Do you actually watch 24? If so - what is the "answer" the show is trying to force on us?
I'm not saying I think it's great intellectual entertainment, but I get the impression that the majority of people who are up in arms about it haven't watched it. Most of the claims of anti-Muslim bias or what have you are simply not reflected in the actual show. Consider that the current villains include an evil currupt corporate (white) American, a Soviet-era general, and (yes) a Muslim terrorist. You've also got overzealous hawks in the administration trying to assassinate the president in order to get the internment camp agenda operational. Meanwhile on the other side you have a Muslim ex-terrorist, a Muslim leader of a non-profit, a president who acts like the opposite of George Bush and, of course, Jack Bauer.
Just wondering whether you're one of those people who think it's anti-Islamic. If anything, it's pedantically anti-anti-Islamic.
I attack the messenger, and you hen-peck my message.
Stop me if I'm wrong, but that's a good thing when in debate, no? Hen-pecking the message instead of attacking the message avoids ad hominem attacks or just plain non sequitors.
Your argument is null in a world already populated with the likes of Splinter Cell and Rainbow 6.
I'll be honest, I've played neither game very much. From what I have played, however, the philosophical implications are rather shallow at best. A traditional tale of political intrigue and killing foreign terrorists while fighting internal corruption blah blah blah. Like I said, I could be wrong, but it sounds like it has all the weighty political implications of a James Bond movie. When I think of an intellectually challenging and entertaining narrative I think of "The Left Hand of Darkness" or "Dune" or at the very least something like "Ender's Game". All of these sci-fi masterpieces have something to say and questions to raise, and do so without being bombastic or shoving an agenda in the readers face. I think you can see that you and I are really talking about different levels of intellectual engagement. I like a story that makes me think. I like a story that challenges my world view. I like a story that presents an alien world view. I just don't like stories that try to manipulate me into agreement or pontificate or lecture, etc.
Given the track record of narratives in video games (not all video games need narratives - e.g. Civilization, but they are a part of most strategy, adventure, RPG, and FPS games) I'm fairly certain that "Dune" quality politics will be missing, whereas we will be getting the philosophical equivalent of Resident Evil dialog. I'm not exactly thrilled by this prospect.
Are games supposed to be some sort of emotionless intellectual exercise?
I think the best games would be intellectual and emotional. There's not reason the two should be mutually exclusive. But I've frequently been told by friends that I over-analyze movies/books/shows/songs, so I may like more intellectual content than most people.
You'll never find the truth if you only ask questions.
Two things. First of all, I think it's naive to assume that you're going to "find the truth" at all. There is no truth to be found about exactly which type of government works best, how much socialism, how much free-market capitalism, etc. Not that there isn't any such objective truth, but pat answers will never be found. Getting closer to the truth is a cyclic process of asking questions and proposing possible answers. Any body that says "this is it, the final concrete truth" on any given serious topic is lying or deluded.
So I'd say the process of asking questions and proposing intelligent, open-ended possible solutions is more important that rushing in with "solutions". I'm not really sure which end of this spectrum you fall into, and I don't want to judge you, but your tone so far is a little too "the truth is obviously X" for my taste. Anyone that takes that tone in a game is going to make a game I don't want to play.
2. And that's really the point. We're talking about what makes a good game. Even if you did find the right answers, even if you could prove they were correct: why foist them into a video game? It makes the games annoying (to people like me) and it's arguably not a great way to get your ideas spread across. People don't like to be talked down to, and that's exactly what you're going to sound like when you try to present a tight, final, immutable answer in a game. Even if you're right. You'll turn people off, whereas a more subtle question-raising approach that allows people to put the dots together is both more fun and more effective.
This is the same way plot works in a movie/book/game. If you have to get into long-winded exposition to explain the plot, the theme, or the point of your narrative you've already screwed it up.
Much as you seem to want to turn this into a discussion about the war in Iraq and politics in America, it's a conversation about what makes a good game. And someone trying to foist their particular political philosophy onto the players does not.
