When you give all the authority to the private sector, then it essentially is the government, but with less accountability and with a mandate to make money.
Re:Micro-Transactions and game balance
on
The Future of MMOs
·
· Score: 1
Asian MMORPG players are about 5 years older, on the average, than western MMORPG players. They have more money, and perhaps less time, than their Western counterparts. For them, time is money - an equation (informally) that is less attractive as a transitive one to people with a lot of time and not much money.
I also blame society that has laws for everything so that the dad of little can't walk over to the asshat's house and kicking the shit out of them.
Well, you've just introduced the concept of penalizing the perpetrators, with the twist that the penalization can only occur if the victim's father happens to be physically dominant over the perpetrator. The reason we have things like laws and such is so that people can get justice even if they aren't physically strong.
I think it is correct to look at a society's level of freedom, rather than just a government's. It is an index of the actual freedom of thought and discourse in that culture. After all, many countries have very open-seeming constitutions, but have para-military or other semi-official organizations which crush dissent. The use of civil law to squelch discussion is as serious as the use of criminal law to do so, at least from the perspective of the open exchange of ideas.
No one with a Cambridge degree (they don't use the 4.0 grade system there, incidentally) will get the same job as someone with a 2.5 at a community college. The fact that you don't know that suggests you have an extraordinarily limited exposure to people educated at top-flight universities. Very few people with firsts from Cambridge will go into industry without some time in a post-graduate program, either.
Sysadmin-type knowledge is not conceptually difficult at all. It is largely just familiarity with a lot of very arbitrary configuration information, habit, and knowing where to look for things. It does involve a great deal of time to build all that up - a poor investment of time to someone doing research in another field, including real computer science.
Gack. I like Apple products (iPod, Mac) but this argument, that if you don't have an iPhone, you must want one, is ridiculous. The iPod Touch is all the interesting bits of an iPhone without that horrid phone service thrown in. When the iPhone2 comes out with 3G, then maybe there will be something to talk about. Until then, it's just a cult fetish object.
The very idea of "tl;dr" is art of the crumbling of the American mind, and may be at least related to the rise of videogames. I like videogames, but they by no means are demonstrating the kind of depth, ambiguity, or sophistication (morally, emotionally, and spiritually) of the printed word. ("Aeris dying" doesn't cut it; Bioshock is just a first-inkling.) Before objecting that "someday" videogames will evolve into a form as sophisticated as film - a prediction I agree with - I'll note how many otherwise intelligent people show such poverty in their intellectual lives, able only to answer "how" and not "why," able to think in terms of utility but not in terms of the creation of values (at best, implicitly and unthinkingly recycling old ones.)
Shorthand: not only do we not know what works about what we do, we don't even always know what we're doing, even when it works. The engineer's bias toward explicit knowledge over implicit adaptation (something often in evidence here in/.) is starting to filter its way back into the social sciences, unfortunately.
No, actually, more people learn about Ayn Rand from encountering objectivists. In any case, yes, I think people should read The Scarlet Letter. I'm not opposed to humor and entertainment, I'm opposed to that being the limit or prerequisite for all cultural activity. I'm opposed to the endemic resistance to tragedy and to the trivialization of human thought. I'm opposed to mass-market sentimentality and catering to the lowest-common denominator in attention and affect.
I'm opposed to this kind of culture. I understand that even in Tolstoy's time, more people read cheap nickel novels in easily understood genres where the conflicts were well-understood, the protagonists admirable, the plots straightforward, and the good guys won. Still, Tolstoy and Todorov and Doestoevsky and Flaubert and Goethe and Joyce and Proust and Hemingway and Steinbeck and Woolf and Faulkner were all able to write, find an audience, and have their works sustained in print over the decades. Those works have come to define what the novel is, even if pulp outsells them in any given year. Compare that to what has happened to comics (and yes, I love graphic novels like Persepolis, Blankets and Ghost World - but they still are stuck in a ghetto.)
Actually, not all games are games of competition, either. I'd refer you to Roger Caillois' classificatory scheme for games. Our culture privileges "agon" games over those which involve chance, mimicry, or vertigo as their defining logics. But a broader understanding of games as "systems of play" includes things like games of chance, make-believe (which evolves into theater), and activities such as "ring around the roses" and other vertiginous activities that evolve into things like snowboarding, skydiving, and acrobatics.
