You know, it's quite possible for a 20-year-old to still be a full-time student, in college, without their own income, and dependent on their parents. I mean, yeah, a lot of us students get part-time jobs to help defray the costs, but the $3,000 I make a year at the tech desk isn't going to cover all that much of collegiate existence.
I haven't RTFA, so if it actually said she wasn't a student, this doesn't apply. But I'm 22, and not (much of a) slacker, and my folks still pay for my cell phone.
I'm guessing the GP meant "bus" as emergency-type-folk slang for ambulance.
And, yeah, there's risks in everything, but it's generally best to minimize those risks. I'd sooner err on the side of pre-human testing than not. And getting "up in arms", or putting the burden of proof of risk vs. benefit on the tester, is a prudent way to do that.
College students. Seriously, I'm not gonna pay $$$$ a semester, plus the cost of the box, for the glitchy TV service our campus gets when I can download TV shows for free. Plus, I can watch what I want (including older stuff), when I want. All the benefits of tivo, for free, and I can surf the internet while watching Law & Order. Sounds perfect. ^_^
We're 'fittest' because we're surviving and dominating. Despite the non-neutral connotation of the word 'fittest', there's no judgment of worth in natural selection, just causality. The insects are capable of survival, ergo they pass on their genes. The dolphins were not capable of survival, ergo they did not. The dolphins may be, in our view, a more worthy species than the insects, but the laws of cause and effect don't care.
So, yes, our brains or adaptability do not guarantee us a spot further down the evolutionary chain. Current evidence suggests that it helps in the world as it is now, but if our environment were to change in a way that was unfortunate to us, then the cockroaches could become the dominant lifeform.
*Idealist voice*
"Our intelligence could provide an advantage in that human society would hopefully be able to foresee such problems and find ways to deal with them that would not lead to selection against our species."
Much as I'd greatly prefer an ideal society where everyone is free to express their opinion without the need for approval... I think most of them are just trying to avoid being sued over comments about the GNAA, surprise buttsecks, the Jewish Banker world conspiracy, and/or links to tubgirl.
Most places I've seen seem to automatically approve any opinion out to the reaches of wingnuttery on either side, so I don't agree that that's their motivation. The Intarweb can be a nasty, nasty place. I ran across a youtube video (lost the link) that a little old lady had put up to detail the service of her husband (who had recently passed away) in WWII. The comments? Lots of random nonsensical sexual references, congratulations to the deceased for 'escaping' the miserable old hag, bitch, etc, and other completely inappropriate obscenities.
Slashdot is a self-moderated forum for nerds. It can generally assumed that its readers are old enough to not be scarred and reasonable enough not to sue if they run across a detailed account of pedophiliac rape or a strident Holocaust denial. Most members of the MSM cannot make these assumptions.
Actually, I largely feel the same way (4th out of 5 years, combined Comp Sci Engineering and Int'l Relations at a fairly decent school). Most CS classes I've had are almost totally theory, and what coding we do is limited to the school universe. If I didn't fix hardware at the Tech Desk, I wouldn't have too much more hands-on inside-the-computer experience than when I started, and my ability to code something that's not related to an assignment and given parameters is somewhat limited. But then again, I CAN look at product descriptions and white papers and have a decent understanding of what it's talking about and how X would influence Y and at what cost.
I'd argue it's better to know the theory first, to know what SHOULD be happening, and after that figure out the nuts and bolts of how to MAKE it happen. And I agree with some other posters that it's largely the responsibility of the student to learn the latter on their own. Frankly, I'll admit that I have neither the time nor the inclination at the moment to do so. Does that make me a bad geek? Perhaps, but it also contributes to my status as a not-failing geek.
I did the same thing at first... but then I found mods that made the menus much more computer-friendly and adjusted the difficulty slider (to make my poor little theify not go splat all. the. bloody. time). And then it became much, much better.
There's a lot of things Morrowind did a lot better, hands down. But Oblivion has it's charms, once I got past that initial "it's pretty but doesn't feel like I expected" hump. I think the Dark Brotherhood questline is a really well done mindgame. Many of the other factions are pretty good, too.
