"The only thing surprising is that so many Americans are still looking up with worshipful puppy eyes -- at the leaders who pretend to protect them while stealing their wealth, liberty, and lives."
The truth is the world of nations are simply puppets of powerful and wealthy people to manage as best the can groups of working human populations they deem mostly as expendable where they can get away with it.
Most of the world is basically a theatre for the workers. Think about it, you need serious technology and wealth to truly accurate verify anything someone tells you that is removed from your direct experience of it. (i.e. sattelite photo's, videos by other people, etc, etc).
Lying about of a lot of things is fuck shit easy the bigger your populations become, lastly so many events go on in so many places the modern person intellectual resources are overwhelmed by data, it would literally take the computation of many supercomputers today and the ones to be developed in the future to sort out the bullshit from what can actually happen when pitted against the laws of nature and biology perception and human behaviour.
Just look at religious belief, it THRIVES in the modern internet age, and yet it was proven as falsehood many 1000's of years ago. Too many people simply do not have the thinking capacity or a deep interest in truth when they are too busy living their lives.
All humans have real limitations on what they can really "know" as true, the internet makes much information easier to debunk, but it also makes it harder to verify more lengthy reports of news and facts for their veracity, subtle bias, or what wasn't said.
"This rapid walk away from democracy in the name of democracy is frightning."
The truth is, there has not been a democracy for a long time, it is actually a play powerful actors entitle "democratic theatre", the goal of which is to get people to believe they actually make the real important decisions and that they are "free".
"I've come to think that it's rather stupid that we think of "intelligence" and "awareness" as mystical disembodied things. I mean to include some scientists and philosophers in this group-- pretty much anyone who talks about "the mind" as a separable entity from "the body". "
I agree that the mind is not DIVORCED from material reality (i.e. see autism, brain damage, anthesia, oxygen deprivation, etc)
But it is curious question, why is it when you are sleeping or in a coma you are not aware and effectively "dead"? The question is why aren't all organisms permanently in a unconscious death state following stimuli-response pattern all the time?
It's weird, because consciousness acts like a man inside your minds eye who chooses what buttons to push while you are awake to enable your behaviour (i.e. "the man inside the machine").
Obviously anesthetics and oxygen deprivation prove beyond all doubt the physicality of the mind, what we don't understand is the weird property of the way human animal minds are arranged in their ability see themselves and self-reference and MODULATE their behaviour when they are awake, versus when they are asleep. For instance, no one remembers being self-aware in their mothers womb because their brain was not yet fully developed to a capacity that self-awareness could take place.
What exactly emanles the collection of matter and cells to be able to self-reference itself?
I think descartes was right that most animals may be in fact machines, in fact a human below a certain age is "asleep" while he is in effect running around, I have pictures of myself from when I was 1-2 years old, on the beach happily running around, but I dont remember any of it. It's like an autonomic robotic control program that runs your behaviou funcitons until the body is ready to enable "the man in the machine".
What's the difference between E. Coli and a human being? One is self-aware, the other is simnply automatically responding to it's environment based on programmed predictable responses.
We know for instance that despite plants having nerves, and being alive, it does not mean they are "conscious" of their existance, they are as aware as a rock, or a skeleton of a decomposed body.
I think they're more concerned with the spread of truth about the USA and its activities coming from communists, socialists and other activists from different ism's and ist's.
The fact that many fragmented individual people and nations can now post truths about the U.S. Military and government that usually wouldn't get out of their locality due to time, resource constraints, and general cultural and media controls and barriers... i.e. "he's crazy", "conspiracy theorist", etc and other "trigger words" that automagically make someone ones or some nations opinions or thoughts "invalid" by triggering the emotionally laden trigger words in the unthinking mass because of public education (i.e. biasing thought through brainwashing) and capitalist culture.
There are certain games band music is appropriate for, but for many games, you need to design the music around the gameplay.
Lastly I fear a lot of great music composers would loose out to big money and trashy bands, I'd hate to have never been able to experience the music of Nubuo Uematsu of Final fantasy or Yamitsu Mitsuda of Chrono Trigger, Xeno gears, FF Tactics, etc.
I'd also hate to hear typical band stuff in a game like Freespace 2 for instance. Need for speed undeground or racing I can understand because of the natural overlap (listening to music in a car while driving) or a game like Tony hawk or sports games, but for most games I'd rather have the music designed FOR THE GAME, not as some sloppy way to promote bands, pop stars/artists, who's music doesn't fit the style and gameplay of the game.
I can understand some cross over but it should fit the game, not be a sloppy add in. Ideally I prefer composers over bands and "artists".
Some of the best music is GAME MUSIC designed to evoke and convey emotions best suited to what the game is about, i.e. Need for speed porsche unleashed, Final fantasy, Chrono trigger, FF tactics, etc, etc.
All of those games used composers, not typical mass music, and I'm greatful that many game experiences have not yet been ruined in the game industry because of it.
Wikipedia alspo has the potential, to allow historians to see how experts or powerful figures no longer can perform revisionist history as easily through corruption, provided unscrupulous individuals or wikipedia is not hacked and records of edits destroyed.
Uncensored mass edited knowledge source on anything would be incredibly valuable to a historian especially since many things are surpressed from becoming public knowledge by powerful figures, in media, academia and government.
"With all that said, bringing some form of timestamps to wikipedia would, in my opinion, make it more trustworthy."
I do not agree that timestamps make an article more trustworthy, time from last edit does not equal lest trustworthy. Many times small edits are made simply because some person comes across something that could be said a little clearer, or tighten up the grammar or spelling mistakes.
I do this all the time when I find someone is injecting bias (or sounding biased by the phraseology) or has said something with a lack of clarity and specificity, I hate jargon with a passion when you need to communicate ideas clearly to others who may not have the repository of knowledge to decode the compressed words (aka: jargon). I rather be a little more verbose and crystal clear so that there is no ambiguity, then using compound jargon that you usually only use with other people who have a great wealth of knowedge that enables those jargon words to be understood. Jargon is usually shorthand for people to compound many ideas or words into one words or less words, but it doesn't do anything to clarify what is being said when you are just gaining the knowledge, you need specifics to build up that library, then you can "graduate" to more complex jargon.