Film and novels accomplish incredible artistic achievements because they are not forced into one type of experience. Tolstoy is not "fun." Tolstoy is not even entertaining per se, but it is powerful and thoughtful. If novels all had to be "fun" first and foremost, many of the most important works of history would never have been written.
That's the nature of the "ghetto" for videogames, that a rather narrow criteria - fun - ends up circumscribing the ambitions of the media. The mental straightjacket that we have to remove if games are going to thrive as an artistic media the way that prose and film have, is thinking that games need to be "fun" to be compelling.
So, you get a bunch of cheapskates sitting around your tables using the free Wi-Fi without having to buy anything, while your paying customers may have trouble finding a seat. If I'm a business owner, I like this why?
I recently turned around and found another place to have lunch when there were no seats at a cafe with Free Wi-Fi near my office. At least half of the table-occupants didn't seem to have purchased anything, or had finished consuming it some time before.
No, actually, contempt is intransitive. I'm pretty contemptuous of you right now. And you're being pretty contemptuous yourself, so by your own standards, you're contemptible.
Those who hold other classes in contempt are the most contemptible? So if you hold the class of paedophiles and mass murderers in contempt, you are more contemptible than they are?
I don't know if it's the most contemptible class, but people who engage in specious reasoning and crude, exaggerated statements that collapse at the slightest analysis are pretty contemptible, too. Contempt is a valid mechanism for establishing values and criticizing behavior.
The headline is essentially accurate. T-Mobile and AT&T have made an agreement to allow T-Mobile users to continue connecting at Starbucks. They are being "grandfathered in," so to speak. Thus, T-Mobile users don't get hosed, but it still remains the case that Starbucks is no longer working with T-Mobile.
I'm a subscriber to a pretty substantial package of T-Mobile services. I have been happy with their service offerings, and their customer service has been outstanding. I can't help but wonder, though, as they fail to get the iPhone and start losing valuable partnerships like Starbucks, whether the benefits of their excellent service will start to mean less if they don't provide offerings with major partners like Apple. When these kind of alliances create unique opportunities, it is a path to monopoly - think Microsoft.
But the reaction to just this incredulity has been sticking fingers in one's ears and saying "LA LA LA I can't hear you," roughly speaking. To be specific, postmodernist isn't moral relativism. (It's not *not* moral relativism, either - moral relativism is far older, as is nihilism.) Postmodernism is a critique of meta-narratives, yes - meta-narratives such as the march of progress that legitimized colonialism and imperialism, or the creation of a worker's utopia (much of it is a critique of Marxism), or any number of teleological presumptions (including those that are locked up in evolutionary language, mistaking adaptation to a niche with simple progress.) One can recognize that these metanarratives are really just human inventions and that none of them are the "meaning of history," while retaining one's moral bearings.
That morality is ultimately produced by history and circumstances, rather than being something etched into the fabric of the cosmos, is not the interesting or relevant part of postmodernism. Nihilism may reside in the belief that one cannot have a morality without reference to a meta-narrative that one is "acting as if is true." Pretending God (or whatever fixed moral center of gravity you are yearning for) exists because we're afraid to imagine life without HIm or It is more nihilistic than simply acting on the basis of one's moral intuitions and producing, rather than simply echoing, fundamental values.
"Gay" is a belief? You think it's not OK to criticize attempts to implement Sharia law?
What we don't criticize are identities, or assume that religious practices are reducible to a simple body of tenets. There is a difference between criticizing someone for being Christian and criticizing them for believing that the world is 6000 years old. Obviously, there is a relationship between the two, but that relationship isn't a simple one. What it meant to be Christian, Islamic, Buddhist, etc . has changed over the centuries of those practices, and I'm pretty sure that I have more in common with most Christians today than those contemporary Christians have with 5th century Christians. Likewise with Muslims, etc.
The "post-modernism" (or, really, post-structuralism - post-modernism is more a theory of cultural history) comes in when we observe that every act of making a statement - even a "true" or well-founded statement - comes with an agenda, says more about the reasons for saying, carries their own presumptions, etc. It is caught up in the idea that "even if they really are out to get you, you still can be paranoid." "Anything goes" is actually a very old idea, when really, you are talking about a well-founded hesitation to critique other identities simply on the basis of some of their explicitly stated beliefs, rather than addressing those beliefs historically.
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When you give all the authority to the private sector, then it essentially is the government, but with less accountability and with a mandate to make money.
Asian MMORPG players are about 5 years older, on the average, than western MMORPG players. They have more money, and perhaps less time, than their Western counterparts. For them, time is money - an equation (informally) that is less attractive as a transitive one to people with a lot of time and not much money.
