There's no knowing what the long-term effects of genetic engineering in food will be. So stop mass-testing it on the population.
You do realize that all of the derived benefits of evolution were conferred upon populations that had to endure the mass-testing of a change in their environment, right?
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for ecological biodiversity and the stability in confers, but evolution isn't finished and to think we're living in some sort of steady-state paradise is an inaccurate way to view ecology. Do we know the long term effects of genetic alterations? No. Should we ignore the power of genetic manipulationm and return to a Rousseau-like state of nature? I'd say no.
Interestingly enough, most of the tampering you mentioned in your post is icedentally environmental rather than deliberate. Mad Cow's deisease is thought to have developed from livestock being fed the nervous tissue of butched livestock. Antibiotics in pork and chicken arose out of a direct response to the demand of consumers to keep prices low. Lead (and other metals, especially mercury) poisoning of fish has arisen due to the increasing amount of pollution our culture creates.
So again, I do sympathize with your concern and share it to a great degree, but I think most of these problems have come about because the owners/operators of these production centers see science as a means to improving their profits and blissfully ignore the other, less (forgive the pun) appetizing implications a rigorous appraisal of their operations by a scientist might illuminate.
For example, anyone with a rudementry understanding of evolution and the reproductive cycle of bacteria would strongly recommend against keeping livestock healthy by overmedicating them with antibiotics. This might work in the short term, but the bacteria reproduce so fast that resistence to the antibiotics would be selected for at an incredibly fast rate, so now you're stuck with the same problem and one less tool to combat it. Deliberately ceasing to "mess" with food isn't a flag that will rally many, but intelligently going about attempting to solve problems instead of deferring or ignoring them might not either. Still, I think it's a strategy that makes more sense.
I'm with kaellinn18.
Your argument is that MMO's are illusory and therefore meaningless. In that regard, I agree with you 100%. However, there isn't one thing in this world that's empiracly meaningful, so I'm not sure your argument gets us anywhere.
Is work meaningful? In the great order of the universe, the fact that I was the one that scanned Ms. Delaney's turnips at the cash register is supposed to make me feel better about my existence? please.
Is love meaningful? Yeah, I've been in love, I've also had my heart put through a shredder. Doesn't mean I've never loved anyone again, but let's just say I have my doubts about the permanance of meaningful romantic love. I'm sure anyone who has been through a bad breakup can back me up here about how love...that seems so maningful and right, can often be a lot more flimsy than it might seem.
is art meaningful? This is a tougher one because who hasn't heard a fantastic song or read a great book that made everythign just seem right. But they, too, are invented. They aren't permanent and they aren't inherently meaningful. Your interaction with them and belief that they are meaningful is what makes them so.
So yeah MMO's are not, at their core, meaningful unless I make them that way, and if it works for me, there absolutely isn't anything better I can be doing with my time.
What about high-level instances?
I'll be honest. I'm probably from the target market so I doubt I count as a "true" MMO gamer, but I'm not convinced by your arguments.
I, too, am curious how high level content is going to play out since so much of WoW seems focussed on levelling, but I'm not necessarily disheartened by the fact that I can hit a level cap.
To my mind there are two ways MMO's can challenge their users. One is by levelling. i.e. putting rewards in front of the user (skills, hit points, spells etc.) which they can only achieve through gaining experience by killing monsters.
The other way is by achievement, i.e. putting reawrds in front of the user (I killed Onyxia! I got the elite warlock gear!) that can only be achievved by large groups of people working cooperatively.
The first 60 levels are about the former. The rest of the high level content is about the later. At least that's how I envision it. Do I really want a game that keeps me hooked by just extending the former forever?
Note that I do not fall back on PVP and battlegrounds for high end content. Frankly, I can see why a lot of lvl 60s are bored. Unless they have a tight-knit group of guildies to tackle high-end content with, they aren't going to get much out of level 60 at all. If you're not willing to make the switch into something much more cooperative than you aren't going to enjoy WoW at high levels. case closed.
Personally, the best times I have had in WoW are when I've been teamed up with guildies and working cooperatively in large groups (whether those groups have been instance raiding or pvp raiding).
Again, I'm only level 52, so I can't say for a fact what level 60 is going to be like, but I'm excited to get there so my guild can tackle the more strategic and complex challenges WoW has to offer.
I actually heard about this anniversary this morning on npr. There are still channels to finding important news in the US. They just aren't as popular.
Yes, first world countries have a negative population growth. The human population as a whole, however, has been steadily (if not exponentially) increasing along with the availability of food. This is consistent with ecological patterns of behavior for any species. If given more food than the population needs to survive, the population (as a whole) will expand.
The fact that certain pockets of this population are decreasing in number while other pockets are growing does not discount my earlier fear concerning overpopulation because it doesn't refute the ecological principle. Like I said in the original post, if the world population (again, as a whole) begins to decrease because of self-imposed limits, then you might have a case, but since it hasn't I'm skeptical that humans are immune to this principle.
