nerd in a CS university, you're bored enough one week and write the uber-universe simulation. Sort of like a SimCity or Children Of The Nile or The Sims 2 or Spore. Except let's say you're really really smart and have an uber-computer and those little creatures on your screen actually go sentient.
Now think about your position in the universe you just created. You're entirely outside it. In fact, there's no way for you to ever be _in_ it. You could create a character in that world, but it won't be _you_.
Also realize that whatever rules you set there, don't apply to _you_. E.g., if you set those creatures to no longer need to eat, it doesn't mean _you_ also suddenly don't.
Now also realize that you didn't sign any contract or anything. You can change the program's rules or bypass them any time you feel like it. If you want to raise a mountain over there, or have a jolly good flood, who's to stop you? Conservation of mass and energy? You can just change a variable and create more mass and energy. And if a bunch of those simulated people nailed your avatar to a cross, pfft, who's to keep you from resurrecting that char? Laws of biology? Pfft. You wrote the laws of their biology, and can amend them. Or change a bit in the database and have that guy up and kicking like nothing ever happened to him.
Or if that's too hard to palate, think Blizzard and WoW. All Blizzard employees exist outside of the world of Azeroth. In fact, they can't ever really be _in_ that world. They can create characters there, but the real "gods" at Blizzard are and remain fundamentally outside the world they created, and are not subject to their own laws. If they want to do something as mysterious and supernatural as creating a whole new island, or indeed a whole new planet out of nowhere (see the Burning Crusade launch), who's to keep them? If they don't like their own rules, who's to keep them from changing those rules?
What is it, 95% believe in a supreme being? Not that believing in a supreme being is compromised by understanding the results of science. Oh no.
Actually, if they otherwise put their faith in double-blind tests or whatever sound methodology, I couldn't care less if they also believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster or the Invisible Pink Unicorn or whatever.
But the most worrisome phenomenon is the large mass of people believing in homeopathy, magic (as in, that you can actually change the universe by refusing to believe it's really like that), natural snake oils, conspiracy-theory science, and the like.
I mean, seriously, there are people buying wooden volume knobs and $500 ethernet cables, believing that it makes their MP3s sound better. (I mean, an MP3 is already digital and a network cable transmits digital information. A 1 is a 1 is a 1, and 0 is a 0 is a 0. It doesn't sound "warmer" or "more natural".) At least one on the Hardware Central forums believed he can hear differences in how MP3's sound, based on the hard drive brand. And not because of hard drive noise or interference, but because the magnetic coating somehow makes a difference, like in old cassettes.
There are people who believe that power lines cause brain cancer. Or that they can detect a turned on cell phone by getting a headache near one.
There are people who think that "natural" minerals are healthier, and that, say, salt processed industrially has mollecules that are unnaturally round and regular, and can't be processed as well by the body.
There are people who drink water with extra O2 in it and think it actually makes a difference in how well oxygenated their body is. As if would even make a difference. (No, seriously, calculate it.)
Etc.
And while I'd love to point fingers and laugh at the USA, trust me, it's no better in Europe.
And anyway, that should already tell anyone all they need to know about voters and science. The above mentioned people have a right to vote too, you know.
Ivins began working late nights in the weeks prior to the anthrax mailings -- he apparently claimed he had trouble at home and found solace in his work which the FBI apparently found absurd;
Absurd, eh? And what have we learned here? Never do overtime.
If you'd rather stare into a flask than see your wife again, do yourself a favour and go get wasted at the pub. Sure, it ruins your liver, but so does Tylenol. Or get a mistress. Get a divorce. But for the love of Bast, don't be the last guy at the office.
Sure, you may think you're an IT dude, no way someone would link anthrax to your servers. Right? We'll see who laughs last when some idiot script kiddie defaces a DOD web server, and people go "OMG, it was in the same county as a computer which controls the nukes! The hacker mastermind must have planned to reprogram the computer to load itself into a truck, drive there and plug itself into the secure network! It's teh Al Qaeda! Terrorism! Jihad! Concerted attack on our freedoms! It's those dastardly... umm... hey, Jack, which country has oil and we didn't bomb already? Right, it was those dastardly Canadians and their false prophet!"
So leave Slashdot, close that SSH window, turn off the computer (is the uptime willy-waving worth someone inferring that you must have been there if the computer was up and doing stuff on the servers?), tell a bunch of co-workers "good bye" and walk out that door. Yes, you can do it. For the love of all that's good and holy, walk out that door.
And if your boss doesn't like it, tell him you're doing your patriotic duty. When that arab genius mastermind hacks a computer to load itself into a truck and drive to a nuke base, the CIA can chase him instead of wasting valuable time and resources on chasing you. It would be unpatriotic to interfere with their investigation by setting yourself up as a decoy. The future of democracy and freedom may depend on it. If you don't do it, the terrorists win!
TBH, I fail to see why that's a bad thing anyway, assuming that our goal _is_ to give all people the best education we can. (No kid left behind, etc.) As opposed to, say, a some fucked-up kind of show-business to make under-achieving parents of under-achieving children feel better.
Well, or let me better qualify "bad thing." I don't think it's worse than putting everyone in the same classroom and then dumbing it down to the level where even the... _special_ kid on the right can feel special for being able to draw doodles like everyone else.
Most (all?) of Europe isn't afraid to separate kids by skill level, at least at high school level. It wasn't just the USSR and co. I don't think it caused anything bad, so far. Even the USSR and its satellite states, for all we see their economical failures, look around you how many of your co-workers come from their universities. They managed to produce some well educated people. (Then they failed to use them, but that's a different failure.)
Splitting by learning method actually seems to me like the logical next step. Instead of dumping someone into the lowest bracket just because their wiring doesn't fit the teachers' style, maybe there is some other way of teaching them stuff.
And before it sounds like either a nerd-elitist opinion or conversely some kind of plot to isolate and oppress nerds, remember that ADHD and Aspergers' aren't all roses even as educational prospects go. For each ADHD kid that's found his niche with his home computer, there are a couple who just flunk because they just simply get bored to tears in classroom. For each Aspie who's become some great programmer or physicist, there'll be one or two who just got bullied around and discouraged, and maybe backed into some useless interest (as an Aspie you _will_ have a very narrow focus of interest) like remembering all the football scores since 1900. Or flunked because their narrow interests didn't include geography and victorian english literature and God knows what else. Maybe we can guide them down a better path.
Even for neurotypicals, well, maybe they can do better if they don't have to compete with the local autism-spectrum disorder kid. Or at least find a better passtime than taunting the nerd.
It won't be a neat 70/30 split, duly noted, but it will be a good start anyway. We don't build all tools the exact same way, we don't raise all animals the same way (raising chicken can be slightly different from raising sheep), we don't plant all plants the same way, so, umm, I fail to see why we must teach everyone the same way _if_ we have enough proof that their brains do work differently.
It will be more expensive, though. That much is obvious.
The European versions of FO1 and FO2 were edited/censored to remove the ability to kill children. I'm not necessarily a proponent of censorship, but it wasn't like the game was really missing anything.
