Most of them grew from a combination of a flawed democratic process and fear in the population that a civil war or anarchy is imminent
Hmm... like, say, a democratic process, where the main determining factor in getting elected is the amount of money you can raise by pandering to giant corporations and a fear that is played up and nurtured by those in power to justify extraordinary means? Backed with, say, talk of a war against an evil enemy spiced with calls for patriotism?
Sounds strangely familiar... not that I'd be one to draw hasty comparisons or claim analogy, though.
From an outsider's point of view (I'm from Finland myself), it seems that one of the problems is that everything in the US gets turned into a dichotomy between the democrats and the republicans. It seems that every time somebody tries to bring up a valid point about the way things are run or working within the government, someone else will counter that by claiming the original argument simply stems from party affiliation. And everything is easily reduced to partisan bickering (sort of what Jon Stewart complained about on Crossfire). I see that happening here on Slashdot a lot as well. Every time there's a discussion about politics, it seems pointless to me to read it, because I know it will only degrade into two camps insulting each other and not really discussing anything. Especially with the divisive issues like gun control, etc, but also in general. There never seems to be a possibility of a third viewpoint, of a compromise. Hell, there's only two parties anyway, so naturally there can be only two possible solutions to any problem, right?
I think that's one reason why the current government gets away with so much. To an outside observer, especially from a northern European democracy, it seems really amazing that there's isn't more of a backlash, especially in the media. Even my father, whose a very mild-mannered man commented on the Scooter Libby pardon, sorry, 'commute', 'it's like it's some kind of a banana republic!'
Then again, there is the apathy. And the money. But I really do think that the two-party system and the mentality it brings is hurting the country.
Artificial limitations appear because you find a place where you should be able to use a special ability, but the designers just didn't make it possible on that wall because it could be used as an exploit.
I think a big reason why that happens a lot in games is because the developers really want to tell you a story instead of giving you a game or a world to explore. They've got this beautiful story that they feel they really want to tell and don't want you, the player, to intervene in that in any really meaningful way. So they guide you and disallow any unorthodox ways of advancing in the game so that you'll get the story they want to tell you. And that creates the feel that many modern games have of you just having to run fundamentally meaninglessly to find the speacial ability or special object you need to find in this part of the game to get to the next cutscene that will advance the story.
Then the developers remember that they're trying to make a game and not a movie and add all kinds of extra things that you called 'advanced features', but that happens after the fact, and at that point, the story already constrains the game so much that any freedom to explore the world of the game that would otherwise be possible is already gone.
I suppose a lot of people enjoy that type of game, or maybe it's just a safe choice for the developers in some sense; it's maybe easier to tell a story through a game that's at least relatively engaging than to come up with gameplay mechanics that would keep people interested in and of themselves (a story is probably a lot easier to market as well).
Personally, I'd really like to see commercial games that would have game mechanics rather like what Nethack has. What I really enjoy about Nethack is that it feels like there's an actual world there where there are no artificial barriers. If something kills instantly, it kills everything instantly, all the 'boss' characters and yourself. Fair's fair and deadly's deadly. But fair is interesting, although at times extremely frustrating. Maybe for anything to be truly interesting it has to be frustrating on occasion...
Well, I guess I went off on a bit of a tangent there, since Nethack really doesn't use that much procedural content generation (apart from the layout of the dungeon), but I suppose I felt like I had to vent my frustration at the state of modern games, which for the most part seem to be not much more than glorified computer-animated movies with some meaningless running around required to reach the next scene. And the most frustrating thing about that is that computers and computer games as a medium could be used for so much more, for all kinds of unprecedented things! Alas, such are the realities of commercial products. Maybe I'll need to check out more indie games, maybe I'd find more variety there. I hear Darwinia's quite interesting.
Well, I hope you have good luck with your projects, they sound interesting. I hope you'll get far enough to publish something for the rest of us to see. My own projects and visions for games mostly seem to be stuck at the planning stage:-)
Hmm, and I was considering learning Haskell, a language with monadic I/O...
Actually, though, the difference described in the summary, between the past tenses, isn't actually a distinction of tenses, but rather of modality (or mood, in some writer's terminology). From the description, it seems Choctaw would have a distinction between past and non-past, at least, and a distinction between believed-to-be-true and hearsay (a distinction of evidentiality). Sort of like English distinguishes past and present and two aspects. That is, two one-bit distinctions, making for four different combinations: I eat, I have eaten , I ate, had eaten. Not to mention all the other aspects of verbal systems...
In fact, every sentence in every human language is formed from a noun phrase, auxillory, and a verb phrase
Come now.
This is the problem with Chomsky and his linguistics really. Looking at English and believing that all languages are fundamentally alike and that there is a simple structure to be found.
