It certainly does to me! I wasted several years of my life there. Hell, I could probably even blame it for flunking out of college the first time around. Heh. Still, if I could put mytharria.org,2593 in my login.cfg right now and start playing again, I would in a heartbeat. Believe it or not, I have an old mytharria.tgz that's been sitting on my hard drive for years (the file date says 12/25/2001) that's the entire POL run environment for the server at some point, I think the "Dawn's Rising". Don't ask me how I got it, I can't remember. I used to have a huge number of screenshots, but I lost them all several years ago. It was a sad day.
There's really never been another game or another UO community that has been able to recapture that magic. =\
Er, you're talking about a system that, supposedly, god created. He made those rules. Sure, that makes sense with the rules we understand, but he could just as easily made a reality where we had free will AND there was no suffering. Or no "sin", even. God created sin! Isn't that a hoot? You are mistakenly assuming that reality as we know it is the only possibility, but it's not. Things that seem contradictory to us, in this reality, could be perfectly sensible in some other reality that god could have created, but didn't. He could also just change all the rules in the middle of things, and sort out all the problems. That's the beauty of omnipotence! He really could end all suffering and let us all have free will. We don't understand that, but he MUST be able to do it, if he's omnipotent. So why doesn't he? Oh right, he's an asshole. Or imaginary. Or not really omnipotent after all.
I don't see how he could do that and still give humans free will?
Woah there fella, you are implying both that you understanding of things is on par with god's AND that he isn't omnipotent. You can't see how, that's fine. But if we assume omnipotence and omniscience, then god knows how to do it, and has the power to do it. He just didn't. Kinda sick in the head, when you think about it.
Yeah, but "supernatural" doesn't equal an omnipotent, benevolent god. There are logical problems with the idea of an omnipotent and benevolent god, which I have never seen answered. The best explanation is something about "free will", or how all the bad that happens is due to Adam eating the magic apple, but that requires you to believe in the mythology, and you can't really buy into it before you've boughten into it, if that makes sense.
I think the polytheists had it right: there are lots of gods, none of them all powerful, and some of them are good, and some are evil. That makes a lot more sense. The idea of a single all-powerful being who loves you more than you can even imagine falls apart at even the slightest scrutiny.
It comes down to "faith", which is nothing more than believing something as a truth with no rational basis. There is really no way to dissuade someone from faith, only show them that the idea itself opens them up to a lot of manipulation and hinders our ability the understand how the world around us works, even if we never figure out why. I think it's clear that, whatever gods there may or may not be, humanity is left to its own devices. If anyone is going to get us out of a pickle, it's us. To think that a magic man from the sky is going to come down and fix everything is almost a license to ignore all the problems around you. That's my main point of contention with religion.
Oddly, Christianity, at least, speaks strongly to being very humanitarian and very tolerant. It teaches being a good steward of what you've been given. That's assuming the throw out the Old Testament on the argument of "grace" or however they rationalize cherry-picking parts of the book. Still, I think the biggest problem is that we have mostly bad Christians. They'd rather demonize gays and abotionists while allowing robbers to steal from the poor and give to the rich, and rape our environment, and generally break all the rules the believe in. I really think their Christ, were he here today, would rank caring for the sick and poor (gasp, socialism!) far above what gay people do, or above the handful of abortions that are performed.
But that's just my little soapbox. There's really no point to posting all this on Slashdot. I might as well, though, since I typed it all.
I'm with you on this in the sense that commercials can't make false claims about a product. If you're peddling what you have as the truth, without disclaimer, then you ought to be held accountable for it. The media is extremely powerful. The real problem is that to get on the TV -- which is perhaps the only way an uniformed person learns anything -- you have to have massive amounts of cash. So automatically, broadcasters' interests are wildly different from the average American.
Which brings us back to the internet. Media is afraid of the internet, and media is very well represented by Washington. Washington always puts its interests first. Is it any wonder the conservatives are afraid of a totally free and neutral internet in the hands of the masses? They're afraid of your average american being informed by other average Americans and not mega-corp media. It really comes down to money. Media is more apt to keep the status quo, which right now, is the rich getting richer. So the conservatives are in love with it, because they really only put the thinnest veneer of religious, social, and moral conservativism on top of their main platform, which is getting the rich richer. Of course FOX news is never going to give you enough honest information to figure that out.
Actually, I hadn't considered that eating plants doesn't necessarily have to kill the plant, so I guess it's a more "humane" in a sense.
No really, thanks -- it's really unusual for me to encounter a point of view I hadn't considered. I'm going to have to think about that for a while an reevaluate where I stand on this issue.