There is another flaw at work here. If we take, for the sake of argument, your assertion that humans as a whole can limit their population growth as true, there is no assurance that whatever this x factor (wealth? the pill? high incidents of impotance?) that allows it to happen in first world countries will "blossom" throughout the world, esspecially if there were no limit to quantity or distribution of food.
Regarding the argument that the underfed portions of the populations are the ones that are growing, I ask what are the people made of if they are not made of food? An ecologist would agree that hunger does thin populations through starvations, but this isn't necessarily occuring in the human population. Every year there are hungry members of our population, every year the world as a whole produces more food to feed them, the population grows, and there are hungry members of our population again...
I admit it's a possibility that humans are not succepitble to this ecological principle, but I until I see the world population of humans become self-sustaining, I'm going to remain skeptical.
Also, I wrote that ecologists would agree with my premise concerning populations and carrying capcities, not economists.
I agree with you that if such a technology were made available to the population at large there would be open source alternatives, hence my shoe example. There will be a functional shoe for a small fee (or free), but commercial shoes would probably still be available. They would be focussed around the superior design and brand of such an object, not its function.
This happens already today. Anyone could get a decent sweater at Ross at a salvation army store for a few bucks, but they go the GAP because they are willing to pay more for design and brand.
Sneakout's critique is actual very well-founded. Energy will be the next hurdle to overcome regarding this technology. The materials could probably be found in most matter, but the energy to reduce these materials to the level they'd need to be to resynthisize them into what you're building would probably prevent this technology from "taking hold" throughout the world.
interestingly enough, the games that you mentioned that have a single player aspect (Half-life 2, GTA), also have progression built into them. For FPSs the progression is usually type of weapons, or defeating a particularly nasty boss/figuring out a puzzle, but it's progression.
It strikes me that, when it comes down to it, video games are about creating frustration for players to transcend. In simplistic team-on team games, the developers an give you all the weapons/skills etc. right at the beginning because the frustration comes from a team of people that are similarly equipped that are trying to stop you.
Any sort of a first personexperience is going to have to have frustration built into it, and if it's massively multiplayer it has to have progression (How long would you stay in a massive online world where there was absolutely nothing to accomplish?).
I was also in beta and have purchased the retail game as well. I very much enjoy the questing/levelling but I'm most curious to see how they deliver content for lvl 60 players. Now that the main issues of progression (levelling, talents, tradeskills) have beenestablished, how are they going to create new (and surmountable) challenges. Should be a fun time finding out!
This would throw the world economy into chaos since any industry based on the manufacture of goods would suddenly be SOL.
Of course, corporations would try to "fix" this situation with DRM-encoded recipes. Anyone can make a shoe (with the help of open source), but if you want the new spectacular Nike shoe recipe you have to spend money...the recipe components are downloaded to your nanofactory and boom, you have the "cool" shoe.
What this would do would be to make branding more important that it already is. Emphasis will be placed on quality and style of the product instead of usability (which will be possible to gain for practically nothing). Stephenson thought that this would give rise to a whole new artisan class of the economy which I agree is possible.
There will be economic restabilization, and that's going to mean a lot of death and suffering for a lot of people. Since people kill each other over resources anything that creates a massive alteration in how resources (and thus people) are controlled will result in war, whether they can produce the weapons from nanofacotries or not . But you just wait, this is only a precursor to the real suffering.
The real danger of this, at least for me, isn't economic restabilization, but population control. With such a device food will be possible to create even more easily. No need for crops, cattle or any other "source" of food. All food can be manufactured for the simple cost of energy needed to combine the appropriate atoms.
Any ecologist will tell you that the one thing that limits a population is food. (lots of people debate this and say humans are different. That we control our population at will, however since the "invention" of agriculture the world's human population has done nothing but go up. When the world's population starts decreasing because of self-imposed limits, then I'll listening to how we determine our own carrying capacity). World hunger is a constant issue now, but if everyone in the world can eat, I assure you that the world's next generation will be even bigger. And if all of them can eat...well you see where I'm going.
The only thing limiting (and I use that word loosely) global population is the manufacture and distribution of food. If those limitations are taking away the world is soon going to be a very cramped and unlivable place.
I heard about this study while running
on
Humans Born to Run
·
· Score: 1
For me, the ideal when running is when I can get my body onto "auto-pilot" which leaves me with plenty of mental cycles to think. Often I listen to NPR otherwise it can get a bit monotonous (and for all the nike commericals you may have seen, listening to Nirvana for a four hour run gets real, old real quick). Though it's a rare occurance, listening to stories about running while running always makes me smile.
