A community group at one time decided to have a celebration on Guy Fawkes day that focused on the Indian culture that was the vast majority of the local council. It was reported in the Daily Mail as a council "banning bonfire night," because they chose to do something other than the bonfire. This lead to a chorus of anti-immigrant sentiment from the Mail-reading rabble.
This is typical of the Daily Mail. They are in the business of generating outrage among angry right-wing types, not in reporting the news.
That isn't true. I'm not a staunch defender of the wonders of the market, but in this case, it really is a matter of a product finding its audience. Of course, the product isn't Brain Age, but Brain Age + Nintendo DS; the game is helping sell the platform to people who otherwise might not be interested.
This is unlikely to lead to a lot of the people who bought Brain Age also buying Castelvania. (Well, I bought both, but...) Understand that there isn't just one market - there really are dozens, hundreds of them.
If you actually talk to people who innovate (and I do), you'll learn that they can trace almost every great idea to a conversation they had.
There really is a growing field of innovation studies, and a related discipline of distributed cognition. I recommend Ed Hutchin's "Cognition in the Wild" as an introduction to the latter.
Now, if one is a 3rd party game developer, pondering what platform to support, what would one draw from that?
I love the Wii, and am not interested in getting a PS3. But if/when I did get a PS3, I would bulk up my library with PS3 titles for the next several years. I'm probably going to be happy with a pretty small library of Wii games. Kudos to Nintendo for thinking about play-experience over game-as-media, resulting in a product that's more, erm, fun, but that's not going to spur a lot of 3rd party development. Ultimately, the finest games of the next 10 years may still turn out to be made for the PS2 or Xbox360 (or, as an outside chance, the PC!)
Just because you stop doing something foolish, it doesn't mean that the thing you've done to replace it is any less foolish.
I could create a dozen examples and metaphors, but it would just belabor an obvious point. You shouldn't worry about placating environmentalists: you should worry about effects on the environment. Physics votes last.
Criminal neglect is a separate issue from drug use. Neglect can be the result of legal or illegal drug use (including alcohol use), or it can be the result of other mental problems. We can pursue and prosecute criminal neglect on its own merits, distinct from the question of drug use. We take this approach with alcohol as it is.
What also isn't going to change is that people choose newspapers based on their niches, not because they are published via one medium over another. In the UK, the paper you read says, pretty much, who you are: the difference between a Sun reader and a Guardian reader is massive. I don't know the Seattle markets, but I suspect that the gap between a P-I reader and a Seattle Times reader has more to do with culture, socioeconomic class, and political affiliation than with how the content is distributed.
Perhaps my claim, then, is that much of the "payoff" of the recycled gag isn't humor, but reassurance and familiarity. When we encounter something really funny and new, we have a reaction that is far-reaching, one that almost makes us forget ourselves: an aesthetic experience. That experience is replaced by a relaxed knowingness in the case of repetition.
Now, a true running gag may be a bit different in a narrative context (one of the few philosophical texts on comedy, written by Henri Bergson, might describe it as a collision of natural and mechanical rhythms.) But what makes a running gag work (that is, to produce that kind of aesthetic experience of "deep" humor) is the rupture of context in which it occurs. When it is completely expected, that payoff is depleted.
Solispsism is not philosophically a canard: it is, per Berkeley, irrefutable. The observation that no non-psychotic actually behaves like a solipsist is irrelevant: we don't behave like substance monists, either, and consistently use language which implies mental substance as well as free will, even if our philosophical commitments are otherwise.
I think it is a dead-end as a position, but that's another issue.
Your "experiment" and other jejune refutations of idealism (Johnson's "thus I refute Berkeley") would prove nothing. For the experimenter, you would only get confirmation that the world disappears when they stop their mental activity.
Repetition isn't real humor. It's the recollection of humor: the joke as an algorithm. It really is Pavlovian: you remember having found it funny once, and repeating it reminds you of that first moment (with diminishing returns.)
Real comedy involves an element of surprise and discovery: nothing is as funny as it is the first time you hear (or at least understand) it, because that's when the contradictions and paradoxes that make it funny are released as if they were pent-up energy.
The geek sense of humor - at least, the repetitive part of it (repeating Monty Python skits, for example) comes from a state of high anxiety, not really a spontaneously funny state of mind. It's motivated by a need for reassurance and safety, and its almost the antithesis of actual wit, which is risk-taking and treacherous.
I love geeks, don't get me wrong. But not for the humor.
What do you have against The Arcade Fire? One of the better bands I've seen in a while, and the album is excellent. It's enough of a sea-change in style that it takes some getting used to, but it's entered my personal high-rotation list.
Fortunately, networks of people usually manage to create ways of sorting the wheat from the chaff. Think of it as a "YouTube" for games: most of the good YouTube videos get discovered and are spread around via word of mouth/net.
