No you didn't, I'm certain you didn't... Did all the smart people understand George cantor's theory of transfinite numbers?
Cantor's theory of transfinite numbers was originally regarded as so counter-intuitive—even shocking—that it encountered resistance from mathematical contemporaries such as Leopold Kronecker and Henri Poincaré[3] and later from Hermann Weyl and L. E. J. Brouwer, while Ludwig Wittgenstein raised philosophical objections. Some Christian theologians (particularly neo-Scholastics) saw Cantor's work as a challenge to the uniqueness of the absolute infinity in the nature of God,[4] on one occasion equating the theory of transfinite numbers with pantheism.[5] The objections to his work were occasionally fierce: Poincaré referred to Cantor's ideas as a "grave disease" infecting the discipline of mathematics,[6] and Kronecker's public opposition and personal attacks included describing Cantor as a "scientific charlatan", a "renegade" and a "corrupter of youth."[7] Writing decades after Cantor's death, Wittgenstein lamented that mathematics is "ridden through and through with the pernicious idioms of set theory," which he dismissed as "utter nonsense" that is "laughable" and "wrong".[8] Cantor's recurring bouts of depression from 1884 to the end of his life were once blamed on the hostile attitude of many of his contemporaries
"Somebody who believes educational success is all about social status in technical subjects is probably somebody who was lazy and prefers to say stuff like "Persistance and skill are often confused.""
I'm sorry but you didn't understand my post at all, I'm saying beyond a certain point, degree's are about status and NOT what you are capable of.
"Sounds like you're confusing education with schooling."
We all know dumb people with degree's, my point is just because someone went through school does not guarantee they are any good at what they do or that they learned much of anything while they were there.
The degree is about handing out marks of status, in my experience with people someone with a masters is not really better then someone with a bachelors. One simply had more persistance, endurance/ability to cheat amd money to pursue a mark of higher status.
"Isn't being a developer about real skill level, not the piece of paper on the wall?"'
It's really a game of social status, education does NOT ensure someone is smarter or more skilled, it only ensures that, that person had the persistance or was a very good cheater.
Persistance and skill are often confused, the education system is really about handing out status to attempt to justify who gets jobs over who doesn't merit be damned. Anyone who believes education is not mostly about social status is not very bright.
"I read about a research a while ago (years, sorry no source) that states that acquiring large sums of money creates the same kind of euphoria as for instance using cocaine as it causes the same neurotransmitters to be produced in the brain. Irrational need for more and more money is a real addiction I think and should be treated as such."
It has nothing to do with euphoria, being rich enables one to be free from work (slavery). Only people who are RICH get the FREEDOM TO CHOOSE whether they work or not, the rest of society is co-erced into working whatever the can find because they have no money and do not own the means of production.
Marx was correct about capitalist society in that sense, in our society most people are peasants since they have no political say in the seting of prices or the distribution of resources beyond the wage by and large that someone else who controls large amounts of resources determines.
It's not "new" it's just a modified aurora, i.e. the toolset gives it away bigtime.
"Dragon Age: Origins Bioware uses the newly developed Eclipse engine. This new architecture uses parts of the Aurora engine"
Which is code for we're taking aurora and modifying it, it's not really "new" it's just (now) more heavily modified aurora, but the crappyness of aurora is still all there, esp with the combat mechanics.
Re:Philosophy should have never been....
on
The Big Questions
·
· Score: 1
"Most well known ancient greek philosophers would also be baffled that our "natural philosophy" comes from observation of evidence rather than constructing internally consistent arguments with no basis in the natural world."
Sigh you missed the point of the post, they would laude our passion and commitment to truth had they still lived through the ages and saw the rise of science, etc. What we call "philosophy" of those ancient philosophers was a people's attempts to come to grips with the nature of understanding well before many discoveries had been made, you act like it was obvious how to develop knowledge when the necessarily conceptual advances historically speaking were not available to the ancient greeks.
Philosophy should have never been....
on
The Big Questions
·
· Score: 1
... considered a seperate "branch of knowledge" since if you study people like plato, Plato says thus:
"And those whose hearts are fixed on Reality itself deserve the title of Philosophers." (Plato, Republic, 380BC)
I think many ancient philosophers would find it strange we consider things seperate, in the last little while we've tended not to see things holistically like ancient philosophers did.
"In other words, I suppose I'd rather pay $57 for a fantastic game than $50 for a mediocre one."
But weren't you supposed to pay $50 for a fantastic game when you bought it? DLC is basically extortion, when you buy a car and it's missing it's doors, would you be happy if they sold you the doors after you just laid down 20 or 30K for a car? I didn't think so either.
When you buy a product it should be the WHOLE product. DLC has shown itself to be nothing more then ripping off gamers everywhere and these stupid gamers keep this crap afloat.
The game uses the same base engine of previous neverwinter games and you can tell when you look at the combat mechanics of the game, go play some quick battles in NWN1 and NWN2 and you can still feel how the never got rid of the clumsyness of battle system itself.
Dragon ages would have been better as an ARPG instead they tried to stuff it into Neverwinters moldy engine. The only thing that keeps the game going is the art and interesting characters and dialogue.
