As I understand from some earlier comments in this thread that the prescriptions they were giving out wouldn't be honored in other states. My guess is, in most cases he was selling the prescription for the hydrocodone, which would then turn out to be void when you went to cash it in. Bill o' goods. (I also expect that, if you did manage to wheedle your way into getting the prescription filled somehow, you would still have to pay for the actual drugs.)
I think he was talking about using an additive that would give you (for example) a stomach ache. The kind of thing that plants use aspirin for in the wild - to make ingestion painful without actually harming the bugs that like to nibble on them. We use the same thing on recovering alcoholics - give them a drug that makes them feel ill whenever they ingest alcohol. It's the psychological effect that's valuable.
For those not into the Alternate Reality scene: While the biggest ARGs (i love bees, Art of the Heist, etc) are ad campaigns, various companies and hobbyists also put them on for fun. There is, in fact, a flourishing indie ARG scene.
As far as I can tell, Jamie Kane is NOT a viral marketing campaign. It's being run by the BBC in a way that seems to be equivalent to a television show. It isn't actually advertising anything (except perhaps the BBC, by which logic everything ever broadcast is advertising.)
Librarians are not allowed by federal law to restrict what people view on the Internet.
Which federal law? As I recall, the federal government tried to pull the purse strings on libraries that didn't install internet filters.
(Luckily, they didn't put any clauses in the law requiring that the filter actually work to any standard. A content-neutral proxy would have counted as a "filter.")
This sounds like something a patron of The Gord might say.
Child pornography, yes. Legal pornography?
Exactly who are you going to report that to?
Read the report again. It said the guy was a registered sex offender, and that he was convicted of possessing child pornography, but did they say that's what he was looking at on the library computers?
I've read a number of your other posts. So far, your strategy seems to be drawing conclusions from evolution that you think are silly, but which are actually true. (For example, as I mentioned, you think it's impossible for bacteria to be the most genetically diverse things on the planet, but they actually are.) Where is this observable data? Your incredulity does NOT count.
One of my friends just pointed out that you might also be a joke poster. If so, good job! You totally had me.
If the organisms evolved, they should have traits that allowed them to progress the furthest, mostly with short reproduction and many offspring.
bzzt! wrong again! A large population absorbs resources. If there are too many members of the population, there will not be enough resources to maintain them, and large swaths of the population will die off. In fact, an even larger percentage will die off if the population is too large (as resources tend to get spread so that every individual has an equal portion, but all those portions will be too small.) There is also a general restriction on how fast you can grow an embryo, meaning the resulting offspring of a "reproduce early, a lot, and quickly" species would be very small and likely to be killed by larger creatures before they grow past infancy.
Secondly, evolution, macro or micro, will not occur without an environmental factor. Natural selection does not select positive traits. "Natural selection" is the name of the process by which some factor in the environment makes a trait less likely to survive (and, consequentially, the other traits more likely to survive.) But imagine a population with fifty different gene options (say, for instance, fifty different eye colors), where no one trait was less likely to survive than any other. Evolution will not occur here, because there is no selection taking place. All 50 traits will remain as prevalent as their corresponding genes allow them to be.
Natural selection has NOTHING to do with the actual genes we possess. It has NOTHING to do with mutation. Natural selection is merely what nature does with us once our genes have been chosen. Natural selection cannot "make new genes" any more than I can change whether it rains today or not. It is a reaction to natural phenomena, as simple as my desire to stay inside when it rains. (Unfortunately, that decision is infinitely more complex than it seems, which makes explaining these things even more harrowing.)
Your expectation that new genes will merely "appear" comes from biblical logic. A mutation may appear but serve no advantage or disadvantage. Or appear as a recessive gene which is passed on but not expressed (as with male-linked color blindness and Tay-Sachs disease). Not everything is heralded with a blast of trumpets. Humanity does not always recognize the things they see at once. Look at how long it took us to realize that the earth revolved around the sun.
