"Encrypted save files, DRM, and those types of things are the companies reactions to piracy, not the cause"
This is nonsense, cartridges and special 'flash savegame cards' have been around a long time in spite of other media that allows access. One of the Wii's selling points for me was the SD card slot, realizing my saves were encrypted really pissed me off. The "Fear of piracy" is just bullshit cover for their own greed.
I'm getting tired of the "all the intelligent people are victims", what really needs to be done is to have good guidance counsellors and to know about these internet resources, many intelligent kids can get the help they need from professors on the net and whatnot now. They have all the ability, what they need most is to have a map to be pointed in the right direction.
"In the end, as an observer, I guess I've always just found the pirate's reasoning to be a little self-serving. It's always been so easy to call corporations evil, controlling bastards intent on ripping the public off."
Because thats just what corporations do, I've worked in many industries whose profit margins are insanely high (much higher then 100%) on many items they sell their 'customers'. Just look at cables (i.e. the monster cable nonsense). Many small ticket items consumers are raped on by big box chains by doubling the price and basically lying about the product on the packaging. Consumers know that Marketing is often about lying, exaggeration and deception. So why wouldn't they be jaded, cynical and not wanting to participate in enriching someone whose values are blatantly offending?
Pirates are reacting to the rather evil infringing of their property rights and civil liberties, companies are trying to turn us into their serfs by not having us own anything or be able to use it and modify it as we wish. This is just kind of pseudo market-fuedalism where consumers are serfs and businesses and corporations are 'lords'. You can see this starting to happen in the MMO industry, WoW has 10 million subscribers, they have gained tremendous amounts of capital simply by exploiting population size. That's how people get rich, try getting rich in a group of 30 people and see how that works out for you, despite all your hard work or intelligence. Most free market fundamentalists would like to convince themselves 'they got rich by their merit', but they didn't, other factors come into play - i.e. population size. These are simply the rules of math and geometry, in any system of x number of people, x number of people WILL become rich, regardless of skill or merit.
Property issues: Why are my Wii save games encrypted, what gives the company the right to encyrpt and lock away my save data that *I* created by mixing it with my labour? Companies have long since thrown morality to the wind and sewn ill will among their customers because they are ignorant, simply don't give a fuck, or both. Expecting your customers to give a shit when you don't listen to them and are just there to pick up the money from the herd when they come to the trough is not good business practice over the long term.
If you've been in any sort of business you know that relationships you have with your customers are the most important, the media and content industries see people as merely objects to be mined for money. Corporations set the precedent first by their insatiable greed and by their lying... I mean marketing departments.
The idea that self-interest unchecked is some moral high ground is a farce for anyone with any kind of intelligence.
"On a slightly more serious note, I think the people attacking Microsoft's "monopoly" position are out of line. Not only are there alternatives, like OS X, but there are FREE alternatives that clearly produce similar results, like the many flavors of Linux including Ubuntu. "
It's way way more complicated then that for a lot of people, for instance games on windows will have a severe lag time before they are supported under linux, if at all. In many instances OTHER companies products determine what you choose. It's the same for game consoles: Many people buy consoles not because of SONY but because of other 3rd party companies (specifically, square and Konami with metal gear solid 4).
Also there is also the issue of do most people give a shit? People care about operating systems like they care about what kind of butter knife they use. All they care about is what they use it for, you're dealing with herd like animals.
In the real world there is inertia and habit, that takes precedence over the idea of the informed rational agent of markets, that is, market fundamentalism. Most people are nothing like what many economists espouse, asserting that there is 'choice' doesn't matter when most product in question is seen as a tool like a screwdriver, rather then something like say a car, where people care about what kind of car they drive, etc. The level of interest and personal investment is completely different, and is very important.
"I mean, where are the true believers now? Does anyone seriously think that western governments have any kind of moral credibility"
Talk to the average north american, and you'll find out that there are many that would rank you with steretype of the crzzy-type 'conspiracy theorists'.
This is just more example of fascism plain and simple, when business tools government for it's own interests.
"It shows the difficult part of ideas isn't dreaming them up, it's actually realizing them."
