Ten or twenty years' worth of academic wages ain't something to sneeze at, nor is the single most prestigious award in mathematics. I could see turning the Fields down just to make a point, but the million dollars can free you from financial obligation so you can distance yourself from your peers however long you want while doing what you love doing. Otherwise the money just goes back into feeding the system that you apparently hate.
There are lots of items that can be devalued at someone else's whim. Once it gets serious enough that more companies start implementing in-game, "legit" systems, I bet you see the item fluctuations controlled more.
How many rich hack job golfers at the country club drop a couple thousand on clubs that no one's really going to know or care about? It doesn't improve their shitty game, either.
As online gaming becomes more prevalent, those same numbnuts will drop cash there.
How many people are actually going to whip out their autographed baseball and have a game of catch? The amount of money they're paying for MMO stuff is misguided and not my type of fun, but at least they're getting something functional. Collecting is the worst type of consumerist whack jobs.
Just curious what specific information tells you that individual readers look at the stories more than the comments. Often I'll look at the top layer of comments and only open one or two that interest me. I might open the story itself in another tab and spend ten seconds browsing it before I jump into the comments. Or if a comment specifically refers to the story I'll go back into the story to find it. How do you use logfiles to root out my preferences from this behavior?
Maybe there was some point, long ago, when that was true... most of the time it's slashdotted and the "news for nerds" is written by CNN or some other mass media, which is decidedly uninteresting for nerds. Anyone interested in world events has seen it elsewhere before it comes here. Book reviews have gone the way of the dodo. The gaming articles are gamer angst or painfully obvious.
The only articles I really enjoy are the interviews because they're the only unique content I don't know already, except for the occasional highly technical article (where the comments typically do a better job of exposition than the article).
If this site was just news posts I'd have waved bye-bye to it long, long ago. I'm interested in where he got support for the argument that most readers don't want to read through the comments, though. And if that's true, I'm wondering what they're doing here.
Seriously, anyone coming to Slashdot for "cool breaking stories" has their head up their ass. You come to Slashdot for discussion. I can't recall ever being informed by or interested in the actual story or, god forbid, the write-up. They exist to set a topic or get you pissed off.
No kidding... I know this isn't the same level, but I made a post on a game message board last week advocating the idea that people shouldn't be so enthusiastic about acting like deputized members of its admins and reporting back users who break a ridiculous rule intended to cover their asses from a frivolous lawsuit.
Imagine my surprise when I got an openly hostile reaction from people citing law incorrectly, saying that they just report them and Big Pappa Authority is responsible for what comes next, and getting offended by someone trying to "paint them like a bad guy" just for being part of the "oral majority" and "following the rules."
I was ready to introduce them to a bit of enlightening literature and hopefully get a couple converts, but surprise, surprise, the individual posts in question were actually deleted from the thread with no trace. A further response that painted me like a raving troll was left on the board, and my response to that got vanished as well.
I'm not sure if this is an indictment against raiding or raiding in WoW, but I found raiding in EQ2 to be a lot of fun. No uber gear necessary for most of the zones, just a sturdy grasp of the classes and tactics. Everyone makes full use of their abilities. Once you get decent gear you can run with a raid party of far less than the cap, which is at 24 right now. There was a pickup raid alliance on my server that was raiding three, four times a week on the easier zones just for fun.
Doesn't even need to be a big conspiracy, a small group of people can send out a huge amount of spam. I remember my grandpa once got adware that was an advertisement for adware removal.
Colbert does definitely play the role of the jackass well, I'll give you that, and I don't find him outrageously funny.
Hungary, however, pulled a web-based publicity stunt and got more publicity than they wanted. Perhaps in the future they will rethink an anonymous online voting strategy for naming part of their country's infastructure (I'm sure they'll manipulate the votes so it doesn't end up being the Chuck Norris bridge, anyway).
The Wikipedia thing was an attempt at pointing out a flaw in the system. It got shut down fast, props to Wikipedia, but it does make you think exactly what those economic competitors do. And what happens if Wikipedia does get really big, and other news commentators start making calls-to-arms to "correct" pages to the "truth"? Can Wikipedia be a victim of its success if it gets too much notoriety? It depends on large numbers of people to survive, but it also depends on a kind of security through obscurity to stop massive attacks like this launched by influential leaders.
So, people are still watching corporate-sponsored television news shows? Really? You're ok with getting your news from corporate sponsors? Do you Bahh like a sheep when they say something that spikes your pulse?
Everyone's motivated by something, and if you're not live on the scene with a camera, you're trusting in someone that has an agenda. In this case, though, Colbert and Stewart actually make their livings producing shows that mock mainstream corporate media.
