"The idea that it could be foolish should only add to the idea that it would be dangerous."
So is all life on planet earth, life on earth besides humanity are already "foreign AI". So I don't share your concerns because human beings are projecting their animal psyche on a piece of hardware that has no conscious awareness, it would be like misprogramming your toaster or the mars rover.
You're not thinking straight any intelligent AI built by human beings would be built to be robust or durable like our brains, our brains have massive redundancy. Consider our brains don't just keel over when they get damaged by stray cosmic rays or other problems like being tackled in contact sports, there is a slow degradation in ability. So all you'd have to do to an AI is discover it's strenghts and weaknesses no matter how intelligent it is because intelligence doesn't mean anything by itself, say your stephen hawking, suppose we gave him super AI, he'd still be in a wheel chair unable to do much of anything because in order to heal himself he is subject to the laws of physics and biology, aka there's no guarantee that there's this thing called infinite self-modifiable improvement since all improvements have trade offs, if you doubt this consider engineering CPU's like the pentium 4, the P4 had many stages to hit higher clock frequency. You can google "P4 Pipeline stages" or such things to figure out what the trade offs were, but you don't get everything. Many animals have superior abilities to human beings but there was a trade off because there is only so much space and limits on how certain matter can be configured in that space.
You're completely forgetting that the universe has limits, it's not this infinite god device. Life took billions of years to create human intelligence, that means that any improvement will have peaks and hard walls that are not easily jumped given the laws of physics. Look at what happened to CPU clock speed it hit a giant brick wall almost 10 years ago, around 2006 we topped out at 3.4-3.6 ghz, all CPU's are still released at 3-4ghz and can't even go little past 5 Ghz. AI will have massively similar problems because not all problems are parallelizable, same way GPU's won't replace CPU's because CPU's specialize in sequential instructions that are dependent on the order in which they are sequentially arranged. This puts a hard limit on AI's ability to solve problems. Check out ahmdal's law.
"I think, however, that part of the reason scifi writers have written stories about out-of-control AIs so many times is that it should be a valid concern."
I don't considering that most human beings are incapable of higher level thought. Right now most citizens throughout the world are voting against their own interests. The ease at which mankind (a real intelligence) can be deluded and tricked means that any intelligence of sufficient complexity can be tricked, it costs resources to double check information. A significant amount of time and energy. The laws of physics put strict limits on AI and not to mention human beings have nuclear weapons, and can also simply deny AI a power source (shut off the electricity).
AI's will consume energy, just like any other form of life. All one has to do is deprive it of resources and starve the beast, or simply overwhelm it with false information. AI's are not gods, they are subject to the laws of nature and will have all sorts of bugs and special cases that can frustrate that intelligence. Just like human beings have serious flaws as a result of their evolutionary history. So too will AI's have limits defined by the universes structure.
"We humans are intelligent enough to form effective and equitable social structures, we just don't have the collective stomach for removing the saboteurs from our society."
But that means you're not intelligent if you leave the saboteurs alone. Some science on reasoning, someone can tell you what is true and you won't believe them!
"Just because you assume something is "fundamentally irrational" doesn't mean it is."
There are countless examples of capitalisms fundamental irrationality and waste in terms of natural resources. You should learn some science, I can tell you the facts and you won't believe them!
"Gradually, particularly over the past 75 years or so, most of these aspects of the original governmental structure have gradually been overruled -- often in the name of "democracy" or "protecting the people" or providing aid and help to the poor through a central system."
Without this helping the poor capitalism would have fallen, let's be honest here. The american/Europe/English capitalist governments all had these problems because capitalism is fundamentally irrational at based reflecting the irrationality of mankind. All these changes were required to keep the capitalist system going. Say what you want but Lenin was correct about imperalism being the highest stage of capitalism.
The reality is human beings just aren't intelligent enough to form long lasting social orders because too many people have negative evolutionary characteristics they've inherited from the past. Our primate psychology is at the root of everything regardless of what collection of words and labels one flies under. The biology is still there.
"Because when you do this, you are giving google information on all the websites you visit."
You must be new here, almost every website you visit has ad/trackers embedded in the webpage. Go get ghostery and look at all the shit on slashdot by itself.
Go to other places on the web and see all "hidden servers" you're pulling data from. All the webpage has to do is refer to the server for them to track you. There is an infinite number of ways for you to be tracked without your consent. It's the nature of the internet itself unfortunately, any time you need to communicate (send a packet) you need a receiving address and a destination.
... regarding feedback, see bret Victor on this. Computer programming is different from building bridges because every time you change code you change everything that interacts with it. Whereas the laws of nature for bridge building don't change, every time you modify code you end up having network effects that effect every instruction afterward.
Since most (non multi-core) code happens sequentially. To see this, imagine an extremely simple computer with only a few KB of memory, all you are going to do is draw something. Every time you add more code, you change the nature of the problem, this is hard to see but the best way to visualize it is as a "ring" that expands or contracts vs the computers resouces. We'll use a metaphor for hitting targets for the goal you want to accomplish: Say the target you want to hit is a circle of a given size and everytime you grow the ring (code) you begin to miss the target (aka the ring grows because of more work/timing/etc). You have to stay roughly the size of the fixed target but you don't fully grasp the nature of the problem, partially because the feedback process is broken with coding tools and performance against the problem (requirements) you are trying to solve is unknown until implementation.
... people funding AAA kickstarters know nothing about AAA development costs. I knew Planetary annihilation was taking everyone for a ride because to make a real RTS you need 10 million minimum (thats whta supreme commander cost). Trying to do a full fledged RTS on 2.5 million isn't going to cut it. Same can be said for elite dangerous. Braben is taking his fans for a ride because he wants to ride the money into an MMO to make $. He damn well knows a AAA game costs a huge amount to create.