We have seen spontaneous mutations in human beings. Most of them cause the embryo to break down before it reaches fetus stage. (3 of 4 fertilized human eggs do not develop past the embryotic stage due to genetic defects. This, also, is natural selection.) Many cause still births. A wide variety of other somatic defects can be seen in humans that cannot be traced back to the parents' stable genetics. These are mutations. Most likely your own DNA was mutated during the process of creating and storing the egg and sperm that were used to build the body you're using right now. The greater part of the human genome is junk. Most likely your junk DNA is mutated, but a real live gene in your readable sequence could be altered. Maybe the gene is recessive. Maybe it doesn't alter your immediate physical appearance. Only a full genetic profile would show it, a technology which is not nearly so common as to be available to the public.
And, finally, back to the beginning. Bacteria do have the most variations and mutations. From ye olde Wikipedia...
"The great antiquity of the bacteria has enabled them to evolve a great deal of genetic diversity. They are far more diverse than, say, the mammals or insects. For instance, the genetic distance between E. coli and Thermus aquaticus is greater than the distance between humans and oak trees."
The thing I find funny about all this is that the information on Schmidt wasn't even collected using the method described in the article.
The whole thing was about how Google could use your search habits to find out things about you that were otherwise private. But Cnet didn't even bother to do that. They just Googled for information that had already been put out for other people's use.
Seriously, though, they complained about Google keeping IP and browser type logs. I don't think it's a far stretch to assume that every search engine keeps this type of data around. It needs the information to serve the queries, for god's sake. CNet did not, however, seem to know anything about how long that data was being kept by Google. They only insinuated that there was the remote possibility that Google could be hoarding the data. And then went on to speculate about all the nasty things Google could do with it. Personal information about the CEO was used to add a "fear factor" to these speculations. That sounds like mudslinging to me.
Any search engine needs that information to run. It's like saying if you go into Walgreens and buy a pack of gum, the checker might recognize you the next time you go through the line. It's a natural consequence of the action. It won't be helped by buying your gum somewhere else.
I guess Guild Wars is to other MMOs what Paper Mario is to other console RPGs. The entire experience is more distilled, simplified, and elegant. (In fact, I think the leveling system was partly inspired by the Mario RPGs). The focus is on action that feels more pointed and survivalish. That does not make it a bad game.
It seems like the parent is just too hopped up on MMO conventions - a lot of things that matter in other games just don't matter in this one, and vice versa. I dunno. Like I said, I play and enjoy it.
Actually, as I understand, the first modern Islamic terrorists were organized by a man who had been to the US and found the culture here morally depraved, in much the same way that Christian fundamentalists and Rick Santorum see the culture as morally depraved. Drinking, materialism, sex sells, etc. So it seems less like they envy us, and more like they're outraged by the licentious lives we lead. It would be rather pigheaded of us to say, "It's just because they're jealous."
Anyone care to corroborate and/or dispute?
I think you've got the wrong idea there. Empiricism is the formalization of requirements for evidence. Argumentation based on evidence, though, is far older than Empiricism and can be found in Plato and everything after.
Aristotle proves that form and matter are separate by conjuring the image of a metal circle, describing how the two properties of the object can be separated. The only difference I can see there is that an Empiricist would literally make a number of circles of different materials, and shape the metal into different forms to prove that the properties were separate from one another.
It's not hard to say that argumentation from evidence is the soul of philosophy. Plato himself devotes a lot of wax to discerning philosophy from the rhetorical argument practiced in the public forums, which traditionally used unprovable statements, not to mention social arguments, straw men, appeals to emotion and other logical fallacies.
Also, I don't see "metaphysics" as an extension of philosophy per se. (Unless, of course, you mean Aristotle's Metaphysics.) When most people hear "metaphysics" they tend to think of the kind of things that come up in the movie Dogma - things that you usually can't prove or even reason without making grand assumptions about the nature of the universe. Aristotle's Metaphysics, while perhaps not provable, is not an ideology. If anything, it comes across as a tool for examining philosophical ideas.
I'm all for teaching kids to treat philosophy class as brain exercise. Too often kids' debates and discussions devolve into primitive sophistry as each child feels threatened by the prospect of defying the principles of their faith. We should teach them not to bring or drag personal beliefs into the ring. They can still believe as they will.