I've played both the US version and the censored German version, and the censored problem had a few more problems. They hadn't only removed the ability to kill children, they had removed all children from the game outright.
Which now caused a few quests to be broken. E.g., you couldn't find the kid in the well, because there was no kid.
Some things were removed so brutally that it caused even more bugginess than the game had anyway. E.g., at the vault in the north-east, the kid with the doll was missing, but his idle chat would keep happening, because the game script thought he's still there.
Some of the alternate ways to solve other stuff also got broken in the process. E.g., once you got to the next town, now you couldn't have that kid's wrench.
So I'm not saying it was necessarily fatal, but saying that it's not really missing anything... is a bit mis-leading too, IMHO.
Well, I'm not the GP poster, but I think he meant, like many of use SW fans, a good SW game. Note the keyword there.
Actually screw that. We just want a Star Wars game. SWG wasn't even that, when you get at the bottom of it.
SWG from the start was not just incompetently done, but mostly a merchandising exercise. You know, like printing Darth Vader's head on a t-shirt. It doesn't really make it a better t-shirt, nor really SW equipment, it just serves to sell more copies and more expensive.
SW was launched as little more than a SW-themed DIKU MUD with graphics and lots of empty, generic, fractal-generated terrain, but (here's the important part) without vehicles, starships or Jedi. That tells you from the start how well the dev team and Raph Koster understood either SW or their target market segment. It's been a race against time from there to figure out how to put Jedi in, for example, and went from one clusterfucked abomination to the next clusterfucked abomination as results went.
And while the big gripe is gameplay, let's not forget that it wasn't very SW either. Their "solutions" to everyone wanting to be a Jedi was worse lore-wise than the problem. They required you to be already an accomplished and skilled adult before anyone trained you as a Jedi. Hello? That was exactly what they tried to avoid: training someone who's already used to taking all the wrong approaches, and has all the wrong reflexes.
Duly noted, it was the only MMO which allowed a flexible character build. It gets kudos for that, and many people stayed because of that. Many still remember it fondly because of that. But was its only merit.
And there was nothing particularly SW about that either. You could transplant the same system to a high-fantasy MMO and it would work just the same. Heck, something similar worked in Oblivion.
The NGE just managed to make it worse, and God knows that's an accomplishment. It's akin to making a rotten corpse even less sexy.
And again, it became an even more exercise in merchandising. Signature characters are used even more willy-nilly, in places and situations that make no sense for them, like in bad fanfic.
(Though if it makes anyone feel better, the actual game ignores not just the official lore, but also everything that their own tutorial told you half an hour ago.)
So, well, I think all of us SW nerds can be excused for wishing for a SW game, not for SWG.
Not just that, but it's sorta funny when you look at the mitochondrial DNA (inherited strictly from the mother) vs Y chromosome mutations (inherited strictly from the father) for any human invasions or migrations, all the way to the earliest tribes. Invariably you can track the Y chromosome mutations sweeping across the land with the invasion, but the mitochondrial DNA tends to lag behind or even stay put.
Virtually all migrations and invasions _fucked_ their way across a continent. They displaced or killed the males, but then proceeded to "recycle" the newly widdowed women.
It makes sense too, since for most of human history females had a life expectancy of about 2/3 that of men. Birth and birth complications took a pretty heavy toll. So there'd be a steady supply of widdowed men who are still young and horny. You know, given that their life expectancy wasn't high enough to reach andropause. That was in fact a major cause of tribal warfare, and as late as ancient Rome and Greece we find it documented that getting women was an integral part of warfare.
The Romans, for example, demanded women from the defeated Teutones in IIRC 102 BC, in an infamous episode remembered mostly because the german women killed their children and commited suicide rather than comply. They first begged to be at least used to tend the temples of Ceres and Vesta instead, but the Romans refused, and the rest is history.
So indeed it would be mighty peculiar if the same pattern didn't apply to Neanderthals. The offspring must have been sterile or non-viable.
That may be so, but we have plenty of signs that Neanderthals were every bit as evolved as the Cro-Magnons (humans) at the same time.
They did use fire. In fact, occasionally they seem to have even used coal, something Homo Sapiens never really got into until Renaissance. They also cut down trees and used wood extensively. They skinned animals and used the skins. They used traps to hunt, in addition to spears. They built elaborate shelters. Their weapons and tools are every bit as evolved as those of the Cro-Magnons, and they too used tools to build other tools. (A chimp may sharpen a stick into an ad-hoc tool or weapon, and then discard it. Humans and Neanderthals built a wooden mallet to chip a flint axe, to cut a branch, to make a spear. Then keep them.) There are signs of _some_ work specialization, which also involves at least some societal organization and maybe even some primitive trade. (As in, I'll give you a leg of antelope if you make me a good spear.) They not only buried their dead, but there are signs of using grave goods and basically ritual burial. That alone hints at some primitive religion and a concept of afterlife. (You don't bury someone with food and weapons if you expect that he's just dead and rotting, and has essentially just ceased to exist.) But, at the very least, it means they probably had a few abstract concepts there, like remorse. We found stuff from them like a femur with holes drilled in it, very likely a primitive flute or such. They seemed to have decorated themselves with primitive jewellery and paints. That's a few more abstract concepts you need for those. Etc.
Basically, seriously, it's every bit on par with primitive Homo Sapiens. Go look at some forgotten tribe in the Amazon, like the recent ones who were trying to shoot arrows and chuck spears at a helicopter, and the Neanderthals weren't any less advanced than those.
The _only_ puzzling shortcoming about Neanderthals, is that there we found no missile weapons from them, nor any sign that they ever used missile weapons. Which may point at some shortcoming of their brain after all. Still, I wouldn't qualify someone as non-sentient, after they did all I've listed above and more, just because they can't do ballistics.
Quoth the summary: "Neanderthal brains were on average larger than those of modern humans." I'm sure comparing them to those is insulting the Neanderthals;)
Well, while theoretically I see your point, sometimes that's harder than it sounds. And in this case it just didn't happen. The computer did _not_ in fact even play at master level at all.
I think what everyone seems to miss is that the computer was given a 9 stone head-start there.
That's not exactly identical, but similar enough for a bad analogy, with being allowed to move 9 times in a chess game before the opponent even starts. So with that huge advantage, your program managed to beat a chess master. Yay. Big f-ing deal.
No, seriously. A 9 move advantage is _immense_. The first moves are where you stake your claims and influence over whole quarters of the board. If you look at the start of that game, white from the start had to challenge relatively strong positions of the computer. (For that stage of the game.)
At any rate, at professional levels ("dan"), it's played with 1 handicap stone for every 3 ranks! So a 2 dan player would only get 2 stones head start against the master in TFA. The computer got 9. Assuming that the game was relatively even matched, that would put the computer's skill barely above the line between casual player and intermediate player.
To give a chess comparison again, it barely ranks above winning a chess game against your high school's prom queen. Ok, ok, a little higher than that, but not by much.
Mind you, it's still an achievement that they managed to program it to even play at intermediate level. Kudos and all that. But let's get not get too carried away with the "OMG, it beat a go master" line of thought. We can celebrate that when it beats one in an even game. We're still _far_ from that.
