OK, here's the question: are you judging the Bible and the Qur'an by some pre-existing moral compass? Are you looking at them and saying, "well, for the most part, I like the morality in the Bible better, so I'll stick with this one?"
Because that means that your sense of the moral is derived not from religious code, but rather the reverse: you choose your religious code based on moral intuition.
That there are, for many contemporary secular people, morally problematic aspects of the Bible (including the idea that there is no redemption from eternal hellfire without telling Jesus that he's your best friend) should give us a basis for rejecting both the Bible and the Qur'an. Many religionists insist we need scripture to have a morality, but as you've clearly demonstrated, morality pre-exists and is a criterion in the selection of religion, and so is obviously independent of it.
It was poorly written - one has to dig into the end of the summary to get any sense of the AG's actual decision at all. A well-written news piece would have made that clear in the first paragraph, and provided details and context in the rest of the article.
Also, the overuse of the term "reversal" is confusing in this case.
Anyway, why is the GDC in San Francisco instead of San Jose?
Have you ever been to the Moscone Center?
1. Sony Metreon - geek play-land, including the horribly named new "Walk of Game," a Warhammer store, a Playstation Store, a "gadgets" store, an anime/comics shop, and free wireless. In a cool, if already slightly dated techno-utopian piece of boom-era architecture.
2. Yerba Buena Gardens.
3. SF Museum of Modern Art.
4. The best restaurants in the US.
5. Culture.
6. It's San Francisco. Even when it smells like pee, it's better than just about anywhere else in the US not smelling like pee. And it doesn't always smell like pee.
The choreography consists of taking the original requirements, ripping them to shreds, and running around screaming as you throw them into the air like confetti.
A couple years ago, I went snowboarding. It was the first day of a long-overdue three-day snowboarding trip, and on my second run of the day, I bailed and broke my arm. In 3 places.
My whole holiday trip, I realized in an instant, was over. As I lay on the ground, writhing in pain, and waiting for the sweet numbness of shock to come to my relief, I remember thinking on thing: this is still better than work.
I quit as soon as I got back to the office, and began filling out grad school applications. I'm in a PhD program now. Much poorer, and much happier.
Re:Skip chapter 14
on
Exultant
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
I think installing Microsoft SQL Server is the most horrifying way to f*ck yourself.
The fantasy of bodilessness is just that - a fantasy, based usually on bad experiences, and on a fiction of the "unbodied" mind. In fact, what you want is just a different body - one of metal instead of meat, trading one interface for another. You feel unsuccessful at negotiating your existence with this body, the fantasy of the "new" body is one of just starting over. Except that the very term "interface" is misleading, since it again presumes a clear separation between one "world" and the other that isn't realistic.
Our brains have evolved to what they are, our language as we know it is what it is, and our desires are shaped as they are, because of the history of our bodies.
I view this fantasy towards being "freed" of the body as the geek equivalent of white flight. Frankly, I'm more interested in augmenting what is humanly possible, instead of trying to engineer a reduction. That implent you described is more of an intervention into the body than an "escape" from it.
The economy will probably get worse, in that resources will be rarer and more expensive, and less likely to wind up in the auction hall. However, it will be easier to get access to HNM's.
Remember, everything the gil-farmers got, they put into the economy. They, for lack of a better term, worked.
The items involved are player-exchangeable objects. This means that a player can exchange them for any reason at all: because the player likes another player, because the player wants to help the other player level up so they can party together, in exchange for cyber-sex, so that they can finish a mission sooner and the player go to work...
If the game allows players to exchange goods and money for any reason at all, then the fact that one is being paid for the activity in the "real world" is just one reason out of many possible ones.
Farming and camping are part of the game whether you have an IGE or not. (IGE doesn't actually have farmers: they are a clearing house between players. The farmers are utilizing IGE as a brokerage. There are guilds that are large and organized enough to camp and farm with the best of them that are doing it "for fun." Like the case of your 11 guys who keep letting each other in to a line just because they're a clique. That issue is completely separate from the money issue.
