Follow a young man from his hometown, through training, through war, and back home, and readjustment.
Instead of focusing around the shooting, make it a heavy-rain adventure where you make a series of choices and consequences. Small general ones like skipping on some bonding time to put in some after hours work on your own. Or bigger ones like who do you send to draw out the sniper. Respond to orders in the field from a commander that doesn't understand the situation on the ground. For game purposes, fill it out with game-like choices of tactics in the field to form the gaming "meat" throughout the war, because you need to break up the pacing.
Campfire after-action chatting with the boys, and grim consolation of the last survivor of a squad you sent on patrol last night.
Go back home and see your friends and family who have no idea what you've just been through. Listen to petty complaints about their daily life with flashbacks to life you've just left behind. Snap back and finally tell them about what real shit is all about? Or keep it to yourself, because telling them might push them away, and you want to regrow lost a lost relationship. Pick up a job you don't know and start a new life. Ignore your wife's complaints about you staying out late/again/, because you need to take care of a comrade that's having a hard time readjusting to life back home.
End on a reflective note instead of a big climactic finish.
Shooters are rooted in well, shooting. Whatever moral conflict you may have about the taking of a life is quickly resolved and cast aside as you blast your way through hundreds, even thousands of enemies over the course of the game. Any hesitation must necessarily have been overcome in the first few minutes in these games.
This is largely due to the power fantasies that accompany the shooter genre. Players are powerful, and their "shooting" ability must be sufficient to overcome all obstacles thrown at them. Justification is needed to resolve the dissonance stemming from gunning down so many enemies. Uncharted is one example of a (great) game that has received some criticism for failing to address this point. Charming off-the-cuff quips are jarringly out of place after slaughtering hundreds of men. Even after the protagonist is himself shocked at the prospect of shooting museum security guards, and is instead offered tranquilizer darts, these guards are sedated right off walkways to fall several stories down. Or off the edge of rooftops where the fall is almost certainly fatal. The justification for shooting is made necessary by the nature of shooters.
So here's an interesting idea from the "Extra Credits" guys at www.escapistmagazine.com .
How about a game where you're a widowed mother trying to get your children to safety across war-torn Europe? The objective is clear, the motivation even more so. The focus would not be on charging into violence, but avoiding it where possible, or using it as an ugly means to a necessary end. A challenging premise for game design, and for game writers. It offers the potential to challenge the players with things like:
-Dialogue of a mother trying to raise children to be good people in an awful environment. -Deciding what taboos may need to be broken to get the children to safety. Perhaps she will need to kill a man to protect them...and then explain to them why it was right (or wrong?) for her to do that. Perhaps she will need to sleep with a guard so the kids can slip past...but burdened with the memory of what happened. -Being asked to risk your safety and that of your children on behalf of someone else, or even someone else's children. (and again, having to justify your choices to your children later).*** -Comforting a child.
Extra Credits offered this idea up as part of a discussion on what it takes to create a "good female character". They posited that a good/female/ character is not simply a gender-neutral character that would be good regardless of gender (which would simply be a "good character"). Rather, a good female character is a character whose femininity is innately tied to who she is. This would be an opportunity for a strong female character to flourish as a result of her femininity, rather than a lack of the same. And sex appeal would not have to factor in anywhere either.
P.S: ***An interesting dilemma came up for me in Fable 2 *minor spoiler ahead*: Once of the quests involves being tricked by a villain, and finding yourself and an innocent woman, placed in front of a demon demanding life force from one of you. This meant that one of you would be instantly aged into a shriveled husk. In the end, I gave the demon the girl. After all, it was just an AI character, whereas I was a real human being who would feel some regret at having my avatar tarnished for the rest of the game.
But I had a twinge of regret, I had been playing virtuous hero throughout the game until this point, rescuing others, and refusing reward whenever it was offered. But now I was not being asked to be the hero, I was asked to be the martyr. Being defaced was a purely visual effect, but a significant one because this was the first time the player is asked to actually give up something irreplaceable. This was the one time where I was asked to make a real sacrifice, however small it was. I was surprised to find myself a bit ashamed at my selfishness, and the event sparked some brief introspection. Great stuff for a videogame.
My post was in response to the GP's advocacy for music programs on the basis on "Learning music teaches a lot more senses, i.e. rythm, tonal acuity, reading (notes), dexterity with an implement, memory."
To summarize my post, I questioned the value of the characteristics he used to justify advocacy for music, and instead suggested a different beneficial characteristic of music that could be used to advocate for it more effectively.
There was no comparative aspect in my post. Chess simply wasn't involved. (The GP's post was the one to advocate for music programs instead of chess).
I've heard that story before...in ancient Rome...under a/private/ firefighting system.
Essentially, the firefighting teams raced to fires, then pulled out a contract for the homeowner to read and sign as their house burned down. I wonder how much the firefighting company can charge someone when their house is already on fire? $10k? $20k? $300k? You could say that the homeowners is negotiating under some duress. You know, since his house is burning down.
Since a huge amount of people's savings are wrapped up in the house, they'd probably end up paying all of their liquid assets, and running up some additional debt or a second mortgage on the burning house.
No, a private firefighting system is a terrible idea.
Why would the insurance company pay you just because you paid them to insure you?
Even now with a legal system enforced by our government, insurance companies still try to weasel out of paying, and are taken to task for it.
