"So PETA is in the awkward and unenviable position of reminding people of their own moral standards. Not PETA's standards, but the audience's."
My wife had an emergency while she was pregnant - I broke several traffic laws getting her to the hospital. I believe in those traffic laws, but my wife's health was paramount.
I don't like being cruel to animals. But that's similar to traffic laws - something I obey when convient, but will break in a heartbeat for more important things.
"On the flip side, Rowling definitely didn't need even 0.01% of that money in order to keep writing more books."
How do you know? How many timeless best-sellers have you written? Maybe her psychology is such that she needed an unbelievable success in order to convince her to keep going.
Bottom line - only JK Rowling can define her own needs. That's a more basic freedom than speech.
"From a society's point of view, all the money in excess of what was required for her to continue writing was wasted..."
You make it sound like I can feed all data related to a society into a computer and then determine the most appropriate course of action with societies resources.
This doesn't work. People's needs are not all quantifiable. No single person or group is qualified to judge *all* of a society's needs.
"...and could have been spent better elsewhere on hundreds of other promising writers that have now been crowded out of the marketplace by the harry potter monster."
Are you suggesting that I should not be allowed to spend my money on the book of my choice? Because my money is the "resource" we are talking about.
"You personally might not encourage traditional gender roles, but the culture around you, including friends, relatives and the media, probably does."
Nonsense. At the ages the poster was talking about, the parents represent the dominant external influence on the child.
My sister, a major feminist, reported the exact same thing. I've seen it with friends. We'll see about my daughter as she gets older (4mo now).
The intellectuals/reactionaries need to stop overthinking this stuff. Girls and Boys are hardwired differently. The key is to simply deal with each person you meet as a person as much as possible, keeping in mind those gender differences as needed for guidance.
As to the original post, I've watched really smart women leave the field not due to harrassment, but for many other reasons like:
- More time at home. - Roles that involve more people interaction. - Roles with more possibility to advance.
When you go online to pay a bill, both you, the bank, and the recipient of that payment all have a vested interest in making that payment happen in a secure and correct manner.
The problem is how to secure your vote when the people counting the votes potentially do not have that same interest. While there are reasonable deterrents (e.g. paper trail), you can't ultimately safeguard the process. this is true for paper and electronics.
The added problem with electronics is how easy it is to do on a wide scale. With paper, you really have to work at it, and there's lots of people involved with the process who can notice something funny.
Like many on slashdot, I really think electronic voting machines was a bad move. It's great if you want to get a quick result, but the right way is something physical that is counted by hand.
"Eh. The problem isn't how they made it. The game they made was okay, and it developed a nice little niche following."
The game they made was a mish-mash of ideas with lots of bugs and balance issues. I won't detail them all, as they've been argued to death, but calling the game they made "okay" is silly. It was busted.
I had lots of hope. I, like many, found a game inside the mish-mash that appealed to me, and really hoped they would fix things. Where they ended up did not appeal to me at all, so I quit.
I bought spore. I played it, and only installed it once. I am not embarrased for buying it due to DRM - I think that is an excuse from people who are too embarrased to admit they want free stuff.
I am sad that I didn't read the reviews more carefully, though. It was a really bad game, to my tastes, and the truth was out there even in the "9/10" reviews.
"And as to the spending, Bush had a republican congress for most of his reign, and they managed to get our government and our country into a pretty deep financial hole. "
Which just means that Bush, et al, were not conservative.
The big problem is that the republican party is no more fiscally conservative than the democrat party.
Granted, the republicans sponsored the gramm-leahy legislation that repealed the bulk of the glass-steagal act. And yes, we need to remember democrat legislation pushing banks to make loans to people who were otherwise poor risks. Also, don't forgot the banks that looked past obvious issues to make loans because they knew they would just turn around and sell that loan without a problem.
But let's be fair. If someone breaks a contract, it is *their* fault. I have a mortgage on my house - if I fail to pay I'm the one to blame, not my parents, not the government, not glass, not steagal. ME.
