Digital technology makes everything easy to track, everything must pass through routers, so unless the internet moves to something like TOR or hard encryption you can expect underhanded monitoring.
It's too easy to monitor people on the net, the very nature of using the internet to post information you're dropping your IP address everywhere as well as techniques used to identify your machine through flash and javascript, most computer users have no f'n clue how technology works.
Ironically enough corporations gain information they otherwise would be unable to access through the bulk of humanity being ignorant, not that this is new.
"Diablo3 and Starcraft2 will probably be the last two major PC game titles."
Your post shows your complete ignorance of the recent releases for the PC, like Empire total war and Street fighter 4 and other games
Lets not also forget PC's still have RTS and FPS genres licked in case you weren't paying attention, Battle field 1943, team fortress 2, left 4 dead, these are hardly "console only", and these are all fairly recent releases.
I really wish the "PC gaming is dead" crew would get a life, everyone has been saying PC gaming is dead and games still keep being released for the PC forever now.
The fact that Diablo 3 and starcraft 2 are being made is proof positive that it isn't dead, the truth is game developers who couldn't produce good games moved to consoles because they simply lost their mojo and couldn't control development costs. Also console players tend to be easier to please and also generally more stupid on average, you're also selling to mom + pop crowd who will buy any shit in a box for little johnny.
Every point you have made was made 10 years ago with the advent of the PS2, Gamecube and Xbox.
In case you weren't paying attention, Resident Evil 5 is coming to PC and also Street fighter 4 was released for the PC and it's heads and shoulders above the console versions, so much so I've bought a copy.
Enterprising Companies like Capcom will come into fill the PC void because they know there is money to be made by the vacuum left behind.
Only an idiot would write off the PC game market, those who say PC gaming is dead haven't been paying attention at all, or are not really into gaming that much at all. There are plenty of games on the PC.
"But then he might not have had the time and resources to develop his nutty ideas. He had to withdraw somewhat to do that."
I'd have to take issue with Kaczynski being a nut, if you actually read anything he wrote he seemed more like a misguided malcontent who channelled his frustration towards violence out of knowing powerless than someone was who was "crazy".
He understood some of the problems of modern society very well even if he did not always frame them in a way that other people would agree with, the essence of what he wrote here:
He has it right that the model of society we currently use exacerbates and creates un-needed psychological stresses on human beings and that human beings are quite immature (See: George W getting elected, War in IRAQ and all that).
Some people born into this system adjust having known no other way of life, others don't and end up on social assistance.
Personally I think calling people crazy is a intellectually lazy way of not being able to criticize the deficiencies of a society, usually societies outcasts tell us a lot more about society then human beings would like to admit.
The "rational" people never seem to be able to adequately criticize their own faults nor have the degree of introspection necessary to smell the stench of their own rotten selves or society.
"If I were to present to you an artificial intelligence that behaved indistinguishably from a human being, reacted to stimuli, showed varying levels of consciousness in response to changing conditions, and was actively engaged in expanding its reach into whatever domains it could flow into... what would you call that?"
This is exactly my point though, if one could program a CPU to do just this and output to a robotic model, does this mean the cpu driving the robot is aware of itself?
The answer of course is no. I'm saying that we need to better understand our own consciousness before we can simply jump to conclusions that any artifical simulated brain is aware of its existence.
I certainly don't believe in naive physicalism that you are espousing, because X behaves exactly like us, therefore X is conscious like us.
We have good reasons to suppose that people who behave like us are conscious like us for other reasons other then functional similarity.
We need to find out how to discern between: Unconscious entity and Conscious entity
Here's a trivial example: A calculator can compute numbers, a man can compute numbers, therefore the calculator must be aware of what numbers are since they are able to compute numbers.
See the fallacy yet?
Here's a better one, check out the girl who can't feel pain:
This is what I mean, the fact that something could seem to behave like us but *not* be like us in some important respect.