With no obligation to make good on any promise that turns against them, the only incentive insurance companies have for making distributions is when the distribution is so small that they're still making profits.
In other words, they'll only pay when the damage to the insured is small. If the insured actually suffers a real problem, the insurance company will bail, and the insured can't afford the mercenaries needed kidnap valued insurance company employees and fend off the insurance company's army from rescuing them. (Because you know, you have to pay for your police protection).
Business would be far more chaotic without something holding each other to their word. It is not practical for every business to be run like the mob sending out thugs to collect from other businesses when the other business has a contract dispute. Having a structured judicial system lowers the threshold of "shit I can get away with". You can spin as much hyperbole you want about the ineffectiveness of government, but we are not living in a Mad-Max society where the only law is the each man's gun.
"What's the point ? All you can do on the moon is walk around, and then leave again."
I was not your moderator, so I can only offer a guess as to how you received a "Troll" moderation, but I think the main reason was that the brevity of your statement makes it appear flippant or curt, whether or not that was your intent.
To quote wikipedia's definition of a "troll" on the internet (emphasis mine): "In Internet slang, a troll is someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, chat room, or blog, [B]with the primary intent of provoking other users into a desired emotional response[/B][2] or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.[3] In addition to the offending poster, the noun troll can also refer to the provocative message itself, as in "that was an excellent troll you posted". "
Without offering elaboration on your skepticism, this statement simply dismisses a raft of arguments in favor of traveling to the moon without specifics. Without specifics, meaningful responses are impeded. It would be far more productive to recognize the pro-moon travel arguments, and explain why you disagree with them, and in turn, present your own arguments as to how the resources might be more efficiently spent, or even moral arguments on why resources should be spent in certain ways, etc. The other possibility is that you truly do not know of any arguments in favor of travel to the moon, and are unable to comprehend potential benefits, however remote. This would be ignorance that is most likely willful given Slashdot's obvious enthusiasm in favor of travel to the moon, it would be trivial to read further to discover reasons offered for what can be accomplished.
Slashdot has an obvious bias in favor of space travel, and posting a short message simply dismissing all arguments in favor of space travel, neatly fits the image of an internet trolling. Even if it was not your original intention.
Lawyers don't like smart jurors because it makes their case hinge around just the smart jurors. All the other jurors who might not grasp the the finer points of the case end up having these things pointed out to them by the smarter jurors, and establishing a deferential relationship to the smarter juror who they believe to have a better understanding of the case than they do.
Once the smarter juror makes his stance known, other jurors are biased to agree.
Also, that smarter juror takes much more work to persuade since they'll want to pick apart all the arguments presented. It's harder to impress your point of view on a highly critical person. Lawyers don't like the idea of having the case hinge upon that smart juror's murky predisposition, nobody REALLY knows what someone else might think of your case, especially someone you've only known for a few minutes! Lawyers prefer being able to influence the juror's opinions so that the lawyer can have at least some confidence that if he works hard enough on his case he can influence the outcome.
Also, the publications the GP just mentioned are stereotypical of liberals, and when cited in sequence implies a strong bias one way or the other in a case. If a bias is an obstacle for a lawyer, they have the juror removed. So essentially, a bias in either direction will cause one side or the other to excuse you. If the list was more balanced it may not be a problem.
Aside from memory, most of those qualities have little value outside of musical endeavors. Even dexterity with an implement is specific to that genre of implement.
However, music also trains students to be diligent, and that it takes effort to be good at something, and that you can be good at something if you put in enough effort. It gives immediate and constant feedback on progress that students may not be able to recognize as easily in their regular coursework. It helps them form the connection that diligence and success are related. Obviously, it's not hard to recognize this in the abstract, but it's a lesson that needs to be internalized to be put into practice.
I definitely agree that the US should not spend so much on the military.
But I'll just share an anecdote on a little game we played called Guns and Butter in history class back when I was in high school. Students were grouped up into teams and the teams were assigned resource profiles which were simple, but broadly analogous to various countries of the world, middling economies with no oil, high economies with little/no oil, middling economies with a some oil, low economies with lots of oil.
During each round, each team could allocate their resources to quality of living, improving their economy, or building a military. They could also negotiate with other countries and trade resources in whatever bargain they could strike.
There were no goals assigned, each country gets to decide for themselves what they wanted to do. My team was assigned the US. The highest amount of resources, and highest amount of military to start.
We quickly decided internally that our goal was to develop the most prosperity. We bought oil as needed, but mainly poured all resources into our economy on every turn, and even traded a little of our military resource away for some oil to increase our prosperity even further(prosperity is increased through economic resource, and some oil, and will in turn increase economic output slightly in future turns). Of course, we kept some of the military resources we started with, which should be more than enough since the rest of the world had virtually no military to speak of at the start of the game. We were one of only 2 countries that started off with enough military resources to fire a nuclear strike that would obliterate any country foolish enough to pick a fight.
As the game unfolded, the oil-rich nations bonded together into a parallel of OPEC. This was troubling to us, since this limited our growth potential. It was interesting how quickly this happened given that these kids had probably never even heard of OPEC, but recognized that it dramatically increased the value of their oil in trade when they all collectively set prices. Nevertheless, we kept right on with pouring everything into increased prosperity. We were quickly shut out by the oil alliance because they didn't want us to succeed, and were jealous that we had already started off with so much. But we just bought oil from 2 middling nations instead and we had enough for our purposes.
