"Werent the first co-processors FPUs. Arent they now integrated into the CPU? By having all these thing sin one chip they will have much lower latency with communicating between themselves. I think all in one multi-core chips is the future if you ask me."
You misunderstand displacement, first of all there are only so many chips you can pack into a CPU die before bandwidth and memory issues become a problem, high memory bandwidth devices will spam the communications channel waiting for data. Really is a displacement of data (think water, or energy). I've seen computers go from specialized chips to integrated and back to specialized chips again and so forth. It all depends on the state of the technology of the time and the performance/power requirements.
"...If he is, why would he be using the term "zero gee"?"
Give me a break, everyone judges a persons worth based on the spelling of their words? As if people should be expected to fit some perfect ideal. I know plenty of smart degreed people, who couldn't spell to save their life.
"No. Sorry, but no. This is nothing more or less than a profound appeal to improper authority, the authority being the editor in question"
I can see why he did it, I think you can't blame him entirely. We have a whole irrational damn-near religious awe of credentials and enormous stigma against those who do not possess this "sacred currency", if you don't have a degree you're "low cog" (lower down on the cognitive chain) and hence "less worthy". The fact is our culture worships the paper. You are deemed more or less worthy by how well you navigated some arbitrary designed academic obstacle course that may or most likely - may not have interested you because of the stale (or incorrect) way it was presented and the stifling of natural curiosity that happens in how children are taught today. Gatto as commented on this extensively.
Credentials are great if you need to develop a specific complex skill set for your job and need to think in a certain way using a certain set domains they teach you when you go through the academic obstacle course in the academic system (Set domains as in a set domain in set theory of math, except, vis, not with decimal symbols but with accrued experiential data patterns).
The truth is credentials and experience for many jobs are purely manufactured to keep the economy going, that is the big secret of government schools and market economies. The school-market caste system within certain job classifications. You need to divide people into functionaries in order to maintain society.
Most people who graduated high school with fairly decent marks could easily teach the first 3-4 grades in public school, and hell probably more, with a few 6 month course in teaching, public speaking and presentation, they could teach most of what is taught in public school with the exception of perhaps science.
"A game is not entitled to make money due to some intrinsic 'goodness' value. If I spent a billion dollar to make the greatest game ever, I would expect to lose money on this because I don't think you can physically sell enough copies to make up the development cost."
Just remember "Who" the market is, a market is no more then a collection of individuals making choices. That "market" can make increasingly bad choices without direction. The problem was that game developers let game console companies drive their costs up by releasing new hardware that wasn't even NEEDED. Sure you might argue the PS2's graphics were jaggy, but looking at what square can pull off in final fantasy X an a machine that is more mediocre then an Xbox with an Intel celeron P3 and a graphics card says a lot about what game developers learned about how to be efficient with data and memory.
The truth is, just like everything else that is "humanly expensive" to develop in first world nations, you offshore the work as much as possible.
There needs to be equal emphasis on data efficiency and less on expanding graphical bloat. Gameplay in my estimation is stagnating because the graphics front end and graphics garbage (physics, stupid simulated effects, etc) for games became too complicated to manage so gameplay mechanics vision is lost with huge teams of individuals that all have to attempt to synchronize their efforts towards the shape of the vision they have in their minds.
The truth is most of the whiz bang features in games that I appreciate the most are GOOD design decisions, playing with physics in Half life 2 was fun for a little while, and then you only use it when it is necessary in a game to advance or useful to help speed advance as a tool, once you're done you put the game on the shelf, do something else or play multi player.
A better word for biological theory of evolution, would be "The theory of self-organized bio-computational forms of matter"
The word evolve is an outdated term, the whole word no longer represents the kind of knowledge we now have about organisms. Organisms compute data, engineer structures and solve problems like little nano-machines. Referring to them as "evolving" or being "lower life forms" or some other idealogical nonsense is degenerate. Most biologists speaking about creationism are the least intelligent, if they were smart they'd find something better to do and know that natural selection is on its way out and fields related to bio-computation is on its way in to describing the "evolutionary" (read: computational problem solving) process.
Darwin coined the word evolve because he thought organisms were these basic simple things, like water and sand jiggling around in jello, so did most scientists before the discovery of DNA and the complex machinery of the baterial flagella. Intelligent Design people may be wrong about the origin of life, but they are certainly right that most scientists are like old priests trapped in paradigmatic bubble about to fall in on itself. The concept of natural selection is like the old concept of "gods will", if water evaporates thats "gods will", today it would be called "evolution", tomorrow in the truly rational and non-hostile future it will be called just... water molecules dispersing because of heat.
"4) Increase funding for music and art. While most people don't realize this, there is a strong connection between math and music as well as science and art in the human brain. Researchers are still trying to work out exactly what it is, but studies show that there is definitely a link for most people."
Binary and art are related as well, think about black and white on a computer screen filled with pixels, its ENORMOUSLY helpful to teach art with because you have the whole spectrum of paint/colors to use to show that when you take a color gradient from while to a color, or dark to a color, you can tell actually SHOW THEM with VISUAL examples how shapes are created from very small dots and "merged dots" of color or DISPERSED color. Using digital palletes to merge colors is enomrously helpful.
Math is really all about the abstractalization of light, shape and color. Kids are NEVER taught that though. That the "true math" is the WORLD, and symbolic math (1,2,3,4) is really just the points we choose out of geometric space and plot in an area somewhere and then label it with a number and connect the number (plot-points) with lines.
The number line can be better understood as a NUMBER PLOT in a direction with a ratio (reflection/radian/radii(?) point) between numbers. It wasn't until I merged the concept of binary (black/white) on -- off with dots in a piece of paper that I finally understood how shapes are made. They are made of very smalll merged dots of different shapes and sizes and colors, and that you can learn how to draw shapes by understanding how something is distinct from something else in a binary fashion.
In art on a 2D plane: There are only edges and boundaries, and fields of dispersed dots (gradients).
So it's not just music and art, ART and GEOMETRY, Binary number system mapped onto 3D (many stacked 2d planes) planes of dots, that are eithe "there" (on), or "not there" (off), understanding space as an "unfilled area" (off) is totally enlightening.
