When someone who lived under socialism confirms that it wasn't the unmitigated disaster that the American media consensus insists it was, heads explode.
You use the word "by definition" a little too freely.
The terms mean very different things in different contexts; they can refer to personality types as much as political positions, and they "play" differently depending on class, nationality and other factors.
The integration of EndNote with Word, and the instant-import ability of references into EndNote from my university's library system, the Library of Congress, Google Scholar, and various other online sources, clinch it for me. Yes, I back up frequently (since running Word 2003, I've actually had no data-destroying crashes, but I've been around Word long enough to not trust it that much) but the time I save and the flexibility of EndNote more than makes up for that.
EndNote's library of templates is incredibly helpful (I'm interdisciplinary, and submit publications in a variety of formats.)
When you import the top tier of labor instead of outsourcing the work to that same top tier elsewhere, you are actually paying more (in exchange for greater managerial control of the work.) You are also creating work for the people that support the top tier of talent.
A top-flight programmer or engineer from Russia or India is going to be supported by IT staff that comes from the US.
The lack of granularity about the different tiers of high-tech labor that runs rampant in Slashdot is really depressing.
What I'd like to know is what outlets are withholding news stories from the public because they don't want to lose those special favors from the industry. And to blackball them.
If I want to read Sony press releases, I can do so on Sony's website. Video-game journalism needs to be a lot more independent - it's been an industry mouthpiece for too long.
Which meetings? For which purpose? Are you developing a new product? Are you in an IT team producing a support document for users? Are you a research scientist trying to track the work of your assistants, or talking with investors? Are you part of a legal team?
I know there's an IT and/or software development/engineering lens through which a lot of Slashdotters view the world. But many of the assumptions don't migrate to other contexts well. A receptionist, an IT tech, an industrial designer, and a financial analyst all have very different relationships to meetings, information, and creativity.
While I'm not going to defend the pricing policies of command economies, it is a bit misleading to describe our own system as simply a negotiation between two sides of a trade. In fact, it is a negotiation among hundreds - some of whom have much more money than others. The mechanism by which I "negotiate" for the price of my food is extremely indirect - I either buy it or don't. If someone with more money (and thus with less utility value per dollar) doesn't buy it from the price I can't afford, then my decision not to be is a small drop of information in the market.
The monomyth is tiresome and trivial. It has lead to unimaginable formulaic thinking. There really are alternatives. Was "Seven Samurai" really the monomyth?
The reason why it has become so popular is that it appeals to a simplifying drive for a "universal theory," reduced to discreet steps. It's easy to see why that would appeal to geeks. To say the story "works" is like saying macaroni and cheese "works" - after having had it for dinner every day for a year. For a lot of us, it doesn't work.
Much modern heroic fantasy acts as a compensatory adolescent power fantasy - particularly in video games. From dweeb to badass in 50 short hours of play is the payoff. That's fine and well for adolescents (whether chronologically or developmentally) but there are those of us who want something else - protagonists who have desires and goals within limitations. You'll notice how mature literature is really about typical, flawed limited people, not about prodigies and the super-powered.
The fact that there is so little real tragedy left in art of any kind - especially in games - is another problem. Shadow of the Colossus gets pretty close, but the tragic sense of life is generally dwindling, at least in American culture.
I'm sorry, this is excuse-making. For every scenarios which "explains" the US lag in broadband adoption, there is a counter-example of a country with a similar circumstance and higher levels of broadband adoption.
The truth is that there may be cultural explanations as well: differences in education and values. The US has a streak of anti-intellectualism that has been noted by many. Or the explanation could be different priorities, or rising home prices (there are a lot of "mortgage poor" people in the US now.)
The differences in price, too, may have to do with institutional factors: regulation, natural monopolies, public funds. Who knows? But the repeated appeal to the demographic distribution explanation just doesn't wash.
It is a category which informs peoples' experiences, histories, and identities. It is part of their cultural self-expectations and informs how communities think of themselves. Being used as 'a criteria against which people should be judged' is a very small part of the total picture of what race - or any other category - is, and assumes that most of our dealings with each other are as some kind of neutral judges of others. It is better to say that race should be understood as a part of the way in which people understand themselves. And just like no one is "outside" gender, no one is "outside" race. They may have nuanced or idiosyncratic identities or positions, but they aren't outside of it.