Which finally brings us back to the original problem: is ID personal belief, or a collection of evidence?
They have the right to do as little to protect their copyright as they want. Also, provided it's legal, they have the right to condone anything they damn well please.
The phrase "it ain't right" has nothing to do with civil liberties.
Not bashing you, parent, just adding to the laundry list.
I think that a lot of parents are appalled by the idea of their kids playing any kind of video games. They don't even bother to check the contents because, in part, they "know" they won't like it. I know a mom who couldn't discern between Animal Crossing and Resident Evil. To her, it was all just mindless, gory brain rot.
(When we assured her that Animal Crossing was completely nonviolent, she told us no one would play it because there wasn't any shooting.)
"My other suggestion is more decidedly low tech: 2+ camcorders. Switch one on when the other is about to run out of tape."
One videographer I know uses this solution. Every event she tapes, she takes along about 6 cameras. This way she can get 2 or more shots continuously.
If you're wondering where you can get a cheap second DV cam...try looking about for a Sharp Viewcam Z. They have a manufacturing defect that requires you to take out the little watch battery (the one that saves the time stamp and focus setting when you turn the camera off) for the cam to function. As a result I've seen them for about $200 new. The recording quality is quite good on both video and audio as well, although not professional grade.
In my experience, "finding my voice" was the whole point of college. Study was merely a tool to that end. (And, indeed, I went to a state-run college.)
The people I know who didn't go find communication and focusing difficult. Even among my parents' generation, the people I know who didn't go to college are less likely to speak up and more likely to mouth off. This leads me to believe that more education means more individualism and initiative.
In my experience, having more people with those traits actually makes society work better. The more viewpoints there are, and the better articulated they are, the more precisely we are able to figure out what should be done. Just as a child who is exposed to a greater number of religions tends to have a more reasonable religious attitude, a person who hears a panoply of opinion tends toward reasonable opinions. Society is more likely to be "torn apart" when ideological bullies dominate the playground. Or do you really believe that the Red Scare or the Salem witch trials represented the pinnacle of societal health?
But then again, you must be right. The whole point of education is just to make you cry. No point in trying then, I suppose. A real shame.
I'm not trying to down on eMusic, but I think they would get a lot more traffic to their site if you didn't have to put in your billing information to even see a hint of their music catalog. I went there thinking "Hmm, they might have (obscure artist I like). If they do I might just sign up!" But they won't tell me the details until AFTER I type in my credit card? No thanks.
Um...I hate to say this, but most MMOs are derivative also. Here's a shocking revelation: Most of EVERYTHING is derivative. TV, Film, Anime, Musical Theater, Racing, Puzzle, RPG, Tactical, name-your-favorite-genre Video Games. Alternate Reality Games are going through a big wave of derivative games, and the genre is only 3 years old.
Luckily, we have a market that craves originality, energy and creativity. New stuff that turns the concept on it's head will thrive, and huge successes go on to spawn their own wave of derivatives. Knowing that "most of X is derivative" does NOT mean that X is dead.
Er...it's been a while since I played it, but as I recall getting into one dungeon in A Link To the Past required the things you got in the previous dungeon. True, you could wander the overworld freely, but you can't move that huge boulder that's blocking the path up the mountainside until you get the armlets from the desert temple, which you get into by getting the rush boots in the previous temple, etc. (I'm getting the details wrong, but you get the idea.) Heck, there's even a semi-canonical order of the weapons you acquire across games. How is this less linear?
I have a DM who's only prepared so far out of the way of the main plot of my D&D game. How is this less linear than a console RPG? The PM has the ability to adapt the game as I go. The console has more fully-developed storylines available for me from the get-go. Each has theoretical advantages over the other but, assuming you play through an actual story arc, both are linear. The more important question is, do they draw an interesting line? It seems to me a lot of people complain about linearity when they're really suffering from predictability. Easy fix: make your story unpredictable.
Personally, I'm all for copy protection. But I think game developers should do it the old school way: Give us a game supplement and make us look up little bits of info at certain points in the game. It's interactive, you only have to go through it once or twice, and you get a cool piece of swag. I still have my Mixnmojo wheel from Monkey Island 2. Heck, it's on my wall.
