I hear this sort of advice on Slashdot a lot. "If you don't take [insert privacy procedure here], you're ASKING to get caught!" "Don't say anything over email you wouldn't shout in a crowded room!" And so on.
It's kind of dispiriting to me that so many people consider this an acceptable status quo. That you're not allowed to use the Internet, the DOMINANT new form of communication, the one that was supposed to "free" us somehow, without the expectation that everyone from Big Brother to your kid sister is watching over your shoulder.
"Intelligence," as measured by an (ideal) IQ test, has nothing to do with education. That's why an IQ test is different from the SAT. "IQ" is supposed to represent how well you can reason, remember, make connections, and so on, not what body of knowledge you've already learned.
Since (the theory goes) intelligence helps people succeed in life, those born extra-intelligent will tend to rise above the income level they're born into... and the higher your income level, the fewer kids (on average) you have. Meanwhile, the least intelligent people born into the "upper class" will tend to wash out of school or business and end up in mediocre jobs at a lower income level, where they're statistically likely to have more children. Thus, over a long period of time, the population as a whole will tend to get less intelligent (not merely less educated).
Granted, most of the "stupidity" we see in society probably has a lot more to do with education than raw intelligence. But you can't really argue that intelligence DOES vary within the general population, and that it IS important. No matter what prep school Forrest Gump may have gone to, he wouldn't exactly make a great quantum physicist.
Well then, those specialist surgeons can peel off maybe ten of the thousands of dollars they're making per hour in that operating room to hire a semi-literate guy to watch the operation on closed-circuit TV and count sponges going in and out of the patient.
But I guess until I have a couple decades' vested interest in the status quo I'm not allowed to criticize, right?
Nonciteable and nontrustable it may be (not that those are words), but it's still often a decent place to start, if just to scroll down to the references and external links at the bottom of an entry.
I consider it basically the same as asking a question on Slashdot. You may get lies, stupidity, and egregious stories about pooping in response to your query, but there are generally a few informed people who can at least point you in the right direction.
Research subjects who'd just watched 5 minutes of porn were horny. Research subjects who'd just watched 5 minutes of the Food Network were hungry. Research subjects who'd just watched 5 minutes of Lifetime hated men.
I mean, Jesus, talk about "no shit" conclusions. Seems like pretty basic stimulus and response here. People watch these movies BECAUSE of the adrenaline rush, to get "pumped up."
I'd say the more interesting question is what types of long-term effects are involved.
Normally I'd say stick with the commercial stuff, because those re the programs they'll encounter in the workplace.
I know a lot of people are gonna say, "Teach the theory, not the program," and so on, but realistically, a huge number of people out there, from high school kids to professionals, are REALLY BAD WITH COMPUTERS. As in, they learn a few tasks by rote, step-by-step, and are afraid to experiment with anything they haven't explicitly been taught. (I worked in a newsroom where people were shocked and awed when I showed them how to "insert special characters" in Word.)
Yes, ideally anyone working in a modern setting SHOULD know the basics about computers and not call in "the nerdy kid" every time they see an unfamiliar menu. But that's a bit beyond the scope of one multimedia class. Public schools already HAVE a lot of computers and a lot of classtime dedicated to learning them; it's up to teachers to stop spending all those resources having kids play Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing and browsing the Internet (which is most of what I recall from computer class).
HOWEVER, the key difference here is that we're talking about high-school kids, and there's an additional benefit to open-source in this case: you can tell the kids to download the programs themselves and mess around with them at home, even after the class is over. Some of them still won't get past that rote "First I click 'File,' then I click 'New'..." mentality, but the more computer-literate among them will have a lot more cool stuff to play with.
Yeah, but I'm guessing that a whole bunch (probably the majority) of the people who end up in tech jobs are FROM those same upper (or upper-middle) classes, while people like your Bombay friend's housemaid's son are the exception.
You could definitely argue that middle- and lower-class people in Mexico and India would both benefit from learning English, but it's misleading to suggest that India has so many more English-speakers than Mexico purely because they want the tech jobs more... I'd say an extended period of English colonialism had more to do with it.;-)
Actually, if you look at the Gamasutra summary, it's Blizzard (well, Vivendi) buying out Activision. Vivendi gets 52% of the stock of the merged company and 6 of 11 seats on the board.
