The title of this submission should be: "Flamebait"
Claiming to know the top five games of all time is like picking the best religion or operating system. Someone, somewhere, is going to pick a fight... and 87 posts and 150 mod points later, no one agrees on anything.
It is a problem... but frankly it is easier to determine what you don't like than what you like... especially with 20/20 Hindsight at your disposal...
A Kick-Vote system would make politicians subject to every fickle whim of the public (sheparded by the media)... In the current situation, politicians don't have to listen to voters at all, since the voters have no other choice... but with kick-voting, politicians couldn't afford to disagree with anyone... and hence would get nothing done but flip-flopping.
A better solution (albeit not easy to implement by any means) would be to give voters more choices... but good luck doing that... both major parties are more than happy to unite in order to maintain their duopoly against upstarts.
Who the hell modded the parent down? That was totally on topic... just because your creator is a vengeful old dude in white robes and mine is the divine embodiment of my favorite meal doesn't mean it was off topic!
Yes, obviously it is better to teach kids in a one room schoolhouse with 8 hours of strict lecture a day. Preferably from the classics... because those are dense and archaic enough to completely lack entertainment value. But we can't use Shakespeare, because his plays are entertaining... this is the RIGHT way, as dictated by the everything-was-better-in-ye-olde-tymes police.
Last I checked, humanity is advancing, illiteracy is decreasing, HS graduation is up, and kids today ARE able to contribute to society by the time society asks them to... maybe the reason that entertainment as a tool for education has become so common is because it is effective? Just a thought...
So you're telling me that you never played with Legos as a kid? or Barbies? Or Lincoln Logs? Or the little games where you stick shapes into their corresponding holes? Did your teacher never read you books in class? Did you never sing songs for a school concert? Did you ever watch Donald in Mathmagic Land?
I know I did all these things in school. In fact, I'm sure I learned just about everything from playing games (entertainment), watching movies (entertainment), and listening to/singing songs (entertainment).
In fact, short of a direct brain interface, not sure how you would teach children anything if you couldn't entertain them in the process. They just wouldn't pay attention. Heck, the only reason I practiced multiplication tables was to win our math races... and we spent a week during our poetry unit in Junior english listening to and analyzing song lyrics (The Sound of Silence and Stairway to Heaven included)... and I expressly remember singing along to that Kokomo song (by the Beach Boys) in first grade at a school play... it would've been a shame if the RIAA had shown up then and busted poor Mrs. Sanderson for playing it...
How sad society would be if our kids had to learn without entertainment...
Maybe it's just me, but if I bought a HD-DVD/Blu-ray movie, completely legally, and I wanted to watch it on my laptop in a plane or car, I should be able to do it on whatever OS I want. I paid for it. It is now my property, not the MPAA's. This is akin to the author of a book telling me I can only read it in McDonalds. If I dare read it at home or, god forbid, at Wendy's, then the book will be blank when I open it.
What a brilliant case of mutually supportive monopolies. Microsoft supports the MPAA's DRM technology and the MPAA refuses to license it to third parties in order to force people to watch movies on Windows.
This leaves you with two choices... either do without (which only works for an idealist), or pony up for Vista (what the majority will do). I mean, in the short term, hopefully no one will buy this stuff and it will kill the whole scam... but eventually your only choice will be HD content (I know VHS is still around, but really, better to do without than buy VHS).
On the upside, I'm optimistic the DRM will be cracked...
Cool... I always find the things they do to movies in order to export them so interesting... it's always fun watching a movie in it's native language and then another language to see what they change... A future full of Pizza Huts doesn't sound near as dystopian as a future full of Taco Bells... but that's probably just because I'm hungry...
I'm a huge fan of both Stargate series, but I'm going to have to side with the GP and say that Torri Higginson (Weir) is the most overdramatic-painful-to-watch-overactor-only-has-o ne-tone-of-voice-and-it-is-shrill actress I have ever seen. Every episode I hope that she falls off her balcony into the ocean...
Hope they wrap up SG-1 with some sweetness... I hate it when they leave things unresolved at the end of a series... unless the mention of 'the movie being back on' at the end of the 200th episode was a hint that a movie is indeed back on in real life. That would be a sweet way to cap the series, provided they could get the actors to sign on for it.