Actually they are equally hard, idea quality matters and so does execution, the idea is ultimately a guide towards goals. Most of us when we think of great ideas do not have the understanding or necessary tools to realize them. Just like the fellow in the article above, he had a great ideas but to actally implent it would take enormous amounts of effort, willpower, desire and knowhow. Whole industries were founded on ideas no one thought of.
I think using computer animation from CG artists would be the best, after all they are using tools CS guys designed! A lot of comp-sci revolves around problem solving and math so it touches damn near everything.
"I think the role of math as "leading" is oversold. I get the impression that a heck of a lot of math was inspired by physics. It seems as though the two develop in tandem."
There is a reason why that is, math and physics are part of the the same discipline, whether anyone else has realized it or not one only has to look to geometry to see how they cannot be dis-united. The real physical world is full of geometry (i.e. physics) and you need an abstract representational system to describe that geometry (math). You see a sphere x the real world and need some kind of ABSTRACT REPRESENTATIONAL SYSTEM to describe it... (i.e. 1, 2, 3, etc) therefore math is an abstract descriptive language we need to categorize and describe the world itself.
"The first step to skepticism is to show people how easily they can fool themselves by wishful thinking"
I don't think it's wishful thinking, it's some other cognitive (bias) process. When someone gives us something like that our mind will automatically find associations that could likely be true (via similiarity). The thing is most astrology/predictions cast wide nets, you'd want to do one that is specific. I'd like to see the experiment done again but say something like "Tomorrow at 5 you'll meet joe at Joeblow street/ave", or have a gradient of VAGUE to specific 'horoscopes', IMHO they are simply taking advantage of the human minds ability to look for patterns and getting bias from the way our mind works. Doubt anyone would say 'it was true for them' if we used very specific horoscopes.
"Why is it every other media we have speed-ratings and benchmarks and reviews? With USB thumb-drives you can't tell virtually anything when purchasing one other than what color it is."
USB thumb drives are like floppy disks, I think no one really cares that much about reliability since most transfers are done via network or CD/DVD/etc, or external storage (portable hard drive).
"Christians sure do work hard to believe in something that doesn't exist"
Religion is more about the fear of death and it's social function of binding communities, I wish slashdotters would be more relaxed and try to clue in and study the anthropological reasons why people are religious. We can make a good evolutionary argument for why religion exists and is so successful from an evolutionary standpoint. All that evolution cares about is that you make it to the point where you have offspring. One easily look at the demographic trends in say Islam to see that religion succeeds in terms of promoting evolution in that regard, even when it comes along with a host of baggage.
"It doesn't matter that it takes 1 cent to press a disk. How much did it cost to make the software, and how many disks did you sell? If your development cost was 10 million dollars, and you sold 10 million copies, you would have to charge at least $10 per disk to break even -- simple math."
But the most outspoken against piracy are also the most successful, IMHO it's greed plain and simple. The problem is with game companies not innovating in cost cutting in production. That's the REAL problem. Piracy will never go away, and if it ever does they will find out that when a product bombs it was because it wasn't that good / they targetted a small demographic. The fact is gaming industry is becoming increasingly lucrative. Just look at the stats related to it's growth.
Look at how insanely lucrative World of warcraft is, there's a point where it becomes extremely exploitive due to economies of scale. Where companies can take advantage of economies of scale, we know MMO's are made in the hopes of price gouging, to wrap it up in sheeps clothing by saying "oh it costs xx for servers and content development" and this is why game companies want a successful MMO so much.
My point is they do not have the same barriers other institutions do: i.e. the gaps funding and scrutiny. My point about mentioning secret prisons was merely an example of the previous point.
"There are numerous other scientific and social areas in which the military advances society, with far more practical results than do-gooders in other government or public institutions."
It's because the military doesn't have the scrutiny and oversight other institutions do, lets face it. Do public institutions besides the miilitary get secret prison's and liscense to do whatever the want? The military is not held back by moral qualms. We've seen this with all sorts of classified documents coming out of the government. The military has budgets that are kept secret. For anyone to claim the 'military helps us' vs public institutions, we'd have to do an analysis. But that would be fairly difficult and politically sensitive, now wouldn't it?