I was just talking to a friend of mine who notes how weird it is, to play next to someone in an MMORPG who is doing the same thing he is, but while my friend was doing it for fun, the other is doing it as a job. The uncomfortable feeling that comes from that could be why IGE is hated so, more than anything else.
What is really going on is that people are playing different games within the MMO - some are playing the Advancement Game, and for them, people who buy stuff are cheating. But people who are playing the Exploring Game or the Socializing Game only see the advancement as a means to an end - in the case of the latter, it may be a way to keep up with friends.
It depends on the nature of the speech. Threats, blackmail, libel, and conspiracy to do something are all forms of "speech," but they're crimes, too. If someone is, for example, writing racist crap that directly targets nn individual, I think it's no longer a speech issue.
See J.L. Austin's "How to Do Things With Words" and John Searle's "Speech Acts" for their explanation of the types of speech that aren't just speech: they include things like promising, betting, and even marrying people.
Absolutely, positively not true. For thousands of people, HL2 is the first, or among the first videogames that they've purchased. HL2 received a considerable amount of press exposure as a remarkable achievement in game technology, and it appeared in a lot of peoples' "if you only buy one game this year..." list.
This was the target of Intellectual Imposters by Sokal and Bricmont: the rather narrow yet pointed attack of the abuse of science (particular when used as a metaphor) in critical theory and philosophy. The most coherent and valuable point that they made is that a metaphor should make the subject matter clearer, not more obscure - and abusing scientific models (as in your examples) is a problem.
That was not really the point of the Social Text hoax, and the fact that he was only able to pull of the hoax in a non-peer-reviewed journal that was trying to include scientists in its conversation indicates that as impressive as the hoax was, it failed to really prove what he wanted to prove. The book was a bit more successful, but its goals were more modest, also.
A game designer may not even know how to program at all. Those are completely different jobs.
Miyammoto doesn't code. Will Wright knew how to do some coding, but he doesn't really do it now and hasn't for a long time. If you want to learn how to design games, study games themselves. Maybe learn enough about software engineering to learn a few of the processes that actually translate over - many do not, because game dev is not like other software dev. Warren Specter doesn't code at all.
The best game designers in the world have come from backgrounds as diverse as sculpture, cinema, art, industrial engineering, mechanical engineering, and literature. Some, like Peter Molyneaux, come from a traditional CS background, but they are the exception.
Likewise, except my sync target is Symbian Series 60. But all of us would-be synch'ers should keep an eye on Sunbird, as all these platforms are mentioned in the Requirements page.
Thunderbird synch with Symbian would be nice, too - without it, I'm still not really using the T-bird address book as a real contact manager.
See, this is why I'm embarassed to call myself a progressive sometimes, despite the fact that the policy I want to promote probably resembles yours. You completely missed the point of my post. GWB is not Hitler. Hitler created Nazism. GWB isn't bright or driven enough to create the new conservative movement. GWB is not motivated by hatred; AH clearly had hatred built into his program. GWB's mindset is less iron-fisted, heavy-handed, etc. than AH's. My opposition to Bush does not require him to be a comic-book villain - it's a sad intellectual deficiency on your part that yours does.
GWB is just a trope. The conservatives have been behaving the way he's behaved every time they've got into power since Nixon. Your abuse of synedoche is out of control.
If Fred Phelps was running the Republicans - and he most certainly is not - then you might begin to have a case. As long as your hyperbole and hysteria dominates the strong-left critique of the new right, then the right has absolutely nothing to worry about.
I think comparisons with Nazi Germany are fatuous. GWB is not Hitler, on dozens of levels. He's not even that important - the political movement of which he is a part is not his vision, is not really dependent on him in anyway, and would survive his disappearance without batting an eye.
Also, GWB has not engaged in the activities you've described.
