The problem is that the Democrats ran another fuckup against him. Any randomly chosen person could have trounced Bush, but instead the Democrats picked someone really really BAD to put forward.
If you're against what Bush has done, how can you simultaneously support one of the 99 senators that agreed with his asinine Patriot Act, of which Kerry was one.
I disagree, and am already proven right by the fact that it is *already* the case that such elections have occurred (where the turnout was pathetic enough it should have triggered a "wait a minute" realization).
The problem is that the Gay and Lesbian community took something that was sacred to a huge percentage of Americans and turned it into something that is essentially the polar opposite of marriage.
What is the reason for your assertion that gay marriage the "polar opposite" of heterosexual marriage? It's important, since it's the key to your "reasoning", and it's something you merely asserted, and it doesn't make any sense.
Here on planet earth where the rest of us live, there are plenty of posts here complaining about GamaSutra's registration. I have no idea what thread *you're* reading.
I understand Bartle's complaint about how death means nothing in a modern MMORPG, but I don't agree with his claim that permanent death with a restart at level 1 is a good thing either. There is a social aspect he is ignoring - gamers like to game with friends. If your friends (ones you only met in the game or ones you know IRL) are all 20th level and you are now starting over at 1st again, then you can't do that, and it is unlikely you would be able to catch up to them to the point where it is safe for you to be hanging around them in the game anymore.
I think online games can take a cue from pencil and paper RPG's here. This problem is more pronounced in pencil and paper RPG's because the new character you make after your old one dies *must* be able to be a member of the same party, or else you end up being unable to play. (since there is only one "party" that the GM is running, unlike the computerized "GM" of a MMORPG.)
Well, the way a lot of RPG's fix this is that, while character death is permanent, that doesn't mean your replacement character has to be a complete newbie. Your replacement might come back a few "levels" behind the party average, but not so far back that you are useless to them.
Maybe the same could be done in an MMORPG. Have permanent death, but give you "credit points" for building your replacement.
Here's a further clue that Bartle doesn't understand people who play these games, note this section from his article:
Player: You don't have teleporting! How can I rejoin my group if I miss a session? Designer: Well gee, maybe by omitting teleportation I'm kinda dropping a hint that you can have a meaningful gaming experience, without always having to group with the same people of the same level and run a treadmill the whole time? Player: Are you NUTS? I want to play with my friends, and I want to play with them RIGHT NOW! Designer: But how are you ever going to make new friends? How - Player: Are you listening? RIGHT NOW! Designer: (Sigh)
There are two large problems here: 1 - these might be REAL LIFE friends who get online at the same time to go out grouped together. Maybe this isn't something Bartle understands, but people do actually game for social benefit. It's not all about the hit points and the ass-kicking. How would you feel if a GM in a pencil-and-paper game told you you can't be in the game anymore because your charcter died, so go find another group with another GM? How would you feel if the GM said, "your new character must come into the gameworld at the town square in Centersville because that is the source of all newcomers to this realm. Yeah, I know that's 1,000 miles from the party, on a different continent, but so what? Nobody could ever possibly be found starting anywhere else."
A no-teleport rule must be accompanined by the ability to bring in a new character somewhere somewhat near where the old one was, if you wish, otherwise you *are* forcibly breaking up groups of friends.
Does Bartle have friends? Does he understand how the concept works?
Allowing a dumb computer program to kill off months of your work is not a "long-term-good" feature (ie. lag = death). In the alternate universe where the ONLY way for a character to die is for it to be a fair death, you might have had a point. But no computer program is capable of doing that. (And if you throw in PvP, it sucks a *LOT* because it really discourages any newbies from bothering to restart (if a high level PC wants to have fun lording his high level over everyone just starting out, you can do nothing about it if you're the one just starting out. PvP does not, in practice, lead to good roleplaying. It leads to newbies being the fodder for previously established munchins' characters.)
In order to not piss off players, permanent death can only be implemented in a setting where unfair death isn't possible. Any RPG in which your "GM" is a stupid computer program isntead of a human being who can take into account extenuating circumstances is going to be an RPG in which this is completely impossible.
