I don't know about you guys, but I thought it was fairly common knowledge that we are being manipulated by various different groups. I also thought that most people can recognise when and how they are being manipulated by advertising or whatever. Personally, at school, I was taught how to identify techniques used to influence viewer or reader responses in advertising, documentaries, feature articles, and other forms of media. For example I was taught how to spot techniques such as selection of detail in expository texts, I was taught how to spot phrases such as "leading expert" "world community" and "possibly billions of lives" (as an example taken from Moozooh's post above) and be able to identify what they are trying to achieve in the context of an article. These are some of the things I learned in my regular high school education. Undoubtedly, most of you guys know this stuff too.
Well, the exact same goes for all the conspiracy theorists too (yes, including those who claim that we are being manipulated by the government, the media and the scientific community). They will use all the tricks in the book (including deliberate and wilful deceit) to try to convince people that their conspiracy theory is legit.
The major problem is not really the people who try to deceive other people. The major problem is that those other people seldom do the proper research, and will believe anything that is presented in a sufficiently convincing manner.
Since there are at least two strong runs that can compete for the prize, it's already fair. The previous year Banjo Kazooie would have effectively been competing with itself.
That's a fair point. Also it might not be fair that the few N64 runs have to compete against a plentiful of SNES runs for the award...
It was a one-time thing that took place in 2010, but there's no need for that now, is there?
adelikat wrote:
Note: N64 was lumped in with SNES due to lack of N64 publications.
Ok, there are 6 N64 publications in 2010, which is a bit low. Well, 5 if you don't count the OoT run that was obsoleted in the same year. The question is, thus, if 5 runs is enough for a fair "competition" for the award.
"Climate Change" a myth perpetuated by the wealthy?
I have always wondered why so many people oppose so strongly the very idea of global warming and climate change. They propose that it's just a big hoax, a conspiracy, we are being lied to...
I just can't understand why the vehement opposition. Even if it really was a big hoax (which it isn't, obviously, but let's just assume it was), for what purpose would that hoax have been fabricated? What great and selfish evil are these hoaxers after? "Hey, we shouldn't pollute our environment" doesn't sound like such an evil goal.
And why would the wealthy promote such a hoax? Less pollution means less consumerism, which means less money going from the poor to the wealthy. If anything, it would be the interest of the wealthy to expose the hoax, so that people would keep consuming more and more. Wouldn't promoting the hoax be detrimental for them?
Heck, if this global warming thing would be a big hoax, I would be all for it.
I personally hold many irrational beliefs and don't think any irrational belief in and of itself is a good or a bad thing simply by dint of its irrationality.
Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but what exactly is the "problem" here? Simply sort the dimensions of the boxes being compared in descending order, and then see if each dimension in the to-be-inside box is smaller or equal to each corresponding dimension in the container box. "Time limit 3 seconds"? Maximum of 10 dimensions? You could have 10 thousand dimensions and it would still take significantly less than 3 seconds.
If one would really want to do something about this, it might be easier to simply remove authors' own ratings from the database from time to time with a script/stored procedure/whatever rather than adding a check to the rating code. For each movie, check if the author has rated it, and if so, silently remove those ratings.
OTOH, whether all this is worth the effort is another question.
I do think SNES and N64 should be separate categories.
I was wondering about that myself. Why are SNES and N64 collated into one? And why precisely those two platforms. It's about as arbitrary of a pairing as it could possibly get. (Ok, both are Nintendo consoles, but aside from that...)
* At a given frame, systematically select a test input for this frame.
* Compare the resulting screen with the corresponding frame from the video.
* If they differ, step back and try a new input. If all combinations have been tried for the frame, step back one more frame, and so on.
* Otherwise, keep the input for now and try the next frame.
The major problem with this is that if there are some "invisible" key presses being done in the video (which affect the RNG or whatever), the difference they make might become apparent only much later, eg. hundreds or even thousands of frames later. The more frames between the "invisible" key presses and their effect, the (exponentially) longer the algorithm would take to find it.
I didn't get it.
Granted, I only watched Pt. 1/10, but if the program cannot clearly get its main point across in the first 15 minutes, it fails to give me any incentive to watch 2 hours of it.
