I'm not sure what definition you're using to gauge what a thesis is "about". If WoW was the study medium for a thesis on game addiction, I would say it's equally accurate to describe the thesis as "about WoW and how it relates to game addiction", or as "about game addiction, using WoW as a research tool to approach the problem".
Same deal here. The thesis is titled "Broadcast Space: TV Culture, Myth and Star Trek". The thesis is about Star Trek.
It seems we've been spoiled by continuity in sci-fi and (especially) fantasy (since that's often more overtly myth-building). Ancient myths had no overarching story either. They were diverse traditions, often passed on orally, that embodied certain cultural values. Far from coherent. Some of the sources that have come down to the modern day have strung together (or at least tied in) several myths, but even they don't agree with each other. (Often it comes out resembling modern comics, in the way they have endless crossovers and reboots and Wold Newton families. C'mon, the Argonauts were the ultimate comic-book "League" of heroes.)
Star Trek has a much more coherent, "overarching" quality that the word myth should suggest. (The great-great-grandparent made an even bigger mistake: the "myth" is not the "backstory". It's the values of the culture and how they're embedded in the story.) I've naturally not read this thesis, unfortunately, but I wouldn't be surprised to find that some mention is made of the difference between TV myth and ancient, oral myth. (I did catch the news story last night, which featured a tubby guy in Starfleet uniform for no apparent reason, as well as some actual discussion from the author on what her thesis was about. She said she chose Star Trek because its production spanned forty years of culture.)
The real fun of online gaming comes from the shared experience of the adventure
Not for everyone. For a lot of people, the fun comes from the immersiveness. This means that yes, people want to engage in the mundane crap like creating and trading items, rather than buying these items from minimally-interactive merchants who seem able to pull them out of their... magic stock rooms.
And moreover, there's a peculiar kind of feedback effect in the gilfarmers' favour. 'Shared experience of the adventure' games have been around for ages. But people wanted more immersive MMORPGs, so the game companies gave them to them. And now they can't just take them away, because they'll lose out big. This effect benefits the people who want to be able to sell their game achievements for real cash: they create demand for such a game, and so the game companies supply.
That's why the companies have to target the farmers explicitly, rather than trying to cut off their supply by restructuring the games. Cut off their supply, and this faceless mass of gamers leaves for another game that hasn't altered. But do a targeted crackdown, and you (and the public) know why these people are leaving. Much better PR.
"Many say that DOS is the dark side, but actually UNIX is more like the dark side: It's less likely to find the one way to destroy your incredibly powerful machine, and more likely to make upper management choke." Lore Sjoberg, in the Book of Ratings
So it doesn't apply so strictly to Windows and Linux these days. This was a long time ago, in... you know.
Re:What is Perl 6?
on
What is Perl 6?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
That's the thing, though. PHP is the big name (from management's perspective), at least in the P category of LAMP, right now. Not that Perl's gone away by any stretch of the imagination, but the existing Perl shops are happy to keep on doing what they're doing, while the PHP advocates crow about how many new jobs are being done in their language.
So is Perl 6 going to bring about a Perl revival, or is it (as I suspect) going to fall flat when faced with Perl 5's quietly entrenched support and PHP's proclaimed grip on new uptakers? TFA mentions the reasons for cutting backwards compatibility (or at least reducing its priority) far too often for me to be optimistic there.
I think Perl 6 will catch on, eventually... but it's going to be more of an alternative language, not an upgrade, to Perl 5 for a long time yet.
It should be noted that you don't have to give ANYBODY your TFN. Most people who ask are trying to pay you money, and want to know how much tax to take out. If you don't give them your TFN, they take out 48%, assuming you're in the highest tax bracket. You can then claim back any excess from the Tax Office directly, on your annual tax return.
The nearest direct equivalent to the SSN is your Centrelink (social security office) Customer Reference Number. And your CRN is practically useless for authentication purposes, except perhaps if a Centrelink employee gets slack in checking someone's identity when they request information.
This might be a problem once ordinary users start modding their 360s, but I don't think the reverse engineering wizards would be foolish enough to allow the device a phone-home line while tinkering with it. (I haven't heard that the Xbox 360 NEEDS an Xbox Live connection to use; am I wrong?)