Yeah, it can be a pain in the ass. But it also has at least the potential to be fun. Staring at a loading screen for five minutes: not fun. "Now what was her channel number, I have it written down somewhere... Oh yes! It's on the back of the CD case!": funny. Fun. Easy to play through, if you have the CD case. If not, you have to stop playing and look up the code. Yeah, so that won't deter pirates. So what? Nothing else does either.
I'll gladly play a game that uses the copy protection to add to the game. Heck, I might even pay for it.
Hmm... As someone who comes from a family of female gamers, I have to speculate that her perception of video games might have less to do with her gender and more to do with those two advanced degrees she holds. I realize you said as much in your post, but I felt it needed reiterating.
As for what's keeping "normal" people from playing video games, I think it has a lot to do with the perception that play requires a lot of specialized knowledge and they will be punished harshly for losing (a reasonable assumption considering "n00b" is a common gamer insult.) I don't doubt that a lot of people think the way your sister-in-law does, but I more often see people say, "I don't want to play, I'd be bad at it."
Yeah, but when the article contains the words "consider them withdrawn," can you imagine a more accurate way to report it?
On the subject in general, they said the purpose of the license agreement was to impose quality control on the games that get run for money. I don't see how they can possibly accomplish this, since there are definitely more poor storytellers than good ones. And anyone can spend twenty bucks.
(FYI, otaku is not a nice word. It inherently carries connotations of creepy, socially-stunted hermits. The term use for obsessed geeks comes from its use by such people who would use it to greet each other (as a polite form of "you") because they couldn't remember other people's names. Don't wear it like a badge of pride.)
Actually, the word "otaku," like the english terms "geek" and "nerd," have softened over the years, as less "creepy, socially stunted hermits" and more normal fans began to wear it as a badge of honor.
I was quite taken aback that you believe that words have "inherent connotations". The word connotation literally means "something written together with it", a meaning outside the actual meaning of the word. In other words, an allusion or metaphor attached to the word based on outside knowledge of myth, history, or allegory.
Say I had a best friend named Heavy, and one day Heavy turned on me and helped murder me. Everyone who heard the name "Heavy" would think of my friend and my untimely death. They might even go so far as to create adjectives such as "Heavylike" to describe a sudden and monstrous act, or to call murderers, the callous and the uncaring "Heavies." That wouldn't change the meaning of the word "heavy", would it? It would still mean something that weighed a lot.
If I were Julius Caesar the above story would be true. "Brutus" in Latin means heavy or unweildy (and also, by roman metaphor, dull in the mental sense.) We call sudden attacks "brutal" and mean people "brutes" because of Brutus. Likewise, if I named my child "Brute" and he turned out to be christlike in his compassion and gentleness, the connotation of the word would reverse. But that doesn't change the core of the word. It all still means heavy.
In other words, self-identifiers define connotations. Every time someone takes it upon themselves to say, "I am an otaku," the connotation changes depending on what that person is like. They define the connotations of the word, not you. You can sit and spout about how "otaku" means crazy all you like, but when smart, sociable, balanced people use the term to define themselves, you're instantly wrong.
Is is a ridiculous distinction when taken in context. Whether those facts are actually printed on the page or redirected to, it doesn't change the fact that the collection itself can't be copyrighted.
I believe the point was that, because the archive merely aggregates facts, it cannot infringe on the copyright because the collection that they make is not subject to copyright. I don't know if this argument holds any water at all, but trying to split hairs about how the data is stored doesn't change the basic principle.
In this world of instant perfect replication, I think we experience a constant struggle between the desire for accuracy and the fear of violating copyright. The Internet Archive is sincere in their desire to preserve an accurate record for the sake of history, although admittedly recent. I for one believe that this is more important than the copy rights of any particular individual. The truth is more important than any IP, and what was said and done in the public sphere should be recalled by those who can. I apologize. I'll get off my soapbox now.
