"For price, game performance, creen quality give me a nice 21" - 24" CRT
I like my CRT's too but LCD's have their benefits, usually they are easier on the eyes the new Samsung Gaming LCD is very good in terms of colors, the Samsung 931c. CRT's have better colors but their screens fade over time and get dirty, right now on my CRT I can see that the inside has gotten a bit of dirt/dust over the years, and this CRT has to be at least 5+ years old.
... needs to ask himself whether forcing kids and young adults alike to concentrate in a forced manner is a healthy thing. Everyone wants a good education but this obsession with 'raising the bar' or trying to force the human mind (which has limits) to get things done within an arbitrarily forced certain period of time is at a root of a lot of problems that are emerging now, depression, suicide, etc.
We only have to look at modern money markets and their products to see that this idea of rushign to market or trying to make a buck produced inferior buggy products... the fact is school systems have for a while been doing similar things to their students, administrations and teachers barely know what they are doing. Being a good educator and teacher is not simply having been through university and teachers college.
No one stopped to ask, are we over stressing the kids? Is the way we teach hurting people psychologically? The biggest factor is that evolutionary biology is ignored, so is maslow's hierarchy of needs. What if a student isn't getting laid at all or has some other biological trait (anxiety, etc) that is effecting his ability to perform school work because his more basic needs are not met?
No one has stopped to ask... is the insane scholastic and hence market competition toxic to the social fabric and harmony of society?
"But there is indeed an intuition that an 'overly-efficient' government is a danger."
I'll tell you what the real problem is, because new humans are born and old ones die societies, governments and industries have a hard time stabilizing themselves because with each death of high quality people, you get new ones that are of varying quality. And the ratio's of high quality people to low quality ones are thus difficult to quantify at this time, the ratio's change over time due to a host of circumstances.
Really all the allegedly superior forms of government or human values, have their basis in the shortness of human life and the fact that the overall quality of men, women and children varies considerably, then add in the cycle of birth and death and you have a recipe for instability.
The fact is, you lose your best men and women as the age, get sick and die, and then you have to reinvent the wheel all over again with every new child that is born hoping when it grows up, that it will pick up good values to carry on a peaceful and stable society.
I know in Need for speed series I remember the stupid burger king and shaving adds, as well with cingular wireless... It DOES work but you have to have a game that fits the context and the focus of attention needs to be paid attention to. You can strategically place adds in high visibility areas and they will get noticed if they stand out or are repeatedly seen over and over again, provided the exposure is long enough.
Of course this study picks the worst games to do it, I would really like to see a study done on Need for speed underground 2, I remember many of the adds in this game. Autozone, Gillette, Burger king, Cingular, etc.
"Console systems, on the other hand, are engineered for a very tight, very specific, set of tasks. This is why a console with comparatively crappy stats can walk all over a much beefier computer, and vice versa."
Let's not forget that a console does not have to run an entire operating system or deal with an enormous amount of applications and their compatability. With PS3 and Xbox 360 we even see how difficult it is for consoles to remains backwards compatable.
Just like we don't use all the power of our most powerful supercomputers, or that 640K would be enough for anybody... or that cartridges are the way of the future... or that CD-R discs have so much storage capacity they will never need to be replaced... give us a technology an we'll stress it to the point of having to develop even more technology to compensate for the constant explosion of data.
"Windows 95 onwards made life WAY easier to play games."
While they made it easier to play games, they made it more difficult to uninstall them... and not just games either, Programs as well. Any sane programmer has to hate the windows registry with a passion. Programs are no longer self-contained to their installed directory, they merge with the windows registry with their little tendrils. It makes uninstalling, copying and moving games a pain in the royal ass. Some days I wish there was an ini / text setup file for all programs stored in their home directories.