Imagine being able to show people that you were taught math in a very limited sense, that when somebody told you about counting what they really were talking about were nodes, planes and lines in 3D space, what math is really all about is shapes of binary nodes (on or off) with rays cast between them (lines). And that when we add or subtract what we really are doing is reflecting the number one or a group of ones at certain angles or vectors using a vector mirror.
I agree, but I think what people don't understand is that Aspergers is a information processing "disorder" in other words our minds process information in certain forms and cannot process easily information in other forms.
You have to think of it mathematically. In my mind for instance I think in pictures (i.e. 3D like a movie) and word metaphors. My axis when I convert what I'm thinking to words is from pictures >> to words and from words to pictures.
What people don't understand about the brain is that the brain is a circuit with electron flows amd therefore subject to all the same kinds of mishaps as differently ro strangely wired circuits.
I view aspergers (my own) as having my minds structure as being highly tuned to process information visually and conceptually in terms of word metaphors. All that exists its flows and fields of energy in a persons mind, an aspergers mind has different ones. And we're all unique in our own way but for strange reason there seems to a pattern where we have predominant axis (specialization) in certain areas and less (or none) in others, leaving us without a "general purpose CPU".
Think of an aspergers mind as a GPU card trying to process CPU data, or a soundcard DSP trying to process graphical data. What happens in aspergers data gets truncated due to their mind specializing in processing certain kinds of data, so it makes it more difficult to process others that their mind is not designed for.
Inforation science and circuit design explains the REALITY of aspergers.
I'm not sure it's related to autism but I do know one thing, the collection of phenotypic traits known as Aspergers is real, that is for sure.
I only began to understand what social interaction was about after I read Mystery's Venusian Arts handbook and David DeAngelo's double your dating. I couldn't MODEL other peoples perspectives in my mind due to some kind of egocentric data procesing barrier. I can't look at a person and determine what they are thinking or what their intents are unless it's extremely exagerated and perfect like in a movie, and even then, people to me more often then not, I cannot pick up on what they are thinking, they are just robots to me and I can't model their behaviour. I have to learn it egocentrically by socializing with my self through videos, and then seeing myself say act out some script that has emotional content in words and body language and then I begin to understand how another person feels when I express things in a certain way by reflecting it back on myself.
The aspergers mind has probles modelling (reflecting) their own behaviour back on themselves in a way that the can see how another person see's.
The only way I can really understand socialization is if I visualize me being in another person body and imagine myself talking to them... but that is fairly vague, so I used webcam videos when I was beginning to learn how to see from other peoples eyes.
Jimmy needs to ask people not for DONATIONS, but LENDING THEM THEIR MONEY... instead of donating our money and watching it disappear, we give him the money for it to earn interest in a bank account for a few months, and then he sends it back, and then he uses the interest to pay the wikipedia costs.
Sorry about my last post, the first paragraph was mangled. What I meant to say was, "true capitalism" has NO LAWS, it is one giant FREE FOR ALL. i.e. war, domination, "Crime", profiteering, collusion, etc.
Many things go on under the "Free market" that people see as "capitalistic" which are in fact not, capitalism is like evolution, you can make it mean whatever you want it to mean. The truth is our language is the problem a "free-market" to you, is not what I'd call a free market. i.e. what is and isn't a "free-market" or "capitalistic" is very elastic and relative. Everyone and their neighbor has their own definiton of what constitutes "capitalism". Next while "property rights", are useful, property is really a priviledge, not a right. Hence government stepping in to save certain ecological niches from destruction. Since the private man can't be counted on to have the best interests of the whole society or human race at heart, there has to be a balance between private rights and public rights, its really not about "property" since property was invented to solve a problem. I'd be all for abolishing property RIGHTS tomorrow, and rename it PROPERTY PRIVILEDGES, people that are irresponsible do not deserve property rights, and deserve all the aggression and ill will inflicted upon them if they abuse their property to dominate other classes in the name of excessive self-interest.
Rich people have enormous power in society, but if everyone except rich people died tomorrow, I would PAY for front row seats to see how they'd live and deal with not having an entire society to command with their monopoly on social energy and their lovely dollar collars they put on the rest of us, I'm not saying they are even conscious of their own power, since they too were born under "the system" and are in their own perceptually distorted world.
"However, any society that refrains from aggression already meets the critera for a free-market economy."
Well the whole point is the definition of "free market" is a moving target... while it is useful, I think the term "free market" has become TOO emotionally and idealogically loaded. Me I went through my phases of being idealogically awed by different doctrines and idealogies, now I simply want the best solutions, and the best quality people possible.
The only way out of a hellish world is for the man himself to grow up and change and ACCEPT that nature is evil. Human beings selfishness is a reflection of the bio-behavioural baggage of evolution, in short, you could come up with all manner of SCIENTIFIC justification for peoples inferiority if they are TOO self interested, and deserve to be killed, jailed or "aggressively de-propertized". Right now many rich people are getting away with nothing less then indirect murder in theivery in the so called "free market", because of hte LIMITED MONEY SUPPLY, and because they have MONOPOLY ownership PROFIT STREAMS. The whole problem is with their ownership of the profit supply (social energy supply).
Checks on economic power are what we need, we have them on government, so it seems absolutely stupid not to have them on how much property or money you can have, since think about it, if someone had enough money to own the earth, ALL other people are now SLAVES / Indentured servants to the owner. That is the danger of property "rights", is domination of others legally without their consent, unfortunately most people are too intellectually limited to see what is going on. Eventually the stupid aspects of our society will have to go extinct.
"People don't like taking risks on new games that could rule or stink at the prices involved in that kind of gamble."
The problem is not with gamers, it's with how much games cost. Games have not seen any significant cost reduction at all at RETAIL when they are first released. THIS is the barrier to why "games don't sell", games cost too much to make and are in fact to expensive to buy unless it is a killer AAA title, if you wnat people to buy more games. 1) Figure out a better business model 2) Outsource.
This is the real world, not fantasy land. Game developers in rich countries have to face the fact that: They cost too damn much and inflate game prices beyond what they are worth. That is a fact. The guys at EPIC know this, I remember reading an article from one of them saying that games really have to come down in price and new business / deevelopment models have to be found and to stop blaming gamers, they are trying to force a development and business model on a market unwilling to accept the price tag, so either you evolve, suck it up, or die.