However, I do think that the rise of the Japanese militarist regime is a far more productive metaphor. Replace state Shinto with Christianity, and the parallels really start to fit. The slow erosion of civil liberties, the pressure to put media in the service of state goals, the increasing authority given to law enforcement, the hostility to dissent, the use of rhetorics of victimization to justify intervention (Japan used the fact of European colonialism to legitimize its own empire).
The "slow boil" effect is the key parallel, I think. In 1933, the Nazis took over a fairly democratic society, and the flags went up. Nazi ideology was explicitly racist, with an agenda for racial domination. There was no such moment in Japan. Yamato suprematism was never part of official doctrine, and was often repudiated by members of the military who wanted to encourage the cooperation of the co-prosperity sphere members (while the same sort of "boys will be boys" apologetics you would hear for Abu Ghraib and other abuses would be used to minimize or deny responsibility for events like the Rape of Nanking.)
As in Fascist Italy, there was room for some (limited, monitored) dissent - Communists were able to operate throughout conflict, though many leaders were imprisoned.
The parallels aren't perfect, but I don't think the last chapter in the US' rightward drift has been written yet, either. The attitudes that are looming are worrisome.
Psychology isn't neuroscience or cognitive science. It exists in a sort of in-between land between science and personal narrative and philosophy.
Even for the things Freud may be right about, he will be right about them without it being a scientific insight: his method was essentially one of introspection and aggregated self-report. That he has so much traction even today says more about his insight than about his methods. And should be considered an entertaining coincidence, rather than a real scientific theory subject to verification or falsification. Outside of the humanities, he's an historical figure.
I'm fairly socialistic myself, but to say that "there has yet to be a true communist state" tends towards a fallacy - the True Scotsman fallacy.
I believe that which actually exists matters. Talking about "true Christianity," "true Islam", "real Americans," etc. is a red herring. The actual practice informed by these ideologies is what we live in, not a cloudy ideal that they never actually have to manifest. Every advocate of an ideology has to be ready to own that ideology's demons, or they are just deluding themselves. As a socialist, I have to account for the nature of the state as an instrument of power as well as a mechanism by which resources can be organized and public benefits created. A capitalist has to account for the instability, the materialism, the nihilism that is part of the capitalist rationale. Etc.
Oh, no question. For gaming qua gaming, Nintendo is still the way to. I can't imagine ever owning more than 4 or 5 N-Gage games. The DS offers much more for gameplay.
But, there's a port of MAME for N-Gage. Which means retro fun-time.
I've always been used to long contracts for decent phones as it is. In the case of the N-Gage, the hardware was underwritten by expected game licensing revenues.
Yes, an el-Cheapo just-a-phone would be less, but even without the games, the N-Gage is a Symbian Series 60 phone, which means it's a PDA replacement with email access, instant messaging, and even an SSH client. (Run your sshd on a non-standard port if T-Mobile is your carrier, though.)
I got it as a phone a while ago. It's a Symbian Series 60 phone for a fraction of the price of others. My expectations of the N-Gage as a gaming device were minimal, to say the least.
But I just picked up Pathways to Glory. It's impressive, an excellent game of considerable depth. Pocket Kingdoms also looks like a first-rate title.
The way I look at it is - I need a phone, don't you? Why not this one? It's not the one gaming platform that everyone should have, but it could be the phone that every gamer should have. Or could have been.
PS. I got the QD. Had no interest in the first one. I've got some dignity.
The lacuna in this Panglossian story: Brazilification. If the relative value of one's work drops, then the net consumer power drops. The value isn't determined by the value of the work, but by market forces, and by the perception of value of contribution within the organization/industry. This last element is outside of classical economics, but is a vital one - in some societies, the differential between entry and top-tier positions is as little as 10 to 1 (many European countries, and Japan, I think, are close to this differential - the causes are a mixture of culture and revenue policy.) In the US, it's as much as 300 to 1. As the pyramid gets fatter on the bottom, it becomes clear that the added buying power goes to the top.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, here's the question: are you judging the Bible and the Qur'an by some pre-existing moral compass? Are you looking at them and saying, "well, for the most part, I like the morality in the Bible better, so I'll stick with this one?"