In any case, I found it amusing that two of the lead scientists for this "discovery" are both long-distance runners as well. One said he wasn't biased but that he did do his best thinking while running. Not saying that it's not true (I can see many ways in which long distance running would be an evolutionary benefit, esspecially when it comes to getting to food), but it's easy to ascribe almost any attribute to an activity that modern humans do regularly.
See that large bum is actually very beneficial for sitting. Those who didn't have a comfy reear would fidget a lot and would be noticed by bears and eaten first...that sort of thing.
I think the rest of us are in the same boat. Though I did get to see fileplanet's wonderful flash advertising and I was able to submit a request, I haven't had any indication that anything actually worked.
That's okay though...I have my mad minesweeper skilzz to see me through the next few weeks.
Without a doubt, Bush and a republican controlled congress have had a great degree of influence over the past four years. I'm quite sure that those in this country who lean to the left are angry about this, that they are also angry about the questionable results of the 2000 election *and* that they are angry about Gore's lackluster support of issues that Nader endorsed wholeheartedly.
It's impossible to say which of these had the most influence in igniting calls for "liberal revenge," but I for one, am glad that Nader's voice is out there.
I went to the "slacker uprising" rally at the Univeristy of Minnesota during the 2nd presidential debate. Slacker Uprising is a publicity tour of Michael Moore nominally to increase voter turnout by offering a pair of underwear if you register to vote (Yes I registered, no I didn't grab the undies).
After the debate, and Moore's appearance on HBO, he began his "speech." I use quotation marks because most of the content was culled from other writers and speakers. The one salient point I thought he did have concerned Nader and the temptation to vote for him. As you can imagine there were quite a few Nader supporters in the crowd that were wavering between supporting Kerry and supporting Nader. There were others that were plain pricks about it, calling Moore a traitor and such.
Moore expressed the opinion that, because of Nader, the democrats have been pulled much further to the left than they were in 2000. If you compare Kerry to Gore in 2000, the rhetoric has become much harsher and emphises the differences instead of their cheery agreements. The two candidates today have very different proposed solutions to the same problems, and no one thinks for a minute that Kerry and Bush are equally evil (I haven't heard anyone use the tweedledee and tweedledum analogy this time around).
As someone who voted for Nader in 2000 this argument made a certain degree of sense to me. Is voting for Nader throwing your vote away? I don't think so. In fact I think Nader's support has swung the democrats over enough to my viewpoint that I'm willing to vote for them, hence my decision to vote for Kerry.
A socialist has never been elected preisdent of the United States, but minimum wage and social security would hardly haave had as much support without them. Those who support Nader don't expect to have him become president, they expect to influence policy of those who *are* elected.
This trend is not only frustrating but it's becoming absurd. I'm perfectly willing to accept advertisements for free services (i.e. network television, GMail), but I find it infuriating that my purchases are increasingly subverted into a branding vector.
Perhaps I'm a bit extreme, but I make it a point to not buy products that advertise the brand and if that's impossible I try to purchase products where I can remove the branding as soon as I go home (this can be difficult for things like cars, but surprisingly easy for many clothing items).
I realize I'm a bizarre specimin of an american consumer, but I don't CARE if people know what kind of car I drive as long as it gets me from A to B. I do not find satisfaction and community through my choice of pepsi over coke or vice versa. I am not my Operating System.
Am I the only one that's sick of paying to see a movie and then suffering through "the 20?" I've almost entirely stopped seeing first-run movies just to avoid this advertising, but thanks to product placement they get me anyway.
I bought the product! I've paid your development bills! Shouldn't I be allowed to use it in peace?
It's facinating to me that, despite its age, Brood Wars is still heavily played. Just goes to show you that a game doesn't have to have the absolute Best Graphics Ever(tm) to be good. In fact, I'm off to go play load-runner on my apple 2e as soon as I'm done posting this...but I digress
Does anyone know where I can download some quicktime files of the wcg gameplay? I noticed they had a wcgtv section on the website but it looks like that was for live broadcasts.
I'm looking forward to the day when gameplay in these events are broadcast on an espn-like channel. These players are fantastic at what they do.
It's not that I am against experimentation or even eye candy. In fact some of my favorite projects aren't exactly the most productive things in the world (K++ is a good example). However, these projects don't make a pretense of productivity.
What I'm criticizing isn't the fact that someone implemented a "cool looking" idea, but that so many users are touting it as an incredible aid to productivity, an thus a reason to convert to linux.
I see you're point, though. Having people say "oooh, that's awesome!" is an excellent marketing strategy. But I'd rather not have the feature-bloat in the OS.
I totally agree with you on this one. A small change to a FPS (look look, I can weild two guns at the same time!), is not nearly as engaging to me as an engaging story.
Yeah, I saw the screenshots. I also saw Sun's "spectacular" demonstration of similar technology.
I'm just not that impressed. Is anyone's productivity really suffering because of the horific amounts of time it takes to rotate through your desktops?