How would you know this girl could not feel pain for instance? When you've known pain all your life it would seem unbelievable that someone with very similar biological heritage to you couldn't feel pain.
These are non trivial "hard problems".
Complex reactions is not proof of it is aware of it's existence, otherwise you could say a robot with pre-programmed inputs and outputs to respond dynamically to stimuli is aware of it's existence by sheer nature of duplicating complex reactions.
An embryo is not conscious, yet it leads to a host organism that finally comes to possesses one. During pregnancy none of us remember or were aware of ourselves being developed by unconscious processes of our cells, yet when we reach a certain age a few years after being born we finally become consciously aware of ourselves, before that time anything that would happen to us we would not even feel nor know about, even though we were reacting and engaging our parents, even though we were not conscious of this fact**.
Unconscious processes are certainly an aspect of consciousness no doubt about it but there's a threshold between being alive and unconscious of your own existence and being aware of ones own existence. No one would say bacteria for instance are conscious, yet most would believe they have some form of limited intelligence in order to have survived
I'm saying there is more to consciousness that we must figure out what it is before we can say for certain that *x is aware of it's existence*
Copying everything a human does, does not prove awareness, this is only going to be figured out with a lot of hard slog.
Take the case of Terri Schiavo for instance, her brain was functioning in that vegitative state yet she is not aware of her existence, even though much of her body is still 'very alive', in the sense that it functions exactly like a human being.
I'm not denying that we will some day get there and create real conscious entities but we should not pretend we have figured out the hard problems yet.
What you fail to grasp is consciousness is tied to physical reality, or would you like to claim alzheimers patients don't lose their cognitive function as their cognition declines?
I dislike people who but into the conversation but add nothing to it.
Everyone who replied had a beef with my claim against the original GP who said:
"I'd be pretty concerned about the ethics of experimenting on an artficial brain complex enough to reasonably simulate a human one..."
and then... "An artificial brain of that complexity would be, in effect, a moral person."
My whole post is that an artificial brain by definition is not guaranteed to be equivalent to conscious entity, nor a moral person. Which is absolutely 100% correct.
One can build a fine simulated replica of a thing but this does not necessarily mean the replica is the thing in question.
(I'm going to repost my reply I made to someone else)
My comment about anesthesia was that a simulation of a thing, is *not* the thing in question it's hard for naive physicalists to grasp, because when you have to grasp all the subtle details they tend to overlook a hell of a lot especially when their ignorance is far far greater then their assumed knowledge.
I have no doubt that we will be able to re-create consciousness someday and in new forms, but to the GP to whom I was replying I was saying that simulations regarding consciousness are not conscious in and of themselves. Just because something mimics the function of something does not mean it *is* that something, this is where the confusion comes in.
A behaves like B therefore B is A. Many physicalists would assert that A behaving like B implies that A is equivalent to B, rather then A being a representation of B.
One must not confuse the thing in question, with the representation of a thing.
--- end of reply to other poster ---
Now Dr Spork you simply haven't grasped the point I was making, and until you do you will not understand what it is I just said in the above post to the GP.
My comment about anesthesia was that a simulation of a thing, is *not* the thing in question it's hard for naive physicalists to grasp, because when you have to grasp all the subtle details they tend to overlook a hell of a lot especially when their ignorance is far far greater then their assumed knowledge.
I have no doubt that we will be able to re-create consciousness someday and in new forms, but to the GP to whom I was replying I was saying that simulations regarding consciousness are not conscious in and of themselves. Just because something mimics the function of something does not mean it *is* that something, this is where the confusion comes in.
A behaves nearly like B therefore B is A. Many physicalists would assert that A behaving like B implies that A is equivalent to B, rather then A being a representation of B.
One must not confuse the thing in question, with the representation of a thing.
I agree some of what you say but my point is just because one can simulate consciousness does not mean consciousness exists in that simulation.