People like to play games and interact with culture in which they believe they are well-represented when possible.
We may disagree on this issue, but it doesn't make me rabid and emotional. Being too quick to label people "emotional and rabid" makes you look, well, emotional and defensive. I'm placing neither crime on the scale of the worst human atrocities.
While the Japanese internments affected more (and almost entirely innocent) people, none of them were tortured per se. Torture changes the character of the situation substantially - as does the fact that the duration of the WW2 internments was already less than that of the Gitmo detainments.
Race isn't about pigmentation. It doesn't have any strictly biological rationale at all. Rather, it's produced by the intersection of some genetic characteristics with history, culture, and society. It was used to legitimate slavery in the US for decades, and then to justify the creation of a two-tiered society in much of the US after the Civil War. That experience created a common culture based on a "myth" - that of (biological) race - but the cultures and communities created by it are quite real. And the difference between black American culture(s)and history and "non-racial" (but canonically white) American culture(s) and history is also quite real.
Now, this is mostly an American problem. Different conflicts exist in different parts of the world. Many videogames are from Japan, and a lot of the issues surrounding race and history become very different through Japanese lens.
There's a lot more I could refer you to - look at the literature surrounding "the invention of whiteness," which is really how very different European identities got merged into a common one mostly so that less well-treated Europeans, like the Irish and Italians, could enjoy the benefits of not-being-minorities.
I think this is really an issue for some, but not a majority of games. It's interesting how GTA:SA simply wouldn't make sense if the lead character were white, but otherwise nothing else were changed. Same with Vice City. Insofar as racial identity is part of overall identity, a blithely "color-blind" approach doesn't work in games that are set in contexts where specific identities are part of characterization.
He was comparing Gitmo to the American-run internment camps to which Japanese-American civilians were sent, and I agree with him: Gitmo is worse. Japanese-American civilians were allowed to exist in communities with their families. Rounding them up was still very wrong, and it did cause considerable hardship, but it didn't break spirits the way that Gitmo has - and many of the Gitmo detainees have been demonstrated to be innocent of any wrongdoing.
That explanation for the differences between Europe and the US doesn't really fly as well as you think. Most Americans live in regions as dense as Europe. If you have ever been to England, for example, you would notice that it is quite possible to commute to London on public transit from as many as 80 miles away - and quite a many people do. Likewise with France.
Historically, the auto industry made an extensive effort in the early and middle part of the 20th century to replace rail-based mass transit with cars and buses. This led to patterns of urban development designed around the car-commuter in the 50's and later. Before mid-century, a much less dense US primarily commuted on trains.
You mangle the intellectual history of critical thinking to the extent in a way that is embarrassing to watch for those of us who know something about it. It's comparable to talking about the internet as "tubes."
I understand that geek philistinism is largely a product of a kind of inferiority complex, but that's no excuse for bluster.
No. We should listen to the people who've been there, but we will absolutely not refrain from speaking just because we haven't. Do you have opinions about Vietnam? Kosovo? Sudan? The Civil War? Stem-cell research? Environmental policy? Do you think you should be disqualified from expressing or advocating a position simply because you weren't in those places or actively engaged in those research projects?
I hear your line of commentary a lot. The experience of people who are there and who have been there is important, but everyone's individual experience is still just that - it doesn't give an overview, you may miss very important features of the situation that didn't occur where you are (and, of course, it leaves out the experiences of Iraqis). Asking your experiences to be taken seriously is important. Trying to quell discussion based on those experiences is wrong.
I'm willing to clean up after kids if it means they are developing real-world motor and mechanical skills, and getting some exercise and air in the process. Otherwise, I would just have Sim Children. That really gets rid of the messiness.
The problem is that you aren't going anywhere in a computer game: at least, your body isn't. What is lost in the translation from physical spaces to virtual spaces is substantial. The last 15+ years of research and thought on the role of the body on cognition has made the idea that a virtual environment can really replace a physical one obsolete - our vestibular, proprioceptive, and sensorimotor systems are very important to how we think, how we experience place, how we understand other people, etc. Virtual socialization through language omits a vast range of cues, feedback and experience that comes across when people are in the same physical spaces.
Physical toys, which can move across real spaces and be shared (even fought over!) with other real children offer things that the virtual simply cannot - and it does a disservice to the development of children to ignore that.