"For example, this morning I told my wife about the new season of Futurama. She got excited. Not surprising. Then I told her about Hachiko - the Akita who kept trying to meet his master at the train station years after his master's death, because Fry's dog Seymour lives sort of the same story. I thought it was a sweet, funny story. Like a Japanese version of Greyfriar's Bobby. She started crying. To her, it was a sad story, partly because it reminded her of Odysseus' dog, who waited for him, greeting him at the end of his exile with a single wag of his tail before dying. You never know what's going to happen, even with the people you know best."
The problem is not that human relationships do not subscribe to logic, it's understanding the logic of the underlying hardware, the reason she found it sad is because the way her mind processes information and relates data, chose to focus on certain parts of you story and then relate them, her mind was picking out and emphasizing different parts of the story, just like yours was.
The truth is all human relationships have logic behind them, it's in our lack of understanding that we think the are somehow 'irrational', simply because we cannot see confounding factors or different evolutionary traits, and understand how someone's mind chooses what information to focus on, and what to cull, and how her mind is going do a search and make connections and emotiona relations.
"Oh dear. I see yet another individual has bought in to the Myth of Man the Killer."
Maybe you need a bit of a history lesson? Go read the bible for some examples of how brutish many culture's were. Even the jews themselves. The truth is man is what evolution encodes him with, this is why we have criminals, etc. It's not simply only lack of social programs, survival programs are running on the biological hardware of the individual whether he is aware of it or not.
"Intel pushes the 'more power! faster!' philosophy while AMD just redesigns the architecture and it takes Intel a few years to catch up. Not much has changed since 2000."
The truth is there is no one way to design a CPU, what really happens is Displacement according to what's possible in the possiblitiy space at the time and what resources and solutions are available.
For example CPU's at some point may go back to a Pentium 4 style design if they ever design a better substrate that can withstand high frequencies, not be subject leaks, heat and make it cost effective. The truth is Intels engineers thought their design would scale, the pentium 4's permance while not great was not exactly shattered by AMD completely, I was not really swayed by the fairly minor difference between AMD and Intel processors during the Pentium 4 generation. It wasn't until the Core 2 that I decided to upgrade from my P4 3.2 Ghz, you got more bang for your buck simply getting a better video card, unless you do other things that require serious cpu power.
"These are all areas where custom cores can provide enormous performance benefits (both in absolute terms, and in terms of performance per watt) over current CPUs, which are general purpose."
The problem is I think many developers would not like it, after all if you're the loser or non-beneficiary of the specialized circuitry you're not going to be a happy camper.
That and the article that was pulled from Anandtech about the highly specialized Playstation 3 CPU said game dev's were not happy with the degree of specialization versus the more general design of the Xbox 360's CPU.
"When we talk about sending someone to jail because they're dangerous it usually means preventing them from physically harming people in society at large."
The truth is white collar crime is even more dangerous because you can perform your hostile intent in abstract terms such as money, it's just as violent and hostile to take someones money through theft and deceit as it is through lesser means such as identity theft or breaking into someones house or invading their privacy.
Enormous amounts of criminal activity go unpunished through white collar and other criminals offloading financial risk to citizens or other businesses!
"Come on now, there are some very smart folks at Microsoft, so why can't they come up with ideas and products on their own?"
The problem is microsoft is divorced from the end users reality and the fact that they are spreading the whole company too thin, they are trying to manage too many projects I would think and thats part of the reason why other parts of the company and other products suffer, lack of focus!
Another real problem is that too many technically minded people are designing products they themselves do not use enough (because they are working on them) or even enjoy using and working on. The fact is they really need to hire a bunch of nerdy tech types who have lived among the end users and their problems, especially computer shop techs, or former ones say like me for instance to help with designing programs. I have enormous amounts of ideas and insights from dealing with computer users over the years at all skill levels, all I need is a team to make them manifest and figure out ways to design and implement them, what they need is men and women who have insights into how people use computers and how people use objects in every day life.
Lastly they should move some aspects of designing their products open to PUBLIC scrutiny, i.e. have open wiki's and developer blogs that end users and especially power users / tech head philosopher kings (i.e. possessing the knowledge to make a better product for all end users no matter what level they are at). Take advantage of the hive mind, there is a reason wikipedia is so popular and useful, even with its flaws you have so much distributed computing power out there in the form of human beings you need to tap into it.