I don't understand why everyone, everywhere, is giving the fiscally irresponsible people who bought houses that they couldn't afford such a pass. They are responsible for their actions, not *us*.
We're mixing words and sentences up to the extent that nothing has any meaning any more. If someone wants to print anonymously, they can contact a newspaper (blog/whatever), submit an article, and be heard if the media entity will print it. Hence "publius" in the federalist papers.
But sending mail headers with fraudulant address should be "fraud" in the criminal sense and prosecuted in extreme cases.
To be honest, I don't mind a simple heading of "anonymous" - then I can screen you out without a problem. But lying is a real issue, and should be dealt with, not hidden under some glorious "oppressed" nonsense.
I can see people talking around the water cooler, taking more time for lunch, calling home, and so on. I agree that a bit of that is expected and likely healthy.
But IM is different - I'll never find out how much they are chatting. Humans are selfish, lazy creatures - if you give them an out, they will take it. So I don't advocate giving them an out.
Again, don't put words in my mouth - I'm not aiming for 8 hours of unbroken productivity. I've never seen that from anybody. But I think IM is too much in the other direction.
In general I agree with you - I've seen some strong & stupid policies in my time. But this I have to call-out:
"And of course they also ban every IM program available, even if using it actually would save time and improve productivity..."
They do this because the vast, vast majority of people use it for chatting when they should be working. Even people who do use it productively often *also* use it for chatting.
If I owned a company, I would ban chat in a heartbeat.
If your goal is to stop every instance of sold gold, then yes you will get around it.
I suggest a better goal is:
a) significantly reduce the inflation of the economy caused by the selling of gold, and b) reduce the amount of annoying in-game spam.
Then I think you can succeed. (b) is simple - you let people right click on messages (mail or broadcast) to report them. GMs have wide discretion to lock accounts. It doesn't take long for a human to recognize a spam message.
(a) is more difficult, but again if you organize the information correctly you should be able to hit the most egregious cases. Now you are left with people who are being meticulous as you suggest, but your method is very slow (months on an account, remember?), expensive (each account is an expense), and thus even if spammers move to that method their impact should be greatly reduced.
I think you guys make this vastly more difficult than it needs to be. Remember that all the data does lie on Mythic's servers, so it's just a question of organizing it correctly.
In this case, you want to stop the illicit transfer of gold. So you carefully record all gold transfers in the game (auctions, mail, whatever), and then sort the list in a few different reports: size of individual transfer, number of transfers per account (send and receive), sum of all transfers by account (send and receive).
Now draw an arbitrary line - transfers below that line are deemed too small to follow-up on for now. Pursue the ones above the line aggressively. Review that line in meetings every week/month/whatever.
It's work, but it's not hard to identify once the numbers are sorted properly.
For the record, I think the article points to a neat experiment. However, I can't let this nonsense pass:
"If external forces (such as humans) knock a species out of existence,..."
Humans are not external to "the ecosystem" - we all live on planet earth here. Furthermore, violent impulses are as natural as any other impulses - we have seen them throughout recorded history, and there is every bit of reason to believe they existed before records. Furthermore, violent impulses appear to help individual humans survive, and thus propogate.
"...then the ecosystem is out of balance due to the loss of that species."
Huh? What does "balance" mean in regards to an "ecosystem"? There is no such thing - the living world is a chaotic, ever-changing environment, not a static, precariously-balanced one.
So again, I think this is a neat experiment. Let's not go wrapping it pseudo-scientific language in some strange attempt to morally justify it.
> And honestly, did you actually agree with every single thing Ron Paul advocated?
Forgive me, but that's childish. Are you suggesting that only a leader who agrees with you 100% of the time will be effective?
Like many here, I have a day job. I read a bit here and there, watch a little TV, and come to some conclusions. But in the end, I know that my judgement is easily flawed because I don't have the time or staff to properly evaluate the available information. So even if my core principals are somehow "right", my decisions are likely to be wildly askew from reality.