Your own sig - "Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it." - contradicts your faith in mob justice.
You trust mobs over courts? Courts aren't perfect, but I think I'd review the history of the mob if I were you.
I also blame society that has laws for everything so that the dad of little can't walk over to the asshat's house and kicking the shit out of them.
Well, you've just introduced the concept of penalizing the perpetrators, with the twist that the penalization can only occur if the victim's father happens to be physically dominant over the perpetrator. The reason we have things like laws and such is so that people can get justice even if they aren't physically strong.
I think it is correct to look at a society's level of freedom, rather than just a government's. It is an index of the actual freedom of thought and discourse in that culture. After all, many countries have very open-seeming constitutions, but have para-military or other semi-official organizations which crush dissent. The use of civil law to squelch discussion is as serious as the use of criminal law to do so, at least from the perspective of the open exchange of ideas.
I am not going to make an SQL Injection joke. No. I am not.
More details on the reason for the poor US standing is here.
No one with a Cambridge degree (they don't use the 4.0 grade system there, incidentally) will get the same job as someone with a 2.5 at a community college. The fact that you don't know that suggests you have an extraordinarily limited exposure to people educated at top-flight universities. Very few people with firsts from Cambridge will go into industry without some time in a post-graduate program, either.
Sysadmin-type knowledge is not conceptually difficult at all. It is largely just familiarity with a lot of very arbitrary configuration information, habit, and knowing where to look for things. It does involve a great deal of time to build all that up - a poor investment of time to someone doing research in another field, including real computer science.
Gack. I like Apple products (iPod, Mac) but this argument, that if you don't have an iPhone, you must want one, is ridiculous. The iPod Touch is all the interesting bits of an iPhone without that horrid phone service thrown in. When the iPhone2 comes out with 3G, then maybe there will be something to talk about. Until then, it's just a cult fetish object.
The very idea of "tl;dr" is art of the crumbling of the American mind, and may be at least related to the rise of videogames. I like videogames, but they by no means are demonstrating the kind of depth, ambiguity, or sophistication (morally, emotionally, and spiritually) of the printed word. ("Aeris dying" doesn't cut it; Bioshock is just a first-inkling.) Before objecting that "someday" videogames will evolve into a form as sophisticated as film - a prediction I agree with - I'll note how many otherwise intelligent people show such poverty in their intellectual lives, able only to answer "how" and not "why," able to think in terms of utility but not in terms of the creation of values (at best, implicitly and unthinkingly recycling old ones.)
Shorthand: not only do we not know what works about what we do, we don't even always know what we're doing, even when it works. The engineer's bias toward explicit knowledge over implicit adaptation (something often in evidence here in /.) is starting to filter its way back into the social sciences, unfortunately.
Moreover, if you have 99% compatibility, enough users will hit that 1% often enough in meaningful enough situations that they will shrug and go back.
No, actually, more people learn about Ayn Rand from encountering objectivists. In any case, yes, I think people should read The Scarlet Letter. I'm not opposed to humor and entertainment, I'm opposed to that being the limit or prerequisite for all cultural activity. I'm opposed to the endemic resistance to tragedy and to the trivialization of human thought. I'm opposed to mass-market sentimentality and catering to the lowest-common denominator in attention and affect.
I'm opposed to this kind of culture. I understand that even in Tolstoy's time, more people read cheap nickel novels in easily understood genres where the conflicts were well-understood, the protagonists admirable, the plots straightforward, and the good guys won. Still, Tolstoy and Todorov and Doestoevsky and Flaubert and Goethe and Joyce and Proust and Hemingway and Steinbeck and Woolf and Faulkner were all able to write, find an audience, and have their works sustained in print over the decades. Those works have come to define what the novel is, even if pulp outsells them in any given year. Compare that to what has happened to comics (and yes, I love graphic novels like Persepolis, Blankets and Ghost World - but they still are stuck in a ghetto.)
That's why not all videogames are games.
Actually, not all games are games of competition, either. I'd refer you to Roger Caillois' classificatory scheme for games. Our culture privileges "agon" games over those which involve chance, mimicry, or vertigo as their defining logics. But a broader understanding of games as "systems of play" includes things like games of chance, make-believe (which evolves into theater), and activities such as "ring around the roses" and other vertiginous activities that evolve into things like snowboarding, skydiving, and acrobatics.