The middling nations pretty much kept to themselves, just cutting a handful of trade deals. Eventually the oil nations, while still incredibly poor, and individually weak, had amassed a significant military in the aggregate. But that still meant that the first to attack us would get nuked by us and drop out of the game. So we weren't too concerned. They even roped in a few middling nations towards the end, and we lost one of our oil contracts. This cut into our prosperity initiative since we weren't getting enough oil to improve on each turn. None of the other countries would deal with us to avoid getting burned on their own contracts with the powerful oil alliance. But we knew our goal and just invested in prosperity on every other turn when we saved up enough oil.
Then the nukes launched. The oil alliance had grown so incredibly paranoid of our power that their ultimate goal for the entire game was to take us down. One of the poor nations had volunteered to be the sacrificial lamb that kept building up military(with the assistance of the alliance) to the exclusion of all else, until they could fire a nuke.
We were aghast, we'd lost all of our progress in the game. We had been entirely peaceful, and aside from 2 oil contracts were complete isolationists. We sighed and fired our 1 nuke back. It was all we had left of our military since it was the highest possible deterrent and we didn't need conventional military arms for conquest. In the end, the small oil country was vaporized, and the US was nearly wiped out, and the useless remains were conquered by an oil nation on the following turn. The end of the game came
Anytime he needs to know something or have done something he goes back in time to pre-emptively develop what he needs.
Otherwise, how does he fight crime during the night, pose as a playboy during the day, and then somehow research/train/build everything for every situation in the time between day and night?
Tony stark is an even worse offender. son of a bitch actually had an "anti-spiderman" device on hand "just in case". Batman made anti-JLA contingencies but at least he didn't carry it around with him all the time.
The goal of AI in games is to be entertaining though.
Being smart is useful up to a point, because players like to see the game respond to them, it makes the experience feel more dynamic and engages the player to respond in kind.
However, the value of effective of AI drops off very quickly. Players like to get challenged, but not beaten. Ultimately players like to win more than they lose. There's much less play in this area for shooters than in other more contrived games where the designers have full control of the dynamics of play(RTS, Puzzles, etc.). But in a shooter, you have a very specific style of play at its core that's very limited in terms of give and take. At the core, shooters are line of sight, one on one engagement.
Even when fighting multiple enemies you're still shooting at one group with an AOE, or shooting one enemy at a time out of the group. The obvious response for an AI trying to overcome the overwhelming firepower of the lone player would be to retreat and encircle. That makes for a pretty shitty fight where everyone you're looking at is hiding in cover, trying not to get shot, while everyone you're not looking at is peppering you. Plus, grenades raining down (since it won't incur LOS) on you exactly when you need to stay behind cover to reload/recover health. Basically, the AI should make sure that the player never actually sees them since direct contact with the player is suicide. It's not very fun to just get killed from something outside your field of view all the time, because most players don't have enough hindsight to recognize that it's their fault that they died, they just feel that it was a "cheap shot". (The same thing goes for multiplayer gaming where the average players is only thinking about what's in front of them rather than the entire map at once. Kill cams were a nice way of training players to understand why they died)
Really, shooter AI should expose itself regularly so the player can eliminate them and progress through the level. Maybe use some cover here and there to make the player imagine some sense of self-preservation. Also, toss grenades when it's apparent the player is going to ruin his/her own experience by just sitting in one spot and poking enemies to death for the entire game. That's good shooter AI. The AI should resist the player, not beat them.
That said, I don't care for the ridiculous volume of enemies that certain games throw at you, it's immersion breaking.
Rubberbanding AI is a term for racing games. The farther in front you get from the AI racers, the faster they become to catch up. The farther behind you get from the AI racers, the slower they become so you can catch up.
Essentially, it's as though there's a rubber band tying the player car to all other AI cars.
The idea is that having cars around you and jostling for a pass is supposedly more exciting for the player. However, most players see through this pretty easily.
I can talk to people, and as a client-facing professional I have to. But I talk with them because I have to, not because I want to.
I don't like having to feign interest in topics, but I have to in order to show people that I'm friendly. The thing is, I/am/ friendly, I just wish there was an easier way to show other people that I am a nice person and that they should feel at ease. But sadly, small talk is the only practical means of doing so. I prefer friendly silence over awkward small talk, but unfortunately I've only met a handful of people who share the same preference.
The research linked above notes that obese and naturally slim folk have a different composition of gut bacteria.
They note that they cannot yet make conclusions as to why the composition is different, or which came first (Did the bacteria cause them to be fat? Or does a fat lifestyle lead to the change in bacteria?).
In any case, energy and nutrition absorption levels are different for different people. People vary in many ways. Some people have low fat even though they struggle daily to eat thousands upon thousands of calories so they can gain muscle weight, others have much more muscle weight even though they're cutting calories to try to shed fat.
Of course the overall trends remain the same for the general population. In/general/ eating less results in a thinner person. In/general/ eating more results in a larger person. The specific results vary widely from person to person.
Also, it's just plain cool when applied math explains away the mysteries of the world. To my perspective as a layperson, it's incredible how many layers of ingenuity piled up to enable someone to explore and explain some odd phenomenon bouncing off a craft hurtling through space.