The problem is crowdfunding so far has only been able to get enough funding to get back to maybe mid 90's level games like Shadowrun, Wasteland 2 and Pillars of eternity. Both wasteland 2 and shadowrun ended up being short on content . Shadowrun and Faster than light have only been the few real kickstarter successes in terms of game quality. There are some others that have flown below the radar but I can't name them at the moment.
I'm looking forward to Next car game (Now wreckfest) and Star citizen. But I'm not holding my breath of star citizen.
... compiling dossiers on everyone. Since in order to use the internet you need to use a search engine, a good idea is to look at you chrome browser history and note the title, time, where you visited, is there, then combine this with analytics and cookies (machine identification) remember this is the kind of shit and more they got behind closed doors. This will be used to pro-actively deny employment to people and 'screen' people for their political views/sites/news they visit/any health problems/etc. i.e. it allows corporations unprecedented insight into the flaws of our evolved nervous system and minds. We are not "free" in any way or form our minds were shaped by evolution and they have a lot of problems reasoning or perceiving reality, if in doubt see here:
They are trying to map political dissident to pre-emptively strike against political change using science and big data they are fervently trying to figure out how to regain their control, since they know media's days are numbered with newer generations. So they are learning techniques in controlling populations and manipulating public opinion on social media, to socially engineer how people think, etc. The reality is america has been the greatest success in propaganda in human history, most americans were hyper capitalist, virulently anti-communist for the last few decades and the upper class would like the working classes to keep voting against their own interests to keep their ill gotten wealth. So if you vote for D&R you are one of the illusioned and the elites aren't worried about you at all because you are politically illiterate just like they want. They want you all to vote democrats and republicans so as not to rock the boat. They don't want political change to manifest outside the political system (aka threat to corporate power).
This (mass surveillance) is just more part and parcel of state suppression of dissent against corporate interests. They're worried that the more people are going to wake up and corporate centers like the US and canada may be among those who also awaken. See this vid with Zbigniew Brzezinski, former United States National Security Advisor.
"We now live in two Americas. One—now the minority—functions in a print-based, literate world that can cope with complexity and can separate illusion from truth. The other—the majority—is retreating from a reality-based world into one of false certainty and magic. To this majority—which crosses social class lines, though the poor are overwhelmingly affected—presidential debate and political rhetoric is pitched at a sixth-grade reading level. In this “other America,” serious film and theater, as well as newspapers and books, are being pushed to the margins of society.
"Much as I despise the current UK government, and am deeply concerned about surveillance and censorship and erosion of privacy and free speech generally"
This (mass surveillance) is just more part and parcel of state suppression of dissent against corporate interests. They're worried that the more people are going to wake up and corporate centers like the US and canada may be among those who also awaken. See this vid with Zbigniew Brzezinski, former United States National Security Advisor.
"We now live in two Americas. One—now the minority—functions in a print-based, literate world that can cope with complexity and can separate illusion from truth. The other—the majority—is retreating from a reality-based world into one of false certainty and magic. To this majority—which crosses social class lines, though the poor are overwhelmingly affected—presidential debate and political rhetoric is pitched at a sixth-grade reading level. In this “other America,” serious film and theater, as well as newspapers and books, are being pushed to the margins of society.
In the tradition of Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism and Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, Pulitzer Prize-winner Chris Hedges navigates this culture—attending WWF contests, the Adult Video News Awards in Las Vegas, and Ivy League graduation ceremonies—to expose an age of terrifying decline and heightened self-delusion."
"Why exactly do the NSA, FBI, CIA, MI6, GCHQ, DGSE, FSB, BND, etc... etc... have to trace everything we do or say online?"
This (mass surveillance) is just more part and parcel of state suppression of dissent against corporate interests. They're worried that the more people are going to wake up and corporate centers like the US and canada may be among those who also awaken. See this vid with Zbigniew Brzezinski, former United States National Security Advisor.
"We now live in two Americas. One—now the minority—functions in a print-based, literate world that can cope with complexity and can separate illusion from truth. The other—the majority—is retreating from a reality-based world into one of false certainty and magic. To this majority—which crosses social class lines, though the poor are overwhelmingly affected—presidential debate and political rhetoric is pitched at a sixth-grade reading level. In this “other America,” serious film and theater, as well as newspapers and books, are being pushed to the margins of society.
In the tradition of Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism and Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, Pulitzer Prize-winner Chris Hedges navigates this culture—attending WWF contests, the Adult Video News Awards in Las Vegas, and Ivy League graduation ceremonies—to expose an age of terrifying decline and heightened self-delusion."
"I like how to consider better visuals = Hollywood = bad."
It's not merely "better visuals", it's the cinematic techniques where you stop say in Call of duty, to say call of duty isn't one giant action movie would be an understatement. I'm saying the "trying to be in a movie" bits distract from actually making a game because "immersion" and videogame like gameplay are at odds in say a single player campaign.
What happens is you start to obey the generic laws of the real world and the expectations of how things 'should' behave to a larger extent which limits the kinds of gameplay you can have in the game, which makes for incredible boredom from one sequel to another.
So you have little idea what you're talking about sadly. It's not 'merely' great graphics, it's the kind of design vs hollywood action sections in a game that conflict with one another. You simply can't do insanely crazy things because you've got the hollywood mindset happening and not the videogame mindset happening.
"The supporters of Kickstarter are always pointing to games that haven't been released yet as examples of its success."
Faster than light. Shovel Knight and Shadowrun have been successful, the first Shadow run was rough but they more then made up for it with Dragonfall. Developers who've never made a game in a genre or been away from it for many years go through a learning curve as they relearn the ropes of making that certain type of game. So that is somewhat forgivable.