If I create a device that mimics or imitates, this does not imply the imatation is the thing in question, it is non-sequitor. This is the problem for naive physicalists (hence the term naive), you can create a replica of a human being that does and behaves like a human being but is not self aware on the inside, although it appears to the extreme physicalist that this is like that, so this *is* that.
There's a difference between a model and reality, everyones confusing the model *with* reality. All models have computability limitations, and lets not forget about noncomputability.
What I meant by my aenesthetize comment was that: Just because you can simulate a thing, does mean the simulated thing is equivalent to the thing you are simulating. This is highly confusing to those who do not grasp the subtle difference.
"An artificial brain of that complexity would be, in effect, a moral person."
No it wouldn't, just because something mimics consciousness does not mean it is conscious. This is a common fallacy amongst people who take a naive form of physicalism to extremes. Can you aenesthetize an artificial brain? The fact that anesthesia exists is proof positive that consciousness is inherently tied to the structures that produce it, just because you can build circuits that mimic consciousness does not mean they are alive, or even equivalent.
The nature of consciousness is inextricably linked with what causes consciousness self-awareness to emerge beyond unconscious processing and intelligence, like say a computer.
"I have no words. I just don't understand how people can be content to live in a fog of ignorance."
Because
1) There is not a enough time in the day 2) People tend to not do what they are not interested in
Are there things you'd hate doing, or don't want to learn? That's all that needs to be said really.
You could say the same thing about Doctors, why doesn't everyone have the same basic knowledge as a doctor, or why don't they understand basic biology, physics or math?
The answer: Because most are not good at these things.
We tend to take our own inborn potential to learn things for granted while other people struggle, we wouldn't expect someone who is clearly mentally challenged to be able to do things someone with higher potential is not. The problem is intelligence isn't uniform, what one person finds easy, the next person finds hard, all within say a given range of IQ.
But the biggest thing is people have no interest in it, time spent doing X is time not spent doing Y.
"Your comment goes against the very essence of civilization."
What is this essence of civilization you speak of? A truly civilized race of people would not have a world like ours in the slightest, the fact that we can justify billionaires while others starve is proof positive of our *lack* of civilization.
"I have to completely disagree here with computers being more complex than cars for repairs."
I'd say you're mostly incorrect, when dealing with software problems there are any number of errors. Did you ever use computers pre Win98? DOS, Win95 and Win 3.1 were sometimes nightmares to manage sometimes often with obscure errors that one had to figure out on ones own (because the internet was not widespread back then).
Software problems easily trump the complexity of a car, all cars have common problems which you can distill down to an art because you know *something is wrong* with the car and it's a matter of a process of elimination, also car's are known quantities, with computers you're constantly up against obscurity.
Computer errors usually still baffle people, even today getting bluescreens and why they happen can still be a mystery even with error codes. It's way more time consuming to do a thorough job troubleshooting hard software problems then fixing any car.
Sure one can take the easy road - wipe and re-install and you may fix the problem. But you will never learn what was the problem to begin with, and you're taking a hammer and smashing the software to 'solve' the problem. But to **actually fix the problem** without having to resort to a reinstall, that takes serious skill.
I will still get blue screens from time to time on machines that are completely fucking baffling even with google, and better error codes and whatnot. I'll take cars over baffling error screens anyday, in terms of times I've spent figuring shit out, computers have consumed way more of my time then any car ever did.
"If you have anything resembling standards, dating is really, really fucking hard."
Truth is having standards is a luxury, for most of history people didn't have the *luxury* of "standards", really, there are some minimum standards before dating a person (not crazy, etc, etc). But beyond a certain point you're attempting to live in an unreal fantasy land, people always have flaws, if the person in a relationship would suddenly bail on you in times of war or a down economy, they are certainly not worth your time.
