"And those whose hearts are fixed on Reality itself deserve the title of Philosophers." (Plato, Republic, 380BC)
Philosophy is about the eternal struggle for the truth(tm), anyone who says it isn't seriously has no clue about philosophy. I've read many posts here and I'm quite disturbed at the fact that no one has realized that philosophy is absolutely necessary for science's development - if you're missing the concepts from a system of thought (which is philosophy, how one seperates truths from non truths, and the different levels of truth) then you're not going to get very far.
"Notice that both of these acts are perfectly legal, and while the second arguably should be regulated and restricted by law (the aggregation, correlation and publication parts, not the picture-taking part), the first one ought not to."
But you cannot put the privacy genie back in the bottle. All information has this problem. It's like trying to undo piracy and prohibition. Whenever I see a privacy article on slashdot about privacy on the net, I'm usually reminded of David brin's "The transparent society"
We consumers are as much to blame as marketers for all this loose data. At every turn we have willingly given up a layer of privacy in exchange for convenience; it is why we use a credit card to shop, enduring a barrage of junk mail. And although I agree in the ideal world there should be ways to limit information because anyone can put info about us online, etc, it still for the most part would be impossible to stop.
I remember someone unintentionally leaking their real name because they did not realize their wishlist was public and when someone googled their name, they showed up via amazon wishlist. People do a lot of things not realizing they have given others means to track them down. But this should be understood using the internet. Sun's CEO I think it was mentioned that there was no privacy and that other tech and non tech companies alike would have to deal with the fact that you don't really have any.
"Certain learning techniques can be used to improve synaptic formation in those with a lower amount of total neurons"
The idea that autistics have a lower amount of total neurons is quite the opposite, people who are autistic have larger then average brains. Elephants have very large brains as well but I doubt anyone would consider elephants even as smart as many low IQ human beings.
Currently not much is understood about autism at all.
"... I remember seeing these shutter glasses on GeForce 2. The contrast ratio was not awesome but it worked okay and was provided for free with the card. I wonder why it didn't succeed then."
The reason it didn't succeed then was because it wasn't well designed, it did not work with all games equally well. Next the fact that it ONLY worked for games is something often overlooked. If we ever finally do move to 3D UI in regular appplications outside of games and such apps become ubiquitous, only then I can see a much more realistic market for the addition of addition of 'true' 3D depth.
I remember trying to play Porsche unleashed in 3D and it was mind-screwing and headache inducing experience. One of the problems if 'true 3D' using shutterglass technology is making sure it works the same for every game out of the box. The old implementation did not have this.
Personally I would rather see 3D be implemented and standardized from the monitor manufacturer's side rather then having to use special glasses that will only come with a 3D card. I have to wonder why Nvidia has not looked into investing in monitor technology to bypass the whole cheezy-3d glasses thing. Most people don't want to wear 3D glasses to get the 3D depth effect.
One of the biggest problems for mass adoption of technologies is the way in which a technology obstructs, repulses (i.e. glasses are 'gimmick'/ uncool) or confuses a lay audience.
Truth be told, the only way Open ID will gain traction is if someone like google takes it over or implements it (merges it) with google accounts. Something many people have already signed up for. This is what google did with other services they had going.
Personally I use disposable email sites like mailinator.com and Roboform to just register once, then save the password. Then all you do is have to click a button and you can backup your passwords and never have to worry about forgetting a password again.
Re:In My Opinion, Cisco Should Be Worried
on
Google Router Rumors
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
"And all I can say is that it's about time someone put pressure on the home & enterprise networking hardware companies. What a stagnant squabbling market that has become."
If they do get into network tech, I seriously hope they release some home routers. I'm probably not the only one tired of having to reboot home routers every so often, especially with multiple people connected and having their wireless connection suddenly drop.
"Your attitude leads directly to plentiful releases of low-quality, just-good-enough software, many with bundled advertising and malware, much like the Windows software scene in fact. TINSTAAFL."
This is where I disagree somewhat, for instance software that has made game companies plenty of profits, game companies still find ways to cut corners and release software that is buggy and who's development is outright incompetent a lot of the time. Or companies to re-release the same software with a few updates for cash grab opportunities (Windows ME, Windows XYZ) or 'expansion packs' for games.