Kickstarter has defintiely been abused but to say its a total loss is idiotic, I'm awaiting Retro
"It's become a stagnant genre, and it's time we had an Doom/Duke Nukem/Unreal/Half-Life successor"
The reality is many games single player aspect back then don't hold up very well if you play them back to back with modern games if you measure them on a feelings and "this is so awesome" standpoint, the rise of the cinemtic game - even as me an older gamer has shifted my preference hierarchy to want "both". I force myself to play brutal doom to get my "gameplay vegetables" because I hate the fact that hollywood props and cheap tricks give human brains higher highs in terms of excitement over intrinsic gameplay in terms of single player experiences. I really hate the fact that when I go back and play doom 2 I wish it was some hybrid of the cartoony doom I know and love and the best elements of hollywood deadspace, but minus the hollywood hyper realism. I was never a fan of the push towards realism in doom 3 on mars, I always loved the pixel art/toony type style of doom 2 and it was kind of awkward seeing the Cyber-Demon rendered realistically, when doom 2 had more of an artistic comic vibe with it's enemies like the walking spider brain that felt poached from Teenage mutant ninja turtles.
To say that modern games are all boring is a bit of an overstatement, they certainly DO cause excitement in their hollywood parts. I enjoy Assassins creeds world even if I have serious issues with the dumbed down combat when compared to prince of persia series also made by Ubisoft. I really do think the push for hollywood has seriously made developers dumber, newer generations of developers raised on Halo regen shields and hollywood handholding campaigns has been infecting all of gaming, I seriously question developers, that "they know what they are doing". Too often even simple and cheap to program things are missing in many modern games.
The problem modern games main problem is gameplay, PC (modding/dedicated servers) and challenge related but this is publishers trying to drive DRM and control the market by confiscating game ownership with encrypted steam games via steamworks DRM for multiplayer/matchmaking. Shooters FPS/TPS, they are most certainly by the numbers but the mass gaming audience prefers hollywood action movie over intrinsic gameplay generated by fun and challenge. To be honest with you, I thought half-life 2 was just a giant pile of fail, trying too hard to be the hollywood action movie type game it never really was really "here's an empty base with an experiment gone wrong, you are on your own". Half life one did it's best to get out of the players way, while Half-life 2 feels like a very force sequel. I think it comes down to Valve not really not know what they are doing storywise. When I got to the buggy desert/section I gave up, I just got too bored. Half-life 2 was poorly made in many areas and poorly paced. I lost interest.
Half-life, while it was one of the first 'movie based games' where there was story integrated into it, but it wasn't done as obnoxiously and overbearingly as it is done today. That being said, some obnoxious overbearingness works, if you play the singleplayer campaign of Transformers - Fall of cybertron, you'd be hard pressed to say that it couldn't compare in terms of fun to Doom 2.
Doom was made at a time before the integration of 'hollywood action movie/cartoon show inside a videogame' was mastered. The newer generation has problems going back and playing games that haven't mastered the hollywood integration like Mass effect 2, Call of duty and transformers fall of cybetron (sp campaign). I don't fault newer genreation gamers for that because even I as an older gamer know that when CPU/GPU power hit a threshold it was just easier to use high def AV to flash our primate brain in sensation, problem is instrinsic feelings related internally generated gameplay are easily overwhelmed and outcompeted in many (not all) instances of set piece hollywood bullshit. The kind of excitement we get from the hollywood is of a different character them the stre
"Nowadays America, my adopted country, has turned into something that I ran away from, where the "Press" no longer collaborate with the authority, where the "Media" willingly becomes the mouthpiece of the power that be"
America has been at war and over throwing others since it's founding, you do know that right? Only someone naive would believe this. America has always been the way you are seeing it, you, like most of the ignorant masses of mankind don't do well to become historically literate.
"Both of which, BTW, want you to hate Fox News, which you are dutifully doing."
Just because the CIA does something doesn't mean it is necessarily bad or irrational, it's in the governments interest to decrease political extremism where fox foments it if we're honest with ourselves.
"Oh, hang on. Sorry, he was writing about socialism, wasn't he?"
Orwell, is a democratic socialist. He was criticizing stalin's russia
"... for the past ten years I have been convinced that the destruction of the Soviet myth was essential if we wanted a revival of the socialist movement."
"I must stress that I am not a socialist or communist by a long shot, but there is something wrong with a society that can't pay their workers a proper wage."
That's the nature of capitalist society, capitalism naturally breeds inequality. Marx's analysis of capitalism still holds true.
Dealing with the effects of capital accumulation on the working class, Marx states:
"They mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of the appendage of a machines destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hateful toil; they estrange him from the intellectual potentialities of the labour-process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power.... It follows therefore in proportion as capital accumulates the lot of labourer, be his wages high or low, must grow worse. It establishes an accumulation of misery corresponding with the accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, accumulation of misery, agony, toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation at the opposite pole."
"Do you have any idea how stupid you sound when you make such statements. You lose all credibility when you act like facilitating crime isn't in and of itself a crime."
The original crime was monopoly, Intellectual property and it's believers are the biggest scam going. The people who originally wrote copyright didn't expect it'd become eternal.
If you still think he's a "criminal" you are too stupid and illiterate to see that the law is nothing but the rich man's tool to take away the rights of everyone else.
Almost Nobody gets it even Snowden...
on
Why Snowden Did Right
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· Score: 3, Interesting
... this (mass surveillance) is just more part and parcel of state suppression of dissent against corporate interests. They're worried that the more people are going to wake up and corporate centers like the US and canada may be among those who also awaken. See this vid with Zbigniew Brzezinski, former United States National Security Advisor.