I got started on some of the MUDs this guy was talking about. One of the most frustrating things was that there were ways to die that weren't your fault, like playing a mage when there is a sudden netowrk lag that makes you unable to issue commands in time. (fighters tend to fight correctly on autopilot so they do okay when you aren't in control, but mages really need you to be there issuing constant spellcasting commands or the autopilot will make them behave like they are just really bad fighters without enough hit points.)
And that's why character deaths were never that permanent. You'd typically lose a little something, but not a lot, so that people didn't have a lot to get mad about when the dumb computer did something unfair.
I do agree with the article's author, though, that this lack of real-death helps downgrade the level of roleplaying available, but I disagree with his unstated assertion that there's some kind of fair way to fix it. I therefore disagree *VERY* strongly with his stated claim that in a real-permadeath game setting, there would be a correlation between character level and player level. There'd be a stronger correlation between character level and player *LUCK*.
Actually, it wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't for the fact that such a large majority of players seem to but into the bullsh*t that PC death is always the player's fault, or that being high level is always because the player is good. The juvenile bragging that goes with that attitude is what turned me off of online gaming back before it ever developed graphics.
(That and the fact that I in general don't like the idea of buying a piece of software that I have to pay a continuing subscription fee to be able to use, because customer lock-in always equals crappy quality. If these MMORPG companies weren't so lawyerific in their smacking-down anyone running alternate servers with alternate worlds, it wouldn't be so bad because you could buy the client, and then shop around for the server you like the most.)
Fact is, few if any auto salesmen are likely to emphasize the inherent instability that goes with a high center of gravity.
So? As long as they don't actually lie about it or FUD about it, it is still the customer's fault for not understanding basic rudimentary high-school science, or even just paying attention to the universe around them with a higher-than-single-digit IQ. It's taller. It will tip easier. Duh. This isn't a case of the salesman neglecting to mention something non-obvious like "oh, by the, way, this model has brakes that sometimes fail. This is a case of the salesman neglecting to mention something like "two plus two equals four".
I don't have a lot of sympathy for stupid people who get themselves killed by being idiots. If a drunk driver gets in an accident that kills a bystander or passenger, that's sad. If a drunk driver gets in an accident that kills just himeself and nobody else, I say he deserves it. I feel much the same way about SUV rollover accidents.
If you want to take into account default userland configuartion differences, then you can only talk about individual distributions of Linux, not Linux as a whole. (For example, Redhat may have a problem that Slackware does not.)
You mentioned differences in the kernel in passing, but your examples were all userland examples.
If you don't participate in the lottery, the ones who did can't use their participation to screw you over. The consequences of not participating are nothing. If non enough people particpate in the election, then a minorty ends up telling the majority how to run their lives.
When the election results are certified, the results are correct--with an error rate of zero.
That's not where the errors in the system come from. The errors occurred before you even got the pile of ballots to count. The count of how many people tried to vote does not match the count of how many ballots end up getting into that counting "pile". You have accurately counted the pile which was already inaccurate before you got your hands on it.
In the US it varies by time of day. Election day is NOT a holiday. A lot of people still have to go to their jobs. Therefore the times immediately before and after typical work hours are very busy at the polls, and the rest of the time it's in-and-out in a minute. ( I went to the polling station at 8:45 AM - stood in line for an hour and realized I was not going to have enough time, and I had a meeting to get to, so I had to leave. I got permission from my boss to duck out of work to go vote at 1pm, and at that time there was NOBODY in line at all and it only took a minute, with lots of poll workers standing around idle looking like they didn't know what to do with their time. These are the same people who earlier in the morning were navigating large crowds toward their respective places and running around in mad dashes.)
Although it is not officialy a holiday, most bosses are very generous about allowing time off for this in an "off the record" kind of way, since most of them have the attitude that they don't want to feel they were responsible for someone's disenfranchisement.
Not only was my ballot *touched* by a poll worker, it had to be *signed* by two of them (and it even said so in the print by their signatures - if not notorized with signatures, it isn't official) before being handed over to me to make my picks and drop it in the scanner machine.
I can see why. They don't want someone getting their hands on a box of printed ballots, filling them all out, and somehow sneaking them in to the count.
Your post would have made more sense in the alternate universe where anarchy is actually possible. Government is inevitable. Take it away and another will replace it rather shortly. If it's going to happen, like it or not, then I'd prefer it to be a democracy to any other system.