It's not Morrowind, and the hour count isn't even close (despite being rather high and hard on my grades), but there's no cliff racers, and the compass takes away all of the pain of 'directions' that say something like "find a pointy mountain next to a dead tree south of a talking guar". And it's pretty. And while Radiant AI's not perfect, the fact that NPCs actually care what time it is *does* do something for realism.
Bottom line, it's not the game I would have made, but I still really do like it. Although I agree that awards and ratings can have a certain element of wankfestery to them.
Honestly, for all the talk of the 'culture war' and 'red-versus-blue', most scientific polls really show that the United States is actually fairly centrist. I mean, yes, of course there are cultural difference between the urban, cosmopolitan, intellectual, organic-sushi-and-venti-caramel-latte crowd and the rural, traditional, down-to-earth steak-and-potatoes group. Confederate flags versus Che shirts, Harley-Davidson versus Yugos, Wal-Mart versus Saks 5th avenue... The 'red state' is the heir of Jefferson's agrarian ideal and the rural pride of the Confederacy. The 'blue state' is Hamilton's intellectual heir, connected to the rest of the world and a service-based, not agriculture or production, economy.
And yet, as deep as these cultural differences run, they don't really lead to ideological incompatibility. In America, both urban sophisticates and rural hard-workers tend to harbor a solid streak of libertarianism, preferring that the government not interfere with their personal lives. Both tend to be in favor of a certain degree of a social net, either for the impoverished and disenfranchised as a general rule or in case the farm breaks or the factory is offshored.
And, honestly, both sides are fucking sick of the current system. We've got corrupt incompetent nutjobs on the right, corrupt incompetent chickens-with-their-heads-cut-off on the left, and K Street lobbyists running the show. If there's a better time for a centrist, charismatic, iconoclastic third party candidate, I honestly can't picture it.
The last time a centrist-ish third-party candidate ran, he got 19% of the vote... and Ross Perot was a complete unhinged loon. Jon Stewart could do a metric fuckload better.
The bit that weirds out isn't the information. It's twofold: the ANNOUNCEMENT of information rather than availability, and the display of behavior as well as information.
An analogy would be the fact that what you do on public land is public information. You have no real expectation of privacy while walking down the street, just as you don't on the internet.
On such-and-such a day, you went into X stores of Y nature. You then hopped a train to Xanadu and went on a date. All public information; if you really didn't want it known, you wouldn't do it in public. Someone with enough time and patience, however, could follow you and aggregate data on your behavior, all perfectly legally, and announce it to all of your associates.
That's the difference. The one scenario is you doing things in a public forum you expect others to be able to see. The other is having an investigator follow you around and announce to anyone you know what you are doing, when, and to/with whom. BIG difference.
Yes, fine, if someone were intentionally stalking you, they could see most of this directly.
But some of it wasn't previously available on your profile. To know what my buddy was commenting on someone else's picture, I would've had to know that person and gone through their picture album. To know what walls my buddy had written on, I would have had to examine all of their friends' profiles. To see what friends they had added, I would have had to look at the list before and after and realize what the difference was. To track all of my behavior on the site, I would need to do all of the above and more. All of these things WERE very complicated. They are now made obvious. I can see when and what any of my friends does immediately, as can they can see all that I do.
And even the things that were available, it makes more awkward. Honestly, I want anyone who might potentially be interested in me (unlikely, of course, but has oddly not been impossible) to know when I become single again, and so I post that information. Do I want that announced loudly to all my casual acquaintances, including those who may only know me through my now-ex? No, not really.
There is a large difference between the casual posting of information you want folks to find out if they care and the announcement of said facts to everyone you've marked as someone you know. There is also a large difference between people seeing the large number of groups you are in and guessing that you use the site a lot, and having people see a list of everything you've done on the site in the last umpteen days. THIS is what people would really prefer Facebook not do. It's their right as outlined in whatever click-through agreements were used, but that doesn't change the fact that it seems that most of their users think that it sucks.:-P
See, the thing is, people don't care about the information being publicly available. You're right, the whole point of posting it is so that people can see it. If they didn't want people to see it, then they wouldn't put it up.
But, see, here's some examples of differences:
OLD: People look at your profile and see that you're now dating someone (presuming non-slashdot here)
NEW: Anyone connected to you recieves a notice as soon as you change your relationship status
OLD: You write a random note on someone's profile "Wall" that anyone who looks at it can see.
