... how would they determine how they are related in the first place? Especially given the complexity of these issues in their relation to the central nervous system.
The truth is they don't want players whipping through all the content in the first month. So they nerfed travel so people can't "finish" the game and move on, it's really damn cheap if you ask me.
"But whilst you are using civil disobedience to disregard the laws of the land that you feel are wrong, then you accept the outcome that you may be dealt with according to the law. "
But you miss the point entirely. You say camera's don't take away your freedom, but they can be used to take away your freedom when the shit hits the fan. People are easily strong armed into giving out information if it threatens their survival or can be bribed into doing so.
It all depends on the situation, the situation can change and since you've never been in a situation where camera's have been used to take away your rights or freedom (that you know of) you can't really grasp it, until you've lived it.
I've been through certain situations in which information was divulged by third parties that ended up coming back to bite me in the ass even though I didn't do anything wrong and I never want to be in that position again.
You're missing the fact that, socially you can be humiliated just for being investigated and whatnot, and many times it's a stressful, hair raising and humiliating experience.
Histories greatest struggles have been about men doing things that their societies thought they didn't have the right and freedom to do. See the founding of america, women getting the vote, and on and on.
People don't see eye to eye on principles (see: copyright infringement vs theft), and the idea that there is one superior model to all others is a bunch of BS.
Principles are guidelines only and are subject to change as the environment, people and culture change around them. For instance, many of us can't imagine owning slaves or being able to legally mistreat slaves today as a *right* and a principle of *freedom for the owner*.
What is a right and what is a freedom is determined by people themselves.
"The masses have spoken: saving a few bucks is worth it. If you don't like it--vote with your dollars and encourage your friends and family to do the same"
The problem is the average human being has the cognitive power of a lemon, most people are creatures of habit and could care less. People don't change unless they can feel the effects of what they are doing.
You can see this when they do choice experiments on how people choose: People who use credit cards spend more then those who don't because it doesn't activate the part of the brain associated with pain. It also explains why americans are up to their eyeballs in debt.
"Whether you agree with the outcome or not, foreign labor has helped to reduce the price of many of the goods and services that westerners rely on every day"
But this comes at the cost of jobs, the idea that the free market will pick up the slack is a lot idealogical bullshit. The early United states used protectionism to build it's economy when britains manufaturing was better then theirs, they protected domestic industries so they would not be subject to foreign interests, while the free trading south bought foreign cheap goods and used slaves, guess who won that one? The protectionists.
The free traders need to bone up on their history.
I'd just like to add people are curious, plus if anyone wants to get a taste of what people wish they could do if they could get away with it read some books by nancy friday.
Human beings are animals, and they are curious. Put the two together and it's not surprising.
And googlebooks if google could take it further and unlock it's potential would be a godsend. I've found countless books I would hav enever have found traditionally at a library via googlebook search.
"Technically, the internet is the largest library of information ever known to man. To dismiss it only shows his inability to truly grasp it."
While some of that sentiment is expressed in hist post he has an overarching point: On the internet it's hard to get stuff done because you're just a mouseclick away from distractions (youtube, email, music, videogames, etc, etc)
When you go to a library there is much less potential for distraction and so you focus on what you originally intended to go there for.
While I agree the internet is just as wonderful if not more so, the technology hasn't totally caught up yet. I love google books, and being able to search books (something you'd never be able to do in a library of non digitized books). But the downside is endless distraction for those who lack self restraint.
Note what you suggest would take a large chunk of ones lifetime to put together, by restructuring the theory and mapping them onto observations from the real world.
Consider:
The birth of Galois theory was originally motivated by the following question, whose answer is known as the Abel-Ruffini theorem.
"Why is there no formula for the roots of a fifth (or higher) degree polynomial equation in terms of the coefficients of the polynomial, using only the usual algebraic operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division) and application of radicals (square roots, cube roots, etc)?"
Now I would force the original author to translate his equations into real world objects and manipulations, no more abstract jargon, this *exactly* what I'm talking about, where people take jargon so far away from observations in the world and *de map them* to such an extent they've gutted the original sources persons from whom they are derived.