Film and novels accomplish incredible artistic achievements because they are not forced into one type of experience. Tolstoy is not "fun." Tolstoy is not even entertaining per se, but it is powerful and thoughtful. If novels all had to be "fun" first and foremost, many of the most important works of history would never have been written.
That's the nature of the "ghetto" for videogames, that a rather narrow criteria - fun - ends up circumscribing the ambitions of the media. The mental straightjacket that we have to remove if games are going to thrive as an artistic media the way that prose and film have, is thinking that games need to be "fun" to be compelling.
So, you get a bunch of cheapskates sitting around your tables using the free Wi-Fi without having to buy anything, while your paying customers may have trouble finding a seat. If I'm a business owner, I like this why?
I recently turned around and found another place to have lunch when there were no seats at a cafe with Free Wi-Fi near my office. At least half of the table-occupants didn't seem to have purchased anything, or had finished consuming it some time before.
No, actually, contempt is intransitive. I'm pretty contemptuous of you right now. And you're being pretty contemptuous yourself, so by your own standards, you're contemptible.
Those who hold other classes in contempt are the most contemptible? So if you hold the class of paedophiles and mass murderers in contempt, you are more contemptible than they are?
I don't know if it's the most contemptible class, but people who engage in specious reasoning and crude, exaggerated statements that collapse at the slightest analysis are pretty contemptible, too. Contempt is a valid mechanism for establishing values and criticizing behavior.
Simple compensation doesn't create a disincentive.
The headline is essentially accurate. T-Mobile and AT&T have made an agreement to allow T-Mobile users to continue connecting at Starbucks. They are being "grandfathered in," so to speak. Thus, T-Mobile users don't get hosed, but it still remains the case that Starbucks is no longer working with T-Mobile.
I'm a subscriber to a pretty substantial package of T-Mobile services. I have been happy with their service offerings, and their customer service has been outstanding. I can't help but wonder, though, as they fail to get the iPhone and start losing valuable partnerships like Starbucks, whether the benefits of their excellent service will start to mean less if they don't provide offerings with major partners like Apple. When these kind of alliances create unique opportunities, it is a path to monopoly - think Microsoft.
But the reaction to just this incredulity has been sticking fingers in one's ears and saying "LA LA LA I can't hear you," roughly speaking. To be specific, postmodernist isn't moral relativism. (It's not *not* moral relativism, either - moral relativism is far older, as is nihilism.) Postmodernism is a critique of meta-narratives, yes - meta-narratives such as the march of progress that legitimized colonialism and imperialism, or the creation of a worker's utopia (much of it is a critique of Marxism), or any number of teleological presumptions (including those that are locked up in evolutionary language, mistaking adaptation to a niche with simple progress.) One can recognize that these metanarratives are really just human inventions and that none of them are the "meaning of history," while retaining one's moral bearings.
That morality is ultimately produced by history and circumstances, rather than being something etched into the fabric of the cosmos, is not the interesting or relevant part of postmodernism. Nihilism may reside in the belief that one cannot have a morality without reference to a meta-narrative that one is "acting as if is true." Pretending God (or whatever fixed moral center of gravity you are yearning for) exists because we're afraid to imagine life without HIm or It is more nihilistic than simply acting on the basis of one's moral intuitions and producing, rather than simply echoing, fundamental values.
"Gay" is a belief? You think it's not OK to criticize attempts to implement Sharia law?
What we don't criticize are identities, or assume that religious practices are reducible to a simple body of tenets. There is a difference between criticizing someone for being Christian and criticizing them for believing that the world is 6000 years old. Obviously, there is a relationship between the two, but that relationship isn't a simple one. What it meant to be Christian, Islamic, Buddhist, etc . has changed over the centuries of those practices, and I'm pretty sure that I have more in common with most Christians today than those contemporary Christians have with 5th century Christians. Likewise with Muslims, etc.
The "post-modernism" (or, really, post-structuralism - post-modernism is more a theory of cultural history) comes in when we observe that every act of making a statement - even a "true" or well-founded statement - comes with an agenda, says more about the reasons for saying, carries their own presumptions, etc. It is caught up in the idea that "even if they really are out to get you, you still can be paranoid." "Anything goes" is actually a very old idea, when really, you are talking about a well-founded hesitation to critique other identities simply on the basis of some of their explicitly stated beliefs, rather than addressing those beliefs historically.
You forgot the 2 rules of being a cranky IT guy:
1. It's always the user's fault.
2. If it isn't the user's fault, see rule 1.