Slashdot Mirror
As I understand from some earlier comments in this thread that the prescriptions they were giving out wouldn't be honored in other states. My guess is, in most cases he was selling the prescription for the hydrocodone, which would then turn out to be void when you went to cash it in. Bill o' goods. (I also expect that, if you did manage to wheedle your way into getting the prescription filled somehow, you would still have to pay for the actual drugs.)
I think he was talking about using an additive that would give you (for example) a stomach ache. The kind of thing that plants use aspirin for in the wild - to make ingestion painful without actually harming the bugs that like to nibble on them. We use the same thing on recovering alcoholics - give them a drug that makes them feel ill whenever they ingest alcohol. It's the psychological effect that's valuable.
For those not into the Alternate Reality scene: While the biggest ARGs (i love bees, Art of the Heist, etc) are ad campaigns, various companies and hobbyists also put them on for fun. There is, in fact, a flourishing indie ARG scene.
As far as I can tell, Jamie Kane is NOT a viral marketing campaign. It's being run by the BBC in a way that seems to be equivalent to a television show. It isn't actually advertising anything (except perhaps the BBC, by which logic everything ever broadcast is advertising.)
Librarians are not allowed by federal law to restrict what people view on the Internet.
Which federal law? As I recall, the federal government tried to pull the purse strings on libraries that didn't install internet filters.
(Luckily, they didn't put any clauses in the law requiring that the filter actually work to any standard. A content-neutral proxy would have counted as a "filter.")
This sounds like something a patron of The Gord might say.
Child pornography, yes. Legal pornography? Exactly who are you going to report that to?
Read the report again. It said the guy was a registered sex offender, and that he was convicted of possessing child pornography, but did they say that's what he was looking at on the library computers?
I've read a number of your other posts. So far, your strategy seems to be drawing conclusions from evolution that you think are silly, but which are actually true. (For example, as I mentioned, you think it's impossible for bacteria to be the most genetically diverse things on the planet, but they actually are.) Where is this observable data? Your incredulity does NOT count.
One of my friends just pointed out that you might also be a joke poster. If so, good job! You totally had me.
If the organisms evolved, they should have traits that allowed them to progress the furthest, mostly with short reproduction and many offspring.
bzzt! wrong again! A large population absorbs resources. If there are too many members of the population, there will not be enough resources to maintain them, and large swaths of the population will die off. In fact, an even larger percentage will die off if the population is too large (as resources tend to get spread so that every individual has an equal portion, but all those portions will be too small.) There is also a general restriction on how fast you can grow an embryo, meaning the resulting offspring of a "reproduce early, a lot, and quickly" species would be very small and likely to be killed by larger creatures before they grow past infancy.
Secondly, evolution, macro or micro, will not occur without an environmental factor. Natural selection does not select positive traits. "Natural selection" is the name of the process by which some factor in the environment makes a trait less likely to survive (and, consequentially, the other traits more likely to survive.) But imagine a population with fifty different gene options (say, for instance, fifty different eye colors), where no one trait was less likely to survive than any other. Evolution will not occur here, because there is no selection taking place. All 50 traits will remain as prevalent as their corresponding genes allow them to be.
Natural selection has NOTHING to do with the actual genes we possess. It has NOTHING to do with mutation. Natural selection is merely what nature does with us once our genes have been chosen. Natural selection cannot "make new genes" any more than I can change whether it rains today or not. It is a reaction to natural phenomena, as simple as my desire to stay inside when it rains. (Unfortunately, that decision is infinitely more complex than it seems, which makes explaining these things even more harrowing.)
Your expectation that new genes will merely "appear" comes from biblical logic. A mutation may appear but serve no advantage or disadvantage. Or appear as a recessive gene which is passed on but not expressed (as with male-linked color blindness and Tay-Sachs disease). Not everything is heralded with a blast of trumpets. Humanity does not always recognize the things they see at once. Look at how long it took us to realize that the earth revolved around the sun.