"The U.S. corporate tax burden is smaller than average for developed countries.[1] Corporations in 19 of the member states of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development paid 16.1 percent of their profits in taxes between 2000 and 2005, on average, while corporations in the United States paid 13.4 percent.
Nevertheless, some have argued that U.S. corporate tax rates unduly burden U.S. companies by pointing to the country’s top statutory tax rate, which is 35 percent. For example, a recent Wall Street Journal editorial calling for corporate tax cuts noted that this is the second highest top statutory tax rate among developed countries.[2] While true, this gives the false impression that the corporate tax burden is greater here than in other developed countries. Because the U.S. tax code offers so many deductions, credits, and other mechanisms by which corporations can reduce their taxes, the actual percentage of profits that U.S. corporations pay in taxes — or what analysts refer to as their effective tax rate — is not high, compared to other developed countries."
The article advocates true tax "reform" which seeks to streamline the taxcode (last major overhaul was in 1983), by removing many of the arcane deductions and exceptions, and in turn, reducing the corporate tax rate accordingly, to arrive at the same level of tax revenue. FYI, Obama had advocated such changes, but thus far no movement has been made. The ones who have the real control over this are the congressmen on the "House commitee on Ways & Means".
Tax overhaul is difficult because every deduction and exception had a purpose behind it. Someone wanted that clause there. The political reality is that if you want to pass legislature, you have to get votes. To get votes, you throw someone a bone, getting a seat on The House committee on Ways & Means is a very powerful position because you have a lot of bones when you're tasked with writing tax law proposals. At the same time, passing any of those tax law proposals means you need to throw out a lot of those bones.
So to get tax reform passed, you need to hand out deductions for all the representatives trying to get laws that favor their constituencies. And doing so defeats the purpose of streamlining the tax code. This limits the chance of real tax reform to minor clean-ups of obsolete clauses.
Getting the milk bottle for $8 instead of $9.50 is little comfort when your job is shipped overseas and you can't get another one.
It's also no comfort to hear that "you just aren't as competitive" when compared to the guy living on $100 a year dodging livestock riding his bicycle down a dirt path on the way to work.
Hearing that you lost your job because your industry just isn't "efficient" enough because it was paying a livable wage...also no comfort.
Economic/theory/ in general does nothing to relieve the real-world impact. Those impacted are the "hidden costs" not considered in the rosy picture of a more efficient world. The hidden cost is that the efficiency comes from crushing out the unwanted in the meantime. Of COURSE those unwanted aren't on board.
If crushing out inefficiency means that YOU have to suffer, then there's pretty much nothing you can say to convince that person that it's good news that their job is gone. When the global economy is reframed into the perspective of the individual, or a particular country, then general "efficiency" is NOT the goal. While the overall system is not a zero-sum game, when seen from a mortal lifespan, or more appropriately, the length of time the average unemployed can live off of their savings, then globalization is full of winners and losers in a zero-sum game. Hearing that other people are made better off while you made much worse off doesn't help. In such situations, I could hardly blame someone for wanting protectionism.
Circle strafing has gone out of fashion in shooters over time. Shooters have gradually drifted towards high damage hitscan weaponry. This results in small fast clashes that end before someone can strafe in a circle.
It hasn't gone entirely extinct. The remake of Serious Sam, and Borderlands still rely heavily on circle strafing, and of course, older games won't go away.
I liked my trackball too, and I got great results with it at the time, but I've moved on since then.
I have to agree. It bothers me to see a "gay cure" app. But not to the point that I think they should have been banned.
It's certainly contentious, but not outright hostile. However wrong their basis may be, it's implied that the creators are putting that app out to help those who they believe to have a problem.
From an abstract perspective, I feel that the appropriate response for this sort of ignorance would be to enlighten, rather than to censor. It's not helpful to simply stifle those that would disagree with me, the ultimate goal is to show them why they should agree. Shutting them up only hardens their hearts making it more difficult for meaningful discussion.
Should they cross the line into hate speech, then I would see legitimate reasons to censor them, but this was not the case.
That kind of "choice" has little practical bearing.
It's one thing to be a fat guy choosing to eat less. The amount of distress they'd have to overcome to go against their inherent inclination is relatively minimal.
Looking at the idea of a gay guy choosing to be straight, and flipping it around: How many straight guys do you know would willingly choose to get penetrated, or to penetrate another man? To wrap their tongue around another man's penis? Sort of a horrible reverse "what-would-you-do-for-a-klondike bar" quiz.
It's a really damned high obstacle to overcome. You'd pretty much have to be holding a gun to my head, and I'm still not sure I'd be willing to do it even then. Sure, I can see a man as being "beautiful" or pleasing to look at, but at no point do I want to have sex with him.
If a choice comes into play, I think it really only applies for bisexuals.
Slashdot Mirror
Or perhaps an adventure game?
Call it: "The Good Soldier"
Follow a young man from his hometown, through training, through war, and back home, and readjustment.
Instead of focusing around the shooting, make it a heavy-rain adventure where you make a series of choices and consequences. Small general ones like skipping on some bonding time to put in some after hours work on your own. Or bigger ones like who do you send to draw out the sniper. Respond to orders in the field from a commander that doesn't understand the situation on the ground. For game purposes, fill it out with game-like choices of tactics in the field to form the gaming "meat" throughout the war, because you need to break up the pacing.
