Since I'm out of the industry, can someone hire me as a game review writer or something as an excuse for me to go?
Haha, the good old days, when any fuckwit with a game review website could land passes to E3. I wonder if they cut tickets to the largely irrelevant sites that used to get off on taking their yearly trip to Cali and doing some major league "reporting".
The people that used to put on the event were the ESA, an industry association theoretically supported by its members, the developers and publishers. The complaints from E3 were from their constituents, a lot of whom felt that it was mostly a big money and time sink for very little in the way of reward.
The IDG is sponsoring this event, and their business is gaming rags and trade shows. E3 probably sold a lot of copy for them and I'm sure they'll get some money as the event's organizers. I mean, even the name is advertising for one of their (shithole) mags. I'm sure they have some plan to leverage publishers into attending.
Nothing's improved, it's just that the people with a vested interest in E3 and similar events have decided to carry the torch in the interest of their profit.
When America comes under fire from an external threat, consensus is not an issue. I don't care if Congress and the Senate had been 100% staunch frothing-at-the-mouth anti-Bush pacifists, he would've had the go-ahead to push into Afghanistan and root out al-Qaeda. If a country sent over bombers in an overt act of war? Fogeddaboudit.
It's the muddled issues that a divided government would hopefully raise some questions about: the Patriot Acts, the internment camps, the Guantanamo Bays, the Iraqi invasions. It's during times of crisis that leaders have the most political capital. I'd say it's more important then than during any other time.
That's true, and if you can't put those keywords in, essentially no one's going to find it except people you explicitly link to it. And if no one can find it except people you explicitly link to it, it's sorta like the sound of a cybertree falling in the interforest for all monetarily interested parties.
No, you can't cite the discussion page in an academic paper. I don't think that anyone is operating under that pretense. As to most people only reading the article alone, I can't say whether that's true or not.
But what you seem to be saying is that people can't be trusted to read articles critically, even when pretty much all the background material is laid bare. Nor can we just trust academics across the board, since there are certainly card-carrying PhDs in the Ayn Rand Institute. So me, the average guy that dabbles in philosophy and obviously is incapable of forming his own opinion, who are you suggesting that I blindly place my faith in? The editorial board of a journal? A textbook? Would a degree from Harvard do, or must it be Princeton?
Wikipedia is not doing a disservice to their readers. Their readers are doing a disservice to themselves, if anything.
Wikipedia makes the grade at being Wikipedia. For people that are adept at using the internet, it's like a card catalog, general reference book, and informal discussion group all rolled up into one. And it covers pretty much every single topic you can imagine, with more every day, with inline linking to other relevant articles and links to other sources.
There's honestly not much more that I could ever want out of Wikipedia. There are certainly academics that find it very useful and there are a goodly amount actively editing it.
I'm pretty sure that's very close to what Citizendium is planning on doing -- anyone that's logged in can edit, but flagged Editors resolve disputes and can add a "Verified" tag.
But if Jimbo was the editor of a journal, encyclopedia, or textbook, the process would be completely opaque. As it is now, I can go onto the Discussion page and find out the disputes that everyone is having and how it relates to the content of the main article. Knowledge is constantly evolving and it's almost impossible to create an article that even the majority will agree is unbiased. For me, the victory in Wikipedia is that I can witness the whole, ugly, behind-the-scenes process. If I was interested in modern Randian philosophers, whether I think Rand and philosophy belong in the same sentence or not, what better way to gain insight than to read their raw arguments?
There's a lot of armchair lawyers that will tell you what would've happened one way or the other, but the case actually got settled before the ruling. For a fun time, start a post about it on the CoH official forums. The mods there instavanish any discussion about it.
Basically, no one's had the balls to take it to court and find out yet. It's inevitable that it'll happen someday, though.
No kidding. Plus they completely deemphasized building structures, base defense, weapon kits... they added in a little hoverbike thing, and those weird caves with the flying rocket vehicles. I actually did really like the idea of the grappling hook and had a little fun playing around with that. Of course the number one has to be WTF did they do to skiing?!
I still launch Tribes 2 every once in a while, but my desire to dig up Vengeance is just about zero.
Ya, I thought the article was pretty funny. Although maybe you have to have sat through one or more of Uwe Boll's films for the real effect. Boll is sort of a surreal character.