Development of software is simply costly to develop for what the user gets out of it, this is not the fault of the users. The fact is software development is probably one of the most time intensive and thankless tasks on the planet but who's results for end users are "meh" versus the time and cost involved for the developers - this is just the nature of the beast. End users don't purchase "software", they purchase "the experience", an app can be horribly written and have a great UI and still be considered a great application to the user. The "quality" of software is highly variable and most importantly, is not easily measurable from a consumer standpoint. A person cannot see the defects in software, like they can in a physical product, they are miles apart.
Most software, commercially developed or not sucks. No amount of money has ever really increased the quality of a software product in my eyes. Most software that is worth anything to the user is simply much too demanding in terms of complexity and development time. This is just the nature of the beast.
Consider Adobe - how many versions of photoshop does the average person one need? For the average user paint.net would probably be enough. There's many more examples I could point to.
... that are facing computing. CPU speed is far out-stripping storage and memory bandwidth. More efficient transistors = nice, but LESS robust to defects = bad. I have to wonder how fragile these atom transistors will be. I'm wondering if we're approaching a point where having too few atoms leads to much higher failure rate.
I can't be the only one thinking about how expensive this is going to be.
"The fun part is overcoming the hard part and thats what a game needs to focus on instead of punishing the player for failure."
I understand the frustration of repeating long stretches of level (i.e. no automatic saved waypoints from which to restart in case of death throughout a level).
But personally I think modern gamers are diluting gaming. You mind as well just take all the risk out of the game, and turn on the invincibility cheatcode. That's exactly what cheat codes were for back in the day - to give the people that absolutely hate challenge a way to play through the game without fear of punishment.
It seems to me they mind as well just make every game risk-less and make your character invincible going by modern gaming trends. I can't be the only one that's losing interest in modern games since there's no risk and the gameplay has been simplified so much that they hollow out what made gaming great to begin with.
For some reason slashdot has a lot of kooky capitalistic/libertarian types, I am always disturbed at the amount of crazyness that comes from the crazy kinds of capitalists. (No offense to the good kind)
It's difficult to criticize aspects of captialist economics on slashdot without getting severely modded into oblivion. Truth be told the numbers of calm intelligent people who understand the systems failings to those who are on some idealogical binge is tremendously skewed towards the latter. Much of it comes out of america, certain americans are really hardheaded in this regard.
SLI is no more about computation then gaming now..
on
Is the Gaming PC Dead?
·
· Score: 1
... I think the days of SLI as a gaming thing is numbered since Nvidia and others have been attempting to take GPU acceleration of applications more seriously. SLI is more now mostly for those who buy these cards for computation, and only secondly as a gaming card for those with the disposable income IMHO.
I never understood why people would pay so much for SLI, in the voodoo days it was neat but the average person didn't have SLI. I also never fully grasped why people were so obsessed with high resolutions, @ 1280x1024 I was fine and I kept watching the benchmarks go up to higher and higher resolutions and I was thinking we've reached a point of diminishing returns.
No you're blaming it on capitalism, extremism is the clueless man's excuse.
"So the badge of contemporary economic expertise lies with those recognising extreme capitalism as the cause of the current economic crisis. Political figures, media commentators, and theologians concur that "extreme capitalism" must be addressed. The problem is that "extreme capitalism" is just a meaningless slogan without definition or meaning in formal economics. Such economic sloganism identifies how debased the current economic commentary has become. It is becoming increasingly clear that the slogan brigade is out if its depth. The current crisis is about fundamental economic philosophy and theory.
1980's structural reform was based upon 19th century economic philosophy modernised in the 1950's by Milton Friedman. Political scientists mistakenly attribute contemporary orthodox economics to Hayek. While Hayek is undoubtedly the darling of the far right free market brigade, it is Friedman whose modern monetarism pervades western economic policy. The Australian Reserve Bank and Australian Treasury accepted Friedman's theories in the mid 1970's. Independent central banks, inflationary expectations, natural rate of unemployment and inflation targeting policies are identifying characteristics of modern monetarism.