Therefore, I think it's ludicrous to pick someone who agrees with you 100%, or even close. See if you can match up some core values, check a couple of "key" (in your mind) decisions a bit more thoroughly, do a gut-check on the person, and vote. But trying for 100% is a laughable criteria.
"Also, psychology is difficult to employ, and impossible to deploy well, in all but the very best TBS games."
Psychology works as long as there's fog of war and/or diplomacy. IMO, a necessary step in TBS games is to turn off the score (and all related charts, e.g. economy size, army size, whatever). Force people to get that information the old-fashioned way, by probing the enemy's territories. Add multi-player, and you got yourself all the psych you need.
-Jeff
P.S. I'll plug dominions III - best TBS game I've played, *IF* you like complexity.
"The problem is that we don't have a good system of accountability set up to put all this corruption in the public eye."
That's only a part of the problem. The other part is scale/scope. It's easy to find and deal with small issues of corruption, but nearly impossible to deal with larger scale corruption.
That's why it's important not to put our energy eggs into one federal basket. We should let this happen at local levels, with many competing forms of energy production, and let the market find the best ones.
"Replace all taxes on economic activity with a tax on net-assets,... and then,... disperse those funds evenly in a dividend to all citizens,"
So basically, my smartest action is to do nothing and wait for your check? Cool, me likey this plan. Who are you going to sucker into doing the work for me?
Stupid trekies, go to a convention. Real economics starts and ends with personal greed.
"Think about it: if everyone pirated games, what would happen?"
We are already at that point without "everyone". Enough people are pirating that the gaming industry is moving away from PC games. My local EBgames has changed dramatically in the past many years. There used to be 2 or 3 walls full of PC games. Now, PC games are a tiny handful, and they mainly sell xbox/ps/wii/etc. Meanwhile, the pc game industry is surviving by turning more and more to online games.
The market works - if one area is unsafe/less-profitable, the market moves towards other areas.
Socialised medicine has the humanity cost as well. When you are told that you have to wait 1 year for the knee operation that you could otherwise afford because someone else has determined that it's not a priority, you feel the loss of humanity.
Tangent - I live in the US. Recently my wife gave birth, and I find myself entering the hospital through the emergency room entrance a lot now. Emergency rooms have really changed - when I was a kid, the people there were bleeding, drastically sick, broken limbs, whatever. Now it's just a 24x7 doctors office. It's really pathetic, and it is totally the result of the ongoing socialization of medicine in the US.
Cavalry was far more difficult than you state. The horse had to be specially trained, as well as the rider. A farmer with a pitchfork and a nag was not the same thing as a mounted cavalryman. Furthermore, cavalry was intended to work in groups, in formation. That's a further layer of intense training that you brush over.
Tactics were far more developed than you state. Professional armies trained to put out a larger volume of fire from a smaller frontage against a smaller frontage. Again, lots of training, and lots of use of formations. People had to kneel & load in the same time. Then step up and advance beyond the front rank in time, and then fire at the same time so the shock of their attack was maximized. The various ranks had to keep up this rythm in the face of return fire, and the ranks in the back had to be prepared to step up and take their turns. Just as with the cavalry, there was a further layer of intense training that you brush over.
"The Brits essentially did little more than pout when the rifled guns of the minutemen just sniped their officers in the first volley."
I'm not certain if you're trying to be offensive or what. The British army at the time was the premier army in the world. They did not "pout" over the loss of some officers.
Oh, to be fair the French were most certainly a big factor. Americans do often ignore that side of things. But in something as complicated as the American Revolution, that's one factor among many.
Slashdot Mirror
"So PETA is in the awkward and unenviable position of reminding people of their own moral standards. Not PETA's standards, but the audience's."
My wife had an emergency while she was pregnant - I broke several traffic laws getting her to the hospital. I believe in those traffic laws, but my wife's health was paramount.
I don't like being cruel to animals. But that's similar to traffic laws - something I obey when convient, but will break in a heartbeat for more important things.
"On the flip side, Rowling definitely didn't need even 0.01% of that money in order to keep writing more books."