How the above got labelled insightful is an eyesore, yes government can mismanage funds, but no government did not "steal" your income, taxes go to pay for schools, roads, etc, etc, and other projects that for private ventures would never be able to handle on their own.
"Can the camera tell which was which before it phones the police?"
It can if there are policemen behind the camera.
"There'll be more cameras than patrolling cop cars. A patrolling cop car can ignore or react to an incident depending on how it unfolds. A camera that tells a cop to respond to a particular location means the cop HAS to respond."
I do agree with much of what you say but this one thing...
Social contract is not a "theory". i.e. the constitution. The government (i.e. peoples) defense of the private property and trade system, the military, police and judicial powers of government that allow the private property and law system to exist in the first place to allow peaceful trade and help to enforce contracts, how would you enforce the contract between a buyer and seller, if the buyer or seller is a theif or there is a sufficient criminal (i.e. mafia) presence without a government? Say you are not a rich employer or rich individual so from these criminal elements, how can you protect your rights and yourself? Copyright laws, and countless other laws that protect both producers, employers and consumers and everyone as a citizen come from 'the' social contract.
People have the right to disband government (and yes the government when it is in accordance with the will of the people has the right to confiscate property of individuals) if they are doing damage to society and not abiding by the laws of the land, thats why it's called a DEMOCRACY. No government is perfect, you could split hairs over infringements of "rights" on all our rights and "non consent" about everything that happens that is much too astracted from the citzen every-day.
For instance, jobs in government and trade have become so specialized and abstracted from the everyday citizen that many decisions are made "without your consent" to protect relations between peoples of your nation and others. Some of these are not trivial issues, they are very complicated.
... and not articulate enough when it tries to comming up with new ways to distill complex information to those who do not process more complex information as fast or as easily as others. I always keep thinking back to Albert Einsteins comments on if you can't communicate your concepts or break them down into understandable terms to anyone, which IMHO means a lot of your smarts you could do good with are wasted.
Lastly, I think the lack of academics and credentialists who can be bribed / corrupted, or living in their own little distorted reality, actually helps wikipedia. I do believe that having as many eyes on information as possible and churning it through millions of different minds gives us the ability to REFINE and CLARIFY what is being said, and distill that information CLEARLY better to everyone, then a group of academics can, since even good academics can edit wikipedia, and then others can break down jargon into clear statements.
I'm reminded of debates of philosophers of the ancients, where one of the purposes of argumentation was to CLEAR your thoughts and refine ideas to clarify those "murky ideas" in others heads that are more complicated and not easily communicated without refinement through argumentation... and I believe that's wikipedia's greatest strength. I don't care how smart someone is, one fantasticly superior mind cannot beat millions of average to great ones minds.
Not to mention measuring "merit" and "superiority" through academic credentialism or scholastic obstacle does not give one a monopoly on the judgement of the quality of ideas, nor in the clarity of their communication.
"Nintendo had plenty of brand recognition back in the day, and that didn't stop them from getting their asses handed to them by the playstation."
Nintendo made the fatal mistake of the N64 and mistreating developers earlier when it had a natural monopoly on games during the NES era, not to mention with the N64 they were "pulling a sega", and many hardcore and early console gamers remember the sting of the Sega CD, 32X, Saturn, etc. Sega created ill will against itself by lack of software support for released hardware if it did not sell as well as they would have liked, the fact is the tried to flood the market with hard to develop for hardware and games simply not understanding the dynamics of why people buy consoles to begin with.
Nintendo slowly killed itself by doing the a similar thing killing interest of developers by shackling the N64 with Cartridge. Notice many of the most popular (still) playstation games today had their start and first success on the NES and SNES to begin with. Playstation would never have taken off all peoples favorite games from the SNES era didn't move over to PS1. Go look at major franchises and look at what systems they were on historically, its not hard to see the pattern - Gamers followed the games.
"I think they are a role-model that other companies (Including the existing big boys) should strive to be more like."
Most companies have yet to understand that building goodwill is profitable, not only that, people are also more likely to "donate" through purchasing product/services simply to support your efforts even if they do not particulary need what your selling.
Of course people who make/own IP/software and write EULA's for such software would disagree with you that the above is the 'true' substance of "the contract" or "agreement" they have between their customer and themselves when they make the purchase.
"Irrelevant."
Infinite supply and negligable reproduction costs is certainly not irrelevant. It enables new aspects of economic distribution impossible under traditional scarcity based models. Do you think current economic theory would survive if humanity found a way to infinitely produce at low cost anything they desired? You're still stuck in old pre-internet one dimensional producers-as-sole-source of success and therefore 100% ownership (which means total and absolute control) based economic thinking.
I agree that people should be paid for their work, but I disagree on the models currently in use when in reference to digital goods, especially with regards to infinite supply goods with negligable reproduction costs.
Ideally, if you could maximize profit even more by charging dynamic prices to customers based on a percentage of their income maximizing both "legal" exposure/use and profit.
Although one can see "loopholes" in such an idea, stores already do things kind of like this where they drastically reduce the price of an item so much that it could be sold for a profit to someone else in another market and hence limit the amount of items sold per individual/family (a protectionist measure I might add).
Yhinking outside the current about concepts of ownership and success, co-operation, etc, need to be looked into. Old economic doctrines simply don't apply when the nature of a product changes in such a radical way as to permit perfect distribution without penalizing creators. The most pirated works are also the most successful, since market failures need to reach a quality or impulse buy threshold to maintain economic viability.
In theory maximum distribution of such goods for dynmaic price of ratio of a persons income making it affordable to those on the bottom ends of the economic scale is a good thing, therefore maximizing profit to those who would otherwise not buy it based on it's percieved expense relative to their income.
I do not know how anyone interested in economic theory and society, would want to hold back the new possibilities infinite supply opens up for the benefit of others beyond the typical producer, domination instinct based self-interest arguments rooted in scarcity.