I must admit though the art direction is what really makes this game, it's a miracle they got decent art finally out of the abortions in terms of ART that Neverwinter 1 and 2 were.
You can still feel the sluggishness of the aged aurora/NWN engine though, even on the latest and greatest it will chug in some area's.
"It's not a port of Dead Space, nor is it a Wii-ed down version of it. It's an entirely separate title, which serves as a prequel to the original game"
But only a small segment fo the hardcore would know this. Plus people would assume it's the same as deadspace and just rent it, there is no reason to BUY extraction, extraction is a rented only game. I'd love to see the comparisons of how many people rented Deadspace Extraction vs sales of the game. Lets not forget renting cuts into game sales in a big way, why buy a semi ok mature game for $50 when you can rent it for 5-7 bucks for a week and just finish it and not waste your money?
I also think deadspace was a bad game to target on the Wii, the Wii needs mature games from Japan like JRPG's like Final fantasy, and fighters like Soul calibur, it doesn't need western Quasi third person FPS games.
FPS games are so overdone as it is and Xbox 360/Ps3 does them better. Anyone who has a Wii also has an Xbox and/or PS3, AND a PC. I think companies keep forgetting this.
There's also a shit tonne of games to get through every year, for someone who doesn't have an infinite amount of time to play games Deadspace extraction would just be passed over.
I still claim that companies are getting stupid and out of touch. We can see this with what Nintendo did to the starfox franchise, the original development team knew the fans wanted starfox in the Vein of the original and SF64 but Miyamoto is a complete dickhead, I read an article on how The dev of Starfox and miyamoto had a falling out which lead to the abortion that was starfox adventure's and Starfox assault.
"The sad thing is that the few mature games for the Wii that are actually any good are being hit by the fallout from this. Dead Space: Extraction is an excellent game - a thinking man's rail shooter (which I would previously have believed to be a contradiction in terms) and it deserved to do well. Instead, if wikipedia is to be believed, it sold less than 9,300 copies at launch, despite a positive critical reception."
Because everyone already played it, deadspace was released for the PC and other platforms a long time ago it would make sense that everyone who wanted to play it would get the better versions on Xbox/PS3 or PC. Sometimes I think companies are DUMB, people own more then one platform and EVERYONE has a PC. So anyone who wanted to play Deadspace most likely did already.
I think gaming companies are getting dumber and dumber personally, they are not making the right mature games for the Wii. They need to make a real sequal to starfox (not adventures crap), since Starfox assault was total crap.
Nintendo needs to convince Namco to release soul calibur on it's platform, I loved Soul calibur 2 on the gamecube and I was so pissed off that the didn't release SC3 for the GC. I loved the whole special characters they added too in SC2 like Link, and others for other platforms. Soul calibur 2 sold over 700,000 copies for each platform and somehow they justified not releasing SC3 for the GC (not sure if they nixed xbox as well) and just released for PS2, it was a dumb ass move.
Quite frankly it's getting obvious that the people in charge getting out of touch with business more and more.
Awful analysis - not even self consistent. Actually, not even your analysis - just a regurgitation of something in Slate, or... wherever you nubbed it from."
Try reading the aritcle and looking at data and other posts he references with SORUCES you troll.
It's obvious you didn't read the damn article and have some kneejerk need to defend your ideology (extremely pro private sector obviously) if you had you would have noticed he linked to blogs which linked to references and souces of the data.
You didn't read it all (especially the slate article)
Your "affordability" bullshit, here's what you said:
"but aren't "economic reasons" perfectly *good* reasons to shut people out of home ownership? If you can't afford it, you can't afford it!"
Here's page 2 of slate:
Second, many of the biggest flameouts in real estate have had nothing to do with subprime lending. WCI Communities, builder of highly amenitized condos in Florida (no subprime purchasers welcome there), filed for bankruptcy in August. Very few of the tens of thousands of now-surplus condominiums in Miami were conceived to be marketed to subprime borrowers, or minorities—unless you count rich Venezuelans and Colombians as minorities. The multiyear plague that has been documented in brilliant detail at IrvineHousingBlog is playing out in one of the least-subprime housing markets in the nation.
Third, lending money to poor people and minorities isn't inherently risky. There's plenty of evidence that in fact it's not that risky at all. That's what we've learned from several decades of microlending programs, at home and abroad, with their very high repayment rates. And as the New York Times recently reported, Nehemiah Homes, a long-running initiative to build homes and sell them to the working poor in subprime areas of New York's outer boroughs, has a repayment rate that lenders in Greenwich, Conn., would envy. In 27 years, there have been fewer than 10 defaults on the project's 3,900 homes. That's a rate of 0.25 percent.