O.K. Then riddle me this: why do _women_ watch porn, if it's strictly about men having power over them? Depending on what study you want to believe, even a _lot_ of women. One study claimed that 87% (yes, eighty-seven percent) of women aged 25 to 39 watch porn. I find that a bit _too_ high to believe, but there you go. Another claim, and from an ACLU activist woman no less, claimed that 40% of porn rentals in the USA are women, for a total of some 160 million videos per year. An erotica magazine claimed the same 40% women among its subscribers. So, you know, us men barely score 50% higher than women in porn rentals (60% rentals by men, vs 40% by women.) Go figure.
So, you know, why _do_ so many women watch it then? Some even pay for it (e.g., rentals.) Go figure. You'd think that something that blatantly and obviously about power over women, wouldn't turn so many women on. Are so many of you gals secretly masochistic, or what? Or maybe it's not that clear cut at all that having sex is some kind of humiliation and torture?
Not the power of women over men, as one poster claims. If porn was about sex, why would the most popular pornography be all about humiliation, violence, and torture?
No offense, but I'd like to see some statistics about that "most popular" claim. Just how much of you find on the internet, doesn't say much about how many people watch that, let alone make it their primary motive there. Catering to niches can be sometimes disproportionately more represented.
Point in case: gay porn. Pretty much _everywhere_ you turn, you find gay porn thumbnails, although only 10% of the population are gay. A lot of us males actually lose erection at the sight of that, and, at least in the USA, I get the idea that a large segment of the population is outright homophobe. But judging by availability on the net, you'd think the majority of the people get off on male homosexuality. Sometimes extrapolating from an unrepresentative sample gets you that kind of thing.
At any rate, even so, the vast majority of porn _I_ found doesn't involve any pain or humiliation. Maybe because I'm not looking for that kind of thing. There _is_ plenty of it on the net, but not a majority by any reckoning, and, again, there's actually more gay porn than that. See the previous paragraph.
Porn is fulfilling and perpetuating a fantasy of punishing women.
Just repeating it doesn't make it true. There's more than one kind of porn, you know? Much as I hate to rain on your self-righteous parrade (ok, ok, I don't), but not all porn is about punishing anyone in any way.
Porn isn't sex. Pornography is pimps and johns, outsourced and mass-mediated. When you masturbate to pornography, you are buying a prostitute. The fact that there are technologies of film or video between you and the pimp doesn't change the equation. You're still just a john.
That may be so, but prostitution doesn't necessarily involve violence either. Pretty much everyone who goes to a brothel here (yes, they're legal), goes there for a fuck. You _can't_ get abusive to the gals there, any more than you could on a woman on the street, because the cops then want to get in the act. And they're as unionized as anything else here.
So basically again you're projecting your own androphobe ideas there, and have to see humiliation and abuse because that's what you already decided to see. In practice it's a bunch of women who do that of their own free will, same as any other job, and are decently paid for it.
This is what porn is really about:
I'd like to really show what I believe the men want to see: violence against women. I firmly believe that we serve a purpose by showing that. The most violent we can get is the cum shot in the face. Men get off behind that, because they get even with the women they
Maybe all that porn watching addled his tiny mind. Maybe he believes he is allowed to do anything he wants to any woman he wants. That's what porn teaches you, isn't it? Porn consumption is all about a power game. This is a natural progression, taking what you learn out into your neighborhood.
Given that a majority of men have watched or are watching porn, and the numbers are steadily rising for women too, I'm not so sure. Chances are half the guys at the office, the taxi driver if you use one at any point, at least one of the clerks at the supermaket you visit, maybe even one of the doctors who've treated you, etc, are into porn. If porn taught that, you'd notice it.
Plus, I don't know... I thought porn was about _sex_. I don't get the mentality that it's all some kind of (preferrably male) plot and power game. There _are_ people of both sexes who enjoy sex, as just that. Not as some form of power game or currency, but as just, you know, two people having an intimate moment and some fun too.
So, really, I don't get it when I hear it that porn is somehow teaching males to exert power over women. (Read your quote too, if you don't know what I'm talking about.) Or that anything that happens in there is only for the male's pleasure. Apparently regardless of whether it's one on one, two guys on one gal, two gals on one guy, or just two lesbians and no guy involved, it surely is only a depiction of something where just the guy gets any pleasure there. Apparently even if what's portrayed is one guy going down on his SO, it's still only for the guy's pleasure. And apparently demeaning, abusive or otherwise unwanted and unwelcome for the woman, if it involves sex in any way.
Women are occasionally known to have orgasms too, you know?
Plus, it's a depiction of an act which isn't just natural, but millions of married people are doing it right as you read this. And that's not even counting the unmarried ones. Is it really that much worse and harmful than a depiction of someone being beaten up, shot, stabbed, burned alive, or the other stapples of TV and movies? I mean, if people take what they saw in movies into the real world, wouldn't it make more sense to worry about those who watch war movies?
But, anyway, anyone who thinks that any kind of sex is inherently demeaning or submissive for the woman, well, at least do us guys a favour and don't marry:P
I see it got modded off-topic, but it seems to me like a valid question. What the heck was this guy thinking? Or the recent story on The Register, where a 47 year old techie got jailed for a similar stunt, except he also tried to blackmail a 17 year old girl into underessing in front of the camera. (Which is how he got caught.)
I mean, seriously. What. The. Fuck.
Didn't these guys find enough photos of naked women on the internet? I mean, seriously, how did that train of thought go? "Man, if only I could see some photos of women at least partially undressed... Nah, surely nobody publishes something like that. I guess I'll just have to bug someone's web-cam." Or what?
Or was it just a psychopath's power game?
Since the story is about him, it doesn't seem to me offtopic at all. No, seriously, I want to know. What goes in the head of that kind of idiot? How do you recognize one?
In fact, the racial version of using Blacks is a quirk from the age of colonization of America. Mostly because the locals had too strong a warrior culture and preferred to die than to do forced labour as slaves. (Something the Europeans liked to mis-represent as "the Indians are lazy".) So since there was nobody else in the area they could enslave, they had to import some more obedient slaves from Africa. Which incidentally happened to be black.
But if you look back in history, for most of human civilization, people used their fellow man as a slave. Prisoners of war were a major source of slaves, for example, and a lot of the warfare was between highly related populations across an arbitrary border. Semitic Babilon took the semitic Jews as slaves. Same race, highly similar language, it didn't matter anway. Scythians took other Scythians as slaves, and sold them to the greeks. Spartans had the Hellots as their serfs/slaves, and they were both greeks. Romans, for the first 400 years or so, fought only inside Italy. Other than the occasional Gaul raiters or Greek army, who do you think they took as slaves in their wars? Egypt seems to have had _some_ slavery, although not as extensive or oppressive as initially assumed. Most were, in fact, just as Egyptian as their masters. (Which would partially explain the social stigma they attached to being too mean to one's slaves.)