Ownership as it is currently thought about is justified when resources are limited, but when such goods are effectively unlimited, the nature of ownership and the benefiting others need to be rethought.
It's both in the interest of the producer to have maximum exposure of his product while reaping benefit, and it is also in the interest of the market to have the maximum distribution of the product. The market SUPPORTS the producer by consumers voting with their dollars, the producers existence is dependent upon the consumer of his work. This is an act of co-operation, consumers act in co-operating in the success of a product by investing their money in it, in fact if you look at consumption in IP as a form of investment by both the business producer, and the consumer the success of which is entirely dependent upon the producer and the consumers investment.
The idea that producers "own" exclusively or succeed exclusively is an illusion, if the person was populated by 1 person or all the people there existed a market for his product died, how exactly would the producer benefit without other people their to support him and enable his success?
Either way I think more thought needs to be done and new essays and works need to be written, and critiques about ownership, success, merit, etc, and its relation to society especially when it comes to intellectual property and infinte supply goods.
"Sounds like someone drank the karl marx koolaid. The basis of IP rights is not whether you've profitted sufficiently (which is impossible to measure anyway)."
This shows me your ignorance. No it is in fact a damn important question whether someone has profited sufficiently considering the economics, of both scarce and non-scarce goods whose supply is not limited and the social effects of of what happens in markets. I'm not saying that people who produce IP should be punished or we should live in communist fairy fairy land, I understand the value of markets, but I do believe new round of thinking needs to be done on economic doctrine, the concepts of ownership, contracts, compensation, etc. You need to not let your economic knee jerk reaction of your economic doctrine color your thinking. Optimum rate of profit is not impossible to measure, in fact many serious economists look into the optimimum rate of profit and how markets operate in such ways that I have described.
"Based on what? This doesn't advance the state of the art or enrich the public domain, nor was it in the contract."
There is NO contract. When something is bought, people barely understand anything beyond knowing that money gets exchanged for a good. Not to mention we're talking about intellectual works here who's supply is infinite.
"So what if you paid for the product? If you want to do derivative works, you should first negotiate with the copyright holder. Nobody owes you anything if you do a lot of work and infringe someone's copyright, thus rendering it useless."
The success of any product or business depends on those other people existing in the first place, you act like these people operate or produce in a vacuum, they do not. Take for instance if all gamers died tomorrow the game industry would go out of business, you have to realize that our current thinking about property and ownership is out of date when we consider infinite supply and negligable reproduction costs.
"The fact is pirates are enjoying the fruits of someone else's labor without compensating them for the price they are charging."
Your argument is one of who has not thought very much about the nature of ownership, property and pitfalls of profit oriented markets with regards to "artificially scarce" works. It's the argument of simpleton. Infinite supply of said works drastically change the compensation justification and economics of such works.
The argument is far from simple, many pirated products do VERY WELL financially, in fact many people that pirate DO purchase full versions of their games. People may "steal" but they aren't stupid, many know that people work hard to produce goods. VERY MANY people that produce copyright and intellectual works PIRATE THEMSELVES, if you don't think people who produce such goods don't pirate you must be smoking something. The fact is DIGITIZED works combined with the internet has made such intellectual property worth less then what it could command if not for the competitive market force of infinite digital supply, hence piracy, *supply and demand*. There are arguments that piracy is GOOD for the market, it's not so cut and dried as "theft". Since the nature of what is produced is different from a physical good whose components are both limited and scarce at humanities current technological state of development.
Factors to consider:
Many copyrighted works have negligable reproduction costs, but high production costs, BUT there is INFINITE supply, creating two problems:
1. Abuse and Infinite profit potential over time (Produces disincentives and protectionist lobbying measures for producers or "investors" of said works to protect "their" profits indefinitely). See: Game publishers and game developers for extreme exploitation in terms of copyright ownership and unequal contracts between the two.
2. Inefficiency and immorality of artificially restricting supply for those who artificially "cannot afford it", ideally a work which has infinite supply can be sold to everyone at every economic bracket for dynamic price as a percentage of what that person can afford according to how much income they take in.
I find it economically and morally appalling that certain intellectual propertiies whose supply is infinite cannot be sold for dynamic price to the individuals according to their income, this is not "limited supply" economics we are dealing with, there is in fact NO justification for artificially denying distribution with infinite supply and zero reproductive cost. I personally think piracy would go away if we could somehow implement dynamic prices per individual based on ratio percentage of what they make.
2. Infinitely profiting from finite works is a form of theft when one thinks about the social and economic power that gives such producers (indefinite copyright extensions, so XYC,inc can sell me the same shit again, on a different format for profit, or again to a new generation when technically I already paid for the license/use of it?)
3. Lobbying for indefinite protection of copyright/intellectual works, where public domain, and fan/customer derivatives cannot be made for fear of litigation despite the abandonment of the now not very profitable past works that will never slip into the public domain.
I personally think culturally intellectual property stifles creativity, the current ideas about property, ownership, licenses and stakes people have in what they exchange needs to be really thought out, reworked and published. People are using old and out-moded ideas of ownership and theories of economic and social transaction.
The negative side effects of intellectual property for society would bring a lot of good debate.
And artificial scarcity of digital goods intellectual property owners attempt to combat. When really once a company achieves a safe profit threshold on a product any piracy does not really do "hurt" them economically at all for digital goods. I think artificial scarcity is one of the biggest issues that really needs to be discussed, and the whole supply/demand economic reasoning of capitalism goes out the window with infinitely reproductive works that cost nothing to reproduce, but only cost money to PRODUCE once.
1. Is profiting too much from intellectual property theft? 2. Is profit in certain context's of intellectual property a form of theft? 3. If one could potentially generate infinite revenue from a finite amount of work using intellectual property, why or why not would this be bad for society in terms of social control of ideas and works? i.e. see indefinite Copyright extensions, etc.