I think the GP's point is that all these secondary 'misses' are just another way to keep the google brand (and google search and adwords) front in center in Internet culture. One could argue that Coke wastes tons of money developing advertisements and promotions, but they have a very strong brandname and they got it because they continually push it. As soon as Google stops releasing a new beta for everyone to go gaga over once a month, they will no longer hold the spotlight, and people will take them for granted. As long as google uses new products to generate buzz, they will keep generating revenue for their ads.
An analogy would be how Nintendo used to operate... I'm sure they didn't make a ton of money on each game title, but having a good collection of games was critical to get people to buy the console in the first place. This analogy isn't too great though, because nowdays the consoles most likely sell at a loss and the bread and butter are the games and accessories.
I don't know about you, but I can't remember the last time I was only running one peice of software at a time.
I just got a new Turion X2 laptop, and I can say that it handles running Eclipse, MySQL, Apache, GAIM, my 40 Firefox tabs, mp3 player, and a bunch of other random shit much better than my other (single core) machine. How much faster is it? Heck if I know. I'm not really a benchmark fanboy... but dual/multi-core systems don't require awesomely parallel software. They just require some degree of multitasking and a somewhat recent OS.
That is because every time eBay tries to change things, their sellers pitch a hissy fit. I can understand that when you are doing a lot of ebay business, you don't want to have to constantly relearn where they moved such and such option or setting, but eBay has tried to modernize... it just can't stand up to it's own sellers. What amazes me is that they have owned PayPal for this long and still haven't integrated any better than they have. Monopoly breeds complacency.
I, for one, am seriously pissed that this article got posted. Up until now, natural selection was working like a charm... hopefully none of those scream-into-the-phone-about-their-one-night-stand assholes in the Borders cafe read/.
I realize you're not trying to ridicule, unlike the AC who keeps posting in this little thread, who seems to take what I consider to be lighthearted sarcasm to be a seriously premeditated attempt at an ad hominem. Like this issue seriously matters enough to degenerate into something on the level of politics. I can see it now... the Strict Definitivists vs. those who liberally interpret the dictionary. I wonder which party would take up which side?;)
But anyway, I like hashing out pointless things like this!
You can say that 'begging the question' means 'eating pineapple' all you want, but unless that becomes a common use of the term, then people will just look at you funny. I totally agree that language is communal, and that was my whole argument to begin with. Trying to impose strict rules on a language has never worked for very long. The French have been trying to do it for some time (although they do at least add new words that are approved by the group in charge of maintaining the language), and it doesn't work incredibly well. They recently created a decidedly more 'French' word for email... couriel or something. But most will probably still use the old word or at least understand it for some time. What matters, and what I was trying to convey, is that most of the people understand the meaning in context.
If we all know that X means X, then X has meaning. If, over time, we all decide that X really means Y, then X still has meaning and there's no confusion.
But if some people say X means X1 and others that it means X2 then we have issues.
You say it right there... if, over time, we decide that X means Y. Those changes don't happen instantly, and at some point X will mean both X and Y. The issue is not whether X really means X or Y. The fact is that X has come to mean both X and Y, depending on the context and the audience. Allowing one group to dictate the meaning of a word regardless of context, even one they created to suit their subject matter, just doesn't work. Another group is bound to hear the new word, think it sounds cool or works in their own context, and co-opt it. It's not wrong or corrupt to do so, it is simply the evolution of language.
The group that uses 'begs the question' to mean 'raises the question' might sound like a bunch of bumbling idiots to you. That makes sense considering the context in which you are used to using the phrase. I'm not arguing that they are right and that you are wrong. I'm saying that the poster used it in a manner that was understood by the audience, and the expression served its purpose. Had he been discussing a philosophical argument, it would have been mighty confusing, but thankfully he was talking about cars.
Also, I would say that the only difference between the expression 'beating a dead horse' and 'making a quantum leap' is familiarity. The phrase 'to beat a dead horse' has probably been around long enough to be more acceptable in a non-literal sense, whereas the idea of quantum leaps is new enough that people can still remember the time when it only referred to electrons and not to flashy marketing slogans about giant leaps in product design. Similiarly, I would guess that 'begging the question' has only begun to be misused recently, and so still strikes people as strange and incorrect. Hell, I know that hearing someone use the word 'download' when they clearly mean 'install' (i.e. "Can you download Windows onto my new computer?") chaps my ass, just because it is incorrect terminology, but sadly, it wouldn't surprise me if that meaning takes off in common usage.