Well, one man's propaganda is another man's scripture.
Well I would also hate a game that attempted to push another man's scripture. Yes, including a game that tried to push Mormon scripture. It would suck.
This is incorrect though, a poorly written story with a mouthpeice is going to be horrid, but there is no reason why a story with an agenda cannot be good and intresting.
I disagree. No matter how good the technical execution, I don't like agenda-driven art/entertainment (regardless of whether or not I like the agenda itself).
You're whining that a game called "Area 51" is using a standard X-Files plot device because it is too "polemic"?
No. I'm responding to the article. Novel concept. Please read it. I'll post some of it for you here:
The game is intended to be enjoyed regardless of subject matter, but Smith hopes that gamers will accept a title that even touches on some of the issues that popular television shows deal with on a regular basis. What do you think about this? Is there room for politics in gaming, or do you just want to shoot stuff?
Please note that the question I was responding to was a general one. I've never played Area 51, why would I whine about something I've never played? I'm "whining" that if politics are executed in games the way plot and dialogue are, games will get worse and not better for the inclusion. Or maybe you think the script of Resident Evil 4 was worthy of a Pulitzer?
Have you ever read a book?
No. Never. I'm frightened of all the pages. Not to mention the ideas. You never know when they might sneak into your head and take over.
Do ideas threaten you?
Yes, yes they do. Sometimes I cry at night.
Even cartoonish strawmen repudiations of your beliefs?
Especially those. Shit man, straw man talking! Proving me wrong! That's not scary to you? How did they get so damn smart? How do they know what's in my head?! And why are they 2-d?!!! Oh NNNOOOOEEESSSS!!!!!oneoneoneoneeleventyoneone
Talking about politics without expressing any actual viewpoint is pointless. The purpose of debate is controversy. Rational arguments can & SHOULD offend people.
The purpose of debate is controversy? No, I think not. That sounds more like the CNN.com obligatory "teacher sleeps with student/ random celeb does something awful/ etc.". The point of debate is to arrive at truth, or at least somewhere in the vicinity. If controversy is necessary along that path, so be it. But controversy for the sake of controversy is good for nothing but selling papers.
Furthermore, that's debate. We're talking about a game. I'd prefer games to have enough substance to provide fodder for interesting extra-game debates, not actually take a side in the debate. I'd prefer my games to raise issues, not try to tell me how to vote.
This is what we expect out of good literature, and it's what I love (and all to often find missing) in sci-fi. Good art, in my opinion, should raise questions. Not try to answer them.
No - business worse than usual. It's better to not include a "feature" at all than to include it badly. It looks like we're headed for bad, horrible, awful politics.
I think there's room for politics in the sense of relevant issues with today's politics, but I don't want polemics in my video games. I think a lot of people who want to inject "politics" really mean "polemics". They have an axe to grind. Even if it's someone who shares my general political outlook (which I highly doubt, coming from a video game designer) I would really hate to have basically propoganda in a game I'm playing.
I mean bad story and bad dialogue and bad characterization aren't horrible enough? Now we're going to get stupid 8th-grade reading level political treatises as well? When game designers figure out how to write a script that doesn't suck maybe I'll trust them to inject politics.
Until that day this can only end in tears. Frustrated tears of tortured gamers crying out for entertainment that doesn't suck.
Now that Wikipedia has reached a critical mass, the time has come to establish a trusted editorial board that can vet articles to established experts in the field of subjects.
No no no no no. The parent is falling into the same trap as most of the critics of wikipedia - a presumed expectation of being like something else. Like an encyclopedia. Like a new outlet. Like a scholarly journal. Regardless of the original aims of wikipedia what we have before us is something different than all of those 3. It's a new creation with unique benefits and drawbacks. Any attempt to convert wikipedia more closely into one of those objects is, in my mind, wrong headed and dangerous. We already have encyclopedias. We don't really need another one, even if it's free.