When I purchase a song on iTMS using iTunes, they provide a handy "Burn" button on their iTunes software. The terms of use are that you can only burn the same exact playlist seven times if it contains purchased music. You can rearrange the songs into different playlists and burn to your heart's content. I can take all sorts of precautions to prevent my music library from getting wasted, much as I can in reality. Those include but are not limited to burning them to CDs and transferring them to different folders, computers, hard drives, or any other removable storage (up to five of which at a time can be enabled to play them).
Let's see you prove a negative. Have you ever lost a computer filled with iTunes music and tried to clear it with either the insurance company or Apple? Do you feel ethically that paying for a song and downloading it without any sort of payment are exactly the same, or are your ethics based entirely on cold legality? For that matter, do you honestly think if on some bizzaro day it ever came down to a court room, Johnny downloading 5 billion MP3s would play out the exact same way as Johnny paying for a library of songs and converting them into a different format for personal use?
Finally, everything is a calculated risk. Everything. I make a risky bet when I put money into a startup. I make a risky bet when I put money into a stock. I make a less risky bet when I put my life savings into a bank account. When I vote for a public official, I make a bet. When I accept a job offer, I make a bet. I make bets all the time. Dropping a couple hundred into iTunes over a couple years is investing tiddlywinks of my leisure money into a product that is convenient for me, fronted by a company whose successful music division is not likely to go away, and which, even if it did, would still leave me with files that I could manipulate with no ethical or practical legal ramifications. They can change the EULA, but they're not likely to bend their primary clientbase over a rail. Yes, it's a bet, but so is everything else in life.
I've never really experienced many crashes with OS X or Windows 2000. Is your experience from OS 9 machines? The older revisions weren't very good.
Dunno, they were the production machines in our newspaper staff office, I think they were running OS X. They had that toolbar thingie on the bottom that expands when you roll over things. My point was that, as always, it depends on the user. Macs might make it harder to crash them, but it can be done by someone incompetent enough, and someone competent doesn't necessarily gain an advantage either way.
There is an ocean more difference with OS X than just a different color scheme, that statement really smacks of ignorance to me.
Oh, I believe there's a difference, I've just had enough airheaded, dreadlocked, stanky-ass, irritable no-talents try to convince me that I needed to make Teh Switch with absolutely no justification that it's colored my opinion. I wasn't saying that there was no legitimate reason, but that they had no legitimate reason to present to me.
The reasonable points that people have presented to me, i.e., greater stability, ease-of-use, etc, just don't really do anything to sway me because I'm not experiencing issues with stability and ease-of-use on XP.
Nope. I've been cannibalizing my old box and building a close-to-top-of-the-line system every three or four years on a thousand dollar budget. The Macs I've used have experienced annoying and repeated crashes, whereas I can't remember the last time I crashed in Windows. I don't get any virii or trojans just by virtue of using a little common sense and a few precautions. Everything's compatible, it's an environment I'm familiar with... no compelling reason to switch, every reason not to.
Oh, and I might have a natural bias thanks to going to undergrad with a school full of asshat art majors that kept extolling the Mac's superiority with no real justification except the color scheme.
Well, all correct and consistant theories if you get down to "nuts and bolts stuff" nest themselves in safe defensive positions where you can't prove or disprove anything, otherwise they'd either be incorrect or inconsistant. I think postmodernism is a natural evolution into trying to explore these areas, and this is where I agree with your string theory analogy -- it's elegant in a sort of masturbatory way to the people doing it, but many academics would agree that neither are worth the expenditure of time or manpower that they've taken.
The difference is in the public at large, at least with the people who have a vague notion of what postmodernism is (though I'm not sure there's any other kind of notion). Most people trust string theory because they trust physicists. You can read a physics journal and have no idea where to start without years of specialized training in just the symbology, so there's not much choice. You can sit down with a paper on postmodernism and a handy dictionary and puzzle out that they're saying, and one time is enough for most people to decide it's not worth their time.
I'm a theoretical mathematician in training, so I obviously think there's a use in the world for abstraction that doesn't present an immediate use. I don't have a problem with at least a handful of people out there in the world pondering postmodernism carefully. I just begin to wonder how much effort is spent along that line.
Ya, when I was in the Scouts a decade or two ago, my mom and dad ran my den and all our little individual meetings were great. However, the larger pack meetings were pretty awful. Lots of boring ceremony, some canned activities, and a lot of people living vicariously through their kids. The bureaucracy was awful and every event was terribly inefficient -- I realized this even at eight. Eventually my parents quit because they were fed up dealing with the bureaucracy and some terrible kids in the den whose parents were using the scouts as a daycare service.