... lack of killer system selling game or games. It has to be said if the games were there even the high price would not be such a barrier of there really was a killer app that made people throw their financial reason to the wind.
"For that matter, when you get down to it, copyright was instigated (in the U.S.) as an attempt at social engineering, which is even more directly opposed to property rights (and thus also capitalism). Give credit where credit is due: copyright is an outgrowth of the "social democratic" mindset, not the apolitical market economy."
No I'm sorry copyright has everything to do with capitalism, REAL capitalism would have no patent or copyright laws, because patents are also against capitalism, they are PROPERTARIAN and hence CAPITALISTIC in nature. Modern capitalist idealogues use capitalism as a weasal word to make it mean anything they want it to mean...
To me in an economy with a limited money supply, and money being a finite form and supply of SOCIAL ENERGY, in which determines the outcome of a persons living standard, ability to feed themselves and take care of themselves, any monopoly on the money supply (becoming insanely rich) is also anti-capitalist by your reasoning, because by definition you see copyright as monopoly, then also being too rich is also anti-capitalist because it monopolizes the money supply (people with more money own more profit generating assets or property, and through this ownership TAX the rest of the population).
The problem ultimately is with unchecked economic power because of the limited social energy supply, anyone who monopolizes too much money and the profit supply and other profit generating assets choke other classes out of existence.
The truth is our language is inferior, Power is the only freedom and economic power is the onlly freedom worth speaking about since it lubricates and enables all other forms of freedom. You can't have freedom if you're starving, or without a place to live for example, or without a job to collect social energy, i.e. money, etc.
Believe me idealogies are for wussies, a real person wants to solve problems, take the best solutions of each strain of thought and best elements of human ideas and snythesize them to create a better world. The for profit sytstem works, but there are no checks and balances against abuse and causing social problems through monopolizing the money supply and profit generating assets of a society. Right now it's an monopolistic oligarchy, and the research proves it. Capitalism doesn't "truly" exist in the best or ideal form, right now its being used by rich people to engineer society and the world to its whims.
Utlimately at first you'd need users to tell you what was spam and what was not to help develop an anti-system gaming algorithm, also you could offer financial rewards for outing people gaming the search engine.
Ideally you'd need users to help you fight the constant battle with those trying to game the search results, but users would need some kind of incentive or payment to keep the search engine running smoothly. Ideally maybe you could select random samples of people and pay them to filter out garbage? I have no idea at this point. If anyone has better ones, shoot!
Re:Sounds good, a quasi Wikipedia like development
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Everybody Votes on the Wii
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Well no shit, that's but better game development is what "survey data" is all about.
"Now that Wikipedia has reached a critical mass, the time has come to establish a trusted editorial board that can vet articles to established experts in the field of subjects."
The problem with wikipedia is not going to go away by electing a "trusted" board of experts and their wholly fuzzy and extremely emotional and dogmatic pronouncements. Take the articles on creationism and intelligent design for instance. They are in no way thoughtfully created, with a clear dispassionate, philosophic and intellectual eye. There is enormous cultural dogmatic bias and alleged "scientific" (evolutionary) bias in those articles, the authors and "experts" covering those topics (the evolution experts heavily emotionally invested in intelligent design debate) are basically slandering anything related to the idea of design marring it.
Experts have the same problem except in reverse: They think they are so good that their opinions and judgments on ideas, philosophies and world views are beyond reproach. They have what I call "filthy ignorance of the mass of intellectuals" problem, even if experts while a minority in society at large, they have all the same problems the masses have except magnified within a smaller number of people. They are only slightly above the average.
Sure they are skilled, and yes they are talented, but this in no way gives them infallible judgment or even trustworthy judgment. Plato and other ancient philosophers / semi-proto-scientists would be appalled at the todays so-called "intellectuals" and their wholly dogmatic and fuzzy thinking.
Take for instance For the record: I am agnostic atheist.
Any serious intellectual who has ever studied religion already knows: That the bible and Christianity are untrue, and there are believers who are trying to use ID as justification for false beliefs. But regardless, ID itself as an idea divorced from religion, if practiced in a scientific fashion would 1) Overturn religious forms of creationism and all religion because if ID was true, then all religions now become within the purview of scientific scrutiny and hence automatic rejection through rational inquiry rather than pseudo-intellectual gymnastics.
Regardless of whether ID is influenced by creationism or belief in god, no "Expert" has ever dealt with the substance of the arguments put forth by ID advocates, they are narrowly confined and wedded, to juxtoposing "omnipotent intelligence" in place of simply intelligence in detecting design in biology or nature. Maybe there is an evolutonary intelligence at work and not just natural selection acting on variaton. Perhaps organisms reprogram themselves on semi or very intelligently on the fly according to stimulus in the environment? That may in fact be natural, or embedded in cells / life, etc.
Any man/woman worth his or her salt knows that creationism and the bible god are fiction. The concept of ID does not depend on the bible or Christianity being true or any religion for that matter. This fact is totally glossed over and outright ignored by "Experts" today, the first sign of closed-mindedness and pseudo-intellectualism at its best.
The question of design, is an age old question that is not dependent on anyone's religion or scientific worldview: Taken all the way back the Greeks Atomists vs. teleologists. Take a look at the animations of the flagellar motor and bloodclotting system and there is unmistakable pattern of machinery and chemical engineering there, anyone that says there isn't has not taken nor studied seriously engineering or molecular biology. The fact that fundamentalist secularist "experts" deny this vehemently shows their closed-mindedness to the fact that: We will be a "founding class" of designers in the future when we create and engineer new life forms and sentient beings that will be their own life forms and will also be designing things through their own intelligent agency and intervention. These life-forms will have come about by direct intelligent (human) or otherwise (agent) interve
"How about World of Starcraft. I know this has been mentioned many times, but I do think it is a good idea. I'm hooked on to Eve Online. I can see something like Eve with a Starcraft theme. I'd buy it."
Please no, Eve's pace of gameplay is enormously tedious and boring. It's great if you like waiting a lot but the lack of an optional skill based action oriented ship-to-ship fighting leaves a lot to be desired. Starcraft works on the principle of management but it also takes skill, speed and dedication. Eve is not such a game, all it takes in eve is time and dedication.