I agree completely: the problem is that the alternatives are usually worse. While the popular abuse of materialist explanations is often fraught with cliches and crude caricatures from evolutionary psychology or cognitive neuroscience, the alternative winds up being an appeal to older folk-methods of explanation, such as substance-dualistic or even religious ones (whether explicit or covert - it is startling how much of the metaphysics, epistemology and ethics of Western-educated people who think themselves secular are still essentially Christian - this includes especially so-called liberal humanism!)
But if a California court found him guilty of any wrong, then I think he should serve his time.
The problem is that he feared for his life if imprisoned. The Scientologists have a code of ethics by which people who are identified as enemies of their organization are "fair game" for any aggression. It is not unlike a fatwa against a critic of Islam. Indeed, in some ways, Scientology is a post-modern form of Wahhabism.
Well, that old canard about Andre Serrano's "Piss Christ" is both a distortion and an exaggeration. For one thing, it's a photograph: people who quote the urban mythology about it consistently assume it's an actual vial with a crucifix in it, but no such vial exists and the effect may actually be an illusion (it is said that the fluid is simply beer.) Second, the photo was produced as part of a broad series of photos in personal work: it wasn't commissioned as such. Third, his total funding: $5000 of public money, to cover a couple months worth of photographic work. You have no idea how funding in the arts works - and how little of it there is (and how most of it is actually funding artists working for institutions of higher education.)
Finally, Serrano is himself devoutly Catholic, and the piece was meant to be very devotional. Whether it is a claiming that contemporary society is "pissing" on the tradition of Christianity, or whether it is a claim that, by becoming human, Christ accepted all the indignities of incarnation, is a somewhat open question (and, indeed, both readings are possible: that the Incarnation was itself the divine willing to endure the shame of human existence.)
But the piece is still trotted out as an example of egregious misuse of public funds, though it cost far, far less than a Halliburton-built swimming pool in an unused training center in the middle of a desert in Iraq.
Slashdot Mirror
When someone who lived under socialism confirms that it wasn't the unmitigated disaster that the American media consensus insists it was, heads explode.
You use the word "by definition" a little too freely.
The terms mean very different things in different contexts; they can refer to personality types as much as political positions, and they "play" differently depending on class, nationality and other factors.
The integration of EndNote with Word, and the instant-import ability of references into EndNote from my university's library system, the Library of Congress, Google Scholar, and various other online sources, clinch it for me. Yes, I back up frequently (since running Word 2003, I've actually had no data-destroying crashes, but I've been around Word long enough to not trust it that much) but the time I save and the flexibility of EndNote more than makes up for that.
EndNote's library of templates is incredibly helpful (I'm interdisciplinary, and submit publications in a variety of formats.)
H1-Bs are not awarded to rank-and-file IT staff. It makes no economic sense for the employer, either.
Help desks may be outsourced. Not network engineers.
When you import the top tier of labor instead of outsourcing the work to that same top tier elsewhere, you are actually paying more (in exchange for greater managerial control of the work.) You are also creating work for the people that support the top tier of talent.
A top-flight programmer or engineer from Russia or India is going to be supported by IT staff that comes from the US.
The lack of granularity about the different tiers of high-tech labor that runs rampant in Slashdot is really depressing.
What I'd like to know is what outlets are withholding news stories from the public because they don't want to lose those special favors from the industry. And to blackball them.
If I want to read Sony press releases, I can do so on Sony's website. Video-game journalism needs to be a lot more independent - it's been an industry mouthpiece for too long.
Which meetings? For which purpose? Are you developing a new product? Are you in an IT team producing a support document for users? Are you a research scientist trying to track the work of your assistants, or talking with investors? Are you part of a legal team?
I know there's an IT and/or software development/engineering lens through which a lot of Slashdotters view the world. But many of the assumptions don't migrate to other contexts well. A receptionist, an IT tech, an industrial designer, and a financial analyst all have very different relationships to meetings, information, and creativity.
While I'm not going to defend the pricing policies of command economies, it is a bit misleading to describe our own system as simply a negotiation between two sides of a trade. In fact, it is a negotiation among hundreds - some of whom have much more money than others. The mechanism by which I "negotiate" for the price of my food is extremely indirect - I either buy it or don't. If someone with more money (and thus with less utility value per dollar) doesn't buy it from the price I can't afford, then my decision not to be is a small drop of information in the market.