Or if you look at more modern times, chain gangs and other forms of forced labour, often were worse than actual slavery. African slaves were expensive, especially after Victorian England started trying to force an end to their being hauled across the Atlantic, plus made various countries and states sign agreements to no longer sponsor or cooperate with such practices. The supply became a lot less abundant, so the price went up. The owner had _some_ incentive to keep them alive and healthy. Or at least away from crippling injuries, if possible. Rented convicts, on the other hand, had no such value or penalties attached. Even having to wear the chains for long periods produced ulcers and gangrenes that were often life threatening, but nobody gave a damn, essentially.
But at the very least, they were used as, basically, slaves and equally deprived of any freedom, choice or control over their own life. Most had less of all 3 than what the ancient Greeks or Romans called "slaves." And a lot of them were just as white as the guys forcing them to work.
Well, there _are_ some finer points to playing a rogue than that it dual-wields, but ok, I guess someone who's already played once to 70 does have a bit of a head start.
I still don't get those who try to do it on their first char, though. Heck, you occasionally run into someone on a trial account, who wants to be power-levelled to level 20. What for and what they hope to achieve... I guess I better not even try to understand.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you kidding? Companies reinvent themselves all the time, sometimes not even for good reason. Especially when a new boss comes around, he just _has_ to piss on everything to mark his territory. Whole processes get turned on their head just because the new guy has to show vision and initiative.
To it, Caldera went from an obscure Linux distribution, to a major proponent of Linux standardization, to buying the SCO name and reinventing itself as an expensive Unix vendor, then to the litigation clown we all love to hate. Volkswagen went through a phase of trying to reinvent itself as a luxury executive automobile maker. (Yeah, 'cause executives so wanted to drive a car made by someone called "People's Car" and associated with the el-cheapo old Beetle.) Sun went from "Linux ftl, proprietary lock in FTW", to "Ok, ok, we love open source. No, seriously." With an embarassing schizophrenic phase in between, where they'd say one in the morning and the other in the same day's evening. With an even more crazy stint of trying to just convince everyone to fight against MS, instead of telling them why they should buy a Sun server. Coke had the New Coke episode, which although it worked spectacularly in their favour in the end (something they hadn't foreseen, much less planned), but involved one of the most absurd changes to their main product out of nowhere. Etc, etc, etc.
Now some of those stunts paid off, some were outright retarded, and some just settled into something everyone forgot about.
And for each executive who earned his big bucks through some visionary change, there were a lot which just got lucky against all odds and in spite of doing something clueless (see New Coke again), and a lot which just siphoned tens of millions per year in salary and stock options while sending the company circling the drain. But I digress.
Anyway, I'd praise those who actually did a good change, not change generally. Change is easy. Cut one of your legs and put on a peg leg. That's change. And people do that kind of idiotic change all the time, either privately or at the helm of some company or division. Figuring out something that works well, now that is harder and more worthy of praise.
I don't think the hedgehog has anything to do with it. The top factors in console wars, from what I can tell are:
1. Fanboyism. I swear some people should have been born dogs, the way they must dedicate their life to some Master.
2. Us-vs-them mentalities. If you can't have both consoles, you already have a criterion by which to divide the world into an "us" camp and a "they" camp. 'Nuff said.
3. Probably actually the root of both above: Cognitive dissonance. People tend to be the most rabid in either defending or attacking something, when that position is the least easy to defend or makes no sense. And again, a lot of people couldn't have both, either because mommy doesn't buy both, or because they can't justify to themselves buying both. But in the willy-waving contest that a status-based culture is, they don't want to admit something like "well, I'm kinda tempted by game X too, but I can't afford console Y too". That kind of admission is, essentially, an admission of failure. Not many people are going to admit _that_. So they rebuild the whole mental model into something that's actually a proclamation of being some kind of elite. E.g., "pfft, game X sucks, console Y sucks, heck everything that company does is pure shit, and only idiots fall for their hype."
It's just a function of the mammal brain to try to keep the model consistent. (See the recent experiment with monkeys.) Where Mother Nature failed though, was foreseeing that humans will base their whole status, self-esteem or "face" on some notions being a priori, unquestionably true. And if one notion is beyond questioning, something _else_ will have to give. If someone's model is based on "I'm t3h 31337" or "my decisions are right, dammit" (e.g., the decision to buy console A instead of console B), and some memory or situation challenges that, they'll rewrite some other piece of history or reality to make the model consistent again.
You can see all 3 at work, or various perversions thereof, in any other such situation. PC vs consoles, PC vs Mac, 3dfx fanboys vs nVidiots (as both sides fondly called each other back then), and a bunch of others. Not saying that _all_ such arguments are bunk, far from it, but I _am_ under the distinct impression that the most rabid fanboys are putting up that unmovable faith show more to keep themselves convinced than for the benefit of the readers.
So, anyway, to get back to Sega, they ceased to be the "enemy", the moment they weren't competition any more. In all 3 aspects, it made no sense to be against Sega any more.
Fanboyism: Sega wasn't one of the choices for a fanboy's Master any more. In fact, it became an orthogonal choice entirely. So there was no need any more to be against it if you chose Sony or Nintendo instead.
Us-vs-Them: Ditto. You could be one of Sony's or Nintendo's faithful, and still play a Sega game. It became a lot harder to draw a neat line where Sega falls in the "them" camp.
Cognitive Dissonance: well, there was no more need to justify why not buy a Sega console and play, say, PSO. You could just get PSO on the GameCube or XBox or whatever. There was no more need to plug a leaky mental model with a "Sega sucks" bandaid. And thus no need to defend that fragile bandaid at all cost, lest the whole edifice come crashing down around your ears.
So don't. My argument was merely that we can't prove that _a_ god can't possibly exist.
Plus, you'll notice that my beardie-nerd-in-the-sky example isn't literally the christian god, although it is very loosely based on it.
Duly noted, and as I was saying somewhere else, he won't be _literally_ omnipotent. There are some restrictions, some of which you've correctly noted.
But as someone who's been a coder on a MUD and nearly managed to program another one from scratch (before getting bored and giving up), I can assure you that those restrictions are more loose than you have to think. The rules governing avatars are very very loose, when you're the one who wrote those rules and can change them on a whim.
Plus there's a lot of stuff you can do by simply editing files online or offline, completely unconstrained by the limitations of an avatar. If you want to create, say, a talking sword, just fire up your favourite text editor and program one. Or if you want to raise the sea level to above Mt Everest to wipe humanity, I doubt you'll be using your in-game avatar for that. Why would you? Instead of wondering how you can make your avatar able to command the sea, just open up an editor and code that change. Most of my building was done that way.
Funnily, you'll notice that the christian god never made an avatar, so he wasn't constrained by that anyway. He's adamant that no, you can't see his face. He can do all sorts of miraculous stuff in the world, but you can never see _him_. It would very much fit a god _outside_ our universe.
Mind you, I'm not saying you should believe in one, much less which one. Just that, as idle intellectual exercises go, being the coder and admin of an online world gives you quite a bit of freedom and power. (Though if anyone will want to play your game, that's another good question.)
Indeed, but to some extent it's again not that much of a limit. As someone who's started from assembly and went through two dozen languages or so (about half as idle curiosity only), I'd say as long as it's Turing-complete (for the pedants: in the loose sense, without also requiring infinite memory), you can find a way around its limitations.