Most people don't keep a perfect record of their insights and intuitions and the ideas that lead them to systems of equations, you'd see a lot of what looked like 'gobbleygook' to you because unless you have direct access to that persons mind *you simply can't grasp the relationships* and intuitions they have been building up for an enormous amount of time.
I am only one man and I would *happily* take your challenge. There is only so much time and mathematics is an enormous discipline.
"You've missed the point: it isn't mathematicians who've made it overly complicated."
Actually it is, go read the authors of modern textbooks "So and so, PHD of mathematics university of so and so", I know because I've got a heap of textbooks written by these complainers that I've gone through and marked with notes on my own time doing my own research.
I wouldn't have posted my OP if I didn't have genuine beef with many in the establishment in the first place.
I think he means they have a semi respectable image that people want to aspire to, usually people in such positions have social skills and some kind of charm and social network they benefit from.
Scientists, engineers, mathematicians and philosophers tend to be disproportionately nerdy, they may be alright socially but they aren't that agressively social in their personalities and truth is culturally they are shown in a negative light. (scientists = glasses + white lab coats, hunching over an experiment, John nash in a beautiful mind = genius = mental illness, etc).
Lawyers have always had both respect and disrespect. From a parents perspective dealing with their kids going into law - they make good money (and there are good lawyers, think EFF, civil rights lawyers, etc, etc) and then their are the bad apples in the profession that give the law profession a bad name and become the butt of endless lawyer jokes.
"You are not truly a mathematician until you learn to abstract. Symbols "
Nonsense, you're just proving my point that your particular mind is suited to the way the current mathematical systmes have been systamatized.
Everyone on earth in some way mathematician (even if not a very good one) the very act of perceiving *this is not equal to that* is mathematical in and of itself, one could not much less think or navigate the world, let alone function if one could not determine *this* is NOT EQUAL to *that*. As you can see there are no numbers there and yet there you intuitively sense the 'matehmatical' nature of these relationships, but not ice how they are expressed without any kind of formal system of abstractions, and people do this *every day*.
Symbols only come in *after* you learn that math is a subset of observing relationships.
Say you want to create a system for caclucating the bounce of a ball or the motion of someones arm when they move it, etc.
Math started first with basic observations and people then used little ticks, symbols and whatnot to create systems of instructions to record, order and systemtize those observations so they could reproduce them.
You can do math without symbols at all using shapes and objects in reality and just thinking about it conceptually.
For instance one can interpret 1.5 as being the same as 15, and the same as 150 within a particular perspective context of looking at it.
Sure you notice they are all 10 times the distance apart. But you'll also notice they are also *reflections* of the similar ratio. By converting these numbers into visual figures or objects and alignin them on a scale or horizon you can see the relationship of scale and size along something much more natural and intuitive then simply just juggling sybols, sure it's simple example but there the point being there are ways to take down the complexity of mathematics for kids by teaching them that multiple ways to think about these things conceptually outside of the strict bounds of what the are normally taught.
Yes but you're missing the point by quite a lot: Mayan's used geometric distinct shapes directly for a reason.
For instance if I take a cirlce and half a circle, that can be expressed as 1.5.
For instance in the stock market, companies often do stock splits to keep their stocks "cheap"
Google is $410 and something dollars at the moment.
If you buy a stock at say 410, and it goes to 440, and you buy a stock that's 4.10 and it goes to 4.40 its the same difference but many people don't intuitively grasp this (hence why some companies do stock splits to give the perception of "cheap")
Now say you express 400 as a single circle (base 400) and the change was expressed as a fraction of a circle, and did the same for the other stock cheaper stock (base 4)
Base 400 and base 4 have a relationship that can be communicated more clearly and concisely using visual figures and representation.
Now I know this is a simple model but I'm saying as you go up the mathematical pole their's way to take complexity and simplify it like this that hasn't been realized so many students get lost in symbolic jaron that seemingly has no meaning.