Because that means that your sense of the moral is derived not from religious code, but rather the reverse: you choose your religious code based on moral intuition.
That there are, for many contemporary secular people, morally problematic aspects of the Bible (including the idea that there is no redemption from eternal hellfire without telling Jesus that he's your best friend) should give us a basis for rejecting both the Bible and the Qur'an. Many religionists insist we need scripture to have a morality, but as you've clearly demonstrated, morality pre-exists and is a criterion in the selection of religion, and so is obviously independent of it.
It was poorly written - one has to dig into the end of the summary to get any sense of the AG's actual decision at all. A well-written news piece would have made that clear in the first paragraph, and provided details and context in the rest of the article.
Also, the overuse of the term "reversal" is confusing in this case.
Anyway, why is the GDC in San Francisco instead of San Jose?
Have you ever been to the Moscone Center?
1. Sony Metreon - geek play-land, including the horribly named new "Walk of Game," a Warhammer store, a Playstation Store, a "gadgets" store, an anime/comics shop, and free wireless. In a cool, if already slightly dated techno-utopian piece of boom-era architecture.
2. Yerba Buena Gardens.
3. SF Museum of Modern Art.
4. The best restaurants in the US.
5. Culture.
6. It's San Francisco. Even when it smells like pee, it's better than just about anywhere else in the US not smelling like pee. And it doesn't always smell like pee.
San Jose is so... south bay.
"I call this next piece, 'Scope Drift.'"
The choreography consists of taking the original requirements, ripping them to shreds, and running around screaming as you throw them into the air like confetti.
A couple years ago, I went snowboarding. It was the first day of a long-overdue three-day snowboarding trip, and on my second run of the day, I bailed and broke my arm. In 3 places.
My whole holiday trip, I realized in an instant, was over. As I lay on the ground, writhing in pain, and waiting for the sweet numbness of shock to come to my relief, I remember thinking on thing: this is still better than work.
I quit as soon as I got back to the office, and began filling out grad school applications. I'm in a PhD program now. Much poorer, and much happier.
I think installing Microsoft SQL Server is the most horrifying way to f*ck yourself.
(I'm not an MS basher, but I hate that thing.)
The fantasy of bodilessness is just that - a fantasy, based usually on bad experiences, and on a fiction of the "unbodied" mind. In fact, what you want is just a different body - one of metal instead of meat, trading one interface for another. You feel unsuccessful at negotiating your existence with this body, the fantasy of the "new" body is one of just starting over. Except that the very term "interface" is misleading, since it again presumes a clear separation between one "world" and the other that isn't realistic.
Our brains have evolved to what they are, our language as we know it is what it is, and our desires are shaped as they are, because of the history of our bodies.
I view this fantasy towards being "freed" of the body as the geek equivalent of white flight. Frankly, I'm more interested in augmenting what is humanly possible, instead of trying to engineer a reduction. That implent you described is more of an intervention into the body than an "escape" from it.
The economy will probably get worse, in that resources will be rarer and more expensive, and less likely to wind up in the auction hall. However, it will be easier to get access to HNM's.
Remember, everything the gil-farmers got, they put into the economy. They, for lack of a better term, worked.
OK, here are the subtleties:
The items involved are player-exchangeable objects. This means that a player can exchange them for any reason at all: because the player likes another player, because the player wants to help the other player level up so they can party together, in exchange for cyber-sex, so that they can finish a mission sooner and the player go to work...
If the game allows players to exchange goods and money for any reason at all, then the fact that one is being paid for the activity in the "real world" is just one reason out of many possible ones.
Farming and camping are part of the game whether you have an IGE or not. (IGE doesn't actually have farmers: they are a clearing house between players. The farmers are utilizing IGE as a brokerage. There are guilds that are large and organized enough to camp and farm with the best of them that are doing it "for fun." Like the case of your 11 guys who keep letting each other in to a line just because they're a clique. That issue is completely separate from the money issue.