Campfire after-action chatting with the boys, and grim consolation of the last survivor of a squad you sent on patrol last night.
Go back home and see your friends and family who have no idea what you've just been through. Listen to petty complaints about their daily life with flashbacks to life you've just left behind. Snap back and finally tell them about what real shit is all about? Or keep it to yourself, because telling them might push them away, and you want to regrow lost a lost relationship. Pick up a job you don't know and start a new life. Ignore your wife's complaints about you staying out late /again/, because you need to take care of a comrade that's having a hard time readjusting to life back home.
End on a reflective note instead of a big climactic finish.
Shooters are rooted in well, shooting. Whatever moral conflict you may have about the taking of a life is quickly resolved and cast aside as you blast your way through hundreds, even thousands of enemies over the course of the game. Any hesitation must necessarily have been overcome in the first few minutes in these games.
This is largely due to the power fantasies that accompany the shooter genre. Players are powerful, and their "shooting" ability must be sufficient to overcome all obstacles thrown at them. Justification is needed to resolve the dissonance stemming from gunning down so many enemies. Uncharted is one example of a (great) game that has received some criticism for failing to address this point. Charming off-the-cuff quips are jarringly out of place after slaughtering hundreds of men. Even after the protagonist is himself shocked at the prospect of shooting museum security guards, and is instead offered tranquilizer darts, these guards are sedated right off walkways to fall several stories down. Or off the edge of rooftops where the fall is almost certainly fatal. The justification for shooting is made necessary by the nature of shooters.
So here's an interesting idea from the "Extra Credits" guys at www.escapistmagazine.com .
How about a game where you're a widowed mother trying to get your children to safety across war-torn Europe? The objective is clear, the motivation even more so. The focus would not be on charging into violence, but avoiding it where possible, or using it as an ugly means to a necessary end. A challenging premise for game design, and for game writers. It offers the potential to challenge the players with things like:
-Dialogue of a mother trying to raise children to be good people in an awful environment.
-Deciding what taboos may need to be broken to get the children to safety. Perhaps she will need to kill a man to protect them...and then explain to them why it was right (or wrong?) for her to do that. Perhaps she will need to sleep with a guard so the kids can slip past...but burdened with the memory of what happened.
-Being asked to risk your safety and that of your children on behalf of someone else, or even someone else's children. (and again, having to justify your choices to your children later).***
-Comforting a child.
Extra Credits offered this idea up as part of a discussion on what it takes to create a "good female character". They posited that a good /female/ character is not simply a gender-neutral character that would be good regardless of gender (which would simply be a "good character"). Rather, a good female character is a character whose femininity is innately tied to who she is. This would be an opportunity for a strong female character to flourish as a result of her femininity, rather than a lack of the same. And sex appeal would not have to factor in anywhere either.
P.S:
***An interesting dilemma came up for me in Fable 2 *minor spoiler ahead*:
Once of the quests involves being tricked by a villain, and finding yourself and an innocent woman, placed in front of a demon demanding life force from one of you. This meant that one of you would be instantly aged into a shriveled husk. In the end, I gave the demon the girl. After all, it was just an AI character, whereas I was a real human being who would feel some regret at having my avatar tarnished for the rest of the game.
But I had a twinge of regret, I had been playing virtuous hero throughout the game until this point, rescuing others, and refusing reward whenever it was offered. But now I was not being asked to be the hero, I was asked to be the martyr. Being defaced was a purely visual effect, but a significant one because this was the first time the player is asked to actually give up something irreplaceable. This was the one time where I was asked to make a real sacrifice, however small it was. I was surprised to find myself a bit ashamed at my selfishness, and the event sparked some brief introspection. Great stuff for a videogame.
Sheesh, quick google of "US AID JAPAN"
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2011-03-11-us-reaction-tsunami_N.htm
Relief en route the same day that the tsunami struck. All assets already in the area mobilized immediately.
It makes you sound like a douche to imply that they wouldn't help without charging, when the US sent aid immediately.
My post was in response to the GP's advocacy for music programs on the basis on "Learning music teaches a lot more senses, i.e. rythm, tonal acuity, reading (notes), dexterity with an implement, memory."
To summarize my post, I questioned the value of the characteristics he used to justify advocacy for music, and instead suggested a different beneficial characteristic of music that could be used to advocate for it more effectively.
There was no comparative aspect in my post. Chess simply wasn't involved. (The GP's post was the one to advocate for music programs instead of chess).
I've heard that story before...in ancient Rome...under a /private/ firefighting system.
Essentially, the firefighting teams raced to fires, then pulled out a contract for the homeowner to read and sign as their house burned down. I wonder how much the firefighting company can charge someone when their house is already on fire? $10k? $20k? $300k? You could say that the homeowners is negotiating under some duress. You know, since his house is burning down.
Since a huge amount of people's savings are wrapped up in the house, they'd probably end up paying all of their liquid assets, and running up some additional debt or a second mortgage on the burning house.
No, a private firefighting system is a terrible idea.
Why would the insurance company pay you just because you paid them to insure you?
Even now with a legal system enforced by our government, insurance companies still try to weasel out of paying, and are taken to task for it.
With no obligation to make good on any promise that turns against them, the only incentive insurance companies have for making distributions is when the distribution is so small that they're still making profits.