Says who? You? Great. Got any sources to back you up?
Sources? You mean like some magazine article or a study by some big-name research body, that I'm supposed to take as gospel while denouncing Wikipedia as "not worthy"? No. What I have are the raw numbers on Wikipedia usage, a handful of Slashdot articles about Wikipedia's detractors, and (what I think are) logical conclusions based on these data.
What I conclude is that the naysayers are a vocal minority—in the minority by several orders of magnitude, mind you. Therefore I say Wikipedia works and I find it hard to understand how people can say otherwise so unequivocally.
Is it some assumption that most of the users are idiots and the detractors are the smart ones? I can't buy that. And even if there were a grain of truth there, my claim is that Wikipedia is good enough for most people for most purposes. It's not a scientific journal that you'd base years of research on, but for ordinary everyday purposes, millions of users find themselves believing it and coming to no harm.
Off the statistics and into the subjective realms, my analogy of "consulting Wikipedia is like asking your friends" can be contrasted with "consulting Wikipedia is like asking a bunch of hooligans". In this way, Wikipedia isn't "just another example of how the internet succeeds/fails". It's a test case for whether "free speech in its purest form" will turn out honest attempts to help one another, deliberate attempts to trip one another up, or just white noise.
In the former case, asking my friends, I can expect to get a reliable answer. I don't expect it to be 100% accurate and I might consider researching it a bit before doing anything critical with what they say, but I know they won't deliberately give me misinformation.
The latter analogy, the bunch of hooligans, will want to give me misinformation. They'll try to sell me a believable lie, and then snicker at my turned back as I make a fool of myself relying on what they told me.
As a Wikipedia user, I see malicious edits, and I see them fixed. I see dubious edits, and I see them discussed and refined. I see long-running arguments that tug an article back and forth and yet keep it hovering somewhere around the "usable truth" mark. On the whole, it's my subjective but informed opinion that Wikipedia behaves much more like "my friends" than "a bunch of hooligans".
If you DO have sources, then why are entries such as George W. Bush's 'protected'?
Because my friends have trouble resisting the urge to have a go at him? But seriously, look at what Wikipedia could be compared to here. Encyclopaedias do not have comprehensive, up-to-date coverage on current political issues, which is what Wikipedia tries to provide. In this it's comparable to the mainstream media, with political analysts and the politicians themselves sounding off on TV and in the papers. You can't tell me that's "stating raw facts and ignoring political slants"!
No, if you want to have a good metric for the reliability of Wikipedia, shelve your George W. Bush argument and pick a field where the "traditional" or "mainstream" competitor is more provably factual. Compare Wikipedia's articles on higher maths or theoretical physics to the published papers and journals.
Bush's article needs to be locked because it's controversial and debated. That's not a flaw in Wikipedia, that's inherent in the subject matter. Your a priori argument, that "Political agendas would logically cancel one another out", simply does not reflect reality; and nor, I believe, does your overall prediction that Wikipedia's expression of free speech will produce just noise, "not worthy of being taken seriously".
The major experiment of Wikipedia is whether, on the balance of things, good information (or sincere mistakes) will outweigh malice and unexcused stupidity.
The answer surely must be yes.
Have stupidity and malice been completely eliminated from Wikipedia? Of course not; anyone who tells you otherwise is probably part of the problem. Wikipedia is the grand global equivalent of asking your friends what they know about something. Some will steer you right, some will steer you wrong, some will give you irrelevant anecdotes or misunderstand the question. But the Wikipedia balance shows that for information purposes, the wiki is your friend.
We're not talking about "democracy" in a nanny state, we're talking about a democracy becoming a nanny state. The grandparent post said that this was very hard to do, and that people are being alarmist when they cry "nanny state!" because a senator gets a few other MPs together to think of the children.
On the other hand, it's not as far-fetched as it seems. As others have pointed out, the Coalition currently holds a majority in both houses of Federal parliament. If — if — the government took this one on board, there isn't much our 'democracy' could do to stop it until the next election.
