"Every generation seems to think this is 'as good as it gets' and every generation has been proven wrong. Our technology is still advancing faster than ever."
The problem is the people, not the technology, how are you going to get to that technological place if
1) The vast majority of people are at war with one another over a 'better standard of living' that the west has and will only keep increasing? 2) there are technological ceilings that are hard to crack (i.e. fusion real soon now(tm)) that take more then a few decades. 3) Predicting what problems are easy and what problems are hard is difficult 4) Breeding patterns, right now Islamics and muslims are outbreeding European and north americans quite substantially, which will have enormous effects on what they value as a culture.
"IP has made thousands of people wealthier by their own effort."
It's a matter of population size not effort. Try getting rich of a population of 20 people. Any idiot can make 'ip' and then spam his product to the whole globe milking the dictatorial protection ip gets. It ends up in the end if not limited acting as a tax on the people and on innovation.
Yeah right, if piracy was such a big deal you would simply go out of business *not by choice*, piracy is businesses problem, it certainly has no effect on the average consumer.
The fact is piracy has been around forever, we could also talk about the fact that commercial entities infringe on civic and personal freedoms ever more in their desire for profit. Banks, credit card companies, microsoft, and even game companies (like Blizzard), monitor their users without their consent.
Intellectual property has the nasty effect of stifling thinking and innovation, and becoming a neo-fuedal or private dictatorship for the rich.
Increasingly commerce and the economy are the real or true government and the government's main job is policeman against the 'bad companies' that become too criminal that it becomes a serious liability. When in actuality both are just as corrupt and theiverous as the populations they so accuse.
"The problem is that many college students see college as a way to make more MONEY first and the love of learning about something SECOND (if at all)."
The problem is TOO MUCH WORK, I think the culture we've created is a culture of over-burdening students (most of whom are not capable of keeping up at a steady pace to the top %20 of the students).
By the time I got out of highschool I hated school, the teachers were incompetent, they frequently assigned meaningless work, the curriculum was god awful, and many of my classmates were pricks. The teaching environment and the environment these kids grow up in have profound effects on them, you can't expect them to like learning when frequently it is society that doesn't know enough about how to teach or learning itself.
Most everything of value I have learned, is from other people, not teachers, nor curriculums, but other intelligent people. The problem is intelligence and wisdom can never be all inside one indivdual or even school. This is what I like abou wikipedia and wikibooks so much, you have all this hidden amateur talent that's often times just as good if not better then professionals, because in our culture we assume that just because someone has a higher IQ or higher marks that they are *globally* better, when it's not the case at all.
Peoples intelligence, ideas and learning is like alphabet soup, some peolpe get A's, others get P's, some get W's, etc, etc. People on programmers and slashdot should know about the concept of *scope*, people have the wrong framework for learning - distributed intelligence and co-operation (all working together) is vastly superior in many ways to the old model in getting things done, the only way the old model works is if you find the "superstars" of talent that know
1) How to communicate and 2) Don't bastardize their language with academic jargon
Most problems in education today stem from badly formed "expert groups" that work on a textbook or curriculum.
The best curriculums and knowledge bases I have seen were from
1) Crowdsouced (wikipedia, etc) 2) Works of a few people who are superstars (they know how to conceptualize and take what they're thinking and translate it to words and concepts in a way that is aesthetically pleasing and also at the same time, clear, concise, and so well written that even a teen or pre-teen can pick it up and start learning because of hte 'beginning to the end' mentality of the authors) 3) Too many authors unconsciously conceptualize something at a jargonistic level of abstraction (compressing complex ideas into one or two words). 4) Academic language is usually one of the largest barriers to teaching today, its not a sign of intelligence to keep your ideas only understandable or circulating in your own circles, it limits the potential of the idea and the potential benefits of having it be spread.
"I would love to see a comparison of the worth of science and religious knowledge."
You've misunderstood because you haven't read spengler (and it's quite obvious that you haven't), you have to read spengler to know what he means by "religious conception of knowledge".
Wrong because a model is itself a description. Think about it: If I correctly describe how somethign functions *I have a model* when we talk about models we talk about descriptive models being more or less accurate. And yes they are merely 'descriptions', a description -- that is, the model for how a car is put together and funtions is not the car itself.
"I can agree in principle with the presumption that faith in God is well-founded...."
The problem is, how would you know it was god and not some advanced life form? Ancient humans with smaller brains would consider us or our mysterious technology 'gods'.