"the actual study is Baron, Larry; Straus, Murray. (1984). Sexual stratification, pornography, and rape in the United States. In Neil Malamuth and Edward Donnerstein (Eds.), Pornography and Sexual Aggression (pp. 185-209). New York: Academic Press. (can't find on web)"
Unfortunately, researchers themselves are frequently biased and have an agenda. The ancient world had no modern pornography and had all the same problems and even worse then that (child sacrifice, etc). What pornoagraphy does is merely bring out what is already inherently latent in many males.
Sorry but I don't believe this is the case at all, the culture of "pay me more" is bullshit. Many teachers and experts can't teach, but there are those in both groups who can. Paying teachers more is not the issue in many places, in Canada highschool teachers after a good decade or so can pull in 60,000-100K per year and student disengagement is at recrod levels. The idea that the private sector will 'solve everything' is also bullshit, it's cultural and it's complicated, people have made the same argument your making throughout history, yet the same problems occur you're not a unique snowflake here.
The problem is really about the culture itself, it goes deeper then that though it's north american insitutional and business culture that is the problem. See here:
Listen to the comments of "calcification" of kids in the school system and adults in the workplace. It makes a lot of good points about self management and responsibility.
I don't agree that all kids are just "lazy", they are disengaged because most of the time we don't allow their curiousity to blossom by killing it early through 'school'. The other problem is that we don't have a place for certain kinds of people in the job market that will pay decent wages. That is the REAL problem, technological displacement, and trying to achieve the impossible (i.e. raising the bar and expectations to unreasonable levels and then being disappointed when kids don't meet them)
Modern schools are often harmful and disengaging enviornments, for many it's positively toxic to someones development. No amount of paying teachers more, or accountability will deal with forced schedules and irrelevant curriculum, the lack of alignment of student curiousity and interest with what they want to learn vs the boring pablum clueless teachers, businesses and government elites, pushing their pablum as 'education'. Many slashdotters can no doubt attest to the low quality of the curriculum and their teachers and school simply not being relevant to what they are interested in, so they 'carve their own path'.
I think something is to be said by not killing childrens motivation and curiousity, which we do very young.
My point was the game sold on the graphics alone, do you want a modern game to have crappy graphics? I doubt you do either. My point is the gameplay is stale and the people who bought and liked World in conflict will give the message to massive that simple dumbed down gameplay is great, when it isn't.
... was way over-rated. The story/cutscenecs in single player are alright, the graphics are good, but the mechanics and art direction of the units are stale and the scale of the art/units is way too small. That and they ripped off company of heroes with squads entering buildings and they didn't even do a good job of copying CoH. Companoy of heroes is probably the best RTS released in recent memory.
World in conflict is just way too simple an RTS. It's a game for graphics whores, great graphics, decent attempt at a story, boring gameplay.
I wish we could take the graphcis of World in conflict and combine it with RTS gameplay knowhow of Starcraft or supreme commander
"Their core audience believes Naruto is masterful storytelling"
Naruto is good story telling, just because it's not to your tastes has no bearing on whether it is good storytelling or not. It's success most certainly tells you that it definitely IS. Not all of us grown ups 'grow up' (whatever that's supposed to mean anyway). And I would venture to imagine that anime watchers do MORE reading since many of them are reading subtitles of fansubbed anime. Just because you like to watch something, it has no bearing on whether or not you read or not. Everyone reads, the internet is all about reading stuff, it's just that longwinded diatribes and stories take a back seat to discussion, interactive games, etc.
Books and reading are passive activities, while you are reading books you are disengaged from other people and the absorb a lot of time. The reason for the decline of books is very easy to see: The rise of TV and the internet. The reading is taking place, more in discussion and fandom (fanfiction etc) where people are allowed to be creative, rather then passively consuming stuff from 'authors' they get to be the authors.
"Bill Gates has contributed more to modern computing than any other ten people together. Most people in IT owe a debt of gratitude because without his contribution most of you wouldn't have jobs"
You over-estimate the impact of bill, someone would have come along. Many technologies are simply wiating in the wings for the right person to come along, as long as new people are born into the world, there will always be more bill gates. The fact is he is not the sole reason for his success, the early adopters and the population count for a lot as well. The culture of the population matters just as much. If we lived in a culture of strong luddites I doubt he would have succeeded.