I guess mainly what I am trying to say is that it is easy to declare new things related to language to be 'wrong' or 'corrupting the language'... but the reality is that languages change greatly over time, and what we have now is no more set in stone than what Shakespeare had then. Sure, writing has probably slowed this down somewhat, just because it gives us a reference point, but it's still always changing. I'm sure every generation has done a thorough butchering on the language of its parent's generation... such is life.
My argument is that the phrase 'begs the question' has passed into the daily lexicon (at least in America) to mean 'raises the question.' Had this been a discussion about logical fallacies, or had the poster tried to use the 'begging the question' fallacy incorrectly, then by all means, make fun of him. But when the phrase is used in it's obvious colloquial manner, don't get all twisted up over it.
The same goes for your quantum leap example. If we were discussing electrons and I said 'Such and such electron made a quantum leap from that energy level, through three others, into this energy level over a period of several minutes'... I would expect you to point out that I am a pinhead. But if I say that my cell phone represents a quantum leap over my last cell phone... I obviously mean the colloqial usage. To think that using quantum leap in that context has anything to do with electron jumping would be absurd, but the fact remains that phrases like 'quantam leap' and 'begs the question' have entered the english vocabulary with these non-technical meanings. To use them in a non-technical manner is not grounds for ridicule.
To illustrate, think of how many people say they 'surf' the web. I bet you might have even uttered this phrase at some point. My, how the surfer technoelite would be appalled! According to Wikipedia, "Surfing is a surface water sport that involves the participant being carried by a breaking wave."... So you are somehow riding a breaking wave on the internet? How could you use a verb like surf in such an incorrect manner?!
Just because a phrase originated in a technical field doesn't mean that it carries that technical meaning when used out of that context. Wikipedia (here) says it best... "Words that have a formal meaning may also have a colloquial meaning that, while technically incorrect, is recognizeable due to common usage."
Using phrases as such may not be utterly correct, but I maintain that the point of language is to communicate, and practicing formal writing is not the point of/.
Slashdot Mirror
And to top that off, where is X-Com: UFO Defense and Age of Empires II: Age of Kings?
The title of this submission should be: "Flamebait"
Claiming to know the top five games of all time is like picking the best religion or operating system. Someone, somewhere, is going to pick a fight... and 87 posts and 150 mod points later, no one agrees on anything.
Next up on /. ---- Top Five Best Magic Cards
It is a problem... but frankly it is easier to determine what you don't like than what you like... especially with 20/20 Hindsight at your disposal...
A Kick-Vote system would make politicians subject to every fickle whim of the public (sheparded by the media)... In the current situation, politicians don't have to listen to voters at all, since the voters have no other choice... but with kick-voting, politicians couldn't afford to disagree with anyone... and hence would get nothing done but flip-flopping.
A better solution (albeit not easy to implement by any means) would be to give voters more choices... but good luck doing that... both major parties are more than happy to unite in order to maintain their duopoly against upstarts.
... I for one welcome our Large Hadron Overlords ...
Who the hell modded the parent down? That was totally on topic... just because your creator is a vengeful old dude in white robes and mine is the divine embodiment of my favorite meal doesn't mean it was off topic!
Hallowed is the Orisi!
Not according to the RIAA... seems like blackmail would fit right in with the rest of their extortion methods...
Yes, obviously it is better to teach kids in a one room schoolhouse with 8 hours of strict lecture a day. Preferably from the classics... because those are dense and archaic enough to completely lack entertainment value. But we can't use Shakespeare, because his plays are entertaining... this is the RIGHT way, as dictated by the everything-was-better-in-ye-olde-tymes police.
Last I checked, humanity is advancing, illiteracy is decreasing, HS graduation is up, and kids today ARE able to contribute to society by the time society asks them to... maybe the reason that entertainment as a tool for education has become so common is because it is effective? Just a thought...
So you're telling me that you never played with Legos as a kid? or Barbies? Or Lincoln Logs? Or the little games where you stick shapes into their corresponding holes? Did your teacher never read you books in class? Did you never sing songs for a school concert? Did you ever watch Donald in Mathmagic Land?
I know I did all these things in school. In fact, I'm sure I learned just about everything from playing games (entertainment), watching movies (entertainment), and listening to/singing songs (entertainment).
In fact, short of a direct brain interface, not sure how you would teach children anything if you couldn't entertain them in the process. They just wouldn't pay attention. Heck, the only reason I practiced multiplication tables was to win our math races... and we spent a week during our poetry unit in Junior english listening to and analyzing song lyrics (The Sound of Silence and Stairway to Heaven included)... and I expressly remember singing along to that Kokomo song (by the Beach Boys) in first grade at a school play... it would've been a shame if the RIAA had shown up then and busted poor Mrs. Sanderson for playing it...