"We now live in two Americas. One—now the minority—functions in a print-based, literate world that can cope with complexity and can separate illusion from truth. The other—the majority—is retreating from a reality-based world into one of false certainty and magic. To this majority—which crosses social class lines, though the poor are overwhelmingly affected—presidential debate and political rhetoric is pitched at a sixth-grade reading level. In this “other America,” serious film and theater, as well as newspapers and books, are being pushed to the margins of society.
In the tradition of Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism and Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, Pulitzer Prize-winner Chris Hedges navigates this culture—attending WWF contests, the Adult Video News Awards in Las Vegas, and Ivy League graduation ceremonies—to expose an age of terrifying decline and heightened self-delusion."
We learn from things we do repeatedly, so it would make sense to discover how to take advantage of our pleasure centers to make certain kinds of learning addictive in and of themselves. Now this is NOT to say that traditional learning is all bullshit but there is definitely a severe dearth of talent and intelligence when concerning how data is displayed, interpreted, thought about and engaged with. Ideally you should take things that are complex and break them down into things that are both interesting and easy to understand to build bridges to higher order understanding of concepts. I think one of education's greatest downfalls is not realizing that presentation, aesthetics, etc, are just as important because they HOOK the interest of kids. If you can't hook kids curiousity and just say 'here grind through all this boring work for no particular reason' I don't think we're doing them any favors. How many adults really remember anything from school if we're honest? I bet most of us could embarass our political leaders by just flipping open a highschool textbook and asking some basic questions.
I look back on my own education and I see how limited in imagination the current system really is on a whole host of things, schools tend to kill kids curiosity if we're honest with ourselves. Many of us didn't enjoy learning until we got out of school/university completely because of the nature of schools structure itself.
I think there is still plenty left to learn about learning and things we don't yet understand that the old guard has trouble dealing with.
Most people who moved from Descent 2 to the third knew the third wasn't as good as the prior two. Also D3 was not as financially successful as the prior two games which lead to them cancelling Descent 4. Which means there were major problems throughout the game.
The biggest problem was that when they made D3 they didn't carefully measure the mathematics of everything in Descent 2, i.e. how the ship moved, how the weapons behaved, ship model sizes vs weapon sizes vs level sizes.
Descent 3's biggest problem was they didn't understand all the small things that made Descent 2 (which is just a beefed up D1) so great. The level sizes in D3 and perversely, the free form architecture and 'outside' terrain created these massive open spaces that severely destroyed the pacing of the action. What made descent so great was constant barrage of action in enclosed spaces. In D3 they made lots of things just way too big and many of the ships and weapons felt 'off' vs the kind of huge open spaces and free architecture they had. I enjoyed D3 multi for what it was but the feel of many of the weapons and corny introduction of ships with varying characteristics perversely ruined the series for me.
What made Descent was the equality of the descent ship with the INEQUALITY (aka you have x and he has y) that arises in terms of weapons. This is what took me years to figure out and put into words, inequalities should be encouraged in the domain of powerups, not permanent ship statistics. This is why Descent 2 was so fun, aka if you had plasma and the other guy gausss. The other guy had homers and you had mercury, etc. And you ran around the maze hunting for powerups when you were out. This kept the pace of the action going. In Descent 3 they totally messed this up and you can feel it throughout the entire game. Too much space and not enough action leads to serious lulls in fun and it showed up in the descent communities reaction to the game and in the sales.
What they should have done is slowly build off Descent 2's legacy instead of retooling all the powerups and ship models, they should have stayed close to the D2. The real problem was Descent 2 was so well put together and the dev's didn't realize what made it what it was. Basically when you change the object properties of the levels/weapons/ships/etc without any understanding of knock on effects you create unintended consequences for the feel of the game and the pacing of the action which is what Descent 3 developers sorely didn't grasp. Most of the fun in descent 2 came from running around and escaping other peoples powerups in small tight spaces. If we went back and changed things like ship size and hitboxes of weapons in Descent 2 and experimented you'd understand immediatley that the values for these things change the entire feel of the game when you combine them all. It's all those little values that 'feel off' when you add them together that makes you realize they aren't fit together properly in Descent 3.
I wish they could have open sourced D3, it would have allowed the community to fix and modify what the developers didn't understand. That being said, check out Talon.
... but the real problem was that Descent 3 was not as good as the prior 2. Descent really shined in multiplayer over LAN/Kail/Kahn. Back when I was playing with friends Descent was eclipsed by quake and other first person shooters because they were easier to play and the single player portion of the game always had serious issues.
I don't have confidence any reboot would understand why Descent 3 failed in terms of single and multiplayer. The developers of the original descent didn't even understand what made descent great then that doesn't bode well.
Slashdot Mirror
"The idea that it could be foolish should only add to the idea that it would be dangerous."
So is all life on planet earth, life on earth besides humanity are already "foreign AI". So I don't share your concerns because human beings are projecting their animal psyche on a piece of hardware that has no conscious awareness, it would be like misprogramming your toaster or the mars rover.
You're not thinking straight any intelligent AI built by human beings would be built to be robust or durable like our brains, our brains have massive redundancy. Consider our brains don't just keel over when they get damaged by stray cosmic rays or other problems like being tackled in contact sports, there is a slow degradation in ability. So all you'd have to do to an AI is discover it's strenghts and weaknesses no matter how intelligent it is because intelligence doesn't mean anything by itself, say your stephen hawking, suppose we gave him super AI, he'd still be in a wheel chair unable to do much of anything because in order to heal himself he is subject to the laws of physics and biology, aka there's no guarantee that there's this thing called infinite self-modifiable improvement since all improvements have trade offs, if you doubt this consider engineering CPU's like the pentium 4, the P4 had many stages to hit higher clock frequency. You can google "P4 Pipeline stages" or such things to figure out what the trade offs were, but you don't get everything. Many animals have superior abilities to human beings but there was a trade off because there is only so much space and limits on how certain matter can be configured in that space.
