As for the distinction of teaching religion vs. practicing religion in school, I don't remember any public schools in the past thirty years requiring students to get down and pray. This leaves nothing but a discussion of a topic of very real import to life on this planet. No, I don't think teachers should shove any religion down childrens throats (that would be wrong), but how can you shy away from discussing it?
The best science teacher I ever had (8th grade) started off the school year pointing to the (inconspicuous) Bible on his desk and saying "I don't draw my lesson plans from that book, and I will never open it in class--it's for reading in my off hours. But I can promise you that nothing that I teach you will in any way conflict with the spirit of what's in that book. If you have any concerns about that, I'd be happy to speak with you about it anytime after class."
Absolutely brilliant. And allowed him to teach evolution in the Bible-belt South with *nary a peep*.
But more directly to your point, as a Unitarian, I agree with you completely, and find it disheartening that the first time many people get to learn about religion, in a non-partisan, educational setting is in college, when it's often too late to get anyone to actually listen to anyone else. But on the other hand, having grown up in a small, very Baptist town, I can understand why it's a good idea to play it safe and just keep it out of the school entirely. Things don't go bad too often, but when they do, they get extremely ugly, and it happens very quickly.
But what constitutes proper ID? A drivers license, sure, but what if you don't drive? Or if it expires?
(Mine expired 4 days after 9/11, and I had a plane flight the next day. And it takes at least a week to get a new license. I had to board the plane with an official (but very fake-looking) paper temporary license. I barely got on board.)
Does my 9-yr old need ID? What kind? Where would I get that and where else would I use it.
How about an 18-year old? I've heard people complaining that teenagers have been getting on planes with "easily-faked" student IDs.
But so what? If we can't see the regulation, how do we know what IDs are allowable? Or required? Trying to board your plane is the wrong time to be finding this out.
Pons and Fleischmann violated just about every tenet of the open, peer-reviewed scientific process. In so doing they abandoned any claim to legitimacy.
To be fair to them, I think that the media storm that erupted from their first press conference took them completely by surprise, because I never saw it as being pushed by traditional media. I was in college at the time, and Cold Fusion was the first big 'internet phenomenon' that I can remember. If you were a reader of Usenet (as a great many scientists were), it was inescapable for a good month, at least.
Lots of information (of widely varying quality) circulated almost instantly, and so people were able to argue about it and hash it out and make their minds up much sooner than had been the case before.
Nowadays we expect that, and know how to filter appropriately. I don't think it's fair to have expected P&F to foresee that, since it had never happened before.
Deus Ex: great game, cool story...no Art. You experienced no emotion (well, you know what I mean) during the game.
Well *I* experienced plenty of emotion during the game. Or do you mean that the main character, JC Denton expressed no emotion during the game? That's a different thing.
Art does not require character development to induce emotion. In the case of Deus Ex, it was done through exploration of the setting, and through constantly causing you to reevaluate the question "What is real?" This is not standard in literature (though it has been done), but is a valid choice.
Deus Ex is, IMO the video game most worthy of being called Art (though I have not played Homeworld). I'm not saying it's the only one, just the most clear cut case.
In German, in certain situations, the verb moves to the end. Moreover, certain verbs get even split in certain situations.
This actually happens in English, too, but we've been trained not to think of it that way.
* I'd like to hang up that picture.
* I don't know where to hang that picture up.
* His friends are going to move out at the end of the month.
* Is he going to help move his friends out?
Most of the time when you are "ending a sentence with a preposition," you are actually doing no such thing--you are using a seperable verb. But because we write them as two separate words even when they are next to each other, we don't really think of them as being that closely related anymore. Also the fact that those "particles" (the technical term for them) look and sound exactly like prepositions helped lead to the confusion.
I remember in my introductory syntax class, we spent about a week proving that the sentence structures for English and German were virtually identical, but mirror images of each other. (things that German tended to move to the back, English tended to move to the front, and vice versa) but we had to diagram an awful lot of sentences to get to that point.
Last time there was an article about Acclaim I took a look at their financials, and they were absolutely miserable. They've been dead since 2002, it just took this long for the corpse to stop twitching. Anyone working there who didn't have a resume making the rounds just wasn't paying attention.
I work at a collection agency, and I've seen some co-creditors get most of "what's left" and others get none at all. I'm not sure exactly how that works (I'm not explicity involved in these sorts of things), and who chooses who gets what.