I was just talking to a friend of mine who notes how weird it is, to play next to someone in an MMORPG who is doing the same thing he is, but while my friend was doing it for fun, the other is doing it as a job. The uncomfortable feeling that comes from that could be why IGE is hated so, more than anything else.
What is really going on is that people are playing different games within the MMO - some are playing the Advancement Game, and for them, people who buy stuff are cheating. But people who are playing the Exploring Game or the Socializing Game only see the advancement as a means to an end - in the case of the latter, it may be a way to keep up with friends.
It depends on the nature of the speech. Threats, blackmail, libel, and conspiracy to do something are all forms of "speech," but they're crimes, too. If someone is, for example, writing racist crap that directly targets nn individual, I think it's no longer a speech issue.
See J.L. Austin's "How to Do Things With Words" and John Searle's "Speech Acts" for their explanation of the types of speech that aren't just speech: they include things like promising, betting, and even marrying people.
Absolutely, positively not true. For thousands of people, HL2 is the first, or among the first videogames that they've purchased. HL2 received a considerable amount of press exposure as a remarkable achievement in game technology, and it appeared in a lot of peoples' "if you only buy one game this year..." list.
This was the target of Intellectual Imposters by Sokal and Bricmont: the rather narrow yet pointed attack of the abuse of science (particular when used as a metaphor) in critical theory and philosophy. The most coherent and valuable point that they made is that a metaphor should make the subject matter clearer, not more obscure - and abusing scientific models (as in your examples) is a problem.
That was not really the point of the Social Text hoax, and the fact that he was only able to pull of the hoax in a non-peer-reviewed journal that was trying to include scientists in its conversation indicates that as impressive as the hoax was, it failed to really prove what he wanted to prove. The book was a bit more successful, but its goals were more modest, also.
A game designer may not even know how to program at all. Those are completely different jobs.
Miyammoto doesn't code. Will Wright knew how to do some coding, but he doesn't really do it now and hasn't for a long time. If you want to learn how to design games, study games themselves. Maybe learn enough about software engineering to learn a few of the processes that actually translate over - many do not, because game dev is not like other software dev. Warren Specter doesn't code at all.
The best game designers in the world have come from backgrounds as diverse as sculpture, cinema, art, industrial engineering, mechanical engineering, and literature. Some, like Peter Molyneaux, come from a traditional CS background, but they are the exception.
Likewise, except my sync target is Symbian Series 60. But all of us would-be synch'ers should keep an eye on Sunbird, as all these platforms are mentioned in the Requirements page.
Thunderbird synch with Symbian would be nice, too - without it, I'm still not really using the T-bird address book as a real contact manager.
See, this is why I'm embarassed to call myself a progressive sometimes, despite the fact that the policy I want to promote probably resembles yours. You completely missed the point of my post. GWB is not Hitler. Hitler created Nazism. GWB isn't bright or driven enough to create the new conservative movement. GWB is not motivated by hatred; AH clearly had hatred built into his program. GWB's mindset is less iron-fisted, heavy-handed, etc. than AH's. My opposition to Bush does not require him to be a comic-book villain - it's a sad intellectual deficiency on your part that yours does.
GWB is just a trope. The conservatives have been behaving the way he's behaved every time they've got into power since Nixon. Your abuse of synedoche is out of control.
If Fred Phelps was running the Republicans - and he most certainly is not - then you might begin to have a case. As long as your hyperbole and hysteria dominates the strong-left critique of the new right, then the right has absolutely nothing to worry about.
I think comparisons with Nazi Germany are fatuous. GWB is not Hitler, on dozens of levels. He's not even that important - the political movement of which he is a part is not his vision, is not really dependent on him in anyway, and would survive his disappearance without batting an eye.
Also, GWB has not engaged in the activities you've described.
However, I do think that the rise of the Japanese militarist regime is a far more productive metaphor. Replace state Shinto with Christianity, and the parallels really start to fit. The slow erosion of civil liberties, the pressure to put media in the service of state goals, the increasing authority given to law enforcement, the hostility to dissent, the use of rhetorics of victimization to justify intervention (Japan used the fact of European colonialism to legitimize its own empire).