"I tried to ride a bike for the first time in a decade a few years ago. I could barely get it to go forward, much less straight. Balancing left/right was extremely difficult. I knew what I had to do, but my physical reactions were too rusty to actually perform those actions. So yes, you do forget."
I believe you are an exception, you're trying to generalize your experience to a whole population, I'd love to see a study done myself personally.
For me whenever I learn to do something I never really truly unlearn it, and infrequent drivers does not mean "not drive at all" if you're driving more then once every 6 months to a year, and same with biking it's highly unlikely you're going to forget.
Form is irrelevant to the substance of what I was saying though, if I say the earth is round and I spell round as roudn, and everyone still understands what it was that I said, and that is what matters.
Although I have thought about using such grammar software like the following:
On places like slashdot I like the more relaxed atmosphere and I'm not going to proofread and re-read everything I write, otherwise it would consume way too much time. I can live with people poking at my grammar and other errors.
" assure you, idiots breed in larger numbers than smart people in every country."
But america seems to be special in that it prides itself on it's ignorance, try having an intelligent discussion about ideology with many Americans to see what I mean. It often times seems even the most educated there are also as dumb as rocks in that they will never allow other points of view to penetrate their enormous ideological pride.
"but it would eliminate the big brother aspect of this proposal."
It wouldn't, you'd just replace one big brother (government) with another (corporation) it amazes me that americans think private corporations have their best interests at heart, ever looked at the kind of security and monitoring equipment in many modern businesses? The analyze everything about you're shopping for instance.
Quite frankly there is no privacy once you walk into a corporate building or store for instance.
"How is someone who drives less better at driving?"
The same way someone who's learned how to ride a bike doesn't suddenly stop knowing how to ride a bike. Driving is not difficult, and I imagine if you did a study of infrequent drivers, there would be small re-adjustment period (for things like parallel parking, etc) before they reached the levels of long time drivers, but for regular driving their would be a negligible difference.
There have been some games innovating, esp on the PC with more rare titles like Sins of a Solar Empire and Supreme commander, but the truth is developers inexperience and lack of talent in understanding what makes a game fun is at the root cause of this.
One can see this by playing the end result. Empire total war had serious bugs and the AI was a pushover. Many in the industry have the engineering skills to create games, but no wherewithall about what makes games fun or where to take their franchises (See the many castlevania's that ended up middling to just ok, to downright horrible).
"Honestly, the argument against being able to buy used games is not one I understand."
It comes from the idea that software is liscensed and you never really own anything, the fact that software liscensing got traction in the first place is exactly why they are pushing because the public was much too informed to resits liscensing in PC arena, and now they are trying to bring PC software liscensing to consoles.
"So who is going to produce these multi-million dollar games when anyone can copyright and distribute them without restriction? You do realize there have been more than a few games that have cost over $40M to produce. The average PS3 game costs $15M before marketing."
This is the game industries fault for being in love with graphics and not gameplay, consumers don't force these companies to replace their old consoles, if you look at the sales of the PS1 when the PS2 released and the PS2 slim when the PS3 was released, you'll notice that the entire market was still there.
I really get tired of "oh it's too expensive to develop", consumers don't force developers to keep pushing envelope and sales of old generation consoles and games prove this.
Game developers did this to themselves, the game market was not expanding fast enough for the bulk of more original games as game developer costs expanded. Back in ye old days, if you sold over 250,000 copies that was considered a *success* the fact that a game needs to sell a million to break even is the problem in the first place.
Game developers by and large were not paying attention and publishers as well as they pushed their own dev costs sky high.
Truth is it's a bunch passing since many game developers have been increasingly losing their mojo. Castlevania Judgement for the Wii is a case in point.
Slashdot Mirror
Digital technology makes everything easy to track, everything must pass through routers, so unless the internet moves to something like TOR or hard encryption you can expect underhanded monitoring.
It's too easy to monitor people on the net, the very nature of using the internet to post information you're dropping your IP address everywhere as well as techniques used to identify your machine through flash and javascript, most computer users have no f'n clue how technology works.