As an aside, looking at your website, Ann Coulter is just a troll. She makes a living off being a decent-looking woman and spouting the most hardline, enraging neocon rhetoric possible. I don't even know if she really believes in anything besides promoting her popularity, and giving her more negative exposure just builds her up to be a martyr for the other side. She's best ignored.
To be honest, I'm not quite sure why people feel deliberate misspelling the names of other countries is funny. I know Americans don't generally find the joke funny when it is directed at the US, nor Canadians when directed at Canada.
This joke is directed at Americans, or at least a portion of them. Colbert's routine is to ironically typify the role of the stereotypical neocon talking head "news" commentator. Saying "Hungaria" like that with disdain is meant to parody when other people do the same type of thing, usually with Mexico, Canada, France, or whatever country isn't currently marching in lock-step with our government as the targets.
But that's the thing. I don't think that Stewart would stop criticizing the status quo even if it conformed to whatever beliefs he might have. Suppose anti-war liberals suddenly come to dominate the population. Would the show fold up and stop broadcasting? I don't think that's likely. That's what makes the show, in my mind, nihilist. There is simply nothing that anybody can do that they will not mock.
Even if anti-war liberals came to dominate the population, there's always some silly goings-on to poke fun at. The show generally mocks outright foolishness, self-contradiction, and dishonesty in politics and the media. Stewart's personal biases aren't hidden, but the show is not just an attack on conservative ideologies or the current administration. When he has interviews, he encourages people to actually discuss their stances rationally, and many of those that don't align with Stewart's world views actually come off looking better than they do on other shows. You take away understanding rather than simply affirming your opposition towards them.
That's why I think the show is important. It points out utterly ridiculous things from every political faction. It underlines the media's role in propogating the destructive politics. Then it offers up tempered, rational discourse as a partial solution, or at least a bridge to understanding each other. Plus, it's funny as hell:P
What does matter? Why does it matter? If you figure out the answer for yourself, does it become universal truth?
Is your anwer a reflection of the society that you are a part of? If you were born in 2000 BC or spent your entire life wanting for material necessities in the middle of some third-world country, would your answer be the same?
Given a sufficiently long "long run," humanity has become extinct and the earth has covered up all trace of our ever having existed. Unless the answer is preserving the species or you have devout religiosity, you're throwing out some sort of touchy-feely mumbo-jumbo to excuse your own societally influenced hedonism.
Because it's written in an online gaming mag for gamers? It's also sort of a novelty because there are still many who would not attribute that kind of significance to games.
People are funny. I could hear about a suicide or sudden death on the television and experience a sort of distant sympathy, but with the internet age when they have a significant online presence the death becomes magnified for me. Things like reading transcripts of their last conversations on IRC, looking at the profiles on their still-active accounts, seeing what they've written about themselves on Facebook and reading the messages left by grieving friends on their wall... because that's safe, familiar territory to me, they hit closer to home.
I'm in a similar boat, except it's less that I'm dissatisfied with current offerings than I'm satisfied with what I have. I have a couple different MMOs whose subscriptions I can always renew for a month if I want to go in that direction. I have Half-Life 2 and all of its mods to keep me busy if I want an FPS. Once in a while I'll feel a hankering for an RTS, and Dawn of War's got my back.
The only upcoming PC games on my radar right now are Portal and Natural-Selection: Source. Of course, console games are doing even worse for me right now, I use them for party games and (yeah, I'll admit it) DDR. The only games I've thought about buying are Suikoden 5 (waiting for a price drop) and Ico (just finished Shadow of the Colossus and I'm curious).
Ya, Infiltrator was damned near impossible for me when I was a kid. I never understood what the point of the game was. Spent a half hour running around shooting random people, setting off alarms, and stealing their costumes. As for the helicopter, fogeddaboudit.
2+ hours away parks you square in eastern Pennsylvania. I know a decent amount of people who commute from eastern PA over to NYC. The cost of living is absurdly lower.
That said, northern NJ is actually pretty nice. I grew up in a small suburb out there and there was lots of greenery, tons of parks, very little in the way of crime, and it was something like a 20 minute commute into the city without traffic. Cheaper than similar accomodations in the city itself, too, although still expensive. Of course, now the urban sprawl is picking up and the forests are being decimated for apartment buildings, but I guess that's always the way.
Slashdot Mirror
Whoa. You're right. We should probably have lots of other people look at it twice. This will revolutionize the academic world. Congratulations, sir.
Ten or twenty years' worth of academic wages ain't something to sneeze at, nor is the single most prestigious award in mathematics. I could see turning the Fields down just to make a point, but the million dollars can free you from financial obligation so you can distance yourself from your peers however long you want while doing what you love doing. Otherwise the money just goes back into feeding the system that you apparently hate.
