Maybe we should first of all get a good definition of a "casual gamer".
The best way to define a casual gamer is to first describe their opposite; the hardcore gamer. Now, from my experience there are two ways to stop a "hardcore" gamer, or as I like to refer to myself, an avid video game player.
1) The first thing an avid player will do upon booting up a game is go into the options menu. If you know casual gamers, and you know avid players, watch them as they start a new title. The avid player will virtually always head into the option menu to tweak settings. The casual player tends to jump right in.
2) The avid player plays on the harder difficulty settings. Casual players are notorious for playing on the normal or easy modes, finishing the game and never playing it again. In fact, you'll find that a lot of games now name their difficulty settings "casual", "hardcore"(Gear of War: Xbox360), etc, etc. Over time the easy or "casual" difficulty levels have become absurdly easy to cater to this player type, to the point where most avid players will now, by default, choose the hard or "very hard" difficulty setting on their first playthrough, not out of masochism, but because they actually understand that the reward in a game comes from overcoming the challenges it presents. Despite all else, avid players will respect a difficult title (Transformers:PS2)
The avid player enjoys playing the game for its own sake. They appreciate craftsmanship and will respond to goo quality in gameplay. Casual players play the game simply for the sake of having played it, in the same way they would watch a film. They are out for a fairly automatic, "on rails" experience that resembles a passive film medium as much as possible.
You know, lots of people who play video games don't play MMOs. In fact, quite a lot of people who are long term video game players really don't like MMOs at all. In fact, most MMO players don't even play other kinds of video games! They haven't got the time!
It's bankrupting smaller farmers all over the world and leading to a global hegemony on seeds and food. Do we *really* want that to happen, do we really want to lose natural biodiversity and to keep putting millions of the poorest even further into the poorhouse? And, more importantly than that, something that impacts everyone, think of this: we have no "food insurance" or backup planet either once they screw up even worse,. and it is GOING to happen, inevitable.
This already happened to the Gros Micheal banana and is almost certainly going to affect the Cavendish banana. The failure of a homogeneous crop supply is a practical certainty.
I'm sorry to burst the bubble of a great many who still feel that market forces rule in all areas of human existence, but it had to be said that institutions of higher education are not, and never have been businesses.
This viewpoint is probably very common among graduates (and departments) of engineering and other fields where graduates typically go straight onto employment, or where graduate students research is frequently the subject of various patents. To such people, it's not surprising that education is associated primarily with the attainment of money, and therefore the idea that an institution of education is not a money making enterprise may come as quite a shock.
But they're not. Profit is simply not something most universities do. The majority in fact are currently in quite a lot of debt. That isn't to say that education there is free. In fact universities cost quite a lot of money to run. But frankly so do churches and schools and hospitals. Yet all are not classified as businesses(except in the US, but the place is a basket case anyway).
Universities exist to give academics a place to learn, discover and teach. Academics are people too odd to make their way in the "real world", but too useful to be let fall by the wayside. Rather than have them out on the streets, in mental institutions or otherwise letting their potential go to waste, society created the university when they can be quartered for fairly modest sums, and where their skills and knowledge can be used and passed on in a way that benefits everybody. They can teach people who can make practical use of knowledge and expand existing knowledge. A university is in essence a kind of mental institution for very distracted people, but one which you can send young people to to further themselves.
Universities are not businesses. They are communities of academics who teach and research. Their "product", for want of a better word, is educated graduates and advances in knowledge. It costs money to obtain these things, but they do not, in and of themselves generate any money. Fundamentally the whole institution is a loss making device.
Now, while the patent gravy train continues to chug along, many engineers and the like may again be confused by the idea that there is no money in the advancement of knowledge. Sorry, but there isn't. Historical researchers do not generally become millionaires by publishing their works. Mathematicians do not live like rock stars after discovering a theorem. Claude Shannon did not make a penny from his very great contributions to humanity (He played the stock market instead).
Strange as it may seem, academics are researching for its own sake. Some of them are teaching for its own sake. While they do like to be paid for such endeavors, ultimately they will do them anyway. Essentially, academia resembles the open source programming community. Programmers like to be paid, but in the end their brains are so restless they will write entire applications and OS kernels in their spare time for no money at all. In fact, the Linux kernel is far more an academic pursuit than a commercial one.
So it may be strange to think that vast amounts of money and materials can flow in and out of an institutions without it making money. It may seem daft that people will do work and make discoveries and reap no profit for themselves. It might sound heretical to think that some people aren't constantly scheming to become millionaires, and indeed that communities can be formed by people who are in fact scheming towards completly orthogonal goals. Yet indeed, these things happen.
This idea may be very difficult for students of American Universities to grasp.
