"All this neat stuff we can do, and we *still* dismiss intelligent design as a possibility.
*chuckle* That's really interesting. Sad and funny, but interesting."
I'll bite.
This particular "neat stuff" was creating using the principles and techniques of contemporary genetic science, which in turn wouldn't be possible without a solid foundation in the theory of evolution.
Let's put that another way: much of biology, including the manipulation of tiny bacterial genes, no longer makes any sense and wouldn't be possible if you replace evolution with the Book of Genesis. Which is also exactly why evolution is so widely accepted by legitimate biologists: it predicts stuff (like the existence of DNA, for example)! And lo and behold, we continually find that those predictions were right! And then we make funny pictures using genetically-engineered phototropic E. Coli!
Imagine if someone tried to convince you that, instead of a CPU, Gordon Moore himself was inside your computer doing math with a slide rule. Even if your computer was glued shut, might you reasonably dismiss Gordon Mooreism as a possibility, given everything else you know about computers? Given what you're capable of doing with a computer right now?
That, Chuckles, is why people dismiss "Intelligent Design."
At any rate, are you really philosophically prepared to argue that, if Man can do it, so can God? To me, that always sounds like a great way to diminish your creator. Unless you really want us to think of God as a grad student at UCSF?:-)
"Because I don't believe that the majority of America, let alone 60% of us, want the government to be able to get search warrants without a judge's consent. To force us to keep quiet about a search. To invade the privacy of our medical and library records."
Let's be honest with ourselves. The majority of America has no idea what you're talking about.
Clearly, ethical abstractions like these are Un-American. Until the majority of us start experiencing a concrete impact on our "liberties," nobody will care about these general Constitutional principles and the minority (and minorities) they protect.
Records? Warrants? What, like Law And Order? I saw a great episode last week...
Practical, cosmetic freedoms -- the freedom to purchase, to be entertained, to write pointless and impotent screeds on Slashdot -- are the best technique ever yet invented to keep us in line and not really giving a damn. After all, everything else is just Godless intellectual hippie poetry or something. Give me NASCAR or give me Death!
"When they submitted this game for its ESRB rating, they did not include any notification the "hot chocolate" content. The result of this is that the ESRB rating was potentially inappropriate for the actual game. Now, it's true that in order to see this content, you have to hack around with the game a bit, but this doesn't fundamentally change the problem. Either Rockstar intended this as an "easter egg", in which case they deliberately mislead the ESRB, or else they did not intend it to ever be accessible, in which case they are incompetent."
I doubt that any major game title these days ships without a lot of unused cruft on the disc. Take any random game and you'll find all kinds of textures, sounds etc that were probably used at one point, replaced ingame but never removed from the asset tree.
There's just too much stuff in a game of this size to catch everything and pare back the shipping build to just what's "needed". And deadlines are scary enough that the unknown consequences of ripping stuff out may well compel you to leave it alone, even if you'd rather it wasn't there. This is probably true of every major software project.
In this case, Rockstar apparently left in some animation sequences and scripts. These things happen to be "sexual", but the fact of the matter is that somebody at Rockstar clearly said, at some point, "Let's not put this in the game."
And then some horny fan hacked it back into circulation.
In other words, if the ESRB has any business rating software, they ought to know that pretty much every game they review has baggage like this hidden away in the data files. Maybe it's rarely so scandalous, but it's there. Is it "incompetence", or is it rather none of the ESRB's concern, since it has no bearing whatsoever on the game as sold?
"The trick will be to come up with a reasonable prioritization scheme that will make the probability of losing the most important stuff very small."
Heh. Yes, that's the "trick".
Every archivist faces this problem; there's always more material than can possibly be catalogued. And there's really no practical way to differentiate between material that seems important now but will lose significance over time, and material that seems insignificant but will gain importance over time, or act as a small but key part of somebody's story someday, or derive cultural resonance from some future event, or be highly important to one person but nobody else... You get the picture.
Retention, in other words, is probably one of the defining characteristics of the archivist's craft. They spend all day thinking about "reasonable prioritization schemes", losing some battles while winning others.
The honest ones know that they lose more often than they win. Even in small archives, you might be astonished at just how much stuff languishes in a warehouse someplace, and probably won't even be seen in the lifetime of the current staff, if it survives at all through rodents or floods, or mistakes, or sheer inability to provide storage.