Also you and interpret the entire number system as merely distinctions in surfaces,
For instance there's a direct relationship between our ability to detect differences in objects in reality and mathematics itself, math is merely a codification of our natural way of thinking
"Dude, now you're approaching xenophobia. Have you looked at the state of mathematics in American universities? A conspicuous amount of highly original researchers are the product of foreign educational systems. They aren't doomed to being tech support monkeys like you insinuate."
I don't know how the heck you got that out of my statement. I'm not saying these people are not smart, I'm not saying they are not mathematical prodigies, but they have all learned math in a particular way, many mathematicians don't even realize it because their mind is *naturally suited* to the symbolic form in which the were taught.
Drilling kids with a structure of math when they have no idea how to relate it to their own natural knowledge limits their ability to understand what 'math' is. Most people have never really looked into what mathematics is, where it comes from, how it is derived. I've got books I and articles I've slogged through doing my own research in my spare time and I've realized how disconnected and arbitrary how math is structured in our society really is, and I'm not discounting these peoples contributions to society.
I'm telling you math is much more rich then what most people have even begun to think about*, yes even the PHD's.
I'm talking about how mathematics is *structured* how it is represented.
I remember taking "gifted" tests in school that structured mathematical principles using colored shapes/empty shapes for patterns and principles.
Kids need a way to *connect* what they see as meaningless symbols and see they are *derived* from observations in the world, mathematics *began* as a way for someone to take their observations and format them in a systematic way, but there are many ways to do this and the way something is presented matters A LOT.
I wish I could find the article at about how someone built a physical model as a metaphor of mathematical principles that explained the principles better then the equations and graphics they had made.
Either way there are better ways to communicate mathematical principles and ideas then has been traditionally been taught in societies institutions because I have spent a heck of a lot of time researching this on my own time. As expected on slashdot I would meet a lot of resistance for people who are without my lifetime of experiences that I have yet to congeal into a work of origina lresearch.
"Asia, for example, is still really keen on rote learning. The failure of American pupils is probably not due to the way the subject is taught, but rather because they don't feel the pressure to excel like students in other cultures."
Performance is unrelated to the overly jargonistic complexity, just because asia and india are harsh and drill their kids to perform does not mean they have any clue how to derive creatively go beyond what they are learning. They may make good workers but that doesn't mean anything.
One gains a fuller understanding of math when you realize how to start from the beginning and learn how to observe, if you look at the progress of mathematics over the centuries - systems of symbols and other systems were created to systematize a problem and break it down, most people didn't have to sit down and come up with calculus or algebra themselves, but you can teach kids how to observe and derive things themselves and not feel ashamed to get creative and "go outside" traditional symbolic jargon for leaps forward in creatively seeing underlying relationships between things beyond symbolic computation.
One can be a good performing mathematician and still be clueless about the deeper relationships and observational skills required to become very versed in what math is, outside of what one is taught.
Math has an enormous amount of dogmatism attached to it. Performance in mathematics is only one aspect, we should ask - besides performance, what about understanding? I mean everything I've learned about mathematics I had to teach myself, so I could see through the bullshit of the establishment. I learned I was a visual mathematician, that I understand math through more natural mode of thought: pictures and geometry.
Math is really the language of form and structure, and all structure is necessarily geometric in some way, even relationships (structures of information).
Lets face it a minority of people will like math, but matehmaticians have done a lot to make mathematics overly complicated.
I struggled with the symbolic format math was presented in highschool because it was so disconnected from the world, only as I got older did I realize how arbitrary and how that was only one way to present mathematics. To really teach math one must learn how to observe first before one even gets into symbolic computation, math at it's most basic is about observing relationships, patterns of : Size, ratio, proportion, etc. It's really a language invented to systematize structure and relationships of the real world, therefore how math is represented and structured and is taught matters a hell of a lot.
I've learned over the years that many mathematical systems are totally arbitrary are are more obtuse then they need to be, math comes from the simplest observations. Math has built up a lot of cruft and wasteful jargon disconnecting math from the world.