Led by the outgoing President Bush, the G20 and Lima Conference reaffirmed more of same. As modern monetarists assume a full employment stable real sector, monetary policy is anointed as the major policy arm. Fiscal policy is relegated to dividing the economic cake among contending sectoral interests. Consequently, free markets and free trade become critical to world growth and prosperity; and protectionism must be resisted at all costs. After all President Bush claimed protectionism caused the Great Depression.
The truth is that periodic economic depressions are recorded persistently in annals of economic literature. Six economic depressions are recorded between 1815 and 1866. Between 1876 and 1938 seven more occurred. Periodically through the history of capitalism depressions and wars have been the "cleansing mechanisms" through which excesses of the system are sorted and a more stable system restored. Historically, periodic failure of free market capitalism lies in economic philosophy based upon three 18th and 19th century theories: Adam Smith's invisible hand, Ricardo's comparative advantage; and Jean Baptiste Say's Law of Markets."
Agreed. It's one of the nets must under-rated software IMHO. I'm surprised that the people that make the software haven't petitioned to get it included/bundled with browsers. Sure makes better sense then those yahoo/googe/etc toolbars.
"Robbing Peter to pay Paul is wrong, whether Paul is a corporation or an individual."
Then I guess any person setting a price too high so they can get rich is robbing people? What about inflation caused by multitude of businesses or government? (government via printing money, financial sector via securitization fraud that we just experienced?)
Seems like robbing peter to pay paul is exactly how people get rich in the first place, i.e. distributing their risk onto others by means of the price/profit mechanism. This whole "it's immoral" stuff neglects bugs in the medium of exchange itself, where aggregate actions of actors effect the little people without their consent.
The world is more complex then the black and white thinking you presuppose.
"It may sound romantic that a lone genius comes along and changes everything, but its not a good thing in practice, nor, for the most part, is it even true."
Lies unfortunately, there are some lone genius's, it's usually they who have to endure severe criticism and being ignored by their communities. George Cantor and George boole come to mind as people who did a lot of work that changed their field. Note that these people were highly ridiculed or ignored by their peers. There is this idea that every one who is smart/educated can universally recognize genius, this is not so at all. There are many genius's that have gone unrecognized throughout history because no one was capable of grasping theirs.
About Cantor from Wikipedia:
"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]"
They also have a discussion list. I think it would be a good idea to see if anyones interested in a "wikibooks" project, i.e. people contribute small articles, and over-time the community edits it into something cohesive.
When dealing with teaching, one should teach from the ground up. I've seen way too many programming books that assume previous knowledge and most are really bad. I like the zero-to-hero mentality, where you take someone knowing nothing all the way through. But when you write an article that assumes previous knowledge, you outline for others where they should go, what they should read if they are just starting. Too much knowledge is too fragmented, most peoples knowledge is highly fragmented, they need to know all the necessary concepts in order to further understand and use someones understanding, each link in the chain should ideally be easily linked to and found. Since when most people need to start at the beginning and work their way up, and frequently go back and forth for areas they are weak in.
I've been trying to find good 'self-teaching' resources for a while to take someone from absolutely zip understanding all the way through step-by-step, because much programming and programmers, unfortunately have started way too far up the abstraction chain and have little to zip understanding of what is going on.
Andre lamothe has some interesting things going on here, as he too was frustrated by 'dumb developers'
Why don't you write an article about how to go about teaching them? I agree that "so many programmers are batshit stupid!" but what one doesn't understand is that most learning is unconscious, and the fact that you know it better then others means it's highly likely your interested in it for it's own sake. Many programmers don't know where to begin, I really wish everyone complaining about dumb programmers would write articles to teach them the tricks of the trade. If you don't they won't get passed on.
... VR could work but IMHO we don't really have the horsepower nor the user interfaces to do anything that good with it yet. Also lets consider it takes a few generations of children raised in a technological society before everyone becomes comfortable and literate in technology which is still quite a ways away.
... I don't believe they have any clue what they are talking about in terms of game quality. Games like gears of war and Gears of war 2 sold 2 million +, the used game industry certainly doesn't seem to be hurting AAA games very much. The truth is industry, still after decades, still sucks at making games.
I rented Castlevania Judgement for the Wii and I was appalled that damn near nothing was learned from the previous 10 years of fighting games of what works and what doesn't. It's like many teams in the game industry have never experienced the last 15 years of games. It's pretty shocking IMHO.