How sad society would be if our kids had to learn without entertainment...
Even with spotty native support... ndiswrapper heals all.
Maybe it's just me, but if I bought a HD-DVD/Blu-ray movie, completely legally, and I wanted to watch it on my laptop in a plane or car, I should be able to do it on whatever OS I want. I paid for it. It is now my property, not the MPAA's. This is akin to the author of a book telling me I can only read it in McDonalds. If I dare read it at home or, god forbid, at Wendy's, then the book will be blank when I open it.
What a brilliant case of mutually supportive monopolies. Microsoft supports the MPAA's DRM technology and the MPAA refuses to license it to third parties in order to force people to watch movies on Windows.
This leaves you with two choices... either do without (which only works for an idealist), or pony up for Vista (what the majority will do). I mean, in the short term, hopefully no one will buy this stuff and it will kill the whole scam... but eventually your only choice will be HD content (I know VHS is still around, but really, better to do without than buy VHS).
On the upside, I'm optimistic the DRM will be cracked...
Cool... I always find the things they do to movies in order to export them so interesting... it's always fun watching a movie in it's native language and then another language to see what they change... A future full of Pizza Huts doesn't sound near as dystopian as a future full of Taco Bells... but that's probably just because I'm hungry...
All Your Belong Are Happy To Mice?
Obviously you missed the GP's reference to the greatest movie of 1993!
John Spartan, you are fined one credit...
I'm a huge fan of both Stargate series, but I'm going to have to side with the GP and say that Torri Higginson (Weir) is the most overdramatic-painful-to-watch-overactor-only-has-o ne-tone-of-voice-and-it-is-shrill actress I have ever seen. Every episode I hope that she falls off her balcony into the ocean...
Hope they wrap up SG-1 with some sweetness... I hate it when they leave things unresolved at the end of a series... unless the mention of 'the movie being back on' at the end of the 200th episode was a hint that a movie is indeed back on in real life. That would be a sweet way to cap the series, provided they could get the actors to sign on for it.
Yeah, I know... someone mod up Joel +infinity insightful...
I think the GP's point is that all these secondary 'misses' are just another way to keep the google brand (and google search and adwords) front in center in Internet culture. One could argue that Coke wastes tons of money developing advertisements and promotions, but they have a very strong brandname and they got it because they continually push it. As soon as Google stops releasing a new beta for everyone to go gaga over once a month, they will no longer hold the spotlight, and people will take them for granted. As long as google uses new products to generate buzz, they will keep generating revenue for their ads.
An analogy would be how Nintendo used to operate... I'm sure they didn't make a ton of money on each game title, but having a good collection of games was critical to get people to buy the console in the first place. This analogy isn't too great though, because nowdays the consoles most likely sell at a loss and the bread and butter are the games and accessories.
If I had mod points you'd get a +1 Funny... mainly for working cocker spaniels into the discussion...
I don't know about you, but I can't remember the last time I was only running one peice of software at a time.
I just got a new Turion X2 laptop, and I can say that it handles running Eclipse, MySQL, Apache, GAIM, my 40 Firefox tabs, mp3 player, and a bunch of other random shit much better than my other (single core) machine. How much faster is it? Heck if I know. I'm not really a benchmark fanboy... but dual/multi-core systems don't require awesomely parallel software. They just require some degree of multitasking and a somewhat recent OS.
Pardon the bluntness... but what the heavenly fuck did that mess you just wrote have to do with anything?
That is because every time eBay tries to change things, their sellers pitch a hissy fit. I can understand that when you are doing a lot of ebay business, you don't want to have to constantly relearn where they moved such and such option or setting, but eBay has tried to modernize... it just can't stand up to it's own sellers. What amazes me is that they have owned PayPal for this long and still haven't integrated any better than they have. Monopoly breeds complacency.
+5 Penny-Arcade-Link
I, for one, am seriously pissed that this article got posted. Up until now, natural selection was working like a charm... hopefully none of those scream-into-the-phone-about-their-one-night-stand assholes in the Borders cafe read /.
Brilliant!