Damn this sounds amazing! I've often wondered if doing a test level with test gameplay mechanics and demo'ing it wasn't THE WAY to produce the best games.
"This is also why creationism is not science: it is not disprovable (once an omnipotent God is in the picture, any disproof can be refuted)."
Creationism is not just about omnipotent gods of sacred holy texts, our future creations will have creation theories of their origins, certainly you don't believe our future AI's and artificial life forms will not have been created? Creationism gets a bad wrap because it's comingled with relgiuos dogma, the idea of design is sound, the idea that its an omnipotent being of one of the ancient holy texts is what is false.
There very well could be a secular theory of god / creationism / intelligent design. Slashdot has a heavy anti-creationism bias because of their mixed up thought processes on the issue and their limited scope of thinking about the topic in general.
In every instance we know technology is created by intelligence, there was and is nothing wrong with people inferring intelligent causation as a very preliminary way as a scientific approach to explaining the causes behind life. Our future progenitors will do it for the history of our own future creations if/when/etc they go extinct.
Creationism will definitely have a resurgence as a scientific enterprise and it won't be chained to silly holy texts of ancient human ancestors. As humanity expands it is inevitable, what do you do when you find other races, or others races living creations? At some point science will have to grapple with the issue of intelligent creative causes in the universe. It is only cultural bias and religious poisoning of an idea that has made the idea of intelligent causation stigmatized.
Role playing in MMO's is the worst thing you could possibly do. Video games are about the action and having fun, accomplishing tasks and goals that give you emotional highs and lows, it's not about ACTING. If you want to act, you can find way better avenues to do it in then a game with characters who have limited ability to emote, and can basically only shout text in channels or above their heads.
It boggles the mind why people would even bother to roleplay in a game with such limited abilities in terms of the avatars ability to animate any possible combination of movements, combined with the lack of language ability, emotional expressiveness.
"As an American Citizen I really hope Canada Man's up and tells the USA to go screw itself. America needs to worry more about the problems we have at home and less on other countries internal politics when they are not a threat to the U.S.'s safety."
Any country that doesn't play by the economic policy of the US is a threat to the USA. The US is basically the arm of corporations now, your fellow countrymen's blind adherence to extreme propertarianism and extreme capitalism are partly to blame.
I've been really inspired by a lot of people in the US but it's unfortunate that too many US citizens are slack when it comes to changing their government. Where were the riots when the US invaded IRAQ? How many people have now died and who's lives have been ruined? I know if I was a US Citizens I would be damn pissed at the people in power.
Psychonauts.... some game devs are crazy...
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Why Do Games Sell?
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· Score: 0
Why do game developers thing their games should sell when they make games based on teh weirdest stuff imaginabe without doing any market research about the themes and ideas they are doing?
The truth is not that original games suck, it's that the so called "original" game isn't original most of the time and creatively and thematically they game is way out there (like WAY out there).
Take for instance Planescape torment. It was an excellent game if you LOVED TO READ TEXT and CLICK THROUGH DIALOGUE for hours on end, but for people more action or task oriented, it's a very tedious thing. It was also based on the baldur's gate engine which we had seen before.
Next is the fact that planescape was thematically WAY out there, did you see the box art and ma,e for that game? That alone would have killed sales like the plague. Then there was the fact that it in no way associated itself with Baldur's gate or Forgotten realm properties and franchises. Big mistake. If we changed the box art and the name of the game and art setting and basically had it in the Baldurs gate / forgotten realm universe with decent box art and a some reworking of thee game to make it fit that universe it would have been more of a success I gaurantee it.
Some game developers go a litttle crazy when they are given TOO much creative control and it must be said that creating you dream game, while fufilling can tank your company if you're not considering the business end of it and tempering your labour of love with the reality that people will want to play in your games world especially if they are buying it for $50.
"Then we are doing something wrong. The human brain provides compelling evidence that massive parallelization works. So: what are we missing?"
And yet most people process things sequentially, I think you're mistaking the depth of parallelization that occurs. The mind is enormously more complicated then a computer, the conditions of it's operation are ever changing. New brain cells, culling of old ones, new connections, culling of old ones, etc. Next you forget that the brain is notoriously error prone, ask someone to recall something they did last week, or something they wrote earlier that day, and they will not remember it. Hell ask somebody to memorize a few pages of a novel after one or two quick read throughs, and even the most intelligent people will struggle to recall word-for-word in exacting detail what they just read moments ago. This also applies to what people here and see. While human minds are fantastic at what they can do, they are enormously slow, the whole reason we need to develop technology is because our bodies and minds in many circumstances are not as good as our technology.
Computers have a enormous advantage in the way they store information and the error correction protocols that do not exist to the same degree in human minds. On the internet humans make more mistakes then any random machine error that slips through. If you compared all the computers in the world and their computational/memory error rates and data integrity, against all the human minds, the computers would win hand down.
Human minds are not as good as you make them out to be, most human minds are mind numbingly slow at doing basic tasks (like math), when a computer does them infinitely much faster. Imagine every human being being able to chew through math problems at Core 2 duo + speeds. Societal evolution would be alarmingly much faster then it is today.
"Dismissing evidence based on preconceived belief is called religion. To be scientific you must actually LOOK at the evidence and methods, and consider it using the same methods used to evaluate all other experimental evidence."
In this case I do not totally agree, much scientific knowledge is TOTALLY based on the quality of instrumentation you have to DO the investigation, human beings are very limited in what they can measure. As technology gets more sophisticated I wouldn't totally put some kind of "ESP" (i.e. sensing events, having visions of events before they happen, etc) off the map. In my opinion any kind of "ESP" is "random" and uncontrollable, if you've ever seen the movie Final fantasy the spirits within, they have technology to actually record someones thoughts and see what goes on in their minds eye. This level of instrumentation is necessary I believe before any real serious study can be done, because I for one do not believe in the *stigmatized* or popular versions and definitions of ESP, but I do believe their is some weird natural physics to the universe that allows ESP like things to be sensed by people but they do not control it. It's more like having a random thought come out of nowhere.