Lastly, lot's of good idea's and fan projects (remakes) get killed by copyright owners who have no intention of profiting off future works of the property, and this is in fact a tremendous disservice to customers and fans who PAYED for the product. A fantastic looking Chrono trigger remake on the NET that SQUARE killed, I'm looking at you.
I do believe that the biggest problem is that when customers pay for a product they shouild gain some measure of ownership of the work and freedom for the work, after all, the success of the product occurs because of those who supported it with their hard earned money, just as much as those who produced it, both producer and customer (fan,consumer) have a stake in product. I think the whole concept of property and ownership needs serious critique and rethinking.
"Because I actually -prefer- paper training guides/manuals/etc. You know, with those fancy "Table of Contents" things, and that nifty "Index" in the back."
I don't think you're getting old, I think the real problem many developers haven't clued into yet is making electronic books act like real ones on the computer. I thought of going to rentacoder.com and have someone come up with a program to turn a PDF into a algorithmmically generated 3D model ebook that would behave as such, I think the real problem is not the screen but the usability of real books and ebooks are dissimilar, ebooks are cumbersome in manyways because the programmers of the software didn't take into account what makes books usable to begin with, how they are physically designed and how this can translate into easy-to-use virtual ebooks onscreen.
With 3D user interface in vista I hope programmers will take a clue from the real world and design digital "virtual objects" like their real world counterparts for a more "natural" usability factor.
"There is a certain attraction to the notion of manned space exploration versus robotic/remote methods."
The biggest benefit is all is the endless supply of resources and energy one could harvest, it certainly would change the dynamics of have vs. have not, there are enough resources out there to give everyone on earth a standard of living many times higher then it is now.
That and manned spaceflight would no doubt help enable us to learn to make better spacecraft overtime, and advance our knowledge on how to live in hostile environments on remote planets should anything happen to our original.
"Where the fuck would you get an idea like the one you state?! Is it from the misconception that communism is good, and that all communists must be some sort of noble, refined type who only uses twice-recycled styrofoam cups for their espressos, villanized by the evil capitalist West?"
Either way it all depends on what side you're on and who's writing your history books and reporting your news, if you've ever read any chomsky you know the U.S. is just as dirty as many of its enemies, and with the way things are going right now in the US with bush and company, I'm sure history will find the US in many different ways just as evil as those it accuses of being evil.
Think about all the money spent on the IRAQ war that could have been used to help the US's own people. Think about all the immigrants US business's love while allowing illegals to drive their countrymen's wages down even further towards poverty.
Let's not even mention the U.S's greedy plans for cuba. They're not as overt with their oppression as other states, but in many ways the U.S. is just as evil in that it will not leave other countries (like cuba) the fuck alone.
"FWIW, I actually thought Doom was the best video game movie ever made."
All I have to say is ouch... The best video game movies I thought were faithful to the spirit of the games were not the typical "movies".
Street Fighter 2 (1994 I believe), an anime. Probably the best "faithful" translation of a gameworld to movie I have seen of a video game. Even Final fantasy: The Spirits within would rank above doom IMHO, and they murdered that movie to make it "mass market".
I think the problem is that video game movies got a bad name because a lot of the early one's should NEVER have been made because they weren't made to be GOOD to begin with, they were made in a pathetic attempt by people who don't understand gamers nor video games to grab money as quickly as possible.
Look at Super mario bros, Street fighter (The live action one), etc. I think the whole problem was that a) they were TOO early for their time... and b) the people that were in charge of making them had no understanding of how to capture the essence of the game in a movie to begin with.
Street Fighter 2 live action could POTENTIALLY be a good movie, but I doubt it would make it would make mega $$$. Simply because it takes time for any idea or media to penetrate a population, it also has to be popular enough and people have to be fond of it enough to warrant making a movie out of it. Lastly, the movie better be entertaining and better capture the essence of the game, you can't have idiots that don't understand doing the work or you're just asking for failure.
This isn't the video game industry where you get a license and make the most worthless piece of ass game and have it sell (The matrix I'm looking at you).
With comics, Spiderman and X-men have had DECADES to incubate in a population from childhood to adulthood, i.e. cartoons that mom, dad and the kids watched or caught wind of on saturday morning, or cartoon hour, etc. Spiderman cartoons had been around a looong time, I remember watching the REALLY old ones as a young kid and the better newer ones as I got older. So you get enough widespread interest among a wide range of people. Not all video games really will quite reached that threshold.
"What is interesting, however, is the fact that these online games (having a virtual social and economic society) can actually be used to find the effects of 'real' world social and economic theories theories."
I think what is even more interesting, is what economists, and idealogues can learn from games, like taking game concepts and ideas and applying them to real world economies. i.e. experimenting with new socio-political economic models, hybrids of the elments of the ideas of the major idealogical 'isms'. (Communism, capitalism, socialism, etc), I think not enough work has really been done with experimenting with new kinds of economies, and NEW ways of measuring value, and also giving each one of us EASIER ways to choose and KNOW how our choices effect the environment, energy usage, etc. Because really, a lot of "abstract" problems are caused through sheer ignorance and the fact that the price of items we by don't really measure or give the consumer information about the "hidden costs" of the items they buy, and the amount of resources they displace or waste they create.
Also in games, game developers try to curb power and cheating, that comes with economic or "real" power in the virutal game world. In the real world, this is exact opposite of what really happens. Next, in the real world, you have no "Servers" on which all people and the things they own and monies they have are stored... Unfortunately, you can get away with a lot the more abstract and removed power is from people because of the extreme specialization modern economies and politics require.
And of course you sometimes get crazy people at the top of a country doing insane things to enrich themselves (or those with much to gain economically that elected them) and bankrupting their own countrymen in violation of international law. (i.e. invasion of iraq).
Slashdot Mirror
"The only thing surprising is that so many Americans are still looking up with worshipful puppy eyes -- at the leaders who pretend to protect them while stealing their wealth, liberty, and lives."
The truth is the world of nations are simply puppets of powerful and wealthy people to manage as best the can groups of working human populations they deem mostly as expendable where they can get away with it.
