"But Blizzard's graphics teams are total rubbish!!"
Yes but they have yet to be matched in terms of gameplay. I wouldn't say their graphics teams are total rubbish, I'd like to think that their graphics suck because they want as many people to play their games with as little technical barriers as possible to make the most $$$. There strategy obviously WORKS.
I think any serious hardcore gamer today thats been playing for 20 years has to see what developers would have come up with in terms of gameplay if there were graphical limitations. Gameplay matters more then graphics, period. My fondest memories are of original 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit (original) playstation era games. Don't get me wrong there's been some pretty fun games (Halo, God of war, etc) but they pale in comparison to early generations where developers had the freedom to be experiment and not lose their shirts to find new genres of addictive gameplay.
The truth is dev's today are selling games on graphics and dumbing down gaming, world of warcraft is complete evidence of gaming losing its interactivity (becoming a completely passive activity where you can go to the bathroom while the computer plays a battle out for you).
"Commerce has it's place, but this isn't it. Free market capitalism is good at distributing goods and services, but not at providing equitable education available to all citizens."
The ghost of marx haunts every moderate-capitalist with a brain.
You forget though, we live in a world that worships credentials and status. There is this irrational belief that just because someone isn't a PHD or hasn't finished highschool just yet or whatever else someone could smear someone with has deep cultural roots.
I've learned over the years that there the elements of valid contributions of truth and/or insight are not equally distributed according to some universal ideal belief (i.e. anyone who is X should not be listented to or who's contributions are disqualified on the basis of social or socio economic status)
"A case in point is the article on Harry Potter and the deathly hallows which as has been mentioned earlier in slashdot itself, is full of spoilers, posted inside a day of the book having been released. A lot of people who stumbled onto that article while looking for details on the book must have felt cheated."
Those people cheated themselves, who the hell looks up an article on harry potter on an encyclopedia no less, NOT expecting SPOILERS? It's an encyclopedia for god sakes!
If these people feel cheated it's because they were:
1) Too stupid to not have read the book first or 2) Too stupid to ask someone else if there was spoilers there
I have no sypathy for people who feel that an interactive medium should kowtow to 'how the world ought to be'.
"And frankly, if we're not willing to provide the information necessary for advertisers to make informed choices, we're going to continue to be ignored, both on the web and on television"
I think the real problem is we know the threat of "big brother" does not really come from government in my opinion but private industry, greed outweighs any sense of privacy. Companies want privacy for themselves to hide or obfuscate their operations and their goals, but when it comes to the bottom line privacy be damned.
Adam Smith strongly disliked both governments and corporations. He viewed government primarily as an instrument for extracting taxes to subsidize elites and intervening in the market to protect corporate monopolies. In his words, "Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.'' Smith never suggested that government should not intervene to set and enforce minimum social, health, worker safety, and environmental standards in the common interest or to protect the poor and nature from the rich. Given that most governments of his day were monarchies, the possibility probably never occurred to him.
The theory of market economics, in contrast to free-market ideology, specifies a number of basic conditions needed for a market to set prices efficiently in the public interest. The greater the deviation from these conditions, the less socially efficient the market system becomes
"all because of the idea that "the wisdom of the mob" is infallible."
The same holds true for the wisdom of the 'elect', history has shown that their needs to be a deep suspicion of both, able and intelligent people are just as bone-headed and misguided as anyone else, but this bone-headedness always has to wait for the next generation to look back from the current one to see how hopelessly naive they were. Many experts of the past were just as ignorant and barbaric as any other man, its just that experts can hide their own misguidedness and stupidity behind the ignorance of laity and their current positions of authority.
You can't have a 'game so bad it's funny' really unless parts of the game are actually 'funny' (as in well made), and most likely cutscenes or certain animations.
Games are more like rollercoaster or amusement themepark rides then movies, in my estimation, once you've experienced a game you don't usually want to go back to it unless there is a compelling reason (multiplayer, etc).
"Like fucking, for instance. Everyone knows that fucking is wrong, yet we keep doing it. We damned sure don't want our children to know about fucking; and we do what we can to conceal it from them. We ought to plant cameras in everyone's homes to make sure that they don't fuck. All these fucking people should be shot --- evil, sinning bastards."
Actually you illustrate that human's beings don't necessarily need privacy in this instance, they simply need not be disturbed. If you're neighbors wife is hot and she's an exhibitionist is it wrong? The whole idea of private fucking is a cultural phenomenon, there are other cultures that could have cared less.
To put it another way: Privacy is simply a word we use in place of "self defence from the other", the 'other' being ideas, ways of life, certain traits, characteristics, behavioural norms, abuse of power, etc, in our attempt to prevent frustration, disturbance, fear, attack on our character, negative feelings, fear of discrimination and a host of other ills.
We want privacy simply because... the majority of people on planet earth - suck.
James madison said it correctly in the federalist #51
"... But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?"
"Other than that, things won't change, except you'll have more choices. While the casual gamer market is growing and has the potential to be very large, the hardcore gamer market still has plenty of money to spend, the game industry knows that, and they're already set up for and experienced with serving that market. They're not going to completely abandon it to make minigames, the industry is just going to grow to cover the new types of games."