Launching and navigating the viewer would take you as long as shortcutting to all the desktops you're using. Yes yes, I realize I'm backing a linear technique to handle a potentially exponential problem (what if you have 82 desktops open? what then?), but in my personal experience, even when I have heaps of available desktops at my disposal I find myself utilizing only two or possibly three if things are really busy.
Instead of "improving my productivity" I wish these developers would focus their skills on what linux desperately needs -- more games!
Has anyone actually managed to get gaim working on OSX? I'll admit that I'm a bit of a *nix newbie, but I haven't been able to get this working. I even tried installing it on x11 and with fink with no luck. If anyone has some steps that I could use to make it work I'd love to hear them!
Granted maybe sourceforge is a better place to express this concern but since it was mentioned in the blurb I thought I'd ask/.
you might want to try WIzard's Bane. It's a fantasy story about a programmer who is transported into a fantasy world and learns how to program magic. If you're a geek you'll enjoy many of the small puns the author works in, and it's a fun read and kids would enjoy it. Best of all you can get access to it (and the sequel) for free at www.baen.com.
Another excellent book is Summerland by Michael Chabon. The novel is concerned mostly with baseball, but the father in the story is an inventor of derigibles and is a pretty geeky guy. It has some pretty powerful imagery on when science can go wrong, too.
My family was pretty cheap growing up. early in my life I learned never to throw anything away. I remember we had this horrible small television which I inherited when my parents bought one that actually worked. Every 5 minutes the picture would fuzz out, and require me to jump off from my bunkbed to slam it on top. I didn't complain because, hey, it was a tv and getting rid of it was out of the question.
So one day we get robbed, but the thieves didn't take the working larger television (too heavy to move easily), but they did take the POS. Sure it sucked to have our home invaded, but I was relieved to be rid of that crappy tv.
If I was really lucky the thief gave it to his significant other who would then think he/she was a total moron for paying for something that was defective.
You could extend this theory to all manner of products...bad cars are extremely inexpensive to purchase and every trip is an adventure (what will I find beneath it today? will I actually get to work? stay tuned!)...or purchase extremely old technology. What thief in their right mind would steal a sega master system? a betamax? a commodore 64?
As long as you don't care about having useful/enjoyable equipment this plan is perfect!
T.S. Eliot makes constant allusions to other works in his poetry. It's part of what his poetry is trying to say: that our artists and cultural zeitgeist as a whole don't have the resources to make truly original or meaningful art. The best we can do is try to reorganize and reinterpret what *used* to be meaningful.
Then again, maybe I'm wrong and Dante Alligheri, William Shakespeare, Andrew Marvell and God (Author of the printed book that is stolen most often)'s respective estates should have slammed him with a cease and desist.
The general sentiment of how to leave a bad job seems either
Immature revenge - i.e. random shitting
Taking the high road and just getting out
Both of these have serious drawbacks.
Plenty of/.ers have criticized the first response because "it can come back to haunt you." Another possible angle is that it's petty and in my experience immature revenges almost never work out.
I knew a guy who was trying to get a loan repayed, but the loaneee wasn't returning his calls. So he stayed up for four hours, redialing, letting the answering machine pick up, leaving bad messages then calling back again. Annoying the one who screwed him became a method of revenge. I'm not sure how the individual responded, but I think it would have been a simple matter to leave the house for a while, and then just delete all my messages when I got home. What I do know is that my aquaintance was served up with $100 in long distance bills. It didn't get his money back, and wasted time and money. Petty == stupid.
Also, most people believe in a moral system that subscribes to a view that causing harm or grief to another not only harms them, but you as well. Some might scoff, but I'm throwing it out there anyway;)
But if being immature and cruel doesn't really work, I don't think "taking the high road" works better either. Why? Because it's dishonest. If you're leaving because it's a bad job you should try to express the fact that you think it's a bad job to someone who might be able to do something about it.
Sometimes that's just not possible though. My last job had fantastic coworkers but utterly abyssmal management. Every time I tried to talk to anyone in authority about improving morale or other issues that would make happier or more productive workers they would take it as a personal attack. Finally it became so frustrating that I was close to throttling my boss during a meeting in which she intimated that (despite the fact that some in my department had been there close to a decade) we weren't that important. I apologized for losing my temper, but this was the last straw. Working for management I didn't respect was turning me into something I didn't respect, so I left...after briefly considing accusing my boss of sexual harassment (wail! she said I was pretty and *sob* that she could do so much for my carrer). But you know...slander can get you in trouble. Se how nasty I was becoming?
I suppose what I would say is try to communicate your feelings as best you can to improve the envorinment for those who come after, but do what you can to make your life good.
One potential problem is that samples taken from people with short hair will only give a limited history of very recent movements - leading to the suggestion that criminals or asylum seekers may shave their heads to destroy information on their past whereabouts.
Does that mean we aren't too far away from "You have the right to shave?"