You've obviously got the impression that you understand QM, but you clearly don't understand either it or the nature of semiconductors, because you assert the absurd physical proposition that something can be a theory of electrons and holes without being a quantum theory.
The proposition does not seem that absurd to me considering that I did study such a theory without any quantum mechanics at all, unless quantum mechanics means something other than what I think it means. The whole theory of transistors that I saw used nothing more complicated than the Bohr model of the atom.
Should be a trivial exercise. With the amount of people playing world of warcraft, there are bound to be a few pedophiles lurking about.(Got one in one google link) Couple that with the Disney-esque design and setting, and there are probably a few furries about as well.
I suspect you'd only have to whisper such obscenities into the ear of an IWF member and the whole of Azeroth would be blocked off to UK players within a week.
From what I read on the IWF site, they are not trying to be anything like a moral crusader, what they are trying to do is...[waffle,waffle,waffle,waffle,waffle......]...
What in the name of honest fuck do you think it's going to say on the IWF site!?!
"Dear Public,
We at the IWF, are closet authoritarians who deeply believe that freedom is something that should only be extended to certain types of people, such as ourselves.
We find it offensive and frankly appalling, that any person, or any sex, race, creed or socio-economic background can enjoy the same rights as those of proper pedigree, manners and breeding. The idea that these grown adults people can say whatever they like, and read whatever they like is so abhorrent to our view of how people should behave that we are determined to turn back the clock to a time when people obeyed the mores of the proper sort of people.
To that end, we have embarked on a long term campaign to subject the Internet to the same kind of censorship and restriction as every other medium; books, newspapers, radio and television. This campaign began by playing on your fears and hysterias surrounding child pornography. Working closely with the sensationalist media, we have exaggerated and scandalized the amount of such content that can be found online to such a degree that ISPs were practically wetting themselves with the thought of an imminent government crackdown.
Finding themselves in such a state, the ISPs were all too eager to submit to out "voluntary" code of censorship. Once we got our foot in the door, it was a trivial matter to censor just about anything we liked, with no oversight, scrutiny or transparency whatsoever. Frankly, if we wanted to censor Bravo or even Channel 4 online, we could just about get away with it at this point. We envisage a future when even those pinkos at the BBC will ultimately bow to our mandatory and capricious authority.
It is our understanding that there are some who will object to this perfect new world we attempt to create. We intend to insinuate, again with the help of the media, that any such malcontents are in fact pedophiles and/or rapists and/or terrorists and/or perverts and/or pirates. It is hoped that in time the IWF will eventually gain the powers to imprison, reeducate and hopefully appropriately punish such offenders, again without the complicating factor of government or any other oversight.
The IWF will work towards these and many other goals so that England will once again be safe from the polluting and degenerate effects of too much personal freedom.
Thank you, and God Save England.
Yours,
The Chairmen of the IWF Trust.
If you spot such a letter, please be sure to let the rest of us know about it.
I never ceased to be tickled by people loudly and ignorantly arguing against the reality of quantum mechanics USING A MACHINE DRIVEN BY FUCKING SEMICONDUCTORS.
While I accept quantum mechanics and its power to describe the sub atomic universe, I still have no idea where this claim about QM being used in the development of the transistor comes from. I learned about transistors using a theory of electrons and "holes" and in fact this viewpoint comes from no lesser source than Shockley himself.
I've never seen a theoretical description of any transistor device that required any form of quantum mechanics for its explanation. Given the fact that transistors are to this day, macroscopic devices, I still fail to see how QM comes into their theoretical explanation. It's a subatomic theory.
the Good News is that even I can receive all the greatest benefits of eternal life through grace, rather than the consignment to nothingness that I deserve by my own efforts.
Wow. That is a compelling excuse for slacking off you've got there.
Why do lesbians, gays, and bisexuals allow themselves to be lumped together with transgenders. To me, the layman, they seem like VERY different things.
They are different. However, they have all been, and continue to be, collectively shat on by successive governments, religions, cultures and societies. Like the disparate French revolutionaries, it is not their individual traits, but the commonality of their oppressor that links them.
As for the number analogy, it is flawed - by the same analogy, you and I are nothing but heaps of atoms, and nothing sets us apart from rocks.
The number analogy is fine. Your analogy to atoms is flawed.
The atoms that make up your body, or any object, are particular to that object. There are of course, many carbon atoms, but only some make up you.
Numbers on the other hand, are something different. Numbers are not physical entities. They are closer to, indeed are, Plato's theory of ideals. For me to own a particular set of atoms is one thing. But for me to own a particular number is akin to me owning not only all carbon atoms in the universe, but the very idea of a carbon atom. It's a much stronger claim.
Ultimately, the scale of copyright infingment in the digital age, shows just how absurd this claim really is.