The "slow boil" effect is the key parallel, I think. In 1933, the Nazis took over a fairly democratic society, and the flags went up. Nazi ideology was explicitly racist, with an agenda for racial domination. There was no such moment in Japan. Yamato suprematism was never part of official doctrine, and was often repudiated by members of the military who wanted to encourage the cooperation of the co-prosperity sphere members (while the same sort of "boys will be boys" apologetics you would hear for Abu Ghraib and other abuses would be used to minimize or deny responsibility for events like the Rape of Nanking.)
As in Fascist Italy, there was room for some (limited, monitored) dissent - Communists were able to operate throughout conflict, though many leaders were imprisoned.
The parallels aren't perfect, but I don't think the last chapter in the US' rightward drift has been written yet, either. The attitudes that are looming are worrisome.
Next, they'll blur the line between dogs and beagles!
Psychology isn't neuroscience or cognitive science. It exists in a sort of in-between land between science and personal narrative and philosophy.
Even for the things Freud may be right about, he will be right about them without it being a scientific insight: his method was essentially one of introspection and aggregated self-report. That he has so much traction even today says more about his insight than about his methods. And should be considered an entertaining coincidence, rather than a real scientific theory subject to verification or falsification. Outside of the humanities, he's an historical figure.
I'm fairly socialistic myself, but to say that "there has yet to be a true communist state" tends towards a fallacy - the True Scotsman fallacy.
I believe that which actually exists matters. Talking about "true Christianity," "true Islam", "real Americans," etc. is a red herring. The actual practice informed by these ideologies is what we live in, not a cloudy ideal that they never actually have to manifest. Every advocate of an ideology has to be ready to own that ideology's demons, or they are just deluding themselves. As a socialist, I have to account for the nature of the state as an instrument of power as well as a mechanism by which resources can be organized and public benefits created. A capitalist has to account for the instability, the materialism, the nihilism that is part of the capitalist rationale. Etc.
My solution: such research is funded by the public sector, and its benefits made available to the world.
You know, like this like thing called the internet.
Oh, no question. For gaming qua gaming, Nintendo is still the way to. I can't imagine ever owning more than 4 or 5 N-Gage games. The DS offers much more for gameplay.
But, there's a port of MAME for N-Gage. Which means retro fun-time.
In other words, they aren't just innocent victims. They're heros!
I've always been used to long contracts for decent phones as it is. In the case of the N-Gage, the hardware was underwritten by expected game licensing revenues.
Yes, an el-Cheapo just-a-phone would be less, but even without the games, the N-Gage is a Symbian Series 60 phone, which means it's a PDA replacement with email access, instant messaging, and even an SSH client. (Run your sshd on a non-standard port if T-Mobile is your carrier, though.)
I got it as a phone a while ago. It's a Symbian Series 60 phone for a fraction of the price of others. My expectations of the N-Gage as a gaming device were minimal, to say the least.
But I just picked up Pathways to Glory. It's impressive, an excellent game of considerable depth. Pocket Kingdoms also looks like a first-rate title.
The way I look at it is - I need a phone, don't you? Why not this one? It's not the one gaming platform that everyone should have, but it could be the phone that every gamer should have. Or could have been.
PS. I got the QD. Had no interest in the first one. I've got some dignity.
The lacuna in this Panglossian story: Brazilification. If the relative value of one's work drops, then the net consumer power drops. The value isn't determined by the value of the work, but by market forces, and by the perception of value of contribution within the organization/industry. This last element is outside of classical economics, but is a vital one - in some societies, the differential between entry and top-tier positions is as little as 10 to 1 (many European countries, and Japan, I think, are close to this differential - the causes are a mixture of culture and revenue policy.) In the US, it's as much as 300 to 1. As the pyramid gets fatter on the bottom, it becomes clear that the added buying power goes to the top.