Though the game is entirely deterministic, the bruteforce trial-and-error creation of the input sequence over the course of several YEARS deserves some merit. If you disagree, don't vote for it.
How can you abuse luck when there is no RNG to be abused?
OTOH, we don't (yet) have a "physics engine abuse" award, so we may as well collate that with this one. (Which actually gives a good idea for a new award next year...)
In the famous double-slit experiment a particle shot at a double-slit acts as if it went through both slits at the same time and then interfered with itself, causing an interference pattern (when many such particles are shot in succession). Unless measured, that is (in which case it curiously goes only through one of the slits and acts as such).
In 1926 the physicist Max Born predicted that a consequence of quantum mechanics is that a particle will act as if going through two slits even if there were more than two. In other words, even if you had eg. three slits, a particle would still act as if it went through only two of them. This result was verified in a three-slit experiment made in July 2010.
Two questions:
1) Why does quantum mechanics predict this behavior? (One would think that, according to some interpretations, the particle would take "all possible" paths from the emitter to the detector, causing thus the interference pattern. However, the triple-slit experiment demonstrates that it does not.)
2) Why is the triple-slit experiment seemingly so extraordinarily hard to perform? Why did it take 84 years for such an experiment to be made? Why isn't this a trivial experiment done in a daily basis by university students?
Oh, the title is misleading. It should be "Another thread devolving into religious idiocy".
I think the conversation was interesting from a rational point of view (regardless of what one's convictions might be). Well, at first. It has since degraded.
A good example of a game with a strong narrative element and adequately strong gameplay is Deus Ex. That's why it's fondly remembered over 10 years since its release, and rightfully so.
I like to play games from start to finish in one go (I don't mean in one sitting, but in the sense that I don't want to play several games in alternation, and instead like to play only one game exclusively from start to finish before starting another game). The reason is that if I stop playing a game mid-way for whatever reason (and start playing something else), it too often happens that I will never finish it, which feels like a waste. It doesn't really matter how short or long a game might be (for example it took me 2 days to play Condemned: Criminal Origins through, and slightly over 2 months to play Lost Odyssey through).
However, there are some games which simply go below a certain threshold of interest: No matter how much I try to play them, I can't. I get bored, they completely fail to keep me interested, and after no small amount of struggling I just stop playing them and go to something else. Very rarely do I finish such games.
It's not always clear to me why that happens. As I'm replying to your post, and deducing from what I quoted, I suppose you can guess where I'm going with this. Yes, I bought Deus Ex some years ago because it was so praised, like it was one of the best games ever made, and I couldn't finish it. In fact, I stopped at the second or third level, IIRC. It just didn't work.
Graphically the game hasn't survived the pass of time very well (which isn't very surprising with 3D games, although there are some such games which survive better than others), and I just didn't see the marvelous content that everybody was talking about. Perhaps this content could have appeared if I had played longer, but since it didn't entice me from the very start, it just somehow failed to keep me interested.
Maybe one day I'll try again.
In reality though, if you tell somebody you're an atheist, most people will immediately assume that you are a gnostic atheist (completely sure that there is no God). We may well be in the midst of a shift in the meaning of the term "atheist", so I guess it makes sense to distantiate oneself from atheism as an agnostic nowadays.
Terms are indeed being muddled nowadays, often for ideological reasons (eg. to demonize and vilify people with certain views, such as grouping all non-theists, iow. atheists, into the same group of "bad" people).
The term "atheist" tends to carry a lot of baggage nowadays, even though it shouldn't. For example, it's assumed to imply that atheists are always strong atheists, anti-theists, skeptics, humanists, rationalists, evolutionists and whatnot. That's a lot of baggage to carry, Of course, as said, the term "atheism" does not imply any of that. Technically speaking (and AFAIK) eg. buddhists could be classified as atheists because they don't believe in any gods, yet most people wouldn't call them that. Likewise someone who believes that aliens created life on Earth (but don't believe in any gods) are atheists.
This is a rather common confusion in terminology.
There are two pairs of opposite concepts: Theism/atheism and gnosticism/agnosticism. These pairs are completely independent from each other, and choosing a concept from one pair does in no way imply a concept in the other.