NEW: Your friends get a list of all the walls you've written on
OLD: You upload pictures that anyone who looks at your profile can see
NEW: You recieve notice and thumbnails of any pictures any of your friends post
OLD: Your friend comments on the picture of someone you don't know, and you don't care and will never see it.
NEW: Your friend comments on the picture of someone you don't know, and you are told what they said and the name of the person it was regarding.
OLD: You can look at someone's profile and see what groups they belong to if you care
NEW: A buddy you had in high school starts a random group, and you know instantly
Again, the information itself isn't sensitive or treated as such. But now people can see and analyse your timestamped behavior on the site in addition to whatever you post. And that's what's more of the weirds-people-out thing.
How many folks did you know in high school? Random summer activities? The ten bazillion clubs you take part in?
The average college student knows hundreds of people, at least casually. And it's common for all of the above-mentioned groups to be listed in people's interests or to have facebook groups formed around them. And people that took part in them notice someone else and go "oh yeah, I remember them" and friend them.
Honestly, I have at least a hundred facebook friends from high school alone, only one of whom overlaps with my college, most of whom I haven't spoken to in years and don't really plan on speaking to for years to come, unless something causes them to re-enter my day to day life. But with the new facebook, I get instantly updated about their relationship status. With the possible exception of the few crushes I had who can be reminisced over when they become single, I really don't care worth the hangnail of Ba'al's drunken uncle! And while they may not mind the information being publicly available, they might think twice before sounding the foghorns in the forum.
I highly doubt it's "a list of everything my school acquaintances have done in the last 24 hours."
You need to go outside more.
You'd be amazed at how much people put in there. Random clubs, political affiliations, friends, becoming-non-friends, starting/ending romantic relationships...
Some things are handy. Some people I know update their 'current status' as much as their away messages, intending to make it easier to find them at any time they wish. Another common use is letting people who might be interested see at a glance whether you're available or in a relationship. That can be useful. Recieving a notice that one of my old high school buddies that I haven't seen in years become single 10 minutes ago, however, is a bit of overkill.
When the legislature makes laws that in certain circumstances contradict the consitution, the judicial branch should give primacy to the constitution and try to be reasonable. But strike down laws? Whose idea was it to give them that power?
Uhh.... they did when the concept of "checks and balances" was put into place. That's kinda the entire point of the check that the judiciary has to balance the legislation.
If by "the attitudes demonstrated here" you mean the jokes that were made, I say "oh well". Juvenile or not, they're just jokes, and if someone takes themselves so seriously that they let something like that stop them from doing what they'd otherwise want to do, it's their attitude that needs examining.
Hey, did you hear the one about the lazy black guy? Or the greedy Jew?
Jokes can be indicative of the social mindset of a community. It's not that they're being taken too seriously, it's that they send the message that "people of type foo are not welcome here" and leave the person of type foo with a rather negative impression of the group that they might want to join.
I love gaming. I love coding. I love teh intarwebs. But there are LAN parties where I've been asked shit like "So, whose girlfriend are you?". I've been in IRC channels or random forums where the person I've been having an intelligent conversation with makes a comment about "the bitch (they're) screwing not making dinner" or the perils of PMS or the stupidity of females in general. That sends a pretty clear message of who the "US" and the "THEM" are.
I'm not any kind of 'crazy lesbo feminazi', if such things exist. I'm generally indifferent to "get more females into CS" programs because I'd rather get where I can on my own merit, although females who say they're unable to or shouldn't do math or CS due to their gender do exist and piss me the fuck off. I can drink/code/game with the guys, I'm the school ACM chapter prez, and I like this sort of shit too much to leave because of the (many, many) bad apples I've seen. But it'd be nice if the "GUYS ONLY CLUB LOL" signs were less prevalent.
No, but it did present members of two different races in conflict with each other. What's been found offensive isn't that one or the other is presented as superior, it's the fact that the ad utilizes the concept of racially-motivated aggression in general.
I can't speak for the mental context of other countries, but at least in the mainstream US, this is considered a pretty damn taboo subject. It's not too far in our past (and some would argue it's still in our present) that we had racial conflict and aggression with often horrific results. Too many bad memories/guilts/fears/what-have-you-emotional-resp onses are resurrected by the ads, IMO.