You have NO legal right to copy what and author/artist creates and publishes, only the author or their duly appointed agent who compensates the author for every copy of the author's work they produce based upon whatever agreement the author and agent make.
and it makes sense. like i said before, the answers will bell curve. idiocy is random, it does not skew in a particular manner. the idiots randomly cancel each other out, and become noise, while anyone with the real answer will stand out as a signal against the background noise. involving quantities like a population count, they simply bell curve to the right answer
Totally wrong. Moreover, provably wrong. Poll a random set of individuals on the age of Planet Earth, which is an estimated 4.55 billion years. In the US at least, the answer you are likely to get by averaging is closer to 2.5 billion years, as quite a lot of people will say 6000 years. In fact, if you decided to cheat by restricting your sampling to academics or scientists, your answer now would be different from answer obtained 100 years ago, and will probably be different to answers obtained 100 years from now. Why? Because this is no way to determine the age of the Earth.
In fact, poll people about the number of planets in the solar system. You'll probably get an answer between 8 and 9. But I guarantee you it will not be an integer value, say 8.713452, which will be a fairly strange answer for the number of planets. Moreover, any answer you get will have much less to do with the idea of a "planet" that you might think.
Again, go back to the Emperor of China's nose. Let's take the Last Emperor as an example. Suppose I went around asking people what they thought the length of his nose was? Would the average of the answers somehow converge on the length of his particular nose? Why not someone else? In fact, would they converge on the length of of the nose of anyone who was ever alive?
Now finally go back to the population of China itself. Suppose I asked around. What will people's guesses average to? Say it's 1.3 billion. Am I to take this as a good value for the population of China, which is again an integer? It's only accurate to at best within 50,000 people or 3.8% of the total. That's a pretty wide margin when it comes to such an important number. Do I hope that the answers somehow converge after yet more guesses to the correct one. Will the overestimations cancel out the underestimation? On what basis can I make this claim? The answer is, none at all.
As I said before, I think statistics should probably be taken off most curricula. They seem to induce a rather misguided faith in the primacy of the Gaussian bell curve, and have lead to it application in areas which it is totally inappropriate. Here's a small fact which is completely and totally overlooked in 99.9% of all statistics courses taught. The Gaussian Bell curve is the result of Central Limit Theorem. This theorem states that if one averages the results of sufficiently manyrandom, uncorrelated measurements, then the results will approximate a Gaussian Bell curve.
Random. Uncorrelated. Measurements. If one of these conditions is not satisfied, then no Gaussian Bell curve will result, and the average of the results is meaningless. The answers you get when asking about the population of China, the age of the Earth, or the length of the Emperor's nose will be neither random or uncorrellated, and there will be no accuracy from averaging them. You are in what Nassim Taleb calls the fourth quadrant, and are essentially engaged in numerology. There are very real limits to statistics which everyone using them should be ware of.
its really quite a simple concept, i don't know why you can't grasp it. perhaps you don't need to brush up on your statistics, you just need to brush up on your grasp of common sense reasoning
It is not a simple concept. It is a naive and very dangerous one. I do not accept it because I have studied statistics and I know its power and its limit
if you poll a thousand random americans about the population of china, the answer will be a statistical bell curve centered on the actual population of china
the idiots cancel each other out, to each degree of idiocy, in either direction
Absolutely, completely and utterly wrong! You cannot obtain information from disinformation, no matter how much disinformation you have. There is no mathematic, or numerological trick that will allow random baseless estimates, no matter how many, to lead to a concrete one. Here's a relevant anecdote from the physicist Richard Feynman.
This question of trying to figure out whether a book is good or bad by looking at it carefully or by taking the reports of a lot of people who looked at it carelessly is like this famous old problem: Nobody was permitted to see the Emperor of China, and the question was, What is the length of the Emperor of China's nose? To find out, you go all over the country asking people what they think the length of the Emperor of China's nose is, and you average it. And that would be very "accurate" because you averaged so many people. But it's no way to find anything out; when you have a very wide range of people who contribute without looking carefully at it, you don't improve your knowledge of the situation by averaging.
Sometimes I think it might be best if statistics was left out of most curricula altogether.
Unfortunately the kind people at the "Royal Society for Articles Only People with Money Can Read" would not allow me to review this research.
As a researcher, the single biggest impediment to my research is the lock and key placed upon scientific articles by private publishers. The costs of locked down articles are so prohibitively high that the paper may as well not exist.
Personally, I do not consider any such articles or information to be freely available. They are akin to materials behind the old iron curtain. Technically, you could get your hands on them. Practically, they exist almost on another world. There are frequent examples in mathematics of Soviet and Western mathematicians working on essentially the same topics, with both communities ignorant of the others work and results. I imagine something quite similar happens for researches who close their work off behind a dollar curtain.