"Interactivity should be a means to draw the player into the game, not an end in itself"
I'm sorry but I disagree entirely, gameplay is an end unto itself. The thing I've hated about Final fantasy 12 was that it completley takes the interactivity away from the user to such a degree you're babaysitting a robot, you're not a participant in the story so much as merely pushing a automated robotic dummy through the levels to the next cutscene.
Or take god of war, what if god of war played like FF12? It wouldn't be the same game at all. Sorry this idea that games should be passive movie like affairs is the bane of serious game developers everywhere, they know about casual markets need to be babied, and unchallenged to the point of inanity, and it's a hard problem from a business standpoint if you are a gamer at heart, you want to make GREAT GAMES, not great interactive B movies (aka final fantasy 12). When a game gets to a point where all you do is sit and watch cutscenes via what amounts to a navigation simulation (you simply move your roboticaly controlled character from point a to point b) you've lost the whole point of what makes games great.
I'll take my god of war and previous Final fantasy battle systems over the passification and the dumbing down and elimination of interactivity for the retarded masses. When the masses get bored the hardcore will be left to pick up the pieces of the 'casual flops' and we'll be saying to the game developers "we told you so"
Gaming isn't for everybody despite the game industry growing, and its being mainstream among certain large demographcis of people, it's not as universal as movies, otherwise people would upgrade their PC's on a much larger basis or buy more consoles for said entertainment. The highest selling console is the PS2 with around ~120 million, and that's world wide thats pretty much small potatoes in terms of interest.
The worst thing that has come out of the massification of the gaming industry was the dumbing down of the game in order to keep pushing the siae of the market that will buy games, at some point you can't serve everybody and you're going to have to sacrifice elements of what makes games games, that certain large millions don't 'get'. And I really don't want to see gamings interactivity go away in favor of the drooling knuckle dragging masses.
Listen to the comments of "calficication" of kids in the school system and adults in the workplace. It makes a lot of good points about self management and responsibility.
The idea that the average person thinks everyone is equal is a farce, equal BEFORE THE LAW maybe but no one in their right mind thinks they're equal in ability, looks, etc.
"Some people are just dumb and/or lazy. They can't learn anything. Keeping them in school is the worst possible thing you can do"
I agree that some people are dumb, but I don't agree that some people are just "lazy", they are disengaged because most of the time we don't allow their curiousity to blossom by killing it early through 'school'.
The other problem is that we don't have a place for certain kinds of people in the job market that will pay decent wages. That is the REAL problem, technological displacement.
Modern schools are often harmful and disengaging enviornments, for many it's positively toxic to someones development. No amount of accountability will deal with forced schedules and irrelevant curriculum, the lack of alignment of student curiousity and interest with what they want to learn vs the boring pablum clueless teachers, businesses and government elites, pushing their pablum as 'education'. Many slashdotters can no doubt attest to the low quality of the curriculum and their teachers and school simply not being relevant to what they are interested in, so they 'carve their own path'.
I think something is to be said by not killing childrens motivation and curiousity, which we do very young.
"Why BitTorrent causes network bandwidth to be used. And network packets to be sent & received. Really sometimes I wonder."
Remember not everbody that is a nerd knows the specifics nor has the inclination to learn about the technology in sufficient depth. Most people are timestrapped or disinterested when it comes to domains outside their areas of job or area of their perosnal interests.
Really, it's like complaining we have to teach brand new people the same things over and over again many people figured out many millenia ago.
I think people forget that, not everyon is into tech, or is old enough yet to have become accustomed to it.
Slashdot Mirror
"Encrypted save files, DRM, and those types of things are the companies reactions to piracy, not the cause"
This is nonsense, cartridges and special 'flash savegame cards' have been around a long time in spite of other media that allows access. One of the Wii's selling points for me was the SD card slot, realizing my saves were encrypted really pissed me off. The "Fear of piracy" is just bullshit cover for their own greed.