Not to offend anyone, but that's because, if you're particularity smart, a social group of people with "average" intellect is like hanging out with children. I hope you get the image of Michael Jackson and Neverland here, because that's a little bit what it's like for smart people to engage in of the vapid nonsense that's hip these days. Though if you're posting intelligently on slashdot, you're probably not in that crowd. Is it any wonder, though, given that the relative intelligence of animals is related in the sense of how it corresponds to a child's intelligence?
I'm not saying that smart people can't be well-adjusted, but it's generally not worth the effort you have to put into it. It's easier to just socialize with other smart people primarily, and be somewhat aloof to the rest. To me, what is the latest new pop song, or who's popular in sports, or what's the season's fashion is about as important to me as some random Joe's kids' cartoons and hit toys are to Joe. I just don't see the point of it. It's not that I can't learn every fact about Miley Cyrus, or the NFL, or what the top ten fashion designers are doing these days... but even cursory research would give me far more knowledge about the topic and your average Joe knows about it. Sure, I'd be able to discuss it with them, but we still wouldn't be on a level playing field. Not only would I know more about the topic of their interest than them, I'd know more about it than they'd care to know, and, again, come off as some kind of oddball nerd who is "booksmart but has no common sense." So there's really no winning.
Another thing to consider is that being socially successful is, to a large degree, about being able to manipulate others. Smart people tend to be more ethical, and may be more opposed to manipulating others, even if they are able to.
I may be shooting out of my league here, but I thought we domesticated dogs for three reasons: 1) They would eat our trash, so there was no competition for food. 2) They provided warning and extra protection. 3) In a pinch, you could eat them. Eventually, they because useful in hunting as well, though that probably didn't happen until later, but you could count that as a forth use for foragers.
That said, I don't know about the other things in your posts. From what I understand, foragers were usually very nomadic, had few possessions, and basically unlimited natural resources from their perspective. Why would they be warlike? We can talk about studying skulls, but that has ALWAYS been fraught with really bad science. This is before horticulture and pastoralism, though. Those were still mobile, but also might have some permanent settlements, as in the case of transhumanance pastoralists. Those were potentially warlike, as they'd need some source for food besides the meat their raised, and raiding others was definitely an option, but so was trade or limited horticulture.
I'm not disagreeing with your idea that domestication of the dog by humans is an example of co-evolution, and they it might be as important as fire and tool making, but surely this wasn't because all foragers were constantly warring with each others. From all I can tell, they were generally peaceful. It's not until you move into more sophisticated modes of subsistence that war even makes any sense. All foragers really had to fight over was mate selection.
How is the Mayan way any better? It's just a base-5 / base-20 system?
If you assume the Mayans also counted on their toes, it makes a lot of sense. But it's really not that different. You have to think in terms of "places" or powers of the base to have any real number you can use. I guess adding and subtracting seems easier, because you never have to think of more than four bars or dots, but is it that much harder to deal with nine things, even if they're visually dissimilar? I don't think so.
The real difficult comes when you're crossing the powers, and have to "carry". The Mayan system doesn't make that any easier.
That's what you get for going to the university to study performance. Or maybe you're teaching, but salary there is a different problem. I majored in music (vocal performance) for about a semester. Now I'm doing EE. I figured I can learn the music theory independently, I can still be in ensemble, and there's no possible way for the school to beat the quality and price I can get on my own for private instruction. That's probably the case unless you're going to a really good music school.
And what am I free of? Recital attendance, endless rehearsals, form and analysis, class piano, music history(!) -- do as much or as little of the music curriculum as you want. If you want to perform for a living, I don't see how an academic degree is very useful.
When I'm done I'll have a useful degree in something I enjoy. I can still audition for anything I want, and if I'm good, it won't really matter what my degree is in. The only thing I can't do is teach music, which is something I have no interest in anyway.
The kicker is that, with a degree in performance, there's STILL no measure of how "good" you are. With almost any other degree, you can reasonably assume is the student passed the require courses, they have at least a basic proficiency with those subjects. You can assume someone with a physics degree knows calculus, or that someone with a nursing degree knows basic biology, and so on. With performance... all you know is that they've studied it for at least four years. That may be saying a lot, or may not be saying anything at all. That's why you still have to audition, and why, unless you just really want the music major experience, I think music degrees are useless unless you want to teach.
Everyone has explicit motives for all speech. Ad hominem is never rational discourse: a person's motives are not relevant to the merit of their points.
