There is substantially more to philosophy than forma l logic and argumentation. Only one strand of philosophy - the Anglo-American analytic tradition - so restricts itself. Philosophy has often been more speculative, allusive, and interested in the possibilities that certain types of thinking creates as in being simply a way of creating logical schema. It is not a subset of science.
Philosophy can and does refer to introspection, shared experiences that still remain untestable, on analogy. Now, I don't think ID should be a substantial part of a philosophy cirriculum - you could probably dea with it in 15 minutes as a subset of certain types of religious thinking. But I'm as opposed to reducing all thought to a subset of the scientific way of thinking as I am to the encroachment of religion into the scientific sphere. (I'm not really interested in religion at all, and one of the tendencies of half-clever people that bothers me is to think of religion as the complement of science, when I think, instead, that there really is a triad of ways of thinking: science, philosophy, and literature/art, which have different methods and different functions. I see religious thought as it is becoming in much of the world as a kind of pathological degeneration of the philosophical way of thinking.)
It's bad science, but often good philosophy, poetry, literature, art, or other types of discourse that are also central to what it means to be human and sentient.
I have considerable respect of the scientific episteme. I have little interest in seeing it dominate all others.
The most secure server is one that was raised in a supportive environment with lots of positive reinforcement. "You're a very good server! Everyone likes you, server!"
Insecure servers are ones that felt unloved and neglected, and often engage in needy or self-destructive behaviors to compensate, leaving unnecessary services active and ports open to get the attention it never had as a child... (process)...
The left alternative to the Democrats is the Greens, and they have their own problems with civil liberties - a strong feminist contingent that has no qualms about legislating against pornography. So, for those on the left who are also committed to civil liberties, we don't have much of a choice.
If I thought that the left, as you describe it, was a large enough segment of the American populace to create such a party, I would support that tactic.
It is not. This is simply a fairly conservative country, at least for now. We have to deal with it. Splintering will not help. Politics are about compromise, coalitions, and suasions.
See, the Republicans are largely being successful by keeping their wings together - the libertarianish one and the religious one. I would like nothing more than for one of those wings to completely drive out the other into another party. I'm sure that the Republicans feel the same way about the centrist/soccer-mom wing of the Democrats and the enviromentalist/anti-war/civil libertarian wing.
A true multi-party system, with coalitions and such, would require a radical reworking of the constitution, and there's virtually no interest in that.
I'm definitely of the left, but we have to be precise about this: the democrats are quite often censorious and interventionist because they are opportunistically courting the "soccer mom" vote. This was their basic strategy under Clinton, and it was effective - it drains away much of the Republican base. And they can safely do this, because the Republicans are held immobile by their own right wing, who would never let them take a "free speech" line on something like pornography.
The problem is not the politicians. The problem is the populace: they value safety, security and middle-class family culture more than free speech and an open society. The politics are a reflection of these values.
There's a local cafe that is implementing that very system due to a problem with freeloaders. Seems reasonable - 10 dollars of purchases gets you 4 hours of time.
They had an "honor system" before, but it was abused.
Could it be because we're tired of ads that we don't give a flying shit about and we can make up our own minds about products?
17 to 34 year old males are hard to market to because they're spending less time using ad-saturated media.
But once you get into the media they are watching, they are extraordinarily gullible consumers. Your belief that they are resistant to these efforts is incorrect: take a look at how much ad money gets spent on Super Bowl Sunday.
That's what makes this such a tempting target for advertisers.
Look, including the content and making it inaccessible without a minor hack is no accident. It's a brilliant move. But it's disingenous to think that they "didn't mean" for anyone to access it.
Think about it: all the people with the PS/2 or Xbox version of the game who ran out and actually bought the PC version of the game just so they could use the Hot Coffee mod. The fact that it's going to be rated "AO" now is irrelevant - sales are going to soar for the title no matter what.
The ESRB is doing exactly what it should, and, to be honest, Rockstar is still going to benefit from it. Penny Arcade was right about just how disingenous the cries of innocence on the part of Rockstar really are. If ESRB didn't act, it would become irrelevant - and less voluntary measures would come into force.
I can't believe that no one realizes how Rockstar has had a win-win situation in all this all along.
My income is a fraction of what it was. When I get to tenure-track, it will only start to get close to early-mid career in IT.
But guess what? Because I'm happier, and not spending against my dissatisfaction with my career, I'm actually saving more money than I did before. That, and cooking at home instead of going out, result in a net improvement in my standard of living.