Personally I question the whole basis of casual gaming on consoles. Consoles are exclusively designed for hardcore games, even the alleged 'casual' games on console are simply dumbed down versions of hardcore games. You can see this in RPG's like final fantasy, where earlier versions of final fantasy were more hardcore then later ones as time goes on, and more emphasis on story and passive interaction takes too much precedence. Certain modern RPG's are anything but, they are simply computer rendered animation with small doses of limited activity.
I'm more worried that with the success of the Wii games may get watered down to the point of being totally passive, ALA Final fantasy 12. I get worried about games the more games move away from interactivity, and game mechanics, and what I mean by this is -- the range of things you can interact with in a game that gives it value. For instance in Half-life 2 being able to pick up objects throw them around, etc added a dimension to playing the game, being able to DO A LOT OF STUFF and INTERACT with a lot of stuff is what games really should be about.
God of War was so successful due to what you could do enemies and how the enemies responded in a satisfying and entertaining way.
The problem is that privacy is in fact more apt to protect those who already have power from scrutiny. What about the *unofficial* world you don't hear about in the news? Spy networks and intelligence agencies around the world know privacy is laughable with modern technology, you can spy on people without even having to be close to them.
Modern technology, sattelite tracking, cell phones, electronic money and scientific mathematical techniques pretty much put a damper on any kind of privacy. Just look at places like Google earth pictures that keep popping up on digg. In my opinion privacy does not exist for the 'little man', you'll be floored to know what other businesses know about you. Just perusing sites like statistics canada give you some basic insight into what kinds of information you're *not seeing*.
While someone might claim theire is something 'noble' and right about privacy, the truth is there needs to be a balance between private and public. There is in fact NOT ENOUGH transparency in what happens in many industries since they are immune from criticism. Modern media corporations get to hide certain industries dirty laundry because of financial connections.
People fear the abuse of power but at some point, but ultimately I think privacy is a evolutionary relic, in the modern world its like believing in creationism. You can try to protect your privacy but the tools available to observe and gather data are far beyond your ability to control them.
Just look at statistics on economic data, its not a very far fetched with modern technology to use satellites nad correlate that with the person and build huge databases about each person and then devise mathematical methods and models to help fill in the blanks, even if it isn't a perfect image of you, at some point science will advance to the point where predicting peoples behaviour will get very accurate.
"I think the point was that by starting with the idea "educational software" and trying to turn it into a game, you're more likely to get crap because people underestimate how difficult it is to make a fun game."
Well if you look at "fun games" many fun games are simply repetitive tedium that happens to take advantage of you brains psychological reward system, and many commercial games aren't even all that fun.
I think many games started out as someone simply trying to SIMULATE or understand something, not just 'invented for fun'. I'm sure many accidental games have been DISCOVERED, take SimCity and The sims, while designed to be 'games', they are more akin to 'serious' attempts at simulation of the world around us in many respects.
Indeed what are flight sims and war games if not spin-offs from the idea of military simulation? Many military sims to many are pretty boring, take the old Panzer General / Fantasy general games, note they represent combat by gaudy icons, numbers and statistics representing units. I know people to this day that still play Fantasy general (a financially failed SSI game), simply because to them the challenge and strategy it presents to them is inherently engrossing.
There's tonnes of games I find more simulation or 'excel spreadsheet like' then 'gamey', take Eve online or even MMORPG's, I detest MMO's because most of the game is travel and not gaming in the traditional sense and everything is automated. MMO's are really dumbed down single player games, imagine taking God of war and dumbing down the combat to WoW combat mechanics, it simply would NOT be the same game. Yet some certain subset of the population would find it 'engrossing' in own way.
The same could be said about MUD's (multi user dungeon's) and old BBS games like LORD (Legend of the red dragon). I think games can educate when it comes to certain kinds of concepts, ideas or facts you want to teach. I remember trying to answer an question in my university course using civilization,
I really have to wonder if this is a kneejerk reaction to Banks having fraud problems?
I think this is pretty extreme measure, as if companies didn't already have enough data about people already. What exactly is the criteria for a 'secure' system? Sounds like a lot of BS to me.
"The problem is, is that a lot of gamers don't want to get the card that only supports 16bit graphics, or in this case only supports 1900x1280 resolution. Because they feel that they aren't getting as good of a product, even if they can't tell the difference."
Woah woah woah... you should not be comparing 16-bit vs 32bit colour to 'high resolutions'. You could easily see the quantization errors with transparency effects like smoke or skies on 3Dfx cards, you could easily tell the difference between 16-bit and 32-bit color, the banding was very apparent in multitextured games. I know I was the one who stuck with the voodoo3 while everyone moved over to nvidia TNT and geforce series cards. My first card was a Geforce 2.
Many (if not most) people are satisfied with 1024x768 or 1280x1024/w AA today. Even Doom 3 looked fantastic at 800x600 when it first came out.
Even with a fast card I rarely run higher then 1280x1024, at some point resolution really ceased to matter to me with anti-aliasing, decent speed, and getting rid of blending artifacts that occur with low precision are more important. Since the actual art hasn't caught up yet.