Yes, black people and white people are aesthetically different, and I'll give Sony the benefit of the doubt (whoa...) and say that that's probably what they were going for. But illustrating that point by putting them in violent struggle with each other? Bad Idea (TM).
I work Tech Support at my college, and we had the same case just this past semester. A drunk guy came into another guy's room (neither of them knew the other), and pissed on the laptop.
The funny thing is, we actually got the damn thing working again. Yes, we did actually work on the pissed-on laptop. I carried it from the front desk area to our back hardware-support room (none of the Tech Desk folks wanted to touch it; I had to keep a mantra of "urine is sterile, urine is sterile," going), made an attempt at wit in the case log, and left it for one of the others to clean out.:-P
So the guy that did the pissing bought a new laptop for the original owner, and then he got the, uh, refurbished one.
We had another case where a guy tried to fix his borked power supply using alligator clips and duct tape. He'd taken his second hard drive out of its bay in order to pass the wires through and out to the front to use a tiny physics-class-grade switch.
And THEN there was the guy with a folder labeled "goodies" on the C drive, which had failed and whose data we had to recover. I'm not really against the concept of pr0n, but.... I don't know about the rest of you, but canine bukkake doesn't really count as "goodies" to me.
Heh, yeah. Radiant AI is fine for civilians (yeah, it's not perfect, but it's pretty damn impressive), but the combat....
Notes to all friendly Oblivion NPCs: If your buddy shoots big angry light-making spell thingy at big angry gonna-kill-you-all monster, don't get in between. It probably isn't healthy.
Also (and this was, actually, the more frustrating one), if there's a bunch of you, and a large group of monsters in an area, do not, repeat, do *not* all go haring after different monsters that are very far away. This gets you all killed, and then the squishy little thief/mage needs to hop around dodging many many bad things until the immortal(s) wake(s) up. Or she quickloads for the 10% chance that at least a few of you will gang up and kill *something*. This does not make the squishy one happy.
Or, say, you're a certain nameless Orc warrioress with only melee abilities, and your squishy little thief/mage buddy has ranged magic, a nice new shiny black bow, and is currently running right the @#!%&$##!@ past you to try and get you to kill the big evil giant-weapon-go-smashy guy on her tail that is turning her into scrib jelly... it'd be rather nice if you took your attention off of that archer on top of the building (that you have no path to and no way to hit) and saved your panicking, dying, and probably-hilarious-to-watch buddy. Just a thought.
Seriously, the ways that NPCs target could be improved. A lot. I know it's better NPC AI than is generally available elsewhere, and I love Bethesda for all that they've accomplished, but it's just really reeeeally frustrating sometimes.
Re:Purple Moon, John Romero, and sexist games
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Sims the New Dolls?
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You have a point in that Sims does appeal to females, that this was a sound financial move by EA, and that males partially are drawn by the presence of females in Sims Online. So, I agree with the last sentence.
But I think I'm gonna call you out on the first two. I know a ton of males that looooove the Sims, and I personally logged waaaaaaaaay too many hours on SimCity, SimTower, SimAnt, SimFarm, SimIsland, SimLife, etc. (although the last two were a little too complicated for a 10-year-old to figure out... hell, I can't figure out SimLife's interface now....). SimCity and SimTower aren't 'boring' to females; the lack of females that played these games is probably more due to the lack of females playing video games at all when they came out. Luckily I was a geekette early on, and my folks bought me a lot of 'edutainment' games, which fortunately included all of the above. ^_^
Re:Purple Moon, John Romero, and sexist games
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Sims the New Dolls?
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· Score: 1
It's when it's assumed that pink appeals to all females, or that no females play anything that isn't pink and frilly and OMG ponies, that it gets annoying. Things like Girls Night Out Solitaire are just really fucking stupid.
Yes, many females like pink and princess and what-all. But many don't, and actually are repulsed by them, and are genuinely insulted by the assumption that they would like it. I fully agree with the grandparent poster.
I'm in a computers and society course where the prof actually asked us to read slashdot regularly to stay informed. So, yeah, just doing my homework! ^_^
Uhhh.... riiight. You know, the word just means "black" in Spanish, so I'll just refer to every black person I see as a "negro". It's not the preferred nomenclature, but by that logic, it's hardly derogatory...