Ironically enough corporations gain information they otherwise would be unable to access through the bulk of humanity being ignorant, not that this is new.
"Diablo3 and Starcraft2 will probably be the last two major PC game titles."
Your post shows your complete ignorance of the recent releases for the PC, like Empire total war and Street fighter 4 and other games
Lets not also forget PC's still have RTS and FPS genres licked in case you weren't paying attention, Battle field 1943, team fortress 2, left 4 dead, these are hardly "console only", and these are all fairly recent releases.
I really wish the "PC gaming is dead" crew would get a life, everyone has been saying PC gaming is dead and games still keep being released for the PC forever now.
The fact that Diablo 3 and starcraft 2 are being made is proof positive that it isn't dead, the truth is game developers who couldn't produce good games moved to consoles because they simply lost their mojo and couldn't control development costs. Also console players tend to be easier to please and also generally more stupid on average, you're also selling to mom + pop crowd who will buy any shit in a box for little johnny.
Every point you have made was made 10 years ago with the advent of the PS2, Gamecube and Xbox.
In case you weren't paying attention, Resident Evil 5 is coming to PC and also Street fighter 4 was released for the PC and it's heads and shoulders above the console versions, so much so I've bought a copy.
Enterprising Companies like Capcom will come into fill the PC void because they know there is money to be made by the vacuum left behind.
Only an idiot would write off the PC game market, those who say PC gaming is dead haven't been paying attention at all, or are not really into gaming that much at all. There are plenty of games on the PC.
"But then he might not have had the time and resources to develop his nutty ideas. He had to withdraw somewhat to do that."
I'd have to take issue with Kaczynski being a nut, if you actually read anything he wrote he seemed more like a misguided malcontent who channelled his frustration towards violence out of knowing powerless than someone was who was "crazy".
He understood some of the problems of modern society very well even if he did not always frame them in a way that other people would agree with, the essence of what he wrote here:
http://cyber.eserver.org/unabom.txt
He has it right that the model of society we currently use exacerbates and creates un-needed psychological stresses on human beings and that human beings are quite immature (See: George W getting elected, War in IRAQ and all that).
Some people born into this system adjust having known no other way of life, others don't and end up on social assistance.
Personally I think calling people crazy is a intellectually lazy way of not being able to criticize the deficiencies of a society, usually societies outcasts tell us a lot more about society then human beings would like to admit.
The "rational" people never seem to be able to adequately criticize their own faults nor have the degree of introspection necessary to smell the stench of their own rotten selves or society.
"If I were to present to you an artificial intelligence that behaved indistinguishably from a human being, reacted to stimuli, showed varying levels of consciousness in response to changing conditions, and was actively engaged in expanding its reach into whatever domains it could flow into... what would you call that?"
This is exactly my point though, if one could program a CPU to do just this and output to a robotic model, does this mean the cpu driving the robot is aware of itself?
The answer of course is no. I'm saying that we need to better understand our own consciousness before we can simply jump to conclusions that any artifical simulated brain is aware of its existence.
I certainly don't believe in naive physicalism that you are espousing, because X behaves exactly like us, therefore X is conscious like us.
We have good reasons to suppose that people who behave like us are conscious like us for other reasons other then functional similarity.
We need to find out how to discern between: Unconscious entity and Conscious entity
Here's a trivial example: A calculator can compute numbers, a man can compute numbers, therefore the calculator must be aware of what numbers are since they are able to compute numbers.
See the fallacy yet?
Here's a better one, check out the girl who can't feel pain:
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/OnCall/story?id=1386322
This is what I mean, the fact that something could seem to behave like us but *not* be like us in some important respect.
How would you know this girl could not feel pain for instance? When you've known pain all your life it would seem unbelievable that someone with very similar biological heritage to you couldn't feel pain.
These are non trivial "hard problems".