If no one watches the commercials, they will only be made based on pay-per-view or DVD sales.
You need to think of the full economic model, not just how you might, briefly, take advantage of the fact that enough people are watching the ads, and thus motivating advertisers to subsidize everyone else. In fact, if the people who watch ads do, in fact, modify their behavior to buy more of the advertised goods (which will be priced to reflect the cost of advertisement), then the adviewers themselves are subsidizing the viewing of everyone else, whose buying decisions are not ad-influenced.
They have 2 types of customer, one of them being their advertisers. They are in the business of selling their other customers to these customers.
Perhaps the future is this: as consumers all gain the ability to circumvent ads and the value of advertising on cable declines, that the charges for cable service increase by at least double, since cable providers wouldn't be able to get any money from advertisers. (Ideally, this would be accompanied by a decrease in the cost of other goods, but I suspect that advertisers would simply keep the same marketing budgets and look elsewhere.)
One wonder what things like ratings would mean in a truly post-advertising world. Why spend millions more on a show just because it gets better ratings, if ad revenues don't exist? Would all cable become like the Discovery channel? Or will pay-per-view become universal?
One usually gets a fraction of the amount one pays when buying a CD and selling it back to the same used CD store you bought it from. So, he did pay something for the use of the disk to acquire the music.
I wonder if the publishing company is going to go after used books next?
There are other, and for many strata far better, way to learn communications skills.
People don't really need to be trained significantly to use IM. There are countries filled with people who picked up IM, email and web in internet cafes in half an hour. Learning how to write well, knowing how to travel, multiple spoken languages: these can go farther.
Dollar for dollar, considering the average lifespan of a laptop, it is a very poor investment for most educational purposes.
That's the problem with one-size-fits-all education. For some, computer skills are less useful than skills which may serve more ambitious aspirations: excellent people skills and writing skills can prep one for a legal career, a career in the arts and entertainment, in business, etc. Technology is generally an "in-between" career (of course, there is the question of what "technology" is - there are huge gaps between IT drones, systems architects, and IC designers.) What may be an opportunity for you could be an opportunity cost for someone at a higher rung. "Office worker" is pretty low on the totem pole, really, for most middle-class people.
If a real rape is like flying an airplane into a building, then virtual rape is me sending you a photoshopped image of me flying a plane into the house that you and your family lives in.
Which, frankly, can be read as a threat of sorts, as a kind of non-verbal verbal assault.
There is a fiction that things that happen in the "world" of representations (whether words or images) are different from those that happen in the physical world. It's a misconception. Most language is also an action and has some function beyond just "representing" or "expressing." Language is how we create contracts, make promises, give orders, create a new state in the world ("I now pronounce you man and wife.") By using a sentence - "I bet you $5.00 you can't do this" - I produce a wager, which sets up an expectation for which I will somehow be held accountable. Threats and blackmail are also things done with representations, but likewise they are real.
Think about it - how many Chinese people probably think that the Disneyland in China is genuine? A LOT. Whatever they see there they perceive as representing Disney. If the food tastes like crap and the characters are wandering around the park drunk - they will hate Disney and Disney will lose a customer.
Do you know how close to impossible it is for most citizens of China to enter the US? Getting a visa is nearly impossible, especially a tourist visa, without considerable sponsorship. Not to mention the costs involved.
I would suggest a compromise - if and when Disney truly enters that market and creates its own theme park, then the imitators should cease and desist. Until then, I consider this a kind of "folk art" version of Disneyland, just like the hand-knitted yarn Pikachu finger puppet I bought in the Andes a couple of years ago.
Sometimes, you have to take a side. Backing up one side or another on this issue doesn't make you back them up on all issues: supporting Disney's IP doesn't mean you like their labor practices, or, supporting cultural appropriation and re-use on China's behalf doesn't mean you like their foreign policy.
But there is a substantive issue here, and it makes no sense to try to squirm out of it.
My view? The first world has mass-exported so much cultural material - Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, The USS Enterprise, Darth Vader, Batman - characters that have become embedded in our subconscious and become part of the fabric of mass culture itself - that I think it is only natural that it will break the boundaries of intellectual property, particularly in the peripheries outside the first world, where representations and images flow with a different logic entirely. What is really sad, actually, is that in Latin America, you see craftspeople making (illegal) ceramic and knitted versions of branded merchandise. The sad this isn't that - the sad thing is that, because they don't feel intimidated by IP law, that they are really being more creative/productive and original than people who merely consume "officially licensed" merchandise.
Slashdot Mirror
It's true.
A community group at one time decided to have a celebration on Guy Fawkes day that focused on the Indian culture that was the vast majority of the local council. It was reported in the Daily Mail as a council "banning bonfire night," because they chose to do something other than the bonfire. This lead to a chorus of anti-immigrant sentiment from the Mail-reading rabble.