...with the exception of the very, very overt connotations of rascism and the association with social discourse from periods in which rascism was considered acceptable. A "chinaman" is a buck-toothed, slant-eyed, can't-pronounce-'r's (which is actually a japanese linguistic trait), culturally backwards, laundry-washing creature found in the imaginations of westerners and shirts from Abercrombie & Fitch, and most chinese really don't like it.
Heh, if we're going for anecdotal evidence... my grades generally sucked, because I was way too busy reading not-school books, watching Discovery/History channels, surfing teh intarweb/gaming, being a smart ass, and being bored because I knew more than the teachers....
...and I have boobies. ^_^
I also met my last boyfriend at a D&D campaign that had a male DM, two male players, and 5 female players. Both males wound up quitting, leaving the poor DM(who is also, while probably the best DM I've ever seen, very polite, mild-mannered, and will make a perfect husband after getting no dates at all in college) all alone with some very, very loud, rowdy, and dark-humored females. It was fun.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, it's quite possible for a 20-year-old to still be a full-time student, in college, without their own income, and dependent on their parents. I mean, yeah, a lot of us students get part-time jobs to help defray the costs, but the $3,000 I make a year at the tech desk isn't going to cover all that much of collegiate existence.
I haven't RTFA, so if it actually said she wasn't a student, this doesn't apply. But I'm 22, and not (much of a) slacker, and my folks still pay for my cell phone.
I'm guessing the GP meant "bus" as emergency-type-folk slang for ambulance. And, yeah, there's risks in everything, but it's generally best to minimize those risks. I'd sooner err on the side of pre-human testing than not. And getting "up in arms", or putting the burden of proof of risk vs. benefit on the tester, is a prudent way to do that.
College students. Seriously, I'm not gonna pay $$$$ a semester, plus the cost of the box, for the glitchy TV service our campus gets when I can download TV shows for free. Plus, I can watch what I want (including older stuff), when I want. All the benefits of tivo, for free, and I can surf the internet while watching Law & Order. Sounds perfect. ^_^
We're 'fittest' because we're surviving and dominating. Despite the non-neutral connotation of the word 'fittest', there's no judgment of worth in natural selection, just causality. The insects are capable of survival, ergo they pass on their genes. The dolphins were not capable of survival, ergo they did not. The dolphins may be, in our view, a more worthy species than the insects, but the laws of cause and effect don't care.
So, yes, our brains or adaptability do not guarantee us a spot further down the evolutionary chain. Current evidence suggests that it helps in the world as it is now, but if our environment were to change in a way that was unfortunate to us, then the cockroaches could become the dominant lifeform.
*Idealist voice*
"Our intelligence could provide an advantage in that human society would hopefully be able to foresee such problems and find ways to deal with them that would not lead to selection against our species."
*Cynical voice*
"Yeah, we're doomed."
Most places I've seen seem to automatically approve any opinion out to the reaches of wingnuttery on either side, so I don't agree that that's their motivation. The Intarweb can be a nasty, nasty place. I ran across a youtube video (lost the link) that a little old lady had put up to detail the service of her husband (who had recently passed away) in WWII. The comments? Lots of random nonsensical sexual references, congratulations to the deceased for 'escaping' the miserable old hag, bitch, etc, and other completely inappropriate obscenities.
Slashdot is a self-moderated forum for nerds. It can generally assumed that its readers are old enough to not be scarred and reasonable enough not to sue if they run across a detailed account of pedophiliac rape or a strident Holocaust denial. Most members of the MSM cannot make these assumptions.
Actually, I largely feel the same way (4th out of 5 years, combined Comp Sci Engineering and Int'l Relations at a fairly decent school). Most CS classes I've had are almost totally theory, and what coding we do is limited to the school universe. If I didn't fix hardware at the Tech Desk, I wouldn't have too much more hands-on inside-the-computer experience than when I started, and my ability to code something that's not related to an assignment and given parameters is somewhat limited. But then again, I CAN look at product descriptions and white papers and have a decent understanding of what it's talking about and how X would influence Y and at what cost.
I'd argue it's better to know the theory first, to know what SHOULD be happening, and after that figure out the nuts and bolts of how to MAKE it happen. And I agree with some other posters that it's largely the responsibility of the student to learn the latter on their own. Frankly, I'll admit that I have neither the time nor the inclination at the moment to do so. Does that make me a bad geek? Perhaps, but it also contributes to my status as a not-failing geek.