There are lots of items that can be devalued at someone else's whim. Once it gets serious enough that more companies start implementing in-game, "legit" systems, I bet you see the item fluctuations controlled more.
How many rich hack job golfers at the country club drop a couple thousand on clubs that no one's really going to know or care about? It doesn't improve their shitty game, either.
As online gaming becomes more prevalent, those same numbnuts will drop cash there.
How many people are actually going to whip out their autographed baseball and have a game of catch? The amount of money they're paying for MMO stuff is misguided and not my type of fun, but at least they're getting something functional. Collecting is the worst type of consumerist whack jobs.
Just curious what specific information tells you that individual readers look at the stories more than the comments. Often I'll look at the top layer of comments and only open one or two that interest me. I might open the story itself in another tab and spend ten seconds browsing it before I jump into the comments. Or if a comment specifically refers to the story I'll go back into the story to find it. How do you use logfiles to root out my preferences from this behavior?
Maybe there was some point, long ago, when that was true... most of the time it's slashdotted and the "news for nerds" is written by CNN or some other mass media, which is decidedly uninteresting for nerds. Anyone interested in world events has seen it elsewhere before it comes here. Book reviews have gone the way of the dodo. The gaming articles are gamer angst or painfully obvious.
The only articles I really enjoy are the interviews because they're the only unique content I don't know already, except for the occasional highly technical article (where the comments typically do a better job of exposition than the article).
If this site was just news posts I'd have waved bye-bye to it long, long ago. I'm interested in where he got support for the argument that most readers don't want to read through the comments, though. And if that's true, I'm wondering what they're doing here.
Seriously, anyone coming to Slashdot for "cool breaking stories" has their head up their ass. You come to Slashdot for discussion. I can't recall ever being informed by or interested in the actual story or, god forbid, the write-up. They exist to set a topic or get you pissed off.
No kidding... I know this isn't the same level, but I made a post on a game message board last week advocating the idea that people shouldn't be so enthusiastic about acting like deputized members of its admins and reporting back users who break a ridiculous rule intended to cover their asses from a frivolous lawsuit.
Imagine my surprise when I got an openly hostile reaction from people citing law incorrectly, saying that they just report them and Big Pappa Authority is responsible for what comes next, and getting offended by someone trying to "paint them like a bad guy" just for being part of the "oral majority" and "following the rules."
I was ready to introduce them to a bit of enlightening literature and hopefully get a couple converts, but surprise, surprise, the individual posts in question were actually deleted from the thread with no trace. A further response that painted me like a raving troll was left on the board, and my response to that got vanished as well.
Oh, well.
I'm not sure if this is an indictment against raiding or raiding in WoW, but I found raiding in EQ2 to be a lot of fun. No uber gear necessary for most of the zones, just a sturdy grasp of the classes and tactics. Everyone makes full use of their abilities. Once you get decent gear you can run with a raid party of far less than the cap, which is at 24 right now. There was a pickup raid alliance on my server that was raiding three, four times a week on the easier zones just for fun.
Yeah, screw gaming cafes, give us gaming bars :D
My thought exactly :D
Doesn't even need to be a big conspiracy, a small group of people can send out a huge amount of spam. I remember my grandpa once got adware that was an advertisement for adware removal.
You see, thats the difference between us: i can read & talk your language and could survive in your country...could you survive in mine?
Also, another difference is that you have your dick out with a ruler next to it.
Colbert does definitely play the role of the jackass well, I'll give you that, and I don't find him outrageously funny.
Hungary, however, pulled a web-based publicity stunt and got more publicity than they wanted. Perhaps in the future they will rethink an anonymous online voting strategy for naming part of their country's infastructure (I'm sure they'll manipulate the votes so it doesn't end up being the Chuck Norris bridge, anyway).
The Wikipedia thing was an attempt at pointing out a flaw in the system. It got shut down fast, props to Wikipedia, but it does make you think exactly what those economic competitors do. And what happens if Wikipedia does get really big, and other news commentators start making calls-to-arms to "correct" pages to the "truth"? Can Wikipedia be a victim of its success if it gets too much notoriety? It depends on large numbers of people to survive, but it also depends on a kind of security through obscurity to stop massive attacks like this launched by influential leaders.
So, people are still watching corporate-sponsored television news shows? Really? You're ok with getting your news from corporate sponsors? Do you Bahh like a sheep when they say something that spikes your pulse?
Everyone's motivated by something, and if you're not live on the scene with a camera, you're trusting in someone that has an agenda. In this case, though, Colbert and Stewart actually make their livings producing shows that mock mainstream corporate media.