"...and faith in human reason (i.e. the theory of evolution) is not so well-founded. However, to put faith in the teachings (or books) of any religion is to put faith in human reason."
What *isn't* human reason? The fact of the matter is, if god showed up beside you and put (x book) in your hand, how would you know the words in it aren't from humans if they are in human language?
I think the whole evolution vs design controversy, is simply about the fear of death and the death of traditional morality and culture, it's not about god, it's not about truth, it's about a way of life and community that's decaying and the old gaurd is reacting to it. Western culture today is a mixed bag when you look at the divorce rate, two-parent families, and the declining birth-rate in north america.
I think more slashdotians need to read Oswald Spenglers Decline of the west, he predicted quite a lot and is quite correct that all knowledge is in fact religious in conception, science can't escape the fact that ultimately it is merely a *description* of the universe it doesn't tell us the true nature of the universe or even what 'nature' is.
All natural laws are merely descriptions of geometry and geometric and other relationships in a metaphorical (mathematical) language. Since if you have a sphere, what are you going to use to describe it? An abstract representational system (math).
"When will cheap-bastards learn that there are comparable FREE alternatives?"
When free alternatives have GOOD ADVERTISING... I wish people would stop making ridiculous comments, people as kids n the warez scene (or not so in the warez scene) grew up on adobe, symantec, etc. It's the same reason why people buy the same product/food over and over again, they're used to it and they know they are getting, plus advertisement commercial products get vs joe programmer who released on some niche website for tech nerds.
Free software has to be A LOT better then the competition to even bother with the search and switch anyway. I used paint.net (free software) and the UI still doesn't compare to adobe even with adobe's gaudy interface it's still usable and I grew up on it.
"The difference between the two solutions is probably not great enough to justify the immense computation power required to churn out the perfect solution"
The problem with the salesmen problem is that even if you did have the time, real-time events would eventually fuck with teh solution anyway, at some point there is such a thing as "good enough" until we get a computer that is equal to a god in intelligence and computational power.
"The problem is that for the cost of a single shuttle maintenance mission to Hubble you could build and launch a new telescope."
That may be true but there also may be benefits in learning to repair what we have, that go beyond merely the "launch and trash" philosophy, i.e. when resources are limited. What kinds of new technologies will be spawned to learn how to repair existing stuff in space and what will be learned I think is just as valuable since sooner or later we will have to learn whether others want it or not.
"Revenge only teaches a criminal to be more careful and/or armed."
This wholly depends on the context, if someone tried to rip you off and you killed them, then that's 1 less criminal in the world. The truth is we have become too compassionate in many regards and criminals become a drain on the economy by having to pay for them.
There was a reason our ancestors killed off criminaals because they knew it was a waste of time nad resources to 'rehabilitate' people who's nature's are fundamentally criminal to begin with.
"The middle-class is heavily involved in the stock market now."
The stock market was always a form of usury gambling, and ownership control over key assets and a way for them to increase their wealth exponentially, and also way for the upper classes to offload risk onto the middle and lower classes. The whole idea of investment is fucked up to begin with. Gaining money without working for it through ownership loopholes (i.e. 'passive income') which offloads risk onto other people (i.e. the workers working for the company, and all through the chain of other companies they buy/sell/deal with).
Anti-trust is pretty much a failure because the government is owned and tooled by lobbyists, so the real government is the economy and the power players of the market itself and the government is merely an arm of private industry which is needed from people revolting and attacking big businesses. People really shouldn't hate the government, they should hate the private vested corporate capitalists and their lackeys fucking the world over.
The whole concept of investment is fucked up because ownership, liability, and corporate personhood is the main problem. It's sad that companies are now more powerful then states and whole other countries combined.
"EA is good at marketing, yes. But then so is McDonalds. And despite their insane popularity, there's very few restaurants out there that don't serve better food than McDonalds."
You keep forgetting though that people care more about the taste then anything else, people go to Mc Donalds and eat their food for the taste. McDonalds has got it's chemical engineering of its food down to a science, unlike 99% of other restaurants. They are quite capitalistic and scientific in their methods, they are an exemplar of knowing how to make money. Just because other restaurants offer higher quality food doesn't mean anything because of the LAW OF DIMINISHING RETURNS, after a certain about of value people don't give a shit. Only a minority of 'food conniseurs', go on complaining, if the food was that bad (tasting) McD's would go out of business.
"Out of the dozens of "games" EA has released in the last 5 years, I can count on one hand the ones that were both fun to play and not complete bug-ridden crap."