The unique benefit of wikipedia is transparency. It opens up the guts that go into writing an article and reveals them to public scrutiny. Any sacrifice by not having strict editorial control is more than made up for by having the entire process open to public scrutiny.
For convenient fact look ups wikipedia already rocks and is certainly not failing. For transparency wikipedia is not only succeeding, but is the only serious example of such an approach in existence. Yeah - it may be failing by the standards of other forms of media - but why apply those standards? A cow fails at being a horse too, but both cows and horses have their place. In this particular case, however, there's only one cow. Let's not try to turn it into a horse when we have a whole herd of them already!
Let wikipedia be what it is, and stop trying to convert into something "authoritative". I'd rather keep the transparency. Could you have both? Possibly, but certainly not without diluting the transparency in practice.
I don't know about obnoxious players leaving, but this seriously might make me start playing online again. The only thing worse than being fragged by a 12-year old who has nothing to do but get good at playing Halo is to have to listen to their pre-pubescent trash talk. That was the chief reason I quit playing Halo 2. You can stick me with a plasma, gut me with the sword, blast me with the shotgun, or hit me face-first with a rocket, but please just shut up with the trash talk!
I think it also depends a lot on the type of difficulty. I played Halo (the original) all the way through on regular, heroic, and legendary. I felt that the enemies got faster and smarter. The experience was more intense, but the challenges were over all the same. Halo 2 was a completely different feeling. I felt that instead of making the experience more challenging, they just hyper-inflated the stats of your opponents. I never beat it on legendary. I remember one level in particular near the very end of the game where I restarted from the same checkpoint probably near 200 or 300 times. Not all at once! I would play for an hour or two, surviving for only about a minute, a couple of times a week for a couple of weeks until I finally gave up in disgust. Spawn, lob a grenade at the enemies coming out of a door, try some variant of running for cover and searching for ammo, get wasted, spawn...
I think a lot of old-fashioned turn-based strategy games (like BattleIsle or AdvancedWars) follow the same strategy. Rather than a smart opponent, they just increasingly stack the resources in the opponents favor. This doesn't just make the game hard, it makes it hard and boring.
No, it doesn't mean their scientific findings aren't valid. But it sure the hell does mean they're financially motivated.
And the climate scientists who created this report aren't idealogically motivated? I'm sure some are. Some probably aren't. And scientists who respond to the $10,000 bounty may or may not be motivated. Frankly, I don't care about motivations. If you put out a bounty for an open source project, no one gets upset. Why should this be any different? If the scientist trades his/her credibility to create a fraudalent attack on the climate report that's unethical, but the fault of the scientist - not the bounty. ANd I have no doubt the life of such accusations will be short-lived.
If ExonMobile itself wants to offer bounties for this research I really don't care. Let the scientists try to do the research. They will either come up with a valid criticis, or they won't.
I know the story is in the manual. That just strikes me as exceedingly lame. The manual is not the game. That's like watching a movie that makes no sense because all the crucial back story is written on the cover. It should be in the game.
The dialog wasn't too bad. It just didn't constitute a story.
What I hate is that there is little room left on the internet for legitimate advertising.
You and the original article seem to have this idea that there's a difference in content between legitimate advertising and spam. I'm not so sure there is. Are the advertisements for fake meds spam because the company is illegitimate or because its unsolicited advertisements?
I'm of the opinion that it doesn't matter if the company is legitimate or not. I don't care if it's fake viagra or real bonsai trees. If advertisements come into my inbox that I didn't request - it's spam.
So the whole premise that advertisements from legitimate companies is "marketing" and advertisements from illegitimate companies is "spam" seems flawed to me. If it's unwanted advertising in my inbox it is spam. Here's a tip for legitimate businesses who don't want to get labeled as having sent me spam: don't send me spam. You either send me unsolicited email and take the chance that I'm actually going to be interested (it's a low-probability, but there are several retailers that I actually don't mind getting emails from) or you find another way to attract my attention. But the fact of the matter is that spam is any commercial email the user doesn't want to see.