... now everyone who has the same interests can find each other. IMHO it may have done the opposite, there were a LOT of people who thought like hitler in the era, it would have enabled people to find one another and support one another much more easily.
The internet does as much to inform, as it does to verify what one already believes. I've yet to see any idealogue be convinced by great arguments that their idealogy is false/wrong/error prone.
It takes intellectual honesty, something most idealogues don't have.
I agree to some extent, but we're talking about people that aren't very discriminating here. MMO's in my view are a lot religions, they attract the mediocre and the superficial. One of the reasons WoW is so popular is because it doesn't require traditional more difficult gaming skills. MMO's are glorified chat interfaces babysitting what amounts to an autonomous robot most of the time.
"Spore is also a lesson to MMO makers, it really has a lot of qualities found in MMOs and it also shows why so many MMOs fail despite good outlook and design."
The wonderful thing about MMO's is that MMO's can't blame piracy for when they fail. I really hate how the industry scapegoats piracy. When you look at the MMO space and see all the failures, that should be used as a benchmark against non-mmo games, because realistically you're only going to have so many successful games in a highly over-saturated market.
"I am a pacifist but i love military tech. Is that sick?"
No. Look at entertainment, if you judged people by the entertainment they watched the prisons would be full. We like the idea of destroying stuff and violence, but does liking violent movies like SAW 3 - make everyone who watches it sick?
The truth is humans (generally) are infinitely curious they want to explore every nook and cranny of existence, I would imagine most people would try / watch or do anything once within that individuals limits, if no one could find out about it, not because humans are 'bad' or 'evil', but because they want to know what the experience is like.
"The point is, games have rules. Once you've learned the rules, you're unstoppable."
There is an enormous difference though, the computer doesn't have any of the deficiencies of the human mind to get in the way. Most human beings 'wing it', most thought is 98% unconscious, therefore most of the time what you are testing how good someones unconscious processing is.
Slashdot Mirror
"And those whose hearts are fixed on Reality itself deserve the title of Philosophers." (Plato, Republic, 380BC)
Philosophy is about the eternal struggle for the truth(tm), anyone who says it isn't seriously has no clue about philosophy. I've read many posts here and I'm quite disturbed at the fact that no one has realized that philosophy is absolutely necessary for science's development - if you're missing the concepts from a system of thought (which is philosophy, how one seperates truths from non truths, and the different levels of truth) then you're not going to get very far.
"Notice that both of these acts are perfectly legal, and while the second arguably should be regulated and restricted by law (the aggregation, correlation and publication parts, not the picture-taking part), the first one ought not to."
But you cannot put the privacy genie back in the bottle. All information has this problem. It's like trying to undo piracy and prohibition. Whenever I see a privacy article on slashdot about privacy on the net, I'm usually reminded of David brin's "The transparent society"
http://www.davidbrin.com/transparent.htm
We consumers are as much to blame as marketers for all this loose data. At every turn we have willingly given up a layer of privacy in exchange for convenience; it is why we use a credit card to shop, enduring a barrage of junk mail. And although I agree in the ideal world there should be ways to limit information because anyone can put info about us online, etc, it still for the most part would be impossible to stop.
I remember someone unintentionally leaking their real name because they did not realize their wishlist was public and when someone googled their name, they showed up via amazon wishlist. People do a lot of things not realizing they have given others means to track them down. But this should be understood using the internet. Sun's CEO I think it was mentioned that there was no privacy and that other tech and non tech companies alike would have to deal with the fact that you don't really have any.
"Certain learning techniques can be used to improve synaptic formation in those with a lower amount of total neurons"
The idea that autistics have a lower amount of total neurons is quite the opposite, people who are autistic have larger then average brains. Elephants have very large brains as well but I doubt anyone would consider elephants even as smart as many low IQ human beings.
Currently not much is understood about autism at all.
"... I remember seeing these shutter glasses on GeForce 2. The contrast ratio was not awesome but it worked okay and was provided for free with the card. I wonder why it didn't succeed then."
The reason it didn't succeed then was because it wasn't well designed, it did not work with all games equally well. Next the fact that it ONLY worked for games is something often overlooked. If we ever finally do move to 3D UI in regular appplications outside of games and such apps become ubiquitous, only then I can see a much more realistic market for the addition of addition of 'true' 3D depth.