Actually, mine was just a hypothetical exercise. Pretty much just saying that _a_ god could exist, and the programmer example was just one of the possible examples. Whether it also fits any particular religion, is no longer my concern.
I don't know any god like that, but then it's been a decade since I've read a bit on the history of religions.
The christian God, for example, _did_ change his mind repeatedly. One moment he's against pork, the next moment he changes his mind about it 'cause he wants to feed Peter. One moment he's still pissed of
Well, allegedly some dude and his wife saw the flood first hand. Some other dudes, in fact, a whole people, were fed by mysteriously appearing food for 40 years. Yet other dudes could swear they saw Jesus walk on water and raise the dead and cure the sick.
On yet another hand, other dudes, in fact a whole coalition of them, claim they fought under the magical walls of Troy and personally swung swords and shot arrows against a guy whose skin was tougher than the finest bronze weapons they had. Some people supposedly witnessed the pretty amazing feats of the son of Zeus.
And yet more disturbingly, the Swedish medieval army saw Odin in person as late as the early 13'th century AD. In fact, supposedly he personally led the charge of the Swedish cavalry at the Battle of Lena. And we also have the testimony of the village smith who shod Sleipnir (Odin's 8-legged horse) the previous night. That's supposedly seven to ten thousand Swedes, and up to eighteen thousand Danes who saw him.
Now whether you want to believe them, and which set of them at that, that's another question. A better one in fact.
But, yes, your statement is true.
Very much so, indeed. I'm not saying you should believe in a god (it only encourages them;), much less in which. Just that people can't really make the popular claims of "science proves god doesn't exist" or "science puts limits on what a god can do."
Basically, the only real justifiable position in my book is agnosticism, rather than rabid atheism. We don't know who dun it, or if anyone dun it. Maybe it was the Invisible Pink Unicorn. Maybe it was your cat. I'd keep my eyes on the little furry barstard, just in case he wants to nerf us any time soon ;)
1. You can hear a CRT TV because of the line sync frequency is actually very much in the audible spectrum. I don't know of anything even remotely similar for cell phones.
2. More importantly: they invariably _can't_ detect cell phones in a double blind test. That's really the damning bit.
If we're talking about the God of Judaism and Christianity, he's the same guy who gave commandments like "Thou shalt not kill" and "You shall not covet your neighbours house; you shall not covet your neighbours wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbour."... while leading the same people to Palestine to kill the original inhabitants of it and take their land. The promised land wasn't exactly empty, you see.
It's also the guy who commanded Abraham to sacrifice his son, just to see if he'd actually do it. Then it turns out it was just one hell of a practical joke.
And that's not even getting into more philosophical discussions about the world he created and how it set the stage and created the necessity for most of the sins he then condemned.
He's not that nice a guy. So a bit of deceit wouldn't really stand out, in all that.
Plus, you can think of it as "storytelling" rather than "deceit", if it makes you feel any better. Same as how Blizzard tells you that Stormwind was destroyed and rebuilt once, but in WoW that never actually happened in-game. It's back story. But the new "universe" started directly with the rebuilt one. Or like when your D&D GM tells you something like "you're in a grand ballroom, in front of a festive table on which servants pile up roast boar and exotic fruits", when you can see that you're in his basement and the only food around is some cold pizza ;)
Actually, I don't know... if we're still talking about the same guy, I don't think he bothered making any excuses or cover-ups about breaking his own rules. He's outright proud of a miraculous genocide or two (the flood, or Sodom and Gommorah), and the list is actually much bigger.
To stick to the WoW example, Blizzard created the world of Azeroth complete with a history stretching waay back to outright evolution scales. (E.g., back to the time when the elves as a species split from the trolls.) It created it full of ancient ruins, million-year-old dinosaur skeletons, and NPCs and artefacts telling stories from way before the game got actually launched. The game is, what? A couple of years old? Yet it has a history that goes thousands of years before even a line of code of it existed.
Are Blizzard a bunch of liars and frauds? (Well, ok, some disgruntled ex-WoW-players would probably say so.)
Well, he won't be truly and literally omnipotent, that much is obvious.
On the other hand, in his created universe, he can be very, extremely, incredibly, hideously powerful. He can annihilate the whole universe instantly, any time he wants to. (You know, "rm -rf".) That's pretty damned powerful, if you ask me. He can raise mountains by clicking and dragging a piece of terrain. He can boil the seas, turn off gravity, cover a whole world in trillions of tons of extra water out of nowhere, mess with the language code just because he was bored (see the Tower of Babel episode), or almost anything else he might ever wish. In fact, for a programmer, all those miracles are actually the _easy_ stuff. Changing the sea level is boringly trivial, compared to, say, programming the AI for those critters in the first place.
Again, it won't be literally omnipotent. But it's as close to it as you can get. And it's actually a lot more powerful than most christians imagine their God to be, if you think about it. Most people have a much more limited understanding of what "omnipotent" really means.
Well, in an ideal world that would be the case. But having played plenty of MUDs and MMOs, I also know that it can't really be taken for granted. Maybe the laws of physics stayed the same from day one. Or maybe what we see here is simply the result after a thousand patches, three expansion packs, and a dozen nerfs :P For all we know, there could be a few message boards out there where people whine about how the devs nerfed Earth Online in the Industrial Age expansion pack, and how they want the old game system back.
Well, you have to also think about how you'd explain it to a goat herdsman from the early Bronze Age. I mean, try explaining your old grandma how you programmed something. Now realize that she's _much_ more educated than said goat herdsman from the early Bronze Age.
I mean, heh, I can imagine it:
God: "So anyway, I say to myself, dude, nobody's going to be impressed by a black screen. You need to see something there. So I started by messing up with some old Transform And Lighting code."
Moses: "Curse my feeble mortal mind, Lord, I didn't understand a word."
God: "Uh, dude, you know, I needed to be able to see the world as I create it and stuff. 'Cause, you know, without it there was nothing to see."
Moses: "Ah, that's why the lighting, Lord? And what was that other thing? Transform?"
God: "Eh, let's leave it at light for now. You couldn't see anything before, right? I mean, without that, the whole thing doesn't even _have_ a shape."
(Moses takes notes: "And the earth was without form, and void")
Moses: "And you were saying something about code, my Lord? You mean, like when you write something on a strip of papyrus wrapped around a staff and..."
God: "Uh, no, dude, like program code." (Gah, how do I explain it to this dude?) "Like, I told the computer... err... I told your _world_ what to do. It does exactly what I tell it to do. And I told it I wanted to see some lighting."
(Moses takes notes: "And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.")
Moses: "And did it please you, Lord?"
God: "Heck yeah. Done myself proud, if I can say so myself."
(Moses takes notes: "And God saw the light, that it was good")
God: "So, anyway, then I added some shadows, just to make it pretty."
(Moses takes notes: "and God divided the light from the darkness")
Well, it's a possibility :P
I'm not religious myself, but just to play the devil's advocate:
1. Belief that it's all a metaphor doesn't necessarily make one any less religious. Saint Augustine argued exactly that: that the whole genesis is a metaphor and only an idiot would take it literally. He got sanctified by the Catholic Church. So...