The ultimate Design principle:
Keep It Simple Stupid...
There is too much complexity in Windows. Especially the windows registry, I'm sure a lot of us that remember DOS know that those who designed the registry which allowed 3rd party programs to access them to store settings there should have been shot.
Programs should have never been allowed to store their program settings there. What happened to.ini files or self contained configuration files in directories back in the old DOS days or simply storing path's to DLL's instead of piling them up in the windows system directories? You should be able to simply uninstall a program by deleting its directory... PERIOD, shared DLL's and shared functions are the nightmare for end user management, if you're going to make modular components and functions and store them in DLL's which many programs rely upon, then each program should pull an "original" most recent copy from the system directories to the program's home directories, we have more then enough hard drive space today to do that.
Next, interfaces should be natural enough for non-techies to be able to learn naturally on their own without requiring a "for dummies" book. You should not have to read a novel to jump in and get to work in any prospective program there needs to be a "training mode", just like in video games that give novices who are reflexively retarded time to adjust to the controls of a game and tell them which is what.
You can make windows simpler and still keep the complexity for power users and more experienced computer users who would die without windows and much of the interface in programs being the way it is, but less face it... if you take a program like Windows explorer and compare it to a program like 2xplorer or WinDirStats there is huge lack of a good windows file manager as home users are now storing enormous amounts of files and need better management tools - http://netez.com/2xExplorer/ -- WinDirStats -- http://windirstat.sourceforge.net/
I could go on endlessly in this post, but you get the idea. Microsoft as a company has become myopic.
"Yes, comrade! Together we will drive those filthy capatalist pigs back into two-family-to-a-room apartments, as nature intended!
No, seriously. There are health reasons and such against people living so closely together."
Of course you were misinterpeting what I said. I did not say people did not have any choice in the matter, it was to create incentives to eliminate waste for those who are willing to for economic benefit (tax break) or because they are naturally morally and compassionately superior to their fellow men.
"What I'd like to see is a couple of those field-programmable thingie cores that can reconfigure their circuits to a specialized calculation a program is doing... Wishful thinking but still..."
This is what human minds do but CPU's are far from this goal, not to mention the nightmare of managing it as complexity increases.
"Pretty much everything could do a 2d game today, but gamers don't want them."
That is a huge load of crap, 3D was forced on gamers from the PS1 era. Many 2D games survived on the PS1 platform (i.e. fighting games, Streetfighter 2 comes to mind).
If gamers don't want 2D games then you have to blame the developers that shoved 3D games down our throats, after all they are paradoxically in control of what games get released. I don't think 'the market' can be blamed, it was more a problem with game dev's and publishers they've helped create and re-enforce a culture paradoxically that may be 'anti 2d game' but we'll see how that pan's out with the Wii or other games on the Xbox 360.
"There's of course nothing stating that next-gen games have to be 3D."
The problem is cultural, the suits think that all games have to be 3D, but if you look back in time many of the most popular games before the advent of 3D systems were 2D and it in no way hampered their fun or saleability.
"You're have got to be kidding!@! Do you have any REAL understanding of the types of individuals who are homeless? I do, and without going into a big long sermon on why people end up in these types of situations(at least here in the U.S.), I'll just say that a fair number of them are there by their own designs."
Well I do have a *REAL* understanding of the types of people that end up in homelessnes. Lots of people end up nearly there because many homeless people have learning disabilities or mental health problems caused by the toxic social fabric of market society. You can't go around egocentrically modelling other peoples behaviour and abilities and how they feel on YOUR own personal abilities and psychological model.
1) Inadequate social welfare system Let me repeat that for you. The welfare payments people recieve are inadqueate to afford housing, electricity and food. 2) Many disabled people are homeless because the state refuses or takes too long to put their papers through. 3) Religious belief in markets being able to provide living wages and jobs for everyone in a given area 4) Lack of understanding of just how prejudiced and dicriminatory U.S. businesses are when they hire someone.