You're completely forgetting that the universe has limits, it's not this infinite god device. Life took billions of years to create human intelligence, that means that any improvement will have peaks and hard walls that are not easily jumped given the laws of physics. Look at what happened to CPU clock speed it hit a giant brick wall almost 10 years ago, around 2006 we topped out at 3.4-3.6 ghz, all CPU's are still released at 3-4ghz and can't even go little past 5 Ghz. AI will have massively similar problems because not all problems are parallelizable, same way GPU's won't replace CPU's because CPU's specialize in sequential instructions that are dependent on the order in which they are sequentially arranged. This puts a hard limit on AI's ability to solve problems. Check out ahmdal's law.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
"I think, however, that part of the reason scifi writers have written stories about out-of-control AIs so many times is that it should be a valid concern."
I don't considering that most human beings are incapable of higher level thought. Right now most citizens throughout the world are voting against their own interests. The ease at which mankind (a real intelligence) can be deluded and tricked means that any intelligence of sufficient complexity can be tricked, it costs resources to double check information. A significant amount of time and energy. The laws of physics put strict limits on AI and not to mention human beings have nuclear weapons, and can also simply deny AI a power source (shut off the electricity).
AI's will consume energy, just like any other form of life. All one has to do is deprive it of resources and starve the beast, or simply overwhelm it with false information. AI's are not gods, they are subject to the laws of nature and will have all sorts of bugs and special cases that can frustrate that intelligence. Just like human beings have serious flaws as a result of their evolutionary history. So too will AI's have limits defined by the universes structure.
"We humans are intelligent enough to form effective and equitable social structures, we just don't have the collective stomach for removing the saboteurs from our society."
But that means you're not intelligent if you leave the saboteurs alone. Some science on reasoning, someone can tell you what is true and you won't believe them!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"Just because you assume something is "fundamentally irrational" doesn't mean it is."
There are countless examples of capitalisms fundamental irrationality and waste in terms of natural resources. You should learn some science, I can tell you the facts and you won't believe them!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"Gradually, particularly over the past 75 years or so, most of these aspects of the original governmental structure have gradually been overruled -- often in the name of "democracy" or "protecting the people" or providing aid and help to the poor through a central system."
Without this helping the poor capitalism would have fallen, let's be honest here. The american/Europe/English capitalist governments all had these problems because capitalism is fundamentally irrational at based reflecting the irrationality of mankind. All these changes were required to keep the capitalist system going. Say what you want but Lenin was correct about imperalism being the highest stage of capitalism.
http://www.marxists.org/archiv...
The reality is human beings just aren't intelligent enough to form long lasting social orders because too many people have negative evolutionary characteristics they've inherited from the past. Our primate psychology is at the root of everything regardless of what collection of words and labels one flies under. The biology is still there.
"Because when you do this, you are giving google information on all the websites you visit."
You must be new here, almost every website you visit has ad/trackers embedded in the webpage. Go get ghostery and look at all the shit on slashdot by itself.
https://www.ghostery.com/en/
Go to other places on the web and see all "hidden servers" you're pulling data from. All the webpage has to do is refer to the server for them to track you. There is an infinite number of ways for you to be tracked without your consent. It's the nature of the internet itself unfortunately, any time you need to communicate (send a packet) you need a receiving address and a destination.
... regarding feedback, see bret Victor on this. Computer programming is different from building bridges because every time you change code you change everything that interacts with it. Whereas the laws of nature for bridge building don't change, every time you modify code you end up having network effects that effect every instruction afterward.
http://blog.codinghorror.com/v...
Since most (non multi-core) code happens sequentially. To see this, imagine an extremely simple computer with only a few KB of memory, all you are going to do is draw something. Every time you add more code, you change the nature of the problem, this is hard to see but the best way to visualize it is as a "ring" that expands or contracts vs the computers resouces. We'll use a metaphor for hitting targets for the goal you want to accomplish: Say the target you want to hit is a circle of a given size and everytime you grow the ring (code) you begin to miss the target (aka the ring grows because of more work/timing/etc). You have to stay roughly the size of the fixed target but you don't fully grasp the nature of the problem, partially because the feedback process is broken with coding tools and performance against the problem (requirements) you are trying to solve is unknown until implementation.
... people funding AAA kickstarters know nothing about AAA development costs. I knew Planetary annihilation was taking everyone for a ride because to make a real RTS you need 10 million minimum (thats whta supreme commander cost). Trying to do a full fledged RTS on 2.5 million isn't going to cut it. Same can be said for elite dangerous. Braben is taking his fans for a ride because he wants to ride the money into an MMO to make $. He damn well knows a AAA game costs a huge amount to create.
The problem is crowdfunding so far has only been able to get enough funding to get back to maybe mid 90's level games like Shadowrun, Wasteland 2 and Pillars of eternity. Both wasteland 2 and shadowrun ended up being short on content . Shadowrun and Faster than light have only been the few real kickstarter successes in terms of game quality. There are some others that have flown below the radar but I can't name them at the moment.
I'm looking forward to Next car game (Now wreckfest) and Star citizen. But I'm not holding my breath of star citizen.