Just like every democracy will have — maybe even needs — its kooky elected reps to call for more censorship, every democracy will have, and needs, its alarmists crying "nanny state!" Needs them, because sometimes, the alarm bells they're ringing aren't quite so far-fetched.
It's interesting, from an historical perspective, that people are praising Merriam-Webster for not being prescriptivist. It was Webster who favoured -- and in hindsight, prescribed -- many spelling changes that now set apart American English from other forms. Not saying it's better or worse as a result, just that it's interesting, is all.
(And that's an interesting perspective on Latin, too, but it's a bit of a stretch to describe something as both a bastardised version and a proto-version of something else. From Merriam-Webster, oh the irony: "bastardize 3. to modify especially by introducing discordant or disparate elements." It's a little hard to be both a modification of something and an ancestor thereof!)
I think your definition of efficiency is time taken for one user to download, right? Then sure, BitTorrent won't be so efficient for a small file. But the original argument was torrent versus mirrors, both of these being ways of distributing the load. And a torrent is great for a 5MB file from a bandwidth perspective, because it doesn't take long for users to reach a 100% (or 200% or more) sharing ratio. Less leeching, more efficient bandwidth sharing all around.
Problem is, JNG is the PNG container using JPEG compression. The normal 'JPEG' file format (JFIF) isn't the issue, as far as I can tell, the JPEG compression is. JNG is out.
You were indeed paying for the packaging and the physical contents, but that packaging made certain claims about what you would be able to get inside. A lot of EULAs try to disclaim merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose, which (standard IANAL) I think would let them worm out of their responsibilities to provide what they offered on the box... if you had to agree to it before purchase. (Besides, in Australia at least, I'm pretty sure those warranties can't be disclaimed. If you sell it, it has to be appropriate to sell.)
But no, you're presented with it when you run the installer. Hey... there's a thought. Since you bought a CD containing sufficient data for the program, what if you manually installed the program, never running the installer or clicking through the EULA? Extract this archive, create that registry key, and bang, a copyright-protected-only installation. You'd see an increase in programs that display their licence when they first run, I guess...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure what definition you're using to gauge what a thesis is "about". If WoW was the study medium for a thesis on game addiction, I would say it's equally accurate to describe the thesis as "about WoW and how it relates to game addiction", or as "about game addiction, using WoW as a research tool to approach the problem".
Same deal here. The thesis is titled "Broadcast Space: TV Culture, Myth and Star Trek". The thesis is about Star Trek.
It seems we've been spoiled by continuity in sci-fi and (especially) fantasy (since that's often more overtly myth-building). Ancient myths had no overarching story either. They were diverse traditions, often passed on orally, that embodied certain cultural values. Far from coherent. Some of the sources that have come down to the modern day have strung together (or at least tied in) several myths, but even they don't agree with each other. (Often it comes out resembling modern comics, in the way they have endless crossovers and reboots and Wold Newton families. C'mon, the Argonauts were the ultimate comic-book "League" of heroes.)
Star Trek has a much more coherent, "overarching" quality that the word myth should suggest. (The great-great-grandparent made an even bigger mistake: the "myth" is not the "backstory". It's the values of the culture and how they're embedded in the story.) I've naturally not read this thesis, unfortunately, but I wouldn't be surprised to find that some mention is made of the difference between TV myth and ancient, oral myth. (I did catch the news story last night, which featured a tubby guy in Starfleet uniform for no apparent reason, as well as some actual discussion from the author on what her thesis was about. She said she chose Star Trek because its production spanned forty years of culture.)
Not for everyone. For a lot of people, the fun comes from the immersiveness. This means that yes, people want to engage in the mundane crap like creating and trading items, rather than buying these items from minimally-interactive merchants who seem able to pull them out of their... magic stock rooms.
And moreover, there's a peculiar kind of feedback effect in the gilfarmers' favour. 'Shared experience of the adventure' games have been around for ages. But people wanted more immersive MMORPGs, so the game companies gave them to them. And now they can't just take them away, because they'll lose out big. This effect benefits the people who want to be able to sell their game achievements for real cash: they create demand for such a game, and so the game companies supply.