This is typical of the Daily Mail. They are in the business of generating outrage among angry right-wing types, not in reporting the news.
That isn't true. I'm not a staunch defender of the wonders of the market, but in this case, it really is a matter of a product finding its audience. Of course, the product isn't Brain Age, but Brain Age + Nintendo DS; the game is helping sell the platform to people who otherwise might not be interested.
...) Understand that there isn't just one market - there really are dozens, hundreds of them.
This is unlikely to lead to a lot of the people who bought Brain Age also buying Castelvania. (Well, I bought both, but
That isn't an explanation. It isn't just "good." It hits a new market, and it is good for them in a way that other games haven't been "good."
Of course it's a well-designed game. That explains little.
If you actually talk to people who innovate (and I do), you'll learn that they can trace almost every great idea to a conversation they had.
There really is a growing field of innovation studies, and a related discipline of distributed cognition. I recommend Ed Hutchin's "Cognition in the Wild" as an introduction to the latter.
Now, if one is a 3rd party game developer, pondering what platform to support, what would one draw from that?
I love the Wii, and am not interested in getting a PS3. But if/when I did get a PS3, I would bulk up my library with PS3 titles for the next several years. I'm probably going to be happy with a pretty small library of Wii games. Kudos to Nintendo for thinking about play-experience over game-as-media, resulting in a product that's more, erm, fun, but that's not going to spur a lot of 3rd party development. Ultimately, the finest games of the next 10 years may still turn out to be made for the PS2 or Xbox360 (or, as an outside chance, the PC!)
Just because you stop doing something foolish, it doesn't mean that the thing you've done to replace it is any less foolish.
I could create a dozen examples and metaphors, but it would just belabor an obvious point. You shouldn't worry about placating environmentalists: you should worry about effects on the environment. Physics votes last.
Criminal neglect is a separate issue from drug use. Neglect can be the result of legal or illegal drug use (including alcohol use), or it can be the result of other mental problems. We can pursue and prosecute criminal neglect on its own merits, distinct from the question of drug use. We take this approach with alcohol as it is.
What also isn't going to change is that people choose newspapers based on their niches, not because they are published via one medium over another. In the UK, the paper you read says, pretty much, who you are: the difference between a Sun reader and a Guardian reader is massive. I don't know the Seattle markets, but I suspect that the gap between a P-I reader and a Seattle Times reader has more to do with culture, socioeconomic class, and political affiliation than with how the content is distributed.
Perhaps my claim, then, is that much of the "payoff" of the recycled gag isn't humor, but reassurance and familiarity. When we encounter something really funny and new, we have a reaction that is far-reaching, one that almost makes us forget ourselves: an aesthetic experience. That experience is replaced by a relaxed knowingness in the case of repetition.
Now, a true running gag may be a bit different in a narrative context (one of the few philosophical texts on comedy, written by Henri Bergson, might describe it as a collision of natural and mechanical rhythms.) But what makes a running gag work (that is, to produce that kind of aesthetic experience of "deep" humor) is the rupture of context in which it occurs. When it is completely expected, that payoff is depleted.
Solispsism is not philosophically a canard: it is, per Berkeley, irrefutable. The observation that no non-psychotic actually behaves like a solipsist is irrelevant: we don't behave like substance monists, either, and consistently use language which implies mental substance as well as free will, even if our philosophical commitments are otherwise.
I think it is a dead-end as a position, but that's another issue.
Your "experiment" and other jejune refutations of idealism (Johnson's "thus I refute Berkeley") would prove nothing. For the experimenter, you would only get confirmation that the world disappears when they stop their mental activity.
Repetition isn't real humor. It's the recollection of humor: the joke as an algorithm. It really is Pavlovian: you remember having found it funny once, and repeating it reminds you of that first moment (with diminishing returns.)
Real comedy involves an element of surprise and discovery: nothing is as funny as it is the first time you hear (or at least understand) it, because that's when the contradictions and paradoxes that make it funny are released as if they were pent-up energy.
The geek sense of humor - at least, the repetitive part of it (repeating Monty Python skits, for example) comes from a state of high anxiety, not really a spontaneously funny state of mind. It's motivated by a need for reassurance and safety, and its almost the antithesis of actual wit, which is risk-taking and treacherous.
I love geeks, don't get me wrong. But not for the humor.
What do you have against The Arcade Fire? One of the better bands I've seen in a while, and the album is excellent. It's enough of a sea-change in style that it takes some getting used to, but it's entered my personal high-rotation list.
Fortunately, networks of people usually manage to create ways of sorting the wheat from the chaff. Think of it as a "YouTube" for games: most of the good YouTube videos get discovered and are spread around via word of mouth/net.
If no one watches the commercials, they will only be made based on pay-per-view or DVD sales.