On the other hand, lending money recklessly to obscenely rich white guys, such as Richard Fuld of Lehman Bros. or Jimmy Cayne of Bear Stearns, can be really risky. In fact, it's even more risky, since they have a lot more borrowing capacity. And here, again, it's difficult to imagine how Jimmy Carter could be responsible for the supremely poor decision-making seen in the financial system. I await the Krauthammer column in which he points out the specific provision of the Community Reinvestment Act that forced Bear Stearns to run with an absurd leverage ratio of 33 to 1, which instructed Bear Stearns hedge-fund managers to blow up hundreds of millions of their clients' money, and that required its septuagenarian CEO to play bridge while his company ran into trouble. Perhaps Neil Cavuto knows which CRA clause required Lehman Bros. to borrow hundreds of billions of dollars in short-term debt in the capital markets and then buy tens of billions of dollars of commercial real estate at the top of the market. I can't find it. Did AIG plunge into the credit-default-swaps business with abandon because Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now members picketed its offices? Please. How about the hundreds of billions of dollars of leveraged loans—loans banks committed to private-equity firms that wanted to conduct leveraged buyouts of retailers, restaurant companies, and industrial firms? Many of those are going bad now, too. Is that Bill Clinton's fault?
Look: There was a culture of stupid, reckless lending, of which Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the subprime lenders were an integral part. But the dumb-lending virus originated in Greenwich, Conn., midtown Manhattan, and Southern California, not Eastchester, Brownsville, and Washington, D.C. Investment banks created a demand for subprime loans because they saw it as a new asset class that they could dominate. They made subprime loans for the same reason they made other loans: They could get paid for making the loans, for turning them into securities, and for trading them—frequently using borrowed capital.
At Monday's hearing, Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., gamely tried to pin Lehman's demise on Fannie and Freddie. After comparing Lehman's small political contributions with Fannie and Freddie's much larger ones, Mica asked Fuld what role Fannie and Freddie's failure played in Lehman's demise. Fuld's response: "De minimis."
Lending money to poor people doesn't make you poor. Lending money poorly to rich people does.
Second, many of the biggest flameouts in real estate have had nothing to do with subprime lending. WCI Communities, builder of highly amenitized condos in Florida (no subprime purchasers welcome there), filed for bankruptcy in August. Very few of the tens of thousands of now-surplus condominiums in Miami were conceived to be marketed to subprime borrowers, or minorities—unless you count rich Venezuelans and Colombians as minorities. The multiyear plague that has been documented in brilliant detail at IrvineHousingBlog is playing out in one of the least-subprime housing markets in the nation.
Third, lending money to poor people and minorities isn't inherently risky. There's plenty of evidence that in fact it's not that risky at all. That's what we've learned from several decades of microlending programs, at home and abroad, with their very high repayment rates. And as the New York Times recently reported, Nehemiah Homes, a long-running initiative to build homes and sell them to the working poor in subprime areas of New York's outer boroughs, has a repayment rate that lenders in Greenwich, Conn., would envy. In 27 years, there have been fewer than 10 defaults on the project's 3,900 homes. That's a rate of 0.25 percent.
On the other hand, lending money recklessly to obscenely rich white guys, such as Richard Fuld of Lehman Bros. or Jimmy Cayne of Bear Stearns, can be really risky. In fact, it's even more risky, since they have a lot more borrowing capacity. And here, again, it's difficult to imagine how Jimmy Carter could be responsible for the supremely poor decision-making seen in the financial system. I await the Krauthammer column in which he points out the specific provision of the Community Reinvestment Act that forced Bear Stearns to run with an absurd leverage ratio of 33 to 1, which instructed Bear Stearns hedge-fund managers to blow up hundreds of millions of their clients' money, and that required its septuagenarian CEO to play bridge while his company ran into trouble. Perhaps Neil Cavuto knows which CRA clause required Lehman Bros. to borrow hundreds of billions of dollars in short-term debt in the capital markets and then buy tens of billions of dollars of commercial real estate at the top of the market. I can't find it. Did AIG plunge into the credit-default-swaps business with abandon because Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now members picketed its offices? Please. How about the hundreds of billions of dollars of leveraged loans—loans banks committed to private-equity firms that wanted to conduct leveraged buyouts of retailers, restaurant companies, and industrial firms? Many of those are going bad now, too. Is that Bill Clinton's fault?
Look: There was a culture of stupid, reckless lending, of which Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the subprime lenders were an integral part. But the dumb-lending virus originated in Greenwich, Conn., midtown Manhattan, and Southern California, not Eastchester, Brownsville, and Washington, D.C. Investment banks created a demand for subprime loans because they saw it as a new asset class that they could dominate. They made subprime loans for the same reason they made other loans: They could get paid for making the loans, for turning them into securities, and for trading them—frequently using borrowed capital.
At Monday's hearing, Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., gamely tried to pin Lehman's demise on Fannie and Freddie. After comparing Lehman's small political contributions with Fannie and Freddie's much larger ones, Mica asked Fuld what role Fannie and Freddie's failure played in Lehman's demise. Fuld's response: "De minimis."
Lending money to poor people doesn't make you poor. Lending money poorly to rich people does.
RTFA, you didn't even check out the slate article nor the numerous links provided by it.
The whole point was that this has nothing to do with government and everything to do with business committing fraud.
(from slate article)
"There's much more. As Barry Ritholtz notes in this fine rant, the CRA didn't force mortgage companies to offer loans for no money down, or to throw underwriting standards out the window, or to encourage mortgage brokers to aggressively seek out new markets. Nor did the CRA force the credit-rating agencies to slap high-grade ratings on packages of subprime debt"
"There's much more. As Barry Ritholtz notes in this fine rant, the CRA didn't force mortgage companies to offer loans for no money down, or to throw underwriting standards out the window, or to encourage mortgage brokers to aggressively seek out new markets. Nor did the CRA force the credit-rating agencies to slap high-grade ratings on packages of subprime debt"
"How is it that, with such easy access to information, people still think the crash had anything to do with business? "
More right wing lies.