As of today, the current academic publishing regime is overall a barrier to information. As the parent states, papers are held hostage by "Societies for Articles for People with Money" and this represents as much a barrier to learning as the old requirement that articles be published in Latin. Like this requirement, academic publishing houses once served a purpose, but now serve only as a hindrance.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently called the Internet a "cesspool" of false information. I think he was wrong. I think that the disinformation present on the internet is merely a reflection of the disinformation, poor reporting and outright lies which have become pervasive throughout the media industry.
My firm belief is that in an organisation, industry or society, the rot starts and the top and works its way down. When it comes to information and sensationalism, the national newspapers are the ones to blame for allowing standards to slip as far as they have. In their effort to fish for eyeballs they can sell to advertisers, they have allowed stories to be come more emotional, sensationalist and exaggerated, all while allowing accuracy, fact checking and the honest truth to fall by the wayside.
When it comes to video games or any other activity seen as "fringe", it's easy for newspapers to spin up a story demonising the games and the people who play them. They want eyeballs, and if associating video games with addictive substances like crack cocaine can get them some, then that is exactly what journalists and editors will do.
Keep in mind that most journalists nowadays, in the 20-35 age bracket, will probably have a games console and HD-TV in their home. They probably have a laptop and grab all the latest music, tv show and movie torrents. They probably (almost certainly) go clubbing, sleep around, drink heavily and take illegal drugs. Yet these very same people write stories and reports that demonise, sensationalise, vilify, and condemn every last one of these activities. They do this because it pays the money they need to fund the very lifestyles they are decrying.
This rot has started at the top. With the newspaper industry. We have allowed them, time and again, to publish rot such as "video game addiction" and get away with it, with not a pip of objection from anyone. The game industry has bent over backwards, creating highly conservative rating agencies like the ESRB to self censor its produce. While violence is par for the course,(albiet towards aliens, Nazis or zombies) swear words in video games remain unusual to this day; "Fuck" is still reserved for only a handful of titles, and I cannot recall a single instance of the word "cunt" in any title I have ever played. Sex in video games, simply does not happen. Even Rockstar cut out the Hot Coffee content.
But it's not enough. The media will never be satisfied. They will never acknowledge the extraordinary efforts which the video game industry has gone to to mainstream its content. To the media, video games represent an easy target, the attacking of which will produce enough of a spectacle to attract the eyeballs they need. Video games, and the people who play them, will never be given a break by a media industry that has become, in effect, a established and tyrannical bully, preying on those who cannot defend themselves for its own gain.
In short, newspapers are rotten. Stop reading them.
It's a shame that in the ten hours you were waiting for it to patch you didn't spend two minutes discovering that there's a lot more to combat than "click once and wait", which is the almost useless whack-it-with-your-crappy-weapon autoattack.
On the contrary. I noticed and used all the abilities and spells in my arsenal. But this did not change the fact that the game is essentially a single character RTS, with "click once and wait" comprimising 90% of your time in combat.
Instead you have to imagine that the PVC pipe has holes, which are actually tori in a lower dimensional realm(Think of the dark realm in a Link to the Past, or Soul Reaver). Across the dimensional planes, these tori and intersect the pipe (and each other!) to form a condensed PVC hyperpipe, the net result of which is akin to the creation of time before the big bang. If you now simply allow time to exponentially decay in directions perpendicular to its normal flow, you obtain what we understand to be the "normal" pipe in 3+1 dimensional spacetime.
Of course, this all assumes isotropy in cosmic inflation parameters. But the LHC experiments should confirm this.
Finally, I got sick of wondering that World of Warcraft was all about. I downloaded the free trial. It actually ran in Linux under Wine. I was impressed.
That was about all I was impressed with.
The updates took about 10 hours to fully complete, with each new patch leading to yet another. When the game finally started, I was required to "roll" my character. Having absolutely no idea what I was doing, I selected a Bull, and made it a druid, to get in tune with nature.
The game began. My first mission was to fetch a few feathers "the tribe". A fairly standard tutorial. But it proved tedious. You needed 7 feathers which had to be harvested from these bird creatures which you "fought" by clicking on them and waiting for your characters continuous and slow attacks to finally bring them down(Did I mention that it plays like an RTS). The trouble was that when you killed one of these birds it wouldn't necessarily drop one of these feathers, and even when it did, it could have been a ruined feather. The whole process took around a quarter of a hour. Still I assumed, it was just a tutorial. Things must get better later on.
I was wrong.