Go play Xenosaga Episode 3 on the PS2 (a game released last fall) for the PS2 and compare it to any modern PC game, if that game proves anything, it proves that artists and art direction is much more important then simply having high resolution. High resolution doesn't matter much if you're art is not that great or you game isn't either.
"Consumers need to grow a pair if they want things to change."
You forget most consumers are bloody ignorant, time constrained beings. Not to mention that many of these people who use such software products are not technologically savvy, or it does not effect enough programs to effect them.
Your example with the carmaker and the wired lock on the gas caps is much more visible and a *constant* inconvenience which anyone can obviously recognize. In software you can't "see the defects" visibly, nor due the defects inhibit your use as harshly since if it doesn't effect you (as a user) then you most likely ignore it.
"Video games are pursued by those addicted to it to fulfill a psychological. The players feel more powerful."
Wrong, they are doing it to gamble (pop mobs) for more loot. Sometimes it's about power if you're a PVP'er but that "power" is simply the fun of the activity combined with the addicting qualities of the human challenge or winning. If you lose straight constantly, its highly unlikely you'd continue playing the game. Most games are designed with constant stream of rewards as long as you keep doing something (i.e. popping mobs).
Diablo 2's addictive quality came totally from the well designed item/monster drop system, while technically it was to get more "power" the fact is the rewards (weapons/armor) are what had the percieved high value to begin with and they are given out similarly to "gambling", instead of inserting coins you're simply killing monsters.
"If you think that picking strawberries is a career someone can enjoy, you have very low standards for "enjoyment""
Nonsense, you've obviously never been a gardner out in the sun. Like I said before, strawberry picking is stigmatized because it doesn't pay well, if it paid well I don't think too many people would have a problem doing it and others who like being outside or have a green thumb might *gasp* enjoy it.
It's relative to what the person finds appealing, like I said before most jobs are $hit, because of their repetitive-grind like nature. You can be excited about any job when you first start but over time in your job or emotional attachment starts to lose value, and other things take precedence, like money, rather then the work itself.
"We should view this as cruel. We shouldn't maintain an underclass which picks fruit or maintains gardens. Machines can do this work without becoming tired, bored, getting disabling injuries, suffering reactions to ag chemicals, or any of the other hazards of human labor in orchards and fields. Machines can be built as needed and scrapped when they become unusable or obsolete."
Capitalism (how it works in practice) is *ALL* about maintaining an underclass, get with the program. Whole industries thrive on having underclass or minimum wage class of workers, and while many people would like to believe minimum wage jobs are 'only temporary' the fact of the matter is for many people it is a large part of their life.
If we were truly concerned about the poor we would simply not charge them for goods and services and build such things into the system, there is certainly more then enough money to pay someone more then $10,000/yr to someone who is disabled in ontario for example, but that's all the disabled get in Canada. Corporate shills and "Institutes" are constantly attacking the poor in their cooked 'economic analysis', some argued to maintain or decrease what disabled people get. What kind of heartless MORON does that to these kinds of people who are already at a severe employability disadvantage if not outright unemployable?
""Gee, I'm sure glad I got the opportunity to explore my full human potential in that career!""
The same could be said about any "Career" what makes you think picking strawberries is any different from any other career that one can enjoy? If picking strawberries paid 60K a year and software programming paid $3 an hour you can bet your boot the only reason people "feel satisfied" with their careers half the time is the money it brings in and the working conditions and renumerations associated with the task. Any career or job can lose status, in fact that is the whole purpose of progress: To replicate and replace human labour as much as possible. The problem is technology and capitalism (wage markets) as they are now are on a head on collision course, just what happens when or geneticially enhanced human beings come around? At some point the social order we know today will have to go the way of the dodo.
Many smarter economists realized that a national income whether or not someone worked, simply because technology keeps displacing jobs and makes full employment impossible.
"And, in fact, if the results were not statistically significant, they wouldn't get published very easily, and certainly not in Science."
Nonsense, much that is nonsense is published CERTAINLY in science, todays science is tomorrows superstition when dealing with crude measuring apparatus -- that being ultimately the human being which is prone to bias and overstating their interpretation of the data or doing folloup studies or later finding flaws in methodology that are not apparent, etc. Science is not immune from human frailty. One only has to look back 50-100 years to see how "scientific" many men were Freud, et, al. Even darwin looks almost like a religious mystic by todays actual *evidence* of sophisticated nano-molecular machines within all living beings. His origin theory in todays environment would be seen as crude and unsohpisticated by molecular standards.
For instance Darwin dismissed the question of the eye's ultimate origin:
How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light hardly concerns us more than how life itself originated. He had an excellent reason for declining the question: it was completely beyond nineteenth century science. How the eye works; that is, what happens when a photon of light first hits the retina simply could not be answered at that time. As a matter of fact, no question about the underlying mechanisms of life could be answered. How did animal muscles cause movement? How did photosynthesis work? How was energy extracted from food? How did the body fight infection? No one knew.