As the economy worsens and Election Day approaches, a conservative campaign that blames the global financial crisis on a government push to make housing more affordable to lower-class Americans has taken off on talk radio and e-mail.
Commentators say that's what triggered the stock market meltdown and the freeze on credit. They've specifically targeted the mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which the federal government seized on Sept. 6, contending that lending to poor and minority Americans caused Fannie's and Freddie's financial problems.
Federal housing data reveal that the charges aren't true, and that the private sector, not the government or government-backed companies, was behind the soaring subprime lending at the core of the crisis.
Subprime lending offered high-cost loans to the weakest borrowers during the housing boom that lasted from 2001 to 2007. Subprime lending was at its height vrom 2004 to 2006.
Federal Reserve Board data show that:
_ More than 84 percent of the subprime mortgages in 2006 were issued by private lending institutions.
_ Private firms made nearly 83 percent of the subprime loans to low- and moderate-income borrowers that year.
_ Only one of the top 25 subprime lenders in 2006 was directly subject to the housing law that's being lambasted by conservative critics.
In Slate, Daniel Gross, senior editor of Newsweek, lays out the right wing mantra on the financial crisis:
On the Republican side of Congress, in the right-wing financial media (which is to say the financial media), and in certain parts of the op-ed-o-sphere, there's a consensus emerging that the whole mess should be laid at the feet of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the failed mortgage giants, and the Community Reinvestment Act, a law passed during the Carter administration. The CRA, which was amended in the 1990s and this decade, requires banks—which had a long, distinguished history of not making loans to minorities—to make more efforts to do so.
The thesis is laid out almost daily on the Wall Street Journal editorial page, in the National Review, and on the campaign trail. John McCain said yesterday, "Bad mortgages were being backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and it was only a matter of time before a contagion of unsustainable debt began to spread." Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer provides an excellent example, writing that "much of this crisis was brought upon us by the good intentions of good people." He continues: "For decades, starting with Jimmy Carter's Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, there has been bipartisan agreement to use government power to expand homeownership to people who had been shut out for economic reasons or, sometimes, because of racial and ethnic discrimination. What could be a more worthy cause? But it led to tremendous pressure on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—which in turn pressured banks and other lenders—to extend mortgages to people who were borrowing over their heads. That's called subprime lending. It lies at the root of our current calamity." The subtext: If only Congress didn't force banks to lend money to poor minorities, the Dow would be well on its way to 36,000. Or, as Fox Business Channel's Neil Cavuto put it, "I don't remember a clarion call that said: Fannie and Freddie are a disaster. Loaning to minorities and risky folks is a disaster."
* * * * * * * *
The Community Reinvestment Act applies to depository banks. But many of the institutions that spurred the massive growth of the subprime market weren't regulated banks. They were outfits such as Argent and American Home Mortgage, which were generally not regulated by the Federal Reserve or other entities that monitored compliance with CRA. These institutions worked hand in glo
Yes, because BOTH are the answer, at the same time.
Allow me to try to explain this, before you explode."
The real issue is the AGENT principle problem, people will begin to rule in their interests over the common good. Free marketeers and socialists both fall for it.
But it really comes down to human beings being stupid low intelligence creatures, with genetic engineering/AI I'm guessing a lot of our problems would be eliminated, it's the human minds gullability and mediocrity at seperating truth from error that causes so much mischief
Except most people today are moving from ABSOLUTE poverty to a developed nation poor, does not mean that classes will not solidify over time as the rest of the world becomes fully developed like the west.
In the west we have a reversing trend, more people are getting poorer.
Social mobility cuts both ways (i.e. person in developed country gets job, x amount of workers lose their jobs in USA/Canada, Europe).
And considering the amount of underemployed unviersity educated people in the USA and Canada it's quite obvious that they are backsliding (i.e. goign backwards).
I just read a big article on it the other day I'll see if I can't find it.
"Spengler's analysis of democratic systems argues that even the use of one's own constitutional rights requires money, and that voting can only really work as designed in the absence of organized leadership working on the election process. As soon as the election process becomes organized by political leaders, to the extent that money allows, the vote ceases to be truly significant. It is no more than a recorded opinion of the masses on the organizations of government over which they possess no positive influence whatsoever."
Slashdot Mirror
No you didn't, I'm certain you didn't... Did all the smart people understand George cantor's theory of transfinite numbers?