You need to think of the full economic model, not just how you might, briefly, take advantage of the fact that enough people are watching the ads, and thus motivating advertisers to subsidize everyone else. In fact, if the people who watch ads do, in fact, modify their behavior to buy more of the advertised goods (which will be priced to reflect the cost of advertisement), then the adviewers themselves are subsidizing the viewing of everyone else, whose buying decisions are not ad-influenced.
I buy books, remember them, and then sell them.
One listens to a CD dozens, even hundreds of times. Unless it's a reference work, one reads a book once or twice.
They have 2 types of customer, one of them being their advertisers. They are in the business of selling their other customers to these customers.
Perhaps the future is this: as consumers all gain the ability to circumvent ads and the value of advertising on cable declines, that the charges for cable service increase by at least double, since cable providers wouldn't be able to get any money from advertisers. (Ideally, this would be accompanied by a decrease in the cost of other goods, but I suspect that advertisers would simply keep the same marketing budgets and look elsewhere.)
One wonder what things like ratings would mean in a truly post-advertising world. Why spend millions more on a show just because it gets better ratings, if ad revenues don't exist? Would all cable become like the Discovery channel? Or will pay-per-view become universal?
One usually gets a fraction of the amount one pays when buying a CD and selling it back to the same used CD store you bought it from. So, he did pay something for the use of the disk to acquire the music.
I wonder if the publishing company is going to go after used books next?
There are other, and for many strata far better, way to learn communications skills.
People don't really need to be trained significantly to use IM. There are countries filled with people who picked up IM, email and web in internet cafes in half an hour. Learning how to write well, knowing how to travel, multiple spoken languages: these can go farther.
Dollar for dollar, considering the average lifespan of a laptop, it is a very poor investment for most educational purposes.
That's the problem with one-size-fits-all education. For some, computer skills are less useful than skills which may serve more ambitious aspirations: excellent people skills and writing skills can prep one for a legal career, a career in the arts and entertainment, in business, etc. Technology is generally an "in-between" career (of course, there is the question of what "technology" is - there are huge gaps between IT drones, systems architects, and IC designers.) What may be an opportunity for you could be an opportunity cost for someone at a higher rung. "Office worker" is pretty low on the totem pole, really, for most middle-class people.
If a real rape is like flying an airplane into a building, then virtual rape is me sending you a photoshopped image of me flying a plane into the house that you and your family lives in.
Which, frankly, can be read as a threat of sorts, as a kind of non-verbal verbal assault.
There is a fiction that things that happen in the "world" of representations (whether words or images) are different from those that happen in the physical world. It's a misconception. Most language is also an action and has some function beyond just "representing" or "expressing." Language is how we create contracts, make promises, give orders, create a new state in the world ("I now pronounce you man and wife.") By using a sentence - "I bet you $5.00 you can't do this" - I produce a wager, which sets up an expectation for which I will somehow be held accountable. Threats and blackmail are also things done with representations, but likewise they are real.
Think about it - how many Chinese people probably think that the Disneyland in China is genuine? A LOT. Whatever they see there they perceive as representing Disney. If the food tastes like crap and the characters are wandering around the park drunk - they will hate Disney and Disney will lose a customer.
Do you know how close to impossible it is for most citizens of China to enter the US? Getting a visa is nearly impossible, especially a tourist visa, without considerable sponsorship. Not to mention the costs involved.
I would suggest a compromise - if and when Disney truly enters that market and creates its own theme park, then the imitators should cease and desist. Until then, I consider this a kind of "folk art" version of Disneyland, just like the hand-knitted yarn Pikachu finger puppet I bought in the Andes a couple of years ago.
Sometimes, you have to take a side. Backing up one side or another on this issue doesn't make you back them up on all issues: supporting Disney's IP doesn't mean you like their labor practices, or, supporting cultural appropriation and re-use on China's behalf doesn't mean you like their foreign policy.
But there is a substantive issue here, and it makes no sense to try to squirm out of it.
My view? The first world has mass-exported so much cultural material - Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, The USS Enterprise, Darth Vader, Batman - characters that have become embedded in our subconscious and become part of the fabric of mass culture itself - that I think it is only natural that it will break the boundaries of intellectual property, particularly in the peripheries outside the first world, where representations and images flow with a different logic entirely. What is really sad, actually, is that in Latin America, you see craftspeople making (illegal) ceramic and knitted versions of branded merchandise. The sad this isn't that - the sad thing is that, because they don't feel intimidated by IP law, that they are really being more creative/productive and original than people who merely consume "officially licensed" merchandise.
Imagine being able to find, not only anyone who stole your car, but anyone who stole your car keys.
I think a SPIME-rich world would present a lot of challenges to all but the cleverest of thieves.
I don't think you'd look for them - you'd have your fourth-gen Roomba get them for you.
"Not to nitpick," but a majority (about 3/4) of Iraqis are Arabs, actually.
They aren't Saudi Arabs.