Ryandor.com

Simple minds return simple solutions. Sometimes simple is best, but rarely is it sufficient. Society as a whole is playing a deadly game of chess against the chemistry of the universe, and it is all too apparent that we are not thinking more than one or two moves ahead. Trade a pawn for a bishop, only to have two knights and a rook taken in an irreversible chain reaction.

It all boils down to one key problem: the majority, regardless of social structure, rules society. Dictatorship or democracy, socialist or imperialist, they all fall and work because of the majority. It does not appear so, simply because of our general inability to see beyond the surface, but it is most obviously true. However, the majority are drastically incapable of sufficient understanding to contribute effectively to the future of this world.

You cannot overrule or disregard the majority, so you must raise them, along with yourself, to higher levels of understanding. A threshold, or barrier, exists, though; under which there is lacking enough understanding even to value the concept of advancement. Raising individuals above that threshold often requires a nearly intolerable amount of deception and manipulation, often with horribly inadequate results. Quite simply, the vast majority of people do not understand enough to want to understand more.

Every time a student asks with a sarcastic tone, ?When/why will I ever need to know this?? evolution takes another step back, perhaps for the best. We either advance to higher levels of understanding, or we revert to levels incapable of mass responsibility ? lingering within the middle ground, with the capability to give up the queen, but not the understanding enough to know when, is the most dangerous thing we can, and most likely will, do.

Why must you know this? Oh, so you can make more money someday ? educated people make more money and money is good, right? You will trade a pawn for a knight! ? The real, terribly depressing, reason is quite simply that humanity depends on it.

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Blog: http://www.sydius.org
Web: http://www.sydius.net

Stick to chemistry you mindless philosopher

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This space for rent.

Syd's got a point...so does Stormcrow!

From a historical standpoint the majority has always been "wrong". It has always been the very small majority who has changed the face of humanity.

Knowledge is very important but so is the wisdom to use it and as Syd has stated the majority just does not have much of either. As long as man kind works for money and not for the actual betterment of the species as a whole...humanity will suffer.

Trying to explain this to the average person is like telling a Meth addict that its bad for them...while handing them another hit...they will never understand.

Dev

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"So...if crazy people don't know their crazy...does that mean your only sane if your know your crazy?"

If I had a nickel for everytime I heard this...

This is exactly what's wrong in our education system (the root of the whole problem). Quite simply, look where the money in our (global) society goes. This week, the Nobel Prize for chemistry was awarded to two Americans and one Frenchman, totalling $1.3 million. This represents the highest honor given amongst scientists, and three lifetimes of work and tremendous accomplishment. It also represents less than three months spent by Hollywood actor/actress in shooting a film in which they aren't starring (the headliners often get much more). Meanwhile, teachers in our public schools, who are supposed to inspire the greatness displayed by Nobel Prize winners, get paid a paltry salary, with the national median being barely above the poverty level. The entry salary for an NBA player is $480k annually, which is about what these recent Nobel Prize winners will receive for their lifetimes' work.

I understand that this is in addition to their regular salaries plus anything they've written into grants, etc., but even that is still a sickly sum when compared to what we pay for entertainment...

Almost as bad is (and now I'm mainly preaching to us Americans) our dependence on lawyers. Get bad shrimp and spend a day sick? Sue. Stub your toe? Sue. Who makes out in the end? The lawyers. A recent class-action lawsuit against Paypal had Paypal paying out up to $50 for small claims, with the possibility to make a large claim provided there was enough evidence. The lawyers? Tens of millions.

I bought a house a couple years back. My realtor (buying agent) filled out all of the legal forms in cooperation with the sellers' agent. We met in a law office, as required by law, and signed all the paperwork in the presence of a real estate lawyer, taking all of 15 minutes of his time, and paid them several thousand dollars for the privelege of using their conference room for a few minutes. My agent's comission? About the same as what the lawyer got, and he spent (we estimate) about 60-70 hours helping us find a house and smoothing the way for us to buy it.

Wonder why healthcare costs are skyrocketing? 80% of the typical medical bill is malpractice insurance, which goes to... lawyers.

I know this makes it sound like all of society's ills revolve around money (or lack thereof), but who wants to be a teacher for the pay? You can say, "Teachers should teach for the love of teaching, not for the money!", but how many wonderful teachers have steered away from that career because the pay is simply not enough to live on? Trash collectors in many cities get paid more than my wife, who teaches high school physics.



So true, but try to convince people to support public schools without direct taxes. You already have elementary school kids walking around neighborhoods selling cheap crap for inflated prices as fund-raisers. Around here, the typical "back-to-school list" includes a couple hundred dollars worth of classroom items that the schools can't afford to purchase themselves.