Of course I didn't appreciate this all at the time, but it's become clearer in retrospect:P
You quit, you delete your characters, you have a trusted friend change your account password, delete it from your computer, break the CDs, etc. If it's very hard for you to get started again it's easier to quit. I deleted all my high level EQ2 characters a couple weeks ago. It was actually sad, believe it or not, to hit the delete button on something that'd served as my virtual persona for a year and a half, but once I realized that I still talked to all the friends I'd met in-game that mattered to me, it became easier to see them as just a bunch of pixels and a spreadsheet of data.
If you actually do want to quit, that's the way to do it. But I agree with you that there's far worse things. I just decided that I wasn't even having fun anymore but that I was going to keep coming back, so I took the appropriate steps.
They don't teach it without limits or continuity, at least in a more current edition of that textbook (circa 2002). What they do is just give you a very vague notion of limit and continuity that makes it seem haphazard. It wasn't until my advanced calculus (fourth semester in the sequence, supposedly junior level) course in the sequence that we actually really discussed the definition of a limit, the definition of continuity, the definition of the derivative.
I understand why they do it. You can "do calculus" without knowing the formal definitions -- I mean, the definitions weren't even formalized until the late 1800s if I recall my mathematical timeline. But a lot of the rules for why you can and can't do things will just seem rather arbitrary and have to be taken as axioms that work until later on. I remember tutoring someone who took Calc II and it was really tough explaining why she couldn't do all the crazy things she wanted to do with limits like splitting them over arbitrary quotients and stuff. Hell, I had some problems on that front until I learned them in a rigorous way:P
Maybe he doesn't. Or maybe he cares because there's something inexplicable within him that makes him feel good to care and it's in his self-interest to feel good. Feel free to insert a couple asterisks in there if it helps make the point.
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Since I'm out of the industry, can someone hire me as a game review writer or something as an excuse for me to go?
Haha, the good old days, when any fuckwit with a game review website could land passes to E3. I wonder if they cut tickets to the largely irrelevant sites that used to get off on taking their yearly trip to Cali and doing some major league "reporting".
The people that used to put on the event were the ESA, an industry association theoretically supported by its members, the developers and publishers. The complaints from E3 were from their constituents, a lot of whom felt that it was mostly a big money and time sink for very little in the way of reward.
The IDG is sponsoring this event, and their business is gaming rags and trade shows. E3 probably sold a lot of copy for them and I'm sure they'll get some money as the event's organizers. I mean, even the name is advertising for one of their (shithole) mags. I'm sure they have some plan to leverage publishers into attending.
Nothing's improved, it's just that the people with a vested interest in E3 and similar events have decided to carry the torch in the interest of their profit.
Err the House and the Senate, but you get the point :P
When America comes under fire from an external threat, consensus is not an issue. I don't care if Congress and the Senate had been 100% staunch frothing-at-the-mouth anti-Bush pacifists, he would've had the go-ahead to push into Afghanistan and root out al-Qaeda. If a country sent over bombers in an overt act of war? Fogeddaboudit.
It's the muddled issues that a divided government would hopefully raise some questions about: the Patriot Acts, the internment camps, the Guantanamo Bays, the Iraqi invasions. It's during times of crisis that leaders have the most political capital. I'd say it's more important then than during any other time.
That's true, and if you can't put those keywords in, essentially no one's going to find it except people you explicitly link to it. And if no one can find it except people you explicitly link to it, it's sorta like the sound of a cybertree falling in the interforest for all monetarily interested parties.
No, you can't cite the discussion page in an academic paper. I don't think that anyone is operating under that pretense. As to most people only reading the article alone, I can't say whether that's true or not.
But what you seem to be saying is that people can't be trusted to read articles critically, even when pretty much all the background material is laid bare. Nor can we just trust academics across the board, since there are certainly card-carrying PhDs in the Ayn Rand Institute. So me, the average guy that dabbles in philosophy and obviously is incapable of forming his own opinion, who are you suggesting that I blindly place my faith in? The editorial board of a journal? A textbook? Would a degree from Harvard do, or must it be Princeton?
Wikipedia is not doing a disservice to their readers. Their readers are doing a disservice to themselves, if anything.