I realize you're not trying to ridicule, unlike the AC who keeps posting in this little thread, who seems to take what I consider to be lighthearted sarcasm to be a seriously premeditated attempt at an ad hominem. Like this issue seriously matters enough to degenerate into something on the level of politics. I can see it now... the Strict Definitivists vs. those who liberally interpret the dictionary. I wonder which party would take up which side? ;)
But anyway, I like hashing out pointless things like this!
You can say that 'begging the question' means 'eating pineapple' all you want, but unless that becomes a common use of the term, then people will just look at you funny. I totally agree that language is communal, and that was my whole argument to begin with. Trying to impose strict rules on a language has never worked for very long. The French have been trying to do it for some time (although they do at least add new words that are approved by the group in charge of maintaining the language), and it doesn't work incredibly well. They recently created a decidedly more 'French' word for email... couriel or something. But most will probably still use the old word or at least understand it for some time. What matters, and what I was trying to convey, is that most of the people understand the meaning in context.
You say it right there... if, over time, we decide that X means Y. Those changes don't happen instantly, and at some point X will mean both X and Y. The issue is not whether X really means X or Y. The fact is that X has come to mean both X and Y, depending on the context and the audience. Allowing one group to dictate the meaning of a word regardless of context, even one they created to suit their subject matter, just doesn't work. Another group is bound to hear the new word, think it sounds cool or works in their own context, and co-opt it. It's not wrong or corrupt to do so, it is simply the evolution of language.
The group that uses 'begs the question' to mean 'raises the question' might sound like a bunch of bumbling idiots to you. That makes sense considering the context in which you are used to using the phrase. I'm not arguing that they are right and that you are wrong. I'm saying that the poster used it in a manner that was understood by the audience, and the expression served its purpose. Had he been discussing a philosophical argument, it would have been mighty confusing, but thankfully he was talking about cars.
Also, I would say that the only difference between the expression 'beating a dead horse' and 'making a quantum leap' is familiarity. The phrase 'to beat a dead horse' has probably been around long enough to be more acceptable in a non-literal sense, whereas the idea of quantum leaps is new enough that people can still remember the time when it only referred to electrons and not to flashy marketing slogans about giant leaps in product design. Similiarly, I would guess that 'begging the question' has only begun to be misused recently, and so still strikes people as strange and incorrect. Hell, I know that hearing someone use the word 'download' when they clearly mean 'install' (i.e. "Can you download Windows onto my new computer?") chaps my ass, just because it is incorrect terminology, but sadly, it wouldn't surprise me if that meaning takes off in common usage.
I guess mainly what I am trying to say is that it is easy to declare new things related to language to be 'wrong' or 'corrupting the language' ... but the reality is that languages change greatly over time, and what we have now is no more set in stone than what Shakespeare had then. Sure, writing has probably slowed this down somewhat, just because it gives us a reference point, but it's still always changing. I'm sure every generation has done a thorough butchering on the language of its parent's generation... such is life.
My argument is that the phrase 'begs the question' has passed into the daily lexicon (at least in America) to mean 'raises the question.' Had this been a discussion about logical fallacies, or had the poster tried to use the 'begging the question' fallacy incorrectly, then by all means, make fun of him. But when the phrase is used in it's obvious colloquial manner, don't get all twisted up over it.
The same goes for your quantum leap example. If we were discussing electrons and I said 'Such and such electron made a quantum leap from that energy level, through three others, into this energy level over a period of several minutes' ... I would expect you to point out that I am a pinhead. But if I say that my cell phone represents a quantum leap over my last cell phone... I obviously mean the colloqial usage. To think that using quantum leap in that context has anything to do with electron jumping would be absurd, but the fact remains that phrases like 'quantam leap' and 'begs the question' have entered the english vocabulary with these non-technical meanings. To use them in a non-technical manner is not grounds for ridicule.
To illustrate, think of how many people say they 'surf' the web. I bet you might have even uttered this phrase at some point. My, how the surfer technoelite would be appalled! According to Wikipedia, "Surfing is a surface water sport that involves the participant being carried by a breaking wave." ... So you are somehow riding a breaking wave on the internet? How could you use a verb like surf in such an incorrect manner?!
Just because a phrase originated in a technical field doesn't mean that it carries that technical meaning when used out of that context. Wikipedia (here) says it best... "Words that have a formal meaning may also have a colloquial meaning that, while technically incorrect, is recognizeable due to common usage."
Using phrases as such may not be utterly correct, but I maintain that the point of language is to communicate, and practicing formal writing is not the point of /.