The monomyth is tiresome and trivial. It has lead to unimaginable formulaic thinking. There really are alternatives. Was "Seven Samurai" really the monomyth?
The reason why it has become so popular is that it appeals to a simplifying drive for a "universal theory," reduced to discreet steps. It's easy to see why that would appeal to geeks. To say the story "works" is like saying macaroni and cheese "works" - after having had it for dinner every day for a year. For a lot of us, it doesn't work.
Much modern heroic fantasy acts as a compensatory adolescent power fantasy - particularly in video games. From dweeb to badass in 50 short hours of play is the payoff. That's fine and well for adolescents (whether chronologically or developmentally) but there are those of us who want something else - protagonists who have desires and goals within limitations. You'll notice how mature literature is really about typical, flawed limited people, not about prodigies and the super-powered.
The fact that there is so little real tragedy left in art of any kind - especially in games - is another problem. Shadow of the Colossus gets pretty close, but the tragic sense of life is generally dwindling, at least in American culture.
I'm sorry, this is excuse-making. For every scenarios which "explains" the US lag in broadband adoption, there is a counter-example of a country with a similar circumstance and higher levels of broadband adoption.
The truth is that there may be cultural explanations as well: differences in education and values. The US has a streak of anti-intellectualism that has been noted by many. Or the explanation could be different priorities, or rising home prices (there are a lot of "mortgage poor" people in the US now.)
The differences in price, too, may have to do with institutional factors: regulation, natural monopolies, public funds. Who knows? But the repeated appeal to the demographic distribution explanation just doesn't wash.
It is a category which informs peoples' experiences, histories, and identities. It is part of their cultural self-expectations and informs how communities think of themselves. Being used as 'a criteria against which people should be judged' is a very small part of the total picture of what race - or any other category - is, and assumes that most of our dealings with each other are as some kind of neutral judges of others. It is better to say that race should be understood as a part of the way in which people understand themselves. And just like no one is "outside" gender, no one is "outside" race. They may have nuanced or idiosyncratic identities or positions, but they aren't outside of it.
People like to play games and interact with culture in which they believe they are well-represented when possible.
Just because a category comes into existence historically doesn't mean it's not a real category.
We may disagree on this issue, but it doesn't make me rabid and emotional. Being too quick to label people "emotional and rabid" makes you look, well, emotional and defensive. I'm placing neither crime on the scale of the worst human atrocities.
While the Japanese internments affected more (and almost entirely innocent) people, none of them were tortured per se. Torture changes the character of the situation substantially - as does the fact that the duration of the WW2 internments was already less than that of the Gitmo detainments.
Race isn't about pigmentation. It doesn't have any strictly biological rationale at all. Rather, it's produced by the intersection of some genetic characteristics with history, culture, and society. It was used to legitimate slavery in the US for decades, and then to justify the creation of a two-tiered society in much of the US after the Civil War. That experience created a common culture based on a "myth" - that of (biological) race - but the cultures and communities created by it are quite real. And the difference between black American culture(s)and history and "non-racial" (but canonically white) American culture(s) and history is also quite real.
Now, this is mostly an American problem. Different conflicts exist in different parts of the world. Many videogames are from Japan, and a lot of the issues surrounding race and history become very different through Japanese lens.
There's a lot more I could refer you to - look at the literature surrounding "the invention of whiteness," which is really how very different European identities got merged into a common one mostly so that less well-treated Europeans, like the Irish and Italians, could enjoy the benefits of not-being-minorities.
I think this is really an issue for some, but not a majority of games. It's interesting how GTA:SA simply wouldn't make sense if the lead character were white, but otherwise nothing else were changed. Same with Vice City. Insofar as racial identity is part of overall identity, a blithely "color-blind" approach doesn't work in games that are set in contexts where specific identities are part of characterization.
He was comparing Gitmo to the American-run internment camps to which Japanese-American civilians were sent, and I agree with him: Gitmo is worse. Japanese-American civilians were allowed to exist in communities with their families. Rounding them up was still very wrong, and it did cause considerable hardship, but it didn't break spirits the way that Gitmo has - and many of the Gitmo detainees have been demonstrated to be innocent of any wrongdoing.