I actually read TFA, and it's basically the guy saying, "This happens all the time!" over and over. I'm not even being reductionist here:
"And let me be the first to come out and say that what happened to Jeff Gerstmann happens all the time." (Hmm, let's see. You're not "the first" by a long shot; Penny Arcade said the same thing days ago, and even then it was just reiterating a point they'd been making for YEARS, which was in fact so self-evident that ANYBODY paying attention to the industry was aware of it.)
"And if you look outside of the world of gaming, you will see this is not an isolated event; it happens in more mainstream forms of journalism, and I might add that this could be even seen as a sign of growth for our industry."
"As the industry grows, more money is circulated, and money begets corruption. It's a fact of life and it's a fact of capitalism; this is America after all."
Such ridiculous BS. Your "industry" is "burgeoning" at the exact time when it's becoming redundant and useless. If I want fluff-laden previews, game trailers, interviews with developers, and press releases, I have the friggin' Internet at my fingertips here; I don't need Gamespot to aggregate that stuff for me. In fact, the ONLY thing sites like Gamespot have to offer that I can't get somewhere else with far fewer annoying ads (and at least one less layer of crappy-journalistic obfuscation) is their professional reviews. That's the ONLY content worth having, and Gamespot just screwed it up.
I like the complaints about how things getting "big business" is inevitable. Why? A review is a few pages of plain text with a couple JPEG screenshots; hardly a bandwidth hog. To create that review, you need ONE guy who can string together legible prose and is willing to play a wide range of video games for hours on end. Is that really a hard niche to fill on the goddamned INTERNET? All this could easily be paid for with AdSense ads, which (by their very randomness) would pretty much prevent any kind of coercion, unless Google started making games.
I'm just waiting for the Penny Arcade guys or someone else with enough "e-credibility" among gamers to start pimping a site like that. A huge influx of gamers would at least check it out, along with plenty of linking from reputable sites, which would lead to a high Google rating, and before you know it, LegitGameReviews.com is the top hit every time you type "$gamename review" into Google. Hell, there are probably a dozen sites like that around already that I just don't know about - anyone wanna help me out here?
i.e., it might come as a surprise when researchers discover that NOBODY (who opted in) searches the internet for pornography, music torrents, Paris Hilton...
Hell, out of Google's top 20 searches, you might get maybe 3 listed?
She's studying in the US, but most of her family is back in China, and she uses her Yahoo mail account to communicate with them.
She does this knowing full well that Yahoo is reading her mail and will rat her family out to the government if she says anything that smells like dissidence. She told me she always tries to be careful how she words things, just in case. But she doesn't bother encrypting things or switch email addresses, because she's NOT a political dissident, and she has "nothing to hide." To me, the whole thing seemed terribly Orwellian. Watch what you say, Big Brother is listening.
Hey, wasn't there a case where some foreign branch of Google did the same thing a few days ago, turning data over to the government without even a warrant?
Hey, don't WE have a horrifically intrusive federal government that thinks nothing of trying to push corporations into illegally revealing sensitive information?
Personally, I use gMail, because I too have "nothing to hide" - no weird political affiliations, etc. But I wonder how long before I start to subconsciously self-censor what I write people, just to be sure.
"But if you want to keep your secrets, don't use Google/encrypt your communications!" I hear the cry. This is of course true; if my friend and I WERE political activists, we'd probably both be taking a lot more steps to secure ourselves. But we're not, and it's honestly not practical to start sending out public keys to everyone who wants to chat with us via email. So in comes the self-censorship, which IMO has a far more damaging chilling effect on political dialogue than may be immediately evident.
Why do these two have to ruin fun gaming experiences by bloviating about them for pages and pages like they're Citizen Kane in interactive form?
Calling your Gamertag "Child Killer" for killing Little Sisters would be annoying and sensationalist. These guys are supposed to be a link between video games and the mainstream media, and they don't get that having a bunch of 13-year-olds bragging about their shiny new "Child Killer" tag would be bad PR? (No, those 13-year-olds SHOULDN'T be playing M-rated games, but as anyone who's ever used Xbox Live can tell you, they do anyway.)