Seriously - they're including Gears of War in her writing credits as a good thing? I've played the game all the way through. It has great game mechanics and was a lot of fun. The script writing wasn't as bad as, say, Resident Evil, but it wasn't great either. And there was clearly a ton of backstory of which practically none made it into the movie. The main character goes back to his family's estate and they discover a secret lab with military intel on the enemy of humanity and nothing is said about that. "Hey Fenix, here's your family's mansion. Oh look, your dad thought he was Batman. Well, I guess we better get back to shooting alien-thingies."
I don't know how much influence the writer has on stuff like this, but in the end Gears of War is either solid evidence that Susan is not a very good writer, or simply a horrible example because she had no chance to do good writing.
How does current virtualization software fare with multi-core architecture? I mean, if the hype is even somewhat believed even SMBs will be able to afford off-the-shelf "supercomputers". Of course relative to the real super-computers, these machines will be slow. But relative to actual requirements, they should be, well, supercomputers.
Suddenly the old "everyone's moving to thin-clients/mainframes/dumb terminals/etc" story (as recently as today: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/30/134 0210 ) becomes interesting again. If virtualization software works, then we don't need to wait for a golden age of multi-threaded software development. SMBs (and large companies too) will be able to deploy dumb terminals linked to multi-core monsters, install virtualization software to get as many servers as they need, offload individual instances of programs to the various cores as is natural, and viola: now you can actually realize all those TOC savings the thin client crowd has been raving about all these years.
This transition to multi-core is what we need because, as far as I know, actually getting individual programs to run nicely on multiple cores is (with notable exceptions) something we're not really ready for yet in terms of development.
Most obviously, programmable calculators can be used to cheat in numerous ways. Many modern calculators include functions that do exactly what you're supposed to be learning. (The TI-89 can do closed-form integregation, for example.) Students regularly store notes, formulas, constants, and even step-by-step solution instructions in their calculators, though that might not be considered cheating by some
Right, but at a certain point (usually still the undergrad level) the lessons stop being about memorizing formulas, constants, etc. and actually doing critical thinking. The type of "cheating" you can do with calculators is not high-level stuff.
In my own experience in higher math, physics, and engineering classes, calculators were typically either banned or mostly unnecessary anyway. Professors mostly chose figures that would cancel out or were simple enough to calculate in your head. Indeed, having decimals or terms that didn't cancel was usually a good way to tell you're on the wrong track.
This is a good demonstration of the limitations of not using calculators. I'm not trying to say we all should. It's important to learn algebra, I believe, and not just learn how to operate a calculator. But ideally that's stuff that you're finished with by high school/first couple years of college. And during that time the problems you study are likely to be extremely unrealistic for precisely this reason: the tests have to be tailored to make the calculations simple. Unfortunately in real life, the problems you're working on don't always involve terms that nicely cancel out.
So again: take away the calculator at the lower levels, but by the time you're doing real math it's not about the calculations anymore.
What degree are *you* taking? I got a BS in math, and I'm working on my ME in systems engineering and applying to the PhD program. No one cares about calculators. In fact, I make a habit out of using Mathematica, R and (gasp) Excel to automate calculations and such. Not only is this *allowed*, it's *expected* in higher-level courses. No professor wants to wait while you solve every problem by hand when the point of the class is something other than learning to manipulate numbers.
Math is about more than just calculating. In the higher levels, it becomes irrelevant. Good luck proving something in your abstract algebra using it. And even in calculation-intensive courses (like my numerous stats courses) the calculations themselves are hardly the point.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you actually watch 24? If so - what is the "answer" the show is trying to force on us?
I'm not saying I think it's great intellectual entertainment, but I get the impression that the majority of people who are up in arms about it haven't watched it. Most of the claims of anti-Muslim bias or what have you are simply not reflected in the actual show. Consider that the current villains include an evil currupt corporate (white) American, a Soviet-era general, and (yes) a Muslim terrorist. You've also got overzealous hawks in the administration trying to assassinate the president in order to get the internment camp agenda operational. Meanwhile on the other side you have a Muslim ex-terrorist, a Muslim leader of a non-profit, a president who acts like the opposite of George Bush and, of course, Jack Bauer.