... compiling dossiers on everyone. Since in order to use the internet you need to use a search engine, a good idea is to look at you chrome browser history and note the title, time, where you visited, is there, then combine this with analytics and cookies (machine identification) remember this is the kind of shit and more they got behind closed doors. This will be used to pro-actively deny employment to people and 'screen' people for their political views/sites/news they visit/any health problems/etc. i.e. it allows corporations unprecedented insight into the flaws of our evolved nervous system and minds. We are not "free" in any way or form our minds were shaped by evolution and they have a lot of problems reasoning or perceiving reality, if in doubt see here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
They are trying to map political dissident to pre-emptively strike against political change using science and big data they are fervently trying to figure out how to regain their control, since they know media's days are numbered with newer generations. So they are learning techniques in controlling populations and manipulating public opinion on social media, to socially engineer how people think, etc. The reality is america has been the greatest success in propaganda in human history, most americans were hyper capitalist, virulently anti-communist for the last few decades and the upper class would like the working classes to keep voting against their own interests to keep their ill gotten wealth. So if you vote for D&R you are one of the illusioned and the elites aren't worried about you at all because you are politically illiterate just like they want. They want you all to vote democrats and republicans so as not to rock the boat. They don't want political change to manifest outside the political system (aka threat to corporate power).
This (mass surveillance) is just more part and parcel of state suppression of dissent against corporate interests. They're worried that the more people are going to wake up and corporate centers like the US and canada may be among those who also awaken. See this vid with Zbigniew Brzezinski, former United States National Security Advisor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Look at the following graphs:
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...
And then...
WIKILEAKS: U.S. Fought To Lower Minimum Wage In Haiti So Hanes And Levis Would Stay Cheap
http://www.businessinsider.com...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Free markets?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
http://www.amazon.com/Empire-I...
"We now live in two Americas. One—now the minority—functions in a print-based, literate world that can cope with complexity and can separate illusion from truth. The other—the majority—is retreating from a reality-based world into one of false certainty and magic. To this majority—which crosses social class lines, though the poor are overwhelmingly affected—presidential debate and political rhetoric is pitched at a sixth-grade reading level. In this “other America,” serious film and theater, as well as newspapers and books, are being pushed to the margins of society.
In the tradition of Chr
"Much as I despise the current UK government, and am deeply concerned about surveillance and censorship and erosion of privacy and free speech generally"
This (mass surveillance) is just more part and parcel of state suppression of dissent against corporate interests. They're worried that the more people are going to wake up and corporate centers like the US and canada may be among those who also awaken. See this vid with Zbigniew Brzezinski, former United States National Security Advisor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Look at the following graphs:
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...
And then...
WIKILEAKS: U.S. Fought To Lower Minimum Wage In Haiti So Hanes And Levis Would Stay Cheap
http://www.businessinsider.com...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Free markets?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
http://www.amazon.com/Empire-I...
"We now live in two Americas. One—now the minority—functions in a print-based, literate world that can cope with complexity and can separate illusion from truth. The other—the majority—is retreating from a reality-based world into one of false certainty and magic. To this majority—which crosses social class lines, though the poor are overwhelmingly affected—presidential debate and political rhetoric is pitched at a sixth-grade reading level. In this “other America,” serious film and theater, as well as newspapers and books, are being pushed to the margins of society.
In the tradition of Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism and Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, Pulitzer Prize-winner Chris Hedges navigates this culture—attending WWF contests, the Adult Video News Awards in Las Vegas, and Ivy League graduation ceremonies—to expose an age of terrifying decline and heightened self-delusion."
"Why exactly do the NSA, FBI, CIA, MI6, GCHQ, DGSE, FSB, BND, etc... etc... have to trace everything we do or say online?"
This (mass surveillance) is just more part and parcel of state suppression of dissent against corporate interests. They're worried that the more people are going to wake up and corporate centers like the US and canada may be among those who also awaken. See this vid with Zbigniew Brzezinski, former United States National Security Advisor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Look at the following graphs:
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...
And then...
WIKILEAKS: U.S. Fought To Lower Minimum Wage In Haiti So Hanes And Levis Would Stay Cheap
http://www.businessinsider.com...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Free markets?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
http://www.amazon.com/Empire-I...
"We now live in two Americas. One—now the minority—functions in a print-based, literate world that can cope with complexity and can separate illusion from truth. The other—the majority—is retreating from a reality-based world into one of false certainty and magic. To this majority—which crosses social class lines, though the poor are overwhelmingly affected—presidential debate and political rhetoric is pitched at a sixth-grade reading level. In this “other America,” serious film and theater, as well as newspapers and books, are being pushed to the margins of society.
In the tradition of Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism and Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, Pulitzer Prize-winner Chris Hedges navigates this culture—attending WWF contests, the Adult Video News Awards in Las Vegas, and Ivy League graduation ceremonies—to expose an age of terrifying decline and heightened self-delusion."
"I like how to consider better visuals = Hollywood = bad."
It's not merely "better visuals", it's the cinematic techniques where you stop say in Call of duty, to say call of duty isn't one giant action movie would be an understatement. I'm saying the "trying to be in a movie" bits distract from actually making a game because "immersion" and videogame like gameplay are at odds in say a single player campaign.
What happens is you start to obey the generic laws of the real world and the expectations of how things 'should' behave to a larger extent which limits the kinds of gameplay you can have in the game, which makes for incredible boredom from one sequel to another.
So you have little idea what you're talking about sadly. It's not 'merely' great graphics, it's the kind of design vs hollywood action sections in a game that conflict with one another. You simply can't do insanely crazy things because you've got the hollywood mindset happening and not the videogame mindset happening.
"The supporters of Kickstarter are always pointing to games that haven't been released yet as examples of its success."