Anyway, let's see if I can one-up them on the blowhard meter: if we are to take seriously Kant's Third Critique, we would have to accept that aesthetic appreciation is only possible when the object of appreciation is of no immediate practical interest to us (but rather a "disinterested interest"). If we start salivating when looking at a picture of fruit, that's not "artistic" or "aesthetic" appreciation. If we look at pictures of naked women for sexual pleasure, that's not "aesthetic" appreciation. By the same token, if we're worried about our actions in a video game because we think they'll affect our real life in some way, like making us online social pariahs because of our Gamertags, that's not an aesthetic concern either. Introducing pragmatic interests to games makes them closer to porno than to DaVinci.
I love all the posts criticizing the priorities of the American government.
"If we REALLY had our priorities straight, we'd dump $100 billion right now and be on Mars in 2012!" Well, maybe we could. But what exactly is so damned urgent about getting some dudes on another planet RIGHT AWAY? Yeah, it'd be a better expenditure than the Iraq war, but pretty much ANYTHING would.
If we've got $100 billion to spend, how about putting some of it into running doubt the multi-trillion federal debt, or fixing the US health care system, or Social Security? How about funding some OTHER research, finding a cure for cancer or juvenile diabetes or some other tragic and widespread illness? Or hell, fund some damned energy research, get us all in plug-in hybrid cars fueled by safe nuclear plants, and maybe we can stop pumping quite so much carbon into our atmosphere.
Getting to Mars would/will be cool, and I don't doubt the scientific initiative will introduce lots of unexpected technological advances, so we can all fasten our shoes with ULTRA-Velcro in thirty years. But that doesn't make it the most urgent thing on our plate.
Those statistics also say that there are 122,500,000 homes "passed by cable" out of 112,00,000 homes with television... so apparently cable is available to 109% of households, which I'd say is pretty impressive.
TFA is light on details, but it seems the proposal that was withdrawn was something about requiring cable companies to play material from minority-owned small businesses on the "excess channels" they don't use. Still questionable, but not "OMG the FCC wants to censor my cable TV!"
And BTW, the "fuck the FCC" people might want to consider that the fight here is between the FCC and CABLE COMPANIES about stuff like whether they should be required to provide a la carte channel options. Stuff that the cable companies may not want, but which doesn't seem to have a whole lot of bearing on free-speech issues. If you want to argue that a government bureaucracy is worse than a corporate oligarchy, that's a fair stance, but having both filed federal taxes and tried to get a decent internet plan from Comcast, I'm ambivalent.
Yeah, a modern computer could load up every single level of Doom or Super Mario Brothers at once and string them together... but strangely enough, game designers have actually scaled up the detail of their games as computing power has improved.
It's a pretty tough tradeoff, I imagine. Take Half-Life 2. They probably could have more-or-less eliminated load times by scaling down level detail a bit and loading on-the-fly like Oblivion... but would that make it a better game? Apparently Valve thinks we'd rather wait 20 seconds every 15 minutes that have a "seamless" but lower-detail gaming experience.
If we're talking about non-technical reasons for levels (like the different "chapters" in HL2, which didn't change every time a "loading" screen came up), well, games are (ideally) 20+ hours long. You don't expect people to actually play them straight through, so it makes sense to have breaks and intermissions in the narrative, the exact same way almost every novel is broken into chapters.
I am aware of this. The above comment was a joke. If you think the phrasing, "I may not be a lawyer, but it seems to me that the torrent files hosted by TPB that point to copyright-infringing content, and are therefore themselves presented as illegal by record-company lawyers, are ELECTRONIC..." would make the joke funnier, feel free to substitute it in your head.
"Clearly not everything they do is digital. They have atoms as well: servers, laptops, flash drives. "
I may not be a lawyer, but it seems pretty obvious that since they're making illegal ELECTRONIC copies of stuff, only the electrons from those atoms are really in violation. The Pirate Bay folks should be able to insist that the cops leave behind all the protons and neutrons that are their rightful property.
Slashdot Mirror
I hear this sort of advice on Slashdot a lot. "If you don't take [insert privacy procedure here], you're ASKING to get caught!" "Don't say anything over email you wouldn't shout in a crowded room!" And so on.