Slashdot Mirror
"Werent the first co-processors FPUs. Arent they now integrated into the CPU? By having all these thing sin one chip they will have much lower latency with communicating between themselves. I think all in one multi-core chips is the future if you ask me."
You misunderstand displacement, first of all there are only so many chips you can pack into a CPU die before bandwidth and memory issues become a problem, high memory bandwidth devices will spam the communications channel waiting for data. Really is a displacement of data (think water, or energy). I've seen computers go from specialized chips to integrated and back to specialized chips again and so forth. It all depends on the state of the technology of the time and the performance/power requirements.
"...If he is, why would he be using the term "zero gee"?"
Give me a break, everyone judges a persons worth based on the spelling of their words? As if people should be expected to fit some perfect ideal. I know plenty of smart degreed people, who couldn't spell to save their life.
"No. Sorry, but no. This is nothing more or less than a profound appeal to improper authority, the authority being the editor in question"
I can see why he did it, I think you can't blame him entirely. We have a whole irrational damn-near religious awe of credentials and enormous stigma against those who do not possess this "sacred currency", if you don't have a degree you're "low cog" (lower down on the cognitive chain) and hence "less worthy". The fact is our culture worships the paper. You are deemed more or less worthy by how well you navigated some arbitrary designed academic obstacle course that may or most likely - may not have interested you because of the stale (or incorrect) way it was presented and the stifling of natural curiosity that happens in how children are taught today. Gatto as commented on this extensively.
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/
Credentials are great if you need to develop a specific complex skill set for your job and need to think in a certain way using a certain set domains they teach you when you go through the academic obstacle course in the academic system (Set domains as in a set domain in set theory of math, except, vis, not with decimal symbols but with accrued experiential data patterns).
The truth is credentials and experience for many jobs are purely manufactured to keep the economy going, that is the big secret of government schools and market economies. The school-market caste system within certain job classifications. You need to divide people into functionaries in order to maintain society.
Most people who graduated high school with fairly decent marks could easily teach the first 3-4 grades in public school, and hell probably more, with a few 6 month course in teaching, public speaking and presentation, they could teach most of what is taught in public school with the exception of perhaps science.
"A game is not entitled to make money due to some intrinsic 'goodness' value. If I spent a billion dollar to make the greatest game ever, I would expect to lose money on this because I don't think you can physically sell enough copies to make up the development cost."
Just remember "Who" the market is, a market is no more then a collection of individuals making choices. That "market" can make increasingly bad choices without direction. The problem was that game developers let game console companies drive their costs up by releasing new hardware that wasn't even NEEDED. Sure you might argue the PS2's graphics were jaggy, but looking at what square can pull off in final fantasy X an a machine that is more mediocre then an Xbox with an Intel celeron P3 and a graphics card says a lot about what game developers learned about how to be efficient with data and memory.
The truth is, just like everything else that is "humanly expensive" to develop in first world nations, you offshore the work as much as possible.
There needs to be equal emphasis on data efficiency and less on expanding graphical bloat. Gameplay in my estimation is stagnating because the graphics front end and graphics garbage (physics, stupid simulated effects, etc) for games became too complicated to manage so gameplay mechanics vision is lost with huge teams of individuals that all have to attempt to synchronize their efforts towards the shape of the vision they have in their minds.
The truth is most of the whiz bang features in games that I appreciate the most are GOOD design decisions, playing with physics in Half life 2 was fun for a little while, and then you only use it when it is necessary in a game to advance or useful to help speed advance as a tool, once you're done you put the game on the shelf, do something else or play multi player.
"Bacteria can evolve AND..."
A better word for biological theory of evolution, would be "The theory of self-organized bio-computational forms of matter"
The word evolve is an outdated term, the whole word no longer represents the kind of knowledge we now have about organisms. Organisms compute data, engineer structures and solve problems like little nano-machines. Referring to them as "evolving" or being "lower life forms" or some other idealogical nonsense is degenerate. Most biologists speaking about creationism are the least intelligent, if they were smart they'd find something better to do and know that natural selection is on its way out and fields related to bio-computation is on its way in to describing the "evolutionary" (read: computational problem solving) process.
Darwin coined the word evolve because he thought organisms were these basic simple things, like water and sand jiggling around in jello, so did most scientists before the discovery of DNA and the complex machinery of the baterial flagella. Intelligent Design people may be wrong about the origin of life, but they are certainly right that most scientists are like old priests trapped in paradigmatic bubble about to fall in on itself. The concept of natural selection is like the old concept of "gods will", if water evaporates thats "gods will", today it would be called "evolution", tomorrow in the truly rational and non-hostile future it will be called just... water molecules dispersing because of heat.
"4) Increase funding for music and art. While most people don't realize this, there is a strong connection between math and music as well as science and art in the human brain. Researchers are still trying to work out exactly what it is, but studies show that there is definitely a link for most people."
Binary and art are related as well, think about black and white on a computer screen filled with pixels, its ENORMOUSLY helpful to teach art with because you have the whole spectrum of paint/colors to use to show that when you take a color gradient from while to a color, or dark to a color, you can tell actually SHOW THEM with VISUAL examples how shapes are created from very small dots and "merged dots" of color or DISPERSED color. Using digital palletes to merge colors is enomrously helpful.
Math is really all about the abstractalization of light, shape and color. Kids are NEVER taught that though. That the "true math" is the WORLD, and symbolic math (1,2,3,4) is really just the points we choose out of geometric space and plot in an area somewhere and then label it with a number and connect the number (plot-points) with lines.
The number line can be better understood as a NUMBER PLOT in a direction with a ratio (reflection/radian/radii(?) point) between numbers. It wasn't until I merged the concept of binary (black/white) on -- off with dots in a piece of paper that I finally understood how shapes are made. They are made of very smalll merged dots of different shapes and sizes and colors, and that you can learn how to draw shapes by understanding how something is distinct from something else in a binary fashion.
In art on a 2D plane: There are only edges and boundaries, and fields of dispersed dots (gradients).
So it's not just music and art, ART and GEOMETRY, Binary number system mapped onto 3D (many stacked 2d planes) planes of dots, that are eithe "there" (on), or "not there" (off), understanding space as an "unfilled area" (off) is totally enlightening.