So while it's a big commencement-speech cliche to say "follow your bliss," I'll say: follow your bliss. Better to enjoy a life in the five digits than chafe against one in the 6 digits. I waited about 3 years too long before I made the move. And now - I can futz around with code and systems and stuff for fun (and even still do an occassional contract gig for an extra burst of cash, if I want to.)
Where the hell do you get this "Chomsky this" and "Chomsky that" line from? I don't even read Chomsky. I don't know where the hell you get your data from - I suspect it's from Free Republic or Sean Hannity or such. But it's wrong.
As far as CIA involvement in Uruguay etc. goes, I recommend you read the memoirs of former CIA operative Phillip Agee, and the narratives of Eduardo Galeano. Your data for Pinochet's body count is wrong: the 2000 person figure is for a single massacre; Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch estimate between a conservative 15,000 and a more speculative 20,000 people killed by Pinochet's regime.
I have no idea where you got the claim about the Contras and the Sandinistas, either. The Sandinistas got a little heavy-headed at times as far as shutting down presses went, and some of their electoral practices were corrupt. But there's no account of atrocities or massacres: opposition parties continued to operate throughout the Sandinista administration, and private businesses thrived.
As far as Brazil goes, check out the Lincoln Gordon memos for the extent of US support for the military coup.
Really, you're information sources are questionable at best.
I think the culprit you are looking for is "totalitarianism," not liberalism. And in the US today, do you hear more truly totalitarian rhetoric from the left or from the "either you are with us or against us" right?
Not even the Soviet Union supported terror and murder for the sake of terror and murder. In fact, I bet a lot of the Islamicists don't support terror and murder for its own sake, but as a means to an end. Your distinction says nothing.
I get my history largely through having lived through it. There was no way in which the Sandinistas were worse than the Contras who the US backed. Pinochet was far worse than anything Allende could have done. Throughout the 60's and 70's, the US supported brutal military regimes against generally democratic socialist ones in Latin America. Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina - you can get this history without talking to Chomsky.
I disagree with the claim that "games are entertainment." Most games, though by no means all, have historically been entertainment. Some have been very serious (gambling, wargames and other simulations, gladitorial combat - entertainment for the viewers, I guess.) A game is more or less a formal category, "entertainment" (as a complement to "art", perhaps) is a recent cultural one.
Will the market for entertainment continue to dwarf other markets across most forms and media? Probably. But it's a confusion of the levels of analysis to say that "games are entertainment." Games are a certain kind of artifact, more or less system-like. The use to which they are put can be entertainment or something quite different: in this case, something resembling drama.
As a side note, a Russian friend of mine noted that in the US, "Arts" are often listed as a sub-category under "Entertainment" in various listings. In Europe, they are separate, and peer, categories.
I don't really care. Brittney Spears outsold Miles Davis. McDonald's outsells the French Laundry. That means nothing, except that you can get rich by appealing to mass demographics.
The answer: I want this. I have the kind of attention to system and procedure of a gamer. I want to see something - a problem, a situation - presented to me as a model, as variable, as giving me a way to act rather than just watch. But I also want all the things that historically are associated with other types of aesthetic experience - sadness, discovery, interpersonal drama, comedy (although not just clowning) - coupled to the kind of attention and presence that the gamer gets.
This "gameness" of Facade - and I've played it extensively - is that it sees the story as a system (and so is much more satisfying than a "choose your adventure" type game). And the characters themselves are compelling. (Yes, annoying and sad. But compelling.) There's a field of research - discourse analysis - that treats conversations as systems. And systems can be gamed.
Now, if you've ever really been in serious relationships or raised a kid, you know that conflict, heroism, adventure etc can very much occure in conversations. Hell, a courtroom drama is essentially a series of conversations. So are politics. And so is a marriage on the brink of failure.
The way that Facade works is to incorporate the insights of discourse analysis, and view each string the player inputs as a discourse act (and tries to parse it as such) which then gets thrown to the game system to create a change in game-world state. What this does is allow me as an experienced gamer to migrate my intuitions about gameplay to a sphere - discourse - that I usually don't consider applicable.
Sorry, but escapist fantasy itself gets boring. They don't actually call it a game, they call it an interactive drama, and just like, after a while, you get tired of Star Wars and go see an Ibsen play (at least if you develop aesthetically), it is possible to appreciate actual drama, or other situations that aren't "fun."