In other words, they'll only pay when the damage to the insured is small. If the insured actually suffers a real problem, the insurance company will bail, and the insured can't afford the mercenaries needed kidnap valued insurance company employees and fend off the insurance company's army from rescuing them. (Because you know, you have to pay for your police protection).
Business would be far more chaotic without something holding each other to their word. It is not practical for every business to be run like the mob sending out thugs to collect from other businesses when the other business has a contract dispute. Having a structured judicial system lowers the threshold of "shit I can get away with". You can spin as much hyperbole you want about the ineffectiveness of government, but we are not living in a Mad-Max society where the only law is the each man's gun.
"What's the point ? All you can do on the moon is walk around, and then leave again."
I was not your moderator, so I can only offer a guess as to how you received a "Troll" moderation, but I think the main reason was that the brevity of your statement makes it appear flippant or curt, whether or not that was your intent.
To quote wikipedia's definition of a "troll" on the internet (emphasis mine):
"In Internet slang, a troll is someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, chat room, or blog, [B]with the primary intent of provoking other users into a desired emotional response[/B][2] or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.[3] In addition to the offending poster, the noun troll can also refer to the provocative message itself, as in "that was an excellent troll you posted". "
Without offering elaboration on your skepticism, this statement simply dismisses a raft of arguments in favor of traveling to the moon without specifics. Without specifics, meaningful responses are impeded. It would be far more productive to recognize the pro-moon travel arguments, and explain why you disagree with them, and in turn, present your own arguments as to how the resources might be more efficiently spent, or even moral arguments on why resources should be spent in certain ways, etc. The other possibility is that you truly do not know of any arguments in favor of travel to the moon, and are unable to comprehend potential benefits, however remote. This would be ignorance that is most likely willful given Slashdot's obvious enthusiasm in favor of travel to the moon, it would be trivial to read further to discover reasons offered for what can be accomplished.
Slashdot has an obvious bias in favor of space travel, and posting a short message simply dismissing all arguments in favor of space travel, neatly fits the image of an internet trolling. Even if it was not your original intention.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_class
I don't see IQ on the list of protected classes. Maybe it's simply that there are no defenses for discrimination based on IQ.
After all, employers need to discriminate based on /something/, otherwise the hiring process would simply be based on first-come first-serve.
To paraphrase my business law professor:
Lawyers don't like smart jurors because it makes their case hinge around just the smart jurors. All the other jurors who might not grasp the the finer points of the case end up having these things pointed out to them by the smarter jurors, and establishing a deferential relationship to the smarter juror who they believe to have a better understanding of the case than they do.
Once the smarter juror makes his stance known, other jurors are biased to agree.
Also, that smarter juror takes much more work to persuade since they'll want to pick apart all the arguments presented. It's harder to impress your point of view on a highly critical person. Lawyers don't like the idea of having the case hinge upon that smart juror's murky predisposition, nobody REALLY knows what someone else might think of your case, especially someone you've only known for a few minutes! Lawyers prefer being able to influence the juror's opinions so that the lawyer can have at least some confidence that if he works hard enough on his case he can influence the outcome.
Also, the publications the GP just mentioned are stereotypical of liberals, and when cited in sequence implies a strong bias one way or the other in a case. If a bias is an obstacle for a lawyer, they have the juror removed. So essentially, a bias in either direction will cause one side or the other to excuse you. If the list was more balanced it may not be a problem.
Aside from memory, most of those qualities have little value outside of musical endeavors. Even dexterity with an implement is specific to that genre of implement.
However, music also trains students to be diligent, and that it takes effort to be good at something, and that you can be good at something if you put in enough effort. It gives immediate and constant feedback on progress that students may not be able to recognize as easily in their regular coursework. It helps them form the connection that diligence and success are related. Obviously, it's not hard to recognize this in the abstract, but it's a lesson that needs to be internalized to be put into practice.
I definitely agree that the US should not spend so much on the military.
But I'll just share an anecdote on a little game we played called Guns and Butter in history class back when I was in high school. Students were grouped up into teams and the teams were assigned resource profiles which were simple, but broadly analogous to various countries of the world, middling economies with no oil, high economies with little/no oil, middling economies with a some oil, low economies with lots of oil.
During each round, each team could allocate their resources to quality of living, improving their economy, or building a military. They could also negotiate with other countries and trade resources in whatever bargain they could strike.
There were no goals assigned, each country gets to decide for themselves what they wanted to do. My team was assigned the US. The highest amount of resources, and highest amount of military to start.
We quickly decided internally that our goal was to develop the most prosperity. We bought oil as needed, but mainly poured all resources into our economy on every turn, and even traded a little of our military resource away for some oil to increase our prosperity even further(prosperity is increased through economic resource, and some oil, and will in turn increase economic output slightly in future turns). Of course, we kept some of the military resources we started with, which should be more than enough since the rest of the world had virtually no military to speak of at the start of the game. We were one of only 2 countries that started off with enough military resources to fire a nuclear strike that would obliterate any country foolish enough to pick a fight.
As the game unfolded, the oil-rich nations bonded together into a parallel of OPEC. This was troubling to us, since this limited our growth potential. It was interesting how quickly this happened given that these kids had probably never even heard of OPEC, but recognized that it dramatically increased the value of their oil in trade when they all collectively set prices. Nevertheless, we kept right on with pouring everything into increased prosperity. We were quickly shut out by the oil alliance because they didn't want us to succeed, and were jealous that we had already started off with so much. But we just bought oil from 2 middling nations instead and we had enough for our purposes.