This particular article is interesting, and on Slashdot, because of the nature of the material and the technical challenges it may present, but issues of retention are not appreciably different from those faced by people working on "traditional" non-digital collections now or at any given time in the past.
"That's the best explaination I've heard yet, but it just doesn't seem too jedi of them to give up. They just mope around the hovel for 20 years, making rocks float around and eating that crappy gruel? Sad."
You're right: Jedi shouldn't mope. Maybe I overstated the situation.;)
It's my impression that this is all an endless cycle, in which the Jedi and Sith ascend and descend in power relative to one another over the course of thousands upon thousands of years. Neither ever fully wins or loses in any ultimate way.
"Hopelessness" is probably, therefore, inflected with a certain contemplative hope for future generations -- their sense of personal failure is modulated by the knowledge that, eventually, this will sort itself out, as it always does.
"Here we have dozens of Jedi walking around going, "The Force is strong with you, bozo!" to everybody in the story - except Palpatine - the one guy with enough Force to fry Mace Windu and blow Yoda on his ass!
What's wrong with this picture?"
You give the Jedi too much credit. Just as they took too much credit.
The Librarian in Episode II made clear the dominant belief of the Jedi: If it's not in the Jedi Library, it must not exist!
Jedi faith that the order was infallible became the downfall of the Jedi. Which, y'know, is the whole point. Anakin too believes that his ascendence is unquestionable, that his powers are beyond reproach. The line between dark and light side, as it pertains to that kind of hubris, is blurry and seductive, even to the ostensibly untouchable Council.
" The plot hole that really gets me... is why not just train Luke and Leia in the ways of the force from day one. And why not have a more proactive approach to taking Vader and the Emperor out?"
Because the Jedi -- all two of them at that point -- had LOST ALL HOPE. They were incapable of being "proactive". Utterly defeated and demoralized by the Sith, they retreat to a shack on Dagobah and to the wastelands of Tatooine, and grow old and feeble with sad devotion to their ancient religion.
That's why Luke represents [insert fanfare] A New Hope.
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Finally I can eat my* Ultimate Bacon Sandwich without guilt!
* Sadly, this is not actually my Ultimate Bacon Sandwich.
"All this neat stuff we can do, and we *still* dismiss intelligent design as a possibility.
*chuckle* That's really interesting. Sad and funny, but interesting."
I'll bite.
This particular "neat stuff" was creating using the principles and techniques of contemporary genetic science, which in turn wouldn't be possible without a solid foundation in the theory of evolution.
Let's put that another way: much of biology, including the manipulation of tiny bacterial genes, no longer makes any sense and wouldn't be possible if you replace evolution with the Book of Genesis. Which is also exactly why evolution is so widely accepted by legitimate biologists: it predicts stuff (like the existence of DNA, for example)! And lo and behold, we continually find that those predictions were right! And then we make funny pictures using genetically-engineered phototropic E. Coli!
Imagine if someone tried to convince you that, instead of a CPU, Gordon Moore himself was inside your computer doing math with a slide rule. Even if your computer was glued shut, might you reasonably dismiss Gordon Mooreism as a possibility, given everything else you know about computers? Given what you're capable of doing with a computer right now?
That, Chuckles, is why people dismiss "Intelligent Design."
At any rate, are you really philosophically prepared to argue that, if Man can do it, so can God? To me, that always sounds like a great way to diminish your creator. Unless you really want us to think of God as a grad student at UCSF?
"Because I don't believe that the majority of America, let alone 60% of us, want the government to be able to get search warrants without a judge's consent. To force us to keep quiet about a search. To invade the privacy of our medical and library records."
Let's be honest with ourselves. The majority of America has no idea what you're talking about.
Clearly, ethical abstractions like these are Un-American. Until the majority of us start experiencing a concrete impact on our "liberties," nobody will care about these general Constitutional principles and the minority (and minorities) they protect.
Records? Warrants? What, like Law And Order? I saw a great episode last week...
Practical, cosmetic freedoms -- the freedom to purchase, to be entertained, to write pointless and impotent screeds on Slashdot -- are the best technique ever yet invented to keep us in line and not really giving a damn. After all, everything else is just Godless intellectual hippie poetry or something. Give me NASCAR or give me Death!