In fact, the emphasis on "fun" over other types of aesthetic experience is sort of a pathological disorder, in my opinion. The ancient Greeks had a lot more going on that just the comedies, and there's a reason for it.
I mean, maybe it's not your thing. But I really, really wouldn't want to live in a culture where "fun things that offer clear goals" were the end-all of artistic output. It's in ambiguity, tragedy, sadness, and even anxiety that we can use cultural works to grow as people. And the idea that games can join other media, like drama and literature and film, to do that, is great. It seems you want to keep games on the level of "kid's media", even if it's for grown-up kids.
The chilling thing is, I'm not sure just which "side" your comment is on. Rape, pillage, slavery and murder seem to be part of the history of just about every society, and among the tactics of the US and its allies when it suits them. (My family is South American, and many of us would have Henry Kissinger tried as a war criminal based on the history of the US in the 70's and 80's. Yet even as recently as 3 years ago, GWB tapped him for help.)
I understand the empathy for the victim-villians of the piece, but I wonder just how many of the geeks who identified with the Columbine shooters would be willing to treat the 9/11 perps with the same consideration. I heard a lot of introspection about bullying and alienation in high schools after the Columbine massacre: if anyone dares put any historical or political context around 9/11, they are shouted down.
Um, that's wrong. Constantinople wasn't taken by the Muslims (or to be exact, the Turks) until 1453. The Crusades began in 1284. The Turks didn't invade "for no reason" any more than Europe invaded the New World "for no reason."
Yeah, it is. It's a meta-genre in that there are genres "of anime", but it has such a typified language in itself, that it also makes a genre of its own.
You want a good defition of genre? Read R. Altman's "Film/Genre."
I don't really consider the Studio Ghibli material in quite the same genre as "anime." It's definitely Japanese animation, but particularly Miyazaki's goals have as much to do with pure cinema as anything. It definitely doesn't rely on the genre cliches that most of the rest (even the better made material, like Ghost in the Shell or Metropolis) do.
Slashdot Mirror
There is substantially more to philosophy than forma l logic and argumentation. Only one strand of philosophy - the Anglo-American analytic tradition - so restricts itself. Philosophy has often been more speculative, allusive, and interested in the possibilities that certain types of thinking creates as in being simply a way of creating logical schema. It is not a subset of science.
Philosophy can and does refer to introspection, shared experiences that still remain untestable, on analogy. Now, I don't think ID should be a substantial part of a philosophy cirriculum - you could probably dea with it in 15 minutes as a subset of certain types of religious thinking. But I'm as opposed to reducing all thought to a subset of the scientific way of thinking as I am to the encroachment of religion into the scientific sphere. (I'm not really interested in religion at all, and one of the tendencies of half-clever people that bothers me is to think of religion as the complement of science, when I think, instead, that there really is a triad of ways of thinking: science, philosophy, and literature/art, which have different methods and different functions. I see religious thought as it is becoming in much of the world as a kind of pathological degeneration of the philosophical way of thinking.)
It's bad science, but often good philosophy, poetry, literature, art, or other types of discourse that are also central to what it means to be human and sentient.
I have considerable respect of the scientific episteme. I have little interest in seeing it dominate all others.
The most secure server is one that was raised in a supportive environment with lots of positive reinforcement. "You're a very good server! Everyone likes you, server!"
Insecure servers are ones that felt unloved and neglected, and often engage in needy or self-destructive behaviors to compensate, leaving unnecessary services active and ports open to get the attention it never had as a child... (process)...
The left alternative to the Democrats is the Greens, and they have their own problems with civil liberties - a strong feminist contingent that has no qualms about legislating against pornography. So, for those on the left who are also committed to civil liberties, we don't have much of a choice.
If I thought that the left, as you describe it, was a large enough segment of the American populace to create such a party, I would support that tactic.
It is not. This is simply a fairly conservative country, at least for now. We have to deal with it. Splintering will not help. Politics are about compromise, coalitions, and suasions.
See, the Republicans are largely being successful by keeping their wings together - the libertarianish one and the religious one. I would like nothing more than for one of those wings to completely drive out the other into another party. I'm sure that the Republicans feel the same way about the centrist/soccer-mom wing of the Democrats and the enviromentalist/anti-war/civil libertarian wing.
A true multi-party system, with coalitions and such, would require a radical reworking of the constitution, and there's virtually no interest in that.