(a very brief list in no particular order) 1. The Orange Box X360 EA Games 2. Burnout 3: Takedown XBOX EA Games 3. Half-Life 2 XBOX Electronic Arts 4. Medal of Honor Allied Assault PC EA Games 5. Half-Life 2: Episode One PC EA Games n....
I could go on but one only needs to search www.gamerankings.com or www.gamespot.com and search for "EA" and all the games with different reviews, etc, then compare it against sales #'s. Since a great game nobody buys is bad business practice. We all rememeber planescape: torment and other great game series that tanked like Freespace 2 and Descent 3.
Which games are these? Do you know how many EA games are rated highly on gamerankings? Maybe you should go take a look before claiming all their games are "crap". I don't think most people bashing EA have any IDEA of the projects EA has been involved in and what kind of deals they strike with other developers to help them publish their games, they only know the "bad stuff" (their highly abusive employment practices)
"The same cannot be said about the number of stellar franchises they've purchased and subsequently trashed in the same time period. There's reasons people bash EA. Lots of reasons. And they far outnumber the reasons to like them."
We're talking about game quality here, if a good game comes out under the EA label, it doesn't matter, the fact is EA invested in the developers and gave them the funds to make their game. No company is perfect, that's the nature of capitalist system, you have more of a problem with capitalism then with "EA" which is nothing more then a label for a corporate group of people trying to make money for their shareholders. Just like any other corporate publically traded company.
Your real complaint is about geedy capitalists, welcome to to the real world of capitalism.
"So yes, Java doesn't teach very darn much about the harsh realities of actually thinking. And since thinking is hard, it's an impediment to productivity anyway, so it hasn't much been missed. The only thing we lost in the shuffle is our professional self respect."
Have you ever considered that software is so complex that those "ignorant programmers" need to be specialized, i.e. there are people like you that work on the *foundations* and there are others that work *at another layer of abstraction*. I don't think many programmers really grasp the enormous complexity of modern programming projects, and the need to simplify and mask complexity and take care of it ** automatically ** for the worker and end users.
The job of the great mind, is to realize and make usable tools for those who are not quite as able, but still able none-the-less.
Your ideal is nice in theory, but in the real world replacing these kinds of people who have 1) The same interest and 2) the same talent and 3) in enough numbers. Is ultimately very difficult and unrealistic.
The fact of the matter is the world is changing too fast for professors and teachers to keep up with it, we are overflowing with information, but we have increasing educational costs, and tighter budgets and whatnot, and not enough time to do everything.
Note that today's children take almost 15+ years to get to a point where they can even *function* in the market at a living wage, the amount of time children spend in school has grown enormously over the last 100 years and sooner or later the realization will finally sink in: We're trying to do too much. The fact is the economic situation is creating this delusion that we can keep burdening children with ever increasing education, classes, and higher asbtractions, and this delusion is going to backfire sooner or later.
"Consumers said they had enough of the Xbox and GameCube, hence the need for the newer systems. The PS2 was the only console of the previous generation still selling."
Notice your first and second sentence, now ask you self *why* the ps2 is selling and why sony *needed* to release the PS3. The PS3 was to be released because they knew they had to release it, otherwise their competitors would release something else. The PS2 won the last console war BECAUSE it had all the good games. There was no actual *need* for a next playstation console if the other players were completely wiped out, but the loser companies were still competitive and are forced to do what they have to do because they are *stuck* with smaller and overall more crappy game library that can't compete with the PS2.
"some stupid HOAs will probably scream about it because solar panels don't meed their aesthetic guidelines"
This is a ridiculous comment, most people (I'd imagine 99%) have aesthetic guidelines and preferences, the truth is we could all save a tonne of money if we weren't so obsessed with aesthetics, but the world would be a drab, boring and colorless place. From an engineering point of view I agree, but from a mathematics, psychological and geometric perspective, I disagree. What we call aesthetics is symmetry of shape, color, patterns, etc. Symmetry is fundamental in nature, in fact many animals we could argue are 'inefficient' because much of their energy is spent on things that are for the most part 'useless' from a funcitonal perspective, but not from a physiological psychological perspective. (i.e. hot girls).
"That EA is allowed to buy out all their competition rather than be forced to produce top notch titles in an effort to battle over the market is a farce to me"
I wish people would stop bashing EA, the fact is many of their games are pretty good, even with some bumpy patches here and there (battlefield), The sims series, simcity, Need for speed (almost every god damn one has been and fairly well made). There's other crap for sure, but the fact is you don't get to be top dog if you totally blow. Fact is, EA knows how to play the capitalist game very well, and make lots of money doing it. They know what games sell and produce them.