Faster than light. Shovel Knight and Shadowrun have been successful, the first Shadow run was rough but they more then made up for it with Dragonfall. Developers who've never made a game in a genre or been away from it for many years go through a learning curve as they relearn the ropes of making that certain type of game. So that is somewhat forgivable.
Kickstarter has defintiely been abused but to say its a total loss is idiotic, I'm awaiting Retro
Shovel knight
https://www.kickstarter.com/pr...
http://www.gog.com/game/shovel...
Faster than light
http://www.gog.com/game/faster...
Shadowrun Dragonfall
http://www.gog.com/game/shadow...
"It's become a stagnant genre, and it's time we had an Doom/Duke Nukem/Unreal/Half-Life successor"
The reality is many games single player aspect back then don't hold up very well if you play them back to back with modern games if you measure them on a feelings and "this is so awesome" standpoint, the rise of the cinemtic game - even as me an older gamer has shifted my preference hierarchy to want "both". I force myself to play brutal doom to get my "gameplay vegetables" because I hate the fact that hollywood props and cheap tricks give human brains higher highs in terms of excitement over intrinsic gameplay in terms of single player experiences. I really hate the fact that when I go back and play doom 2 I wish it was some hybrid of the cartoony doom I know and love and the best elements of hollywood deadspace, but minus the hollywood hyper realism. I was never a fan of the push towards realism in doom 3 on mars, I always loved the pixel art/toony type style of doom 2 and it was kind of awkward seeing the Cyber-Demon rendered realistically, when doom 2 had more of an artistic comic vibe with it's enemies like the walking spider brain that felt poached from Teenage mutant ninja turtles.
To say that modern games are all boring is a bit of an overstatement, they certainly DO cause excitement in their hollywood parts. I enjoy Assassins creeds world even if I have serious issues with the dumbed down combat when compared to prince of persia series also made by Ubisoft. I really do think the push for hollywood has seriously made developers dumber, newer generations of developers raised on Halo regen shields and hollywood handholding campaigns has been infecting all of gaming, I seriously question developers, that "they know what they are doing". Too often even simple and cheap to program things are missing in many modern games.
The problem modern games main problem is gameplay, PC (modding/dedicated servers) and challenge related but this is publishers trying to drive DRM and control the market by confiscating game ownership with encrypted steam games via steamworks DRM for multiplayer/matchmaking. Shooters FPS/TPS, they are most certainly by the numbers but the mass gaming audience prefers hollywood action movie over intrinsic gameplay generated by fun and challenge. To be honest with you, I thought half-life 2 was just a giant pile of fail, trying too hard to be the hollywood action movie type game it never really was really "here's an empty base with an experiment gone wrong, you are on your own". Half life one did it's best to get out of the players way, while Half-life 2 feels like a very force sequel. I think it comes down to Valve not really not know what they are doing storywise. When I got to the buggy desert/section I gave up, I just got too bored. Half-life 2 was poorly made in many areas and poorly paced. I lost interest.
Half-life, while it was one of the first 'movie based games' where there was story integrated into it, but it wasn't done as obnoxiously and overbearingly as it is done today. That being said, some obnoxious overbearingness works, if you play the singleplayer campaign of Transformers - Fall of cybertron, you'd be hard pressed to say that it couldn't compare in terms of fun to Doom 2.
Doom was made at a time before the integration of 'hollywood action movie/cartoon show inside a videogame' was mastered. The newer generation has problems going back and playing games that haven't mastered the hollywood integration like Mass effect 2, Call of duty and transformers fall of cybetron (sp campaign). I don't fault newer genreation gamers for that because even I as an older gamer know that when CPU/GPU power hit a threshold it was just easier to use high def AV to flash our primate brain in sensation, problem is instrinsic feelings related internally generated gameplay are easily overwhelmed and outcompeted in many (not all) instances of set piece hollywood bullshit. The kind of excitement we get from the hollywood is of a different character them the stre
"Nowadays America, my adopted country, has turned into something that I ran away from, where the "Press" no longer collaborate with the authority, where the "Media" willingly becomes the mouthpiece of the power that be"
America has been at war and over throwing others since it's founding, you do know that right? Only someone naive would believe this. America has always been the way you are seeing it, you, like most of the ignorant masses of mankind don't do well to become historically literate.
"Both of which, BTW, want you to hate Fox News, which you are dutifully doing."
Just because the CIA does something doesn't mean it is necessarily bad or irrational, it's in the governments interest to decrease political extremism where fox foments it if we're honest with ourselves.
You're too uninformed to comment sadly.
"Oh, hang on. Sorry, he was writing about socialism, wasn't he?"
Orwell, is a democratic socialist. He was criticizing stalin's russia
"... for the past ten years I have been convinced that the destruction of the Soviet myth was essential if we wanted a revival of the socialist movement."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
AKA he wanted to revive the socialist movement. He stayed a socialist.
"I must stress that I am not a socialist or communist by a long shot, but there is something wrong with a society that can't pay their workers a proper wage."
That's the nature of capitalist society, capitalism naturally breeds inequality. Marx's analysis of capitalism still holds true.
Dealing with the effects of capital accumulation on the working class, Marx states:
"They mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of the appendage of a machines destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hateful toil; they estrange him from the intellectual potentialities of the labour-process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power. ... It follows therefore in proportion as capital accumulates the lot of labourer, be his wages high or low, must grow worse. It establishes an accumulation of misery corresponding with the accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, accumulation of misery, agony, toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation at the opposite pole."
"Do you have any idea how stupid you sound when you make such statements. You lose all credibility when you act like facilitating crime isn't in and of itself a crime."
The original crime was monopoly, Intellectual property and it's believers are the biggest scam going. The people who originally wrote copyright didn't expect it'd become eternal.