The order that creditors get paid in is spelled out in the bankruptcy laws, and the bankruptcy court essentially settles any ties. It's not completely set in stone (if all the creditors get together and agree to a particular division, it should be approved), but there is a broad outline. IIRC, the rough order (in my state, at least) is:
#1 Bankruptcy Court costs
#2 Payroll Taxes
#3 Employees back pay
#4 Secured creditors (ie, they got collateral for their loans)
#5 Unsecured creditors
And of course, if more than one lender has the same collateral, the order that the liens were issued in makes a difference. I could be wrong about Employees being so favorably treated, too. Heck, I could be wrong about all of that, but I think it's fairly close.
I actually wasn't really referencing EQ (as I haven't played it). I was actually thinking about UO (which I also haven't played), where I have heard stories about "black" items that became valued extremely highly, because you were only allowed to craft them for a short time.
My game is Shadowbane, which has had enough gold sinks in it that inflation would not have been a problem, except for a massive gold dupe bug that existed for a while. The duped gold has mostly worked its way out of the system by now, though.
As for whether or not there is actual inflation in EQ, though, your statements didn't disprove it. The things that I would want to see in order to tell if there is any inflation are the following:
The $/pp exchange rate on EBay.
The pp prices of a basket of "comparable goods". In other words, you can't compare the price of an Executioner's Axe last year to the price of an Executioner's Axe today. You have to compare the price of the "Best Weapon" last year to the price of the "Best Weapon" today. (Or even better, total value of one characters "Best Gear" a year ago to their "Best Gear" today.)
And probably adjust for the US$ inflation over the same time period.
I have no particular opinion on whether or not there *is* inflation in EQ, but that's how you'd measure it.
The amount of consumers willing to pay 80 but not 100 is insignificant and not worth repricing a whole product line towards, and that niche is not really the target anyway, since if they are that cheap they will not likely be making considerable purchases of any type.
Well...depends. In my house, this might make a difference. $80 puts it in the range of "affordable gift for children" ($70 would be *tons* better, for some reason). Since the idea is to sell games (which have a lower price point) I think theres a decent amount of money to be made in the casual market, just by getting people into the platform. But I'm not in the industry, so the market might skew more heavily towards hard-core users than I think.
Also consider that traditionally once a system drops below 100 in price, the manufacturer is getting out of that business.
I believe that about consoles, but is that true with handhelds as well? I'd expect handhelds to be stable at a slightly lower price. (And this $80, may well be it.) As I recall we got our kids their GBC when it was at end-of-life, which I thought was around $50.
The cut is designed to create fully distinct markets for the DS and SP.
Excellent point! But...
If they were anywhere close in price non-bleeding edge consumers would choose the SP everytime due to its familiarity and broad range of titles.
Don't you think if they were close in price, that everyone would go for the DS, since it would play all of the GBA games *and* the new DS games?
Instead of "old & busted" vs "new & shiny", how about calling the markets "value focused" and "game focused". By lowering the price on the SP, they can now sell it to people who just aren't going to pay more than X amount of money for a system, with the hope that once they get them coopted, they can sell them a higher end system later.
In other words, I'd say this is more about protecting the GBA market, than trying to steer people towards the DS.
"Habit" would be one reason. They were used to using $ for money, and it made sense to them. Also, for a while there, they thought that they would be rescued, and accepted $ on that basis. By the time they didn't believe that anymore, they each had enough of the stuff that they could safely use it.
But really, now that I think about it, did they ever actually use money with each other? Wasn't it just with the Howells that money ever came into anything?
And of course, the real reason for using $: It was funny.
The Heinz family (yes, Teresa's bunch) has given the Tides folks $4 million over the last few years.
OK, now I'm confused. How is the Heinz family = Teresa's bunch? She just married into the family; they're not actually related to her. And given that Heinz was a Republican senator, I would expect the rest of the family to lean more Republican than Democrat.
Oddly enough, that made me think of MMORPG economies. The fiat currency of the MMORPG company (gold pieces) is usually horribly inflationary, since more is constantly being added. (Even ignoring duping.) Stable values are invariably found in worthless items that are no longer being created.
Or maybe it's not so odd...MMORPGs are the most likely exposure/.ers have to widespread currency exchange, I guess.
I'll agree that the current job market isn't Bush's fault.
But the only part of it that is Clinton's fault is that it didn't hit 3 years earlier. Clinton did a very good job of delaying the *normal*, *cyclical* recession much longer than anyone thought possible. Probably due to him getting religion on reducing the deficit and encouraging low interest rates. (Yes, we can thank the Republican Congress for that too. It was a team effort.)
Truth to tell, the current (just finished?) recession wasn't even that bad, expecially considering how long it was put off. Anyone who thinks it was, doesn't remember the 70s. (Thanx to Bush's short-term thinking, we might all get to relive them, though. Lucky us.)