It's kind of dispiriting to me that so many people consider this an acceptable status quo. That you're not allowed to use the Internet, the DOMINANT new form of communication, the one that was supposed to "free" us somehow, without the expectation that everyone from Big Brother to your kid sister is watching over your shoulder.
"Intelligence," as measured by an (ideal) IQ test, has nothing to do with education. That's why an IQ test is different from the SAT. "IQ" is supposed to represent how well you can reason, remember, make connections, and so on, not what body of knowledge you've already learned.
Since (the theory goes) intelligence helps people succeed in life, those born extra-intelligent will tend to rise above the income level they're born into... and the higher your income level, the fewer kids (on average) you have. Meanwhile, the least intelligent people born into the "upper class" will tend to wash out of school or business and end up in mediocre jobs at a lower income level, where they're statistically likely to have more children. Thus, over a long period of time, the population as a whole will tend to get less intelligent (not merely less educated).
Granted, most of the "stupidity" we see in society probably has a lot more to do with education than raw intelligence. But you can't really argue that intelligence DOES vary within the general population, and that it IS important. No matter what prep school Forrest Gump may have gone to, he wouldn't exactly make a great quantum physicist.
No, but if they do use the technology for censorship or persecution, they damn well better make their source code changes available!
Well then, those specialist surgeons can peel off maybe ten of the thousands of dollars they're making per hour in that operating room to hire a semi-literate guy to watch the operation on closed-circuit TV and count sponges going in and out of the patient.
But I guess until I have a couple decades' vested interest in the status quo I'm not allowed to criticize, right?
Nonciteable and nontrustable it may be (not that those are words), but it's still often a decent place to start, if just to scroll down to the references and external links at the bottom of an entry.
I consider it basically the same as asking a question on Slashdot. You may get lies, stupidity, and egregious stories about pooping in response to your query, but there are generally a few informed people who can at least point you in the right direction.
I believe this Firefly comic is a PERFECT example of the permanent parabasis of the allegory of tropes, thank you very much!
How is it even physically possible to write this list without including Chrono Cross?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDnPYoGzW78
Research subjects who'd just watched 5 minutes of porn were horny.
Research subjects who'd just watched 5 minutes of the Food Network were hungry.
Research subjects who'd just watched 5 minutes of Lifetime hated men.
I mean, Jesus, talk about "no shit" conclusions. Seems like pretty basic stimulus and response here. People watch these movies BECAUSE of the adrenaline rush, to get "pumped up."
I'd say the more interesting question is what types of long-term effects are involved.
Normally I'd say stick with the commercial stuff, because those re the programs they'll encounter in the workplace.
I know a lot of people are gonna say, "Teach the theory, not the program," and so on, but realistically, a huge number of people out there, from high school kids to professionals, are REALLY BAD WITH COMPUTERS. As in, they learn a few tasks by rote, step-by-step, and are afraid to experiment with anything they haven't explicitly been taught. (I worked in a newsroom where people were shocked and awed when I showed them how to "insert special characters" in Word.)
Yes, ideally anyone working in a modern setting SHOULD know the basics about computers and not call in "the nerdy kid" every time they see an unfamiliar menu. But that's a bit beyond the scope of one multimedia class. Public schools already HAVE a lot of computers and a lot of classtime dedicated to learning them; it's up to teachers to stop spending all those resources having kids play Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing and browsing the Internet (which is most of what I recall from computer class).
HOWEVER, the key difference here is that we're talking about high-school kids, and there's an additional benefit to open-source in this case: you can tell the kids to download the programs themselves and mess around with them at home, even after the class is over. Some of them still won't get past that rote "First I click 'File,' then I click 'New'..." mentality, but the more computer-literate among them will have a lot more cool stuff to play with.
Yeah, but I'm guessing that a whole bunch (probably the majority) of the people who end up in tech jobs are FROM those same upper (or upper-middle) classes, while people like your Bombay friend's housemaid's son are the exception.
;-)
You could definitely argue that middle- and lower-class people in Mexico and India would both benefit from learning English, but it's misleading to suggest that India has so many more English-speakers than Mexico purely because they want the tech jobs more... I'd say an extended period of English colonialism had more to do with it.
Um, a lot of these workers in India are "willing to learn English" because it's their birth tongue.
Erm, which I suppose I should link.