The middling nations pretty much kept to themselves, just cutting a handful of trade deals. Eventually the oil nations, while still incredibly poor, and individually weak, had amassed a significant military in the aggregate. But that still meant that the first to attack us would get nuked by us and drop out of the game. So we weren't too concerned. They even roped in a few middling nations towards the end, and we lost one of our oil contracts. This cut into our prosperity initiative since we weren't getting enough oil to improve on each turn. None of the other countries would deal with us to avoid getting burned on their own contracts with the powerful oil alliance. But we knew our goal and just invested in prosperity on every other turn when we saved up enough oil.
Then the nukes launched. The oil alliance had grown so incredibly paranoid of our power that their ultimate goal for the entire game was to take us down. One of the poor nations had volunteered to be the sacrificial lamb that kept building up military(with the assistance of the alliance) to the exclusion of all else, until they could fire a nuke.
We were aghast, we'd lost all of our progress in the game. We had been entirely peaceful, and aside from 2 oil contracts were complete isolationists. We sighed and fired our 1 nuke back. It was all we had left of our military since it was the highest possible deterrent and we didn't need conventional military arms for conquest. In the end, the small oil country was vaporized, and the US was nearly wiped out, and the useless remains were conquered by an oil nation on the following turn. The end of the game came
Batman also has power over time itself.
Anytime he needs to know something or have done something he goes back in time to pre-emptively develop what he needs.
Otherwise, how does he fight crime during the night, pose as a playboy during the day, and then somehow research/train/build everything for every situation in the time between day and night?
Tony stark is an even worse offender. son of a bitch actually had an "anti-spiderman" device on hand "just in case". Batman made anti-JLA contingencies but at least he didn't carry it around with him all the time.
The goal of AI in games is to be entertaining though.
Being smart is useful up to a point, because players like to see the game respond to them, it makes the experience feel more dynamic and engages the player to respond in kind.
However, the value of effective of AI drops off very quickly. Players like to get challenged, but not beaten. Ultimately players like to win more than they lose. There's much less play in this area for shooters than in other more contrived games where the designers have full control of the dynamics of play(RTS, Puzzles, etc.). But in a shooter, you have a very specific style of play at its core that's very limited in terms of give and take. At the core, shooters are line of sight, one on one engagement.
Even when fighting multiple enemies you're still shooting at one group with an AOE, or shooting one enemy at a time out of the group. The obvious response for an AI trying to overcome the overwhelming firepower of the lone player would be to retreat and encircle. That makes for a pretty shitty fight where everyone you're looking at is hiding in cover, trying not to get shot, while everyone you're not looking at is peppering you. Plus, grenades raining down (since it won't incur LOS) on you exactly when you need to stay behind cover to reload/recover health. Basically, the AI should make sure that the player never actually sees them since direct contact with the player is suicide. It's not very fun to just get killed from something outside your field of view all the time, because most players don't have enough hindsight to recognize that it's their fault that they died, they just feel that it was a "cheap shot". (The same thing goes for multiplayer gaming where the average players is only thinking about what's in front of them rather than the entire map at once. Kill cams were a nice way of training players to understand why they died)
Really, shooter AI should expose itself regularly so the player can eliminate them and progress through the level. Maybe use some cover here and there to make the player imagine some sense of self-preservation. Also, toss grenades when it's apparent the player is going to ruin his/her own experience by just sitting in one spot and poking enemies to death for the entire game. That's good shooter AI. The AI should resist the player, not beat them.
That said, I don't care for the ridiculous volume of enemies that certain games throw at you, it's immersion breaking.
Rubberbanding AI is a term for racing games. The farther in front you get from the AI racers, the faster they become to catch up. The farther behind you get from the AI racers, the slower they become so you can catch up.
Essentially, it's as though there's a rubber band tying the player car to all other AI cars.
The idea is that having cars around you and jostling for a pass is supposedly more exciting for the player. However, most players see through this pretty easily.
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Cablevision-Launches-Network-DVR-In-The-Bronx-112372
Cablevision has already been storing data at the ISP level.
This is interesting, I would like to hear more if you can point me towards additional reading.
I share your perspective on small talk.
I can talk to people, and as a client-facing professional I have to. But I talk with them because I have to, not because I want to.
I don't like having to feign interest in topics, but I have to in order to show people that I'm friendly. The thing is, I /am/ friendly, I just wish there was an easier way to show other people that I am a nice person and that they should feel at ease. But sadly, small talk is the only practical means of doing so. I prefer friendly silence over awkward small talk, but unfortunately I've only met a handful of people who share the same preference.
http://cmbi.bjmu.edu.cn/news/report/2010/pdf/gut_13.pdf
The research linked above notes that obese and naturally slim folk have a different composition of gut bacteria.
They note that they cannot yet make conclusions as to why the composition is different, or which came first (Did the bacteria cause them to be fat? Or does a fat lifestyle lead to the change in bacteria?).
In any case, energy and nutrition absorption levels are different for different people. People vary in many ways. Some people have low fat even though they struggle daily to eat thousands upon thousands of calories so they can gain muscle weight, others have much more muscle weight even though they're cutting calories to try to shed fat.