"Atheist" means "not theist", nothing more, nothing less. If you are not a theist, then you are an atheist. It doesn't matter if you don't take a stance on whether some god exists or not, if you are not a theist, then you are an atheist, by the very definition of the word. So the question is: Do you believe that the claim "there exists a god" is true? If the answer is no, then you are an atheist by definition.
"Atheism" does not mean belief in the inexistence of a god. Even someone who doesn't take any stance is by definition an atheist because he is not a theist. (The term "strong atheism" is often used for people who positively believe there is no god. This is different from the sole concept of "atheism" which is simply a lack of belief in the existence of a god, although the difference is often confusing.)
Gnosticism vs. agnosticism is a completely separate concept. A gnostic is one who claims to know, while an agnostic is one who does not make such a claim. It doesn't matter what the claim of knowledge is. If you claim that you know that a god exists, you are a gnostic theist, and if you claim that you know that a god doesn't exist, you are a gnostic atheist.
Most people who classify themselves as "agnostics" are in fact, and by definition, agnostic atheists (in other words, they are not theists, but they don't claim to know for sure one way or another). Likewise most people who classify themselves are "atheists" are also agnostic atheists (for the exact same reason).
In principle it's possible for someone to be an agnostic theist: Someone who believes a god exists, but doesn't make claims of certainty (iow. concedes that he might be wrong).
I'm arguing the case about how to serve God and how not to. My priority is in not offending YHWH.
You're arguing the case about how to talk to people and how not to. Your priority seems to be in not offending people.
No wonder our views do not appear to meet...
You don't seem to understand the wrong you are doing. If you don't want to follow a tradition because you think it offends God, then you shouldn't follow that tradition, and that's completely ok. However, once you start judging others for doing what you think is wrong, you are crossing a boundary.
The major problem here is that you are interpreting scripture in a certain way and then applying it to some tradition or symbol you see around you without proper justification, without there being a direct link between the scripture and that tradition/symbol. You are interpreting (no doubt having told so by someone) eg. the star on a christmas tree to be a pagan symbol and offensive to God, and claiming that anybody who uses it is offending God.
Exactly how do you know this? Does the Bible say "thou shalt not put a star on the top of a tree during the time of winter solstice because that's an affront to God"? No. You can find passages which you can vaguely interpret as applying, but that will be your interpretation. Are you so presumptuous as to claim that your interpretation is better than someone else's?
Jesus taught that we should not judge others. Perhaps you don't understand what that means, but you are doing exactly that here. You are in no position to make such judgments. Claiming that someone is worshiping Baal or whatever because they have a christmas tree is atrocious and offensive. You have no idea why they are doing what they are doing, nor what God may or may not think about it.
Warp wrote:
You are basically claiming that God doesn't want to understand the reason why people have certain customs, and instead chooses to get offended by the coincidental similarity of the shape of an object regardless of why it was put there.
Yes. God does not care about our excuses.
Do you really want to believe in a God who does not judge people by their intentions and what is in their heart, but rather by what symbols they use in their homes? Is this really the God you see in the Bible?
And on what grounds can you judge someone of resorting to "excuses" when he follows some tradition? How do you know what they are thinking?
Warp wrote:
You are giving God very human-like qualities and deficiencies, a God who gets offended by trivial minutia.
According to the Bible, He did create us in His image.
Be careful to not to create your own interpretation of God in your own image. A human-like god who has human defects and finite wisdom and understanding. Because that's what it sounds like.
Have you ever thought that your interpretation might be wrong, that you have been deluded by certain people and ideas?
Warp wrote:
Nothing good comes from extreme fundamentalism.
Obviously, I disagree with this part.
Been there, done that (as you probably know). I know where you are right now, and I know it's not good.
Warp wrote:
Also, spreading possible misinformation is not a good thing.
Ah! Don't you think intentions matter more than the actual deed? :)
You may joke about it, but spreading misinformation is where all kinds of conspiracy theories and other such nonsense starts. Christians are not immune to conspiracy theories, including theological ones. On the very contrary, they are quite prone to them.