Wikipedia makes the grade at being Wikipedia. For people that are adept at using the internet, it's like a card catalog, general reference book, and informal discussion group all rolled up into one. And it covers pretty much every single topic you can imagine, with more every day, with inline linking to other relevant articles and links to other sources.
There's honestly not much more that I could ever want out of Wikipedia. There are certainly academics that find it very useful and there are a goodly amount actively editing it.
I'm pretty sure that's very close to what Citizendium is planning on doing -- anyone that's logged in can edit, but flagged Editors resolve disputes and can add a "Verified" tag.
But if Jimbo was the editor of a journal, encyclopedia, or textbook, the process would be completely opaque. As it is now, I can go onto the Discussion page and find out the disputes that everyone is having and how it relates to the content of the main article. Knowledge is constantly evolving and it's almost impossible to create an article that even the majority will agree is unbiased. For me, the victory in Wikipedia is that I can witness the whole, ugly, behind-the-scenes process. If I was interested in modern Randian philosophers, whether I think Rand and philosophy belong in the same sentence or not, what better way to gain insight than to read their raw arguments?
Ha! Flamebait, they say. Why? Because you violated the slashtard group-think mentality!
If you could just point me to which of the 264 comments was supporting the congressman here...
There's a lot of armchair lawyers that will tell you what would've happened one way or the other, but the case actually got settled before the ruling. For a fun time, start a post about it on the CoH official forums. The mods there instavanish any discussion about it.
Basically, no one's had the balls to take it to court and find out yet. It's inevitable that it'll happen someday, though.
No kidding. Plus they completely deemphasized building structures, base defense, weapon kits... they added in a little hoverbike thing, and those weird caves with the flying rocket vehicles. I actually did really like the idea of the grappling hook and had a little fun playing around with that. Of course the number one has to be WTF did they do to skiing?!
I still launch Tribes 2 every once in a while, but my desire to dig up Vengeance is just about zero.
That little black box in the corner there? No, don't open it. Trust me. You won't like it.
D:
Ya, I thought the article was pretty funny. Although maybe you have to have sat through one or more of Uwe Boll's films for the real effect. Boll is sort of a surreal character.
When I purchase a song on iTMS using iTunes, they provide a handy "Burn" button on their iTunes software. The terms of use are that you can only burn the same exact playlist seven times if it contains purchased music. You can rearrange the songs into different playlists and burn to your heart's content. I can take all sorts of precautions to prevent my music library from getting wasted, much as I can in reality. Those include but are not limited to burning them to CDs and transferring them to different folders, computers, hard drives, or any other removable storage (up to five of which at a time can be enabled to play them).
Let's see you prove a negative. Have you ever lost a computer filled with iTunes music and tried to clear it with either the insurance company or Apple? Do you feel ethically that paying for a song and downloading it without any sort of payment are exactly the same, or are your ethics based entirely on cold legality? For that matter, do you honestly think if on some bizzaro day it ever came down to a court room, Johnny downloading 5 billion MP3s would play out the exact same way as Johnny paying for a library of songs and converting them into a different format for personal use?
Finally, everything is a calculated risk. Everything. I make a risky bet when I put money into a startup. I make a risky bet when I put money into a stock. I make a less risky bet when I put my life savings into a bank account. When I vote for a public official, I make a bet. When I accept a job offer, I make a bet. I make bets all the time. Dropping a couple hundred into iTunes over a couple years is investing tiddlywinks of my leisure money into a product that is convenient for me, fronted by a company whose successful music division is not likely to go away, and which, even if it did, would still leave me with files that I could manipulate with no ethical or practical legal ramifications. They can change the EULA, but they're not likely to bend their primary clientbase over a rail. Yes, it's a bet, but so is everything else in life.
I've never really experienced many crashes with OS X or Windows 2000. Is your experience from OS 9 machines? The older revisions weren't very good.
Dunno, they were the production machines in our newspaper staff office, I think they were running OS X. They had that toolbar thingie on the bottom that expands when you roll over things. My point was that, as always, it depends on the user. Macs might make it harder to crash them, but it can be done by someone incompetent enough, and someone competent doesn't necessarily gain an advantage either way.
There is an ocean more difference with OS X than just a different color scheme, that statement really smacks of ignorance to me.