I did the same thing at first... but then I found mods that made the menus much more computer-friendly and adjusted the difficulty slider (to make my poor little theify not go splat all. the. bloody. time). And then it became much, much better.
There's a lot of things Morrowind did a lot better, hands down. But Oblivion has it's charms, once I got past that initial "it's pretty but doesn't feel like I expected" hump. I think the Dark Brotherhood questline is a really well done mindgame. Many of the other factions are pretty good, too.
It's not Morrowind, and the hour count isn't even close (despite being rather high and hard on my grades), but there's no cliff racers, and the compass takes away all of the pain of 'directions' that say something like "find a pointy mountain next to a dead tree south of a talking guar". And it's pretty. And while Radiant AI's not perfect, the fact that NPCs actually care what time it is *does* do something for realism.
Bottom line, it's not the game I would have made, but I still really do like it. Although I agree that awards and ratings can have a certain element of wankfestery to them.
Dude, this makes total sense.
Honestly, for all the talk of the 'culture war' and 'red-versus-blue', most scientific polls really show that the United States is actually fairly centrist. I mean, yes, of course there are cultural difference between the urban, cosmopolitan, intellectual, organic-sushi-and-venti-caramel-latte crowd and the rural, traditional, down-to-earth steak-and-potatoes group. Confederate flags versus Che shirts, Harley-Davidson versus Yugos, Wal-Mart versus Saks 5th avenue... The 'red state' is the heir of Jefferson's agrarian ideal and the rural pride of the Confederacy. The 'blue state' is Hamilton's intellectual heir, connected to the rest of the world and a service-based, not agriculture or production, economy.
And yet, as deep as these cultural differences run, they don't really lead to ideological incompatibility. In America, both urban sophisticates and rural hard-workers tend to harbor a solid streak of libertarianism, preferring that the government not interfere with their personal lives. Both tend to be in favor of a certain degree of a social net, either for the impoverished and disenfranchised as a general rule or in case the farm breaks or the factory is offshored.
And, honestly, both sides are fucking sick of the current system. We've got corrupt incompetent nutjobs on the right, corrupt incompetent chickens-with-their-heads-cut-off on the left, and K Street lobbyists running the show. If there's a better time for a centrist, charismatic, iconoclastic third party candidate, I honestly can't picture it.
The last time a centrist-ish third-party candidate ran, he got 19% of the vote... and Ross Perot was a complete unhinged loon. Jon Stewart could do a metric fuckload better.
So, yeah. STEWART/COLBERT 2008, BABY!!!!
Again.
The bit that weirds out isn't the information. It's twofold: the ANNOUNCEMENT of information rather than availability, and the display of behavior as well as information.
An analogy would be the fact that what you do on public land is public information. You have no real expectation of privacy while walking down the street, just as you don't on the internet.
On such-and-such a day, you went into X stores of Y nature. You then hopped a train to Xanadu and went on a date. All public information; if you really didn't want it known, you wouldn't do it in public. Someone with enough time and patience, however, could follow you and aggregate data on your behavior, all perfectly legally, and announce it to all of your associates.
That's the difference. The one scenario is you doing things in a public forum you expect others to be able to see. The other is having an investigator follow you around and announce to anyone you know what you are doing, when, and to/with whom. BIG difference.
Yes, fine, if someone were intentionally stalking you, they could see most of this directly. But some of it wasn't previously available on your profile. To know what my buddy was commenting on someone else's picture, I would've had to know that person and gone through their picture album. To know what walls my buddy had written on, I would have had to examine all of their friends' profiles. To see what friends they had added, I would have had to look at the list before and after and realize what the difference was. To track all of my behavior on the site, I would need to do all of the above and more. All of these things WERE very complicated. They are now made obvious. I can see when and what any of my friends does immediately, as can they can see all that I do.
And even the things that were available, it makes more awkward. Honestly, I want anyone who might potentially be interested in me (unlikely, of course, but has oddly not been impossible) to know when I become single again, and so I post that information. Do I want that announced loudly to all my casual acquaintances, including those who may only know me through my now-ex? No, not really.