How do you know? How many timeless best-sellers have you written? Maybe her psychology is such that she needed an unbelievable success in order to convince her to keep going.
Bottom line - only JK Rowling can define her own needs. That's a more basic freedom than speech.
"From a society's point of view, all the money in excess of what was required for her to continue writing was wasted..."
You make it sound like I can feed all data related to a society into a computer and then determine the most appropriate course of action with societies resources.
This doesn't work. People's needs are not all quantifiable. No single person or group is qualified to judge *all* of a society's needs.
"...and could have been spent better elsewhere on hundreds of other promising writers that have now been crowded out of the marketplace by the harry potter monster."
Are you suggesting that I should not be allowed to spend my money on the book of my choice? Because my money is the "resource" we are talking about.
-Jeff
"You personally might not encourage traditional gender roles, but the culture around you, including friends, relatives and the media, probably does."
Nonsense. At the ages the poster was talking about, the parents represent the dominant external influence on the child.
My sister, a major feminist, reported the exact same thing. I've seen it with friends. We'll see about my daughter as she gets older (4mo now).
The intellectuals/reactionaries need to stop overthinking this stuff. Girls and Boys are hardwired differently. The key is to simply deal with each person you meet as a person as much as possible, keeping in mind those gender differences as needed for guidance.
As to the original post, I've watched really smart women leave the field not due to harrassment, but for many other reasons like:
- More time at home.
- Roles that involve more people interaction.
- Roles with more possibility to advance.
You can draw your own conclusions from that.
-jeff
As usual, a long, pedantic diatribe ignoring the issue that copying games without paying for them is ethically wrong.
It's all about getting something for nothing.
-Jeff
When you go online to pay a bill, both you, the bank, and the recipient of that payment all have a vested interest in making that payment happen in a secure and correct manner.
The problem is how to secure your vote when the people counting the votes potentially do not have that same interest. While there are reasonable deterrents (e.g. paper trail), you can't ultimately safeguard the process. this is true for paper and electronics.
The added problem with electronics is how easy it is to do on a wide scale. With paper, you really have to work at it, and there's lots of people involved with the process who can notice something funny.
Like many on slashdot, I really think electronic voting machines was a bad move. It's great if you want to get a quick result, but the right way is something physical that is counted by hand.
-Jeff
"Eh. The problem isn't how they made it. The game they made was okay, and it developed a nice little niche following."
The game they made was a mish-mash of ideas with lots of bugs and balance issues. I won't detail them all, as they've been argued to death, but calling the game they made "okay" is silly. It was busted.
I had lots of hope. I, like many, found a game inside the mish-mash that appealed to me, and really hoped they would fix things. Where they ended up did not appeal to me at all, so I quit.
-Jeff
I bought spore. I played it, and only installed it once. I am not embarrased for buying it due to DRM - I think that is an excuse from people who are too embarrased to admit they want free stuff.
I am sad that I didn't read the reviews more carefully, though. It was a really bad game, to my tastes, and the truth was out there even in the "9/10" reviews.
-Jeff
"And as to the spending, Bush had a republican congress for most of his reign, and they managed to get our government and our country into a pretty deep financial hole. "
Which just means that Bush, et al, were not conservative.
The big problem is that the republican party is no more fiscally conservative than the democrat party.
-Jeff
Granted, the republicans sponsored the gramm-leahy legislation that repealed the bulk of the glass-steagal act. And yes, we need to remember democrat legislation pushing banks to make loans to people who were otherwise poor risks. Also, don't forgot the banks that looked past obvious issues to make loans because they knew they would just turn around and sell that loan without a problem.
But let's be fair. If someone breaks a contract, it is *their* fault. I have a mortgage on my house - if I fail to pay I'm the one to blame, not my parents, not the government, not glass, not steagal. ME.
I don't understand why everyone, everywhere, is giving the fiscally irresponsible people who bought houses that they couldn't afford such a pass. They are responsible for their actions, not *us*.
-Jeff
Bull.