Slashdot Mirror
There's no knowing what the long-term effects of genetic engineering in food will be. So stop mass-testing it on the population.
You do realize that all of the derived benefits of evolution were conferred upon populations that had to endure the mass-testing of a change in their environment, right?
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for ecological biodiversity and the stability in confers, but evolution isn't finished and to think we're living in some sort of steady-state paradise is an inaccurate way to view ecology. Do we know the long term effects of genetic alterations? No. Should we ignore the power of genetic manipulationm and return to a Rousseau-like state of nature? I'd say no.
Interestingly enough, most of the tampering you mentioned in your post is icedentally environmental rather than deliberate. Mad Cow's deisease is thought to have developed from livestock being fed the nervous tissue of butched livestock. Antibiotics in pork and chicken arose out of a direct response to the demand of consumers to keep prices low. Lead (and other metals, especially mercury) poisoning of fish has arisen due to the increasing amount of pollution our culture creates.
So again, I do sympathize with your concern and share it to a great degree, but I think most of these problems have come about because the owners/operators of these production centers see science as a means to improving their profits and blissfully ignore the other, less (forgive the pun) appetizing implications a rigorous appraisal of their operations by a scientist might illuminate.
For example, anyone with a rudementry understanding of evolution and the reproductive cycle of bacteria would strongly recommend against keeping livestock healthy by overmedicating them with antibiotics. This might work in the short term, but the bacteria reproduce so fast that resistence to the antibiotics would be selected for at an incredibly fast rate, so now you're stuck with the same problem and one less tool to combat it. Deliberately ceasing to "mess" with food isn't a flag that will rally many, but intelligently going about attempting to solve problems instead of deferring or ignoring them might not either. Still, I think it's a strategy that makes more sense.
drat!
usually I add my br's manually but I brain farted...sorry for the trouble
I'm with kaellinn18. Your argument is that MMO's are illusory and therefore meaningless. In that regard, I agree with you 100%. However, there isn't one thing in this world that's empiracly meaningful, so I'm not sure your argument gets us anywhere. Is work meaningful? In the great order of the universe, the fact that I was the one that scanned Ms. Delaney's turnips at the cash register is supposed to make me feel better about my existence? please. Is love meaningful? Yeah, I've been in love, I've also had my heart put through a shredder. Doesn't mean I've never loved anyone again, but let's just say I have my doubts about the permanance of meaningful romantic love. I'm sure anyone who has been through a bad breakup can back me up here about how love...that seems so maningful and right, can often be a lot more flimsy than it might seem. is art meaningful? This is a tougher one because who hasn't heard a fantastic song or read a great book that made everythign just seem right. But they, too, are invented. They aren't permanent and they aren't inherently meaningful. Your interaction with them and belief that they are meaningful is what makes them so. So yeah MMO's are not, at their core, meaningful unless I make them that way, and if it works for me, there absolutely isn't anything better I can be doing with my time.
What about high-level instances? I'll be honest. I'm probably from the target market so I doubt I count as a "true" MMO gamer, but I'm not convinced by your arguments. I, too, am curious how high level content is going to play out since so much of WoW seems focussed on levelling, but I'm not necessarily disheartened by the fact that I can hit a level cap. To my mind there are two ways MMO's can challenge their users. One is by levelling. i.e. putting rewards in front of the user (skills, hit points, spells etc.) which they can only achieve through gaining experience by killing monsters. The other way is by achievement, i.e. putting reawrds in front of the user (I killed Onyxia! I got the elite warlock gear!) that can only be achievved by large groups of people working cooperatively. The first 60 levels are about the former. The rest of the high level content is about the later. At least that's how I envision it. Do I really want a game that keeps me hooked by just extending the former forever? Note that I do not fall back on PVP and battlegrounds for high end content. Frankly, I can see why a lot of lvl 60s are bored. Unless they have a tight-knit group of guildies to tackle high-end content with, they aren't going to get much out of level 60 at all. If you're not willing to make the switch into something much more cooperative than you aren't going to enjoy WoW at high levels. case closed. Personally, the best times I have had in WoW are when I've been teamed up with guildies and working cooperatively in large groups (whether those groups have been instance raiding or pvp raiding). Again, I'm only level 52, so I can't say for a fact what level 60 is going to be like, but I'm excited to get there so my guild can tackle the more strategic and complex challenges WoW has to offer.
I think there are so few comments because the people who do care about mmorpgs are playing them instead of reading /. comments.
I actually heard about this anniversary this morning on npr. There are still channels to finding important news in the US. They just aren't as popular.
Yes, first world countries have a negative population growth. The human population as a whole, however, has been steadily (if not exponentially) increasing along with the availability of food. This is consistent with ecological patterns of behavior for any species. If given more food than the population needs to survive, the population (as a whole) will expand.