We have seen spontaneous mutations in human beings. Most of them cause the embryo to break down before it reaches fetus stage. (3 of 4 fertilized human eggs do not develop past the embryotic stage due to genetic defects. This, also, is natural selection.) Many cause still births. A wide variety of other somatic defects can be seen in humans that cannot be traced back to the parents' stable genetics. These are mutations. Most likely your own DNA was mutated during the process of creating and storing the egg and sperm that were used to build the body you're using right now. The greater part of the human genome is junk. Most likely your junk DNA is mutated, but a real live gene in your readable sequence could be altered. Maybe the gene is recessive. Maybe it doesn't alter your immediate physical appearance. Only a full genetic profile would show it, a technology which is not nearly so common as to be available to the public.
And, finally, back to the beginning. Bacteria do have the most variations and mutations. From ye olde Wikipedia...
"The great antiquity of the bacteria has enabled them to evolve a great deal of genetic diversity. They are far more diverse than, say, the mammals or insects. For instance, the genetic distance between E. coli and Thermus aquaticus is greater than the distance between humans and oak trees."
The thing I find funny about all this is that the information on Schmidt wasn't even collected using the method described in the article.
The whole thing was about how Google could use your search habits to find out things about you that were otherwise private. But Cnet didn't even bother to do that. They just Googled for information that had already been put out for other people's use.
Lazy journalism, I call that.
Seriously, though, they complained about Google keeping IP and browser type logs. I don't think it's a far stretch to assume that every search engine keeps this type of data around. It needs the information to serve the queries, for god's sake. CNet did not, however, seem to know anything about how long that data was being kept by Google. They only insinuated that there was the remote possibility that Google could be hoarding the data. And then went on to speculate about all the nasty things Google could do with it. Personal information about the CEO was used to add a "fear factor" to these speculations. That sounds like mudslinging to me.
Any search engine needs that information to run. It's like saying if you go into Walgreens and buy a pack of gum, the checker might recognize you the next time you go through the line. It's a natural consequence of the action. It won't be helped by buying your gum somewhere else.
That's odd...I have fun playing it.
I guess Guild Wars is to other MMOs what Paper Mario is to other console RPGs. The entire experience is more distilled, simplified, and elegant. (In fact, I think the leveling system was partly inspired by the Mario RPGs). The focus is on action that feels more pointed and survivalish. That does not make it a bad game.
It seems like the parent is just too hopped up on MMO conventions - a lot of things that matter in other games just don't matter in this one, and vice versa. I dunno. Like I said, I play and enjoy it.
"Netflix seems to have a stronghold on the market"
That's funny, I thought they just rented DVDs.
Actually, as I understand, the first modern Islamic terrorists were organized by a man who had been to the US and found the culture here morally depraved, in much the same way that Christian fundamentalists and Rick Santorum see the culture as morally depraved. Drinking, materialism, sex sells, etc. So it seems less like they envy us, and more like they're outraged by the licentious lives we lead. It would be rather pigheaded of us to say, "It's just because they're jealous." Anyone care to corroborate and/or dispute?
I think you've got the wrong idea there. Empiricism is the formalization of requirements for evidence. Argumentation based on evidence, though, is far older than Empiricism and can be found in Plato and everything after.
Aristotle proves that form and matter are separate by conjuring the image of a metal circle, describing how the two properties of the object can be separated. The only difference I can see there is that an Empiricist would literally make a number of circles of different materials, and shape the metal into different forms to prove that the properties were separate from one another.
It's not hard to say that argumentation from evidence is the soul of philosophy. Plato himself devotes a lot of wax to discerning philosophy from the rhetorical argument practiced in the public forums, which traditionally used unprovable statements, not to mention social arguments, straw men, appeals to emotion and other logical fallacies.
Also, I don't see "metaphysics" as an extension of philosophy per se. (Unless, of course, you mean Aristotle's Metaphysics.) When most people hear "metaphysics" they tend to think of the kind of things that come up in the movie Dogma - things that you usually can't prove or even reason without making grand assumptions about the nature of the universe. Aristotle's Metaphysics, while perhaps not provable, is not an ideology. If anything, it comes across as a tool for examining philosophical ideas.
I'm all for teaching kids to treat philosophy class as brain exercise. Too often kids' debates and discussions devolve into primitive sophistry as each child feels threatened by the prospect of defying the principles of their faith. We should teach them not to bring or drag personal beliefs into the ring. They can still believe as they will.