That explanation for the differences between Europe and the US doesn't really fly as well as you think. Most Americans live in regions as dense as Europe. If you have ever been to England, for example, you would notice that it is quite possible to commute to London on public transit from as many as 80 miles away - and quite a many people do. Likewise with France.
Historically, the auto industry made an extensive effort in the early and middle part of the 20th century to replace rail-based mass transit with cars and buses. This led to patterns of urban development designed around the car-commuter in the 50's and later. Before mid-century, a much less dense US primarily commuted on trains.
You mangle the intellectual history of critical thinking to the extent in a way that is embarrassing to watch for those of us who know something about it. It's comparable to talking about the internet as "tubes."
I understand that geek philistinism is largely a product of a kind of inferiority complex, but that's no excuse for bluster.
Even more important to MMORPGs and other comparable games: experience points and levels. Apotheosis as a numbers game.
No. We should listen to the people who've been there, but we will absolutely not refrain from speaking just because we haven't. Do you have opinions about Vietnam? Kosovo? Sudan? The Civil War? Stem-cell research? Environmental policy? Do you think you should be disqualified from expressing or advocating a position simply because you weren't in those places or actively engaged in those research projects?
I hear your line of commentary a lot. The experience of people who are there and who have been there is important, but everyone's individual experience is still just that - it doesn't give an overview, you may miss very important features of the situation that didn't occur where you are (and, of course, it leaves out the experiences of Iraqis). Asking your experiences to be taken seriously is important. Trying to quell discussion based on those experiences is wrong.
I'm willing to clean up after kids if it means they are developing real-world motor and mechanical skills, and getting some exercise and air in the process. Otherwise, I would just have Sim Children. That really gets rid of the messiness.
The problem is that you aren't going anywhere in a computer game: at least, your body isn't. What is lost in the translation from physical spaces to virtual spaces is substantial. The last 15+ years of research and thought on the role of the body on cognition has made the idea that a virtual environment can really replace a physical one obsolete - our vestibular, proprioceptive, and sensorimotor systems are very important to how we think, how we experience place, how we understand other people, etc. Virtual socialization through language omits a vast range of cues, feedback and experience that comes across when people are in the same physical spaces.
Physical toys, which can move across real spaces and be shared (even fought over!) with other real children offer things that the virtual simply cannot - and it does a disservice to the development of children to ignore that.
I agree completely: the problem is that the alternatives are usually worse. While the popular abuse of materialist explanations is often fraught with cliches and crude caricatures from evolutionary psychology or cognitive neuroscience, the alternative winds up being an appeal to older folk-methods of explanation, such as substance-dualistic or even religious ones (whether explicit or covert - it is startling how much of the metaphysics, epistemology and ethics of Western-educated people who think themselves secular are still essentially Christian - this includes especially so-called liberal humanism!)
But if a California court found him guilty of any wrong, then I think he should serve his time.
The problem is that he feared for his life if imprisoned. The Scientologists have a code of ethics by which people who are identified as enemies of their organization are "fair game" for any aggression. It is not unlike a fatwa against a critic of Islam. Indeed, in some ways, Scientology is a post-modern form of Wahhabism.
Well, that old canard about Andre Serrano's "Piss Christ" is both a distortion and an exaggeration. For one thing, it's a photograph: people who quote the urban mythology about it consistently assume it's an actual vial with a crucifix in it, but no such vial exists and the effect may actually be an illusion (it is said that the fluid is simply beer.) Second, the photo was produced as part of a broad series of photos in personal work: it wasn't commissioned as such. Third, his total funding: $5000 of public money, to cover a couple months worth of photographic work. You have no idea how funding in the arts works - and how little of it there is (and how most of it is actually funding artists working for institutions of higher education.)
Finally, Serrano is himself devoutly Catholic, and the piece was meant to be very devotional. Whether it is a claiming that contemporary society is "pissing" on the tradition of Christianity, or whether it is a claim that, by becoming human, Christ accepted all the indignities of incarnation, is a somewhat open question (and, indeed, both readings are possible: that the Incarnation was itself the divine willing to endure the shame of human existence.)
But the piece is still trotted out as an example of egregious misuse of public funds, though it cost far, far less than a Halliburton-built swimming pool in an unused training center in the middle of a desert in Iraq.