I remember trying to play Porsche unleashed in 3D and it was mind-screwing and headache inducing experience. One of the problems if 'true 3D' using shutterglass technology is making sure it works the same for every game out of the box. The old implementation did not have this.
Personally I would rather see 3D be implemented and standardized from the monitor manufacturer's side rather then having to use special glasses that will only come with a 3D card. I have to wonder why Nvidia has not looked into investing in monitor technology to bypass the whole cheezy-3d glasses thing. Most people don't want to wear 3D glasses to get the 3D depth effect.
One of the biggest problems for mass adoption of technologies is the way in which a technology obstructs, repulses (i.e. glasses are 'gimmick'/ uncool) or confuses a lay audience.
Truth be told, the only way Open ID will gain traction is if someone like google takes it over or implements it (merges it) with google accounts. Something many people have already signed up for. This is what google did with other services they had going.
Personally I use disposable email sites like mailinator.com and Roboform to just register once, then save the password. Then all you do is have to click a button and you can backup your passwords and never have to worry about forgetting a password again.
http://www.roboform.com/
"And all I can say is that it's about time someone put pressure on the home & enterprise networking hardware companies. What a stagnant squabbling market that has become."
If they do get into network tech, I seriously hope they release some home routers. I'm probably not the only one tired of having to reboot home routers every so often, especially with multiple people connected and having their wireless connection suddenly drop.
"Your attitude leads directly to plentiful releases of low-quality, just-good-enough software, many with bundled advertising and malware, much like the Windows software scene in fact. TINSTAAFL."
This is where I disagree somewhat, for instance software that has made game companies plenty of profits, game companies still find ways to cut corners and release software that is buggy and who's development is outright incompetent a lot of the time. Or companies to re-release the same software with a few updates for cash grab opportunities (Windows ME, Windows XYZ) or 'expansion packs' for games.
Development of software is simply costly to develop for what the user gets out of it, this is not the fault of the users. The fact is software development is probably one of the most time intensive and thankless tasks on the planet but who's results for end users are "meh" versus the time and cost involved for the developers - this is just the nature of the beast. End users don't purchase "software", they purchase "the experience", an app can be horribly written and have a great UI and still be considered a great application to the user. The "quality" of software is highly variable and most importantly, is not easily measurable from a consumer standpoint. A person cannot see the defects in software, like they can in a physical product, they are miles apart.
Most software, commercially developed or not sucks. No amount of money has ever really increased the quality of a software product in my eyes. Most software that is worth anything to the user is simply much too demanding in terms of complexity and development time. This is just the nature of the beast.
Consider Adobe - how many versions of photoshop does the average person one need? For the average user paint.net would probably be enough. There's many more examples I could point to.
... that are facing computing. CPU speed is far out-stripping storage and memory bandwidth. More efficient transistors = nice, but LESS robust to defects = bad. I have to wonder how fragile these atom transistors will be. I'm wondering if we're approaching a point where having too few atoms leads to much higher failure rate.
I can't be the only one thinking about how expensive this is going to be.
"The fun part is overcoming the hard part and thats what a game needs to focus on instead of punishing the player for failure."
I understand the frustration of repeating long stretches of level (i.e. no automatic saved waypoints from which to restart in case of death throughout a level).
But personally I think modern gamers are diluting gaming. You mind as well just take all the risk out of the game, and turn on the invincibility cheatcode. That's exactly what cheat codes were for back in the day - to give the people that absolutely hate challenge a way to play through the game without fear of punishment.
It seems to me they mind as well just make every game risk-less and make your character invincible going by modern gaming trends. I can't be the only one that's losing interest in modern games since there's no risk and the gameplay has been simplified so much that they hollow out what made gaming great to begin with.
For some reason slashdot has a lot of kooky capitalistic/libertarian types, I am always disturbed at the amount of crazyness that comes from the crazy kinds of capitalists. (No offense to the good kind)
It's difficult to criticize aspects of captialist economics on slashdot without getting severely modded into oblivion. Truth be told the numbers of calm intelligent people who understand the systems failings to those who are on some idealogical binge is tremendously skewed towards the latter. Much of it comes out of america, certain americans are really hardheaded in this regard.