Mission after mission ensued. Collect 8 hides. Kill five cats. Harvest 8 tooths. Eventually moved on to the second town where new mission could be had. Now I had to collect 9 hides and 8 claws. etc, etc. But I was a patient man. Surely, I thought, after this drudgery is over, I will do something exciting, something that will explain the allure of the title. In the meantime, I competed with other players for the privilege of slaying a few anti-climactic "bosses", again by clicking once on them and waiting, who respawned at lengthy intervals. There were also "skills" to learn, but each needed items to be of use. Items which were only dropped, on occasion, by slow spawing monsters other players were also trying to kill.
Finally after 6 boring hours of pointless mission after pointless mission, I was approaching my goal. I proceeded towards the "capital", ascending slowly up a large basket elevator to a city on a mountain. My expectation peaked. Finally I thought, finally I will get to see what WoW is all about.
I went into the city, and up to the quest giver. The outlook was good. "We need you to fight for the Horde", they said. Finally! But then he went on. "But first we need supplies. We need you to collect 6 of this and 7 of that and..."
But it was too late. I had logged off World of Warcraft, never to return, and the Horde would never get their supplies, at least until the next poor sap came along, willing to waste another 6 hours of their life on pointless and demeaning chores. I went back to other games, and had some fun. To the end of my days I will never understand how people can pay 15 euros a month for the privilege of playing a handyman sim.
On the plus side this comic makes so much sense to me now.
Slashdot Mirror
The best way to define a casual gamer is to first describe their opposite; the hardcore gamer. Now, from my experience there are two ways to stop a "hardcore" gamer, or as I like to refer to myself, an avid video game player.
1) The first thing an avid player will do upon booting up a game is go into the options menu. If you know casual gamers, and you know avid players, watch them as they start a new title. The avid player will virtually always head into the option menu to tweak settings. The casual player tends to jump right in.
2) The avid player plays on the harder difficulty settings. Casual players are notorious for playing on the normal or easy modes, finishing the game and never playing it again. In fact, you'll find that a lot of games now name their difficulty settings "casual", "hardcore"(Gear of War: Xbox360), etc, etc. Over time the easy or "casual" difficulty levels have become absurdly easy to cater to this player type, to the point where most avid players will now, by default, choose the hard or "very hard" difficulty setting on their first playthrough, not out of masochism, but because they actually understand that the reward in a game comes from overcoming the challenges it presents. Despite all else, avid players will respect a difficult title (Transformers:PS2)
The avid player enjoys playing the game for its own sake. They appreciate craftsmanship and will respond to goo quality in gameplay. Casual players play the game simply for the sake of having played it, in the same way they would watch a film. They are out for a fairly automatic, "on rails" experience that resembles a passive film medium as much as possible.
You know, lots of people who play video games don't play MMOs. In fact, quite a lot of people who are long term video game players really don't like MMOs at all. In fact, most MMO players don't even play other kinds of video games! They haven't got the time!
This already happened to the Gros Micheal banana and is almost certainly going to affect the Cavendish banana. The failure of a homogeneous crop supply is a practical certainty.
I'm sorry to burst the bubble of a great many who still feel that market forces rule in all areas of human existence, but it had to be said that institutions of higher education are not, and never have been businesses.
This viewpoint is probably very common among graduates (and departments) of engineering and other fields where graduates typically go straight onto employment, or where graduate students research is frequently the subject of various patents. To such people, it's not surprising that education is associated primarily with the attainment of money, and therefore the idea that an institution of education is not a money making enterprise may come as quite a shock.
But they're not. Profit is simply not something most universities do. The majority in fact are currently in quite a lot of debt. That isn't to say that education there is free. In fact universities cost quite a lot of money to run. But frankly so do churches and schools and hospitals. Yet all are not classified as businesses(except in the US, but the place is a basket case anyway).
Universities exist to give academics a place to learn, discover and teach. Academics are people too odd to make their way in the "real world", but too useful to be let fall by the wayside. Rather than have them out on the streets, in mental institutions or otherwise letting their potential go to waste, society created the university when they can be quartered for fairly modest sums, and where their skills and knowledge can be used and passed on in a way that benefits everybody. They can teach people who can make practical use of knowledge and expand existing knowledge. A university is in essence a kind of mental institution for very distracted people, but one which you can send young people to to further themselves.
Universities are not businesses. They are communities of academics who teach and research. Their "product", for want of a better word, is educated graduates and advances in knowledge. It costs money to obtain these things, but they do not, in and of themselves generate any money. Fundamentally the whole institution is a loss making device.
Now, while the patent gravy train continues to chug along, many engineers and the like may again be confused by the idea that there is no money in the advancement of knowledge. Sorry, but there isn't. Historical researchers do not generally become millionaires by publishing their works. Mathematicians do not live like rock stars after discovering a theorem. Claude Shannon did not make a penny from his very great contributions to humanity (He played the stock market instead).