Which is not surprising given that game developers have over-saturated the market with FPS clones for some time now, the industry has done it to itself.
Supreme commander sold well enough to engender an expansion and talk of a second game. One star falls, anothers rises. Must be something to do with not flooding the market with crap people don't want to pay for maybe? hmm.. I think so! Just because dev's/pubs make a game does not mean I am obligated to buy it just because it exists and was made.
"Doom 3 sold very well, and it was equally a system-killer."
Doom 3 was a recognizable brand from a recognizable company "Crysis" and "Far cry" were never on the level of Doom 3 in terms of being *known*, there are so many FPS that I have passed a lot of them by, at some point you 'reach your fill', because you know it's going to be more of the same in some (most likely crappy rip off) of something you've seen before in the last 10 years. Game dev's / publishers are doing it to themselves being the myopic about the state of the industry and the market. So I'm not going to shed a tear, many other game dev's are doing just fine. Some win, others lose, that's life.
"There is legitimate concern that PC game piracy is reaching epic proportions, enough to actually make game development unprofitable."
Have you ever considered the economics of making games is broken? Game developers and industry pushed the new consoles, consumers don't control these companies, they sped up the development and pushed the graphics angle faster and faster, the drove up their *own* dev costs. Gamers have absolutely no control over these companies, and the decision making.
"Not to start a flame war, but will this console orgy mean the end of PC gaming?"
Doubtful, PC gaming has had it's ups and downs, I think the real problem now is software quality in games has leveled off and market saturation is taking effect. PC games still have MMO's, RPG's, FPS and racing, it's just more cross platform.
How can you say the last year has been bad for PC gaming? You'd have to be pretty out of the loop, thats for sure.
"If I were in such a situation, I don't think believing in a God would make anything better, no. Life would still suck. And I don't think having someone to yell at would improve my life much."
Again we're talking about real evidence here, the evidence in america and human psychology shows us there are quite a substantial number of people who do need it. Whether this applies to us is quite irrelevant, we're talking about genetics and especially psyhicatric genetics.
"I also have big questions with corporate sponsoring of the parties in the USA, this makes the country being run by the corporations and not it's inhabitants, the way it should be."
You keep forgetting : No money, no voice. Most of society doesn't even have enough money for an advertising capaign, only the big boys with all the dough to have a say. You should really read : "Decline of the west" by oswald spengler, media is the enemy of the people since media is beholden to industry (money).
As long as the owning classes own most of the core industries and can threaten the government with offshoring and all sorts of other nasty tactics, it's a dictatorship of the owning classes, and it has been like this for a long time.
Would you be saying that if you were among the genetically unfit, had a very low IQ, were retarded, or had some kind of terrible disability?
I'm not saying atheists can't be happy, I'm saying that most people are forced into a 'competition to the death' over wealth and resources, and as new technologies come online the vast majority of the population will be left behind (not be able to afford them, etc, etc). Most people in the world today live in poverty, you're one of the lucky ones because you live in a place that is a good place to live.
Taking Ray Kurzweilian view: Any life before life extension is pretty shitty, since you were born in such backward and mediocre times.
I'd rather have been born in the far future personally then this extremely primitive time, since all men of this age are little more then barbarians.
... if people are just fucking morons, how hard can it be to setup a vote which is hard to manipulate I mean really? Sometimes I think we should just have a national holiday for one whole week where everybody just goes, gets together and stands and gets counted openly triangulation of picture day via digital cameras, cell phones, etc. (multiple images everyone taking them, etc).
"I once used to think that making concessions to people who oppose this branch of science because of their religious sensitivities was a decent and reasonable thing to do."
Either way both propositions are losers when you are outnumbered 10:1, lets face it there are more religious people then atheists, and an atheistic universe isn't very comforting. A short unfair harsh life slaving away at a soul destroying job then death... but I guess slashdotians don't mind it so much.
As much as I dislike religion they are better breeders then the alleged 'rational' people at least in north america.
"GM's officers and board of directors should have to put their wives and daughters on the street if necessary to hold up their end of the deals they freely made."
This just goes to show you the inequality of economic power in capitalism makes "Freedom of contract" mostly a farce, since those with the money bear the least hurden (if it could even be considered burden at all) when they do not honor them.
Slashdot Mirror
"Every generation seems to think this is 'as good as it gets' and every generation has been proven wrong. Our technology is still advancing faster than ever."