Chomskyan linguistics is in many ways like looking at C and saying: 'Oh! All programming languages must be procedural and have pointers and use curly brackets to delimit blocks! And because it is obvious how all programming languages must be inherently equivalent this must _actually_ be how every other programming language works, everything else is convoluted C! And anyway, I can't be bothered to learn Haskell. Or Prolog.'
Yes, I'm being unnecessarily flamebaitish.
Well, when talking about drugs and addiction, it's really a different kind of addiction. It's not so much an issue of wanting but of needing. Obviously, the human body does not need the drug, but the psychological and emotional response when addicted is similar to a need.
The addiction potential of drugs varies, having some relation to their pleasure-inducing capabilities, but not defined by it. For example, some people can be addicted to nicotine without draeing much pleasure from it (apart from the pleasure of satisfying a need, not unlike to the pleasure gained from drinking something when very thirsty), whereas something like gammahydroxybutyrate is rather pleasurable to some people yet relatively unaddictive.
Some drugs both give much pleasure and are addictive, like most opiates and amphetamines (and derivatives), but the link isn't absolute.
So basically I define addiction as behaviout where a want becomes a need and an addictive substance as one which induces and promotes such a change.
And that is a different issue from simple wanting.
Re:Does this work for non native speakers?
on
Can You Raed Tihs?
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· Score: 1
Well, my native language is Finnish, and I still found the text to be relatively easy to read, but probably not as easy as Finnish text scrambled likewise would be.
I think one reason it would be easier for a native speaker to read is that in reading this sort of a text you still have to unscramble it at some point, and for a non-native unscrambling, say, 'porbelm', would be slightly harder, because the dead-ends which don't result in real words, like, say 'preblom', or 'prebolm' aren't quite so hard-wired in to the brain as to be rejected quite as quickly as for a native (And in some cases a non-native might not even be entirely certain as to whether a certain unscrambling is or is not a real english word!)
Also, a non-native maybe would tend to attack the problem of understanding a scrambled text by unscrambling it on a word-by-word basis, which is how you'd treat anything written in an unfamiliar language most often. However, since understanding a text, especially in this case, relies a lot on the context, it might actually be easier not to focus on individual words so much, hoping that the words further ahead would help to understand that long scrambled word that appeared before. I myself found the text easier to read when I didn't concentrate on the individual words as much, but tried to read the sentences as wholes, however intimidating that seemed to be with all those letters mixed up:). But that's probably highly dependent on the individual as well.
It's called a conflict of interest people, when someone has a financial interest in one particular version of the truth you can't expect them to work against their own interests.
I can and I do expect them not to lie for money.
I mean, lying for money. Lying to save someone or telling white lies not to hurt people, ok, but for money?
Please don't subscribe to the 'I can pollute/steal/lie/deceive, because I'm a business, and we're about the bottom line' credo just because it's what everybody does.
Am I the only person that sees the obvious negative consequences of this? How hard would it be to sabotage this train/skyscraper/internet/power plant and have the thing either explode or otherwise be destroyed (I don't how that would happen because I'm not an expert or even a novice in anything). I think this is a really bad idea, because it could go wrong.
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Hmm... like, say, a democratic process, where the main determining factor in getting elected is the amount of money you can raise by pandering to giant corporations and a fear that is played up and nurtured by those in power to justify extraordinary means? Backed with, say, talk of a war against an evil enemy spiced with calls for patriotism?
Sounds strangely familiar... not that I'd be one to draw hasty comparisons or claim analogy, though.
I think that's one reason why the current government gets away with so much. To an outside observer, especially from a northern European democracy, it seems really amazing that there's isn't more of a backlash, especially in the media. Even my father, whose a very mild-mannered man commented on the Scooter Libby pardon, sorry, 'commute', 'it's like it's some kind of a banana republic!'
Then again, there is the apathy. And the money. But I really do think that the two-party system and the mentality it brings is hurting the country.
I think a big reason why that happens a lot in games is because the developers really want to tell you a story instead of giving you a game or a world to explore. They've got this beautiful story that they feel they really want to tell and don't want you, the player, to intervene in that in any really meaningful way. So they guide you and disallow any unorthodox ways of advancing in the game so that you'll get the story they want to tell you. And that creates the feel that many modern games have of you just having to run fundamentally meaninglessly to find the speacial ability or special object you need to find in this part of the game to get to the next cutscene that will advance the story.
Then the developers remember that they're trying to make a game and not a movie and add all kinds of extra things that you called 'advanced features', but that happens after the fact, and at that point, the story already constrains the game so much that any freedom to explore the world of the game that would otherwise be possible is already gone.
I suppose a lot of people enjoy that type of game, or maybe it's just a safe choice for the developers in some sense; it's maybe easier to tell a story through a game that's at least relatively engaging than to come up with gameplay mechanics that would keep people interested in and of themselves (a story is probably a lot easier to market as well).