For instance I had no idea for a long time that the way math is structured could be restructured when I was young and it was one group of peoples perspective on mathematical principles, I came across debates and alernative systems like:
Math is a very rich subject which unfortunately has a lot of cultish like people who think themselves the gatekeepers of mathematics.
I've thought about writing a book in my spare time about how badly mathematicians and the academia has blinded themselves to simplifying mathematics by focusing too much on symbolic jargon and not teaching children how 'mathematical' relationships are related to our simplest observations of the world: Size, shape, form, color, motion, etc.
"The need for such a feature at all is a design failure in itself though"
No it's not, the fact is games never needed these things until gaming went more mainstream and businesses wanted money from any googly eyed drooling human being.
When you put in things like demo play, you're not actually playing the game. I mean should we just pre-render playthrough's and sell them on discs for casual gamers? At point you stop gaming and just really prefer to watch others play or do things for you, and you've removed yourself from the interactivity completely - i.e. completely passive.
Quite frankly we're not talking about design flaws, we're talking about catering to the lowest common denominator. It would be like saying that because cars don't drive themselves, they have design flaws because they don't prevent idiot drivers from doing stupid shit.
"As a utility, they would be more inclined to institute "metered access" which will be worse than having simple unlimited access"
Caps ARE metered access, and it continues to allow the ISP to oversell and not upgrade it's equipment.
ISP's are one of the area's the free market does not function very well since their is too much incentive to oversell what you don't have. Look at a place like Japan and then compare it to ontario canada, most of canada lives within 20 km of the US border yet their internet access locally is 10 times as slow as places like Japan.
Until you realize they will just lower their speeds. But...
I'd really ike an investigation into how much bandwidth these ISP's and the top telco's really have and what their utilization is. What needs to be done is to make this information public on a permanent basis so these companies can't claim that the small percent of users are eating up allthe bandwidth and use it as an excuse to lower speeds.
Quite frankly these companies should have not be able to withhold this information in these matters because the internet is so important to society.
I've watched nearly everything I have ever downloaded, speak for yourself. A lot of people simply do not have the time to watch all the content the download, imagine if you watched / played everything you possibly could, you'd do nothing else.
A good argument against the so called losses of piracy is that there is only so much time in a day to consume content, there are hard limits on how much one can consume before it effects their life.
"Apple is FAR from the DS, and has NOT positioned its products as game devices."
I'd also like to add that lower penetration of game consoles one can understand whether or not your cusotmers are *interested* in games themselves. Saying a phone has an installed base greater then consoles isn't something to be proud of if most of your customers don't game on their phones. Just because some people play games on their phones doesn't mean everyone with owns that kind of phone does.
"In my work as a programmer, I often have to fill in huge gaps left by the designers, and the designers usually only get the best ideas after they have seen what the engine can do."
But this is more about technology getting in the way of the design and the fact that game design itself is comparitively young, compared to say architecture.
I agree that understanding programming and coding definitely helps a game designer, no doubt about it. The same way that understanding coding and shaders helps artists.
The thing people don't recognize is that the IDEAL designer has slogged through the trenches and gets an idea of what is feasable and what is not. This is why a lot of the greatest designers were programmers (Will Wright, Sid Meier, John carmack).
Building games is about solving mathematical problems and understanding the underlying the underlying guts of what goes into a game, but also it's also about knowing what is fun versus what isn't.
Much of the "fun" in a game comes from tweaking game mechanics things like animation times to make sure everything feels right and whatnot.
Slashdot Mirror
... how would they determine how they are related in the first place? Especially given the complexity of these issues in their relation to the central nervous system.
The truth is they don't want players whipping through all the content in the first month. So they nerfed travel so people can't "finish" the game and move on, it's really damn cheap if you ask me.
"But whilst you are using civil disobedience to disregard the laws of the land that you feel are wrong, then you accept the outcome that you may be dealt with according to the law. "
But you miss the point entirely. You say camera's don't take away your freedom, but they can be used to take away your freedom when the shit hits the fan. People are easily strong armed into giving out information if it threatens their survival or can be bribed into doing so.