The truth is psychometric measurement is much in the same boat, they attempting to measure something in reference to culture without understanding how it works. They simply don't know even how to define intelligence other then my standards of the socio-economic system and cultural education system. If I'm a genius and I choose to live the life of a poor artist am I still a genius by societies standards? This is what I mean by "What are we attempting to measure" and what is "smartness", ultimately IQ, science and the subjective collide in nasty ways that 21st century science does not and cannot understand just yet due to the fact that: It's beyond today science.
"In this study, they had 241,310 subjects. If memory serves me right, the population standard deviation is 15 points, so we have a margin or error along the order of 15 divided by the square root of 241,310, or 0.03. That is, two orders of magnitude smaller than 3 IQ points, which to you 'seems almost within the margin of error'."
Now I know your just being anal retentive, while "two orders of magnitude smaller" seems 'big', I am very right to question whether the difference of "3 IQ points" seems 'reasonable' when you consider the nature of the tests themselves what exactly is the difference of 3 points, in terms of the actual design of the test.
SO you're missing the point you can be given a tool and have other issues or not use it in a healthy fashion. Measuring IQ without a necessary biomolecular theory and definition of intelligence and understanding of the brains subsystem components is a very crude measuring tool.
Because it's in their best rational interest to attempt to survive. Sure human beings have a long history of being stupid but think of all people (millions) that you never here about that did not want war, or suffering, etc. Many people throughout history have been totally powerless. History is just as much marketing, lies and myth as it is "truth". Maybe you want to believe all human beings are necessarily degenerate, lustful, selfish creatures.
From someone who supports (or runs) adequacy.net and has articles like "dealing with communism in the workplace", and see's daycare centers as "liberal slaughterhoues" for childrends minds. I'd have to ask the same. Someone who believes in christianity is already not mentally well put together, see Mathew 8: 30-34, any god that belives in demons or that they cause mental illness is certainl *insane* and non existant.
"Here's an alternative scenario: when every person and group realizes that their coping with each other's conflicting interests has ceased to be for the indefinite future, and instead has a definite endpoint, all such cooperation will stop immediately, and massive all-out conflict will ensue."
Possible but people already have something to deal with of that magnitude: Their own death. The only difference is the cause - natural breakdown vs. star exploding.
"Please note that I do not actually claim to know that that would happen. I jut propose it because it is a different, no less plausible brand of sociobiological bullshit that the one you're so certain about ("the brain's survival routines"? who made you a neuroscientist?).
Or, in short: stop thinking that you know so much."
I think you are just perturbed because you believe the nature of man is evil, while it's not so cut and dry as you'd like to think.
... measuring IQ is like measuring whether or not a million angels can dance on the head of a pin. A difference of three IQ points seems almost within the margin of error and this says nothing of possible increase in co-morbid disorders with a higher IQ, now THAT would be interesting.
Next is pleiopetry (sp?) where genes code for more then one trait. I don't think a study like this is worth much without checking up on people later in life and comparing outcomes.
"Actually, that is not the case. It's the destruction of a blastocyst, which is a compilation of 70-150 cells"
While technically correct, I think he does have a point, after all if the blastocyst that was destined to become you were destroyed YOU would have never existed. I don't think exactly that you (after the fact) would want someone to go back in time and effect change such that your mother aborted you in retrospect, it's all too easy to dismiss pro-lifers as "irrational" but I think it's not the case in modern society, if you get an abortion you should have a damn good reason for getting one. IMHO I view people who do not have a valid reason for getting an abortion as I do drunk drivers: With disrespect.
I think the best analogy here (and a fitting one) is the blastocyst is as a seed is to a tree, except we're dealing with human beings. Next abortion in my opinion only has limited uses in modern society, where there are many alternative and safe methods of contraception. Why exactly does one need to abort a baby unless for medical reasons or the result of a criminals abuse?
Technology is the end result of our problem solving which is a subset of our brain's survival routines. Just think if the sun was say (for convenience of making my point) going to explode in 200 years, you'd definitely see vigorous redirection of resources in finding a way to make it to outer space at any cost or *else*. Technology is simply a way to use our current environment to change or manage our current environment in some way. Medicine is all about changing and managing your bodies environment to keep it alive for as long as is technically possible. Lastly even the body can be viewed itself as technology, what are cells, if not high tech descendent's of ancient designs.
Our quest for Innovation or invention is simply searching a matter/energy combinatorial space so that we can control our environment as in new ways instead of it controlling us, medicine is all about repealing natural selection for instance, where we intelligently intervene and make obsolete natural selection.
All inventions or innovations are combinations of previous knowledge/know-how and... the critical aspect: Foresight and imagination. Inventions mean little if one doesn't have the foresight and imagination to know how to turn it into an earth shattering technology or see how disparate smaller technologies fit together into a unified whole. Many technologies and innovations fall by the wayside until they are sufficiently advanced enough to integrate into something useful (i.e. think of how big/expensive old cell/wireless phones were).
Slashdot Mirror
"But Blizzard's graphics teams are total rubbish!!"