... I think the days of SLI as a gaming thing is numbered since Nvidia and others have been attempting to take GPU acceleration of applications more seriously. SLI is more now mostly for those who buy these cards for computation, and only secondly as a gaming card for those with the disposable income IMHO.
I never understood why people would pay so much for SLI, in the voodoo days it was neat but the average person didn't have SLI. I also never fully grasped why people were so obsessed with high resolutions, @ 1280x1024 I was fine and I kept watching the benchmarks go up to higher and higher resolutions and I was thinking we've reached a point of diminishing returns.
"i blame this on one thing alone - extremism. "
No you're blaming it on capitalism, extremism is the clueless man's excuse.
"So the badge of contemporary economic expertise lies with those recognising extreme capitalism as the cause of the current economic crisis. Political figures, media commentators, and theologians concur that "extreme capitalism" must be addressed. The problem is that "extreme capitalism" is just a meaningless slogan without definition or meaning in formal economics. Such economic sloganism identifies how debased the current economic commentary has become. It is becoming increasingly clear that the slogan brigade is out if its depth. The current crisis is about fundamental economic philosophy and theory.
1980's structural reform was based upon 19th century economic philosophy modernised in the 1950's by Milton Friedman. Political scientists mistakenly attribute contemporary orthodox economics to Hayek. While Hayek is undoubtedly the darling of the far right free market brigade, it is Friedman whose modern monetarism pervades western economic policy. The Australian Reserve Bank and Australian Treasury accepted Friedman's theories in the mid 1970's. Independent central banks, inflationary expectations, natural rate of unemployment and inflation targeting policies are identifying characteristics of modern monetarism.
Led by the outgoing President Bush, the G20 and Lima Conference reaffirmed more of same. As modern monetarists assume a full employment stable real sector, monetary policy is anointed as the major policy arm. Fiscal policy is relegated to dividing the economic cake among contending sectoral interests. Consequently, free markets and free trade become critical to world growth and prosperity; and protectionism must be resisted at all costs. After all President Bush claimed protectionism caused the Great Depression.
The truth is that periodic economic depressions are recorded persistently in annals of economic literature. Six economic depressions are recorded between 1815 and 1866. Between 1876 and 1938 seven more occurred. Periodically through the history of capitalism depressions and wars have been the "cleansing mechanisms" through which excesses of the system are sorted and a more stable system restored. Historically, periodic failure of free market capitalism lies in economic philosophy based upon three 18th and 19th century theories: Adam Smith's invisible hand, Ricardo's comparative advantage; and Jean Baptiste Say's Law of Markets."
http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=8251
Agreed. It's one of the nets must under-rated software IMHO. I'm surprised that the people that make the software haven't petitioned to get it included/bundled with browsers. Sure makes better sense then those yahoo/googe/etc toolbars.
"Robbing Peter to pay Paul is wrong, whether Paul is a corporation or an individual."
Then I guess any person setting a price too high so they can get rich is robbing people? What about inflation caused by multitude of businesses or government? (government via printing money, financial sector via securitization fraud that we just experienced?)
Seems like robbing peter to pay paul is exactly how people get rich in the first place, i.e. distributing their risk onto others by means of the price/profit mechanism. This whole "it's immoral" stuff neglects bugs in the medium of exchange itself, where aggregate actions of actors effect the little people without their consent.
The world is more complex then the black and white thinking you presuppose.
http://www.roboform.com/
"It may sound romantic that a lone genius comes along and changes everything, but its not a good thing in practice, nor, for the most part, is it even true."
Lies unfortunately, there are some lone genius's, it's usually they who have to endure severe criticism and being ignored by their communities. George Cantor and George boole come to mind as people who did a lot of work that changed their field. Note that these people were highly ridiculed or ignored by their peers. There is this idea that every one who is smart/educated can universally recognize genius, this is not so at all. There are many genius's that have gone unrecognized throughout history because no one was capable of grasping theirs.
About Cantor from Wikipedia:
"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]"
Check it out:
http://accu.org/
They also have a discussion list. I think it would be a good idea to see if anyones interested in a "wikibooks" project, i.e. people contribute small articles, and over-time the community edits it into something cohesive.