I'm definitely of the left, but we have to be precise about this: the democrats are quite often censorious and interventionist because they are opportunistically courting the "soccer mom" vote. This was their basic strategy under Clinton, and it was effective - it drains away much of the Republican base. And they can safely do this, because the Republicans are held immobile by their own right wing, who would never let them take a "free speech" line on something like pornography.
The problem is not the politicians. The problem is the populace: they value safety, security and middle-class family culture more than free speech and an open society. The politics are a reflection of these values.
Without wanting to sound like a drunk, I prefer my free wifi in bars.
I think the Slashdot editors agree with you on that score.
There's a local cafe that is implementing that very system due to a problem with freeloaders. Seems reasonable - 10 dollars of purchases gets you 4 hours of time.
They had an "honor system" before, but it was abused.
Could it be because we're tired of ads that we don't give a flying shit about and we can make up our own minds about products?
17 to 34 year old males are hard to market to because they're spending less time using ad-saturated media.
But once you get into the media they are watching, they are extraordinarily gullible consumers. Your belief that they are resistant to these efforts is incorrect: take a look at how much ad money gets spent on Super Bowl Sunday.
That's what makes this such a tempting target for advertisers.
After a year or two, wives count, trust me.
Look, including the content and making it inaccessible without a minor hack is no accident. It's a brilliant move. But it's disingenous to think that they "didn't mean" for anyone to access it.
Think about it: all the people with the PS/2 or Xbox version of the game who ran out and actually bought the PC version of the game just so they could use the Hot Coffee mod. The fact that it's going to be rated "AO" now is irrelevant - sales are going to soar for the title no matter what.
The ESRB is doing exactly what it should, and, to be honest, Rockstar is still going to benefit from it. Penny Arcade was right about just how disingenous the cries of innocence on the part of Rockstar really are. If ESRB didn't act, it would become irrelevant - and less voluntary measures would come into force.
I can't believe that no one realizes how Rockstar has had a win-win situation in all this all along.
I left IT and went back into academia.
My income is a fraction of what it was. When I get to tenure-track, it will only start to get close to early-mid career in IT.
But guess what? Because I'm happier, and not spending against my dissatisfaction with my career, I'm actually saving more money than I did before. That, and cooking at home instead of going out, result in a net improvement in my standard of living.
So while it's a big commencement-speech cliche to say "follow your bliss," I'll say: follow your bliss. Better to enjoy a life in the five digits than chafe against one in the 6 digits. I waited about 3 years too long before I made the move. And now - I can futz around with code and systems and stuff for fun (and even still do an occassional contract gig for an extra burst of cash, if I want to.)
Where the hell do you get this "Chomsky this" and "Chomsky that" line from? I don't even read Chomsky. I don't know where the hell you get your data from - I suspect it's from Free Republic or Sean Hannity or such. But it's wrong.
As far as CIA involvement in Uruguay etc. goes, I recommend you read the memoirs of former CIA operative Phillip Agee, and the narratives of Eduardo Galeano. Your data for Pinochet's body count is wrong: the 2000 person figure is for a single massacre; Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch estimate between a conservative 15,000 and a more speculative 20,000 people killed by Pinochet's regime.
I have no idea where you got the claim about the Contras and the Sandinistas, either. The Sandinistas got a little heavy-headed at times as far as shutting down presses went, and some of their electoral practices were corrupt. But there's no account of atrocities or massacres: opposition parties continued to operate throughout the Sandinista administration, and private businesses thrived.
As far as Brazil goes, check out the Lincoln Gordon memos for the extent of US support for the military coup.
Really, you're information sources are questionable at best.
I think the culprit you are looking for is "totalitarianism," not liberalism. And in the US today, do you hear more truly totalitarian rhetoric from the left or from the "either you are with us or against us" right?
Not even the Soviet Union supported terror and murder for the sake of terror and murder. In fact, I bet a lot of the Islamicists don't support terror and murder for its own sake, but as a means to an end. Your distinction says nothing.
I get my history largely through having lived through it. There was no way in which the Sandinistas were worse than the Contras who the US backed. Pinochet was far worse than anything Allende could have done. Throughout the 60's and 70's, the US supported brutal military regimes against generally democratic socialist ones in Latin America. Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina - you can get this history without talking to Chomsky.
I think the idea is that women, as well as men, can now wear items so geeky that it would actual restore their virginity.