The problem is the people, not the technology, how are you going to get to that technological place if
1) The vast majority of people are at war with one another over a 'better standard of living' that the west has and will only keep increasing?
2) there are technological ceilings that are hard to crack (i.e. fusion real soon now(tm)) that take more then a few decades.
3) Predicting what problems are easy and what problems are hard is difficult
4) Breeding patterns, right now Islamics and muslims are outbreeding European and north americans quite substantially, which will have enormous effects on what they value as a culture.
"IP has made thousands of people wealthier by their own effort."
It's a matter of population size not effort. Try getting rich of a population of 20 people. Any idiot can make 'ip' and then spam his product to the whole globe milking the dictatorial protection ip gets. It ends up in the end if not limited acting as a tax on the people and on innovation.
"and I'm free to cease producing works."
Yeah right, if piracy was such a big deal you would simply go out of business *not by choice*, piracy is businesses problem, it certainly has no effect on the average consumer.
The fact is piracy has been around forever, we could also talk about the fact that commercial entities infringe on civic and personal freedoms ever more in their desire for profit. Banks, credit card companies, microsoft, and even game companies (like Blizzard), monitor their users without their consent.
Intellectual property has the nasty effect of stifling thinking and innovation, and becoming a neo-fuedal or private dictatorship for the rich.
Increasingly commerce and the economy are the real or true government and the government's main job is policeman against the 'bad companies' that become too criminal that it becomes a serious liability. When in actuality both are just as corrupt and theiverous as the populations they so accuse.
"The problem is that many college students see college as a way to make more MONEY first and the love of learning about something SECOND (if at all)."
The problem is TOO MUCH WORK, I think the culture we've created is a culture of over-burdening students (most of whom are not capable of keeping up at a steady pace to the top %20 of the students).
By the time I got out of highschool I hated school, the teachers were incompetent, they frequently assigned meaningless work, the curriculum was god awful, and many of my classmates were pricks. The teaching environment and the environment these kids grow up in have profound effects on them, you can't expect them to like learning when frequently it is society that doesn't know enough about how to teach or learning itself.
Most everything of value I have learned, is from other people, not teachers, nor curriculums, but other intelligent people. The problem is intelligence and wisdom can never be all inside one indivdual or even school. This is what I like abou wikipedia and wikibooks so much, you have all this hidden amateur talent that's often times just as good if not better then professionals, because in our culture we assume that just because someone has a higher IQ or higher marks that they are *globally* better, when it's not the case at all.
Peoples intelligence, ideas and learning is like alphabet soup, some peolpe get A's, others get P's, some get W's, etc, etc. People on programmers and slashdot should know about the concept of *scope*, people have the wrong framework for learning - distributed intelligence and co-operation (all working together) is vastly superior in many ways to the old model in getting things done, the only way the old model works is if you find the "superstars" of talent that know
1) How to communicate and
2) Don't bastardize their language with academic jargon
Most problems in education today stem from badly formed "expert groups" that work on a textbook or curriculum.
The best curriculums and knowledge bases I have seen were from
1) Crowdsouced (wikipedia, etc)
2) Works of a few people who are superstars (they know how to conceptualize and take what they're thinking and translate it to words and concepts in a way that is aesthetically pleasing and also at the same time, clear, concise, and so well written that even a teen or pre-teen can pick it up and start learning because of hte 'beginning to the end' mentality of the authors)
3) Too many authors unconsciously conceptualize something at a jargonistic level of abstraction (compressing complex ideas into one or two words).
4) Academic language is usually one of the largest barriers to teaching today, its not a sign of intelligence to keep your ideas only understandable or circulating in your own circles, it limits the potential of the idea and the potential benefits of having it be spread.
"I would love to see a comparison of the worth of science and religious knowledge."
You've misunderstood because you haven't read spengler (and it's quite obvious that you haven't), you have to read spengler to know what he means by "religious conception of knowledge".
"Scientific theories are more than descriptions,"
Wrong because a model is itself a description. Think about it: If I correctly describe how somethign functions *I have a model* when we talk about models we talk about descriptive models being more or less accurate. And yes they are merely 'descriptions', a description -- that is, the model for how a car is put together and funtions is not the car itself.
"I can agree in principle with the presumption that faith in God is well-founded...."
The problem is, how would you know it was god and not some advanced life form? Ancient humans with smaller brains would consider us or our mysterious technology 'gods'.