2. (A possible) God doesn't have to obey his own rules, or exist _inside_ the universe he created.
Think of (a possible) God in terms of, say, a game programmer. Let's say you're this uber genius nerd in a CS university, you're bored enough one week and write the uber-universe simulation. Sort of like a SimCity or Children Of The Nile or The Sims 2 or Spore. Except let's say you're really really smart and have an uber-computer and those little creatures on your screen actually go sentient.
Now think about your position in the universe you just created. You're entirely outside it. In fact, there's no way for you to ever be _in_ it. You could create a character in that world, but it won't be _you_.
Also realize that whatever rules you set there, don't apply to _you_. E.g., if you set those creatures to no longer need to eat, it doesn't mean _you_ also suddenly don't.
Now also realize that you didn't sign any contract or anything. You can change the program's rules or bypass them any time you feel like it. If you want to raise a mountain over there, or have a jolly good flood, who's to stop you? Conservation of mass and energy? You can just change a variable and create more mass and energy. And if a bunch of those simulated people nailed your avatar to a cross, pfft, who's to keep you from resurrecting that char? Laws of biology? Pfft. You wrote the laws of their biology, and can amend them. Or change a bit in the database and have that guy up and kicking like nothing ever happened to him.
Or if that's too hard to palate, think Blizzard and WoW. All Blizzard employees exist outside of the world of Azeroth. In fact, they can't ever really be _in_ that world. They can create characters there, but the real "gods" at Blizzard are and remain fundamentally outside the world they created, and are not subject to their own laws. If they want to do something as mysterious and supernatural as creating a whole new island, or indeed a whole new planet out of nowhere (see the Burning Crusade launch), who's to keep them? If they don't like their own rules, who's to keep them from changing those rules?
Actually, if they otherwise put their faith in double-blind tests or whatever sound methodology, I couldn't care less if they also believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster or the Invisible Pink Unicorn or whatever.
But the most worrisome phenomenon is the large mass of people believing in homeopathy, magic (as in, that you can actually change the universe by refusing to believe it's really like that), natural snake oils, conspiracy-theory science, and the like.
I mean, seriously, there are people buying wooden volume knobs and $500 ethernet cables, believing that it makes their MP3s sound better. (I mean, an MP3 is already digital and a network cable transmits digital information. A 1 is a 1 is a 1, and 0 is a 0 is a 0. It doesn't sound "warmer" or "more natural".) At least one on the Hardware Central forums believed he can hear differences in how MP3's sound, based on the hard drive brand. And not because of hard drive noise or interference, but because the magnetic coating somehow makes a difference, like in old cassettes.
There are people who believe that power lines cause brain cancer. Or that they can detect a turned on cell phone by getting a headache near one.
There are people who think that "natural" minerals are healthier, and that, say, salt processed industrially has mollecules that are unnaturally round and regular, and can't be processed as well by the body.
There are people who drink water with extra O2 in it and think it actually makes a difference in how well oxygenated their body is. As if would even make a difference. (No, seriously, calculate it.)
Etc.
And while I'd love to point fingers and laugh at the USA, trust me, it's no better in Europe.
And anyway, that should already tell anyone all they need to know about voters and science. The above mentioned people have a right to vote too, you know.
Absurd, eh? And what have we learned here? Never do overtime.
If you'd rather stare into a flask than see your wife again, do yourself a favour and go get wasted at the pub. Sure, it ruins your liver, but so does Tylenol. Or get a mistress. Get a divorce. But for the love of Bast, don't be the last guy at the office.
Sure, you may think you're an IT dude, no way someone would link anthrax to your servers. Right? We'll see who laughs last when some idiot script kiddie defaces a DOD web server, and people go "OMG, it was in the same county as a computer which controls the nukes! The hacker mastermind must have planned to reprogram the computer to load itself into a truck, drive there and plug itself into the secure network! It's teh Al Qaeda! Terrorism! Jihad! Concerted attack on our freedoms! It's those dastardly... umm... hey, Jack, which country has oil and we didn't bomb already? Right, it was those dastardly Canadians and their false prophet!"
So leave Slashdot, close that SSH window, turn off the computer (is the uptime willy-waving worth someone inferring that you must have been there if the computer was up and doing stuff on the servers?), tell a bunch of co-workers "good bye" and walk out that door. Yes, you can do it. For the love of all that's good and holy, walk out that door.
And if your boss doesn't like it, tell him you're doing your patriotic duty. When that arab genius mastermind hacks a computer to load itself into a truck and drive to a nuke base, the CIA can chase him instead of wasting valuable time and resources on chasing you. It would be unpatriotic to interfere with their investigation by setting yourself up as a decoy. The future of democracy and freedom may depend on it. If you don't do it, the terrorists win!
TBH, I fail to see why that's a bad thing anyway, assuming that our goal _is_ to give all people the best education we can. (No kid left behind, etc.) As opposed to, say, a some fucked-up kind of show-business to make under-achieving parents of under-achieving children feel better.
Well, or let me better qualify "bad thing." I don't think it's worse than putting everyone in the same classroom and then dumbing it down to the level where even the... _special_ kid on the right can feel special for being able to draw doodles like everyone else.
Most (all?) of Europe isn't afraid to separate kids by skill level, at least at high school level. It wasn't just the USSR and co. I don't think it caused anything bad, so far. Even the USSR and its satellite states, for all we see their economical failures, look around you how many of your co-workers come from their universities. They managed to produce some well educated people. (Then they failed to use them, but that's a different failure.)
Splitting by learning method actually seems to me like the logical next step. Instead of dumping someone into the lowest bracket just because their wiring doesn't fit the teachers' style, maybe there is some other way of teaching them stuff.
And before it sounds like either a nerd-elitist opinion or conversely some kind of plot to isolate and oppress nerds, remember that ADHD and Aspergers' aren't all roses even as educational prospects go. For each ADHD kid that's found his niche with his home computer, there are a couple who just flunk because they just simply get bored to tears in classroom. For each Aspie who's become some great programmer or physicist, there'll be one or two who just got bullied around and discouraged, and maybe backed into some useless interest (as an Aspie you _will_ have a very narrow focus of interest) like remembering all the football scores since 1900. Or flunked because their narrow interests didn't include geography and victorian english literature and God knows what else. Maybe we can guide them down a better path.
Even for neurotypicals, well, maybe they can do better if they don't have to compete with the local autism-spectrum disorder kid. Or at least find a better passtime than taunting the nerd.
It won't be a neat 70/30 split, duly noted, but it will be a good start anyway. We don't build all tools the exact same way, we don't raise all animals the same way (raising chicken can be slightly different from raising sheep), we don't plant all plants the same way, so, umm, I fail to see why we must teach everyone the same way _if_ we have enough proof that their brains do work differently.
It will be more expensive, though. That much is obvious.
I've played both the US version and the censored German version, and the censored problem had a few more problems. They hadn't only removed the ability to kill children, they had removed all children from the game outright.
Which now caused a few quests to be broken. E.g., you couldn't find the kid in the well, because there was no kid.