I've been to the U.S. and compared to Canada many of the states have a lot of fucking work to do, I was apalled at the inadequate state of social welfare programs in the good ol U.S. of capitalist fuck off and die if you have problems A.
I crossed the border into the U.S. to visit a friend and because at the time I was jobless the border gauards started mouthing off "oh shit, another psychologically fucked up person, just what we need." I wanted to fuckin climb over the counter and kick the living shit out of them all, it's that kind of attitude is why the U.S. is suck a backward destitute place with so much bloody crime, mental illness and homelessness.
"Ahh, the utopian idealist. I love comments like this, they reinforce the fact that many people that think they have solutions to problems really don't have all that large a worldview."
What you call "idealism" I call unrealized goals, think about how many goal chasers (or your so-called 'idealists') of the past created modern technological culture. Think of how many 'idealists' created religions that changed the face of human behaviour and thought (christianity, buddhism, philosophy, etc).
Are people who support anything "idealists" in what they support? That would mean we have open source idealists, capitalist idealists, communist idealists, it's all in the way you frame someones goals. You say someones goals to change society are "ideals" no, they are goals, like we have a goal to create a machine that can fly and transport people and equipment for our benefit - so we create airplanes, are those people "technology or transport idealists"? Were computer scientists "technological idealists" with a worldview "not all that large"? You're like the man who said men would never go to the moon, or that man would never fly, or that man would never harness the power of sun or the atom.
It's the dreamers and visionaries which people attack as "idealists" that change the world. You must have been asleep in history class, where would Martin Luther king be if he gave up on his "utopian ideal" of equal rights for blacks, or women's "utopian ideal" for gaining rights to vote? You see it is you sir who have the small world view. So-called idealists are leaders and problem solvers that are the movers and shakers of world history.
'Great spirits have often encountered violent opposition from weak minds' - Albert Einstein
"Ahh, the utopian idealist. I love comments like this, they reinforce the fact that many people that think they have solutions to problems really don't have all that large a worldview."
What you call idealism in your perjorative attack on achievements concerning chasing after excellence. What youcall "idealism" I call unrealized goals, think about how many goal chasers (or your so-called 'idealists') of the past CREATED modern technological culture. Created religions that changed the face of human behaviour (christianity, buddhism, etc) Think about open source idealists, capitalist idealists, communist idealists, it's all in the way you frame someones goals. You say someones goals to change society are "ideals" no, they are goals, like we have a goal to create a machine that can fly - so we create an airplane, are those people "airplane idealists" with a worldview "not all that large"? You're like the man who said men would never go to the moon, or that man would never fly, or that man would never harness the power of the sun or the atom. It's the dreamers and visionaries which people attack as "idealists" that change the world. You must have been asleep in history class, where would Martin luther king be if he gave up on his "utopian ideal" of equal rights for blacks, or women's "utopian ideal" for gaining rights to vote? You see it is you sir who have the small world view.
It would have been nice if he actually played FPS's with them over the period of weeks and months and tabulated changes in his frags vs. deaths... I believe UT2004 would have been excellent game for this due to built in statistical tracking.
"Umm... How does saving lives from serious accidents count as "Fighting Evolution"?"
From an evolutionary perspective lots of things we do are AGAINST our best interests for survival... i.e. altruism, attempting to save people who we know are lost causes by wasting resources on them, etc.
We fight evolution all the fucking time, we interefere with natural selection daily, that is "fighting evolution", i.e. not letting the chips fall where they may.
"You do see the fallacy in arguing that your cultural values are better than someone else's cultural values right?"
You do see the fallacy in not using your head right? Your comment shows me you are totally at the mercy of your evolutionary instincts and haven't overcome them yet, hence your knee jerk reaction. Logic must take place over emotion and animalistic tendencies to get annoyed.