"...and faith in human reason (i.e. the theory of evolution) is not so well-founded. However, to put faith in the teachings (or books) of any religion is to put faith in human reason."
What *isn't* human reason? The fact of the matter is, if god showed up beside you and put (x book) in your hand, how would you know the words in it aren't from humans if they are in human language?
I think the whole evolution vs design controversy, is simply about the fear of death and the death of traditional morality and culture, it's not about god, it's not about truth, it's about a way of life and community that's decaying and the old gaurd is reacting to it. Western culture today is a mixed bag when you look at the divorce rate, two-parent families, and the declining birth-rate in north america.
I think more slashdotians need to read Oswald Spenglers Decline of the west, he predicted quite a lot and is quite correct that all knowledge is in fact religious in conception, science can't escape the fact that ultimately it is merely a *description* of the universe it doesn't tell us the true nature of the universe or even what 'nature' is.
All natural laws are merely descriptions of geometry and geometric and other relationships in a metaphorical (mathematical) language. Since if you have a sphere, what are you going to use to describe it? An abstract representational system (math).
"When will cheap-bastards learn that there are comparable FREE alternatives?"
When free alternatives have GOOD ADVERTISING... I wish people would stop making ridiculous comments, people as kids n the warez scene (or not so in the warez scene) grew up on adobe, symantec, etc. It's the same reason why people buy the same product/food over and over again, they're used to it and they know they are getting, plus advertisement commercial products get vs joe programmer who released on some niche website for tech nerds.
Free software has to be A LOT better then the competition to even bother with the search and switch anyway. I used paint.net (free software) and the UI still doesn't compare to adobe even with adobe's gaudy interface it's still usable and I grew up on it.
"The difference between the two solutions is probably not great enough to justify the immense computation power required to churn out the perfect solution"
The problem with the salesmen problem is that even if you did have the time, real-time events would eventually fuck with teh solution anyway, at some point there is such a thing as "good enough" until we get a computer that is equal to a god in intelligence and computational power.
"The problem is that for the cost of a single shuttle maintenance mission to Hubble you could build and launch a new telescope."
That may be true but there also may be benefits in learning to repair what we have, that go beyond merely the "launch and trash" philosophy, i.e. when resources are limited. What kinds of new technologies will be spawned to learn how to repair existing stuff in space and what will be learned I think is just as valuable since sooner or later we will have to learn whether others want it or not.
"Revenge only teaches a criminal to be more careful and/or armed."
This wholly depends on the context, if someone tried to rip you off and you killed them, then that's 1 less criminal in the world. The truth is we have become too compassionate in many regards and criminals become a drain on the economy by having to pay for them.
There was a reason our ancestors killed off criminaals because they knew it was a waste of time nad resources to 'rehabilitate' people who's nature's are fundamentally criminal to begin with.
"The middle-class is heavily involved in the stock market now."
The stock market was always a form of usury gambling, and ownership control over key assets and a way for them to increase their wealth exponentially, and also way for the upper classes to offload risk onto the middle and lower classes. The whole idea of investment is fucked up to begin with. Gaining money without working for it through ownership loopholes (i.e. 'passive income') which offloads risk onto other people (i.e. the workers working for the company, and all through the chain of other companies they buy/sell/deal with).
Anti-trust is pretty much a failure because the government is owned and tooled by lobbyists, so the real government is the economy and the power players of the market itself and the government is merely an arm of private industry which is needed from people revolting and attacking big businesses. People really shouldn't hate the government, they should hate the private vested corporate capitalists and their lackeys fucking the world over.
The whole concept of investment is fucked up because ownership, liability, and corporate personhood is the main problem. It's sad that companies are now more powerful then states and whole other countries combined.
"EA is good at marketing, yes. But then so is McDonalds. And despite their insane popularity, there's very few restaurants out there that don't serve better food than McDonalds."
...
You keep forgetting though that people care more about the taste then anything else, people go to Mc Donalds and eat their food for the taste. McDonalds has got it's chemical engineering of its food down to a science, unlike 99% of other restaurants. They are quite capitalistic and scientific in their methods, they are an exemplar of knowing how to make money. Just because other restaurants offer higher quality food doesn't mean anything because of the LAW OF DIMINISHING RETURNS, after a certain about of value people don't give a shit. Only a minority of 'food conniseurs', go on complaining, if the food was that bad (tasting) McD's would go out of business.
"Out of the dozens of "games" EA has released in the last 5 years, I can count on one hand the ones that were both fun to play and not complete bug-ridden crap."