The poor don't pay income taxes, pretty much, as a rule. The top 25% of taxpayers pay 83% of the taxes. How do you lower taxes on people who don't pay any taxes, or, in the case of people who get child credits and the EITC, get government subsidies?
I'm going to split hairs here, because you're making a standard argument that is *almost* a really good point.
The (working) poor play plenty in income taxes, they just might not be paying any FIT (Federal Income Tax). They're still paying plenty of FICA & Medicare, however, which is a tax levied on income. Even worse, it is a tax on Gross Income, and not affected by most tax deductions. The poor and middle class pay overwhelmingly the largest share of FICA, because the amount of income that is subject to FICA is capped (I think at $80K this year? The cap is indexed to inflation.).
Discussions of tweaking income taxes are almost always incomplete because they just focus on the FIT, but for most people, it is FICA that is taking the lions share of their taxes.
Of course they do it this way because Social Security is too political an issue to touch, I understand that. But arguing income tax policy without taking that into account is just sophistry.
*Personally*, if I were in charge, I would remove the income cap on FICA, and then rebalance the rate to be overall revenue neutral. Then we could all talk about our taxes from the same basic framework.
False. In the long run of a competitive market, the market price will equal the production costs. So in the long run of a truly competitive market, there is no profit.
Well, I would have put it opposite. In the short run, you can set your prices to be equal to your direct costs of production. (Though that's generally only true in cases where you have excess capacity.) But in the long run, they have to be the same as your direct costs, plus your overhead, plus your required profit level, or you will discontinue production and make something that gives you more profit.
Of course, cost accounting is more of an art than a science, anyway. Trying to allocate some costs to the product level is, shall we say, speculative. But the fact remains, if you can't show a profit on some level, you won't get the capital you need to ever actually make a product in the first place.
Heh. People have been arguing about "what is *real* science fiction" since about 20 minutes after the term was first coined. Having to grandfather in space opera, time travel, and psi, since they were around from the beginning, pretty much nullified the pristine "hard sf only" definition. But I do agree with you, for the most part, as long as you count Anthropology, Psychology, Linguistics, etc among the sciences being extrapolated, that allow it to be called sf. The ones who know what they're talking about, do it well. The others--well, that's where the hand-waving comes in.
I'll also disagree with you that the change in the genre came about because of lazy authors. I think it's because the audience changed. I don't think that the readers, by and large, know enough science to tell the difference between reasonable and unreasonable extrapolation, and so they don't care. If that's not something they care about, the publisher's sure not going to care.
In the end, I think that the most accepted definition of "science fiction" is: what a science fiction editor buys.
I like the analysis, but I don't think that's where Gilliam was going with the movie. His description of it was that it was a "post-Orwellian look at a pre-Orwellian society". That implies that it is not a look at a failed 1984, but rather a society that is on its way to 1984, but just hasn't gotten there yet.
Whether or not it will ever *actually* get there is where your analysis comes in, and is an open question in the movie. Guess it all depends on how competent those terrorists are.
Actually, when I finally got around to reading _Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep_, it ended up making me even more impressed with the movie, becasue they had *almost nothing to do with each other*. I was impressed that they had made so much up, whole cloth.
Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the book. I enjoyed the movie. But aside from a few thematic elements that they have in common (and which are made very clear in the movie), there's absolutely nothing you *could* get from the book to apply to the movie.
That was my first thought as well. Brazil is, without a doubt, my favorite movie of all time. However, I, will admit that whether or not it should be classified as sf is debatable, so it didn't strike me as *too* surprising that it wasn't on the list.
I think you probably should have went with the light bulb example.
And going even farther OT, every time someone talks about light bulb lifetimes I'm reminded of an example from my college statistics class.
The professor put a chart of numbers from a study he'd been working on up on the overhead, (I forget why) and said:
Now, say these are the lifespans of light bulbs in hours...well, they're actually the life spans of AIDS patients in days, but lets just say they're light bulbs.
The main conclusion I drew from that lecture, was that, unfortunately, AIDS patients made lousy light bulbs.
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The best science teacher I ever had (8th grade) started off the school year pointing to the (inconspicuous) Bible on his desk and saying "I don't draw my lesson plans from that book, and I will never open it in class--it's for reading in my off hours. But I can promise you that nothing that I teach you will in any way conflict with the spirit of what's in that book. If you have any concerns about that, I'd be happy to speak with you about it anytime after class."
Absolutely brilliant. And allowed him to teach evolution in the Bible-belt South with *nary a peep*.