Most of the world is basically a theatre for the workers. Think about it, you need serious technology and wealth to truly accurate verify anything someone tells you that is removed from your direct experience of it. (i.e. sattelite photo's, videos by other people, etc, etc).
Lying about of a lot of things is fuck shit easy the bigger your populations become, lastly so many events go on in so many places the modern person intellectual resources are overwhelmed by data, it would literally take the computation of many supercomputers today and the ones to be developed in the future to sort out the bullshit from what can actually happen when pitted against the laws of nature and biology perception and human behaviour.
Just look at religious belief, it THRIVES in the modern internet age, and yet it was proven as falsehood many 1000's of years ago. Too many people simply do not have the thinking capacity or a deep interest in truth when they are too busy living their lives.
All humans have real limitations on what they can really "know" as true, the internet makes much information easier to debunk, but it also makes it harder to verify more lengthy reports of news and facts for their veracity, subtle bias, or what wasn't said.
"perhaps they're more cultured and civilized than us."
They are to an extent more cultured, but more civilized is debatable.
"This rapid walk away from democracy in the name of democracy is frightning."
The truth is, there has not been a democracy for a long time, it is actually a play powerful actors entitle "democratic theatre", the goal of which is to get people to believe they actually make the real important decisions and that they are "free".
"I've come to think that it's rather stupid that we think of "intelligence" and "awareness" as mystical disembodied things. I mean to include some scientists and philosophers in this group-- pretty much anyone who talks about "the mind" as a separable entity from "the body". "
I agree that the mind is not DIVORCED from material reality (i.e. see autism, brain damage, anthesia, oxygen deprivation, etc)
But it is curious question, why is it when you are sleeping or in a coma you are not aware and effectively "dead"? The question is why aren't all organisms permanently in a unconscious death state following stimuli-response pattern all the time?
It's weird, because consciousness acts like a man inside your minds eye who chooses what buttons to push while you are awake to enable your behaviour (i.e. "the man inside the machine").
Obviously anesthetics and oxygen deprivation prove beyond all doubt the physicality of the mind, what we don't understand is the weird property of the way human animal minds are arranged in their ability see themselves and self-reference and MODULATE their behaviour when they are awake, versus when they are asleep. For instance, no one remembers being self-aware in their mothers womb because their brain was not yet fully developed to a capacity that self-awareness could take place.
What exactly emanles the collection of matter and cells to be able to self-reference itself?
I think descartes was right that most animals may be in fact machines, in fact a human below a certain age is "asleep" while he is in effect running around, I have pictures of myself from when I was 1-2 years old, on the beach happily running around, but I dont remember any of it. It's like an autonomic robotic control program that runs your behaviou funcitons until the body is ready to enable "the man in the machine".
What's the difference between E. Coli and a human being? One is self-aware, the other is simnply automatically responding to it's environment based on programmed predictable responses.
We know for instance that despite plants having nerves, and being alive, it does not mean they are "conscious" of their existance, they are as aware as a rock, or a skeleton of a decomposed body.
I think they're more concerned with the spread of truth about the USA and its activities coming from communists, socialists and other activists from different ism's and ist's.
The fact that many fragmented individual people and nations can now post truths about the U.S. Military and government that usually wouldn't get out of their locality due to time, resource constraints, and general cultural and media controls and barriers... i.e. "he's crazy", "conspiracy theorist", etc and other "trigger words" that automagically make someone ones or some nations opinions or thoughts "invalid" by triggering the emotionally laden trigger words in the unthinking mass because of public education (i.e. biasing thought through brainwashing) and capitalist culture.
There are certain games band music is appropriate for, but for many games, you need to design the music around the gameplay.
Lastly I fear a lot of great music composers would loose out to big money and trashy bands, I'd hate to have never been able to experience the music of Nubuo Uematsu of Final fantasy or Yamitsu Mitsuda of Chrono Trigger, Xeno gears, FF Tactics, etc.
I'd also hate to hear typical band stuff in a game like Freespace 2 for instance. Need for speed undeground or racing I can understand because of the natural overlap (listening to music in a car while driving) or a game like Tony hawk or sports games, but for most games I'd rather have the music designed FOR THE GAME, not as some sloppy way to promote bands, pop stars/artists, who's music doesn't fit the style and gameplay of the game.
I can understand some cross over but it should fit the game, not be a sloppy add in. Ideally I prefer composers over bands and "artists".
Some of the best music is GAME MUSIC designed to evoke and convey emotions best suited to what the game is about, i.e. Need for speed porsche unleashed, Final fantasy, Chrono trigger, FF tactics, etc, etc.
All of those games used composers, not typical mass music, and I'm greatful that many game experiences have not yet been ruined in the game industry because of it.
Wikipedia alspo has the potential, to allow historians to see how experts or powerful figures no longer can perform revisionist history as easily through corruption, provided unscrupulous individuals or wikipedia is not hacked and records of edits destroyed.
Uncensored mass edited knowledge source on anything would be incredibly valuable to a historian especially since many things are surpressed from becoming public knowledge by powerful figures, in media, academia and government.
"With all that said, bringing some form of timestamps to wikipedia would, in my opinion, make it more trustworthy."
I do not agree that timestamps make an article more trustworthy, time from last edit does not equal lest trustworthy. Many times small edits are made simply because some person comes across something that could be said a little clearer, or tighten up the grammar or spelling mistakes.
I do this all the time when I find someone is injecting bias (or sounding biased by the phraseology) or has said something with a lack of clarity and specificity, I hate jargon with a passion when you need to communicate ideas clearly to others who may not have the repository of knowledge to decode the compressed words (aka: jargon). I rather be a little more verbose and crystal clear so that there is no ambiguity, then using compound jargon that you usually only use with other people who have a great wealth of knowedge that enables those jargon words to be understood. Jargon is usually shorthand for people to compound many ideas or words into one words or less words, but it doesn't do anything to clarify what is being said when you are just gaining the knowledge, you need specifics to build up that library, then you can "graduate" to more complex jargon.