We're mixing words and sentences up to the extent that nothing has any meaning any more. If someone wants to print anonymously, they can contact a newspaper (blog/whatever), submit an article, and be heard if the media entity will print it. Hence "publius" in the federalist papers.
But sending mail headers with fraudulant address should be "fraud" in the criminal sense and prosecuted in extreme cases.
To be honest, I don't mind a simple heading of "anonymous" - then I can screen you out without a problem. But lying is a real issue, and should be dealt with, not hidden under some glorious "oppressed" nonsense.
-Jeff
Don't tell me what I assume.
I can see people talking around the water cooler, taking more time for lunch, calling home, and so on. I agree that a bit of that is expected and likely healthy.
But IM is different - I'll never find out how much they are chatting. Humans are selfish, lazy creatures - if you give them an out, they will take it. So I don't advocate giving them an out.
Again, don't put words in my mouth - I'm not aiming for 8 hours of unbroken productivity. I've never seen that from anybody. But I think IM is too much in the other direction.
-Jeff
In general I agree with you - I've seen some strong & stupid policies in my time. But this I have to call-out:
"And of course they also ban every IM program available, even if using it actually would save time and improve productivity..."
They do this because the vast, vast majority of people use it for chatting when they should be working. Even people who do use it productively often *also* use it for chatting.
If I owned a company, I would ban chat in a heartbeat.
-Jeff
It's for reporting spam. Someone who abuses it loses the privilege to use it. We're talking about something that takes a GM seconds to judge here.
If your goal is to stop every instance of sold gold, then yes you will get around it.
I suggest a better goal is:
a) significantly reduce the inflation of the economy caused by the selling of gold, and
b) reduce the amount of annoying in-game spam.
Then I think you can succeed. (b) is simple - you let people right click on messages (mail or broadcast) to report them. GMs have wide discretion to lock accounts. It doesn't take long for a human to recognize a spam message.
(a) is more difficult, but again if you organize the information correctly you should be able to hit the most egregious cases. Now you are left with people who are being meticulous as you suggest, but your method is very slow (months on an account, remember?), expensive (each account is an expense), and thus even if spammers move to that method their impact should be greatly reduced.
-Jeff
I think you guys make this vastly more difficult than it needs to be. Remember that all the data does lie on Mythic's servers, so it's just a question of organizing it correctly.
In this case, you want to stop the illicit transfer of gold. So you carefully record all gold transfers in the game (auctions, mail, whatever), and then sort the list in a few different reports: size of individual transfer, number of transfers per account (send and receive), sum of all transfers by account (send and receive).
Now draw an arbitrary line - transfers below that line are deemed too small to follow-up on for now. Pursue the ones above the line aggressively. Review that line in meetings every week/month/whatever.
It's work, but it's not hard to identify once the numbers are sorted properly.
-Jeff
For the record, I think the article points to a neat experiment. However, I can't let this nonsense pass:
"If external forces (such as humans) knock a species out of existence,..."
Humans are not external to "the ecosystem" - we all live on planet earth here. Furthermore, violent impulses are as natural as any other impulses - we have seen them throughout recorded history, and there is every bit of reason to believe they existed before records. Furthermore, violent impulses appear to help individual humans survive, and thus propogate.
"...then the ecosystem is out of balance due to the loss of that species."
Huh? What does "balance" mean in regards to an "ecosystem"? There is no such thing - the living world is a chaotic, ever-changing environment, not a static, precariously-balanced one.
So again, I think this is a neat experiment. Let's not go wrapping it pseudo-scientific language in some strange attempt to morally justify it.
-Jeff
> And honestly, did you actually agree with every single thing Ron Paul advocated?
Forgive me, but that's childish. Are you suggesting that only a leader who agrees with you 100% of the time will be effective?
Like many here, I have a day job. I read a bit here and there, watch a little TV, and come to some conclusions. But in the end, I know that my judgement is easily flawed because I don't have the time or staff to properly evaluate the available information. So even if my core principals are somehow "right", my decisions are likely to be wildly askew from reality.