But more directly to your point, as a Unitarian, I agree with you completely, and find it disheartening that the first time many people get to learn about religion, in a non-partisan, educational setting is in college, when it's often too late to get anyone to actually listen to anyone else. But on the other hand, having grown up in a small, very Baptist town, I can understand why it's a good idea to play it safe and just keep it out of the school entirely. Things don't go bad too often, but when they do, they get extremely ugly, and it happens very quickly.
(Mine expired 4 days after 9/11, and I had a plane flight the next day. And it takes at least a week to get a new license. I had to board the plane with an official (but very fake-looking) paper temporary license. I barely got on board.)
Does my 9-yr old need ID? What kind? Where would I get that and where else would I use it.
How about an 18-year old? I've heard people complaining that teenagers have been getting on planes with "easily-faked" student IDs.
But so what? If we can't see the regulation, how do we know what IDs are allowable? Or required? Trying to board your plane is the wrong time to be finding this out.
To be fair to them, I think that the media storm that erupted from their first press conference took them completely by surprise, because I never saw it as being pushed by traditional media. I was in college at the time, and Cold Fusion was the first big 'internet phenomenon' that I can remember. If you were a reader of Usenet (as a great many scientists were), it was inescapable for a good month, at least.
Lots of information (of widely varying quality) circulated almost instantly, and so people were able to argue about it and hash it out and make their minds up much sooner than had been the case before.
Nowadays we expect that, and know how to filter appropriately. I don't think it's fair to have expected P&F to foresee that, since it had never happened before.
Well *I* experienced plenty of emotion during the game. Or do you mean that the main character, JC Denton expressed no emotion during the game? That's a different thing.
Art does not require character development to induce emotion. In the case of Deus Ex, it was done through exploration of the setting, and through constantly causing you to reevaluate the question "What is real?" This is not standard in literature (though it has been done), but is a valid choice.
Deus Ex is, IMO the video game most worthy of being called Art (though I have not played Homeworld). I'm not saying it's the only one, just the most clear cut case.
This actually happens in English, too, but we've been trained not to think of it that way.
* I'd like to hang up that picture.
* I don't know where to hang that picture up.
* His friends are going to move out at the end of the month.
* Is he going to help move his friends out?
Most of the time when you are "ending a sentence with a preposition," you are actually doing no such thing--you are using a seperable verb. But because we write them as two separate words even when they are next to each other, we don't really think of them as being that closely related anymore. Also the fact that those "particles" (the technical term for them) look and sound exactly like prepositions helped lead to the confusion.
I remember in my introductory syntax class, we spent about a week proving that the sentence structures for English and German were virtually identical, but mirror images of each other. (things that German tended to move to the back, English tended to move to the front, and vice versa) but we had to diagram an awful lot of sentences to get to that point.
The order that creditors get paid in is spelled out in the bankruptcy laws, and the bankruptcy court essentially settles any ties. It's not completely set in stone (if all the creditors get together and agree to a particular division, it should be approved), but there is a broad outline. IIRC, the rough order (in my state, at least) is:
#1 Bankruptcy Court costs
#2 Payroll Taxes
#3 Employees back pay
#4 Secured creditors (ie, they got collateral for their loans)
#5 Unsecured creditors
And of course, if more than one lender has the same collateral, the order that the liens were issued in makes a difference. I could be wrong about Employees being so favorably treated, too. Heck, I could be wrong about all of that, but I think it's fairly close.
My game is Shadowbane, which has had enough gold sinks in it that inflation would not have been a problem, except for a massive gold dupe bug that existed for a while. The duped gold has mostly worked its way out of the system by now, though.
As for whether or not there is actual inflation in EQ, though, your statements didn't disprove it. The things that I would want to see in order to tell if there is any inflation are the following: The $/pp exchange rate on EBay.
The pp prices of a basket of "comparable goods". In other words, you can't compare the price of an Executioner's Axe last year to the price of an Executioner's Axe today. You have to compare the price of the "Best Weapon" last year to the price of the "Best Weapon" today. (Or even better, total value of one characters "Best Gear" a year ago to their "Best Gear" today.)
And probably adjust for the US$ inflation over the same time period.
I have no particular opinion on whether or not there *is* inflation in EQ, but that's how you'd measure it.
Well...depends. In my house, this might make a difference. $80 puts it in the range of "affordable gift for children" ($70 would be *tons* better, for some reason). Since the idea is to sell games (which have a lower price point) I think theres a decent amount of money to be made in the casual market, just by getting people into the platform. But I'm not in the industry, so the market might skew more heavily towards hard-core users than I think.
Also consider that traditionally once a system drops below 100 in price, the manufacturer is getting out of that business.
I believe that about consoles, but is that true with handhelds as well? I'd expect handhelds to be stable at a slightly lower price. (And this $80, may well be it.) As I recall we got our kids their GBC when it was at end-of-life, which I thought was around $50.