How the above got labelled insightful is an eyesore, yes government can mismanage funds, but no government did not "steal" your income, taxes go to pay for schools, roads, etc, etc, and other projects that for private ventures would never be able to handle on their own.
"Can the camera tell which was which before it phones the police?"
It can if there are policemen behind the camera.
"There'll be more cameras than patrolling cop cars. A patrolling cop car can ignore or react to an incident depending on how it unfolds. A camera that tells a cop to respond to a particular location means the cop HAS to respond."
See above.
"The "social contract" theory claims..."
I do agree with much of what you say but this one thing...
Social contract is not a "theory". i.e. the constitution. The government (i.e. peoples) defense of the private property and trade system, the military, police and judicial powers of government that allow the private property and law system to exist in the first place to allow peaceful trade and help to enforce contracts, how would you enforce the contract between a buyer and seller, if the buyer or seller is a theif or there is a sufficient criminal (i.e. mafia) presence without a government? Say you are not a rich employer or rich individual so from these criminal elements, how can you protect your rights and yourself? Copyright laws, and countless other laws that protect both producers, employers and consumers and everyone as a citizen come from 'the' social contract.
People have the right to disband government (and yes the government when it is in accordance with the will of the people has the right to confiscate property of individuals) if they are doing damage to society and not abiding by the laws of the land, thats why it's called a DEMOCRACY. No government is perfect, you could split hairs over infringements of "rights" on all our rights and "non consent" about everything that happens that is much too astracted from the citzen every-day.
For instance, jobs in government and trade have become so specialized and abstracted from the everyday citizen that many decisions are made "without your consent" to protect relations between peoples of your nation and others. Some of these are not trivial issues, they are very complicated.
... and not articulate enough when it tries to comming up with new ways to distill complex information to those who do not process more complex information as fast or as easily as others. I always keep thinking back to Albert Einsteins comments on if you can't communicate your concepts or break them down into understandable terms to anyone, which IMHO means a lot of your smarts you could do good with are wasted.
Lastly, I think the lack of academics and credentialists who can be bribed / corrupted, or living in their own little distorted reality, actually helps wikipedia. I do believe that having as many eyes on information as possible and churning it through millions of different minds gives us the ability to REFINE and CLARIFY what is being said, and distill that information CLEARLY better to everyone, then a group of academics can, since even good academics can edit wikipedia, and then others can break down jargon into clear statements.
I'm reminded of debates of philosophers of the ancients, where one of the purposes of argumentation was to CLEAR your thoughts and refine ideas to clarify those "murky ideas" in others heads that are more complicated and not easily communicated without refinement through argumentation... and I believe that's wikipedia's greatest strength. I don't care how smart someone is, one fantasticly superior mind cannot beat millions of average to great ones minds.
Not to mention measuring "merit" and "superiority" through academic credentialism or scholastic obstacle does not give one a monopoly on the judgement of the quality of ideas, nor in the clarity of their communication.
"Nintendo had plenty of brand recognition back in the day, and that didn't stop them from getting their asses handed to them by the playstation."
Nintendo made the fatal mistake of the N64 and mistreating developers earlier when it had a natural monopoly on games during the NES era, not to mention with the N64 they were "pulling a sega", and many hardcore and early console gamers remember the sting of the Sega CD, 32X, Saturn, etc. Sega created ill will against itself by lack of software support for released hardware if it did not sell as well as they would have liked, the fact is the tried to flood the market with hard to develop for hardware and games simply not understanding the dynamics of why people buy consoles to begin with.
Nintendo slowly killed itself by doing the a similar thing killing interest of developers by shackling the N64 with Cartridge. Notice many of the most popular (still) playstation games today had their start and first success on the NES and SNES to begin with. Playstation would never have taken off all peoples favorite games from the SNES era didn't move over to PS1. Go look at major franchises and look at what systems they were on historically, its not hard to see the pattern - Gamers followed the games.
"I think they are a role-model that other companies (Including the existing big boys) should strive to be more like."
Most companies have yet to understand that building goodwill is profitable, not only that, people are also more likely to "donate" through purchasing product/services simply to support your efforts even if they do not particulary need what your selling.
"That's a contract - goods for money."
Of course people who make/own IP/software and write EULA's for such software would disagree with you that the above is the 'true' substance of "the contract" or "agreement" they have between their customer and themselves when they make the purchase.
"Irrelevant."
Infinite supply and negligable reproduction costs is certainly not irrelevant. It enables new aspects of economic distribution impossible under traditional scarcity based models. Do you think current economic theory would survive if humanity found a way to infinitely produce at low cost anything they desired? You're still stuck in old pre-internet one dimensional producers-as-sole-source of success and therefore 100% ownership (which means total and absolute control) based economic thinking.
I agree that people should be paid for their work, but I disagree on the models currently in use when in reference to digital goods, especially with regards to infinite supply goods with negligable reproduction costs.
Ideally, if you could maximize profit even more by charging dynamic prices to customers based on a percentage of their income maximizing both "legal" exposure/use and profit.
Although one can see "loopholes" in such an idea, stores already do things kind of like this where they drastically reduce the price of an item so much that it could be sold for a profit to someone else in another market and hence limit the amount of items sold per individual/family (a protectionist measure I might add).
Yhinking outside the current about concepts of ownership and success, co-operation, etc, need to be looked into. Old economic doctrines simply don't apply when the nature of a product changes in such a radical way as to permit perfect distribution without penalizing creators. The most pirated works are also the most successful, since market failures need to reach a quality or impulse buy threshold to maintain economic viability.
In theory maximum distribution of such goods for dynmaic price of ratio of a persons income making it affordable to those on the bottom ends of the economic scale is a good thing, therefore maximizing profit to those who would otherwise not buy it based on it's percieved expense relative to their income.
I do not know how anyone interested in economic theory and society, would want to hold back the new possibilities infinite supply opens up for the benefit of others beyond the typical producer, domination instinct based self-interest arguments rooted in scarcity.