Slashdot Mirror
"For price, game performance, creen quality give me a nice 21" - 24" CRT
I like my CRT's too but LCD's have their benefits, usually they are easier on the eyes the new Samsung Gaming LCD is very good in terms of colors, the Samsung 931c. CRT's have better colors but their screens fade over time and get dirty, right now on my CRT I can see that the inside has gotten a bit of dirt/dust over the years, and this CRT has to be at least 5+ years old.
... needs to ask himself whether forcing kids and young adults alike to concentrate in a forced manner is a healthy thing. Everyone wants a good education but this obsession with 'raising the bar' or trying to force the human mind (which has limits) to get things done within an arbitrarily forced certain period of time is at a root of a lot of problems that are emerging now, depression, suicide, etc.
We only have to look at modern money markets and their products to see that this idea of rushign to market or trying to make a buck produced inferior buggy products... the fact is school systems have for a while been doing similar things to their students, administrations and teachers barely know what they are doing. Being a good educator and teacher is not simply having been through university and teachers college.
No one stopped to ask, are we over stressing the kids? Is the way we teach hurting people psychologically? The biggest factor is that evolutionary biology is ignored, so is maslow's hierarchy of needs. What if a student isn't getting laid at all or has some other biological trait (anxiety, etc) that is effecting his ability to perform school work because his more basic needs are not met?
No one has stopped to ask... is the insane scholastic and hence market competition toxic to the social fabric and harmony of society?
Doctor: "Arm The photonic cannon!".
"But there is indeed an intuition that an 'overly-efficient' government is a danger."
I'll tell you what the real problem is, because new humans are born and old ones die societies, governments and industries have a hard time stabilizing themselves because with each death of high quality people, you get new ones that are of varying quality. And the ratio's of high quality people to low quality ones are thus difficult to quantify at this time, the ratio's change over time due to a host of circumstances.
Really all the allegedly superior forms of government or human values, have their basis in the shortness of human life and the fact that the overall quality of men, women and children varies considerably, then add in the cycle of birth and death and you have a recipe for instability.
The fact is, you lose your best men and women as the age, get sick and die, and then you have to reinvent the wheel all over again with every new child that is born hoping when it grows up, that it will pick up good values to carry on a peaceful and stable society.
I know in Need for speed series I remember the stupid burger king and shaving adds, as well with cingular wireless... It DOES work but you have to have a game that fits the context and the focus of attention needs to be paid attention to. You can strategically place adds in high visibility areas and they will get noticed if they stand out or are repeatedly seen over and over again, provided the exposure is long enough.
Of course this study picks the worst games to do it, I would really like to see a study done on Need for speed underground 2, I remember many of the adds in this game. Autozone, Gillette, Burger king, Cingular, etc.
"Console systems, on the other hand, are engineered for a very tight, very specific, set of tasks. This is why a console with comparatively crappy stats can walk all over a much beefier computer, and vice versa."
Let's not forget that a console does not have to run an entire operating system or deal with an enormous amount of applications and their compatability. With PS3 and Xbox 360 we even see how difficult it is for consoles to remains backwards compatable.
Just like we don't use all the power of our most powerful supercomputers, or that 640K would be enough for anybody... or that cartridges are the way of the future... or that CD-R discs have so much storage capacity they will never need to be replaced... give us a technology an we'll stress it to the point of having to develop even more technology to compensate for the constant explosion of data.
"Windows 95 onwards made life WAY easier to play games."
While they made it easier to play games, they made it more difficult to uninstall them... and not just games either, Programs as well. Any sane programmer has to hate the windows registry with a passion. Programs are no longer self-contained to their installed directory, they merge with the windows registry with their little tendrils. It makes uninstalling, copying and moving games a pain in the royal ass. Some days I wish there was an ini / text setup file for all programs stored in their home directories.