Complex reactions is not proof of it is aware of it's existence, otherwise you could say a robot with pre-programmed inputs and outputs to respond dynamically to stimuli is aware of it's existence by sheer nature of duplicating complex reactions.
An embryo is not conscious, yet it leads to a host organism that finally comes to possesses one. During pregnancy none of us remember or were aware of ourselves being developed by unconscious processes of our cells, yet when we reach a certain age a few years after being born we finally become consciously aware of ourselves, before that time anything that would happen to us we would not even feel nor know about, even though we were reacting and engaging our parents, even though we were not conscious of this fact**.
Unconscious processes are certainly an aspect of consciousness no doubt about it but there's a threshold between being alive and unconscious of your own existence and being aware of ones own existence. No one would say bacteria for instance are conscious, yet most would believe they have some form of limited intelligence in order to have survived
I'm saying there is more to consciousness that we must figure out what it is before we can say for certain that *x is aware of it's existence*
Copying everything a human does, does not prove awareness, this is only going to be figured out with a lot of hard slog.
Take the case of Terri Schiavo for instance, her brain was functioning in that vegitative state yet she is not aware of her existence, even though much of her body is still 'very alive', in the sense that it functions exactly like a human being.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terri_Schiavo_case
I'm not denying that we will some day get there and create real conscious entities but we should not pretend we have figured out the hard problems yet.
What you fail to grasp is consciousness is tied to physical reality, or would you like to claim alzheimers patients don't lose their cognitive function as their cognition declines?
I dislike people who but into the conversation but add nothing to it.
Everyone who replied had a beef with my claim against the original GP who said:
"I'd be pretty concerned about the ethics of experimenting on an artficial brain complex enough to reasonably simulate a human one. .."
and then ... "An artificial brain of that complexity would be, in effect, a moral person."
My whole post is that an artificial brain by definition is not guaranteed to be equivalent to conscious entity, nor a moral person. Which is absolutely 100% correct.
One can build a fine simulated replica of a thing but this does not necessarily mean the replica is the thing in question.
(I'm going to repost my reply I made to someone else)
My comment about anesthesia was that a simulation of a thing, is *not* the thing in question it's hard for naive physicalists to grasp, because when you have to grasp all the subtle details they tend to overlook a hell of a lot especially when their ignorance is far far greater then their assumed knowledge.
I have no doubt that we will be able to re-create consciousness someday and in new forms, but to the GP to whom I was replying I was saying that simulations regarding consciousness are not conscious in and of themselves. Just because something mimics the function of something does not mean it *is* that something, this is where the confusion comes in.
A behaves like B therefore B is A. Many physicalists would assert that A behaving like B implies that A is equivalent to B, rather then A being a representation of B.
One must not confuse the thing in question, with the representation of a thing.
--- end of reply to other poster ---
Now Dr Spork you simply haven't grasped the point I was making, and until you do you will not understand what it is I just said in the above post to the GP.
"Why not?"
My comment about anesthesia was that a simulation of a thing, is *not* the thing in question it's hard for naive physicalists to grasp, because when you have to grasp all the subtle details they tend to overlook a hell of a lot especially when their ignorance is far far greater then their assumed knowledge.
I have no doubt that we will be able to re-create consciousness someday and in new forms, but to the GP to whom I was replying I was saying that simulations regarding consciousness are not conscious in and of themselves. Just because something mimics the function of something does not mean it *is* that something, this is where the confusion comes in.
A behaves nearly like B therefore B is A. Many physicalists would assert that A behaving like B implies that A is equivalent to B, rather then A being a representation of B.
One must not confuse the thing in question, with the representation of a thing.
I agree some of what you say but my point is just because one can simulate consciousness does not mean consciousness exists in that simulation.
If I create a device that mimics or imitates, this does not imply the imatation is the thing in question, it is non-sequitor. This is the problem for naive physicalists (hence the term naive), you can create a replica of a human being that does and behaves like a human being but is not self aware on the inside, although it appears to the extreme physicalist that this is like that, so this *is* that.