I disagree with the claim that "games are entertainment." Most games, though by no means all, have historically been entertainment. Some have been very serious (gambling, wargames and other simulations, gladitorial combat - entertainment for the viewers, I guess.) A game is more or less a formal category, "entertainment" (as a complement to "art", perhaps) is a recent cultural one.
Will the market for entertainment continue to dwarf other markets across most forms and media? Probably. But it's a confusion of the levels of analysis to say that "games are entertainment." Games are a certain kind of artifact, more or less system-like. The use to which they are put can be entertainment or something quite different: in this case, something resembling drama.
As a side note, a Russian friend of mine noted that in the US, "Arts" are often listed as a sub-category under "Entertainment" in various listings. In Europe, they are separate, and peer, categories.
I'll start from the end.
..."
"Which do you think will sell better:
I don't really care. Brittney Spears outsold Miles Davis. McDonald's outsells the French Laundry. That means nothing, except that you can get rich by appealing to mass demographics.
The answer: I want this. I have the kind of attention to system and procedure of a gamer. I want to see something - a problem, a situation - presented to me as a model, as variable, as giving me a way to act rather than just watch. But I also want all the things that historically are associated with other types of aesthetic experience - sadness, discovery, interpersonal drama, comedy (although not just clowning) - coupled to the kind of attention and presence that the gamer gets.
This "gameness" of Facade - and I've played it extensively - is that it sees the story as a system (and so is much more satisfying than a "choose your adventure" type game). And the characters themselves are compelling. (Yes, annoying and sad. But compelling.) There's a field of research - discourse analysis - that treats conversations as systems. And systems can be gamed.
Now, if you've ever really been in serious relationships or raised a kid, you know that conflict, heroism, adventure etc can very much occure in conversations. Hell, a courtroom drama is essentially a series of conversations. So are politics. And so is a marriage on the brink of failure.
The way that Facade works is to incorporate the insights of discourse analysis, and view each string the player inputs as a discourse act (and tries to parse it as such) which then gets thrown to the game system to create a change in game-world state. What this does is allow me as an experienced gamer to migrate my intuitions about gameplay to a sphere - discourse - that I usually don't consider applicable.
Go read Ibsen. Now.
Sorry, but escapist fantasy itself gets boring. They don't actually call it a game, they call it an interactive drama, and just like, after a while, you get tired of Star Wars and go see an Ibsen play (at least if you develop aesthetically), it is possible to appreciate actual drama, or other situations that aren't "fun."
In fact, the emphasis on "fun" over other types of aesthetic experience is sort of a pathological disorder, in my opinion. The ancient Greeks had a lot more going on that just the comedies, and there's a reason for it.
I mean, maybe it's not your thing. But I really, really wouldn't want to live in a culture where "fun things that offer clear goals" were the end-all of artistic output. It's in ambiguity, tragedy, sadness, and even anxiety that we can use cultural works to grow as people. And the idea that games can join other media, like drama and literature and film, to do that, is great. It seems you want to keep games on the level of "kid's media", even if it's for grown-up kids.
The chilling thing is, I'm not sure just which "side" your comment is on. Rape, pillage, slavery and murder seem to be part of the history of just about every society, and among the tactics of the US and its allies when it suits them. (My family is South American, and many of us would have Henry Kissinger tried as a war criminal based on the history of the US in the 70's and 80's. Yet even as recently as 3 years ago, GWB tapped him for help.)
I understand the empathy for the victim-villians of the piece, but I wonder just how many of the geeks who identified with the Columbine shooters would be willing to treat the 9/11 perps with the same consideration. I heard a lot of introspection about bullying and alienation in high schools after the Columbine massacre: if anyone dares put any historical or political context around 9/11, they are shouted down.
Um, that's wrong. Constantinople wasn't taken by the Muslims (or to be exact, the Turks) until 1453. The Crusades began in 1284. The Turks didn't invade "for no reason" any more than Europe invaded the New World "for no reason."
Your grasp of history is tenuous at best.
Yeah, it is. It's a meta-genre in that there are genres "of anime", but it has such a typified language in itself, that it also makes a genre of its own.
You want a good defition of genre? Read R. Altman's "Film/Genre."
I don't really consider the Studio Ghibli material in quite the same genre as "anime." It's definitely Japanese animation, but particularly Miyazaki's goals have as much to do with pure cinema as anything. It definitely doesn't rely on the genre cliches that most of the rest (even the better made material, like Ghost in the Shell or Metropolis) do.