Yes but they have yet to be matched in terms of gameplay. I wouldn't say their graphics teams are total rubbish, I'd like to think that their graphics suck because they want as many people to play their games with as little technical barriers as possible to make the most $$$. There strategy obviously WORKS.
I think any serious hardcore gamer today thats been playing for 20 years has to see what developers would have come up with in terms of gameplay if there were graphical limitations. Gameplay matters more then graphics, period. My fondest memories are of original 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit (original) playstation era games. Don't get me wrong there's been some pretty fun games (Halo, God of war, etc) but they pale in comparison to early generations where developers had the freedom to be experiment and not lose their shirts to find new genres of addictive gameplay.
The truth is dev's today are selling games on graphics and dumbing down gaming, world of warcraft is complete evidence of gaming losing its interactivity (becoming a completely passive activity where you can go to the bathroom while the computer plays a battle out for you).
"Commerce has it's place, but this isn't it. Free market capitalism is good at distributing goods and services, but not at providing equitable education available to all citizens."
The ghost of marx haunts every moderate-capitalist with a brain.
You forget though, we live in a world that worships credentials and status. There is this irrational belief that just because someone isn't a PHD or hasn't finished highschool just yet or whatever else someone could smear someone with has deep cultural roots.
I've learned over the years that there the elements of valid contributions of truth and/or insight are not equally distributed according to some universal ideal belief (i.e. anyone who is X should not be listented to or who's contributions are disqualified on the basis of social or socio economic status)
"A case in point is the article on Harry Potter and the deathly hallows which as has been mentioned earlier in slashdot itself, is full of spoilers, posted inside a day of the book having been released. A lot of people who stumbled onto that article while looking for details on the book must have felt cheated."
Those people cheated themselves, who the hell looks up an article on harry potter on an encyclopedia no less, NOT expecting SPOILERS? It's an encyclopedia for god sakes!
If these people feel cheated it's because they were:
1) Too stupid to not have read the book first or
2) Too stupid to ask someone else if there was spoilers there
I have no sypathy for people who feel that an interactive medium should kowtow to 'how the world ought to be'.
"And frankly, if we're not willing to provide the information necessary for advertisers to make informed choices, we're going to continue to be ignored, both on the web and on television"
I think the real problem is we know the threat of "big brother" does not really come from government in my opinion but private industry, greed outweighs any sense of privacy. Companies want privacy for themselves to hide or obfuscate their operations and their goals, but when it comes to the bottom line privacy be damned.
Adam Smith strongly disliked both governments and corporations. He viewed government primarily as an instrument for extracting taxes to subsidize elites and intervening in the market to protect corporate monopolies. In his words, "Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.'' Smith never suggested that government should not intervene to set and enforce minimum social, health, worker safety, and environmental standards in the common interest or to protect the poor and nature from the rich. Given that most governments of his day were monarchies, the possibility probably never occurred to him.
The theory of market economics, in contrast to free-market ideology, specifies a number of basic conditions needed for a market to set prices efficiently in the public interest. The greater the deviation from these conditions, the less socially efficient the market system becomes
"all because of the idea that "the wisdom of the mob" is infallible."
The same holds true for the wisdom of the 'elect', history has shown that their needs to be a deep suspicion of both, able and intelligent people are just as bone-headed and misguided as anyone else, but this bone-headedness always has to wait for the next generation to look back from the current one to see how hopelessly naive they were. Many experts of the past were just as ignorant and barbaric as any other man, its just that experts can hide their own misguidedness and stupidity behind the ignorance of laity and their current positions of authority.
You can't have a 'game so bad it's funny' really unless parts of the game are actually 'funny' (as in well made), and most likely cutscenes or certain animations.
Games are more like rollercoaster or amusement themepark rides then movies, in my estimation, once you've experienced a game you don't usually want to go back to it unless there is a compelling reason (multiplayer, etc).
"Like fucking, for instance. Everyone knows that fucking is wrong, yet we keep doing it. We damned sure don't want our children to know about fucking; and we do what we can to conceal it from them. We ought to plant cameras in everyone's homes to make sure that they don't fuck. All these fucking people should be shot --- evil, sinning bastards."
Actually you illustrate that human's beings don't necessarily need privacy in this instance, they simply need not be disturbed. If you're neighbors wife is hot and she's an exhibitionist is it wrong? The whole idea of private fucking is a cultural phenomenon, there are other cultures that could have cared less.
To put it another way: Privacy is simply a word we use in place of "self defence from the other", the 'other' being ideas, ways of life, certain traits, characteristics, behavioural norms, abuse of power, etc, in our attempt to prevent frustration, disturbance, fear, attack on our character, negative feelings, fear of discrimination and a host of other ills.
We want privacy simply because... the majority of people on planet earth - suck.
James madison said it correctly in the federalist #51
"... But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?"
"Other than that, things won't change, except you'll have more choices. While the casual gamer market is growing and has the potential to be very large, the hardcore gamer market still has plenty of money to spend, the game industry knows that, and they're already set up for and experienced with serving that market. They're not going to completely abandon it to make minigames, the industry is just going to grow to cover the new types of games."