It all depends on the situation, the situation can change and since you've never been in a situation where camera's have been used to take away your rights or freedom (that you know of) you can't really grasp it, until you've lived it.
I've been through certain situations in which information was divulged by third parties that ended up coming back to bite me in the ass even though I didn't do anything wrong and I never want to be in that position again.
You're missing the fact that, socially you can be humiliated just for being investigated and whatnot, and many times it's a stressful, hair raising and humiliating experience.
"you don't have the right or freedom to do."
Histories greatest struggles have been about men doing things that their societies thought they didn't have the right and freedom to do. See the founding of america, women getting the vote, and on and on.
People don't see eye to eye on principles (see: copyright infringement vs theft), and the idea that there is one superior model to all others is a bunch of BS.
Principles are guidelines only and are subject to change as the environment, people and culture change around them. For instance, many of us can't imagine owning slaves or being able to legally mistreat slaves today as a *right* and a principle of *freedom for the owner*.
What is a right and what is a freedom is determined by people themselves.
"The masses have spoken: saving a few bucks is worth it. If you don't like it--vote with your dollars and encourage your friends and family to do the same"
The problem is the average human being has the cognitive power of a lemon, most people are creatures of habit and could care less. People don't change unless they can feel the effects of what they are doing.
You can see this when they do choice experiments on how people choose: People who use credit cards spend more then those who don't because it doesn't activate the part of the brain associated with pain. It also explains why americans are up to their eyeballs in debt.
You should all check this video out:
Inside my mind
http://fora.tv/2009/02/19/Jonah_Lehrer_Inside_My_Mind
"Whether you agree with the outcome or not, foreign labor has helped to reduce the price of many of the goods and services that westerners rely on every day"
But this comes at the cost of jobs, the idea that the free market will pick up the slack is a lot idealogical bullshit. The early United states used protectionism to build it's economy when britains manufaturing was better then theirs, they protected domestic industries so they would not be subject to foreign interests, while the free trading south bought foreign cheap goods and used slaves, guess who won that one? The protectionists.
The free traders need to bone up on their history.
I'd just like to add people are curious, plus if anyone wants to get a taste of what people wish they could do if they could get away with it read some books by nancy friday.
Human beings are animals, and they are curious. Put the two together and it's not surprising.
"Also, there's really not anything that approaches the value of a good textbook available on line."
See MIT opencourseware:
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm
And googlebooks if google could take it further and unlock it's potential would be a godsend. I've found countless books I would hav enever have found traditionally at a library via googlebook search.
"Technically, the internet is the largest library of information ever known to man. To dismiss it only shows his inability to truly grasp it."
While some of that sentiment is expressed in hist post he has an overarching point: On the internet it's hard to get stuff done because you're just a mouseclick away from distractions (youtube, email, music, videogames, etc, etc)
When you go to a library there is much less potential for distraction and so you focus on what you originally intended to go there for.
While I agree the internet is just as wonderful if not more so, the technology hasn't totally caught up yet. I love google books, and being able to search books (something you'd never be able to do in a library of non digitized books). But the downside is endless distraction for those who lack self restraint.
"Bring it on, man! Your audience awaits."
Note what you suggest would take a large chunk of ones lifetime to put together, by restructuring the theory and mapping them onto observations from the real world.
Consider:
The birth of Galois theory was originally motivated by the following question, whose answer is known as the Abel-Ruffini theorem.
"Why is there no formula for the roots of a fifth (or higher) degree polynomial equation in terms of the coefficients of the polynomial, using only the usual algebraic operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division) and application of radicals (square roots, cube roots, etc)?"
Now I would force the original author to translate his equations into real world objects and manipulations, no more abstract jargon, this *exactly* what I'm talking about, where people take jargon so far away from observations in the world and *de map them* to such an extent they've gutted the original sources persons from whom they are derived.