"For example, this morning I told my wife about the new season of Futurama. She got excited. Not surprising. Then I told her about Hachiko - the Akita who kept trying to meet his master at the train station years after his master's death, because Fry's dog Seymour lives sort of the same story. I thought it was a sweet, funny story. Like a Japanese version of Greyfriar's Bobby. She started crying. To her, it was a sad story, partly because it reminded her of Odysseus' dog, who waited for him, greeting him at the end of his exile with a single wag of his tail before dying. You never know what's going to happen, even with the people you know best."
The problem is not that human relationships do not subscribe to logic, it's understanding the logic of the underlying hardware, the reason she found it sad is because the way her mind processes information and relates data, chose to focus on certain parts of you story and then relate them, her mind was picking out and emphasizing different parts of the story, just like yours was.
The truth is all human relationships have logic behind them, it's in our lack of understanding that we think the are somehow 'irrational', simply because we cannot see confounding factors or different evolutionary traits, and understand how someone's mind chooses what information to focus on, and what to cull, and how her mind is going do a search and make connections and emotiona relations.
"Oh dear. I see yet another individual has bought in to the Myth of Man the Killer."
Maybe you need a bit of a history lesson? Go read the bible for some examples of how brutish many culture's were. Even the jews themselves. The truth is man is what evolution encodes him with, this is why we have criminals, etc. It's not simply only lack of social programs, survival programs are running on the biological hardware of the individual whether he is aware of it or not.
"Intel pushes the 'more power! faster!' philosophy while AMD just redesigns the architecture and it takes Intel a few years to catch up. Not much has changed since 2000."
The truth is there is no one way to design a CPU, what really happens is Displacement according to what's possible in the possiblitiy space at the time and what resources and solutions are available.
For example CPU's at some point may go back to a Pentium 4 style design if they ever design a better substrate that can withstand high frequencies, not be subject leaks, heat and make it cost effective. The truth is Intels engineers thought their design would scale, the pentium 4's permance while not great was not exactly shattered by AMD completely, I was not really swayed by the fairly minor difference between AMD and Intel processors during the Pentium 4 generation. It wasn't until the Core 2 that I decided to upgrade from my P4 3.2 Ghz, you got more bang for your buck simply getting a better video card, unless you do other things that require serious cpu power.
"These are all areas where custom cores can provide enormous performance benefits (both in absolute terms, and in terms of performance per watt) over current CPUs, which are general purpose."
The problem is I think many developers would not like it, after all if you're the loser or non-beneficiary of the specialized circuitry you're not going to be a happy camper.
That and the article that was pulled from Anandtech about the highly specialized Playstation 3 CPU said game dev's were not happy with the degree of specialization versus the more general design of the Xbox 360's CPU.
"When we talk about sending someone to jail because they're dangerous it usually means preventing them from physically harming people in society at large."
The truth is white collar crime is even more dangerous because you can perform your hostile intent in abstract terms such as money, it's just as violent and hostile to take someones money through theft and deceit as it is through lesser means such as identity theft or breaking into someones house or invading their privacy.
Enormous amounts of criminal activity go unpunished through white collar and other criminals offloading financial risk to citizens or other businesses!
"Come on now, there are some very smart folks at Microsoft, so why can't they come up with ideas and products on their own?"
.ini files or self contained configuration files in directories back in the old DOS days or simply storing path's to DLL's instead of piling them up in the windows system directories? You should be able to simply uninstall a program by deleting its directory... PERIOD, shared DLL's and shared functions are the nightmare for end user management, if you're going to make modular components and functions and store them in DLL's which many programs rely upon, then each program should pull an "original" most recent copy from the system directories to the program's home directories, we have more then enough hard drive space today to do that.
The problem is microsoft is divorced from the end users reality and the fact that they are spreading the whole company too thin, they are trying to manage too many projects I would think and thats part of the reason why other parts of the company and other products suffer, lack of focus!
Another real problem is that too many technically minded people are designing products they themselves do not use enough (because they are working on them) or even enjoy using and working on. The fact is they really need to hire a bunch of nerdy tech types who have lived among the end users and their problems, especially computer shop techs, or former ones say like me for instance to help with designing programs. I have enormous amounts of ideas and insights from dealing with computer users over the years at all skill levels, all I need is a team to make them manifest and figure out ways to design and implement them, what they need is men and women who have insights into how people use computers and how people use objects in every day life.