That's why the companies have to target the farmers explicitly, rather than trying to cut off their supply by restructuring the games. Cut off their supply, and this faceless mass of gamers leaves for another game that hasn't altered. But do a targeted crackdown, and you (and the public) know why these people are leaving. Much better PR.
"Many say that DOS is the dark side, but actually UNIX is more like the dark side: It's less likely to find the one way to destroy your incredibly powerful machine, and more likely to make upper management choke." Lore Sjoberg, in the Book of Ratings So it doesn't apply so strictly to Windows and Linux these days. This was a long time ago, in... you know.
That's the thing, though. PHP is the big name (from management's perspective), at least in the P category of LAMP, right now. Not that Perl's gone away by any stretch of the imagination, but the existing Perl shops are happy to keep on doing what they're doing, while the PHP advocates crow about how many new jobs are being done in their language.
So is Perl 6 going to bring about a Perl revival, or is it (as I suspect) going to fall flat when faced with Perl 5's quietly entrenched support and PHP's proclaimed grip on new uptakers? TFA mentions the reasons for cutting backwards compatibility (or at least reducing its priority) far too often for me to be optimistic there.
I think Perl 6 will catch on, eventually... but it's going to be more of an alternative language, not an upgrade, to Perl 5 for a long time yet.
It should be noted that you don't have to give ANYBODY your TFN. Most people who ask are trying to pay you money, and want to know how much tax to take out. If you don't give them your TFN, they take out 48%, assuming you're in the highest tax bracket. You can then claim back any excess from the Tax Office directly, on your annual tax return.
The nearest direct equivalent to the SSN is your Centrelink (social security office) Customer Reference Number. And your CRN is practically useless for authentication purposes, except perhaps if a Centrelink employee gets slack in checking someone's identity when they request information.
This might be a problem once ordinary users start modding their 360s, but I don't think the reverse engineering wizards would be foolish enough to allow the device a phone-home line while tinkering with it. (I haven't heard that the Xbox 360 NEEDS an Xbox Live connection to use; am I wrong?)
Says who? You? Great. Got any sources to back you up?
Sources? You mean like some magazine article or a study by some big-name research body, that I'm supposed to take as gospel while denouncing Wikipedia as "not worthy"? No. What I have are the raw numbers on Wikipedia usage, a handful of Slashdot articles about Wikipedia's detractors, and (what I think are) logical conclusions based on these data.
What I conclude is that the naysayers are a vocal minority—in the minority by several orders of magnitude, mind you. Therefore I say Wikipedia works and I find it hard to understand how people can say otherwise so unequivocally.
Is it some assumption that most of the users are idiots and the detractors are the smart ones? I can't buy that. And even if there were a grain of truth there, my claim is that Wikipedia is good enough for most people for most purposes. It's not a scientific journal that you'd base years of research on, but for ordinary everyday purposes, millions of users find themselves believing it and coming to no harm.
Off the statistics and into the subjective realms, my analogy of "consulting Wikipedia is like asking your friends" can be contrasted with "consulting Wikipedia is like asking a bunch of hooligans". In this way, Wikipedia isn't "just another example of how the internet succeeds/fails". It's a test case for whether "free speech in its purest form" will turn out honest attempts to help one another, deliberate attempts to trip one another up, or just white noise.
In the former case, asking my friends, I can expect to get a reliable answer. I don't expect it to be 100% accurate and I might consider researching it a bit before doing anything critical with what they say, but I know they won't deliberately give me misinformation.
The latter analogy, the bunch of hooligans, will want to give me misinformation. They'll try to sell me a believable lie, and then snicker at my turned back as I make a fool of myself relying on what they told me.
As a Wikipedia user, I see malicious edits, and I see them fixed. I see dubious edits, and I see them discussed and refined. I see long-running arguments that tug an article back and forth and yet keep it hovering somewhere around the "usable truth" mark. On the whole, it's my subjective but informed opinion that Wikipedia behaves much more like "my friends" than "a bunch of hooligans".
If you DO have sources, then why are entries such as George W. Bush's 'protected'?