I just got back from voting for "Protest Vote" as a write-in for president. It's a clearer way to make your statement unambiguously. A blank ballot is indistinguishable from someone who is just too stupid to know how to fill it out, or is apathetic. Fill out the write-in blank, and thus make it clear that it is not a mistake on your part.
Perhaps you've heard of Audre Lorde, who famously said: "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."
Congrats. You found a famous person just as deluded as you are. Is the current system in the same vien to the one the founding fathers envisioned? I'd agree with you that the answer is no. It's just that I realize one obvious logical implication of this is that it is PROOF that the system can in fact change from within - it was changed into what we have now.
What are your plans for doing something to change it? The only options are:
1 - Participate in the system and try to change it from within. 2 - Revolution and throw the system out. 3 - Apathy.
The path you think you are taking doesn't exist. It is identical in effect to apathy.
Even if over 50% of the poeple did what you suggest it would not have the effect you are looking for. The effect would be that the minorty who did vote would decide what happens.
Pick: Armed Revolution or change the system from within. There is no middle ground that works.
Amazing how thousands of corporate intranets flourish without needing to be part of the Internet. Amazing how the technology can be used to build any number of networks
It's not amazing. It's exactly what I'd expect from a system built for compatability FIRST, and profit second. TCP/IP is not a corporate invention. Crap like IPX was.
The same is true of large corporations, though. The problems you mention will happen in any sufficiently large organization that has power. And if you remove government, then what you end up with is nothing more than a government by monopoly corporations, grown from those markets where a natural monopoly is inevitable if you take a laissez-faire approach (and yes, there are such things.
We have the exact same system here where I vote in Wisconsin. I found an interesting technical solution to the peeping eyes problem - I turned the ballot upside down while I was carrying it.
way to re-run the poll restricting it to US bound IP address
First, you'd have to have a way of accurately determining that an IP address is actually in or out of the US. All the attempts to do that so far have only yeilded approximate results.
you are more unlikely to affect the outcome than you are likely to win the daily number drawing in any given state.
And yet somebody still ends up winning the lottery anyway, for exactly the same reason candidates still get millions of votes. when F = X * Y, as X approaches zero, F does not necessarily approach zero if Y is simultaneously approaching infinity while X is approaching zero. (X = worth of your individual vote, Y = population of voters, F = the worthiness of the voting process).
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The problem is that the Democrats ran another fuckup against him. Any randomly chosen person could have trounced Bush, but instead the Democrats picked someone really really BAD to put forward.
If you're against what Bush has done, how can you simultaneously support one of the 99 senators that agreed with his asinine Patriot Act, of which Kerry was one.
Feingold in 2008!
Your figures are a bit misleading because the 280 million number includes the entire population, including those not old enough to vote.
I disagree, and am already proven right by the fact that it is *already* the case that such elections have occurred (where the turnout was pathetic enough it should have triggered a "wait a minute" realization).
You seem to be confusing "correct" and "legally correct". They are not always the same thing.
The problem is that the Gay and Lesbian community took something that was sacred to a huge percentage of Americans and turned it into something that is essentially the polar opposite of marriage.
What is the reason for your assertion that gay marriage the "polar opposite" of heterosexual marriage? It's important, since it's the key to your "reasoning", and it's something you merely asserted, and it doesn't make any sense.
Please explain.
Here on planet earth where the rest of us live, there are plenty of posts here complaining about GamaSutra's registration. I have no idea what thread *you're* reading.
I think online games can take a cue from pencil and paper RPG's here. This problem is more pronounced in pencil and paper RPG's because the new character you make after your old one dies *must* be able to be a member of the same party, or else you end up being unable to play. (since there is only one "party" that the GM is running, unlike the computerized "GM" of a MMORPG.)
Well, the way a lot of RPG's fix this is that, while character death is permanent, that doesn't mean your replacement character has to be a complete newbie. Your replacement might come back a few "levels" behind the party average, but not so far back that you are useless to them.
Maybe the same could be done in an MMORPG. Have permanent death, but give you "credit points" for building your replacement.