Therefore, I think it's ludicrous to pick someone who agrees with you 100%, or even close. See if you can match up some core values, check a couple of "key" (in your mind) decisions a bit more thoroughly, do a gut-check on the person, and vote. But trying for 100% is a laughable criteria.
-Jeff
"Also, psychology is difficult to employ, and impossible to deploy well, in all but the very best TBS games."
Psychology works as long as there's fog of war and/or diplomacy. IMO, a necessary step in TBS games is to turn off the score (and all related charts, e.g. economy size, army size, whatever). Force people to get that information the old-fashioned way, by probing the enemy's territories. Add multi-player, and you got yourself all the psych you need.
-Jeff
P.S. I'll plug dominions III - best TBS game I've played, *IF* you like complexity.
"You do realize that Russia is a democracy, right?"
Yes, and Putin is no longer in charge.
Now that we've got that out of the way, howsabout we discuss this bargain-priced bridge I'm selling? :-)
-Jeff
"The problem is that we don't have a good system of accountability set up to put all this corruption in the public eye."
That's only a part of the problem. The other part is scale/scope. It's easy to find and deal with small issues of corruption, but nearly impossible to deal with larger scale corruption.
That's why it's important not to put our energy eggs into one federal basket. We should let this happen at local levels, with many competing forms of energy production, and let the market find the best ones.
-Jeff
"Replace all taxes on economic activity with a tax on net-assets, ... and then, ... disperse those funds evenly in a dividend to all citizens,"
So basically, my smartest action is to do nothing and wait for your check? Cool, me likey this plan. Who are you going to sucker into doing the work for me?
Stupid trekies, go to a convention. Real economics starts and ends with personal greed.
-Jeff
"Think about it: if everyone pirated games, what would happen?"
We are already at that point without "everyone". Enough people are pirating that the gaming industry is moving away from PC games. My local EBgames has changed dramatically in the past many years. There used to be 2 or 3 walls full of PC games. Now, PC games are a tiny handful, and they mainly sell xbox/ps/wii/etc. Meanwhile, the pc game industry is surviving by turning more and more to online games.
The market works - if one area is unsafe/less-profitable, the market moves towards other areas.
-Jeff
Socialised medicine has the humanity cost as well. When you are told that you have to wait 1 year for the knee operation that you could otherwise afford because someone else has determined that it's not a priority, you feel the loss of humanity.
Tangent - I live in the US. Recently my wife gave birth, and I find myself entering the hospital through the emergency room entrance a lot now. Emergency rooms have really changed - when I was a kid, the people there were bleeding, drastically sick, broken limbs, whatever. Now it's just a 24x7 doctors office. It's really pathetic, and it is totally the result of the ongoing socialization of medicine in the US.
-Jeff
Name a way to prevent bill aggregation on the front end. A way that will work.
Line-item vetos are tried and tested in many of the states. It helps keep bills paired down reasonably in the long run.
-Jeff
Cavalry was far more difficult than you state. The horse had to be specially trained, as well as the rider. A farmer with a pitchfork and a nag was not the same thing as a mounted cavalryman. Furthermore, cavalry was intended to work in groups, in formation. That's a further layer of intense training that you brush over.
Tactics were far more developed than you state. Professional armies trained to put out a larger volume of fire from a smaller frontage against a smaller frontage. Again, lots of training, and lots of use of formations. People had to kneel & load in the same time. Then step up and advance beyond the front rank in time, and then fire at the same time so the shock of their attack was maximized. The various ranks had to keep up this rythm in the face of return fire, and the ranks in the back had to be prepared to step up and take their turns. Just as with the cavalry, there was a further layer of intense training that you brush over.
"The Brits essentially did little more than pout when the rifled guns of the minutemen just sniped their officers in the first volley."
I'm not certain if you're trying to be offensive or what. The British army at the time was the premier army in the world. They did not "pout" over the loss of some officers.
Oh, to be fair the French were most certainly a big factor. Americans do often ignore that side of things. But in something as complicated as the American Revolution, that's one factor among many.
-Jeff