The fact that certain pockets of this population are decreasing in number while other pockets are growing does not discount my earlier fear concerning overpopulation because it doesn't refute the ecological principle. Like I said in the original post, if the world population (again, as a whole) begins to decrease because of self-imposed limits, then you might have a case, but since it hasn't I'm skeptical that humans are immune to this principle.
There is another flaw at work here. If we take, for the sake of argument, your assertion that humans as a whole can limit their population growth as true, there is no assurance that whatever this x factor (wealth? the pill? high incidents of impotance?) that allows it to happen in first world countries will "blossom" throughout the world, esspecially if there were no limit to quantity or distribution of food.
Regarding the argument that the underfed portions of the populations are the ones that are growing, I ask what are the people made of if they are not made of food? An ecologist would agree that hunger does thin populations through starvations, but this isn't necessarily occuring in the human population. Every year there are hungry members of our population, every year the world as a whole produces more food to feed them, the population grows, and there are hungry members of our population again...
I admit it's a possibility that humans are not succepitble to this ecological principle, but I until I see the world population of humans become self-sustaining, I'm going to remain skeptical.
Also, I wrote that ecologists would agree with my premise concerning populations and carrying capcities, not economists.
I agree with you that if such a technology were made available to the population at large there would be open source alternatives, hence my shoe example. There will be a functional shoe for a small fee (or free), but commercial shoes would probably still be available. They would be focussed around the superior design and brand of such an object, not its function.
This happens already today. Anyone could get a decent sweater at Ross at a salvation army store for a few bucks, but they go the GAP because they are willing to pay more for design and brand.
Sneakout's critique is actual very well-founded. Energy will be the next hurdle to overcome regarding this technology. The materials could probably be found in most matter, but the energy to reduce these materials to the level they'd need to be to resynthisize them into what you're building would probably prevent this technology from "taking hold" throughout the world.
interestingly enough, the games that you mentioned that have a single player aspect (Half-life 2, GTA), also have progression built into them. For FPSs the progression is usually type of weapons, or defeating a particularly nasty boss/figuring out a puzzle, but it's progression.
It strikes me that, when it comes down to it, video games are about creating frustration for players to transcend. In simplistic team-on team games, the developers an give you all the weapons/skills etc. right at the beginning because the frustration comes from a team of people that are similarly equipped that are trying to stop you.
Any sort of a first personexperience is going to have to have frustration built into it, and if it's massively multiplayer it has to have progression (How long would you stay in a massive online world where there was absolutely nothing to accomplish?).
I was also in beta and have purchased the retail game as well. I very much enjoy the questing/levelling but I'm most curious to see how they deliver content for lvl 60 players. Now that the main issues of progression (levelling, talents, tradeskills) have beenestablished, how are they going to create new (and surmountable) challenges. Should be a fun time finding out!
This would throw the world economy into chaos since any industry based on the manufacture of goods would suddenly be SOL.
Of course, corporations would try to "fix" this situation with DRM-encoded recipes. Anyone can make a shoe (with the help of open source), but if you want the new spectacular Nike shoe recipe you have to spend money...the recipe components are downloaded to your nanofactory and boom, you have the "cool" shoe.
What this would do would be to make branding more important that it already is. Emphasis will be placed on quality and style of the product instead of usability (which will be possible to gain for practically nothing). Stephenson thought that this would give rise to a whole new artisan class of the economy which I agree is possible.
There will be economic restabilization, and that's going to mean a lot of death and suffering for a lot of people. Since people kill each other over resources anything that creates a massive alteration in how resources (and thus people) are controlled will result in war, whether they can produce the weapons from nanofacotries or not . But you just wait, this is only a precursor to the real suffering.
The real danger of this, at least for me, isn't economic restabilization, but population control. With such a device food will be possible to create even more easily. No need for crops, cattle or any other "source" of food. All food can be manufactured for the simple cost of energy needed to combine the appropriate atoms.
Any ecologist will tell you that the one thing that limits a population is food. (lots of people debate this and say humans are different. That we control our population at will, however since the "invention" of agriculture the world's human population has done nothing but go up. When the world's population starts decreasing because of self-imposed limits, then I'll listening to how we determine our own carrying capacity). World hunger is a constant issue now, but if everyone in the world can eat, I assure you that the world's next generation will be even bigger. And if all of them can eat...well you see where I'm going.
The only thing limiting (and I use that word loosely) global population is the manufacture and distribution of food. If those limitations are taking away the world is soon going to be a very cramped and unlivable place.
For me, the ideal when running is when I can get my body onto "auto-pilot" which leaves me with plenty of mental cycles to think. Often I listen to NPR otherwise it can get a bit monotonous (and for all the nike commericals you may have seen, listening to Nirvana for a four hour run gets real, old real quick). Though it's a rare occurance, listening to stories about running while running always makes me smile. In any case, I found it amusing that two of the lead scientists for this "discovery" are both long-distance runners as well. One said he wasn't biased but that he did do his best thinking while running. Not saying that it's not true (I can see many ways in which long distance running would be an evolutionary benefit, esspecially when it comes to getting to food), but it's easy to ascribe almost any attribute to an activity that modern humans do regularly. See that large bum is actually very beneficial for sitting. Those who didn't have a comfy reear would fidget a lot and would be noticed by bears and eaten first...that sort of thing.