Excellent point! But...
If they were anywhere close in price non-bleeding edge consumers would choose the SP everytime due to its familiarity and broad range of titles.
Don't you think if they were close in price, that everyone would go for the DS, since it would play all of the GBA games *and* the new DS games?
Instead of "old & busted" vs "new & shiny", how about calling the markets "value focused" and "game focused". By lowering the price on the SP, they can now sell it to people who just aren't going to pay more than X amount of money for a system, with the hope that once they get them coopted, they can sell them a higher end system later.
In other words, I'd say this is more about protecting the GBA market, than trying to steer people towards the DS.
"Habit" would be one reason. They were used to using $ for money, and it made sense to them. Also, for a while there, they thought that they would be rescued, and accepted $ on that basis. By the time they didn't believe that anymore, they each had enough of the stuff that they could safely use it.
But really, now that I think about it, did they ever actually use money with each other? Wasn't it just with the Howells that money ever came into anything?
And of course, the real reason for using $: It was funny.
OK, now I'm confused. How is the Heinz family = Teresa's bunch? She just married into the family; they're not actually related to her. And given that Heinz was a Republican senator, I would expect the rest of the family to lean more Republican than Democrat.
Or maybe it's not so odd...MMORPGs are the most likely exposure /.ers have to widespread currency exchange, I guess.
But the only part of it that is Clinton's fault is that it didn't hit 3 years earlier. Clinton did a very good job of delaying the *normal*, *cyclical* recession much longer than anyone thought possible. Probably due to him getting religion on reducing the deficit and encouraging low interest rates. (Yes, we can thank the Republican Congress for that too. It was a team effort.)
Truth to tell, the current (just finished?) recession wasn't even that bad, expecially considering how long it was put off. Anyone who thinks it was, doesn't remember the 70s. (Thanx to Bush's short-term thinking, we might all get to relive them, though. Lucky us.)
But would you get arrested for it, whether or not it is illegal?
I'm going to split hairs here, because you're making a standard argument that is *almost* a really good point.
The (working) poor play plenty in income taxes, they just might not be paying any FIT (Federal Income Tax). They're still paying plenty of FICA & Medicare, however, which is a tax levied on income. Even worse, it is a tax on Gross Income, and not affected by most tax deductions. The poor and middle class pay overwhelmingly the largest share of FICA, because the amount of income that is subject to FICA is capped (I think at $80K this year? The cap is indexed to inflation.).
Discussions of tweaking income taxes are almost always incomplete because they just focus on the FIT, but for most people, it is FICA that is taking the lions share of their taxes.
Of course they do it this way because Social Security is too political an issue to touch, I understand that. But arguing income tax policy without taking that into account is just sophistry.
*Personally*, if I were in charge, I would remove the income cap on FICA, and then rebalance the rate to be overall revenue neutral. Then we could all talk about our taxes from the same basic framework.
Well, I would have put it opposite. In the short run, you can set your prices to be equal to your direct costs of production. (Though that's generally only true in cases where you have excess capacity.) But in the long run, they have to be the same as your direct costs, plus your overhead, plus your required profit level, or you will discontinue production and make something that gives you more profit.
Of course, cost accounting is more of an art than a science, anyway. Trying to allocate some costs to the product level is, shall we say, speculative. But the fact remains, if you can't show a profit on some level, you won't get the capital you need to ever actually make a product in the first place.
I'll also disagree with you that the change in the genre came about because of lazy authors. I think it's because the audience changed. I don't think that the readers, by and large, know enough science to tell the difference between reasonable and unreasonable extrapolation, and so they don't care. If that's not something they care about, the publisher's sure not going to care.
In the end, I think that the most accepted definition of "science fiction" is: what a science fiction editor buys.
Whether or not it will ever *actually* get there is where your analysis comes in, and is an open question in the movie. Guess it all depends on how competent those terrorists are.
Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the book. I enjoyed the movie. But aside from a few thematic elements that they have in common (and which are made very clear in the movie), there's absolutely nothing you *could* get from the book to apply to the movie.
And going even farther OT, every time someone talks about light bulb lifetimes I'm reminded of an example from my college statistics class.
The professor put a chart of numbers from a study he'd been working on up on the overhead, (I forget why) and said:
Now, say these are the lifespans of light bulbs in hours...well, they're actually the life spans of AIDS patients in days, but lets just say they're light bulbs.
The main conclusion I drew from that lecture, was that, unfortunately, AIDS patients made lousy light bulbs.
"Remember, 50% of people are *at least as dumb* as the average person."
Not that you have to care.