Lastly they should move some aspects of designing their products open to PUBLIC scrutiny, i.e. have open wiki's and developer blogs that end users and especially power users / tech head philosopher kings (i.e. possessing the knowledge to make a better product for all end users no matter what level they are at). Take advantage of the hive mind, there is a reason wikipedia is so popular and useful, even with its flaws you have so much distributed computing power out there in the form of human beings you need to tap into it.
The ultimate Design principle:
Keep It Simple Stupid...
There is too much complexity in Windows. Especially the windows registry, I'm sure a lot of us that remember DOS know that those who designed the registry which allowed 3rd party programs to access them to store settings there should have been shot.
Programs should have never been allowed to store their program settings there. What happened to
Next, interfaces should be natural enough for non-techies to be able to learn naturally on their own without requiring a "for dummies" book. You should not have to read a novel to jump in and get to work in any prospective program there needs to be a "training mode", just like in video games that give novices who are reflexively retarded time to adjust to the controls of a game and tell them which is what.
You can make windows simpler and still keep the complexity for power users and more experienced computer users who would die without windows and much of the interface in programs being the way it is, but less face it... if you take a program like Windows explorer and compare it to a program like 2xplorer or WinDirStats there is huge lack of a good windows file manager as home users are now storing enormous amounts of files and need better management tools - http://netez.com/2xExplorer/ -- WinDirStats -- http://windirstat.sourceforge.net/
I could go on endlessly in this post, but you get the idea. Microsoft as a company has become myopic.
"Yes, comrade! Together we will drive those filthy capatalist pigs back into two-family-to-a-room apartments, as nature intended!
No, seriously. There are health reasons and such against people living so closely together."
Of course you were misinterpeting what I said. I did not say people did not have any choice in the matter, it was to create incentives to eliminate waste for those who are willing to for economic benefit (tax break) or because they are naturally morally and compassionately superior to their fellow men.
"What I'd like to see is a couple of those field-programmable thingie cores that can reconfigure their circuits to a specialized calculation a program is doing... Wishful thinking but still..."
This is what human minds do but CPU's are far from this goal, not to mention the nightmare of managing it as complexity increases.
"Pretty much everything could do a 2d game today, but gamers don't want them."
That is a huge load of crap, 3D was forced on gamers from the PS1 era. Many 2D games survived on the PS1 platform (i.e. fighting games, Streetfighter 2 comes to mind).
If gamers don't want 2D games then you have to blame the developers that shoved 3D games down our throats, after all they are paradoxically in control of what games get released. I don't think 'the market' can be blamed, it was more a problem with game dev's and publishers they've helped create and re-enforce a culture paradoxically that may be 'anti 2d game' but we'll see how that pan's out with the Wii or other games on the Xbox 360.
"There's of course nothing stating that next-gen games have to be 3D."
The problem is cultural, the suits think that all games have to be 3D, but if you look back in time many of the most popular games before the advent of 3D systems were 2D and it in no way hampered their fun or saleability.
"You're have got to be kidding!@! Do you have any REAL understanding of the types of individuals who are homeless? I do, and without going into a big long sermon on why people end up in these types of situations(at least here in the U.S.), I'll just say that a fair number of them are there by their own designs."
Well I do have a *REAL* understanding of the types of people that end up in homelessnes. Lots of people end up nearly there because many homeless people have learning disabilities or mental health problems caused by the toxic social fabric of market society. You can't go around egocentrically modelling other peoples behaviour and abilities and how they feel on YOUR own personal abilities and psychological model.
1) Inadequate social welfare system Let me repeat that for you. The welfare payments people recieve are inadqueate to afford housing, electricity and food.
2) Many disabled people are homeless because the state refuses or takes too long to put their papers through.
3) Religious belief in markets being able to provide living wages and jobs for everyone in a given area
4) Lack of understanding of just how prejudiced and dicriminatory U.S. businesses are when they hire someone.