Because my friends have trouble resisting the urge to have a go at him? But seriously, look at what Wikipedia could be compared to here. Encyclopaedias do not have comprehensive, up-to-date coverage on current political issues, which is what Wikipedia tries to provide. In this it's comparable to the mainstream media, with political analysts and the politicians themselves sounding off on TV and in the papers. You can't tell me that's "stating raw facts and ignoring political slants"!
No, if you want to have a good metric for the reliability of Wikipedia, shelve your George W. Bush argument and pick a field where the "traditional" or "mainstream" competitor is more provably factual. Compare Wikipedia's articles on higher maths or theoretical physics to the published papers and journals.
Bush's article needs to be locked because it's controversial and debated. That's not a flaw in Wikipedia, that's inherent in the subject matter. Your a priori argument, that "Political agendas would logically cancel one another out", simply does not reflect reality; and nor, I believe, does your overall prediction that Wikipedia's expression of free speech will produce just noise, "not worthy of being taken seriously".
The major experiment of Wikipedia is whether, on the balance of things, good information (or sincere mistakes) will outweigh malice and unexcused stupidity.
The answer surely must be yes.
Have stupidity and malice been completely eliminated from Wikipedia? Of course not; anyone who tells you otherwise is probably part of the problem. Wikipedia is the grand global equivalent of asking your friends what they know about something. Some will steer you right, some will steer you wrong, some will give you irrelevant anecdotes or misunderstand the question. But the Wikipedia balance shows that for information purposes, the wiki is your friend.
"The game really isn't like football anymore as the rules have developed, but the name has stuck," he added.
Ahh, much like American 'football' then?
We're not talking about "democracy" in a nanny state, we're talking about a democracy becoming a nanny state. The grandparent post said that this was very hard to do, and that people are being alarmist when they cry "nanny state!" because a senator gets a few other MPs together to think of the children.
On the other hand, it's not as far-fetched as it seems. As others have pointed out, the Coalition currently holds a majority in both houses of Federal parliament. If — if — the government took this one on board, there isn't much our 'democracy' could do to stop it until the next election.
Just like every democracy will have — maybe even needs — its kooky elected reps to call for more censorship, every democracy will have, and needs, its alarmists crying "nanny state!" Needs them, because sometimes, the alarm bells they're ringing aren't quite so far-fetched.
It's interesting, from an historical perspective, that people are praising Merriam-Webster for not being prescriptivist. It was Webster who favoured -- and in hindsight, prescribed -- many spelling changes that now set apart American English from other forms. Not saying it's better or worse as a result, just that it's interesting, is all.
(And that's an interesting perspective on Latin, too, but it's a bit of a stretch to describe something as both a bastardised version and a proto-version of something else. From Merriam-Webster, oh the irony: "bastardize 3. to modify especially by introducing discordant or disparate elements." It's a little hard to be both a modification of something and an ancestor thereof!)
I think your definition of efficiency is time taken for one user to download, right? Then sure, BitTorrent won't be so efficient for a small file. But the original argument was torrent versus mirrors, both of these being ways of distributing the load. And a torrent is great for a 5MB file from a bandwidth perspective, because it doesn't take long for users to reach a 100% (or 200% or more) sharing ratio. Less leeching, more efficient bandwidth sharing all around.
Problem is, JNG is the PNG container using JPEG compression. The normal 'JPEG' file format (JFIF) isn't the issue, as far as I can tell, the JPEG compression is. JNG is out.
You were indeed paying for the packaging and the physical contents, but that packaging made certain claims about what you would be able to get inside. A lot of EULAs try to disclaim merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose, which (standard IANAL) I think would let them worm out of their responsibilities to provide what they offered on the box... if you had to agree to it before purchase. (Besides, in Australia at least, I'm pretty sure those warranties can't be disclaimed. If you sell it, it has to be appropriate to sell.)
But no, you're presented with it when you run the installer. Hey... there's a thought. Since you bought a CD containing sufficient data for the program, what if you manually installed the program, never running the installer or clicking through the EULA? Extract this archive, create that registry key, and bang, a copyright-protected-only installation. You'd see an increase in programs that display their licence when they first run, I guess...