Strange as it may seem, academics are researching for its own sake. Some of them are teaching for its own sake. While they do like to be paid for such endeavors, ultimately they will do them anyway. Essentially, academia resembles the open source programming community. Programmers like to be paid, but in the end their brains are so restless they will write entire applications and OS kernels in their spare time for no money at all. In fact, the Linux kernel is far more an academic pursuit than a commercial one.
So it may be strange to think that vast amounts of money and materials can flow in and out of an institutions without it making money. It may seem daft that people will do work and make discoveries and reap no profit for themselves. It might sound heretical to think that some people aren't constantly scheming to become millionaires, and indeed that communities can be formed by people who are in fact scheming towards completly orthogonal goals. Yet indeed, these things happen.
This idea may be very difficult for students of American Universities to grasp.
The proposition does not seem that absurd to me considering that I did study such a theory without any quantum mechanics at all, unless quantum mechanics means something other than what I think it means. The whole theory of transistors that I saw used nothing more complicated than the Bohr model of the atom.
Should be a trivial exercise. With the amount of people playing world of warcraft, there are bound to be a few pedophiles lurking about.(Got one in one google link) Couple that with the Disney-esque design and setting, and there are probably a few furries about as well.
I suspect you'd only have to whisper such obscenities into the ear of an IWF member and the whole of Azeroth would be blocked off to UK players within a week.
What in the name of honest fuck do you think it's going to say on the IWF site!?!
"Dear Public,
We at the IWF, are closet authoritarians who deeply believe that freedom is something that should only be extended to certain types of people, such as ourselves.
We find it offensive and frankly appalling, that any person, or any sex, race, creed or socio-economic background can enjoy the same rights as those of proper pedigree, manners and breeding. The idea that these grown adults people can say whatever they like, and read whatever they like is so abhorrent to our view of how people should behave that we are determined to turn back the clock to a time when people obeyed the mores of the proper sort of people.
To that end, we have embarked on a long term campaign to subject the Internet to the same kind of censorship and restriction as every other medium; books, newspapers, radio and television. This campaign began by playing on your fears and hysterias surrounding child pornography. Working closely with the sensationalist media, we have exaggerated and scandalized the amount of such content that can be found online to such a degree that ISPs were practically wetting themselves with the thought of an imminent government crackdown.
Finding themselves in such a state, the ISPs were all too eager to submit to out "voluntary" code of censorship. Once we got our foot in the door, it was a trivial matter to censor just about anything we liked, with no oversight, scrutiny or transparency whatsoever. Frankly, if we wanted to censor Bravo or even Channel 4 online, we could just about get away with it at this point. We envisage a future when even those pinkos at the BBC will ultimately bow to our mandatory and capricious authority.
It is our understanding that there are some who will object to this perfect new world we attempt to create. We intend to insinuate, again with the help of the media, that any such malcontents are in fact pedophiles and/or rapists and/or terrorists and/or perverts and/or pirates. It is hoped that in time the IWF will eventually gain the powers to imprison, reeducate and hopefully appropriately punish such offenders, again without the complicating factor of government or any other oversight.
The IWF will work towards these and many other goals so that England will once again be safe from the polluting and degenerate effects of too much personal freedom.
Thank you, and God Save England.
Yours,
The Chairmen of the IWF Trust.
If you spot such a letter, please be sure to let the rest of us know about it.
While I accept quantum mechanics and its power to describe the sub atomic universe, I still have no idea where this claim about QM being used in the development of the transistor comes from. I learned about transistors using a theory of electrons and "holes" and in fact this viewpoint comes from no lesser source than Shockley himself.
I've never seen a theoretical description of any transistor device that required any form of quantum mechanics for its explanation. Given the fact that transistors are to this day, macroscopic devices, I still fail to see how QM comes into their theoretical explanation. It's a subatomic theory.
Prospective managers.
Wow. That is a compelling excuse for slacking off you've got there.
They are different. However, they have all been, and continue to be, collectively shat on by successive governments, religions, cultures and societies. Like the disparate French revolutionaries, it is not their individual traits, but the commonality of their oppressor that links them.
The number analogy is fine. Your analogy to atoms is flawed.
The atoms that make up your body, or any object, are particular to that object. There are of course, many carbon atoms, but only some make up you.
Numbers on the other hand, are something different. Numbers are not physical entities. They are closer to, indeed are, Plato's theory of ideals. For me to own a particular set of atoms is one thing. But for me to own a particular number is akin to me owning not only all carbon atoms in the universe, but the very idea of a carbon atom. It's a much stronger claim.
Ultimately, the scale of copyright infingment in the digital age, shows just how absurd this claim really is.