Cantor's theory of transfinite numbers was originally regarded as so counter-intuitive—even shocking—that it encountered resistance from mathematical contemporaries such as Leopold Kronecker and Henri Poincaré[3] and later from Hermann Weyl and L. E. J. Brouwer, while Ludwig Wittgenstein raised philosophical objections. Some Christian theologians (particularly neo-Scholastics) saw Cantor's work as a challenge to the uniqueness of the absolute infinity in the nature of God,[4] on one occasion equating the theory of transfinite numbers with pantheism.[5] The objections to his work were occasionally fierce: Poincaré referred to Cantor's ideas as a "grave disease" infecting the discipline of mathematics,[6] and Kronecker's public opposition and personal attacks included describing Cantor as a "scientific charlatan", a "renegade" and a "corrupter of youth."[7] Writing decades after Cantor's death, Wittgenstein lamented that mathematics is "ridden through and through with the pernicious idioms of set theory," which he dismissed as "utter nonsense" that is "laughable" and "wrong".[8] Cantor's recurring bouts of depression from 1884 to the end of his life were once blamed on the hostile attitude of many of his contemporaries
"Somebody who believes educational success is all about social status in technical subjects is probably somebody who was lazy and prefers to say stuff like "Persistance and skill are often confused.""
I'm sorry but you didn't understand my post at all, I'm saying beyond a certain point, degree's are about status and NOT what you are capable of.
"Sounds like you're confusing education with schooling."
We all know dumb people with degree's, my point is just because someone went through school does not guarantee they are any good at what they do or that they learned much of anything while they were there.
The degree is about handing out marks of status, in my experience with people someone with a masters is not really better then someone with a bachelors. One simply had more persistance, endurance/ability to cheat amd money to pursue a mark of higher status.
"Isn't being a developer about real skill level, not the piece of paper on the wall?"'
It's really a game of social status, education does NOT ensure someone is smarter or more skilled, it only ensures that, that person had the persistance or was a very good cheater.
Persistance and skill are often confused, the education system is really about handing out status to attempt to justify who gets jobs over who doesn't merit be damned. Anyone who believes education is not mostly about social status is not very bright.
"I read about a research a while ago (years, sorry no source) that states that acquiring large sums of money creates the same kind of euphoria as for instance using cocaine as it causes the same neurotransmitters to be produced in the brain. Irrational need for more and more money is a real addiction I think and should be treated as such."
It has nothing to do with euphoria, being rich enables one to be free from work (slavery). Only people who are RICH get the FREEDOM TO CHOOSE whether they work or not, the rest of society is co-erced into working whatever the can find because they have no money and do not own the means of production.
Marx was correct about capitalist society in that sense, in our society most people are peasants since they have no political say in the seting of prices or the distribution of resources beyond the wage by and large that someone else who controls large amounts of resources determines.
"Beggers can't be choosers".
It's not "new" it's just a modified aurora, i.e. the toolset gives it away bigtime.
"Dragon Age: Origins Bioware uses the newly developed Eclipse engine. This new architecture uses parts of the Aurora engine"
Which is code for we're taking aurora and modifying it, it's not really "new" it's just (now) more heavily modified aurora, but the crappyness of aurora is still all there, esp with the combat mechanics.
"Most well known ancient greek philosophers would also be baffled that our "natural philosophy" comes from observation of evidence rather than constructing internally consistent arguments with no basis in the natural world."
Sigh you missed the point of the post, they would laude our passion and commitment to truth had they still lived through the ages and saw the rise of science, etc. What we call "philosophy" of those ancient philosophers was a people's attempts to come to grips with the nature of understanding well before many discoveries had been made, you act like it was obvious how to develop knowledge when the necessarily conceptual advances historically speaking were not available to the ancient greeks.
... considered a seperate "branch of knowledge" since if you study people like plato, Plato says thus:
"And those whose hearts are fixed on Reality itself deserve the title of Philosophers."
(Plato, Republic, 380BC)
I think many ancient philosophers would find it strange we consider things seperate, in the last little while we've tended not to see things holistically like ancient philosophers did.
"In other words, I suppose I'd rather pay $57 for a fantastic game than $50 for a mediocre one."
But weren't you supposed to pay $50 for a fantastic game when you bought it? DLC is basically extortion, when you buy a car and it's missing it's doors, would you be happy if they sold you the doors after you just laid down 20 or 30K for a car? I didn't think so either.
When you buy a product it should be the WHOLE product. DLC has shown itself to be nothing more then ripping off gamers everywhere and these stupid gamers keep this crap afloat.
The game uses the same base engine of previous neverwinter games and you can tell when you look at the combat mechanics of the game, go play some quick battles in NWN1 and NWN2 and you can still feel how the never got rid of the clumsyness of battle system itself.
Dragon ages would have been better as an ARPG instead they tried to stuff it into Neverwinters moldy engine. The only thing that keeps the game going is the art and interesting characters and dialogue.
I must admit though the art direction is what really makes this game, it's a miracle they got decent art finally out of the abortions in terms of ART that Neverwinter 1 and 2 were.
You can still feel the sluggishness of the aged aurora/NWN engine though, even on the latest and greatest it will chug in some area's.
"It's not a port of Dead Space, nor is it a Wii-ed down version of it. It's an entirely separate title, which serves as a prequel to the original game"
But only a small segment fo the hardcore would know this. Plus people would assume it's the same as deadspace and just rent it, there is no reason to BUY extraction, extraction is a rented only game. I'd love to see the comparisons of how many people rented Deadspace Extraction vs sales of the game. Lets not forget renting cuts into game sales in a big way, why buy a semi ok mature game for $50 when you can rent it for 5-7 bucks for a week and just finish it and not waste your money?