Just wondering whether you're one of those people who think it's anti-Islamic. If anything, it's pedantically anti-anti-Islamic.
-stormin
I attack the messenger, and you hen-peck my message.
Stop me if I'm wrong, but that's a good thing when in debate, no? Hen-pecking the message instead of attacking the message avoids ad hominem attacks or just plain non sequitors.
Your argument is null in a world already populated with the likes of Splinter Cell and Rainbow 6.
I'll be honest, I've played neither game very much. From what I have played, however, the philosophical implications are rather shallow at best. A traditional tale of political intrigue and killing foreign terrorists while fighting internal corruption blah blah blah. Like I said, I could be wrong, but it sounds like it has all the weighty political implications of a James Bond movie. When I think of an intellectually challenging and entertaining narrative I think of "The Left Hand of Darkness" or "Dune" or at the very least something like "Ender's Game". All of these sci-fi masterpieces have something to say and questions to raise, and do so without being bombastic or shoving an agenda in the readers face. I think you can see that you and I are really talking about different levels of intellectual engagement. I like a story that makes me think. I like a story that challenges my world view. I like a story that presents an alien world view. I just don't like stories that try to manipulate me into agreement or pontificate or lecture, etc.
Given the track record of narratives in video games (not all video games need narratives - e.g. Civilization, but they are a part of most strategy, adventure, RPG, and FPS games) I'm fairly certain that "Dune" quality politics will be missing, whereas we will be getting the philosophical equivalent of Resident Evil dialog. I'm not exactly thrilled by this prospect.
Are games supposed to be some sort of emotionless intellectual exercise?
I think the best games would be intellectual and emotional. There's not reason the two should be mutually exclusive. But I've frequently been told by friends that I over-analyze movies/books/shows/songs, so I may like more intellectual content than most people.
-stormin
You'll never find the truth if you only ask questions.
Two things. First of all, I think it's naive to assume that you're going to "find the truth" at all. There is no truth to be found about exactly which type of government works best, how much socialism, how much free-market capitalism, etc. Not that there isn't any such objective truth, but pat answers will never be found. Getting closer to the truth is a cyclic process of asking questions and proposing possible answers. Any body that says "this is it, the final concrete truth" on any given serious topic is lying or deluded.
So I'd say the process of asking questions and proposing intelligent, open-ended possible solutions is more important that rushing in with "solutions". I'm not really sure which end of this spectrum you fall into, and I don't want to judge you, but your tone so far is a little too "the truth is obviously X" for my taste. Anyone that takes that tone in a game is going to make a game I don't want to play.
2. And that's really the point. We're talking about what makes a good game. Even if you did find the right answers, even if you could prove they were correct: why foist them into a video game? It makes the games annoying (to people like me) and it's arguably not a great way to get your ideas spread across. People don't like to be talked down to, and that's exactly what you're going to sound like when you try to present a tight, final, immutable answer in a game. Even if you're right. You'll turn people off, whereas a more subtle question-raising approach that allows people to put the dots together is both more fun and more effective.
This is the same way plot works in a movie/book/game. If you have to get into long-winded exposition to explain the plot, the theme, or the point of your narrative you've already screwed it up.
Much as you seem to want to turn this into a discussion about the war in Iraq and politics in America, it's a conversation about what makes a good game. And someone trying to foist their particular political philosophy onto the players does not.
-stormin
Well, one man's propaganda is another man's scripture.
Well I would also hate a game that attempted to push another man's scripture. Yes, including a game that tried to push Mormon scripture. It would suck.
-stormin
This is incorrect though, a poorly written story with a mouthpeice is going to be horrid, but there is no reason why a story with an agenda cannot be good and intresting.