There's a difference between a model and reality, everyones confusing the model *with* reality. All models have computability limitations, and lets not forget about noncomputability.
What I meant by my aenesthetize comment was that: Just because you can simulate a thing, does mean the simulated thing is equivalent to the thing you are simulating. This is highly confusing to those who do not grasp the subtle difference.
"An artificial brain of that complexity would be, in effect, a moral person."
No it wouldn't, just because something mimics consciousness does not mean it is conscious. This is a common fallacy amongst people who take a naive form of physicalism to extremes. Can you aenesthetize an artificial brain? The fact that anesthesia exists is proof positive that consciousness is inherently tied to the structures that produce it, just because you can build circuits that mimic consciousness does not mean they are alive, or even equivalent.
The nature of consciousness is inextricably linked with what causes consciousness self-awareness to emerge beyond unconscious processing and intelligence, like say a computer.
"I have no words. I just don't understand how people can be content to live in a fog of ignorance."
Because
1) There is not a enough time in the day
2) People tend to not do what they are not interested in
Are there things you'd hate doing, or don't want to learn? That's all that needs to be said really.
You could say the same thing about Doctors, why doesn't everyone have the same basic knowledge as a doctor, or why don't they understand basic biology, physics or math?
The answer: Because most are not good at these things.
We tend to take our own inborn potential to learn things for granted while other people struggle, we wouldn't expect someone who is clearly mentally challenged to be able to do things someone with higher potential is not. The problem is intelligence isn't uniform, what one person finds easy, the next person finds hard, all within say a given range of IQ.
But the biggest thing is people have no interest in it, time spent doing X is time not spent doing Y.
"Your comment goes against the very essence of civilization."
What is this essence of civilization you speak of? A truly civilized race of people would not have a world like ours in the slightest, the fact that we can justify billionaires while others starve is proof positive of our *lack* of civilization.
"I have to completely disagree here with computers being more complex than cars for repairs."
I'd say you're mostly incorrect, when dealing with software problems there are any number of errors. Did you ever use computers pre Win98? DOS, Win95 and Win 3.1 were sometimes nightmares to manage sometimes often with obscure errors that one had to figure out on ones own (because the internet was not widespread back then).
Software problems easily trump the complexity of a car, all cars have common problems which you can distill down to an art because you know *something is wrong* with the car and it's a matter of a process of elimination, also car's are known quantities, with computers you're constantly up against obscurity.
Computer errors usually still baffle people, even today getting bluescreens and why they happen can still be a mystery even with error codes. It's way more time consuming to do a thorough job troubleshooting hard software problems then fixing any car.
Sure one can take the easy road - wipe and re-install and you may fix the problem. But you will never learn what was the problem to begin with, and you're taking a hammer and smashing the software to 'solve' the problem. But to **actually fix the problem** without having to resort to a reinstall, that takes serious skill.
I will still get blue screens from time to time on machines that are completely fucking baffling even with google, and better error codes and whatnot. I'll take cars over baffling error screens anyday, in terms of times I've spent figuring shit out, computers have consumed way more of my time then any car ever did.
"If you have anything resembling standards, dating is really, really fucking hard."
Truth is having standards is a luxury, for most of history people didn't have the *luxury* of "standards", really, there are some minimum standards before dating a person (not crazy, etc, etc). But beyond a certain point you're attempting to live in an unreal fantasy land, people always have flaws, if the person in a relationship would suddenly bail on you in times of war or a down economy, they are certainly not worth your time.
"I tried to ride a bike for the first time in a decade a few years ago. I could barely get it to go forward, much less straight. Balancing left/right was extremely difficult. I knew what I had to do, but my physical reactions were too rusty to actually perform those actions. So yes, you do forget."