(a very brief list in no particular order)
1. The Orange Box X360 EA Games
2. Burnout 3: Takedown XBOX EA Games
3. Half-Life 2 XBOX Electronic Arts
4. Medal of Honor Allied Assault PC EA Games
5. Half-Life 2: Episode One PC EA Games
n.
I could go on but one only needs to search www.gamerankings.com or www.gamespot.com and search for "EA" and all the games with different reviews, etc, then compare it against sales #'s. Since a great game nobody buys is bad business practice. We all rememeber planescape: torment and other great game series that tanked like Freespace 2 and Descent 3.
Which games are these? Do you know how many EA games are rated highly on gamerankings? Maybe you should go take a look before claiming all their games are "crap". I don't think most people bashing EA have any IDEA of the projects EA has been involved in and what kind of deals they strike with other developers to help them publish their games, they only know the "bad stuff" (their highly abusive employment practices)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_Electronic_Arts
"The same cannot be said about the number of stellar franchises they've purchased and subsequently trashed in the same time period. There's reasons people bash EA. Lots of reasons. And they far outnumber the reasons to like them."
We're talking about game quality here, if a good game comes out under the EA label, it doesn't matter, the fact is EA invested in the developers and gave them the funds to make their game. No company is perfect, that's the nature of capitalist system, you have more of a problem with capitalism then with "EA" which is nothing more then a label for a corporate group of people trying to make money for their shareholders. Just like any other corporate publically traded company.
Your real complaint is about geedy capitalists, welcome to to the real world of capitalism.
"So yes, Java doesn't teach very darn much about the harsh realities of actually thinking. And since thinking is hard, it's an impediment to productivity anyway, so it hasn't much been missed. The only thing we lost in the shuffle is our professional self respect."
Have you ever considered that software is so complex that those "ignorant programmers" need to be specialized, i.e. there are people like you that work on the *foundations* and there are others that work *at another layer of abstraction*. I don't think many programmers really grasp the enormous complexity of modern programming projects, and the need to simplify and mask complexity and take care of it ** automatically ** for the worker and end users.
The job of the great mind, is to realize and make usable tools for those who are not quite as able, but still able none-the-less.
Your ideal is nice in theory, but in the real world replacing these kinds of people who have 1) The same interest and 2) the same talent and 3) in enough numbers. Is ultimately very difficult and unrealistic.
The fact of the matter is the world is changing too fast for professors and teachers to keep up with it, we are overflowing with information, but we have increasing educational costs, and tighter budgets and whatnot, and not enough time to do everything.
Note that today's children take almost 15+ years to get to a point where they can even *function* in the market at a living wage, the amount of time children spend in school has grown enormously over the last 100 years and sooner or later the realization will finally sink in: We're trying to do too much. The fact is the economic situation is creating this delusion that we can keep burdening children with ever increasing education, classes, and higher asbtractions, and this delusion is going to backfire sooner or later.
"Consumers said they had enough of the Xbox and GameCube, hence the need for the newer systems. The PS2 was the only console of the previous generation still selling."
Notice your first and second sentence, now ask you self *why* the ps2 is selling and why sony *needed* to release the PS3. The PS3 was to be released because they knew they had to release it, otherwise their competitors would release something else. The PS2 won the last console war BECAUSE it had all the good games. There was no actual *need* for a next playstation console if the other players were completely wiped out, but the loser companies were still competitive and are forced to do what they have to do because they are *stuck* with smaller and overall more crappy game library that can't compete with the PS2.
"some stupid HOAs will probably scream about it because solar panels don't meed their aesthetic guidelines"
This is a ridiculous comment, most people (I'd imagine 99%) have aesthetic guidelines and preferences, the truth is we could all save a tonne of money if we weren't so obsessed with aesthetics, but the world would be a drab, boring and colorless place. From an engineering point of view I agree, but from a mathematics, psychological and geometric perspective, I disagree. What we call aesthetics is symmetry of shape, color, patterns, etc. Symmetry is fundamental in nature, in fact many animals we could argue are 'inefficient' because much of their energy is spent on things that are for the most part 'useless' from a funcitonal perspective, but not from a physiological psychological perspective. (i.e. hot girls).
I don't know about you but I like hot girls.
"That EA is allowed to buy out all their competition rather than be forced to produce top notch titles in an effort to battle over the market is a farce to me"
I wish people would stop bashing EA, the fact is many of their games are pretty good, even with some bumpy patches here and there (battlefield), The sims series, simcity, Need for speed (almost every god damn one has been and fairly well made). There's other crap for sure, but the fact is you don't get to be top dog if you totally blow. Fact is, EA knows how to play the capitalist game very well, and make lots of money doing it. They know what games sell and produce them.