Imagine being able to show people that you were taught math in a very limited sense, that when somebody told you about counting what they really were talking about were nodes, planes and lines in 3D space, what math is really all about is shapes of binary nodes (on or off) with rays cast between them (lines). And that when we add or subtract what we really are doing is reflecting the number one or a group of ones at certain angles or vectors using a vector mirror.
I agree, but I think what people don't understand is that Aspergers is a information processing "disorder" in other words our minds process information in certain forms and cannot process easily information in other forms.
You have to think of it mathematically. In my mind for instance I think in pictures (i.e. 3D like a movie) and word metaphors. My axis when I convert what I'm thinking to words is from pictures >> to words and from words to pictures.
What people don't understand about the brain is that the brain is a circuit with electron flows amd therefore subject to all the same kinds of mishaps as differently ro strangely wired circuits.
I view aspergers (my own) as having my minds structure as being highly tuned to process information visually and
conceptually in terms of word metaphors. All that exists its flows and fields of energy in a persons mind, an aspergers mind has different ones. And we're all unique in our own way but for strange reason there seems to a pattern where we have predominant axis (specialization) in certain areas and less (or none) in others, leaving us without a "general purpose CPU".
Think of an aspergers mind as a GPU card trying to process CPU data, or a soundcard DSP trying to process graphical data. What happens in aspergers data gets truncated due to their mind specializing in processing certain kinds of data, so it makes it more difficult to process others that their mind is not designed for.
Inforation science and circuit design explains the REALITY of aspergers.
I'm not sure it's related to autism but I do know one thing, the collection of phenotypic traits known as Aspergers is real, that is for sure.
I only began to understand what social interaction was about after I read Mystery's Venusian Arts handbook and David DeAngelo's double your dating. I couldn't MODEL other peoples perspectives in my mind due to some kind of egocentric data procesing barrier. I can't look at a person and determine what they are thinking or what their intents are unless it's extremely exagerated and perfect like in a movie, and even then, people to me more often then not, I cannot pick up on what they are thinking, they are just robots to me and I can't model their behaviour. I have to learn it egocentrically by socializing with my self through videos, and then seeing myself say act out some script that has emotional content in words and body language and then I begin to understand how another person feels when I express things in a certain way by reflecting it back on myself.
The aspergers mind has probles modelling (reflecting) their own behaviour back on themselves in a way that the can see how another person see's.
The only way I can really understand socialization is if I visualize me being in another person body and imagine myself talking to them... but that is fairly vague, so I used webcam videos when I was beginning to learn how to see from other peoples eyes.
Jimmy needs to ask people not for DONATIONS, but LENDING THEM THEIR MONEY... instead of donating our money and watching it disappear, we give him the money for it to earn interest in a bank account for a few months, and then he sends it back, and then he uses the interest to pay the wikipedia costs.
This is what has to be done.
Sorry about my last post, the first paragraph was mangled. What I meant to say was, "true capitalism" has NO LAWS, it is one giant FREE FOR ALL. i.e. war, domination, "Crime", profiteering, collusion, etc.
Many things go on under the "Free market" that people see as "capitalistic" which are in fact not, capitalism is like evolution, you can make it mean whatever you want it to mean. The truth is our language is the problem a "free-market" to you, is not what I'd call a free market. i.e. what is and isn't a "free-market" or "capitalistic" is very elastic and relative. Everyone and their neighbor has their own definiton of what constitutes "capitalism". Next while "property rights", are useful, property is really a priviledge, not a right. Hence government stepping in to save certain ecological niches from destruction. Since the private man can't be counted on to have the best interests of the whole society or human race at heart, there has to be a balance between private rights and public rights, its really not about "property" since property was invented to solve a problem. I'd be all for abolishing property RIGHTS tomorrow, and rename it PROPERTY PRIVILEDGES, people that are irresponsible do not deserve property rights, and deserve all the aggression and ill will inflicted upon them if they abuse their property to dominate other classes in the name of excessive self-interest.
Rich people have enormous power in society, but if everyone except rich people died tomorrow, I would PAY for front row seats to see how they'd live and deal with not having an entire society to command with their monopoly on social energy and their lovely dollar collars they put on the rest of us, I'm not saying they are even conscious of their own power, since they too were born under "the system" and are in their own perceptually distorted world.
"However, any society that refrains from aggression already meets the critera for a free-market economy."
Well the whole point is the definition of "free market" is a moving target... while it is useful, I think the term "free market" has become TOO emotionally and idealogically loaded. Me I went through my phases of being idealogically awed by different doctrines and idealogies, now I simply want the best solutions, and the best quality people possible.
The only way out of a hellish world is for the man himself to grow up and change and ACCEPT that nature is evil. Human beings selfishness is a reflection of the bio-behavioural baggage of evolution, in short, you could come up with all manner of SCIENTIFIC justification for peoples inferiority if they are TOO self interested, and deserve to be killed, jailed or "aggressively de-propertized". Right now many rich people are getting away with nothing less then indirect murder in theivery in the so called "free market", because of hte LIMITED MONEY SUPPLY, and because they have MONOPOLY ownership PROFIT STREAMS. The whole problem is with their ownership of the profit supply (social energy supply).
Checks on economic power are what we need, we have them on government, so it seems absolutely stupid not to have them on how much property or money you can have, since think about it, if someone had enough money to own the earth, ALL other people are now SLAVES / Indentured servants to the owner. That is the danger of property "rights", is domination of others legally without their consent, unfortunately most people are too intellectually limited to see what is going on. Eventually the stupid aspects of our society will have to go extinct.
"People don't like taking risks on new games that could rule or stink at the prices involved in that kind of gamble."
The problem is not with gamers, it's with how much games cost. Games have not seen any significant cost reduction at all at RETAIL when they are first released. THIS is the barrier to why "games don't sell", games cost too much to make and are in fact to expensive to buy unless it is a killer AAA title, if you wnat people to buy more games. 1) Figure out a better business model 2) Outsource.
This is the real world, not fantasy land. Game developers in rich countries have to face the fact that: They cost too damn much and inflate game prices beyond what they are worth. That is a fact. The guys at EPIC know this, I remember reading an article from one of them saying that games really have to come down in price and new business / deevelopment models have to be found and to stop blaming gamers, they are trying to force a development and business model on a market unwilling to accept the price tag, so either you evolve, suck it up, or die.