Most people don't keep a perfect record of their insights and intuitions and the ideas that lead them to systems of equations, you'd see a lot of what looked like 'gobbleygook' to you because unless you have direct access to that persons mind *you simply can't grasp the relationships* and intuitions they have been building up for an enormous amount of time.
I am only one man and I would *happily* take your challenge. There is only so much time and mathematics is an enormous discipline.
"You've missed the point: it isn't mathematicians who've made it overly complicated."
Actually it is, go read the authors of modern textbooks "So and so, PHD of mathematics university of so and so", I know because I've got a heap of textbooks written by these complainers that I've gone through and marked with notes on my own time doing my own research.
I wouldn't have posted my OP if I didn't have genuine beef with many in the establishment in the first place.
"But who's glorifying lawyers and politicians?"
I think he means they have a semi respectable image that people want to aspire to, usually people in such positions have social skills and some kind of charm and social network they benefit from.
Scientists, engineers, mathematicians and philosophers tend to be disproportionately nerdy, they may be alright socially but they aren't that agressively social in their personalities and truth is culturally they are shown in a negative light. (scientists = glasses + white lab coats, hunching over an experiment, John nash in a beautiful mind = genius = mental illness, etc).
Lawyers have always had both respect and disrespect. From a parents perspective dealing with their kids going into law - they make good money (and there are good lawyers, think EFF, civil rights lawyers, etc, etc) and then their are the bad apples in the profession that give the law profession a bad name and become the butt of endless lawyer jokes.
"You are not truly a mathematician until you learn to abstract. Symbols "
Nonsense, you're just proving my point that your particular mind is suited to the way the current mathematical systmes have been systamatized.
Everyone on earth in some way mathematician (even if not a very good one) the very act of perceiving *this is not equal to that* is mathematical in and of itself, one could not much less think or navigate the world, let alone function if one could not determine *this* is NOT EQUAL to *that*. As you can see there are no numbers there and yet there you intuitively sense the 'matehmatical' nature of these relationships, but not ice how they are expressed without any kind of formal system of abstractions, and people do this *every day*.
Symbols only come in *after* you learn that math is a subset of observing relationships.
Say you want to create a system for caclucating the bounce of a ball or the motion of someones arm when they move it, etc.
Math started first with basic observations and people then used little ticks, symbols and whatnot to create systems of instructions to record, order and systemtize those observations so they could reproduce them.
You can do math without symbols at all using shapes and objects in reality and just thinking about it conceptually.
For instance one can interpret 1.5 as being the same as 15, and the same as 150 within a particular perspective context of looking at it.
Sure you notice they are all 10 times the distance apart. But you'll also notice they are also *reflections* of the similar ratio. By converting these numbers into visual figures or objects and alignin them on a scale or horizon you can see the relationship of scale and size along something much more natural and intuitive then simply just juggling sybols, sure it's simple example but there the point being there are ways to take down the complexity of mathematics for kids by teaching them that multiple ways to think about these things conceptually outside of the strict bounds of what the are normally taught.
Yes but you're missing the point by quite a lot: Mayan's used geometric distinct shapes directly for a reason.
For instance if I take a cirlce and half a circle, that can be expressed as 1.5.
For instance in the stock market, companies often do stock splits to keep their stocks "cheap"
Google is $410 and something dollars at the moment.
If you buy a stock at say 410, and it goes to 440, and you buy a stock that's 4.10 and it goes to 4.40 its the same difference but many people don't intuitively grasp this (hence why some companies do stock splits to give the perception of "cheap")
Now say you express 400 as a single circle (base 400) and the change was expressed as a fraction of a circle, and did the same for the other stock cheaper stock (base 4)
Base 400 and base 4 have a relationship that can be communicated more clearly and concisely using visual figures and representation.
Now I know this is a simple model but I'm saying as you go up the mathematical pole their's way to take complexity and simplify it like this that hasn't been realized so many students get lost in symbolic jaron that seemingly has no meaning.
Also you and interpret the entire number system as merely distinctions in surfaces,
For instance there's a direct relationship between our ability to detect differences in objects in reality and mathematics itself, math is merely a codification of our natural way of thinking
Yes you understand, many posters can't seem to grasp what I'm getting at.