Which finally brings us back to the original problem: is ID personal belief, or a collection of evidence?
They have the right to do as little to protect their copyright as they want. Also, provided it's legal, they have the right to condone anything they damn well please.
The phrase "it ain't right" has nothing to do with civil liberties.
Not bashing you, parent, just adding to the laundry list.
I think that a lot of parents are appalled by the idea of their kids playing any kind of video games. They don't even bother to check the contents because, in part, they "know" they won't like it. I know a mom who couldn't discern between Animal Crossing and Resident Evil. To her, it was all just mindless, gory brain rot.
(When we assured her that Animal Crossing was completely nonviolent, she told us no one would play it because there wasn't any shooting.)
"My other suggestion is more decidedly low tech: 2+ camcorders. Switch one on when the other is about to run out of tape."
One videographer I know uses this solution. Every event she tapes, she takes along about 6 cameras. This way she can get 2 or more shots continuously.
If you're wondering where you can get a cheap second DV cam...try looking about for a Sharp Viewcam Z. They have a manufacturing defect that requires you to take out the little watch battery (the one that saves the time stamp and focus setting when you turn the camera off) for the cam to function. As a result I've seen them for about $200 new. The recording quality is quite good on both video and audio as well, although not professional grade.
In my experience, "finding my voice" was the whole point of college. Study was merely a tool to that end. (And, indeed, I went to a state-run college.)
The people I know who didn't go find communication and focusing difficult. Even among my parents' generation, the people I know who didn't go to college are less likely to speak up and more likely to mouth off. This leads me to believe that more education means more individualism and initiative.
In my experience, having more people with those traits actually makes society work better. The more viewpoints there are, and the better articulated they are, the more precisely we are able to figure out what should be done. Just as a child who is exposed to a greater number of religions tends to have a more reasonable religious attitude, a person who hears a panoply of opinion tends toward reasonable opinions. Society is more likely to be "torn apart" when ideological bullies dominate the playground. Or do you really believe that the Red Scare or the Salem witch trials represented the pinnacle of societal health?
But then again, you must be right. The whole point of education is just to make you cry. No point in trying then, I suppose. A real shame.
I'm not trying to down on eMusic, but I think they would get a lot more traffic to their site if you didn't have to put in your billing information to even see a hint of their music catalog. I went there thinking "Hmm, they might have (obscure artist I like). If they do I might just sign up!" But they won't tell me the details until AFTER I type in my credit card? No thanks.
Um...I hate to say this, but most MMOs are derivative also. Here's a shocking revelation: Most of EVERYTHING is derivative. TV, Film, Anime, Musical Theater, Racing, Puzzle, RPG, Tactical, name-your-favorite-genre Video Games. Alternate Reality Games are going through a big wave of derivative games, and the genre is only 3 years old.
Luckily, we have a market that craves originality, energy and creativity. New stuff that turns the concept on it's head will thrive, and huge successes go on to spawn their own wave of derivatives. Knowing that "most of X is derivative" does NOT mean that X is dead.
Er...it's been a while since I played it, but as I recall getting into one dungeon in A Link To the Past required the things you got in the previous dungeon. True, you could wander the overworld freely, but you can't move that huge boulder that's blocking the path up the mountainside until you get the armlets from the desert temple, which you get into by getting the rush boots in the previous temple, etc. (I'm getting the details wrong, but you get the idea.) Heck, there's even a semi-canonical order of the weapons you acquire across games. How is this less linear?
I have a DM who's only prepared so far out of the way of the main plot of my D&D game. How is this less linear than a console RPG? The PM has the ability to adapt the game as I go. The console has more fully-developed storylines available for me from the get-go. Each has theoretical advantages over the other but, assuming you play through an actual story arc, both are linear. The more important question is, do they draw an interesting line? It seems to me a lot of people complain about linearity when they're really suffering from predictability. Easy fix: make your story unpredictable.
Also, the Haunted Mansion rocks. Don't knock it.