I think the rest of us are in the same boat. Though I did get to see fileplanet's wonderful flash advertising and I was able to submit a request, I haven't had any indication that anything actually worked.
That's okay though...I have my mad minesweeper skilzz to see me through the next few weeks.
Without a doubt, Bush and a republican controlled congress have had a great degree of influence over the past four years. I'm quite sure that those in this country who lean to the left are angry about this, that they are also angry about the questionable results of the 2000 election *and* that they are angry about Gore's lackluster support of issues that Nader endorsed wholeheartedly.
It's impossible to say which of these had the most influence in igniting calls for "liberal revenge," but I for one, am glad that Nader's voice is out there.
I went to the "slacker uprising" rally at the Univeristy of Minnesota during the 2nd presidential debate. Slacker Uprising is a publicity tour of Michael Moore nominally to increase voter turnout by offering a pair of underwear if you register to vote (Yes I registered, no I didn't grab the undies).
After the debate, and Moore's appearance on HBO, he began his "speech." I use quotation marks because most of the content was culled from other writers and speakers. The one salient point I thought he did have concerned Nader and the temptation to vote for him. As you can imagine there were quite a few Nader supporters in the crowd that were wavering between supporting Kerry and supporting Nader. There were others that were plain pricks about it, calling Moore a traitor and such.
Moore expressed the opinion that, because of Nader, the democrats have been pulled much further to the left than they were in 2000. If you compare Kerry to Gore in 2000, the rhetoric has become much harsher and emphises the differences instead of their cheery agreements. The two candidates today have very different proposed solutions to the same problems, and no one thinks for a minute that Kerry and Bush are equally evil (I haven't heard anyone use the tweedledee and tweedledum analogy this time around).
As someone who voted for Nader in 2000 this argument made a certain degree of sense to me. Is voting for Nader throwing your vote away? I don't think so. In fact I think Nader's support has swung the democrats over enough to my viewpoint that I'm willing to vote for them, hence my decision to vote for Kerry.
A socialist has never been elected preisdent of the United States, but minimum wage and social security would hardly haave had as much support without them. Those who support Nader don't expect to have him become president, they expect to influence policy of those who *are* elected.
This trend is not only frustrating but it's becoming absurd. I'm perfectly willing to accept advertisements for free services (i.e. network television, GMail), but I find it infuriating that my purchases are increasingly subverted into a branding vector.
Perhaps I'm a bit extreme, but I make it a point to not buy products that advertise the brand and if that's impossible I try to purchase products where I can remove the branding as soon as I go home (this can be difficult for things like cars, but surprisingly easy for many clothing items).
I realize I'm a bizarre specimin of an american consumer, but I don't CARE if people know what kind of car I drive as long as it gets me from A to B. I do not find satisfaction and community through my choice of pepsi over coke or vice versa. I am not my Operating System.
Am I the only one that's sick of paying to see a movie and then suffering through "the 20?" I've almost entirely stopped seeing first-run movies just to avoid this advertising, but thanks to product placement they get me anyway.
I bought the product! I've paid your development bills! Shouldn't I be allowed to use it in peace?
It's facinating to me that, despite its age, Brood Wars is still heavily played. Just goes to show you that a game doesn't have to have the absolute Best Graphics Ever(tm) to be good. In fact, I'm off to go play load-runner on my apple 2e as soon as I'm done posting this...but I digress
Does anyone know where I can download some quicktime files of the wcg gameplay? I noticed they had a wcgtv section on the website but it looks like that was for live broadcasts.
I'm looking forward to the day when gameplay in these events are broadcast on an espn-like channel. These players are fantastic at what they do.
It's not that I am against experimentation or even eye candy. In fact some of my favorite projects aren't exactly the most productive things in the world (K++ is a good example). However, these projects don't make a pretense of productivity.
What I'm criticizing isn't the fact that someone implemented a "cool looking" idea, but that so many users are touting it as an incredible aid to productivity, an thus a reason to convert to linux.
I see you're point, though. Having people say "oooh, that's awesome!" is an excellent marketing strategy. But I'd rather not have the feature-bloat in the OS.
I totally agree with you on this one. A small change to a FPS (look look, I can weild two guns at the same time!), is not nearly as engaging to me as an engaging story.
Cheers to game content!
thanks! I actually just discovered this today. Very Snazzy!
Yeah, I saw the screenshots. I also saw Sun's "spectacular" demonstration of similar technology.
I'm just not that impressed. Is anyone's productivity really suffering because of the horific amounts of time it takes to rotate through your desktops?