Some things were removed so brutally that it caused even more bugginess than the game had anyway. E.g., at the vault in the north-east, the kid with the doll was missing, but his idle chat would keep happening, because the game script thought he's still there.
Some of the alternate ways to solve other stuff also got broken in the process. E.g., once you got to the next town, now you couldn't have that kid's wrench.
So I'm not saying it was necessarily fatal, but saying that it's not really missing anything... is a bit mis-leading too, IMHO.
Well, I'm not the GP poster, but I think he meant, like many of use SW fans, a good SW game. Note the keyword there.
Actually screw that. We just want a Star Wars game. SWG wasn't even that, when you get at the bottom of it.
SWG from the start was not just incompetently done, but mostly a merchandising exercise. You know, like printing Darth Vader's head on a t-shirt. It doesn't really make it a better t-shirt, nor really SW equipment, it just serves to sell more copies and more expensive.
SW was launched as little more than a SW-themed DIKU MUD with graphics and lots of empty, generic, fractal-generated terrain, but (here's the important part) without vehicles, starships or Jedi. That tells you from the start how well the dev team and Raph Koster understood either SW or their target market segment. It's been a race against time from there to figure out how to put Jedi in, for example, and went from one clusterfucked abomination to the next clusterfucked abomination as results went.
And while the big gripe is gameplay, let's not forget that it wasn't very SW either. Their "solutions" to everyone wanting to be a Jedi was worse lore-wise than the problem. They required you to be already an accomplished and skilled adult before anyone trained you as a Jedi. Hello? That was exactly what they tried to avoid: training someone who's already used to taking all the wrong approaches, and has all the wrong reflexes.
Duly noted, it was the only MMO which allowed a flexible character build. It gets kudos for that, and many people stayed because of that. Many still remember it fondly because of that. But was its only merit.
And there was nothing particularly SW about that either. You could transplant the same system to a high-fantasy MMO and it would work just the same. Heck, something similar worked in Oblivion.
The NGE just managed to make it worse, and God knows that's an accomplishment. It's akin to making a rotten corpse even less sexy.
And again, it became an even more exercise in merchandising. Signature characters are used even more willy-nilly, in places and situations that make no sense for them, like in bad fanfic.
(Though if it makes anyone feel better, the actual game ignores not just the official lore, but also everything that their own tutorial told you half an hour ago.)
So, well, I think all of us SW nerds can be excused for wishing for a SW game, not for SWG.
No, I genuinely meant to say "Cro-Magnons." I do some typos all the time, but not that big ;)
Not just that, but it's sorta funny when you look at the mitochondrial DNA (inherited strictly from the mother) vs Y chromosome mutations (inherited strictly from the father) for any human invasions or migrations, all the way to the earliest tribes. Invariably you can track the Y chromosome mutations sweeping across the land with the invasion, but the mitochondrial DNA tends to lag behind or even stay put.
Virtually all migrations and invasions _fucked_ their way across a continent. They displaced or killed the males, but then proceeded to "recycle" the newly widdowed women.
It makes sense too, since for most of human history females had a life expectancy of about 2/3 that of men. Birth and birth complications took a pretty heavy toll. So there'd be a steady supply of widdowed men who are still young and horny. You know, given that their life expectancy wasn't high enough to reach andropause. That was in fact a major cause of tribal warfare, and as late as ancient Rome and Greece we find it documented that getting women was an integral part of warfare.
The Romans, for example, demanded women from the defeated Teutones in IIRC 102 BC, in an infamous episode remembered mostly because the german women killed their children and commited suicide rather than comply. They first begged to be at least used to tend the temples of Ceres and Vesta instead, but the Romans refused, and the rest is history.
So indeed it would be mighty peculiar if the same pattern didn't apply to Neanderthals. The offspring must have been sterile or non-viable.
That may be so, but we have plenty of signs that Neanderthals were every bit as evolved as the Cro-Magnons (humans) at the same time.
They did use fire. In fact, occasionally they seem to have even used coal, something Homo Sapiens never really got into until Renaissance. They also cut down trees and used wood extensively. They skinned animals and used the skins. They used traps to hunt, in addition to spears. They built elaborate shelters. Their weapons and tools are every bit as evolved as those of the Cro-Magnons, and they too used tools to build other tools. (A chimp may sharpen a stick into an ad-hoc tool or weapon, and then discard it. Humans and Neanderthals built a wooden mallet to chip a flint axe, to cut a branch, to make a spear. Then keep them.) There are signs of _some_ work specialization, which also involves at least some societal organization and maybe even some primitive trade. (As in, I'll give you a leg of antelope if you make me a good spear.) They not only buried their dead, but there are signs of using grave goods and basically ritual burial. That alone hints at some primitive religion and a concept of afterlife. (You don't bury someone with food and weapons if you expect that he's just dead and rotting, and has essentially just ceased to exist.) But, at the very least, it means they probably had a few abstract concepts there, like remorse. We found stuff from them like a femur with holes drilled in it, very likely a primitive flute or such. They seemed to have decorated themselves with primitive jewellery and paints. That's a few more abstract concepts you need for those. Etc.
Basically, seriously, it's every bit on par with primitive Homo Sapiens. Go look at some forgotten tribe in the Amazon, like the recent ones who were trying to shoot arrows and chuck spears at a helicopter, and the Neanderthals weren't any less advanced than those.
The _only_ puzzling shortcoming about Neanderthals, is that there we found no missile weapons from them, nor any sign that they ever used missile weapons. Which may point at some shortcoming of their brain after all. Still, I wouldn't qualify someone as non-sentient, after they did all I've listed above and more, just because they can't do ballistics.
Quoth the summary: "Neanderthal brains were on average larger than those of modern humans." I'm sure comparing them to those is insulting the Neanderthals ;)
Wait, you mean there's a difference? ;)
Well, while theoretically I see your point, sometimes that's harder than it sounds. And in this case it just didn't happen. The computer did _not_ in fact even play at master level at all.
I think what everyone seems to miss is that the computer was given a 9 stone head-start there.
That's not exactly identical, but similar enough for a bad analogy, with being allowed to move 9 times in a chess game before the opponent even starts. So with that huge advantage, your program managed to beat a chess master. Yay. Big f-ing deal.
No, seriously. A 9 move advantage is _immense_. The first moves are where you stake your claims and influence over whole quarters of the board. If you look at the start of that game, white from the start had to challenge relatively strong positions of the computer. (For that stage of the game.)
At any rate, at professional levels ("dan"), it's played with 1 handicap stone for every 3 ranks! So a 2 dan player would only get 2 stones head start against the master in TFA. The computer got 9. Assuming that the game was relatively even matched, that would put the computer's skill barely above the line between casual player and intermediate player.
To give a chess comparison again, it barely ranks above winning a chess game against your high school's prom queen. Ok, ok, a little higher than that, but not by much.
Mind you, it's still an achievement that they managed to program it to even play at intermediate level. Kudos and all that. But let's get not get too carried away with the "OMG, it beat a go master" line of thought. We can celebrate that when it beats one in an even game. We're still _far_ from that.