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=16457
Actually, if you look at the Gamasutra summary, it's Blizzard (well, Vivendi) buying out Activision. Vivendi gets 52% of the stock of the merged company and 6 of 11 seats on the board.
I actually read TFA, and it's basically the guy saying, "This happens all the time!" over and over. I'm not even being reductionist here:
"And let me be the first to come out and say that what happened to Jeff Gerstmann happens all the time." (Hmm, let's see. You're not "the first" by a long shot; Penny Arcade said the same thing days ago, and even then it was just reiterating a point they'd been making for YEARS, which was in fact so self-evident that ANYBODY paying attention to the industry was aware of it.)
"And if you look outside of the world of gaming, you will see this is not an isolated event; it happens in more mainstream forms of journalism, and I might add that this could be even seen as a sign of growth for our industry."
"As the industry grows, more money is circulated, and money begets corruption. It's a fact of life and it's a fact of capitalism; this is America after all."
Such ridiculous BS. Your "industry" is "burgeoning" at the exact time when it's becoming redundant and useless. If I want fluff-laden previews, game trailers, interviews with developers, and press releases, I have the friggin' Internet at my fingertips here; I don't need Gamespot to aggregate that stuff for me. In fact, the ONLY thing sites like Gamespot have to offer that I can't get somewhere else with far fewer annoying ads (and at least one less layer of crappy-journalistic obfuscation) is their professional reviews. That's the ONLY content worth having, and Gamespot just screwed it up.
I like the complaints about how things getting "big business" is inevitable. Why? A review is a few pages of plain text with a couple JPEG screenshots; hardly a bandwidth hog. To create that review, you need ONE guy who can string together legible prose and is willing to play a wide range of video games for hours on end. Is that really a hard niche to fill on the goddamned INTERNET? All this could easily be paid for with AdSense ads, which (by their very randomness) would pretty much prevent any kind of coercion, unless Google started making games.
I'm just waiting for the Penny Arcade guys or someone else with enough "e-credibility" among gamers to start pimping a site like that. A huge influx of gamers would at least check it out, along with plenty of linking from reputable sites, which would lead to a high Google rating, and before you know it, LegitGameReviews.com is the top hit every time you type "$gamename review" into Google. Hell, there are probably a dozen sites like that around already that I just don't know about - anyone wanna help me out here?
i.e., it might come as a surprise when researchers discover that NOBODY (who opted in) searches the internet for pornography, music torrents, Paris Hilton...
Hell, out of Google's top 20 searches, you might get maybe 3 listed?
She's studying in the US, but most of her family is back in China, and she uses her Yahoo mail account to communicate with them.
She does this knowing full well that Yahoo is reading her mail and will rat her family out to the government if she says anything that smells like dissidence. She told me she always tries to be careful how she words things, just in case. But she doesn't bother encrypting things or switch email addresses, because she's NOT a political dissident, and she has "nothing to hide." To me, the whole thing seemed terribly Orwellian. Watch what you say, Big Brother is listening.
Hey, wasn't there a case where some foreign branch of Google did the same thing a few days ago, turning data over to the government without even a warrant?
Hey, don't WE have a horrifically intrusive federal government that thinks nothing of trying to push corporations into illegally revealing sensitive information?
Personally, I use gMail, because I too have "nothing to hide" - no weird political affiliations, etc. But I wonder how long before I start to subconsciously self-censor what I write people, just to be sure.
"But if you want to keep your secrets, don't use Google/encrypt your communications!" I hear the cry. This is of course true; if my friend and I WERE political activists, we'd probably both be taking a lot more steps to secure ourselves. But we're not, and it's honestly not practical to start sending out public keys to everyone who wants to chat with us via email. So in comes the self-censorship, which IMO has a far more damaging chilling effect on political dialogue than may be immediately evident.
Why do these two have to ruin fun gaming experiences by bloviating about them for pages and pages like they're Citizen Kane in interactive form?
Calling your Gamertag "Child Killer" for killing Little Sisters would be annoying and sensationalist. These guys are supposed to be a link between video games and the mainstream media, and they don't get that having a bunch of 13-year-olds bragging about their shiny new "Child Killer" tag would be bad PR? (No, those 13-year-olds SHOULDN'T be playing M-rated games, but as anyone who's ever used Xbox Live can tell you, they do anyway.)