I disagree. No matter how good the technical execution, I don't like agenda-driven art/entertainment (regardless of whether or not I like the agenda itself).
-stormin
You're whining that a game called "Area 51" is using a standard X-Files plot device because it is too "polemic"?
No. I'm responding to the article. Novel concept. Please read it. I'll post some of it for you here:
The game is intended to be enjoyed regardless of subject matter, but Smith hopes that gamers will accept a title that even touches on some of the issues that popular television shows deal with on a regular basis. What do you think about this? Is there room for politics in gaming, or do you just want to shoot stuff?
Please note that the question I was responding to was a general one. I've never played Area 51, why would I whine about something I've never played? I'm "whining" that if politics are executed in games the way plot and dialogue are, games will get worse and not better for the inclusion. Or maybe you think the script of Resident Evil 4 was worthy of a Pulitzer?
Have you ever read a book?
No. Never. I'm frightened of all the pages. Not to mention the ideas. You never know when they might sneak into your head and take over.
Do ideas threaten you?
Yes, yes they do. Sometimes I cry at night.
Even cartoonish strawmen repudiations of your beliefs?
Especially those. Shit man, straw man talking! Proving me wrong! That's not scary to you? How did they get so damn smart? How do they know what's in my head?! And why are they 2-d?!!! Oh NNNOOOOEEESSSS!!!!!oneoneoneoneeleventyoneone
Go troll elsewhere.
-stormin
Dang, should have read your post before I replied. You said what I said, only with brevity. Which makes it better.
-stormin
Talking about politics without expressing any actual viewpoint is pointless. The purpose of debate is controversy. Rational arguments can & SHOULD offend people.
The purpose of debate is controversy? No, I think not. That sounds more like the CNN.com obligatory "teacher sleeps with student/ random celeb does something awful/ etc.". The point of debate is to arrive at truth, or at least somewhere in the vicinity. If controversy is necessary along that path, so be it. But controversy for the sake of controversy is good for nothing but selling papers.
Furthermore, that's debate. We're talking about a game. I'd prefer games to have enough substance to provide fodder for interesting extra-game debates, not actually take a side in the debate. I'd prefer my games to raise issues, not try to tell me how to vote.
This is what we expect out of good literature, and it's what I love (and all to often find missing) in sci-fi. Good art, in my opinion, should raise questions. Not try to answer them.
-stormin
No - business worse than usual. It's better to not include a "feature" at all than to include it badly. It looks like we're headed for bad, horrible, awful politics.
Someone save us please.
-stormin
I think there's room for politics in the sense of relevant issues with today's politics, but I don't want polemics in my video games. I think a lot of people who want to inject "politics" really mean "polemics". They have an axe to grind. Even if it's someone who shares my general political outlook (which I highly doubt, coming from a video game designer) I would really hate to have basically propoganda in a game I'm playing.
I mean bad story and bad dialogue and bad characterization aren't horrible enough? Now we're going to get stupid 8th-grade reading level political treatises as well? When game designers figure out how to write a script that doesn't suck maybe I'll trust them to inject politics.
Until that day this can only end in tears. Frustrated tears of tortured gamers crying out for entertainment that doesn't suck.
-stormin
I wish I could mod your post down and then mod it back up funny again, just because it needs more funny mods.
-stormin
Now that Wikipedia has reached a critical mass, the time has come to establish a trusted editorial board that can vet articles to established experts in the field of subjects.
No no no no no. The parent is falling into the same trap as most of the critics of wikipedia - a presumed expectation of being like something else. Like an encyclopedia. Like a new outlet. Like a scholarly journal. Regardless of the original aims of wikipedia what we have before us is something different than all of those 3. It's a new creation with unique benefits and drawbacks. Any attempt to convert wikipedia more closely into one of those objects is, in my mind, wrong headed and dangerous. We already have encyclopedias. We don't really need another one, even if it's free.
The unique benefit of wikipedia is transparency. It opens up the guts that go into writing an article and reveals them to public scrutiny. Any sacrifice by not having strict editorial control is more than made up for by having the entire process open to public scrutiny.