Personally I question the whole basis of casual gaming on consoles. Consoles are exclusively designed for hardcore games, even the alleged 'casual' games on console are simply dumbed down versions of hardcore games. You can see this in RPG's like final fantasy, where earlier versions of final fantasy were more hardcore then later ones as time goes on, and more emphasis on story and passive interaction takes too much precedence. Certain modern RPG's are anything but, they are simply computer rendered animation with small doses of limited activity.
I'm more worried that with the success of the Wii games may get watered down to the point of being totally passive, ALA Final fantasy 12. I get worried about games the more games move away from interactivity, and game mechanics, and what I mean by this is -- the range of things you can interact with in a game that gives it value. For instance in Half-life 2 being able to pick up objects throw them around, etc added a dimension to playing the game, being able to DO A LOT OF STUFF and INTERACT with a lot of stuff is what games really should be about.
God of War was so successful due to what you could do enemies and how the enemies responded in a satisfying and entertaining way.
The problem is that privacy is in fact more apt to protect those who already have power from scrutiny. What about the *unofficial* world you don't hear about in the news? Spy networks and intelligence agencies around the world know privacy is laughable with modern technology, you can spy on people without even having to be close to them.
Modern technology, sattelite tracking, cell phones, electronic money and scientific mathematical techniques pretty much put a damper on any kind of privacy. Just look at places like Google earth pictures that keep popping up on digg. In my opinion privacy does not exist for the 'little man', you'll be floored to know what other businesses know about you. Just perusing sites like statistics canada give you some basic insight into what kinds of information you're *not seeing*.
While someone might claim theire is something 'noble' and right about privacy, the truth is there needs to be a balance between private and public. There is in fact NOT ENOUGH transparency in what happens in many industries since they are immune from criticism. Modern media corporations get to hide certain industries dirty laundry because of financial connections.
People fear the abuse of power but at some point, but ultimately I think privacy is a evolutionary relic, in the modern world its like believing in creationism. You can try to protect your privacy but the tools available to observe and gather data are far beyond your ability to control them.
Just look at statistics on economic data, its not a very far fetched with modern technology to use satellites nad correlate that with the person and build huge databases about each person and then devise mathematical methods and models to help fill in the blanks, even if it isn't a perfect image of you, at some point science will advance to the point where predicting peoples behaviour will get very accurate.
"I think the point was that by starting with the idea "educational software" and trying to turn it into a game, you're more likely to get crap because people underestimate how difficult it is to make a fun game."
Well if you look at "fun games" many fun games are simply repetitive tedium that happens to take advantage of you brains psychological reward system, and many commercial games aren't even all that fun.
I think many games started out as someone simply trying to SIMULATE or understand something, not just 'invented for fun'. I'm sure many accidental games have been DISCOVERED, take SimCity and The sims, while designed to be 'games', they are more akin to 'serious' attempts at simulation of the world around us in many respects.
Indeed what are flight sims and war games if not spin-offs from the idea of military simulation? Many military sims to many are pretty boring, take the old Panzer General / Fantasy general games, note they represent combat by gaudy icons, numbers and statistics representing units. I know people to this day that still play Fantasy general (a financially failed SSI game), simply because to them the challenge and strategy it presents to them is inherently engrossing.
There's tonnes of games I find more simulation or 'excel spreadsheet like' then 'gamey', take Eve online or even MMORPG's, I detest MMO's because most of the game is travel and not gaming in the traditional sense and everything is automated. MMO's are really dumbed down single player games, imagine taking God of war and dumbing down the combat to WoW combat mechanics, it simply would NOT be the same game. Yet some certain subset of the population would find it 'engrossing' in own way.
The same could be said about MUD's (multi user dungeon's) and old BBS games like LORD (Legend of the red dragon).
I think games can educate when it comes to certain kinds of concepts, ideas or facts you want to teach. I remember trying to answer an question in my university course using civilization,
I really have to wonder if this is a kneejerk reaction to Banks having fraud problems?
I think this is pretty extreme measure, as if companies didn't already have enough data about people already. What exactly is the criteria for a 'secure' system? Sounds like a lot of BS to me.
MOD PARENT UP!
"The problem is, is that a lot of gamers don't want to get the card that only supports 16bit graphics, or in this case only supports 1900x1280 resolution. Because they feel that they aren't getting as good of a product, even if they can't tell the difference."
/w AA today. Even Doom 3 looked fantastic at 800x600 when it first came out.
Woah woah woah... you should not be comparing 16-bit vs 32bit colour to 'high resolutions'. You could easily see the quantization errors with transparency effects like smoke or skies on 3Dfx cards, you could easily tell the difference between 16-bit and 32-bit color, the banding was very apparent in multitextured games. I know I was the one who stuck with the voodoo3 while everyone moved over to nvidia TNT and geforce series cards. My first card was a Geforce 2.
Many (if not most) people are satisfied with 1024x768 or 1280x1024
Even with a fast card I rarely run higher then 1280x1024, at some point resolution really ceased to matter to me with anti-aliasing, decent speed, and getting rid of blending artifacts that occur with low precision are more important. Since the actual art hasn't caught up yet.