Personally, I'm all for copy protection. But I think game developers should do it the old school way: Give us a game supplement and make us look up little bits of info at certain points in the game. It's interactive, you only have to go through it once or twice, and you get a cool piece of swag. I still have my Mixnmojo wheel from Monkey Island 2. Heck, it's on my wall.
Yeah, it can be a pain in the ass. But it also has at least the potential to be fun. Staring at a loading screen for five minutes: not fun. "Now what was her channel number, I have it written down somewhere... Oh yes! It's on the back of the CD case!": funny. Fun. Easy to play through, if you have the CD case. If not, you have to stop playing and look up the code. Yeah, so that won't deter pirates. So what? Nothing else does either.
I'll gladly play a game that uses the copy protection to add to the game. Heck, I might even pay for it.
Hmm... As someone who comes from a family of female gamers, I have to speculate that her perception of video games might have less to do with her gender and more to do with those two advanced degrees she holds. I realize you said as much in your post, but I felt it needed reiterating.
As for what's keeping "normal" people from playing video games, I think it has a lot to do with the perception that play requires a lot of specialized knowledge and they will be punished harshly for losing (a reasonable assumption considering "n00b" is a common gamer insult.) I don't doubt that a lot of people think the way your sister-in-law does, but I more often see people say, "I don't want to play, I'd be bad at it."
Yeah, but when the article contains the words "consider them withdrawn," can you imagine a more accurate way to report it?
On the subject in general, they said the purpose of the license agreement was to impose quality control on the games that get run for money. I don't see how they can possibly accomplish this, since there are definitely more poor storytellers than good ones. And anyone can spend twenty bucks.
(FYI, otaku is not a nice word. It inherently carries connotations of creepy, socially-stunted hermits. The term use for obsessed geeks comes from its use by such people who would use it to greet each other (as a polite form of "you") because they couldn't remember other people's names. Don't wear it like a badge of pride.)
Actually, the word "otaku," like the english terms "geek" and "nerd," have softened over the years, as less "creepy, socially stunted hermits" and more normal fans began to wear it as a badge of honor.
I was quite taken aback that you believe that words have "inherent connotations". The word connotation literally means "something written together with it", a meaning outside the actual meaning of the word. In other words, an allusion or metaphor attached to the word based on outside knowledge of myth, history, or allegory.
Say I had a best friend named Heavy, and one day Heavy turned on me and helped murder me. Everyone who heard the name "Heavy" would think of my friend and my untimely death. They might even go so far as to create adjectives such as "Heavylike" to describe a sudden and monstrous act, or to call murderers, the callous and the uncaring "Heavies." That wouldn't change the meaning of the word "heavy", would it? It would still mean something that weighed a lot.
If I were Julius Caesar the above story would be true. "Brutus" in Latin means heavy or unweildy (and also, by roman metaphor, dull in the mental sense.) We call sudden attacks "brutal" and mean people "brutes" because of Brutus. Likewise, if I named my child "Brute" and he turned out to be christlike in his compassion and gentleness, the connotation of the word would reverse. But that doesn't change the core of the word. It all still means heavy.
In other words, self-identifiers define connotations. Every time someone takes it upon themselves to say, "I am an otaku," the connotation changes depending on what that person is like. They define the connotations of the word, not you. You can sit and spout about how "otaku" means crazy all you like, but when smart, sociable, balanced people use the term to define themselves, you're instantly wrong.
Is is a ridiculous distinction when taken in context. Whether those facts are actually printed on the page or redirected to, it doesn't change the fact that the collection itself can't be copyrighted.
I believe the point was that, because the archive merely aggregates facts, it cannot infringe on the copyright because the collection that they make is not subject to copyright. I don't know if this argument holds any water at all, but trying to split hairs about how the data is stored doesn't change the basic principle.
In this world of instant perfect replication, I think we experience a constant struggle between the desire for accuracy and the fear of violating copyright. The Internet Archive is sincere in their desire to preserve an accurate record for the sake of history, although admittedly recent. I for one believe that this is more important than the copy rights of any particular individual. The truth is more important than any IP, and what was said and done in the public sphere should be recalled by those who can. I apologize. I'll get off my soapbox now.