If a Japanese uses a swastika to decorate a religious building, would you call him a neonazi? If a neonazi used a swastika to symbolize his political views, would you call him a shintoist? No. Even though the symbols look the same, the meaning is completely different.
Would you use a swastika to decorate a festival where Jews are invited to, to cite the good luck it symbolizes, if that is what it honestly meant to you?
You missed the point. I wouldn't go to a Japanese home and call them neonazis if they happened to have a swastika as an oriental symbol of luck, which is what you are doing by claiming that the star at the top of the christmas tree that people put in their homes is a symbol of pagan worship. Even if the symbol looks the same (which in itself is debatable in the case of the star) it doesn't necessarily convey the same meaning or purpose.
Remember that in an event where God is invited to, He is a participant. Do you want to use things that remind Him of times when people did the most horrible things against His commandments? It might be a beloved symbol to you and it reminds you of all the good things, but what does it remind Him of? He does have feelings too, you know.
You are basically claiming that God doesn't want to understand the reason why people have certain customs, and instead chooses to get offended by the coincidental similarity of the shape of an object regardless of why it was put there. You are giving God very human-like qualities and deficiencies, a God who gets offended by trivial minutia.
Wouldn't you think that God cares more about what is in the heart of the person?
And what does it to tell to Him your insistance of favoring your own fathers' traditions over those that He taught to us?
You cannot live completely separated from your environment and society. Your parents, teachers and friends have taught you tons of social customs (for example related to good manners) which you do not have any problems following nor do you think are an affront to God, even though these things are not mentioned in the Bible explicitly. Are you "insistent in favoring your own fathers' traditions" in this case? Would God get offended by you following these customs?
The important thing is not the custom itself, but the reason you are following it.
Yes, I am indeed emphasizing a dichotomy here. Because you cannot be a judge to what is perfectly fine and what is not. No human can. Our viewspan is limited.
I find it a bit contradictory that you state the above in the same thread where you have made absolute claims about certain symbols and traditions being pagan worshiping and offensive to God. How do you know they are offensive to God? What gives you the right to tell others that what they are doing is offensive to God?
Though this is personal, Warp, you are a person who seeks to find the very definite binary threshold on everything, to argue about the definition of each rule and to find the impossiblemost edgecases and how the rule works in that situation. Such is what is definitely happening here, too.
This is personal too, but I think you are simply projecting. What I am doing here is defending a more liberal view, not a stricter view, which is what you are doing. I am not speaking in absolutes, you are. I am proposing a much fuzzier division between what is right and wrong than what you seemingly are, which sounds a lot more binary. It seems that you are the one proposing a hard binary division between "this symbol/tradition is wrong" and "this is ok", but projecting such an attitude on me.
what do you think the ostensible outcome and effect will be in the case of this discussion?
My sincere hope is that you would loosen a bit and stop judging other people for things which are not unambiguously wrong. Nothing good comes from extreme fundamentalism.
Also, spreading possible misinformation is not a good thing.
The relevant thing is: Is the idea founded firmly in the Bible?
I think you are presenting a false dichotomy here (well, in the whole of your post; I just didn't want to quote everything, just a representative sentence). The dichotomy is: Everything is either the work of God, or the work of Satan. If something is not firmly founded on the Bible, it must therefore be the work of Satan. (Moreover: Only things which can be explicitly found in the Bible are the work of God, nothing else.)
Not every action, every thought, every object, every symbol is found in the Bible, yet even you wouldn't claim from every such thing that it is the work of Satan. You yourself do and use many things that are not found in the Bible, yet you (I assume) don't think you are worshiping Satan by doing so.
A symbol is just a symbol. If it's an object, it's a collection of atoms arranged in a certain way. An object has meaning only if you give it meaning, and different people may give the same object different meanings. Is someone's meaning better than another's?
You also seem to assert that if, for example, some symbol has been used for pagan worship, the only use for that symbol from that point forward is worship. This goes back to what I wrote in my previous post: If person A uses symbol X for pagan worship, does X become somehow "cursed" and automatically forbidden from that point forward to eternity and for everybody, regardless of intention?