There is a large difference between the casual posting of information you want folks to find out if they care and the announcement of said facts to everyone you've marked as someone you know. There is also a large difference between people seeing the large number of groups you are in and guessing that you use the site a lot, and having people see a list of everything you've done on the site in the last umpteen days. THIS is what people would really prefer Facebook not do. It's their right as outlined in whatever click-through agreements were used, but that doesn't change the fact that it seems that most of their users think that it sucks. :-P
But, see, here's some examples of differences:
OLD: People look at your profile and see that you're now dating someone (presuming non-slashdot here)
NEW: Anyone connected to you recieves a notice as soon as you change your relationship status
OLD: You write a random note on someone's profile "Wall" that anyone who looks at it can see.
NEW: Your friends get a list of all the walls you've written on
OLD: You upload pictures that anyone who looks at your profile can see
NEW: You recieve notice and thumbnails of any pictures any of your friends post
OLD: Your friend comments on the picture of someone you don't know, and you don't care and will never see it.
NEW: Your friend comments on the picture of someone you don't know, and you are told what they said and the name of the person it was regarding.
OLD: You can look at someone's profile and see what groups they belong to if you care
NEW: A buddy you had in high school starts a random group, and you know instantly
Again, the information itself isn't sensitive or treated as such. But now people can see and analyse your timestamped behavior on the site in addition to whatever you post. And that's what's more of the weirds-people-out thing.
How many folks did you know in high school? Random summer activities? The ten bazillion clubs you take part in?
The average college student knows hundreds of people, at least casually. And it's common for all of the above-mentioned groups to be listed in people's interests or to have facebook groups formed around them. And people that took part in them notice someone else and go "oh yeah, I remember them" and friend them.
Honestly, I have at least a hundred facebook friends from high school alone, only one of whom overlaps with my college, most of whom I haven't spoken to in years and don't really plan on speaking to for years to come, unless something causes them to re-enter my day to day life. But with the new facebook, I get instantly updated about their relationship status. With the possible exception of the few crushes I had who can be reminisced over when they become single, I really don't care worth the hangnail of Ba'al's drunken uncle! And while they may not mind the information being publicly available, they might think twice before sounding the foghorns in the forum.
You'd be amazed at how much people put in there. Random clubs, political affiliations, friends, becoming-non-friends, starting/ending romantic relationships...
Some things are handy. Some people I know update their 'current status' as much as their away messages, intending to make it easier to find them at any time they wish. Another common use is letting people who might be interested see at a glance whether you're available or in a relationship. That can be useful. Recieving a notice that one of my old high school buddies that I haven't seen in years become single 10 minutes ago, however, is a bit of overkill.
Female, INTP when I took the last test, and I agree with her completely. ^_^
Hey, did you hear the one about the lazy black guy? Or the greedy Jew?
Jokes can be indicative of the social mindset of a community. It's not that they're being taken too seriously, it's that they send the message that "people of type foo are not welcome here" and leave the person of type foo with a rather negative impression of the group that they might want to join.
I love gaming. I love coding. I love teh intarwebs. But there are LAN parties where I've been asked shit like "So, whose girlfriend are you?". I've been in IRC channels or random forums where the person I've been having an intelligent conversation with makes a comment about "the bitch (they're) screwing not making dinner" or the perils of PMS or the stupidity of females in general. That sends a pretty clear message of who the "US" and the "THEM" are.
I'm not any kind of 'crazy lesbo feminazi', if such things exist. I'm generally indifferent to "get more females into CS" programs because I'd rather get where I can on my own merit, although females who say they're unable to or shouldn't do math or CS due to their gender do exist and piss me the fuck off. I can drink/code/game with the guys, I'm the school ACM chapter prez, and I like this sort of shit too much to leave because of the (many, many) bad apples I've seen. But it'd be nice if the "GUYS ONLY CLUB LOL" signs were less prevalent.
No, but it did present members of two different races in conflict with each other. What's been found offensive isn't that one or the other is presented as superior, it's the fact that the ad utilizes the concept of racially-motivated aggression in general.
I can't speak for the mental context of other countries, but at least in the mainstream US, this is considered a pretty damn taboo subject. It's not too far in our past (and some would argue it's still in our present) that we had racial conflict and aggression with often horrific results. Too many bad memories/guilts/fears/what-have-you-emotional-resp onses are resurrected by the ads, IMO.