Maybe I'm just bitter. Syd, you hit a sore point there...

:grumble:

Actually it takes a brilliant mind to return a simple solution.

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This space for rent.

By ?solution?, I meant ?solution in the mind of the solver,? not ?solution? as in ?actual solution to the problem.?

Einstein aside, most people find the easiest ?solution? which they think fixes the problem and their immediate goals, and ignore the subtle complexity hidden beneath the surface.

A simple solution that takes into account the subtleties of the problem and does not just satisfy the immediate consequences would be a work of genius, as many wise men have said, but that is not what I meant, and I think that is clear by the context of the original message.

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Blog: http://www.sydius.org
Web: http://www.sydius.net

Was there a point to all this?

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This space for rent.

Syd said that the "monkey is to stupid to continue along the evolutionary path" of course I'm paraphrasing...

Dev

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"So...if crazy people don't know their crazy...does that mean your only sane if your know your crazy?"

Does there need to be one?

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Blog: http://www.sydius.org
Web: http://www.sydius.net

Hah... the tribe of monkeys successfully evaluate to humans and on pleasures has got drunk. Other monkeys having seen result, have decided to not evaluate to humans anymore...

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"Be calm and silent, as Darkness care not of passions and lies. Be patient and cold, as Darkness exists out of borders of time and emotions. Just be yourself, as You are in the Darkness and Darkness is inside of you."
-Dark Ones Doctrine, 2001y (c)-

Oh, good point.

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This space for rent.

This is old but I expressed my views on this topic a while back....like last year.

http://serpentsmoon.com/v-web/bulletin/bb/viewtopic.php?t=15

Don't take it to serious...

Dev

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"So...if crazy people don't know their crazy...does that mean your only sane if your know your crazy?"

My favourite colour is yellow. No wait, it's blueeeeeaaaAAAAAAA*

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-= Ho Eyo He Hum =-

Damn... it seems that forum lost his popularity... its a sign of UO domination is slowly fading out, sadly...

_________________
"Be calm and silent, as Darkness care not of passions and lies. Be patient and cold, as Darkness exists out of borders of time and emotions. Just be yourself, as You are in the Darkness and Darkness is inside of you."
-Dark Ones Doctrine, 2001y (c)-

UO Dominion died a long time ago but thats ok, we still manage to have fun here on our own.

Dev

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"So...if crazy people don't know their crazy...does that mean your only sane if your know your crazy?"

yeah, but ages of 3D MMORPG's has come. some day it happens that a most of admins and players forgot UO... althrough we are still here

_________________
"Be calm and silent, as Darkness care not of passions and lies. Be patient and cold, as Darkness exists out of borders of time and emotions. Just be yourself, as You are in the Darkness and Darkness is inside of you."
-Dark Ones Doctrine, 2001y (c)-

Most people who are concerned with graphics have left already. For a long while, UO was a fad with a huge audience, now about the only thing left over are those who saw something in it beyond just the fad.

After all, plenty of people still play text-based MUDs and pen & paper RPGs.

The way UO works is just too inherently intuitive, for the most part ? that is not nearly so true for most of the newer MMOs. The newer ones are much more complicated behind the scenes ? not necessarily better, just more complex to make room for the better graphics. UO will always remain to be one of the easiest and lowest barrier-to-entry MMOs to emulate.

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Blog: http://www.sydius.org
Web: http://www.sydius.net

Actually i like UO much in fact of it's freedom to make additions and customized things. If many peoples come together, they can do a wonder. Redraw tiles, weapons, models and animation, rewrite abilities, skills, crafts... if collect a couple of artists, scripters and developers and it will be the slighty different game in result! And everyone can try himself as administrator of his own server. Any other MMORPG can give us all that?

_________________
"Be calm and silent, as Darkness care not of passions and lies. Be patient and cold, as Darkness exists out of borders of time and emotions. Just be yourself, as You are in the Darkness and Darkness is inside of you."
-Dark Ones Doctrine, 2001y (c)-

Given enough time and skill, theoretically, any modern MMO could be emulated with ease and become as low-barrier to entry as UO, but so far, no one had dedicated that amount of effort to create something as easy to modify as UO. That was my point, in a way. The people who originally created the first UO emulators faced a huge barrier to entry, but they lowered it for the rest of us, and there does not seem much incentive to do the same for other games (although some notable progress has been made with other games).

That is at least partially due to the advancements being made in open-source and/or free MMO software that is not emulating anything, and therefore has much more flexibility (theoretically) and fewer legal restraints.

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Blog: http://www.sydius.org
Web: http://www.sydius.net