... the intelligent kids have fewer and fewer excuses with places like MIT offering their challenging courses for FREE - http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm
I'm getting tired of the "all the intelligent people are victims", what really needs to be done is to have good guidance counsellors and to know about these internet resources, many intelligent kids can get the help they need from professors on the net and whatnot now. They have all the ability, what they need most is to have a map to be pointed in the right direction.
"In the end, as an observer, I guess I've always just found the pirate's reasoning to be a little self-serving. It's always been so easy to call corporations evil, controlling bastards intent on ripping the public off."
Because thats just what corporations do, I've worked in many industries whose profit margins are insanely high (much higher then 100%) on many items they sell their 'customers'. Just look at cables (i.e. the monster cable nonsense). Many small ticket items consumers are raped on by big box chains by doubling the price and basically lying about the product on the packaging. Consumers know that Marketing is often about lying, exaggeration and deception. So why wouldn't they be jaded, cynical and not wanting to participate in enriching someone whose values are blatantly offending?
Pirates are reacting to the rather evil infringing of their property rights and civil liberties, companies are trying to turn us into their serfs by not having us own anything or be able to use it and modify it as we wish. This is just kind of pseudo market-fuedalism where consumers are serfs and businesses and corporations are 'lords'. You can see this starting to happen in the MMO industry, WoW has 10 million subscribers, they have gained tremendous amounts of capital simply by exploiting population size. That's how people get rich, try getting rich in a group of 30 people and see how that works out for you, despite all your hard work or intelligence. Most free market fundamentalists would like to convince themselves 'they got rich by their merit', but they didn't, other factors come into play - i.e. population size. These are simply the rules of math and geometry, in any system of x number of people, x number of people WILL become rich, regardless of skill or merit.
Property issues: Why are my Wii save games encrypted, what gives the company the right to encyrpt and lock away my save data that *I* created by mixing it with my labour? Companies have long since thrown morality to the wind and sewn ill will among their customers because they are ignorant, simply don't give a fuck, or both. Expecting your customers to give a shit when you don't listen to them and are just there to pick up the money from the herd when they come to the trough is not good business practice over the long term.
If you've been in any sort of business you know that relationships you have with your customers are the most important, the media and content industries see people as merely objects to be mined for money. Corporations set the precedent first by their insatiable greed and by their lying... I mean marketing departments.
The idea that self-interest unchecked is some moral high ground is a farce for anyone with any kind of intelligence.
"On a slightly more serious note, I think the people attacking Microsoft's "monopoly" position are out of line. Not only are there alternatives, like OS X, but there are FREE alternatives that clearly produce similar results, like the many flavors of Linux including Ubuntu. "
It's way way more complicated then that for a lot of people, for instance games on windows will have a severe lag time before they are supported under linux, if at all. In many instances OTHER companies products determine what you choose. It's the same for game consoles: Many people buy consoles not because of SONY but because of other 3rd party companies (specifically, square and Konami with metal gear solid 4).
Also there is also the issue of do most people give a shit? People care about operating systems like they care about what kind of butter knife they use. All they care about is what they use it for, you're dealing with herd like animals.
In the real world there is inertia and habit, that takes precedence over the idea of the informed rational agent of markets, that is, market fundamentalism. Most people are nothing like what many economists espouse, asserting that there is 'choice' doesn't matter when most product in question is seen as a tool like a screwdriver, rather then something like say a car, where people care about what kind of car they drive, etc. The level of interest and personal investment is completely different, and is very important.
"I mean, where are the true believers now? Does anyone seriously think that western governments have any kind of moral credibility"
Talk to the average north american, and you'll find out that there are many that would rank you with steretype of the crzzy-type 'conspiracy theorists'.
This is just more example of fascism plain and simple, when business tools government for it's own interests.
"It shows the difficult part of ideas isn't dreaming them up, it's actually realizing them."
Actually they are equally hard, idea quality matters and so does execution, the idea is ultimately a guide towards goals. Most of us when we think of great ideas do not have the understanding or necessary tools to realize them. Just like the fellow in the article above, he had a great ideas but to actally implent it would take enormous amounts of effort, willpower, desire and knowhow. Whole industries were founded on ideas no one thought of.