Go play Xenosaga Episode 3 on the PS2 (a game released last fall) for the PS2 and compare it to any modern PC game, if that game proves anything, it proves that artists and art direction is much more important then simply having high resolution. High resolution doesn't matter much if you're art is not that great or you game isn't either.
"Consumers need to grow a pair if they want things to change."
You forget most consumers are bloody ignorant, time constrained beings. Not to mention that many of these people who use such software products are not technologically savvy, or it does not effect enough programs to effect them.
Your example with the carmaker and the wired lock on the gas caps is much more visible and a *constant* inconvenience which anyone can obviously recognize. In software you can't "see the defects" visibly, nor due the defects inhibit your use as harshly since if it doesn't effect you (as a user) then you most likely ignore it.
"Cavemen would have to walk across continents to find food, had a life expectancy of 20 and slept in a cave half-freezing to death."
c iety
Nonsense, you've never heard of the original affluent society? Anthropologists would disagree.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_so
"Video games are pursued by those addicted to it to fulfill a psychological. The players feel more powerful."
Wrong, they are doing it to gamble (pop mobs) for more loot. Sometimes it's about power if you're a PVP'er but that "power" is simply the fun of the activity combined with the addicting qualities of the human challenge or winning. If you lose straight constantly, its highly unlikely you'd continue playing the game. Most games are designed with constant stream of rewards as long as you keep doing something (i.e. popping mobs).
Diablo 2's addictive quality came totally from the well designed item/monster drop system, while technically it was to get more "power" the fact is the rewards (weapons/armor) are what had the percieved high value to begin with and they are given out similarly to "gambling", instead of inserting coins you're simply killing monsters.
"If you think that picking strawberries is a career someone can enjoy, you have very low standards for "enjoyment""
Nonsense, you've obviously never been a gardner out in the sun. Like I said before, strawberry picking is stigmatized because it doesn't pay well, if it paid well I don't think too many people would have a problem doing it and others who like being outside or have a green thumb might *gasp* enjoy it.
It's relative to what the person finds appealing, like I said before most jobs are $hit, because of their repetitive-grind like nature. You can be excited about any job when you first start but over time in your job or emotional attachment starts to lose value, and other things take precedence, like money, rather then the work itself.
"We should view this as cruel. We shouldn't maintain an underclass which picks fruit or maintains gardens. Machines can do this work without becoming tired, bored, getting disabling injuries, suffering reactions to ag chemicals, or any of the other hazards of human labor in orchards and fields. Machines can be built as needed and scrapped when they become unusable or obsolete."
Capitalism (how it works in practice) is *ALL* about maintaining an underclass, get with the program. Whole industries thrive on having underclass or minimum wage class of workers, and while many people would like to believe minimum wage jobs are 'only temporary' the fact of the matter is for many people it is a large part of their life.
If we were truly concerned about the poor we would simply not charge them for goods and services and build such things into the system, there is certainly more then enough money to pay someone more then $10,000/yr to someone who is disabled in ontario for example, but that's all the disabled get in Canada. Corporate shills and "Institutes" are constantly attacking the poor in their cooked 'economic analysis', some argued to maintain or decrease what disabled people get. What kind of heartless MORON does that to these kinds of people who are already at a severe employability disadvantage if not outright unemployable?
""Gee, I'm sure glad I got the opportunity to explore my full human potential in that career!""
The same could be said about any "Career" what makes you think picking strawberries is any different from any other career that one can enjoy? If picking strawberries paid 60K a year and software programming paid $3 an hour you can bet your boot the only reason people "feel satisfied" with their careers half the time is the money it brings in and the working conditions and renumerations associated with the task. Any career or job can lose status, in fact that is the whole purpose of progress: To replicate and replace human labour as much as possible. The problem is technology and capitalism (wage markets) as they are now are on a head on collision course, just what happens when or geneticially enhanced human beings come around? At some point the social order we know today will have to go the way of the dodo.
Many smarter economists realized that a national income whether or not someone worked, simply because technology keeps displacing jobs and makes full employment impossible.
"And, in fact, if the results were not statistically significant, they wouldn't get published very easily, and certainly not in Science."
Nonsense, much that is nonsense is published CERTAINLY in science, todays science is tomorrows superstition when dealing with crude measuring apparatus -- that being ultimately the human being which is prone to bias and overstating their interpretation of the data or doing folloup studies or later finding flaws in methodology that are not apparent, etc. Science is not immune from human frailty. One only has to look back 50-100 years to see how "scientific" many men were Freud, et, al. Even darwin looks almost like a religious mystic by todays actual *evidence* of sophisticated nano-molecular machines within all living beings. His origin theory in todays environment would be seen as crude and unsohpisticated by molecular standards.
For instance Darwin dismissed the question of the eye's ultimate origin:
How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light hardly concerns us more than how life itself originated. He had an excellent reason for declining the question: it was completely beyond nineteenth century science. How the eye works; that is, what happens when a photon of light first hits the retina simply could not be answered at that time. As a matter of fact, no question about the underlying mechanisms of life could be answered. How did animal muscles cause movement? How did photosynthesis work? How was energy extracted from food? How did the body fight infection? No one knew.