Yes, black people and white people are aesthetically different, and I'll give Sony the benefit of the doubt (whoa...) and say that that's probably what they were going for. But illustrating that point by putting them in violent struggle with each other? Bad Idea (TM).
The funny thing is, we actually got the damn thing working again. Yes, we did actually work on the pissed-on laptop. I carried it from the front desk area to our back hardware-support room (none of the Tech Desk folks wanted to touch it; I had to keep a mantra of "urine is sterile, urine is sterile," going), made an attempt at wit in the case log, and left it for one of the others to clean out. :-P
So the guy that did the pissing bought a new laptop for the original owner, and then he got the, uh, refurbished one.
We had another case where a guy tried to fix his borked power supply using alligator clips and duct tape. He'd taken his second hard drive out of its bay in order to pass the wires through and out to the front to use a tiny physics-class-grade switch.
And THEN there was the guy with a folder labeled "goodies" on the C drive, which had failed and whose data we had to recover. I'm not really against the concept of pr0n, but.... I don't know about the rest of you, but canine bukkake doesn't really count as "goodies" to me.
Notes to all friendly Oblivion NPCs: If your buddy shoots big angry light-making spell thingy at big angry gonna-kill-you-all monster, don't get in between. It probably isn't healthy.
Also (and this was, actually, the more frustrating one), if there's a bunch of you, and a large group of monsters in an area, do not, repeat, do *not* all go haring after different monsters that are very far away. This gets you all killed, and then the squishy little thief/mage needs to hop around dodging many many bad things until the immortal(s) wake(s) up. Or she quickloads for the 10% chance that at least a few of you will gang up and kill *something*. This does not make the squishy one happy.
Or, say, you're a certain nameless Orc warrioress with only melee abilities, and your squishy little thief/mage buddy has ranged magic, a nice new shiny black bow, and is currently running right the @#!%&$##!@ past you to try and get you to kill the big evil giant-weapon-go-smashy guy on her tail that is turning her into scrib jelly... it'd be rather nice if you took your attention off of that archer on top of the building (that you have no path to and no way to hit) and saved your panicking, dying, and probably-hilarious-to-watch buddy. Just a thought.
Seriously, the ways that NPCs target could be improved. A lot. I know it's better NPC AI than is generally available elsewhere, and I love Bethesda for all that they've accomplished, but it's just really reeeeally frustrating sometimes.
You have a point in that Sims does appeal to females, that this was a sound financial move by EA, and that males partially are drawn by the presence of females in Sims Online. So, I agree with the last sentence.
But I think I'm gonna call you out on the first two. I know a ton of males that looooove the Sims, and I personally logged waaaaaaaaay too many hours on SimCity, SimTower, SimAnt, SimFarm, SimIsland, SimLife, etc. (although the last two were a little too complicated for a 10-year-old to figure out... hell, I can't figure out SimLife's interface now....). SimCity and SimTower aren't 'boring' to females; the lack of females that played these games is probably more due to the lack of females playing video games at all when they came out. Luckily I was a geekette early on, and my folks bought me a lot of 'edutainment' games, which fortunately included all of the above. ^_^
It's when it's assumed that pink appeals to all females, or that no females play anything that isn't pink and frilly and OMG ponies, that it gets annoying. Things like Girls Night Out Solitaire are just really fucking stupid.
Yes, many females like pink and princess and what-all. But many don't, and actually are repulsed by them, and are genuinely insulted by the assumption that they would like it. I fully agree with the grandparent poster.
Nintendo = Japanese. When written in our alphabet (romanized), "Wi" is pronounced like "We" and "Wii" simply draws out that same sound into "Wee".
And all the tank has to do is to fire. And then it *would* catch up. ^_^
I'm in a computers and society course where the prof actually asked us to read slashdot regularly to stay informed. So, yeah, just doing my homework! ^_^
I also met my last boyfriend at a D&D campaign that had a male DM, two male players, and 5 female players. Both males wound up quitting, leaving the poor DM(who is also, while probably the best DM I've ever seen, very polite, mild-mannered, and will make a perfect husband after getting no dates at all in college) all alone with some very, very loud, rowdy, and dark-humored females. It was fun.