Comment Re:*Dons asbestos suit* (Score 1) 1262
It's possible to be a lucrative demographic without having PR money. Case in point: Alcoholics.
It's possible to be a lucrative demographic without having PR money. Case in point: Alcoholics.
I think the wholesale failure of web 2.0 sites to facilitate any discussion of these issues over the last few weeks proves just how shallow their promise of a brave new web is. The scope and scale of the censorship seen around this issue is to my knowledge unprecedented.
Slashdot had the right ethics and mores all along, Anonymous Cowards and all. The community can mod them down, but even they should be free to speak.
I think a poster on the escapist forums but it most succinctly: "The gaming community is being bullied for profit".
The gaming community is being singled out for being misogynist, over the film/tv industry, over the music business, over religious groups, because they are a relatively easy target who won't put up as much of a fight. While it's almost certain that Sarkeesian has received threats, let's be honest, they do not carry anywhere near the same weight as those which would come from, say, a religious group who was called out for being conservative. Gamers also lack the PR money to respond, which would be readily available to entertainment companies. Overall, it's a fairly safe group to criticize.
I'm sure that misogyny exists in video games, but no more (and I would argue to a lesser extent) than that seen in general society and other forms of entertainment. Yet Sarkeesian and her backers have launched what amounts to an internet crusade against the most counter-cultural -- and I would argue visibly progressive -- media industries.
Her videos present selectively chosen examples from several video games, purporting to show that games are actually hateful towards women. Many of us have played several of these titles, and can judge how exaggerated such claims are. Indeed, using Sarkeesian's techniques, it would be perfectly possible to go through these games and more, and selectively picks clips and examples "proving" that games and the gaming industry promote animal cruelty.
Yet no-one makes the animal cruelty argument about video games. And the reason is I think obvious -- The misogynist argument makes more money. Sarkeesian has been backed to the tune of $150,000 to makes these videos. Sites like Kotaku generate huge ad-revenue from the inevitable click-bait headlines which follow from these exaggerated claims. The more games who take the bait, who defend their hobby from these accusations, the more revenue goes to the people making and promoting them.
This does not represent a genuine feminist movement. This represents a business model. Gamers are being singled out and bullied -- over religious conservatives, over music video directors, over corporate policies towards women -- because gamers are an easier and more lucrative target. Gamers are "hate-baited" with very, very ugly accusations painting them as haters of women, so that their predictable responses can be farmed out to ad-servers and marketing firms. Bullied; for profit.
I've played video games since 1990; I do not hate women; My hobby does not hate women; The vast majority of people who play video games do not hate women. Please, Sarkeesian's of the world, turn your attentions to the people who do.
But if you don't puff up your offspring with enough praise early one, how will they have the iron-cast confidence to windbag their way to the top in todays bullshit world? Again, what use is true intelligence if you don't have the bellicosity to shout down all gainsayers?
It's obviously, The Big O.
Your outdated "value-adding" "service provding" skills are so 20th century. 21st century careerism is about networking. Networking. Networking. Netowrking.
Look at item number one on TFAs list.
1. Take names.
... In five to 10 years, that will all be different and the person who you ignored because they were boring and couldn't help you will be the person who could have won you an important opportunity.
Network! Impress people! Dress right! Booze people up! This is how successful companies are made. You will not attract the rright venture capital with your simple abilities. Most companies won't even use those anyway.
2. Problem solving.
..... Problem solving is essentially the same thing you learned in abstract in seventh or eighth grade or whenever you learned simple algebra.
See! Look at this! The people this guy is writing for don't even know how to solve problems. They just code stuff nobody really needs -- and they're still successful! You think your ability to analyse and abstract is something all the cool kids will pay for? Think again. Your geek/nerd/hipster/bro-grammer cred wil matter far more.
6. Work more than 40 hours per week.
Profession? You think programming is a profession. Get back on that hamster wheel and like it code monkey. And get some hair dye. First sign of a grey hair or stress line from yellow packs like you and we sack you and hire a fresh young grad to suck into a husk.
5. Think in terms of a career, not a series of jobs.
Translation: "You can either join the fed-money, app-cloud bullshit wagon, or you can learn to love foodstamp lines. Either way, it'll still be a superior outcome to any science-fiction fantasy you imagined programmers were capable of making in a rational universe. The Market wants fart-buttons, not robots, so drink the kool-aid or join the lowest caste of contract workers you, you, you..... Loser."
No wonder so many programmers go into management.
Silly rabbit. Property rights and contract laws don't apply in the digital world. Control is 99/100ths of the law.
most of them AOL-tier,
AOL-tier. On a +4 post. Is today the day that
Wow. An "implying" post reaches +4 Insightful on Slashdot. I guess Anonymous and Anonymous Coward really are the same person.
I didn't argue for a money free world. I argued that money is not the relevant factor in the energy debate.
If you thing counting paper dollars and electronic euros is somehow going to meaningfully contribute to the sourcing, production, and distribution of electrical energy over the next five decades, please saddle your own unicorn, ride back to the 1960s and count all the pounds shillings and pence spent back then and their relevancy to energy today. It won't add up to a whole lot.
To properly need to debug such a language, you would need to be aware of all of the possible rules, pitfalls, bugs, and race conditions of every language under its hood.
At a basic level, is your "if else" condition running on it's Java or C++ or C version? Does it catch exceptions? Where is data being handled in memory? Are buffer overruns possible in some of these languages?
No one human could possibly we simultaneously cognisant of all possible sources of error. Programs in such a language would be a security disaster waiting to happen.
The standard NSA tatctic for introducing security holes into a system is to obfuscate things so that holes are hard to spot and find. SELinux is probably such a system, and this polglot language -- which effectviely makes debugging impossible -- is likely another.
We do need to talk about cost but we
need to talk about ALL the costs not just the operating costs but all the externalized costs as well.
We don't need to talk about costs at all. Costs are measured in the monopoly money we call "currency", and subject as they are to the vagaries and panics of the financial classes, are not an indicator or metric which we should rely on when planning our energy policies.
We need to talk about watts, mega-watt hours, materials, hours of labour, and disposal of waste. We need to talk about physical things, things we know, understand, and can do in the physical world. Not about intellectual casino chips which are magicked in and out of existence like pixels in a video game.
Energy policy is a long game that humanity is playing with the forces of the natural world. Our (dysfunctional) systems of money are about as relevant as our spoken languages in this debate.
He probably works in finance now.
After Goliath's defeat, giants ceased to command respect. - Freeman Dyson