Fixed.
It's not just pregnant women. The bottom line is that; Employers hate children. This is a real problem in Western society.
! C...cuh....coah....COMMUNIST!!!
Totally wrong. Moreover, provably wrong. Poll a random set of individuals on the age of Planet Earth, which is an estimated 4.55 billion years. In the US at least, the answer you are likely to get by averaging is closer to 2.5 billion years, as quite a lot of people will say 6000 years. In fact, if you decided to cheat by restricting your sampling to academics or scientists, your answer now would be different from answer obtained 100 years ago, and will probably be different to answers obtained 100 years from now. Why? Because this is no way to determine the age of the Earth.
In fact, poll people about the number of planets in the solar system. You'll probably get an answer between 8 and 9. But I guarantee you it will not be an integer value, say 8.713452, which will be a fairly strange answer for the number of planets. Moreover, any answer you get will have much less to do with the idea of a "planet" that you might think.
Again, go back to the Emperor of China's nose. Let's take the Last Emperor as an example. Suppose I went around asking people what they thought the length of his nose was? Would the average of the answers somehow converge on the length of his particular nose? Why not someone else? In fact, would they converge on the length of of the nose of anyone who was ever alive?
Now finally go back to the population of China itself. Suppose I asked around. What will people's guesses average to? Say it's 1.3 billion. Am I to take this as a good value for the population of China, which is again an integer? It's only accurate to at best within 50,000 people or 3.8% of the total. That's a pretty wide margin when it comes to such an important number. Do I hope that the answers somehow converge after yet more guesses to the correct one. Will the overestimations cancel out the underestimation? On what basis can I make this claim? The answer is, none at all.
As I said before, I think statistics should probably be taken off most curricula. They seem to induce a rather misguided faith in the primacy of the Gaussian bell curve, and have lead to it application in areas which it is totally inappropriate. Here's a small fact which is completely and totally overlooked in 99.9% of all statistics courses taught. The Gaussian Bell curve is the result of Central Limit Theorem. This theorem states that if one averages the results of sufficiently many random, uncorrelated measurements, then the results will approximate a Gaussian Bell curve.
Random. Uncorrelated. Measurements. If one of these conditions is not satisfied, then no Gaussian Bell curve will result, and the average of the results is meaningless. The answers you get when asking about the population of China, the age of the Earth, or the length of the Emperor's nose will be neither random or uncorrellated, and there will be no accuracy from averaging them. You are in what Nassim Taleb calls the fourth quadrant, and are essentially engaged in numerology. There are very real limits to statistics which everyone using them should be ware of.
It is not a simple concept. It is a naive and very dangerous one. I do not accept it because I have studied statistics and I know its power and its limit
Absolutely, completely and utterly wrong! You cannot obtain information from disinformation, no matter how much disinformation you have. There is no mathematic, or numerological trick that will allow random baseless estimates, no matter how many, to lead to a concrete one. Here's a relevant anecdote from the physicist Richard Feynman.
Sometimes I think it might be best if statistics was left out of most curricula altogether.
As a researcher, the single biggest impediment to my research is the lock and key placed upon scientific articles by private publishers. The costs of locked down articles are so prohibitively high that the paper may as well not exist.
Personally, I do not consider any such articles or information to be freely available. They are akin to materials behind the old iron curtain. Technically, you could get your hands on them. Practically, they exist almost on another world. There are frequent examples in mathematics of Soviet and Western mathematicians working on essentially the same topics, with both communities ignorant of the others work and results. I imagine something quite similar happens for researches who close their work off behind a dollar curtain.
As of today, the current academic publishing regime is overall a barrier to information. As the parent states, papers are held hostage by "Societies for Articles for People with Money" and this represents as much a barrier to learning as the old requirement that articles be published in Latin. Like this requirement, academic publishing houses once served a purpose, but now serve only as a hindrance.
Please. The man has his dignity.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently called the Internet a "cesspool" of false information. I think he was wrong. I think that the disinformation present on the internet is merely a reflection of the disinformation, poor reporting and outright lies which have become pervasive throughout the media industry.
My firm belief is that in an organisation, industry or society, the rot starts and the top and works its way down. When it comes to information and sensationalism, the national newspapers are the ones to blame for allowing standards to slip as far as they have. In their effort to fish for eyeballs they can sell to advertisers, they have allowed stories to be come more emotional, sensationalist and exaggerated, all while allowing accuracy, fact checking and the honest truth to fall by the wayside.
When it comes to video games or any other activity seen as "fringe", it's easy for newspapers to spin up a story demonising the games and the people who play them. They want eyeballs, and if associating video games with addictive substances like crack cocaine can get them some, then that is exactly what journalists and editors will do.