... lack of killer system selling game or games. It has to be said if the games were there even the high price would not be such a barrier of there really was a killer app that made people throw their financial reason to the wind.
"For that matter, when you get down to it, copyright was instigated (in the U.S.) as an attempt at social engineering, which is even more directly opposed to property rights (and thus also capitalism). Give credit where credit is due: copyright is an outgrowth of the "social democratic" mindset, not the apolitical market economy."
No I'm sorry copyright has everything to do with capitalism, REAL capitalism would have no patent or copyright laws, because patents are also against capitalism, they are PROPERTARIAN and hence CAPITALISTIC in nature. Modern capitalist idealogues use capitalism as a weasal word to make it mean anything they want it to mean...
To me in an economy with a limited money supply, and money being a finite form and supply of SOCIAL ENERGY, in which determines the outcome of a persons living standard, ability to feed themselves and take care of themselves, any monopoly on the money supply (becoming insanely rich) is also anti-capitalist by your reasoning, because by definition you see copyright as monopoly, then also being too rich is also anti-capitalist because it monopolizes the money supply (people with more money own more profit generating assets or property, and through this ownership TAX the rest of the population).
The problem ultimately is with unchecked economic power because of the limited social energy supply, anyone who monopolizes too much money and the profit supply and other profit generating assets choke other classes out of existence.
The truth is our language is inferior, Power is the only freedom and economic power is the onlly freedom worth speaking about since it lubricates and enables all other forms of freedom. You can't have freedom if you're starving, or without a place to live for example, or without a job to collect social energy, i.e. money, etc.
Believe me idealogies are for wussies, a real person wants to solve problems, take the best solutions of each strain of thought and best elements of human ideas and snythesize them to create a better world. The for profit sytstem works, but there are no checks and balances against abuse and causing social problems through monopolizing the money supply and profit generating assets of a society. Right now it's an monopolistic oligarchy, and the research proves it. Capitalism doesn't "truly" exist in the best or ideal form, right now its being used by rich people to engineer society and the world to its whims.
"Because everybody knows that companies should invest millions of dollars to develop technologies which should then be given away for free."
Maybe they wouldn't cost millions if they outsourced the labour!
Utlimately at first you'd need users to tell you what was spam and what was not to help develop an anti-system gaming algorithm, also you could offer financial rewards for outing people gaming the search engine.
Ideally you'd need users to help you fight the constant battle with those trying to game the search results, but users would need some kind of incentive or payment to keep the search engine running smoothly. Ideally maybe you could select random samples of people and pay them to filter out garbage? I have no idea at this point. If anyone has better ones, shoot!
Well no shit, that's but better game development is what "survey data" is all about.
"Now that Wikipedia has reached a critical mass, the time has come to establish a trusted editorial board that can vet articles to established experts in the field of subjects."
The problem with wikipedia is not going to go away by electing a "trusted" board of experts and their wholly fuzzy and extremely emotional and dogmatic pronouncements. Take the articles on creationism and intelligent design for instance. They are in no way thoughtfully created, with a clear dispassionate, philosophic and intellectual eye. There is enormous cultural dogmatic bias and alleged "scientific" (evolutionary) bias in those articles, the authors and "experts" covering those topics (the evolution experts heavily emotionally invested in intelligent design debate) are basically slandering anything related to the idea of design marring it.
Experts have the same problem except in reverse: They think they are so good that their opinions and judgments on ideas, philosophies and world views are beyond reproach. They have what I call "filthy ignorance of the mass of intellectuals" problem, even if experts while a minority in society at large, they have all the same problems the masses have except magnified within a smaller number of people. They are only slightly above the average.
Sure they are skilled, and yes they are talented, but this in no way gives them infallible judgment or even trustworthy judgment. Plato and other ancient philosophers / semi-proto-scientists would be appalled at the todays so-called "intellectuals" and their wholly dogmatic and fuzzy thinking.
Take for instance For the record: I am agnostic atheist.
Any serious intellectual who has ever studied religion already knows: That the bible and Christianity are untrue, and there are believers who are trying to use ID as justification for false beliefs. But regardless, ID itself as an idea divorced from religion, if practiced in a scientific fashion would 1) Overturn religious forms of creationism and all religion because if ID was true, then all religions now become within the purview of scientific scrutiny and hence automatic rejection through rational inquiry rather than pseudo-intellectual gymnastics.
Regardless of whether ID is influenced by creationism or belief in god, no "Expert" has ever dealt with the substance of the arguments put forth by ID advocates, they are narrowly confined and wedded, to juxtoposing "omnipotent intelligence" in place of simply intelligence in detecting design in biology or nature. Maybe there is an evolutonary intelligence at work and not just natural selection acting on variaton. Perhaps organisms reprogram themselves on semi or very intelligently on the fly according to stimulus in the environment? That may in fact be natural, or embedded in cells / life, etc.
Any man/woman worth his or her salt knows that creationism and the bible god are fiction. The concept of ID does not depend on the bible or Christianity being true or any religion for that matter. This fact is totally glossed over and outright ignored by "Experts" today, the first sign of closed-mindedness and pseudo-intellectualism at its best.
The question of design, is an age old question that is not dependent on anyone's religion or scientific worldview: Taken all the way back the Greeks Atomists vs. teleologists. Take a look at the animations of the flagellar motor and bloodclotting system and there is unmistakable pattern of machinery and chemical engineering there, anyone that says there isn't has not taken nor studied seriously engineering or molecular biology. The fact that fundamentalist secularist "experts" deny this vehemently shows their closed-mindedness to the fact that: We will be a "founding class" of designers in the future when we create and engineer new life forms and sentient beings that will be their own life forms and will also be designing things through their own intelligent agency and intervention. These life-forms will have come about by direct intelligent (human) or otherwise (agent) interve
"How about World of Starcraft. I know this has been mentioned many times, but I do think it is a good idea. I'm hooked on to Eve Online. I can see something like Eve with a Starcraft theme. I'd buy it."