Yeah, but compare what happens when a 250k/yr + family loses 10% of their income (to tax in this case) versus, for example, versus a 30k/yr family.
The former might not get a new car this year, or take that extra vacation, or have to sell the 70' lake yacht and get a 50' lake yacht instead, drop the country club membership, etc. etc.-- basically they'd lose some luxuries.
For the latter, it might mean a foreclosure, not being able to send little Johnny to college this year, not being able to afford medical care, and what have you. 3k/yr could easily be make or break for a low-income family.
So really, forgive me if I don't see how it's a fair comparison. I really don't see how the richer folks are being cheated. They are benefiting more from a system that both ends of the spectrum put effort into -- with the people in the low and middle income brackets probably putting in most of the effort.
I don't know if I'd go that far. There are usually school policies and departmental guidelines. A paying student can always file a formal complaint, and is usually granted audience with a dean or whoever else they request to meet with. Ultimately, the students could all drop the class and not sign up for any further classes by that teacher, if they unionized. That would definitely force some kind of resolution.
You could aim a webcam at it and have it snap a picture every 5 minutes.
I actually suggested a friend of mine use that technique for wanting to be able to remotely check the reading from a weather station on his boat while he was at home.
I'm not really joking. If you're good with software, but not hardware, this might be the way to go. Then have some image processing software read the data you want from a series of images, or in realtime, and pop it into a spreadsheet. You could even do with no internet connection if you got one of those prepay camera phone and put some software on it to take the pictures and upload them somewhere. You'd just need a power tap. (which is much simpler than designing circuits)
You can't really have one without the other, though. Cities live off the resources of the rural areas, and it just wouldn't work to have a huge urban center surrounded by wild lands. All your points of access to water, lumber, metals, agriculture, etc. wouldn't exist, and that's not to mention the folks that would need to be transported there for logging, mining, farming, etc.
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It certainly does to me! I wasted several years of my life there. Hell, I could probably even blame it for flunking out of college the first time around. Heh. Still, if I could put mytharria.org,2593 in my login.cfg right now and start playing again, I would in a heartbeat. Believe it or not, I have an old mytharria.tgz that's been sitting on my hard drive for years (the file date says 12/25/2001) that's the entire POL run environment for the server at some point, I think the "Dawn's Rising". Don't ask me how I got it, I can't remember. I used to have a huge number of screenshots, but I lost them all several years ago. It was a sad day.
There's really never been another game or another UO community that has been able to recapture that magic. =\
Er, you're talking about a system that, supposedly, god created. He made those rules. Sure, that makes sense with the rules we understand, but he could just as easily made a reality where we had free will AND there was no suffering. Or no "sin", even. God created sin! Isn't that a hoot? You are mistakenly assuming that reality as we know it is the only possibility, but it's not. Things that seem contradictory to us, in this reality, could be perfectly sensible in some other reality that god could have created, but didn't. He could also just change all the rules in the middle of things, and sort out all the problems. That's the beauty of omnipotence! He really could end all suffering and let us all have free will. We don't understand that, but he MUST be able to do it, if he's omnipotent. So why doesn't he? Oh right, he's an asshole. Or imaginary. Or not really omnipotent after all.
I don't see how he could do that and still give humans free will?
Woah there fella, you are implying both that you understanding of things is on par with god's AND that he isn't omnipotent. You can't see how, that's fine. But if we assume omnipotence and omniscience, then god knows how to do it, and has the power to do it. He just didn't. Kinda sick in the head, when you think about it.
Yeah, but "supernatural" doesn't equal an omnipotent, benevolent god. There are logical problems with the idea of an omnipotent and benevolent god, which I have never seen answered. The best explanation is something about "free will", or how all the bad that happens is due to Adam eating the magic apple, but that requires you to believe in the mythology, and you can't really buy into it before you've boughten into it, if that makes sense.
I think the polytheists had it right: there are lots of gods, none of them all powerful, and some of them are good, and some are evil. That makes a lot more sense. The idea of a single all-powerful being who loves you more than you can even imagine falls apart at even the slightest scrutiny.
It comes down to "faith", which is nothing more than believing something as a truth with no rational basis. There is really no way to dissuade someone from faith, only show them that the idea itself opens them up to a lot of manipulation and hinders our ability the understand how the world around us works, even if we never figure out why. I think it's clear that, whatever gods there may or may not be, humanity is left to its own devices. If anyone is going to get us out of a pickle, it's us. To think that a magic man from the sky is going to come down and fix everything is almost a license to ignore all the problems around you. That's my main point of contention with religion.