It is possible to celebrate a festivity without worship. You might argue that someone claiming "this christmas tree honors God" is blasphemous and goes against everything that the Bible teaches, and that may be the case. However, almost nobody says or thinks like that. The intention is not to decorate a christmas tree to worship anything or to represent anything. It's just a tradition and there is no deeper meaning to it than that. This doesn't mean that every christian should start using christmas trees. It means that you claiming that they are worshiping Satan by doing so is rather outrageous. Worship is in the mind, not in the object. What matters is what is in the mind, what the intentions are, not what a collection of atoms looks like. It would be a petty God indeed who judged people based on how some atoms happened to be arranged rather than what the purpose for that object is in the mind of the person who uses it.
If a Japanese uses a swastika to decorate a religious building, would you call him a neonazi? If a neonazi used a swastika to symbolize his political views, would you call him a shintoist? No. Even though the symbols look the same, the meaning is completely different. What you are doing is exactly that: You are taking two symbols of two different cultures and claiming that the meanings are the same, regardless of intention.
God is eternal and he knows what those things, that one does, originally meant.
In this particular context (in other words, the star at the top of the christmas tree and halos on icons and statues) you are committing the petitio principii fallacy, iow. assuming the premise to be true and basing conclusions on it, when it's not clear at all that the premise is true in the first place (that is, that the star and the halos have a common origin with ancient pagan religions).
As I already said, similarity does not necessarily imply common origin. The fact that suns and stars are common symbols in many religions and cultures doesn't necessarily mean that the symbols in one culture originate from (and have the same meaning as) the ones in another culture. It could be that the modern star symbol and halos do indeed come from ancient religions, but that's to be demonstrated (at least in this discussion). Hence no such conclusions should be made because the premise is not necessarily valid.
Another question is that even if, hypothetically, they shared the claimed common origin of ancient blasphemous pagan religions, is someone committing a sin against God if he uses these symbols without knowing their origin? Why would God judge somebody for using a symbol he doesn't know the meaning of?
Basically you are transferring the sins of one person to another. Person A used symbol X for some blasphemous rituals, and hence person A deserves punishment. If later person B uses the same symbol X for a completely different purpose, without knowing that A used that symbol or what for, the sins of A are automatically transferred to B?
Moreover, even if B knows that symbol X was used in pagan rituals, does this make X a forbidden symbol? It's forever cursed and cannot ever be used again for anything without the user committing a sin against God?
Because that is, basically, what you are claiming. How many symbols have you used which might have been used by some ancient pagan religion for their blasphemous rituals? You don't know, and that's the point.
Wouldn't it make more sense that it's the intention that matters, not the precise symbol? It's not what you use, but how and for what purpose.
I have to disagree with the notion that if a game has a programming error that makes it impossible to reach the normal ending intended by the game designers, the last point reachable in the game could be considered a valid "ending" with respect to a TAS.
If a game cannot be completed, then it cannot be completed, and thus it's unTASable (at least with respect to the traditional goal of playing the game through). It's no different than eg. a game that is so buggy that it outright fails to start being completely unTASable.
Of course a special goal/category could be created for such a game, but it would be an exception to the general rule.
I think this is the movement most closely related to the ideology in question: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messianic_Judaism
(Of course there are differences between congregations and individuals.)
Though it is now interpreted to signify the star of Bethlehem -- a convenient explanation --, the star on top of the christmas tree is actually an ancient Babylonian symbol, "solar wheel" / "sunburst" / "sundisc", which was also present in Egypt (the disc between the horns of the Apis calf), and which is also the origin of the disc of light around the heads of saints in icons. It is a remnant of the worship of the Sun, present in almost all pagan cultures. It just had different names. Ba'al, Nimrod, Ra, etc.
Correlation does not necessarily imply causation. Just because the Sun is an extremely common target of worship in many ancient religions doesn't necessarily mean that all old sun/star symbols are related to those ancient religions. The person or group who first thought about putting a star on top of the christmas tree didn't necessarily have anything like that in mind. (The same goes for halos in icons and statues. Similarity does not necessarily imply common origin.)
Okay, sorry for looking like an idiot, but are you Christian or Jewish? I've always thought you were Christian but apparently you're not? I don't know.
You mean christians cannot celebrate jewish holidays? Why not?