No you don't get it, it was just to demonstrate there are many ways of looking at things.
"Dude, now you're approaching xenophobia. Have you looked at the state of mathematics in American universities? A conspicuous amount of highly original researchers are the product of foreign educational systems. They aren't doomed to being tech support monkeys like you insinuate."
I don't know how the heck you got that out of my statement. I'm not saying these people are not smart, I'm not saying they are not mathematical prodigies, but they have all learned math in a particular way, many mathematicians don't even realize it because their mind is *naturally suited* to the symbolic form in which the were taught.
Drilling kids with a structure of math when they have no idea how to relate it to their own natural knowledge limits their ability to understand what 'math' is. Most people have never really looked into what mathematics is, where it comes from, how it is derived. I've got books I and articles I've slogged through doing my own research in my spare time and I've realized how disconnected and arbitrary how math is structured in our society really is, and I'm not discounting these peoples contributions to society.
I'm telling you math is much more rich then what most people have even begun to think about*, yes even the PHD's.
I'm talking about how mathematics is *structured* how it is represented.
I remember taking "gifted" tests in school that structured mathematical principles using colored shapes/empty shapes for patterns and principles.
Kids need a way to *connect* what they see as meaningless symbols and see they are *derived* from observations in the world, mathematics *began* as a way for someone to take their observations and format them in a systematic way, but there are many ways to do this and the way something is presented matters A LOT.
I wish I could find the article at about how someone built a physical model as a metaphor of mathematical principles that explained the principles better then the equations and graphics they had made.
Either way there are better ways to communicate mathematical principles and ideas then has been traditionally been taught in societies institutions because I have spent a heck of a lot of time researching this on my own time. As expected on slashdot I would meet a lot of resistance for people who are without my lifetime of experiences that I have yet to congeal into a work of origina lresearch.
Yes they are but notice how
3 hides the fact that its actualyl THREE 1's
(1) (1) (1)
of couse all systems use shorthand to compress teh relationships but when we say 3, we mean *three distinct shapes/objects/things*
Our characters we use for numbers *hide* those relationships.
"Asia, for example, is still really keen on rote learning. The failure of American pupils is probably not due to the way the subject is taught, but rather because they don't feel the pressure to excel like students in other cultures."
Performance is unrelated to the overly jargonistic complexity, just because asia and india are harsh and drill their kids to perform does not mean they have any clue how to derive creatively go beyond what they are learning. They may make good workers but that doesn't mean anything.
One gains a fuller understanding of math when you realize how to start from the beginning and learn how to observe, if you look at the progress of mathematics over the centuries - systems of symbols and other systems were created to systematize a problem and break it down, most people didn't have to sit down and come up with calculus or algebra themselves, but you can teach kids how to observe and derive things themselves and not feel ashamed to get creative and "go outside" traditional symbolic jargon for leaps forward in creatively seeing underlying relationships between things beyond symbolic computation.
One can be a good performing mathematician and still be clueless about the deeper relationships and observational skills required to become very versed in what math is, outside of what one is taught.
Math has an enormous amount of dogmatism attached to it. Performance in mathematics is only one aspect, we should ask - besides performance, what about understanding? I mean everything I've learned about mathematics I had to teach myself, so I could see through the bullshit of the establishment. I learned I was a visual mathematician, that I understand math through more natural mode of thought: pictures and geometry.
Math is really the language of form and structure, and all structure is necessarily geometric in some way, even relationships (structures of information).
... interesting things kids want to do.
Lets face it a minority of people will like math, but matehmaticians have done a lot to make mathematics overly complicated.
I struggled with the symbolic format math was presented in highschool because it was so disconnected from the world, only as I got older did I realize how arbitrary and how that was only one way to present mathematics. To really teach math one must learn how to observe first before one even gets into symbolic computation, math at it's most basic is about observing relationships, patterns of : Size, ratio, proportion, etc. It's really a language invented to systematize structure and relationships of the real world, therefore how math is represented and structured and is taught matters a hell of a lot.