I think using computer animation from CG artists would be the best, after all they are using tools CS guys designed! A lot of comp-sci revolves around problem solving and math so it touches damn near everything.
"I think the role of math as "leading" is oversold. I get the impression that a heck of a lot of math was inspired by physics. It seems as though the two develop in tandem."
There is a reason why that is, math and physics are part of the the same discipline, whether anyone else has realized it or not one only has to look to geometry to see how they cannot be dis-united. The real physical world is full of geometry (i.e. physics) and you need an abstract representational system to describe that geometry (math). You see a sphere x the real world and need some kind of ABSTRACT REPRESENTATIONAL SYSTEM to describe it... (i.e. 1, 2, 3, etc) therefore math is an abstract descriptive language we need to categorize and describe the world itself.
So math is - the language of the shapes.
"Most people don't understand the beauty of ray tracing .... oh wait a minute, most people are DUMB! that's right >;D
Seeing these comments reflects very well the average human intellect about a subject before talking about it."
Tell that to NVIDIA -- http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/07/1659250
"The first step to skepticism is to show people how easily they can fool themselves by wishful thinking"
I don't think it's wishful thinking, it's some other cognitive (bias) process. When someone gives us something like that our mind will automatically find associations that could likely be true (via similiarity). The thing is most astrology/predictions cast wide nets, you'd want to do one that is specific. I'd like to see the experiment done again but say something like "Tomorrow at 5 you'll meet joe at Joeblow street/ave", or have a gradient of VAGUE to specific 'horoscopes', IMHO they are simply taking advantage of the human minds ability to look for patterns and getting bias from the way our mind works. Doubt anyone would say 'it was true for them' if we used very specific horoscopes.
"Why is it every other media we have speed-ratings and benchmarks and reviews? With USB thumb-drives you can't tell virtually anything when purchasing one other than what color it is."
USB thumb drives are like floppy disks, I think no one really cares that much about reliability since most transfers are done via network or CD/DVD/etc, or external storage (portable hard drive).
Evolution is a blind process it doesn't care whether your an idiot, it only cares that you have kids. Despite your protestation it is evolution.
"Christians sure do work hard to believe in something that doesn't exist"
Religion is more about the fear of death and it's social function of binding communities, I wish slashdotters would be more relaxed and try to clue in and study the anthropological reasons why people are religious. We can make a good evolutionary argument for why religion exists and is so successful from an evolutionary standpoint. All that evolution cares about is that you make it to the point where you have offspring. One easily look at the demographic trends in say Islam to see that religion succeeds in terms of promoting evolution in that regard, even when it comes along with a host of baggage.
"It doesn't matter that it takes 1 cent to press a disk. How much did it cost to make the software, and how many disks did you sell? If your development cost was 10 million dollars, and you sold 10 million copies, you would have to charge at least $10 per disk to break even -- simple math."
But the most outspoken against piracy are also the most successful, IMHO it's greed plain and simple. The problem is with game companies not innovating in cost cutting in production. That's the REAL problem. Piracy will never go away, and if it ever does they will find out that when a product bombs it was because it wasn't that good / they targetted a small demographic. The fact is gaming industry is becoming increasingly lucrative. Just look at the stats related to it's growth.
Look at how insanely lucrative World of warcraft is, there's a point where it becomes extremely exploitive due to economies of scale. Where companies can take advantage of economies of scale, we know MMO's are made in the hopes of price gouging, to wrap it up in sheeps clothing by saying "oh it costs xx for servers and content development" and this is why game companies want a successful MMO so much.
My point is they do not have the same barriers other institutions do: i.e. the gaps funding and scrutiny. My point about mentioning secret prisons was merely an example of the previous point.
"There are numerous other scientific and social areas in which the military advances society, with far more practical results than do-gooders in other government or public institutions."
It's because the military doesn't have the scrutiny and oversight other institutions do, lets face it. Do public institutions besides the miilitary get secret prison's and liscense to do whatever the want? The military is not held back by moral qualms. We've seen this with all sorts of classified documents coming out of the government. The military has budgets that are kept secret. For anyone to claim the 'military helps us' vs public institutions, we'd have to do an analysis. But that would be fairly difficult and politically sensitive, now wouldn't it?