The truth is psychometric measurement is much in the same boat, they attempting to measure something in reference to culture without understanding how it works. They simply don't know even how to define intelligence other then my standards of the socio-economic system and cultural education system. If I'm a genius and I choose to live the life of a poor artist am I still a genius by societies standards? This is what I mean by "What are we attempting to measure" and what is "smartness", ultimately IQ, science and the subjective collide in nasty ways that 21st century science does not and cannot understand just yet due to the fact that: It's beyond today science.
"In this study, they had 241,310 subjects. If memory serves me right, the population standard deviation is 15 points, so we have a margin or error along the order of 15 divided by the square root of 241,310, or 0.03. That is, two orders of magnitude smaller than 3 IQ points, which to you 'seems almost within the margin of error'."
Now I know your just being anal retentive, while "two orders of magnitude smaller" seems 'big', I am very right to question whether the difference of "3 IQ points" seems 'reasonable' when you consider the nature of the tests themselves what exactly is the difference of 3 points, in terms of the actual design of the test.
SO you're missing the point you can be given a tool and have other issues or not use it in a healthy fashion. Measuring IQ without a necessary biomolecular theory and definition of intelligence and understanding of the brains subsystem components is a very crude measuring tool.
"Why are you so sure of that?"
Because it's in their best rational interest to attempt to survive. Sure human beings have a long history of being stupid but think of all people (millions) that you never here about that did not want war, or suffering, etc. Many people throughout history have been totally powerless. History is just as much marketing, lies and myth as it is "truth". Maybe you want to believe all human beings are necessarily degenerate, lustful, selfish creatures.
From someone who supports (or runs) adequacy.net and has articles like "dealing with communism in the workplace", and see's daycare centers as "liberal slaughterhoues" for childrends minds. I'd have to ask the same. Someone who believes in christianity is already not mentally well put together, see Mathew 8: 30-34, any god that belives in demons or that they cause mental illness is certainl *insane* and non existant.
"Here's an alternative scenario: when every person and group realizes that their coping with each other's conflicting interests has ceased to be for the indefinite future, and instead has a definite endpoint, all such cooperation will stop immediately, and massive all-out conflict will ensue."
Possible but people already have something to deal with of that magnitude: Their own death. The only difference is the cause - natural breakdown vs. star exploding.
"Please note that I do not actually claim to know that that would happen. I jut propose it because it is a different, no less plausible brand of sociobiological bullshit that the one you're so certain about ("the brain's survival routines"? who made you a neuroscientist?).
Or, in short: stop thinking that you know so much."
I think you are just perturbed because you believe the nature of man is evil, while it's not so cut and dry as you'd like to think.
... measuring IQ is like measuring whether or not a million angels can dance on the head of a pin. A difference of three IQ points seems almost within the margin of error and this says nothing of possible increase in co-morbid disorders with a higher IQ, now THAT would be interesting.
Next is pleiopetry (sp?) where genes code for more then one trait. I don't think a study like this is worth much without checking up on people later in life and comparing outcomes.
"Actually, that is not the case. It's the destruction of a blastocyst, which is a compilation of 70-150 cells"
While technically correct, I think he does have a point, after all if the blastocyst that was destined to become you were destroyed YOU would have never existed. I don't think exactly that you (after the fact) would want someone to go back in time and effect change such that your mother aborted you in retrospect, it's all too easy to dismiss pro-lifers as "irrational" but I think it's not the case in modern society, if you get an abortion you should have a damn good reason for getting one. IMHO I view people who do not have a valid reason for getting an abortion as I do drunk drivers: With disrespect.
I think the best analogy here (and a fitting one) is the blastocyst is as a seed is to a tree, except we're dealing with human beings. Next abortion in my opinion only has limited uses in modern society, where there are many alternative and safe methods of contraception. Why exactly does one need to abort a baby unless for medical reasons or the result of a criminals abuse?
Technology is the end result of our problem solving which is a subset of our brain's survival routines. Just think if the sun was say (for convenience of making my point) going to explode in 200 years, you'd definitely see vigorous redirection of resources in finding a way to make it to outer space at any cost or *else*. Technology is simply a way to use our current environment to change or manage our current environment in some way. Medicine is all about changing and managing your bodies environment to keep it alive for as long as is technically possible. Lastly even the body can be viewed itself as technology, what are cells, if not high tech descendent's of ancient designs.
Our quest for Innovation or invention is simply searching a matter/energy combinatorial space so that we can control our environment as in new ways instead of it controlling us, medicine is all about repealing natural selection for instance, where we intelligently intervene and make obsolete natural selection.
All inventions or innovations are combinations of previous knowledge/know-how and... the critical aspect: Foresight and imagination. Inventions mean little if one doesn't have the foresight and imagination to know how to turn it into an earth shattering technology or see how disparate smaller technologies fit together into a unified whole. Many technologies and innovations fall by the wayside until they are sufficiently advanced enough to integrate into something useful (i.e. think of how big/expensive old cell/wireless phones were).