Here's a further clue that Bartle doesn't understand people who play these games, note this section from his article:
There are two large problems here: 1 - these might be REAL LIFE friends who get online at the same time to go out grouped together. Maybe this isn't something Bartle understands, but people do actually game for social benefit. It's not all about the hit points and the ass-kicking. How would you feel if a GM in a pencil-and-paper game told you you can't be in the game anymore because your charcter died, so go find another group with another GM? How would you feel if the GM said, "your new character must come into the gameworld at the town square in Centersville because that is the source of all newcomers to this realm. Yeah, I know that's 1,000 miles from the party, on a different continent, but so what? Nobody could ever possibly be found starting anywhere else."
A no-teleport rule must be accompanined by the ability to bring in a new character somewhere somewhat near where the old one was, if you wish, otherwise you *are* forcibly breaking up groups of friends.
Does Bartle have friends? Does he understand how the concept works?
Allowing a dumb computer program to kill off months of your work is not a "long-term-good" feature (ie. lag = death). In the alternate universe where the ONLY way for a character to die is for it to be a fair death, you might have had a point. But no computer program is capable of doing that. (And if you throw in PvP, it sucks a *LOT* because it really discourages any newbies from bothering to restart (if a high level PC wants to have fun lording his high level over everyone just starting out, you can do nothing about it if you're the one just starting out. PvP does not, in practice, lead to good roleplaying. It leads to newbies being the fodder for previously established munchins' characters.)
In order to not piss off players, permanent death can only be implemented in a setting where unfair death isn't possible. Any RPG in which your "GM" is a stupid computer program isntead of a human being who can take into account extenuating circumstances is going to be an RPG in which this is completely impossible.
I got started on some of the MUDs this guy was talking about. One of the most frustrating things was that there were ways to die that weren't your fault, like playing a mage when there is a sudden netowrk lag that makes you unable to issue commands in time. (fighters tend to fight correctly on autopilot so they do okay when you aren't in control, but mages really need you to be there issuing constant spellcasting commands or the autopilot will make them behave like they are just really bad fighters without enough hit points.)
And that's why character deaths were never that permanent. You'd typically lose a little something, but not a lot, so that people didn't have a lot to get mad about when the dumb computer did something unfair.
I do agree with the article's author, though, that this lack of real-death helps downgrade the level of roleplaying available, but I disagree with his unstated assertion that there's some kind of fair way to fix it. I therefore disagree *VERY* strongly with his stated claim that in a real-permadeath game setting, there would be a correlation between character level and player level. There'd be a stronger correlation between character level and player *LUCK*.
Actually, it wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't for the fact that such a large majority of players seem to but into the bullsh*t that PC death is always the player's fault, or that being high level is always because the player is good. The juvenile bragging that goes with that attitude is what turned me off of online gaming back before it ever developed graphics.
(That and the fact that I in general don't like the idea of buying a piece of software that I have to pay a continuing subscription fee to be able to use, because customer lock-in always equals crappy quality. If these MMORPG companies weren't so lawyerific in their smacking-down anyone running alternate servers with alternate worlds, it wouldn't be so bad because you could buy the client, and then shop around for the server you like the most.)
Very, very false. What percentage of the people killed trying to cross the wall were going east-to-west? I'd say it's really close to 100%.
Fact is, few if any auto salesmen are likely to emphasize the inherent instability that goes with a high center of gravity.
So? As long as they don't actually lie about it or FUD about it, it is still the customer's fault for not understanding basic rudimentary high-school science, or even just paying attention to the universe around them with a higher-than-single-digit IQ. It's taller. It will tip easier. Duh. This isn't a case of the salesman neglecting to mention something non-obvious like "oh, by the, way, this model has brakes that sometimes fail. This is a case of the salesman neglecting to mention something like "two plus two equals four".
I don't have a lot of sympathy for stupid people who get themselves killed by being idiots. If a drunk driver gets in an accident that kills a bystander or passenger, that's sad. If a drunk driver gets in an accident that kills just himeself and nobody else, I say he deserves it. I feel much the same way about SUV rollover accidents.
If you want to take into account default userland configuartion differences, then you can only talk about individual distributions of Linux, not Linux as a whole. (For example, Redhat may have a problem that Slackware does not.)
You mentioned differences in the kernel in passing, but your examples were all userland examples.