Oh, I believe there's a difference, I've just had enough airheaded, dreadlocked, stanky-ass, irritable no-talents try to convince me that I needed to make Teh Switch with absolutely no justification that it's colored my opinion. I wasn't saying that there was no legitimate reason, but that they had no legitimate reason to present to me.
The reasonable points that people have presented to me, i.e., greater stability, ease-of-use, etc, just don't really do anything to sway me because I'm not experiencing issues with stability and ease-of-use on XP.
Nope. I've been cannibalizing my old box and building a close-to-top-of-the-line system every three or four years on a thousand dollar budget. The Macs I've used have experienced annoying and repeated crashes, whereas I can't remember the last time I crashed in Windows. I don't get any virii or trojans just by virtue of using a little common sense and a few precautions. Everything's compatible, it's an environment I'm familiar with... no compelling reason to switch, every reason not to.
Oh, and I might have a natural bias thanks to going to undergrad with a school full of asshat art majors that kept extolling the Mac's superiority with no real justification except the color scheme.
Well, all correct and consistant theories if you get down to "nuts and bolts stuff" nest themselves in safe defensive positions where you can't prove or disprove anything, otherwise they'd either be incorrect or inconsistant. I think postmodernism is a natural evolution into trying to explore these areas, and this is where I agree with your string theory analogy -- it's elegant in a sort of masturbatory way to the people doing it, but many academics would agree that neither are worth the expenditure of time or manpower that they've taken.
The difference is in the public at large, at least with the people who have a vague notion of what postmodernism is (though I'm not sure there's any other kind of notion). Most people trust string theory because they trust physicists. You can read a physics journal and have no idea where to start without years of specialized training in just the symbology, so there's not much choice. You can sit down with a paper on postmodernism and a handy dictionary and puzzle out that they're saying, and one time is enough for most people to decide it's not worth their time.
I'm a theoretical mathematician in training, so I obviously think there's a use in the world for abstraction that doesn't present an immediate use. I don't have a problem with at least a handful of people out there in the world pondering postmodernism carefully. I just begin to wonder how much effort is spent along that line.
I think in these comments we've achieved post-irony.
Ya, when I was in the Scouts a decade or two ago, my mom and dad ran my den and all our little individual meetings were great. However, the larger pack meetings were pretty awful. Lots of boring ceremony, some canned activities, and a lot of people living vicariously through their kids. The bureaucracy was awful and every event was terribly inefficient -- I realized this even at eight. Eventually my parents quit because they were fed up dealing with the bureaucracy and some terrible kids in the den whose parents were using the scouts as a daycare service.
:P
Of course I didn't appreciate this all at the time, but it's become clearer in retrospect
Commenting on addiction in World of Warcraft is not necessarily addictive, World of Warcraft commentors say.
You quit, you delete your characters, you have a trusted friend change your account password, delete it from your computer, break the CDs, etc. If it's very hard for you to get started again it's easier to quit. I deleted all my high level EQ2 characters a couple weeks ago. It was actually sad, believe it or not, to hit the delete button on something that'd served as my virtual persona for a year and a half, but once I realized that I still talked to all the friends I'd met in-game that mattered to me, it became easier to see them as just a bunch of pixels and a spreadsheet of data.
If you actually do want to quit, that's the way to do it. But I agree with you that there's far worse things. I just decided that I wasn't even having fun anymore but that I was going to keep coming back, so I took the appropriate steps.
They don't teach it without limits or continuity, at least in a more current edition of that textbook (circa 2002). What they do is just give you a very vague notion of limit and continuity that makes it seem haphazard. It wasn't until my advanced calculus (fourth semester in the sequence, supposedly junior level) course in the sequence that we actually really discussed the definition of a limit, the definition of continuity, the definition of the derivative.
:P
I understand why they do it. You can "do calculus" without knowing the formal definitions -- I mean, the definitions weren't even formalized until the late 1800s if I recall my mathematical timeline. But a lot of the rules for why you can and can't do things will just seem rather arbitrary and have to be taken as axioms that work until later on. I remember tutoring someone who took Calc II and it was really tough explaining why she couldn't do all the crazy things she wanted to do with limits like splitting them over arbitrary quotients and stuff. Hell, I had some problems on that front until I learned them in a rigorous way
Maybe he doesn't. Or maybe he cares because there's something inexplicable within him that makes him feel good to care and it's in his self-interest to feel good. Feel free to insert a couple asterisks in there if it helps make the point.