Ownership as it is currently thought about is justified when resources are limited, but when such goods are effectively unlimited, the nature of ownership and the benefiting others need to be rethought.
It's both in the interest of the producer to have maximum exposure of his product while reaping benefit, and it is also in the interest of the market to have the maximum distribution of the product. The market SUPPORTS the producer by consumers voting with their dollars, the producers existence is dependent upon the consumer of his work. This is an act of co-operation, consumers act in co-operating in the success of a product by investing their money in it, in fact if you look at consumption in IP as a form of investment by both the business producer, and the consumer the success of which is entirely dependent upon the producer and the consumers investment.
The idea that producers "own" exclusively or succeed exclusively is an illusion, if the person was populated by 1 person or all the people there existed a market for his product died, how exactly would the producer benefit without other people their to support him and enable his success?
Either way I think more thought needs to be done and new essays and works need to be written, and critiques about ownership, success, merit, etc, and its relation to society especially when it comes to intellectual property and infinte supply goods.
"Sounds like someone drank the karl marx koolaid. The basis of IP rights is not whether you've profitted sufficiently (which is impossible to measure anyway)."
This shows me your ignorance. No it is in fact a damn important question whether someone has profited sufficiently considering the economics, of both scarce and non-scarce goods whose supply is not limited and the social effects of of what happens in markets. I'm not saying that people who produce IP should be punished or we should live in communist fairy fairy land, I understand the value of markets, but I do believe new round of thinking needs to be done on economic doctrine, the concepts of ownership, contracts, compensation, etc. You need to not let your economic knee jerk reaction of your economic doctrine color your thinking. Optimum rate of profit is not impossible to measure, in fact many serious economists look into the optimimum rate of profit and how markets operate in such ways that I have described.
"Based on what? This doesn't advance the state of the art or enrich the public domain, nor was it in the contract."
There is NO contract. When something is bought, people barely understand anything beyond knowing that money gets exchanged for a good. Not to mention we're talking about intellectual works here who's supply is infinite.
"So what if you paid for the product? If you want to do derivative works, you should first negotiate with the copyright holder. Nobody owes you anything if you do a lot of work and infringe someone's copyright, thus rendering it useless."
The success of any product or business depends on those other people existing in the first place, you act like these people operate or produce in a vacuum, they do not. Take for instance if all gamers died tomorrow the game industry would go out of business, you have to realize that our current thinking about property and ownership is out of date when we consider infinite supply and negligable reproduction costs.
"The fact is pirates are enjoying the fruits of someone else's labor without compensating them for the price they are charging."
Your argument is one of who has not thought very much about the nature of ownership, property and pitfalls of profit oriented markets with regards to "artificially scarce" works. It's the argument of simpleton. Infinite supply of said works drastically change the compensation justification and economics of such works.
The argument is far from simple, many pirated products do VERY WELL financially, in fact many people that pirate DO purchase full versions of their games. People may "steal" but they aren't stupid, many know that people work hard to produce goods. VERY MANY people that produce copyright and intellectual works PIRATE THEMSELVES, if you don't think people who produce such goods don't pirate you must be smoking something. The fact is DIGITIZED works combined with the internet has made such intellectual property worth less then what it could command if not for the competitive market force of infinite digital supply, hence piracy, *supply and demand*. There are arguments that piracy is GOOD for the market, it's not so cut and dried as "theft". Since the nature of what is produced is different from a physical good whose components are both limited and scarce at humanities current technological state of development.
Factors to consider:
Many copyrighted works have negligable reproduction costs, but high production costs, BUT there is INFINITE supply, creating two problems:
1. Abuse and Infinite profit potential over time (Produces disincentives and protectionist lobbying measures for producers or "investors" of said works to protect "their" profits indefinitely). See: Game publishers and game developers for extreme exploitation in terms of copyright ownership and unequal contracts between the two.
2. Inefficiency and immorality of artificially restricting supply for those who artificially "cannot afford it", ideally a work which has infinite supply can be sold to everyone at every economic bracket for dynamic price as a percentage of what that person can afford according to how much income they take in.
I find it economically and morally appalling that certain intellectual propertiies whose supply is infinite cannot be sold for dynamic price to the individuals according to their income, this is not "limited supply" economics we are dealing with, there is in fact NO justification for artificially denying distribution with infinite supply and zero reproductive cost. I personally think piracy would go away if we could somehow implement dynamic prices per individual based on ratio percentage of what they make.
2. Infinitely profiting from finite works is a form of theft when one thinks about the social and economic power that gives such producers (indefinite copyright extensions, so XYC,inc can sell me the same shit again, on a different format for profit, or again to a new generation when technically I already paid for the license/use of it?)
3. Lobbying for indefinite protection of copyright/intellectual works, where public domain, and fan/customer derivatives cannot be made for fear of litigation despite the abandonment of the now not very profitable past works that will never slip into the public domain.
I personally think culturally intellectual property stifles creativity, the current ideas about property, ownership, licenses and stakes people have in what they exchange needs to be really thought out, reworked and published. People are using old and out-moded ideas of ownership and theories of economic and social transaction.
The negative side effects of intellectual property for society would bring a lot of good debate.
And artificial scarcity of digital goods intellectual property owners attempt to combat. When really once a company achieves a safe profit threshold on a product any piracy does not really do "hurt" them economically at all for digital goods. I think artificial scarcity is one of the biggest issues that really needs to be discussed, and the whole supply/demand economic reasoning of capitalism goes out the window with infinitely reproductive works that cost nothing to reproduce, but only cost money to PRODUCE once.
1. Is profiting too much from intellectual property theft?
2. Is profit in certain context's of intellectual property a form of theft?
3. If one could potentially generate infinite revenue from a finite amount of work using intellectual property, why or why not would this be bad for society in terms of social control of ideas and works? i.e. see indefinite Copyright extensions, etc.
Lastly, lot's of good idea's and fan projects (remakes) get killed by copyright owners who have no intention of profiting off future works of the property, and this is in fact a tremendous disservice to customers and fans who PAYED for the product. A fantastic looking Chrono trigger remake on the NET that SQUARE killed, I'm looking at you.