Personally, I'd really like to see commercial games that would have game mechanics rather like what Nethack has. What I really enjoy about Nethack is that it feels like there's an actual world there where there are no artificial barriers. If something kills instantly, it kills everything instantly, all the 'boss' characters and yourself. Fair's fair and deadly's deadly. But fair is interesting, although at times extremely frustrating. Maybe for anything to be truly interesting it has to be frustrating on occasion...
Well, I guess I went off on a bit of a tangent there, since Nethack really doesn't use that much procedural content generation (apart from the layout of the dungeon), but I suppose I felt like I had to vent my frustration at the state of modern games, which for the most part seem to be not much more than glorified computer-animated movies with some meaningless running around required to reach the next scene. And the most frustrating thing about that is that computers and computer games as a medium could be used for so much more, for all kinds of unprecedented things! Alas, such are the realities of commercial products. Maybe I'll need to check out more indie games, maybe I'd find more variety there. I hear Darwinia's quite interesting.
Well, I hope you have good luck with your projects, they sound interesting. I hope you'll get far enough to publish something for the rest of us to see. My own projects and visions for games mostly seem to be stuck at the planning stage :-)
End rant.
Hmm, and I was considering learning Haskell, a language with monadic I/O...
Actually, though, the difference described in the summary, between the past tenses, isn't actually a distinction of tenses, but rather of modality (or mood, in some writer's terminology). From the description, it seems Choctaw would have a distinction between past and non-past, at least, and a distinction between believed-to-be-true and hearsay (a distinction of evidentiality). Sort of like English distinguishes past and present and two aspects. That is, two one-bit distinctions, making for four different combinations: I eat, I have eaten , I ate, had eaten. Not to mention all the other aspects of verbal systems...
In fact, every sentence in every human language is formed from a noun phrase, auxillory, and a verb phrase
Come now.
This is the problem with Chomsky and his linguistics really. Looking at English and believing that all languages are fundamentally alike and that there is a simple structure to be found.
Chomskyan linguistics is in many ways like looking at C and saying: 'Oh! All programming languages must be procedural and have pointers and use curly brackets to delimit blocks! And because it is obvious how all programming languages must be inherently equivalent this must _actually_ be how every other programming language works, everything else is convoluted C! And anyway, I can't be bothered to learn Haskell. Or Prolog.'
Yes, I'm being unnecessarily flamebaitish.
Well, when talking about drugs and addiction, it's really a different kind of addiction. It's not so much an issue of wanting but of needing. Obviously, the human body does not need the drug, but the psychological and emotional response when addicted is similar to a need.
The addiction potential of drugs varies, having some relation to their pleasure-inducing capabilities, but not defined by it. For example, some people can be addicted to nicotine without draeing much pleasure from it (apart from the pleasure of satisfying a need, not unlike to the pleasure gained from drinking something when very thirsty), whereas something like gammahydroxybutyrate is rather pleasurable to some people yet relatively unaddictive.
Some drugs both give much pleasure and are addictive, like most opiates and amphetamines (and derivatives), but the link isn't absolute.
So basically I define addiction as behaviout where a want becomes a need and an addictive substance as one which induces and promotes such a change. And that is a different issue from simple wanting.
Well, my native language is Finnish, and I still found the text to be relatively easy to read, but probably not as easy as Finnish text scrambled likewise would be.
:). But that's probably highly dependent on the individual as well.
I think one reason it would be easier for a native speaker to read is that in reading this sort of a text you still have to unscramble it at some point, and for a non-native unscrambling, say, 'porbelm', would be slightly harder, because the dead-ends which don't result in real words, like, say 'preblom', or 'prebolm' aren't quite so hard-wired in to the brain as to be rejected quite as quickly as for a native (And in some cases a non-native might not even be entirely certain as to whether a certain unscrambling is or is not a real english word!)
Also, a non-native maybe would tend to attack the problem of understanding a scrambled text by unscrambling it on a word-by-word basis, which is how you'd treat anything written in an unfamiliar language most often. However, since understanding a text, especially in this case, relies a lot on the context, it might actually be easier not to focus on individual words so much, hoping that the words further ahead would help to understand that long scrambled word that appeared before.
I myself found the text easier to read when I didn't concentrate on the individual words as much, but tried to read the sentences as wholes, however intimidating that seemed to be with all those letters mixed up
It's called a conflict of interest people, when someone has a financial interest in one particular version of the truth you can't expect them to work against their own interests.
I can and I do expect them not to lie for money.
I mean, lying for money. Lying to save someone or telling white lies not to hurt people, ok, but for money?
Please don't subscribe to the 'I can pollute/steal/lie/deceive, because I'm a business, and we're about the bottom line' credo just because it's what everybody does.
Am I the only person that sees the obvious negative consequences of this? How hard would it be to sabotage this train/skyscraper/internet/power plant and have the thing either explode or otherwise be destroyed (I don't how that would happen because I'm not an expert or even a novice in anything). I think this is a really bad idea, because it could go wrong.