Of course the overall trends remain the same for the general population. In /general/ eating less results in a thinner person. In /general/ eating more results in a larger person. The specific results vary widely from person to person.
Also, it's just plain cool when applied math explains away the mysteries of the world. To my perspective as a layperson, it's incredible how many layers of ingenuity piled up to enable someone to explore and explain some odd phenomenon bouncing off a craft hurtling through space.
"The U.S. corporate tax burden is smaller than average for developed countries.[1] Corporations in 19 of the member states of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development paid 16.1 percent of their profits in taxes between 2000 and 2005, on average, while corporations in the United States paid 13.4 percent.
Nevertheless, some have argued that U.S. corporate tax rates unduly burden U.S. companies by pointing to the country’s top statutory tax rate, which is 35 percent. For example, a recent Wall Street Journal editorial calling for corporate tax cuts noted that this is the second highest top statutory tax rate among developed countries.[2] While true, this gives the false impression that the corporate tax burden is greater here than in other developed countries. Because the U.S. tax code offers so many deductions, credits, and other mechanisms by which corporations can reduce their taxes, the actual percentage of profits that U.S. corporations pay in taxes — or what analysts refer to as their effective tax rate — is not high, compared to other developed countries."
http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=784
The article advocates true tax "reform" which seeks to streamline the taxcode (last major overhaul was in 1983), by removing many of the arcane deductions and exceptions, and in turn, reducing the corporate tax rate accordingly, to arrive at the same level of tax revenue. FYI, Obama had advocated such changes, but thus far no movement has been made. The ones who have the real control over this are the congressmen on the "House commitee on Ways & Means".
Tax overhaul is difficult because every deduction and exception had a purpose behind it. Someone wanted that clause there. The political reality is that if you want to pass legislature, you have to get votes. To get votes, you throw someone a bone, getting a seat on The House committee on Ways & Means is a very powerful position because you have a lot of bones when you're tasked with writing tax law proposals. At the same time, passing any of those tax law proposals means you need to throw out a lot of those bones.
So to get tax reform passed, you need to hand out deductions for all the representatives trying to get laws that favor their constituencies. And doing so defeats the purpose of streamlining the tax code. This limits the chance of real tax reform to minor clean-ups of obsolete clauses.
Getting the milk bottle for $8 instead of $9.50 is little comfort when your job is shipped overseas and you can't get another one.
It's also no comfort to hear that "you just aren't as competitive" when compared to the guy living on $100 a year dodging livestock riding his bicycle down a dirt path on the way to work.
Hearing that you lost your job because your industry just isn't "efficient" enough because it was paying a livable wage...also no comfort.
Economic /theory/ in general does nothing to relieve the real-world impact. Those impacted are the "hidden costs" not considered in the rosy picture of a more efficient world. The hidden cost is that the efficiency comes from crushing out the unwanted in the meantime. Of COURSE those unwanted aren't on board.
If crushing out inefficiency means that YOU have to suffer, then there's pretty much nothing you can say to convince that person that it's good news that their job is gone. When the global economy is reframed into the perspective of the individual, or a particular country, then general "efficiency" is NOT the goal. While the overall system is not a zero-sum game, when seen from a mortal lifespan, or more appropriately, the length of time the average unemployed can live off of their savings, then globalization is full of winners and losers in a zero-sum game. Hearing that other people are made better off while you made much worse off doesn't help. In such situations, I could hardly blame someone for wanting protectionism.
I have the same double-click bug too on my MX Revo. Otherwise it was a good mouse. Terrible shame.
Circle strafing has gone out of fashion in shooters over time. Shooters have gradually drifted towards high damage hitscan weaponry. This results in small fast clashes that end before someone can strafe in a circle.
It hasn't gone entirely extinct. The remake of Serious Sam, and Borderlands still rely heavily on circle strafing, and of course, older games won't go away.
I liked my trackball too, and I got great results with it at the time, but I've moved on since then.
I have to agree. It bothers me to see a "gay cure" app. But not to the point that I think they should have been banned.
It's certainly contentious, but not outright hostile. However wrong their basis may be, it's implied that the creators are putting that app out to help those who they believe to have a problem.
From an abstract perspective, I feel that the appropriate response for this sort of ignorance would be to enlighten, rather than to censor. It's not helpful to simply stifle those that would disagree with me, the ultimate goal is to show them why they should agree. Shutting them up only hardens their hearts making it more difficult for meaningful discussion.
Should they cross the line into hate speech, then I would see legitimate reasons to censor them, but this was not the case.
That kind of "choice" has little practical bearing.
It's one thing to be a fat guy choosing to eat less. The amount of distress they'd have to overcome to go against their inherent inclination is relatively minimal.
Looking at the idea of a gay guy choosing to be straight, and flipping it around: How many straight guys do you know would willingly choose to get penetrated, or to penetrate another man? To wrap their tongue around another man's penis? Sort of a horrible reverse "what-would-you-do-for-a-klondike bar" quiz.
It's a really damned high obstacle to overcome. You'd pretty much have to be holding a gun to my head, and I'm still not sure I'd be willing to do it even then. Sure, I can see a man as being "beautiful" or pleasing to look at, but at no point do I want to have sex with him.
If a choice comes into play, I think it really only applies for bisexuals.