"The low sales of Crysis are troubling."
Which is not surprising given that game developers have over-saturated the market with FPS clones for some time now, the industry has done it to itself.
Supreme commander sold well enough to engender an expansion and talk of a second game. One star falls, anothers rises. Must be something to do with not flooding the market with crap people don't want to pay for maybe? hmm.. I think so! Just because dev's/pubs make a game does not mean I am obligated to buy it just because it exists and was made.
"Doom 3 sold very well, and it was equally a system-killer."
Doom 3 was a recognizable brand from a recognizable company "Crysis" and "Far cry" were never on the level of Doom 3 in terms of being *known*, there are so many FPS that I have passed a lot of them by, at some point you 'reach your fill', because you know it's going to be more of the same in some (most likely crappy rip off) of something you've seen before in the last 10 years. Game dev's / publishers are doing it to themselves being the myopic about the state of the industry and the market. So I'm not going to shed a tear, many other game dev's are doing just fine. Some win, others lose, that's life.
"There is legitimate concern that PC game piracy is reaching epic proportions, enough to actually make game development unprofitable."
Have you ever considered the economics of making games is broken? Game developers and industry pushed the new consoles, consumers don't control these companies, they sped up the development and pushed the graphics angle faster and faster, the drove up their *own* dev costs. Gamers have absolutely no control over these companies, and the decision making.
"Not to start a flame war, but will this console orgy mean the end of PC gaming?"
Doubtful, PC gaming has had it's ups and downs, I think the real problem now is software quality in games has leveled off and market saturation is taking effect. PC games still have MMO's, RPG's, FPS and racing, it's just more cross platform.
How can you say the last year has been bad for PC gaming? You'd have to be pretty out of the loop, thats for sure.
"If I were in such a situation, I don't think believing in a God would make anything better, no. Life would still suck. And I don't think having someone to yell at would improve my life much."
Again we're talking about real evidence here, the evidence in america and human psychology shows us there are quite a substantial number of people who do need it. Whether this applies to us is quite irrelevant, we're talking about genetics and especially psyhicatric genetics.
"I also have big questions with corporate sponsoring of the parties in the USA, this makes the country being run by the corporations and not it's inhabitants, the way it should be."
You keep forgetting : No money, no voice. Most of society doesn't even have enough money for an advertising capaign, only the big boys with all the dough to have a say. You should really read : "Decline of the west" by oswald spengler, media is the enemy of the people since media is beholden to industry (money).
As long as the owning classes own most of the core industries and can threaten the government with offshoring and all sorts of other nasty tactics, it's a dictatorship of the owning classes, and it has been like this for a long time.
Would you be saying that if you were among the genetically unfit, had a very low IQ, were retarded, or had some kind of terrible disability?
I'm not saying atheists can't be happy, I'm saying that most people are forced into a 'competition to the death' over wealth and resources, and as new technologies come online the vast majority of the population will be left behind (not be able to afford them, etc, etc). Most people in the world today live in poverty, you're one of the lucky ones because you live in a place that is a good place to live.
Taking Ray Kurzweilian view: Any life before life extension is pretty shitty, since you were born in such backward and mediocre times.
I'd rather have been born in the far future personally then this extremely primitive time, since all men of this age are little more then barbarians.
... if people are just fucking morons, how hard can it be to setup a vote which is hard to manipulate I mean really? Sometimes I think we should just have a national holiday for one whole week where everybody just goes, gets together and stands and gets counted openly triangulation of picture day via digital cameras, cell phones, etc. (multiple images everyone taking them, etc).
"I once used to think that making concessions to people who oppose this branch of science because of their religious sensitivities was a decent and reasonable thing to do."
Either way both propositions are losers when you are outnumbered 10:1, lets face it there are more religious people then atheists, and an atheistic universe isn't very comforting. A short unfair harsh life slaving away at a soul destroying job then death... but I guess slashdotians don't mind it so much.
As much as I dislike religion they are better breeders then the alleged 'rational' people at least in north america.
"GM's officers and board of directors should have to put their wives and daughters on the street if necessary to hold up their end of the deals they freely made."
This just goes to show you the inequality of economic power in capitalism makes "Freedom of contract" mostly a farce, since those with the money bear the least hurden (if it could even be considered burden at all) when they do not honor them.