As an aside, looking at your website, Ann Coulter is just a troll. She makes a living off being a decent-looking woman and spouting the most hardline, enraging neocon rhetoric possible. I don't even know if she really believes in anything besides promoting her popularity, and giving her more negative exposure just builds her up to be a martyr for the other side. She's best ignored.
To be honest, I'm not quite sure why people feel deliberate misspelling the names of other countries is funny. I know Americans don't generally find the joke funny when it is directed at the US, nor Canadians when directed at Canada.
This joke is directed at Americans, or at least a portion of them. Colbert's routine is to ironically typify the role of the stereotypical neocon talking head "news" commentator. Saying "Hungaria" like that with disdain is meant to parody when other people do the same type of thing, usually with Mexico, Canada, France, or whatever country isn't currently marching in lock-step with our government as the targets.
But that's the thing. I don't think that Stewart would stop criticizing the status quo even if it conformed to whatever beliefs he might have. Suppose anti-war liberals suddenly come to dominate the population. Would the show fold up and stop broadcasting? I don't think that's likely. That's what makes the show, in my mind, nihilist. There is simply nothing that anybody can do that they will not mock.
:P
Even if anti-war liberals came to dominate the population, there's always some silly goings-on to poke fun at. The show generally mocks outright foolishness, self-contradiction, and dishonesty in politics and the media. Stewart's personal biases aren't hidden, but the show is not just an attack on conservative ideologies or the current administration. When he has interviews, he encourages people to actually discuss their stances rationally, and many of those that don't align with Stewart's world views actually come off looking better than they do on other shows. You take away understanding rather than simply affirming your opposition towards them.
That's why I think the show is important. It points out utterly ridiculous things from every political faction. It underlines the media's role in propogating the destructive politics. Then it offers up tempered, rational discourse as a partial solution, or at least a bridge to understanding each other. Plus, it's funny as hell
What does matter? Why does it matter? If you figure out the answer for yourself, does it become universal truth?
Is your anwer a reflection of the society that you are a part of? If you were born in 2000 BC or spent your entire life wanting for material necessities in the middle of some third-world country, would your answer be the same?
Given a sufficiently long "long run," humanity has become extinct and the earth has covered up all trace of our ever having existed. Unless the answer is preserving the species or you have devout religiosity, you're throwing out some sort of touchy-feely mumbo-jumbo to excuse your own societally influenced hedonism.
Because it's written in an online gaming mag for gamers? It's also sort of a novelty because there are still many who would not attribute that kind of significance to games.
People are funny. I could hear about a suicide or sudden death on the television and experience a sort of distant sympathy, but with the internet age when they have a significant online presence the death becomes magnified for me. Things like reading transcripts of their last conversations on IRC, looking at the profiles on their still-active accounts, seeing what they've written about themselves on Facebook and reading the messages left by grieving friends on their wall... because that's safe, familiar territory to me, they hit closer to home.
I feel a disturbance... it's as if a thousand postmodernists cried out at once and were instantly silenced.
I'm in a similar boat, except it's less that I'm dissatisfied with current offerings than I'm satisfied with what I have. I have a couple different MMOs whose subscriptions I can always renew for a month if I want to go in that direction. I have Half-Life 2 and all of its mods to keep me busy if I want an FPS. Once in a while I'll feel a hankering for an RTS, and Dawn of War's got my back.
The only upcoming PC games on my radar right now are Portal and Natural-Selection: Source. Of course, console games are doing even worse for me right now, I use them for party games and (yeah, I'll admit it) DDR. The only games I've thought about buying are Suikoden 5 (waiting for a price drop) and Ico (just finished Shadow of the Colossus and I'm curious).
Play any of them and your average slashdot or WoW geek will be knocked down to zero life instantly.
You made it too easy.
That depends, are you using the profit metric or the nostalgia metric?
Ya, Infiltrator was damned near impossible for me when I was a kid. I never understood what the point of the game was. Spent a half hour running around shooting random people, setting off alarms, and stealing their costumes. As for the helicopter, fogeddaboudit.
2+ hours away parks you square in eastern Pennsylvania. I know a decent amount of people who commute from eastern PA over to NYC. The cost of living is absurdly lower.
That said, northern NJ is actually pretty nice. I grew up in a small suburb out there and there was lots of greenery, tons of parks, very little in the way of crime, and it was something like a 20 minute commute into the city without traffic. Cheaper than similar accomodations in the city itself, too, although still expensive. Of course, now the urban sprawl is picking up and the forests are being decimated for apartment buildings, but I guess that's always the way.