I also think deadspace was a bad game to target on the Wii, the Wii needs mature games from Japan like JRPG's like Final fantasy, and fighters like Soul calibur, it doesn't need western Quasi third person FPS games.
FPS games are so overdone as it is and Xbox 360/Ps3 does them better. Anyone who has a Wii also has an Xbox and/or PS3, AND a PC. I think companies keep forgetting this.
There's also a shit tonne of games to get through every year, for someone who doesn't have an infinite amount of time to play games Deadspace extraction would just be passed over.
I still claim that companies are getting stupid and out of touch. We can see this with what Nintendo did to the starfox franchise, the original development team knew the fans wanted starfox in the Vein of the original and SF64 but Miyamoto is a complete dickhead, I read an article on how The dev of Starfox and miyamoto had a falling out which lead to the abortion that was starfox adventure's and Starfox assault.
"The sad thing is that the few mature games for the Wii that are actually any good are being hit by the fallout from this. Dead Space: Extraction is an excellent game - a thinking man's rail shooter (which I would previously have believed to be a contradiction in terms) and it deserved to do well. Instead, if wikipedia is to be believed, it sold less than 9,300 copies at launch, despite a positive critical reception."
Because everyone already played it, deadspace was released for the PC and other platforms a long time ago it would make sense that everyone who wanted to play it would get the better versions on Xbox/PS3 or PC. Sometimes I think companies are DUMB, people own more then one platform and EVERYONE has a PC. So anyone who wanted to play Deadspace most likely did already.
I think gaming companies are getting dumber and dumber personally, they are not making the right mature games for the Wii. They need to make a real sequal to starfox (not adventures crap), since Starfox assault was total crap.
Nintendo needs to convince Namco to release soul calibur on it's platform, I loved Soul calibur 2 on the gamecube and I was so pissed off that the didn't release SC3 for the GC. I loved the whole special characters they added too in SC2 like Link, and others for other platforms. Soul calibur 2 sold over 700,000 copies for each platform and somehow they justified not releasing SC3 for the GC (not sure if they nixed xbox as well) and just released for PS2, it was a dumb ass move.
Quite frankly it's getting obvious that the people in charge getting out of touch with business more and more.
... it make's sense that placebo effect exists because the ability to shut on and shut off pain perception is critical to human development.
There is a condition where people feel no pain at all, see this article here of a girl who feels no pain.
http://www.cnn.com/2006/HEALTH/conditions/02/03/btsc.oppenheim/
"Give someone enough rope to hang themselves....
Awful analysis - not even self consistent. Actually, not even your analysis - just a regurgitation of something in Slate, or ... wherever you nubbed it from."
Try reading the aritcle and looking at data and other posts he references with SORUCES you troll.
Ctrl-F "sources"
http://bigpicture.typepad.com/comments/2008/10/misunderstandin.html
It's obvious you didn't read the damn article and have some kneejerk need to defend your ideology (extremely pro private sector obviously) if you had you would have noticed he linked to blogs which linked to references and souces of the data.
http://bigpicture.typepad.com/comments/2008/10/misunderstandin.html
Ctrl-F "sources"
Try answering the questions in that blogpost before you spout off your bullshit saying it was the government.
You didn't read it all (especially the slate article)
Your "affordability" bullshit, here's what you said:
"but aren't "economic reasons" perfectly *good* reasons to shut people out of home ownership? If you can't afford it, you can't afford it!"
Here's page 2 of slate:
Second, many of the biggest flameouts in real estate have had nothing to do with subprime lending. WCI Communities, builder of highly amenitized condos in Florida (no subprime purchasers welcome there), filed for bankruptcy in August. Very few of the tens of thousands of now-surplus condominiums in Miami were conceived to be marketed to subprime borrowers, or minorities—unless you count rich Venezuelans and Colombians as minorities. The multiyear plague that has been documented in brilliant detail at IrvineHousingBlog is playing out in one of the least-subprime housing markets in the nation.
Third, lending money to poor people and minorities isn't inherently risky. There's plenty of evidence that in fact it's not that risky at all. That's what we've learned from several decades of microlending programs, at home and abroad, with their very high repayment rates. And as the New York Times recently reported, Nehemiah Homes, a long-running initiative to build homes and sell them to the working poor in subprime areas of New York's outer boroughs, has a repayment rate that lenders in Greenwich, Conn., would envy. In 27 years, there have been fewer than 10 defaults on the project's 3,900 homes. That's a rate of 0.25 percent.
On the other hand, lending money recklessly to obscenely rich white guys, such as Richard Fuld of Lehman Bros. or Jimmy Cayne of Bear Stearns, can be really risky. In fact, it's even more risky, since they have a lot more borrowing capacity. And here, again, it's difficult to imagine how Jimmy Carter could be responsible for the supremely poor decision-making seen in the financial system. I await the Krauthammer column in which he points out the specific provision of the Community Reinvestment Act that forced Bear Stearns to run with an absurd leverage ratio of 33 to 1, which instructed Bear Stearns hedge-fund managers to blow up hundreds of millions of their clients' money, and that required its septuagenarian CEO to play bridge while his company ran into trouble. Perhaps Neil Cavuto knows which CRA clause required Lehman Bros. to borrow hundreds of billions of dollars in short-term debt in the capital markets and then buy tens of billions of dollars of commercial real estate at the top of the market. I can't find it. Did AIG plunge into the credit-default-swaps business with abandon because Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now members picketed its offices? Please. How about the hundreds of billions of dollars of leveraged loans—loans banks committed to private-equity firms that wanted to conduct leveraged buyouts of retailers, restaurant companies, and industrial firms? Many of those are going bad now, too. Is that Bill Clinton's fault?