"the actual study is Baron, Larry; Straus, Murray. (1984). Sexual stratification, pornography, and rape in the United States. In Neil Malamuth and Edward Donnerstein (Eds.), Pornography and Sexual Aggression (pp. 185-209). New York: Academic Press. (can't find on web)"
Unfortunately, researchers themselves are frequently biased and have an agenda. The ancient world had no modern pornography and had all the same problems and even worse then that (child sacrifice, etc). What pornoagraphy does is merely bring out what is already inherently latent in many males.
"Pay teachers more..."
Sorry but I don't believe this is the case at all, the culture of "pay me more" is bullshit. Many teachers and experts can't teach, but there are those in both groups who can. Paying teachers more is not the issue in many places, in Canada highschool teachers after a good decade or so can pull in 60,000-100K per year and student disengagement is at recrod levels. The idea that the private sector will 'solve everything' is also bullshit, it's cultural and it's complicated, people have made the same argument your making throughout history, yet the same problems occur you're not a unique snowflake here.
The problem is really about the culture itself, it goes deeper then that though it's north american insitutional and business culture that is the problem. See here:
See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gG3HPX0D2mU
Listen to the comments of "calcification" of kids in the school system and adults in the workplace. It makes a lot of good points about self management and responsibility.
I don't agree that all kids are just "lazy", they are disengaged because most of the time we don't allow their curiousity to blossom by killing it early through 'school'. The other problem is that we don't have a place for certain kinds of people in the job market that will pay decent wages. That is the REAL problem, technological displacement, and trying to achieve the impossible (i.e. raising the bar and expectations to unreasonable levels and then being disappointed when kids don't meet them)
Modern schools are often harmful and disengaging enviornments, for many it's positively toxic to someones development. No amount of paying teachers more, or accountability will deal with forced schedules and irrelevant curriculum, the lack of alignment of student curiousity and interest with what they want to learn vs the boring pablum clueless teachers, businesses and government elites, pushing their pablum as 'education'. Many slashdotters can no doubt attest to the low quality of the curriculum and their teachers and school simply not being relevant to what they are interested in, so they 'carve their own path'.
I think something is to be said by not killing childrens motivation and curiousity, which we do very young.
My point was the game sold on the graphics alone, do you want a modern game to have crappy graphics? I doubt you do either. My point is the gameplay is stale and the people who bought and liked World in conflict will give the message to massive that simple dumbed down gameplay is great, when it isn't.
... was way over-rated. The story/cutscenecs in single player are alright, the graphics are good, but the mechanics and art direction of the units are stale and the scale of the art/units is way too small. That and they ripped off company of heroes with squads entering buildings and they didn't even do a good job of copying CoH. Companoy of heroes is probably the best RTS released in recent memory.
World in conflict is just way too simple an RTS. It's a game for graphics whores, great graphics, decent attempt at a story, boring gameplay.
I wish we could take the graphcis of World in conflict and combine it with RTS gameplay knowhow of Starcraft or supreme commander
"Their core audience believes Naruto is masterful storytelling"
Naruto is good story telling, just because it's not to your tastes has no bearing on whether it is good storytelling or not. It's success most certainly tells you that it definitely IS. Not all of us grown ups 'grow up' (whatever that's supposed to mean anyway). And I would venture to imagine that anime watchers do MORE reading since many of them are reading subtitles of fansubbed anime. Just because you like to watch something, it has no bearing on whether or not you read or not. Everyone reads, the internet is all about reading stuff, it's just that longwinded diatribes and stories take a back seat to discussion, interactive games, etc.
Books and reading are passive activities, while you are reading books you are disengaged from other people and the absorb a lot of time. The reason for the decline of books is very easy to see: The rise of TV and the internet. The reading is taking place, more in discussion and fandom (fanfiction etc) where people are allowed to be creative, rather then passively consuming stuff from 'authors' they get to be the authors.