Oddly, Christianity, at least, speaks strongly to being very humanitarian and very tolerant. It teaches being a good steward of what you've been given. That's assuming the throw out the Old Testament on the argument of "grace" or however they rationalize cherry-picking parts of the book. Still, I think the biggest problem is that we have mostly bad Christians. They'd rather demonize gays and abotionists while allowing robbers to steal from the poor and give to the rich, and rape our environment, and generally break all the rules the believe in. I really think their Christ, were he here today, would rank caring for the sick and poor (gasp, socialism!) far above what gay people do, or above the handful of abortions that are performed.
But that's just my little soapbox. There's really no point to posting all this on Slashdot. I might as well, though, since I typed it all.
I'm with you on this in the sense that commercials can't make false claims about a product. If you're peddling what you have as the truth, without disclaimer, then you ought to be held accountable for it. The media is extremely powerful. The real problem is that to get on the TV -- which is perhaps the only way an uniformed person learns anything -- you have to have massive amounts of cash. So automatically, broadcasters' interests are wildly different from the average American.
Which brings us back to the internet. Media is afraid of the internet, and media is very well represented by Washington. Washington always puts its interests first. Is it any wonder the conservatives are afraid of a totally free and neutral internet in the hands of the masses? They're afraid of your average american being informed by other average Americans and not mega-corp media. It really comes down to money. Media is more apt to keep the status quo, which right now, is the rich getting richer. So the conservatives are in love with it, because they really only put the thinnest veneer of religious, social, and moral conservativism on top of their main platform, which is getting the rich richer. Of course FOX news is never going to give you enough honest information to figure that out.
Actually, I hadn't considered that eating plants doesn't necessarily have to kill the plant, so I guess it's a more "humane" in a sense.
No really, thanks -- it's really unusual for me to encounter a point of view I hadn't considered. I'm going to have to think about that for a while an reevaluate where I stand on this issue.
I am trying to figure out why you value animal life more than plant life.
All eating requires sacrifice of life.
I wonder if the GP had a teratoma, would he respect its right to live? It is, after all, human life -- a living bundle of human cells.
What a jerkoff.
If you're going to spend money you don't have, no matter what, it's better to do it interest free.
You sure that's not robe and wizard hat?
Not to offend anyone, but that's because, if you're particularity smart, a social group of people with "average" intellect is like hanging out with children. I hope you get the image of Michael Jackson and Neverland here, because that's a little bit what it's like for smart people to engage in of the vapid nonsense that's hip these days. Though if you're posting intelligently on slashdot, you're probably not in that crowd. Is it any wonder, though, given that the relative intelligence of animals is related in the sense of how it corresponds to a child's intelligence?
I'm not saying that smart people can't be well-adjusted, but it's generally not worth the effort you have to put into it. It's easier to just socialize with other smart people primarily, and be somewhat aloof to the rest. To me, what is the latest new pop song, or who's popular in sports, or what's the season's fashion is about as important to me as some random Joe's kids' cartoons and hit toys are to Joe. I just don't see the point of it. It's not that I can't learn every fact about Miley Cyrus, or the NFL, or what the top ten fashion designers are doing these days... but even cursory research would give me far more knowledge about the topic and your average Joe knows about it. Sure, I'd be able to discuss it with them, but we still wouldn't be on a level playing field. Not only would I know more about the topic of their interest than them, I'd know more about it than they'd care to know, and, again, come off as some kind of oddball nerd who is "booksmart but has no common sense." So there's really no winning.
Another thing to consider is that being socially successful is, to a large degree, about being able to manipulate others. Smart people tend to be more ethical, and may be more opposed to manipulating others, even if they are able to.
I may be shooting out of my league here, but I thought we domesticated dogs for three reasons:
1) They would eat our trash, so there was no competition for food.
2) They provided warning and extra protection.
3) In a pinch, you could eat them.
Eventually, they because useful in hunting as well, though that probably didn't happen until later, but you could count that as a forth use for foragers.
That said, I don't know about the other things in your posts. From what I understand, foragers were usually very nomadic, had few possessions, and basically unlimited natural resources from their perspective. Why would they be warlike? We can talk about studying skulls, but that has ALWAYS been fraught with really bad science. This is before horticulture and pastoralism, though. Those were still mobile, but also might have some permanent settlements, as in the case of transhumanance pastoralists. Those were potentially warlike, as they'd need some source for food besides the meat their raised, and raiding others was definitely an option, but so was trade or limited horticulture.