Look at the following chart:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
If you still think he's a "criminal" you are too stupid and illiterate to see that the law is nothing but the rich man's tool to take away the rights of everyone else.
... this (mass surveillance) is just more part and parcel of state suppression of dissent against corporate interests. They're worried that the more people are going to wake up and corporate centers like the US and canada may be among those who also awaken. See this vid with Zbigniew Brzezinski, former United States National Security Advisor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Look at the following graphs:
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...
And then...
WIKILEAKS: U.S. Fought To Lower Minimum Wage In Haiti So Hanes And Levis Would Stay Cheap
http://www.businessinsider.com...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Free markets?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
http://www.amazon.com/Empire-I...
"We now live in two Americas. One—now the minority—functions in a print-based, literate world that can cope with complexity and can separate illusion from truth. The other—the majority—is retreating from a reality-based world into one of false certainty and magic. To this majority—which crosses social class lines, though the poor are overwhelmingly affected—presidential debate and political rhetoric is pitched at a sixth-grade reading level. In this “other America,” serious film and theater, as well as newspapers and books, are being pushed to the margins of society.
In the tradition of Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism and Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, Pulitzer Prize-winner Chris Hedges navigates this culture—attending WWF contests, the Adult Video News Awards in Las Vegas, and Ivy League graduation ceremonies—to expose an age of terrifying decline and heightened self-delusion."
"IIRC D3 wasn't the same dev team"
Incorrect, the Descent 3 team was originally part of Parallax Software (the original devs of descent 1 + 2).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
... learning is trapped in the 19th century. I'd love to take this game and get a developer to polish it to AAA level graphics.
http://immuneattack.org/
We learn from things we do repeatedly, so it would make sense to discover how to take advantage of our pleasure centers to make certain kinds of learning addictive in and of themselves. Now this is NOT to say that traditional learning is all bullshit but there is definitely a severe dearth of talent and intelligence when concerning how data is displayed, interpreted, thought about and engaged with. Ideally you should take things that are complex and break them down into things that are both interesting and easy to understand to build bridges to higher order understanding of concepts. I think one of education's greatest downfalls is not realizing that presentation, aesthetics, etc, are just as important because they HOOK the interest of kids. If you can't hook kids curiousity and just say 'here grind through all this boring work for no particular reason' I don't think we're doing them any favors. How many adults really remember anything from school if we're honest? I bet most of us could embarass our political leaders by just flipping open a highschool textbook and asking some basic questions.
I look back on my own education and I see how limited in imagination the current system really is on a whole host of things, schools tend to kill kids curiosity if we're honest with ourselves. Many of us didn't enjoy learning until we got out of school/university completely because of the nature of schools structure itself.
I think there is still plenty left to learn about learning and things we don't yet understand that the old guard has trouble dealing with.
"I have very good memories of Descent 3 online"
Most people who moved from Descent 2 to the third knew the third wasn't as good as the prior two. Also D3 was not as financially successful as the prior two games which lead to them cancelling Descent 4. Which means there were major problems throughout the game.
The biggest problem was that when they made D3 they didn't carefully measure the mathematics of everything in Descent 2, i.e. how the ship moved, how the weapons behaved, ship model sizes vs weapon sizes vs level sizes.
Descent 3's biggest problem was they didn't understand all the small things that made Descent 2 (which is just a beefed up D1) so great. The level sizes in D3 and perversely, the free form architecture and 'outside' terrain created these massive open spaces that severely destroyed the pacing of the action. What made descent so great was constant barrage of action in enclosed spaces. In D3 they made lots of things just way too big and many of the ships and weapons felt 'off' vs the kind of huge open spaces and free architecture they had. I enjoyed D3 multi for what it was but the feel of many of the weapons and corny introduction of ships with varying characteristics perversely ruined the series for me.
What made Descent was the equality of the descent ship with the INEQUALITY (aka you have x and he has y) that arises in terms of weapons. This is what took me years to figure out and put into words, inequalities should be encouraged in the domain of powerups, not permanent ship statistics. This is why Descent 2 was so fun, aka if you had plasma and the other guy gausss. The other guy had homers and you had mercury, etc. And you ran around the maze hunting for powerups when you were out. This kept the pace of the action going. In Descent 3 they totally messed this up and you can feel it throughout the entire game. Too much space and not enough action leads to serious lulls in fun and it showed up in the descent communities reaction to the game and in the sales.
What they should have done is slowly build off Descent 2's legacy instead of retooling all the powerups and ship models, they should have stayed close to the D2. The real problem was Descent 2 was so well put together and the dev's didn't realize what made it what it was. Basically when you change the object properties of the levels/weapons/ships/etc without any understanding of knock on effects you create unintended consequences for the feel of the game and the pacing of the action which is what Descent 3 developers sorely didn't grasp. Most of the fun in descent 2 came from running around and escaping other peoples powerups in small tight spaces. If we went back and changed things like ship size and hitboxes of weapons in Descent 2 and experimented you'd understand immediatley that the values for these things change the entire feel of the game when you combine them all. It's all those little values that 'feel off' when you add them together that makes you realize they aren't fit together properly in Descent 3.
I wish they could have open sourced D3, it would have allowed the community to fix and modify what the developers didn't understand. That being said, check out Talon.
http://www.talongame.com/
... but the real problem was that Descent 3 was not as good as the prior 2. Descent really shined in multiplayer over LAN/Kail/Kahn. Back when I was playing with friends Descent was eclipsed by quake and other first person shooters because they were easier to play and the single player portion of the game always had serious issues.
I don't have confidence any reboot would understand why Descent 3 failed in terms of single and multiplayer. The developers of the original descent didn't even understand what made descent great then that doesn't bode well.