For convenient fact look ups wikipedia already rocks and is certainly not failing. For transparency wikipedia is not only succeeding, but is the only serious example of such an approach in existence. Yeah - it may be failing by the standards of other forms of media - but why apply those standards? A cow fails at being a horse too, but both cows and horses have their place. In this particular case, however, there's only one cow. Let's not try to turn it into a horse when we have a whole herd of them already!
Let wikipedia be what it is, and stop trying to convert into something "authoritative". I'd rather keep the transparency. Could you have both? Possibly, but certainly not without diluting the transparency in practice.
-stormin
I don't know about obnoxious players leaving, but this seriously might make me start playing online again. The only thing worse than being fragged by a 12-year old who has nothing to do but get good at playing Halo is to have to listen to their pre-pubescent trash talk. That was the chief reason I quit playing Halo 2. You can stick me with a plasma, gut me with the sword, blast me with the shotgun, or hit me face-first with a rocket, but please just shut up with the trash talk!
-stormin
I think it also depends a lot on the type of difficulty. I played Halo (the original) all the way through on regular, heroic, and legendary. I felt that the enemies got faster and smarter. The experience was more intense, but the challenges were over all the same. Halo 2 was a completely different feeling. I felt that instead of making the experience more challenging, they just hyper-inflated the stats of your opponents. I never beat it on legendary. I remember one level in particular near the very end of the game where I restarted from the same checkpoint probably near 200 or 300 times. Not all at once! I would play for an hour or two, surviving for only about a minute, a couple of times a week for a couple of weeks until I finally gave up in disgust. Spawn, lob a grenade at the enemies coming out of a door, try some variant of running for cover and searching for ammo, get wasted, spawn...
I think a lot of old-fashioned turn-based strategy games (like BattleIsle or AdvancedWars) follow the same strategy. Rather than a smart opponent, they just increasingly stack the resources in the opponents favor. This doesn't just make the game hard, it makes it hard and boring.
-stormin
I, for one, am shocked.
-stormin
No, it doesn't mean their scientific findings aren't valid. But it sure the hell does mean they're financially motivated.
And the climate scientists who created this report aren't idealogically motivated? I'm sure some are. Some probably aren't. And scientists who respond to the $10,000 bounty may or may not be motivated. Frankly, I don't care about motivations. If you put out a bounty for an open source project, no one gets upset. Why should this be any different? If the scientist trades his/her credibility to create a fraudalent attack on the climate report that's unethical, but the fault of the scientist - not the bounty. ANd I have no doubt the life of such accusations will be short-lived.
If ExonMobile itself wants to offer bounties for this research I really don't care. Let the scientists try to do the research. They will either come up with a valid criticis, or they won't.
-stormin
Written back in 2004, it is still relevant today.
Seriously, a 3 year old history of Starcraft? Is news? You've got to be kidding me.
-stormin
I know the story is in the manual. That just strikes me as exceedingly lame. The manual is not the game. That's like watching a movie that makes no sense because all the crucial back story is written on the cover. It should be in the game.
The dialog wasn't too bad. It just didn't constitute a story.
-stormin
What I hate is that there is little room left on the internet for legitimate advertising.
You and the original article seem to have this idea that there's a difference in content between legitimate advertising and spam. I'm not so sure there is. Are the advertisements for fake meds spam because the company is illegitimate or because its unsolicited advertisements?
I'm of the opinion that it doesn't matter if the company is legitimate or not. I don't care if it's fake viagra or real bonsai trees. If advertisements come into my inbox that I didn't request - it's spam.
So the whole premise that advertisements from legitimate companies is "marketing" and advertisements from illegitimate companies is "spam" seems flawed to me. If it's unwanted advertising in my inbox it is spam. Here's a tip for legitimate businesses who don't want to get labeled as having sent me spam: don't send me spam. You either send me unsolicited email and take the chance that I'm actually going to be interested (it's a low-probability, but there are several retailers that I actually don't mind getting emails from) or you find another way to attract my attention. But the fact of the matter is that spam is any commercial email the user doesn't want to see.