I believe you are an exception, you're trying to generalize your experience to a whole population, I'd love to see a study done myself personally.
For me whenever I learn to do something I never really truly unlearn it, and infrequent drivers does not mean "not drive at all" if you're driving more then once every 6 months to a year, and same with biking it's highly unlikely you're going to forget.
Form is irrelevant to the substance of what I was saying though, if I say the earth is round and I spell round as roudn, and everyone still understands what it was that I said, and that is what matters.
Although I have thought about using such grammar software like the following:
http://www.whitesmoke.com/
On places like slashdot I like the more relaxed atmosphere and I'm not going to proofread and re-read everything I write, otherwise it would consume way too much time. I can live with people poking at my grammar and other errors.
Sorry I should have said *some* voice actors are total dicks.
Unconscious neurological errors are common take some courses in neurology, many people (including myself) cannot help those mistakes.
" assure you, idiots breed in larger numbers than smart people in every country."
But america seems to be special in that it prides itself on it's ignorance, try having an intelligent discussion about ideology with many Americans to see what I mean. It often times seems even the most educated there are also as dumb as rocks in that they will never allow other points of view to penetrate their enormous ideological pride.
Personally I can't wait until they perfect synthetic voices, then there will be no need for overpaid voice actors at all.
Many voice actors for the most part are total dicks.
Yet the problem is it is free legally online, seems lime more american corporate bullshit to me.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four#The_War
"but it would eliminate the big brother aspect of this proposal."
It wouldn't, you'd just replace one big brother (government) with another (corporation) it amazes me that americans think private corporations have their best interests at heart, ever looked at the kind of security and monitoring equipment in many modern businesses? The analyze everything about you're shopping for instance.
Quite frankly there is no privacy once you walk into a corporate building or store for instance.
"How is someone who drives less better at driving?"
The same way someone who's learned how to ride a bike doesn't suddenly stop knowing how to ride a bike. Driving is not difficult, and I imagine if you did a study of infrequent drivers, there would be small re-adjustment period (for things like parallel parking, etc) before they reached the levels of long time drivers, but for regular driving their would be a negligible difference.
" What happened to innovation?"
There have been some games innovating, esp on the PC with more rare titles like Sins of a Solar Empire and Supreme commander, but the truth is developers inexperience and lack of talent in understanding what makes a game fun is at the root cause of this.
One can see this by playing the end result. Empire total war had serious bugs and the AI was a pushover. Many in the industry have the engineering skills to create games, but no wherewithall about what makes games fun or where to take their franchises (See the many castlevania's that ended up middling to just ok, to downright horrible).
"Honestly, the argument against being able to buy used games is not one I understand."
It comes from the idea that software is liscensed and you never really own anything, the fact that software liscensing got traction in the first place is exactly why they are pushing because the public was much too informed to resits liscensing in PC arena, and now they are trying to bring PC software liscensing to consoles.
"So who is going to produce these multi-million dollar games when anyone can copyright and distribute them without restriction? You do realize there have been more than a few games that have cost over $40M to produce. The average PS3 game costs $15M before marketing."
This is the game industries fault for being in love with graphics and not gameplay, consumers don't force these companies to replace their old consoles, if you look at the sales of the PS1 when the PS2 released and the PS2 slim when the PS3 was released, you'll notice that the entire market was still there.
I really get tired of "oh it's too expensive to develop", consumers don't force developers to keep pushing envelope and sales of old generation consoles and games prove this.
Game developers did this to themselves, the game market was not expanding fast enough for the bulk of more original games as game developer costs expanded. Back in ye old days, if you sold over 250,000 copies that was considered a *success* the fact that a game needs to sell a million to break even is the problem in the first place.
Game developers by and large were not paying attention and publishers as well as they pushed their own dev costs sky high.
Truth is it's a bunch passing since many game developers have been increasingly losing their mojo. Castlevania Judgement for the Wii is a case in point.