I've been to the U.S. and compared to Canada many of the states have a lot of fucking work to do, I was apalled at the inadequate state of social welfare programs in the good ol U.S. of capitalist fuck off and die if you have problems A.
I crossed the border into the U.S. to visit a friend and because at the time I was jobless the border gauards started mouthing off "oh shit, another psychologically fucked up person, just what we need." I wanted to fuckin climb over the counter and kick the living shit out of them all, it's that kind of attitude is why the U.S. is suck a backward destitute place with so much bloody crime, mental illness and homelessness.
"Ahh, the utopian idealist. I love comments like this, they reinforce the fact that many people that think they have solutions to problems really don't have all that large a worldview."
What you call "idealism" I call unrealized goals, think about how many goal chasers (or your so-called 'idealists') of the past created modern technological culture. Think of how many 'idealists' created religions that changed the face of human behaviour and thought (christianity, buddhism, philosophy, etc).
Are people who support anything "idealists" in what they support? That would mean we have open source idealists, capitalist idealists, communist idealists, it's all in the way you frame someones goals. You say someones goals to change society are "ideals" no, they are goals, like we have a goal to create a machine that can fly and transport people and equipment for our benefit - so we create airplanes, are those people "technology or transport idealists"? Were computer scientists "technological idealists" with a worldview "not all that large"? You're like the man who said men would never go to the moon, or that man would never fly, or that man would never harness the power of sun or the atom.
It's the dreamers and visionaries which people attack as "idealists" that change the world. You must have been asleep in history class, where would Martin Luther king be if he gave up on his "utopian ideal" of equal rights for blacks, or women's "utopian ideal" for gaining rights to vote? You see it is you sir who have the small world view. So-called idealists are leaders and problem solvers that are the movers and shakers of world history.
'Great spirits have often encountered violent opposition from weak minds' - Albert Einstein
"Ahh, the utopian idealist. I love comments like this, they reinforce the fact that many people that think they have solutions to problems really don't have all that large a worldview." What you call idealism in your perjorative attack on achievements concerning chasing after excellence. What youcall "idealism" I call unrealized goals, think about how many goal chasers (or your so-called 'idealists') of the past CREATED modern technological culture. Created religions that changed the face of human behaviour (christianity, buddhism, etc) Think about open source idealists, capitalist idealists, communist idealists, it's all in the way you frame someones goals. You say someones goals to change society are "ideals" no, they are goals, like we have a goal to create a machine that can fly - so we create an airplane, are those people "airplane idealists" with a worldview "not all that large"? You're like the man who said men would never go to the moon, or that man would never fly, or that man would never harness the power of the sun or the atom. It's the dreamers and visionaries which people attack as "idealists" that change the world. You must have been asleep in history class, where would Martin luther king be if he gave up on his "utopian ideal" of equal rights for blacks, or women's "utopian ideal" for gaining rights to vote? You see it is you sir who have the small world view.
It would have been nice if he actually played FPS's with them over the period of weeks and months and tabulated changes in his frags vs. deaths... I believe UT2004 would have been excellent game for this due to built in statistical tracking.
"Umm... How does saving lives from serious accidents count as "Fighting Evolution"?" From an evolutionary perspective lots of things we do are AGAINST our best interests for survival... i.e. altruism, attempting to save people who we know are lost causes by wasting resources on them, etc. We fight evolution all the fucking time, we interefere with natural selection daily, that is "fighting evolution", i.e. not letting the chips fall where they may.
"You cannot fight against evolution and win."
People do it everyday. i.e. Hospitals, doctors, psychologists, etc.
"You do see the fallacy in arguing that your cultural values are better than someone else's cultural values right?"
You do see the fallacy in not using your head right? Your comment shows me you are totally at the mercy of your evolutionary instincts and haven't overcome them yet, hence your knee jerk reaction. Logic must take place over emotion and animalistic tendencies to get annoyed.