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/WB:FB
When dealing with teaching, one should teach from the ground up. I've seen way too many programming books that assume previous knowledge and most are really bad. I like the zero-to-hero mentality, where you take someone knowing nothing all the way through. But when you write an article that assumes previous knowledge, you outline for others where they should go, what they should read if they are just starting. Too much knowledge is too fragmented, most peoples knowledge is highly fragmented, they need to know all the necessary concepts in order to further understand and use someones understanding, each link in the chain should ideally be easily linked to and found. Since when most people need to start at the beginning and work their way up, and frequently go back and forth for areas they are weak in.
I've been trying to find good 'self-teaching' resources for a while to take someone from absolutely zip understanding all the way through step-by-step, because much programming and programmers, unfortunately have started way too far up the abstraction chain and have little to zip understanding of what is going on.
Andre lamothe has some interesting things going on here, as he too was frustrated by 'dumb developers'
http://www.xgamestation.com/
Why don't you write an article about how to go about teaching them? I agree that "so many programmers are batshit stupid!" but what one doesn't understand is that most learning is unconscious, and the fact that you know it better then others means it's highly likely your interested in it for it's own sake. Many programmers don't know where to begin, I really wish everyone complaining about dumb programmers would write articles to teach them the tricks of the trade. If you don't they won't get passed on.
... VR could work but IMHO we don't really have the horsepower nor the user interfaces to do anything that good with it yet. Also lets consider it takes a few generations of children raised in a technological society before everyone becomes comfortable and literate in technology which is still quite a ways away.
... I don't believe they have any clue what they are talking about in terms of game quality. Games like gears of war and Gears of war 2 sold 2 million +, the used game industry certainly doesn't seem to be hurting AAA games very much. The truth is industry, still after decades, still sucks at making games.
I rented Castlevania Judgement for the Wii and I was appalled that damn near nothing was learned from the previous 10 years of fighting games of what works and what doesn't. It's like many teams in the game industry have never experienced the last 15 years of games. It's pretty shocking IMHO.
... now everyone who has the same interests can find each other. IMHO it may have done the opposite, there were a LOT of people who thought like hitler in the era, it would have enabled people to find one another and support one another much more easily.
The internet does as much to inform, as it does to verify what one already believes. I've yet to see any idealogue be convinced by great arguments that their idealogy is false/wrong/error prone.
It takes intellectual honesty, something most idealogues don't have.
I agree to some extent, but we're talking about people that aren't very discriminating here. MMO's in my view are a lot religions, they attract the mediocre and the superficial. One of the reasons WoW is so popular is because it doesn't require traditional more difficult gaming skills. MMO's are glorified chat interfaces babysitting what amounts to an autonomous robot most of the time.
"Spore is also a lesson to MMO makers, it really has a lot of qualities found in MMOs and it also shows why so many MMOs fail despite good outlook and design."
The wonderful thing about MMO's is that MMO's can't blame piracy for when they fail. I really hate how the industry scapegoats piracy. When you look at the MMO space and see all the failures, that should be used as a benchmark against non-mmo games, because realistically you're only going to have so many successful games in a highly over-saturated market.
"I am a pacifist but i love military tech. Is that sick?"
No. Look at entertainment, if you judged people by the entertainment they watched the prisons would be full. We like the idea of destroying stuff and violence, but does liking violent movies like SAW 3 - make everyone who watches it sick?
The truth is humans (generally) are infinitely curious they want to explore every nook and cranny of existence, I would imagine most people would try / watch or do anything once within that individuals limits, if no one could find out about it, not because humans are 'bad' or 'evil', but because they want to know what the experience is like.
http://www.amazon.com/Saw-III-Unrated-Full-Screen/dp/B000LC3IDI/
"The point is, games have rules. Once you've learned the rules, you're unstoppable."
There is an enormous difference though, the computer doesn't have any of the deficiencies of the human mind to get in the way. Most human beings 'wing it', most thought is 98% unconscious, therefore most of the time what you are testing how good someones unconscious processing is.
You'll probably find the following interesting:
(Quick version)
http://i35.tinypic.com/10fruxh.jpg
(Longer version)
http://www.linktv.org/video/2142
To get to the good part, watch from 15 minute mark to ~25:00