If you don't participate in the lottery, the ones who did can't use their participation to screw you over. The consequences of not participating are nothing. If non enough people particpate in the election, then a minorty ends up telling the majority how to run their lives.
When the election results are certified, the results are correct--with an error rate of zero.
That's not where the errors in the system come from. The errors occurred before you even got the pile of ballots to count. The count of how many people tried to vote does not match the count of how many ballots end up getting into that counting "pile". You have accurately counted the pile which was already inaccurate before you got your hands on it.
In the US it varies by time of day. Election day is NOT a holiday. A lot of people still have to go to their jobs. Therefore the times immediately before and after typical work hours are very busy at the polls, and the rest of the time it's in-and-out in a minute. ( I went to the polling station at 8:45 AM - stood in line for an hour and realized I was not going to have enough time, and I had a meeting to get to, so I had to leave. I got permission from my boss to duck out of work to go vote at 1pm, and at that time there was NOBODY in line at all and it only took a minute, with lots of poll workers standing around idle looking like they didn't know what to do with their time. These are the same people who earlier in the morning were navigating large crowds toward their respective places and running around in mad dashes.)
Although it is not officialy a holiday, most bosses are very generous about allowing time off for this in an "off the record" kind of way, since most of them have the attitude that they don't want to feel they were responsible for someone's disenfranchisement.
Not only was my ballot *touched* by a poll worker, it had to be *signed* by two of them (and it even said so in the print by their signatures - if not notorized with signatures, it isn't official) before being handed over to me to make my picks and drop it in the scanner machine.
I can see why. They don't want someone getting their hands on a box of printed ballots, filling them all out, and somehow sneaking them in to the count.
Your post would have made more sense in the alternate universe where anarchy is actually possible. Government is inevitable. Take it away and another will replace it rather shortly. If it's going to happen, like it or not, then I'd prefer it to be a democracy to any other system.
Turn in a blank ballot.
I just got back from voting for "Protest Vote" as a write-in for president. It's a clearer way to make your statement unambiguously. A blank ballot is indistinguishable from someone who is just too stupid to know how to fill it out, or is apathetic. Fill out the write-in blank, and thus make it clear that it is not a mistake on your part.
Perhaps you've heard of Audre Lorde, who famously said: "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."
Congrats. You found a famous person just as deluded as you are. Is the current system in the same vien to the one the founding fathers envisioned? I'd agree with you that the answer is no. It's just that I realize one obvious logical implication of this is that it is PROOF that the system can in fact change from within - it was changed into what we have now.
What are your plans for doing something to change it? The only options are:
1 - Participate in the system and try to change it from within.
2 - Revolution and throw the system out.
3 - Apathy.
The path you think you are taking doesn't exist. It is identical in effect to apathy.
Even if over 50% of the poeple did what you suggest it would not have the effect you are looking for. The effect would be that the minorty who did vote would decide what happens.
Pick: Armed Revolution or change the system from within. There is no middle ground that works.
Amazing how thousands of corporate intranets flourish without needing to be part of the Internet. Amazing how the technology can be used to build any number of networks
It's not amazing. It's exactly what I'd expect from a system built for compatability FIRST, and profit second. TCP/IP is not a corporate invention. Crap like IPX was.
The same is true of large corporations, though. The problems you mention will happen in any sufficiently large organization that has power. And if you remove government, then what you end up with is nothing more than a government by monopoly corporations, grown from those markets where a natural monopoly is inevitable if you take a laissez-faire approach (and yes, there are such things.
We have the exact same system here where I vote in Wisconsin. I found an interesting technical solution to the peeping eyes problem - I turned the ballot upside down while I was carrying it.
way to re-run the poll restricting it to US bound IP address
First, you'd have to have a way of accurately determining that an IP address is actually in or out of the US. All the attempts to do that so far have only yeilded approximate results.
you are more unlikely to affect the outcome than you are likely to win the daily number drawing in any given state.
And yet somebody still ends up winning the lottery anyway, for exactly the same reason candidates still get millions of votes. when F = X * Y, as X approaches zero, F does not necessarily approach zero if Y is simultaneously approaching infinity while X is approaching zero. (X = worth of your individual vote, Y = population of voters, F = the worthiness of the voting process).