I've learned over the years that many mathematical systems are totally arbitrary are are more obtuse then they need to be, math comes from the simplest observations. Math has built up a lot of cruft and wasteful jargon disconnecting math from the world.
For instance I had no idea for a long time that the way math is structured could be restructured when I was young and it was one group of peoples perspective on mathematical principles, I came across debates and alernative systems like:
http://www.symmetryperfect.com/
And it showed me how arbitrary mathematical systems and their structures really are and they are built to suit particular kinds of minds or cultures.
For instance the ancient mayans used shapes for numbers, instead of 1, 2, 3
See here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_numerals
Math is a very rich subject which unfortunately has a lot of cultish like people who think themselves the gatekeepers of mathematics.
I've thought about writing a book in my spare time about how badly mathematicians and the academia has blinded themselves to simplifying mathematics by focusing too much on symbolic jargon and not teaching children how 'mathematical' relationships are related to our simplest observations of the world: Size, shape, form, color, motion, etc.
"The need for such a feature at all is a design failure in itself though"
No it's not, the fact is games never needed these things until gaming went more mainstream and businesses wanted money from any googly eyed drooling human being.
When you put in things like demo play, you're not actually playing the game. I mean should we just pre-render playthrough's and sell them on discs for casual gamers? At point you stop gaming and just really prefer to watch others play or do things for you, and you've removed yourself from the interactivity completely - i.e. completely passive.
Quite frankly we're not talking about design flaws, we're talking about catering to the lowest common denominator. It would be like saying that because cars don't drive themselves, they have design flaws because they don't prevent idiot drivers from doing stupid shit.
"As a utility, they would be more inclined to institute "metered access" which will be worse than having simple unlimited access"
Caps ARE metered access, and it continues to allow the ISP to oversell and not upgrade it's equipment.
ISP's are one of the area's the free market does not function very well since their is too much incentive to oversell what you don't have. Look at a place like Japan and then compare it to ontario canada, most of canada lives within 20 km of the US border yet their internet access locally is 10 times as slow as places like Japan.
Until you realize they will just lower their speeds. But...
I'd really ike an investigation into how much bandwidth these ISP's and the top telco's really have and what their utilization is. What needs to be done is to make this information public on a permanent basis so these companies can't claim that the small percent of users are eating up allthe bandwidth and use it as an excuse to lower speeds.
Quite frankly these companies should have not be able to withhold this information in these matters because the internet is so important to society.
I've watched nearly everything I have ever downloaded, speak for yourself. A lot of people simply do not have the time to watch all the content the download, imagine if you watched / played everything you possibly could, you'd do nothing else.
A good argument against the so called losses of piracy is that there is only so much time in a day to consume content, there are hard limits on how much one can consume before it effects their life.
"Apple is FAR from the DS, and has NOT positioned its products as game devices."
I'd also like to add that lower penetration of game consoles one can understand whether or not your cusotmers are *interested* in games themselves. Saying a phone has an installed base greater then consoles isn't something to be proud of if most of your customers don't game on their phones. Just because some people play games on their phones doesn't mean everyone with owns that kind of phone does.
"In my work as a programmer, I often have to fill in huge gaps left by the designers, and the designers usually only get the best ideas after they have seen what the engine can do."
But this is more about technology getting in the way of the design and the fact that game design itself is comparitively young, compared to say architecture.
I agree that understanding programming and coding definitely helps a game designer, no doubt about it. The same way that understanding coding and shaders helps artists.
The thing people don't recognize is that the IDEAL designer has slogged through the trenches and gets an idea of what is feasable and what is not. This is why a lot of the greatest designers were programmers (Will Wright, Sid Meier, John carmack).
Building games is about solving mathematical problems and understanding the underlying the underlying guts of what goes into a game, but also it's also about knowing what is fun versus what isn't.
Much of the "fun" in a game comes from tweaking game mechanics things like animation times to make sure everything feels right and whatnot.