Look: There was a culture of stupid, reckless lending, of which Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the subprime lenders were an integral part. But the dumb-lending virus originated in Greenwich, Conn., midtown Manhattan, and Southern California, not Eastchester, Brownsville, and Washington, D.C. Investment banks created a demand for subprime loans because they saw it as a new asset class that they could dominate. They made subprime loans for the same reason they made other loans: They could get paid for making the loans, for turning them into securities, and for trading them—frequently using borrowed capital.
At Monday's hearing, Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., gamely tried to pin Lehman's demise on Fannie and Freddie. After comparing Lehman's small political contributions with Fannie and Freddie's much larger ones, Mica asked Fuld what role Fannie and Freddie's failure played in Lehman's demise. Fuld's response: "De minimis."
Lending money to poor people doesn't make you poor. Lending money poorly to rich people does.
Dammit you don't read anything do you.
I'll repost:
Second, many of the biggest flameouts in real estate have had nothing to do with subprime lending. WCI Communities, builder of highly amenitized condos in Florida (no subprime purchasers welcome there), filed for bankruptcy in August. Very few of the tens of thousands of now-surplus condominiums in Miami were conceived to be marketed to subprime borrowers, or minorities—unless you count rich Venezuelans and Colombians as minorities. The multiyear plague that has been documented in brilliant detail at IrvineHousingBlog is playing out in one of the least-subprime housing markets in the nation.
Third, lending money to poor people and minorities isn't inherently risky. There's plenty of evidence that in fact it's not that risky at all. That's what we've learned from several decades of microlending programs, at home and abroad, with their very high repayment rates. And as the New York Times recently reported, Nehemiah Homes, a long-running initiative to build homes and sell them to the working poor in subprime areas of New York's outer boroughs, has a repayment rate that lenders in Greenwich, Conn., would envy. In 27 years, there have been fewer than 10 defaults on the project's 3,900 homes. That's a rate of 0.25 percent.
On the other hand, lending money recklessly to obscenely rich white guys, such as Richard Fuld of Lehman Bros. or Jimmy Cayne of Bear Stearns, can be really risky. In fact, it's even more risky, since they have a lot more borrowing capacity. And here, again, it's difficult to imagine how Jimmy Carter could be responsible for the supremely poor decision-making seen in the financial system. I await the Krauthammer column in which he points out the specific provision of the Community Reinvestment Act that forced Bear Stearns to run with an absurd leverage ratio of 33 to 1, which instructed Bear Stearns hedge-fund managers to blow up hundreds of millions of their clients' money, and that required its septuagenarian CEO to play bridge while his company ran into trouble. Perhaps Neil Cavuto knows which CRA clause required Lehman Bros. to borrow hundreds of billions of dollars in short-term debt in the capital markets and then buy tens of billions of dollars of commercial real estate at the top of the market. I can't find it. Did AIG plunge into the credit-default-swaps business with abandon because Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now members picketed its offices? Please. How about the hundreds of billions of dollars of leveraged loans—loans banks committed to private-equity firms that wanted to conduct leveraged buyouts of retailers, restaurant companies, and industrial firms? Many of those are going bad now, too. Is that Bill Clinton's fault?
Look: There was a culture of stupid, reckless lending, of which Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the subprime lenders were an integral part. But the dumb-lending virus originated in Greenwich, Conn., midtown Manhattan, and Southern California, not Eastchester, Brownsville, and Washington, D.C. Investment banks created a demand for subprime loans because they saw it as a new asset class that they could dominate. They made subprime loans for the same reason they made other loans: They could get paid for making the loans, for turning them into securities, and for trading them—frequently using borrowed capital.
At Monday's hearing, Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., gamely tried to pin Lehman's demise on Fannie and Freddie. After comparing Lehman's small political contributions with Fannie and Freddie's much larger ones, Mica asked Fuld what role Fannie and Freddie's failure played in Lehman's demise. Fuld's response: "De minimis."
Lending money to poor people doesn't make you poor. Lending money poorly to rich people does.
RTFA, you didn't even check out the slate article nor the numerous links provided by it.
The whole point was that this has nothing to do with government and everything to do with business committing fraud.
(from slate article)
"There's much more. As Barry Ritholtz notes in this fine rant, the CRA didn't force mortgage companies to offer loans for no money down, or to throw underwriting standards out the window, or to encourage mortgage brokers to aggressively seek out new markets. Nor did the CRA force the credit-rating agencies to slap high-grade ratings on packages of subprime debt"
Rant he was talking about:
http://bigpicture.typepad.com/comments/2008/10/misunderstandin.html
Try RTFA you are clearly misinformed.