I'm not disagreeing with your idea that domestication of the dog by humans is an example of co-evolution, and they it might be as important as fire and tool making, but surely this wasn't because all foragers were constantly warring with each others. From all I can tell, they were generally peaceful. It's not until you move into more sophisticated modes of subsistence that war even makes any sense. All foragers really had to fight over was mate selection.
How is the Mayan way any better? It's just a base-5 / base-20 system?
If you assume the Mayans also counted on their toes, it makes a lot of sense. But it's really not that different. You have to think in terms of "places" or powers of the base to have any real number you can use. I guess adding and subtracting seems easier, because you never have to think of more than four bars or dots, but is it that much harder to deal with nine things, even if they're visually dissimilar? I don't think so.
The real difficult comes when you're crossing the powers, and have to "carry". The Mayan system doesn't make that any easier.
That's what you get for going to the university to study performance. Or maybe you're teaching, but salary there is a different problem. I majored in music (vocal performance) for about a semester. Now I'm doing EE. I figured I can learn the music theory independently, I can still be in ensemble, and there's no possible way for the school to beat the quality and price I can get on my own for private instruction. That's probably the case unless you're going to a really good music school.
And what am I free of? Recital attendance, endless rehearsals, form and analysis, class piano, music history(!) -- do as much or as little of the music curriculum as you want. If you want to perform for a living, I don't see how an academic degree is very useful.
When I'm done I'll have a useful degree in something I enjoy. I can still audition for anything I want, and if I'm good, it won't really matter what my degree is in. The only thing I can't do is teach music, which is something I have no interest in anyway.
The kicker is that, with a degree in performance, there's STILL no measure of how "good" you are. With almost any other degree, you can reasonably assume is the student passed the require courses, they have at least a basic proficiency with those subjects. You can assume someone with a physics degree knows calculus, or that someone with a nursing degree knows basic biology, and so on. With performance... all you know is that they've studied it for at least four years. That may be saying a lot, or may not be saying anything at all. That's why you still have to audition, and why, unless you just really want the music major experience, I think music degrees are useless unless you want to teach.
- source: infowars.com
Way to drain all credibility from your post. :P
Everyone has explicit motives for all speech. Ad hominem is never rational discourse: a person's motives are not relevant to the merit of their points.
That has to be the most random thing ever.
Yeah, but compare what happens when a 250k/yr + family loses 10% of their income (to tax in this case) versus, for example, versus a 30k/yr family.
The former might not get a new car this year, or take that extra vacation, or have to sell the 70' lake yacht and get a 50' lake yacht instead, drop the country club membership, etc. etc.-- basically they'd lose some luxuries.
For the latter, it might mean a foreclosure, not being able to send little Johnny to college this year, not being able to afford medical care, and what have you. 3k/yr could easily be make or break for a low-income family.
So really, forgive me if I don't see how it's a fair comparison. I really don't see how the richer folks are being cheated. They are benefiting more from a system that both ends of the spectrum put effort into -- with the people in the low and middle income brackets probably putting in most of the effort.
The paying students have no say in the matter
I don't know if I'd go that far. There are usually school policies and departmental guidelines. A paying student can always file a formal complaint, and is usually granted audience with a dean or whoever else they request to meet with. Ultimately, the students could all drop the class and not sign up for any further classes by that teacher, if they unionized. That would definitely force some kind of resolution.
You could aim a webcam at it and have it snap a picture every 5 minutes.
I actually suggested a friend of mine use that technique for wanting to be able to remotely check the reading from a weather station on his boat while he was at home.
I'm not really joking. If you're good with software, but not hardware, this might be the way to go. Then have some image processing software read the data you want from a series of images, or in realtime, and pop it into a spreadsheet. You could even do with no internet connection if you got one of those prepay camera phone and put some software on it to take the pictures and upload them somewhere. You'd just need a power tap. (which is much simpler than designing circuits)
Well, in fairness, engineering students are usually the least fond of academia.
If it didn't take so much damn knowledge to be one, I doubt they'd suffer a liberal arts institution at all!
Hey, I'd happily take the top 1% of the income in exchange for paying 40% of the taxes. :)
You can't really have one without the other, though. Cities live off the resources of the rural areas, and it just wouldn't work to have a huge urban center surrounded by wild lands. All your points of access to water, lumber, metals, agriculture, etc. wouldn't exist, and that's not to mention the folks that would need to be transported there for logging, mining, farming, etc.
If we can someone spin this on THINKOFTHECHILDREN, we've got a fighting chance.
That looks like the artwork for a good game of Rifts.