"Bill Gates has contributed more to modern computing than any other ten people together. Most people in IT owe a debt of gratitude because without his contribution most of you wouldn't have jobs"
You over-estimate the impact of bill, someone would have come along. Many technologies are simply wiating in the wings for the right person to come along, as long as new people are born into the world, there will always be more bill gates. The fact is he is not the sole reason for his success, the early adopters and the population count for a lot as well. The culture of the population matters just as much. If we lived in a culture of strong luddites I doubt he would have succeeded.
"Interactivity should be a means to draw the player into the game, not an end in itself"
I'm sorry but I disagree entirely, gameplay is an end unto itself. The thing I've hated about Final fantasy 12 was that it completley takes the interactivity away from the user to such a degree you're babaysitting a robot, you're not a participant in the story so much as merely pushing a automated robotic dummy through the levels to the next cutscene.
Or take god of war, what if god of war played like FF12? It wouldn't be the same game at all. Sorry this idea that games should be passive movie like affairs is the bane of serious game developers everywhere, they know about casual markets need to be babied, and unchallenged to the point of inanity, and it's a hard problem from a business standpoint if you are a gamer at heart, you want to make GREAT GAMES, not great interactive B movies (aka final fantasy 12). When a game gets to a point where all you do is sit and watch cutscenes via what amounts to a navigation simulation (you simply move your roboticaly controlled character from point a to point b) you've lost the whole point of what makes games great.
I'll take my god of war and previous Final fantasy battle systems over the passification and the dumbing down and elimination of interactivity for the retarded masses. When the masses get bored the hardcore will be left to pick up the pieces of the 'casual flops' and we'll be saying to the game developers "we told you so"
Gaming isn't for everybody despite the game industry growing, and its being mainstream among certain large demographcis of people, it's not as universal as movies, otherwise people would upgrade their PC's on a much larger basis or buy more consoles for said entertainment. The highest selling console is the PS2 with around ~120 million, and that's world wide thats pretty much small potatoes in terms of interest.
The worst thing that has come out of the massification of the gaming industry was the dumbing down of the game in order to keep pushing the siae of the market that will buy games, at some point you can't serve everybody and you're going to have to sacrifice elements of what makes games games, that certain large millions don't 'get'. And I really don't want to see gamings interactivity go away in favor of the drooling knuckle dragging masses.
"The real problem is that people think that all people are equal."
It goes deeper then that though it's north american insitutional and business culture that is the problem. See here:
See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gG3HPX0D2mU
Listen to the comments of "calficication" of kids in the school system and adults in the workplace. It makes a lot of good points about self management and responsibility.
The idea that the average person thinks everyone is equal is a farce, equal BEFORE THE LAW maybe but no one in their right mind thinks they're equal in ability, looks, etc.
"Some people are just dumb and/or lazy. They can't learn anything. Keeping them in school is the worst possible thing you can do"
I agree that some people are dumb, but I don't agree that some people are just "lazy", they are disengaged because most of the time we don't allow their curiousity to blossom by killing it early through 'school'.
The other problem is that we don't have a place for certain kinds of people in the job market that will pay decent wages. That is the REAL problem, technological displacement.
Modern schools are often harmful and disengaging enviornments, for many it's positively toxic to someones development. No amount of accountability will deal with forced schedules and irrelevant curriculum, the lack of alignment of student curiousity and interest with what they want to learn vs the boring pablum clueless teachers, businesses and government elites, pushing their pablum as 'education'. Many slashdotters can no doubt attest to the low quality of the curriculum and their teachers and school simply not being relevant to what they are interested in, so they 'carve their own path'.
I think something is to be said by not killing childrens motivation and curiousity, which we do very young.
"Why BitTorrent causes network bandwidth to be used. And network packets to be sent & received. Really sometimes I wonder."
Remember not everbody that is a nerd knows the specifics nor has the inclination to learn about the technology in sufficient depth. Most people are timestrapped or disinterested when it comes to domains outside their areas of job or area of their perosnal interests.
Really, it's like complaining we have to teach brand new people the same things over and over again many people figured out many millenia ago.
I think people forget that, not everyon is into tech, or is old enough yet to have become accustomed to it.