O.K. Then riddle me this: why do _women_ watch porn, if it's strictly about men having power over them? Depending on what study you want to believe, even a _lot_ of women. One study claimed that 87% (yes, eighty-seven percent) of women aged 25 to 39 watch porn. I find that a bit _too_ high to believe, but there you go. Another claim, and from an ACLU activist woman no less, claimed that 40% of porn rentals in the USA are women, for a total of some 160 million videos per year. An erotica magazine claimed the same 40% women among its subscribers. So, you know, us men barely score 50% higher than women in porn rentals (60% rentals by men, vs 40% by women.) Go figure.
So, you know, why _do_ so many women watch it then? Some even pay for it (e.g., rentals.) Go figure. You'd think that something that blatantly and obviously about power over women, wouldn't turn so many women on. Are so many of you gals secretly masochistic, or what? Or maybe it's not that clear cut at all that having sex is some kind of humiliation and torture?
No offense, but I'd like to see some statistics about that "most popular" claim. Just how much of you find on the internet, doesn't say much about how many people watch that, let alone make it their primary motive there. Catering to niches can be sometimes disproportionately more represented.
Point in case: gay porn. Pretty much _everywhere_ you turn, you find gay porn thumbnails, although only 10% of the population are gay. A lot of us males actually lose erection at the sight of that, and, at least in the USA, I get the idea that a large segment of the population is outright homophobe. But judging by availability on the net, you'd think the majority of the people get off on male homosexuality. Sometimes extrapolating from an unrepresentative sample gets you that kind of thing.
At any rate, even so, the vast majority of porn _I_ found doesn't involve any pain or humiliation. Maybe because I'm not looking for that kind of thing. There _is_ plenty of it on the net, but not a majority by any reckoning, and, again, there's actually more gay porn than that. See the previous paragraph.
Just repeating it doesn't make it true. There's more than one kind of porn, you know? Much as I hate to rain on your self-righteous parrade (ok, ok, I don't), but not all porn is about punishing anyone in any way.
That may be so, but prostitution doesn't necessarily involve violence either. Pretty much everyone who goes to a brothel here (yes, they're legal), goes there for a fuck. You _can't_ get abusive to the gals there, any more than you could on a woman on the street, because the cops then want to get in the act. And they're as unionized as anything else here.
So basically again you're projecting your own androphobe ideas there, and have to see humiliation and abuse because that's what you already decided to see. In practice it's a bunch of women who do that of their own free will, same as any other job, and are decently paid for it.
Given that a majority of men have watched or are watching porn, and the numbers are steadily rising for women too, I'm not so sure. Chances are half the guys at the office, the taxi driver if you use one at any point, at least one of the clerks at the supermaket you visit, maybe even one of the doctors who've treated you, etc, are into porn. If porn taught that, you'd notice it.
Plus, I don't know... I thought porn was about _sex_. I don't get the mentality that it's all some kind of (preferrably male) plot and power game. There _are_ people of both sexes who enjoy sex, as just that. Not as some form of power game or currency, but as just, you know, two people having an intimate moment and some fun too.
So, really, I don't get it when I hear it that porn is somehow teaching males to exert power over women. (Read your quote too, if you don't know what I'm talking about.) Or that anything that happens in there is only for the male's pleasure. Apparently regardless of whether it's one on one, two guys on one gal, two gals on one guy, or just two lesbians and no guy involved, it surely is only a depiction of something where just the guy gets any pleasure there. Apparently even if what's portrayed is one guy going down on his SO, it's still only for the guy's pleasure. And apparently demeaning, abusive or otherwise unwanted and unwelcome for the woman, if it involves sex in any way.
Women are occasionally known to have orgasms too, you know?
Plus, it's a depiction of an act which isn't just natural, but millions of married people are doing it right as you read this. And that's not even counting the unmarried ones. Is it really that much worse and harmful than a depiction of someone being beaten up, shot, stabbed, burned alive, or the other stapples of TV and movies? I mean, if people take what they saw in movies into the real world, wouldn't it make more sense to worry about those who watch war movies?
But, anyway, anyone who thinks that any kind of sex is inherently demeaning or submissive for the woman, well, at least do us guys a favour and don't marry :P
I see it got modded off-topic, but it seems to me like a valid question. What the heck was this guy thinking? Or the recent story on The Register, where a 47 year old techie got jailed for a similar stunt, except he also tried to blackmail a 17 year old girl into underessing in front of the camera. (Which is how he got caught.)
I mean, seriously. What. The. Fuck.
Didn't these guys find enough photos of naked women on the internet? I mean, seriously, how did that train of thought go? "Man, if only I could see some photos of women at least partially undressed... Nah, surely nobody publishes something like that. I guess I'll just have to bug someone's web-cam." Or what?
Or was it just a psychopath's power game?
Since the story is about him, it doesn't seem to me offtopic at all. No, seriously, I want to know. What goes in the head of that kind of idiot? How do you recognize one?
Actually, slavery isn't always racial.
In fact, the racial version of using Blacks is a quirk from the age of colonization of America. Mostly because the locals had too strong a warrior culture and preferred to die than to do forced labour as slaves. (Something the Europeans liked to mis-represent as "the Indians are lazy".) So since there was nobody else in the area they could enslave, they had to import some more obedient slaves from Africa. Which incidentally happened to be black.
But if you look back in history, for most of human civilization, people used their fellow man as a slave. Prisoners of war were a major source of slaves, for example, and a lot of the warfare was between highly related populations across an arbitrary border. Semitic Babilon took the semitic Jews as slaves. Same race, highly similar language, it didn't matter anway. Scythians took other Scythians as slaves, and sold them to the greeks. Spartans had the Hellots as their serfs/slaves, and they were both greeks. Romans, for the first 400 years or so, fought only inside Italy. Other than the occasional Gaul raiters or Greek army, who do you think they took as slaves in their wars? Egypt seems to have had _some_ slavery, although not as extensive or oppressive as initially assumed. Most were, in fact, just as Egyptian as their masters. (Which would partially explain the social stigma they attached to being too mean to one's slaves.)
Or if you look at more modern times, chain gangs and other forms of forced labour, often were worse than actual slavery. African slaves were expensive, especially after Victorian England started trying to force an end to their being hauled across the Atlantic, plus made various countries and states sign agreements to no longer sponsor or cooperate with such practices. The supply became a lot less abundant, so the price went up. The owner had _some_ incentive to keep them alive and healthy. Or at least away from crippling injuries, if possible. Rented convicts, on the other hand, had no such value or penalties attached. Even having to wear the chains for long periods produced ulcers and gangrenes that were often life threatening, but nobody gave a damn, essentially.
But at the very least, they were used as, basically, slaves and equally deprived of any freedom, choice or control over their own life. Most had less of all 3 than what the ancient Greeks or Romans called "slaves." And a lot of them were just as white as the guys forcing them to work.
Well, there _are_ some finer points to playing a rogue than that it dual-wields, but ok, I guess someone who's already played once to 70 does have a bit of a head start.
I still don't get those who try to do it on their first char, though. Heck, you occasionally run into someone on a trial account, who wants to be power-levelled to level 20. What for and what they hope to achieve... I guess I better not even try to understand.