Anyway, let's see if I can one-up them on the blowhard meter: if we are to take seriously Kant's Third Critique, we would have to accept that aesthetic appreciation is only possible when the object of appreciation is of no immediate practical interest to us (but rather a "disinterested interest"). If we start salivating when looking at a picture of fruit, that's not "artistic" or "aesthetic" appreciation. If we look at pictures of naked women for sexual pleasure, that's not "aesthetic" appreciation. By the same token, if we're worried about our actions in a video game because we think they'll affect our real life in some way, like making us online social pariahs because of our Gamertags, that's not an aesthetic concern either. Introducing pragmatic interests to games makes them closer to porno than to DaVinci.
Nicely crafted, but couldn't you have worked "sheeple" in there somewhere?
I love all the posts criticizing the priorities of the American government.
"If we REALLY had our priorities straight, we'd dump $100 billion right now and be on Mars in 2012!" Well, maybe we could. But what exactly is so damned urgent about getting some dudes on another planet RIGHT AWAY? Yeah, it'd be a better expenditure than the Iraq war, but pretty much ANYTHING would.
If we've got $100 billion to spend, how about putting some of it into running doubt the multi-trillion federal debt, or fixing the US health care system, or Social Security? How about funding some OTHER research, finding a cure for cancer or juvenile diabetes or some other tragic and widespread illness? Or hell, fund some damned energy research, get us all in plug-in hybrid cars fueled by safe nuclear plants, and maybe we can stop pumping quite so much carbon into our atmosphere.
Getting to Mars would/will be cool, and I don't doubt the scientific initiative will introduce lots of unexpected technological advances, so we can all fasten our shoes with ULTRA-Velcro in thirty years. But that doesn't make it the most urgent thing on our plate.
Actually, according to the cable industry, 58% of TV households have basic cable.
http://www.ncta.com/ContentView.aspx?contentId=54
Those statistics also say that there are 122,500,000 homes "passed by cable" out of 112,00,000 homes with television... so apparently cable is available to 109% of households, which I'd say is pretty impressive.
TFA is light on details, but it seems the proposal that was withdrawn was something about requiring cable companies to play material from minority-owned small businesses on the "excess channels" they don't use. Still questionable, but not "OMG the FCC wants to censor my cable TV!"
And BTW, the "fuck the FCC" people might want to consider that the fight here is between the FCC and CABLE COMPANIES about stuff like whether they should be required to provide a la carte channel options. Stuff that the cable companies may not want, but which doesn't seem to have a whole lot of bearing on free-speech issues. If you want to argue that a government bureaucracy is worse than a corporate oligarchy, that's a fair stance, but having both filed federal taxes and tried to get a decent internet plan from Comcast, I'm ambivalent.
...a WHAT ball?
Yeah, a modern computer could load up every single level of Doom or Super Mario Brothers at once and string them together... but strangely enough, game designers have actually scaled up the detail of their games as computing power has improved.
It's a pretty tough tradeoff, I imagine. Take Half-Life 2. They probably could have more-or-less eliminated load times by scaling down level detail a bit and loading on-the-fly like Oblivion... but would that make it a better game? Apparently Valve thinks we'd rather wait 20 seconds every 15 minutes that have a "seamless" but lower-detail gaming experience.
If we're talking about non-technical reasons for levels (like the different "chapters" in HL2, which didn't change every time a "loading" screen came up), well, games are (ideally) 20+ hours long. You don't expect people to actually play them straight through, so it makes sense to have breaks and intermissions in the narrative, the exact same way almost every novel is broken into chapters.
I am aware of this. The above comment was a joke. If you think the phrasing, "I may not be a lawyer, but it seems to me that the torrent files hosted by TPB that point to copyright-infringing content, and are therefore themselves presented as illegal by record-company lawyers, are ELECTRONIC..." would make the joke funnier, feel free to substitute it in your head.
"Clearly not everything they do is digital. They have atoms as well: servers, laptops, flash drives. "
I may not be a lawyer, but it seems pretty obvious that since they're making illegal ELECTRONIC copies of stuff, only the electrons from those atoms are really in violation. The Pirate Bay folks should be able to insist that the cops leave behind all the protons and neutrons that are their rightful property.