-stormin
Clearly when I said "none of it made it into the movie" I meant "none of it made it into the game".
Seriously - they're including Gears of War in her writing credits as a good thing? I've played the game all the way through. It has great game mechanics and was a lot of fun. The script writing wasn't as bad as, say, Resident Evil, but it wasn't great either. And there was clearly a ton of backstory of which practically none made it into the movie. The main character goes back to his family's estate and they discover a secret lab with military intel on the enemy of humanity and nothing is said about that. "Hey Fenix, here's your family's mansion. Oh look, your dad thought he was Batman. Well, I guess we better get back to shooting alien-thingies."
I don't know how much influence the writer has on stuff like this, but in the end Gears of War is either solid evidence that Susan is not a very good writer, or simply a horrible example because she had no chance to do good writing.
-stormin
How does current virtualization software fare with multi-core architecture? I mean, if the hype is even somewhat believed even SMBs will be able to afford off-the-shelf "supercomputers". Of course relative to the real super-computers, these machines will be slow. But relative to actual requirements, they should be, well, supercomputers.
4 0210 ) becomes interesting again. If virtualization software works, then we don't need to wait for a golden age of multi-threaded software development. SMBs (and large companies too) will be able to deploy dumb terminals linked to multi-core monsters, install virtualization software to get as many servers as they need, offload individual instances of programs to the various cores as is natural, and viola: now you can actually realize all those TOC savings the thin client crowd has been raving about all these years.
Suddenly the old "everyone's moving to thin-clients/mainframes/dumb terminals/etc" story (as recently as today: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/30/13
This transition to multi-core is what we need because, as far as I know, actually getting individual programs to run nicely on multiple cores is (with notable exceptions) something we're not really ready for yet in terms of development.
-stormin
Most obviously, programmable calculators can be used to cheat in numerous ways. Many modern calculators include functions that do exactly what you're supposed to be learning. (The TI-89 can do closed-form integregation, for example.) Students regularly store notes, formulas, constants, and even step-by-step solution instructions in their calculators, though that might not be considered cheating by some
Right, but at a certain point (usually still the undergrad level) the lessons stop being about memorizing formulas, constants, etc. and actually doing critical thinking. The type of "cheating" you can do with calculators is not high-level stuff.
In my own experience in higher math, physics, and engineering classes, calculators were typically either banned or mostly unnecessary anyway. Professors mostly chose figures that would cancel out or were simple enough to calculate in your head. Indeed, having decimals or terms that didn't cancel was usually a good way to tell you're on the wrong track.
This is a good demonstration of the limitations of not using calculators. I'm not trying to say we all should. It's important to learn algebra, I believe, and not just learn how to operate a calculator. But ideally that's stuff that you're finished with by high school/first couple years of college. And during that time the problems you study are likely to be extremely unrealistic for precisely this reason: the tests have to be tailored to make the calculations simple. Unfortunately in real life, the problems you're working on don't always involve terms that nicely cancel out.
So again: take away the calculator at the lower levels, but by the time you're doing real math it's not about the calculations anymore.
-stormin
What degree are *you* taking? I got a BS in math, and I'm working on my ME in systems engineering and applying to the PhD program. No one cares about calculators. In fact, I make a habit out of using Mathematica, R and (gasp) Excel to automate calculations and such. Not only is this *allowed*, it's *expected* in higher-level courses. No professor wants to wait while you solve every problem by hand when the point of the class is something other than learning to manipulate numbers.
Math is about more than just calculating. In the higher levels, it becomes irrelevant. Good luck proving something in your abstract algebra using it. And even in calculation-intensive courses (like my numerous stats courses) the calculations themselves are hardly the point.
-stormin
Who are you trying to apologize to? Whom did you offend? I can't see that you wrote anything offensive...
-stormin