"There's much more. As Barry Ritholtz notes in this fine rant, the CRA didn't force mortgage companies to offer loans for no money down, or to throw underwriting standards out the window, or to encourage mortgage brokers to aggressively seek out new markets. Nor did the CRA force the credit-rating agencies to slap high-grade ratings on packages of subprime debt"
http://bigpicture.typepad.com/comments/2008/10/misunderstandin.html
"How is it that, with such easy access to information, people still think the crash had anything to do with business? "
More right wing lies.
As the economy worsens and Election Day approaches, a conservative campaign that blames the global financial crisis on a government push to make housing more affordable to lower-class Americans has taken off on talk radio and e-mail.
Commentators say that's what triggered the stock market meltdown and the freeze on credit. They've specifically targeted the mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which the federal government seized on Sept. 6, contending that lending to poor and minority Americans caused Fannie's and Freddie's financial problems.
Federal housing data reveal that the charges aren't true, and that the private sector, not the government or government-backed companies, was behind the soaring subprime lending at the core of the crisis.
Subprime lending offered high-cost loans to the weakest borrowers during the housing boom that lasted from 2001 to 2007. Subprime lending was at its height vrom 2004 to 2006.
Federal Reserve Board data show that:
_ More than 84 percent of the subprime mortgages in 2006 were issued by private lending institutions.
_ Private firms made nearly 83 percent of the subprime loans to low- and moderate-income borrowers that year.
_ Only one of the top 25 subprime lenders in 2006 was directly subject to the housing law that's being lambasted by conservative critics.
In Slate, Daniel Gross, senior editor of Newsweek, lays out the right wing mantra on the financial crisis:
http://www.slate.com/id/2201641
On the Republican side of Congress, in the right-wing financial media (which is to say the financial media), and in certain parts of the op-ed-o-sphere, there's a consensus emerging that the whole mess should be laid at the feet of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the failed mortgage giants, and the Community Reinvestment Act, a law passed during the Carter administration. The CRA, which was amended in the 1990s and this decade, requires banks—which had a long, distinguished history of not making loans to minorities—to make more efforts to do so.
The thesis is laid out almost daily on the Wall Street Journal editorial page, in the National Review, and on the campaign trail. John McCain said yesterday, "Bad mortgages were being backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and it was only a matter of time before a contagion of unsustainable debt began to spread." Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer provides an excellent example, writing that "much of this crisis was brought upon us by the good intentions of good people." He continues: "For decades, starting with Jimmy Carter's Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, there has been bipartisan agreement to use government power to expand homeownership to people who had been shut out for economic reasons or, sometimes, because of racial and ethnic discrimination. What could be a more worthy cause? But it led to tremendous pressure on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—which in turn pressured banks and other lenders—to extend mortgages to people who were borrowing over their heads. That's called subprime lending. It lies at the root of our current calamity." The subtext: If only Congress didn't force banks to lend money to poor minorities, the Dow would be well on its way to 36,000. Or, as Fox Business Channel's Neil Cavuto put it, "I don't remember a clarion call that said: Fannie and Freddie are a disaster. Loaning to minorities and risky folks is a disaster."
* * * * * * * *
The Community Reinvestment Act applies to depository banks. But many of the institutions that spurred the massive growth of the subprime market weren't regulated banks. They were outfits such as Argent and American Home Mortgage, which were generally not regulated by the Federal Reserve or other entities that monitored compliance with CRA. These institutions worked hand in glo
"Is capitalism or socialism the answer? Yes.
Yes, because BOTH are the answer, at the same time.
Allow me to try to explain this, before you explode."
The real issue is the AGENT principle problem, people will begin to rule in their interests over the common good. Free marketeers and socialists both fall for it.
But it really comes down to human beings being stupid low intelligence creatures, with genetic engineering/AI I'm guessing a lot of our problems would be eliminated, it's the human minds gullability and mediocrity at seperating truth from error that causes so much mischief
Except most people today are moving from ABSOLUTE poverty to a developed nation poor, does not mean that classes will not solidify over time as the rest of the world becomes fully developed like the west.
In the west we have a reversing trend, more people are getting poorer.
Social mobility cuts both ways (i.e. person in developed country gets job, x amount of workers lose their jobs in USA/Canada, Europe).
And considering the amount of underemployed unviersity educated people in the USA and Canada it's quite obvious that they are backsliding (i.e. goign backwards).
I just read a big article on it the other day I'll see if I can't find it.
"Apparently just voting them out doesn't have very much of an effect anymore."
Oswald spengler wrote about this a while ago...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_the_West
Go down to "Democracy, media and money"
"Spengler's analysis of democratic systems argues that even the use of one's own constitutional rights requires money, and that voting can only really work as designed in the absence of organized leadership working on the election process. As soon as the election process becomes organized by political leaders, to the extent that money allows, the vote ceases to be truly significant. It is no more than a recorded opinion of the masses on the organizations of government over which they possess no positive influence whatsoever."
"Class is not fixed."
Class is relatively fixed, do not confuse some dynamic movement in income as social mobility, most people behave like atoms in gas. See here:
http://prayatna.typepad.com/satya/2005/07/are_the_rich_ge.html
"I make $180K designing hardware as an EE,"
The average EE makes nowhere near 180K, you are in the top 5% of all wage earners.