Please no, Eve's pace of gameplay is enormously tedious and boring. It's great if you like waiting a lot but the lack of an optional skill based action oriented ship-to-ship fighting leaves a lot to be desired. Starcraft works on the principle of management but it also takes skill, speed and dedication. Eve is not such a game, all it takes in eve is time and dedication.
Damn this sounds amazing! I've often wondered if doing a test level with test gameplay mechanics and demo'ing it wasn't THE WAY to produce the best games.
"This is also why creationism is not science: it is not disprovable (once an omnipotent God is in the picture, any disproof can be refuted)."
Creationism is not just about omnipotent gods of sacred holy texts, our future creations will have creation theories of their origins, certainly you don't believe our future AI's and artificial life forms will not have been created? Creationism gets a bad wrap because it's comingled with relgiuos dogma, the idea of design is sound, the idea that its an omnipotent being of one of the ancient holy texts is what is false.
There very well could be a secular theory of god / creationism / intelligent design. Slashdot has a heavy anti-creationism bias because of their mixed up thought processes on the issue and their limited scope of thinking about the topic in general.
In every instance we know technology is created by intelligence, there was and is nothing wrong with people inferring intelligent causation as a very preliminary way as a scientific approach to explaining the causes behind life. Our future progenitors will do it for the history of our own future creations if/when/etc they go extinct.
Creationism will definitely have a resurgence as a scientific enterprise and it won't be chained to silly holy texts of ancient human ancestors. As humanity expands it is inevitable, what do you do when you find other races, or others races living creations? At some point science will have to grapple with the issue of intelligent creative causes in the universe. It is only cultural bias and religious poisoning of an idea that has made the idea of intelligent causation stigmatized.
Role playing in MMO's is the worst thing you could possibly do. Video games are about the action and having fun, accomplishing tasks and goals that give you emotional highs and lows, it's not about ACTING. If you want to act, you can find way better avenues to do it in then a game with characters who have limited ability to emote, and can basically only shout text in channels or above their heads.
It boggles the mind why people would even bother to roleplay in a game with such limited abilities in terms of the avatars ability to animate any possible combination of movements, combined with the lack of language ability, emotional expressiveness.
"As an American Citizen I really hope Canada Man's up and tells the USA to go screw itself. America needs to worry more about the problems we have at home and less on other countries internal politics when they are not a threat to the U.S.'s safety."
Any country that doesn't play by the economic policy of the US is a threat to the USA. The US is basically the arm of corporations now, your fellow countrymen's blind adherence to extreme propertarianism and extreme capitalism are partly to blame.
I've been really inspired by a lot of people in the US but it's unfortunate that too many US citizens are slack when it comes to changing their government. Where were the riots when the US invaded IRAQ? How many people have now died and who's lives have been ruined? I know if I was a US Citizens I would be damn pissed at the people in power.
Why do game developers thing their games should sell when they make games based on teh weirdest stuff imaginabe without doing any market research about the themes and ideas they are doing?
The truth is not that original games suck, it's that the so called "original" game isn't original most of the time and creatively and thematically they game is way out there (like WAY out there).
Take for instance Planescape torment. It was an excellent game if you LOVED TO READ TEXT and CLICK THROUGH DIALOGUE for hours on end, but for people more action or task oriented, it's a very tedious thing. It was also based on the baldur's gate engine which we had seen before.
Next is the fact that planescape was thematically WAY out there, did you see the box art and ma,e for that game? That alone would have killed sales like the plague. Then there was the fact that it in no way associated itself with Baldur's gate or Forgotten realm properties and franchises. Big mistake. If we changed the box art and the name of the game and art setting and basically had it in the Baldurs gate / forgotten realm universe with decent box art and a some reworking of thee game to make it fit that universe it would have been more of a success I gaurantee it.
Some game developers go a litttle crazy when they are given TOO much creative control and it must be said that creating you dream game, while fufilling can tank your company if you're not considering the business end of it and tempering your labour of love with the reality that people will want to play in your games world especially if they are buying it for $50.
"Then we are doing something wrong. The human brain provides compelling evidence that massive parallelization works. So: what are we missing?"
And yet most people process things sequentially, I think you're mistaking the depth of parallelization that occurs. The mind is enormously more complicated then a computer, the conditions of it's operation are ever changing. New brain cells, culling of old ones, new connections, culling of old ones, etc. Next you forget that the brain is notoriously error prone, ask someone to recall something they did last week, or something they wrote earlier that day, and they will not remember it. Hell ask somebody to memorize a few pages of a novel after one or two quick read throughs, and even the most intelligent people will struggle to recall word-for-word in exacting detail what they just read moments ago. This also applies to what people here and see. While human minds are fantastic at what they can do, they are enormously slow, the whole reason we need to develop technology is because our bodies and minds in many circumstances are not as good as our technology.
Computers have a enormous advantage in the way they store information and the error correction protocols that do not exist to the same degree in human minds. On the internet humans make more mistakes then any random machine error that slips through. If you compared all the computers in the world and their computational/memory error rates and data integrity, against all the human minds, the computers would win hand down.
Human minds are not as good as you make them out to be, most human minds are mind numbingly slow at doing basic tasks (like math), when a computer does them infinitely much faster. Imagine every human being being able to chew through math problems at Core 2 duo + speeds. Societal evolution would be alarmingly much faster then it is today.
"Dismissing evidence based on preconceived belief is called religion. To be scientific you must actually LOOK at the evidence and methods, and consider it using the same methods used to evaluate all other experimental evidence."
In this case I do not totally agree, much scientific knowledge is TOTALLY based on the quality of instrumentation you have to DO the investigation, human beings are very limited in what they can measure. As technology gets more sophisticated I wouldn't totally put some kind of "ESP" (i.e. sensing events, having visions of events before they happen, etc) off the map. In my opinion any kind of "ESP" is "random" and uncontrollable, if you've ever seen the movie Final fantasy the spirits within, they have technology to actually record someones thoughts and see what goes on in their minds eye. This level of instrumentation is necessary I believe before any real serious study can be done, because I for one do not believe in the *stigmatized* or popular versions and definitions of ESP, but I do believe their is some weird natural physics to the universe that allows ESP like things to be sensed by people but they do not control it. It's more like having a random thought come out of nowhere.