Keep in mind that most journalists nowadays, in the 20-35 age bracket, will probably have a games console and HD-TV in their home. They probably have a laptop and grab all the latest music, tv show and movie torrents. They probably (almost certainly) go clubbing, sleep around, drink heavily and take illegal drugs. Yet these very same people write stories and reports that demonise, sensationalise, vilify, and condemn every last one of these activities. They do this because it pays the money they need to fund the very lifestyles they are decrying.
This rot has started at the top. With the newspaper industry. We have allowed them, time and again, to publish rot such as "video game addiction" and get away with it, with not a pip of objection from anyone. The game industry has bent over backwards, creating highly conservative rating agencies like the ESRB to self censor its produce. While violence is par for the course,(albiet towards aliens, Nazis or zombies) swear words in video games remain unusual to this day; "Fuck" is still reserved for only a handful of titles, and I cannot recall a single instance of the word "cunt" in any title I have ever played. Sex in video games, simply does not happen. Even Rockstar cut out the Hot Coffee content.
But it's not enough. The media will never be satisfied. They will never acknowledge the extraordinary efforts which the video game industry has gone to to mainstream its content. To the media, video games represent an easy target, the attacking of which will produce enough of a spectacle to attract the eyeballs they need. Video games, and the people who play them, will never be given a break by a media industry that has become, in effect, a established and tyrannical bully, preying on those who cannot defend themselves for its own gain.
In short, newspapers are rotten. Stop reading them.
On the contrary. I noticed and used all the abilities and spells in my arsenal. But this did not change the fact that the game is essentially a single character RTS, with "click once and wait" comprimising 90% of your time in combat.
Absolutely! I for one reject this studies' thinly veiled attack on the hegemony of genetic determinism!
Not quite.
Instead you have to imagine that the PVC pipe has holes, which are actually tori in a lower dimensional realm(Think of the dark realm in a Link to the Past, or Soul Reaver). Across the dimensional planes, these tori and intersect the pipe (and each other!) to form a condensed PVC hyperpipe, the net result of which is akin to the creation of time before the big bang. If you now simply allow time to exponentially decay in directions perpendicular to its normal flow, you obtain what we understand to be the "normal" pipe in 3+1 dimensional spacetime.
Of course, this all assumes isotropy in cosmic inflation parameters. But the LHC experiments should confirm this.
Finally, I got sick of wondering that World of Warcraft was all about. I downloaded the free trial. It actually ran in Linux under Wine. I was impressed.
That was about all I was impressed with.
The updates took about 10 hours to fully complete, with each new patch leading to yet another. When the game finally started, I was required to "roll" my character. Having absolutely no idea what I was doing, I selected a Bull, and made it a druid, to get in tune with nature.
The game began. My first mission was to fetch a few feathers "the tribe". A fairly standard tutorial. But it proved tedious. You needed 7 feathers which had to be harvested from these bird creatures which you "fought" by clicking on them and waiting for your characters continuous and slow attacks to finally bring them down(Did I mention that it plays like an RTS). The trouble was that when you killed one of these birds it wouldn't necessarily drop one of these feathers, and even when it did, it could have been a ruined feather. The whole process took around a quarter of a hour. Still I assumed, it was just a tutorial. Things must get better later on.
I was wrong.
Mission after mission ensued. Collect 8 hides. Kill five cats. Harvest 8 tooths. Eventually moved on to the second town where new mission could be had. Now I had to collect 9 hides and 8 claws. etc, etc. But I was a patient man. Surely, I thought, after this drudgery is over, I will do something exciting, something that will explain the allure of the title. In the meantime, I competed with other players for the privilege of slaying a few anti-climactic "bosses", again by clicking once on them and waiting, who respawned at lengthy intervals. There were also "skills" to learn, but each needed items to be of use. Items which were only dropped, on occasion, by slow spawing monsters other players were also trying to kill.
Finally after 6 boring hours of pointless mission after pointless mission, I was approaching my goal. I proceeded towards the "capital", ascending slowly up a large basket elevator to a city on a mountain. My expectation peaked. Finally I thought, finally I will get to see what WoW is all about.
I went into the city, and up to the quest giver. The outlook was good. "We need you to fight for the Horde", they said. Finally! But then he went on. "But first we need supplies. We need you to collect 6 of this and 7 of that and..."
But it was too late. I had logged off World of Warcraft, never to return, and the Horde would never get their supplies, at least until the next poor sap came along, willing to waste another 6 hours of their life on pointless and demeaning chores. I went back to other games, and had some fun. To the end of my days I will never understand how people can pay 15 euros a month for the privilege of playing a handyman sim.
On the plus side this comic makes so much sense to me now.
Quantitative Finance!