I do believe that the biggest problem is that when customers pay for a product they shouild gain some measure of ownership of the work and freedom for the work, after all, the success of the product occurs because of those who supported it with their hard earned money, just as much as those who produced it, both producer and customer (fan,consumer) have a stake in product. I think the whole concept of property and ownership needs serious critique and rethinking.
"Because I actually -prefer- paper training guides/manuals/etc. You know, with those fancy "Table of Contents" things, and that nifty "Index" in the back."
I don't think you're getting old, I think the real problem many developers haven't clued into yet is making electronic books act like real ones on the computer. I thought of going to rentacoder.com and have someone come up with a program to turn a PDF into a algorithmmically generated 3D model ebook that would behave as such, I think the real problem is not the screen but the usability of real books and ebooks are dissimilar, ebooks are cumbersome in manyways because the programmers of the software didn't take into account what makes books usable to begin with, how they are physically designed and how this can translate into easy-to-use virtual ebooks onscreen.
With 3D user interface in vista I hope programmers will take a clue from the real world and design digital "virtual objects" like their real world counterparts for a more "natural" usability factor.
"There is a certain attraction to the notion of manned space exploration versus robotic/remote methods."
The biggest benefit is all is the endless supply of resources and energy one could harvest, it certainly would change the dynamics of have vs. have not, there are enough resources out there to give everyone on earth a standard of living many times higher then it is now.
That and manned spaceflight would no doubt help enable us to learn to make better spacecraft overtime, and advance our knowledge on how to live in hostile environments on remote planets should anything happen to our original.
I love HNIC! There's nothing quite like seeing Horny Nymphomaniacs Inhaling C... you get the picture! Then again, this is slashdot.
"Where the fuck would you get an idea like the one you state?! Is it from the misconception that communism is good, and that all communists must be some sort of noble, refined type who only uses twice-recycled styrofoam cups for their espressos, villanized by the evil capitalist West?"
Either way it all depends on what side you're on and who's writing your history books and reporting your news, if you've ever read any chomsky you know the U.S. is just as dirty as many of its enemies, and with the way things are going right now in the US with bush and company, I'm sure history will find the US in many different ways just as evil as those it accuses of being evil.
Think about all the money spent on the IRAQ war that could have been used to help the US's own people. Think about all the immigrants US business's love while allowing illegals to drive their countrymen's wages down even further towards poverty.
Let's not even mention the U.S's greedy plans for cuba. They're not as overt with their oppression as other states, but in many ways the U.S. is just as evil in that it will not leave other countries (like cuba) the fuck alone.
"FWIW, I actually thought Doom was the best video game movie ever made."
All I have to say is ouch... The best video game movies I thought were faithful to the spirit of the games were not the typical "movies".
Street Fighter 2 (1994 I believe), an anime. Probably the best "faithful" translation of a gameworld to movie I have seen of a video game. Even Final fantasy: The Spirits within would rank above doom IMHO, and they murdered that movie to make it "mass market".
I think the problem is that video game movies got a bad name because a lot of the early one's should NEVER have been made because they weren't made to be GOOD to begin with, they were made in a pathetic attempt by people who don't understand gamers nor video games to grab money as quickly as possible.
Look at Super mario bros, Street fighter (The live action one), etc. I think the whole problem was that a) they were TOO early for their time... and b) the people that were in charge of making them had no understanding of how to capture the essence of the game in a movie to begin with.
Street Fighter 2 live action could POTENTIALLY be a good movie, but I doubt it would make it would make mega $$$. Simply because it takes time for any idea or media to penetrate a population, it also has to be popular enough and people have to be fond of it enough to warrant making a movie out of it. Lastly, the movie better be entertaining and better capture the essence of the game, you can't have idiots that don't understand doing the work or you're just asking for failure.
This isn't the video game industry where you get a license and make the most worthless piece of ass game and have it sell (The matrix I'm looking at you).
With comics, Spiderman and X-men have had DECADES to incubate in a population from childhood to adulthood, i.e. cartoons that mom, dad and the kids watched or caught wind of on saturday morning, or cartoon hour, etc. Spiderman cartoons had been around a looong time, I remember watching the REALLY old ones as a young kid and the better newer ones as I got older. So you get enough widespread interest among a wide range of people. Not all video games really will quite reached that threshold.
"What is interesting, however, is the fact that these online games (having a virtual social and economic society) can actually be used to find the effects of 'real' world social and economic theories theories."
r net_Fuckwad_Theory
I think what is even more interesting, is what economists, and idealogues can learn from games, like taking game concepts and ideas and applying them to real world economies. i.e. experimenting with new socio-political economic models, hybrids of the elments of the ideas of the major idealogical 'isms'. (Communism, capitalism, socialism, etc), I think not enough work has really been done with experimenting with new kinds of economies, and NEW ways of measuring value, and also giving each one of us EASIER ways to choose and KNOW how our choices effect the environment, energy usage, etc. Because really, a lot of "abstract" problems are caused through sheer ignorance and the fact that the price of items we by don't really measure or give the consumer information about the "hidden costs" of the items they buy, and the amount of resources they displace or waste they create.
Also in games, game developers try to curb power and cheating, that comes with economic or "real" power in the virutal game world. In the real world, this is exact opposite of what really happens. Next, in the real world, you have no "Servers" on which all people and the things they own and monies they have are stored... Unfortunately, you can get away with a lot the more abstract and removed power is from people because of the extreme specialization modern economies and politics require.
And of course you sometimes get crazy people at the top of a country doing insane things to enrich themselves (or those with much to gain economically that elected them) and bankrupting their own countrymen in violation of international law. (i.e. invasion of iraq).
Lastly, lots of things happen in games, simply because people could never get away with them in the real world. To get an idea, refer to John Gabriel's (Penny Arcade's) Greater internet fuckwad theory: http://sc.tri-bit.com/John_Gabriel's_Greater_Inte