Launching and navigating the viewer would take you as long as shortcutting to all the desktops you're using. Yes yes, I realize I'm backing a linear technique to handle a potentially exponential problem (what if you have 82 desktops open? what then?), but in my personal experience, even when I have heaps of available desktops at my disposal I find myself utilizing only two or possibly three if things are really busy.
Instead of "improving my productivity" I wish these developers would focus their skills on what linux desperately needs -- more games!
Has anyone actually managed to get gaim working on OSX? I'll admit that I'm a bit of a *nix newbie, but I haven't been able to get this working. I even tried installing it on x11 and with fink with no luck. If anyone has some steps that I could use to make it work I'd love to hear them!
/.
Granted maybe sourceforge is a better place to express this concern but since it was mentioned in the blurb I thought I'd ask
you might want to try WIzard's Bane. It's a fantasy story about a programmer who is transported into a fantasy world and learns how to program magic. If you're a geek you'll enjoy many of the small puns the author works in, and it's a fun read and kids would enjoy it. Best of all you can get access to it (and the sequel) for free at www.baen.com.
Another excellent book is Summerland by Michael Chabon. The novel is concerned mostly with baseball, but the father in the story is an inventor of derigibles and is a pretty geeky guy. It has some pretty powerful imagery on when science can go wrong, too.
Don't have anything worth stealing.
My family was pretty cheap growing up. early in my life I learned never to throw anything away. I remember we had this horrible small television which I inherited when my parents bought one that actually worked. Every 5 minutes the picture would fuzz out, and require me to jump off from my bunkbed to slam it on top. I didn't complain because, hey, it was a tv and getting rid of it was out of the question.
So one day we get robbed, but the thieves didn't take the working larger television (too heavy to move easily), but they did take the POS. Sure it sucked to have our home invaded, but I was relieved to be rid of that crappy tv.
If I was really lucky the thief gave it to his significant other who would then think he/she was a total moron for paying for something that was defective.
You could extend this theory to all manner of products...bad cars are extremely inexpensive to purchase and every trip is an adventure (what will I find beneath it today? will I actually get to work? stay tuned!)...or purchase extremely old technology. What thief in their right mind would steal a sega master system? a betamax? a commodore 64?
As long as you don't care about having useful/enjoyable equipment this plan is perfect!
What if you extended this idea to literature?
T.S. Eliot makes constant allusions to other works in his poetry. It's part of what his poetry is trying to say: that our artists and cultural zeitgeist as a whole don't have the resources to make truly original or meaningful art. The best we can do is try to reorganize and reinterpret what *used* to be meaningful.
Then again, maybe I'm wrong and Dante Alligheri, William Shakespeare, Andrew Marvell and God (Author of the printed book that is stolen most often)'s respective estates should have slammed him with a cease and desist.
The general sentiment of how to leave a bad job seems either
- Immature revenge - i.e. random shitting
- Taking the high road and just getting out
Both of these have serious drawbacks. Plenty ofI knew a guy who was trying to get a loan repayed, but the loaneee wasn't returning his calls. So he stayed up for four hours, redialing, letting the answering machine pick up, leaving bad messages then calling back again. Annoying the one who screwed him became a method of revenge. I'm not sure how the individual responded, but I think it would have been a simple matter to leave the house for a while, and then just delete all my messages when I got home. What I do know is that my aquaintance was served up with $100 in long distance bills. It didn't get his money back, and wasted time and money. Petty == stupid.
Also, most people believe in a moral system that subscribes to a view that causing harm or grief to another not only harms them, but you as well. Some might scoff, but I'm throwing it out there anyway
But if being immature and cruel doesn't really work, I don't think "taking the high road" works better either. Why? Because it's dishonest. If you're leaving because it's a bad job you should try to express the fact that you think it's a bad job to someone who might be able to do something about it.
Sometimes that's just not possible though. My last job had fantastic coworkers but utterly abyssmal management. Every time I tried to talk to anyone in authority about improving morale or other issues that would make happier or more productive workers they would take it as a personal attack. Finally it became so frustrating that I was close to throttling my boss during a meeting in which she intimated that (despite the fact that some in my department had been there close to a decade) we weren't that important. I apologized for losing my temper, but this was the last straw. Working for management I didn't respect was turning me into something I didn't respect, so I left...after briefly considing accusing my boss of sexual harassment (wail! she said I was pretty and *sob* that she could do so much for my carrer). But you know...slander can get you in trouble. Se how nasty I was becoming?
I suppose what I would say is try to communicate your feelings as best you can to improve the envorinment for those who come after, but do what you can to make your life good.
One potential problem is that samples taken from people with short hair will only give a limited history of very recent movements - leading to the suggestion that criminals or asylum seekers may shave their heads to destroy information on their past whereabouts.
Does that mean we aren't too far away from "You have the right to shave?"