"When they submitted this game for its ESRB rating, they did not include any notification the "hot chocolate" content. The result of this is that the ESRB rating was potentially inappropriate for the actual game. Now, it's true that in order to see this content, you have to hack around with the game a bit, but this doesn't fundamentally change the problem. Either Rockstar intended this as an "easter egg", in which case they deliberately mislead the ESRB, or else they did not intend it to ever be accessible, in which case they are incompetent."
I doubt that any major game title these days ships without a lot of unused cruft on the disc. Take any random game and you'll find all kinds of textures, sounds etc that were probably used at one point, replaced ingame but never removed from the asset tree.
There's just too much stuff in a game of this size to catch everything and pare back the shipping build to just what's "needed". And deadlines are scary enough that the unknown consequences of ripping stuff out may well compel you to leave it alone, even if you'd rather it wasn't there. This is probably true of every major software project.
In this case, Rockstar apparently left in some animation sequences and scripts. These things happen to be "sexual", but the fact of the matter is that somebody at Rockstar clearly said, at some point, "Let's not put this in the game."
And then some horny fan hacked it back into circulation.
In other words, if the ESRB has any business rating software, they ought to know that pretty much every game they review has baggage like this hidden away in the data files. Maybe it's rarely so scandalous, but it's there. Is it "incompetence", or is it rather none of the ESRB's concern, since it has no bearing whatsoever on the game as sold?
"The trick will be to come up with a reasonable prioritization scheme that will make the probability of losing the most important stuff very small."
Heh. Yes, that's the "trick".
Every archivist faces this problem; there's always more material than can possibly be catalogued. And there's really no practical way to differentiate between material that seems important now but will lose significance over time, and material that seems insignificant but will gain importance over time, or act as a small but key part of somebody's story someday, or derive cultural resonance from some future event, or be highly important to one person but nobody else... You get the picture.
Retention, in other words, is probably one of the defining characteristics of the archivist's craft. They spend all day thinking about "reasonable prioritization schemes", losing some battles while winning others.
The honest ones know that they lose more often than they win. Even in small archives, you might be astonished at just how much stuff languishes in a warehouse someplace, and probably won't even be seen in the lifetime of the current staff, if it survives at all through rodents or floods, or mistakes, or sheer inability to provide storage.
This particular article is interesting, and on Slashdot, because of the nature of the material and the technical challenges it may present, but issues of retention are not appreciably different from those faced by people working on "traditional" non-digital collections now or at any given time in the past.
"That's the best explaination I've heard yet, but it just doesn't seem too jedi of them to give up. They just mope around the hovel for 20 years, making rocks float around and eating that crappy gruel? Sad."
You're right: Jedi shouldn't mope. Maybe I overstated the situation.
It's my impression that this is all an endless cycle, in which the Jedi and Sith ascend and descend in power relative to one another over the course of thousands upon thousands of years. Neither ever fully wins or loses in any ultimate way.
"Hopelessness" is probably, therefore, inflected with a certain contemplative hope for future generations -- their sense of personal failure is modulated by the knowledge that, eventually, this will sort itself out, as it always does.
"One could also complain that the Jedi weren't very smart to so seriously misread the 'prophecy' about Anakin."
Did they?
Who tosses Palpatine down the shaft?
Anakin's unlikely redemption restores balance to the force, not Luke's whining.
"Here we have dozens of Jedi walking around going, "The Force is strong with you, bozo!" to everybody in the story - except Palpatine - the one guy with enough Force to fry Mace Windu and blow Yoda on his ass! What's wrong with this picture?"
You give the Jedi too much credit. Just as they took too much credit.
The Librarian in Episode II made clear the dominant belief of the Jedi: If it's not in the Jedi Library, it must not exist!
Jedi faith that the order was infallible became the downfall of the Jedi. Which, y'know, is the whole point. Anakin too believes that his ascendence is unquestionable, that his powers are beyond reproach. The line between dark and light side, as it pertains to that kind of hubris, is blurry and seductive, even to the ostensibly untouchable Council.
And when they fail, they really, really fail.
" The plot hole that really gets me
Because the Jedi -- all two of them at that point -- had LOST ALL HOPE. They were incapable of being "proactive". Utterly defeated and demoralized by the Sith, they retreat to a shack on Dagobah and to the wastelands of Tatooine, and grow old and feeble with sad devotion to their ancient religion.
That's why Luke represents [insert fanfare] A New Hope.
It's not a hole, it's a feature!