Quoting: wvstolzing

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: wvstolzingYou guys are so naive... It's not an ordinary trademark; it's a stylized version of the emblem of the KNIGHTS TEMPLAR. These poor developers found themselves in the middle of a TEMPLAR conspiracy. Fortunately, they don't seem to have alerted the Illuminati yet.

... or have they? :S:

Pendantry: Isn't the red cross actually a stylized version of the emblem of the Knights Hospitaller, the Templars' foes/rivals?

Pendantry? That's the kind of cross you wear around your neck.
I don't think the Red Cross is related to the Knights Hospitaller; it's just a Greek cross (arms of equal length).

Yes, "pendantry" is a sort of joke among a few people of my acquaintance--to make one's persnicketing on minutiae a bit tongue in cheek by deliberately putting an inaccuracy to contrast with the call for accuracy.

Hrm . . . you're right though. I was getting the Red Cross mixed up with the St. John Ambulance people, who are as I understand it direct descendants of the Hospitallers. They were after all a medical order who healed people in between slaughtering them.

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Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: Purple Library GuyThere is actually no irony in organized anarchism. An + archy = no ruler. Not, no rules. It's perfectly possible to be organized without a boss.

You won't find your definition in a dictionary.

You will find it in the traditions of Anarchism as a movement and in the basic derivation of the word. Please don't talk down to me on this issue, I have paid a good deal of attention to it over a large number of years; I may be wrong about it, but not in ways that can be got at with facile one-liners.

I had no intention to condescend. Sorry about that. I guess my experience with Anarchism as a movement has pretty much preconditioned me not to take it very seriously. A couple of my more impressionable friends from high school actually took up the ideology, hanging with a small group of self-professed anarchists. In reality the whole bunch were pretty much punk fans with angry slogans and a tendency to tag public buildings with their Circle-A logo, although they did read the literature and were very much part of a larger community as far as I understand. None of them seemed to know what they actually wanted though, beyond having no-one telling them what to do. They did like to call me a "slave to the system" and talk about the big brother and the police state, among other things.

There are certainly some young fools with no real idea what's what who profess Anarchism. It is awfully available as a thing to give your inchoate anger some respectability if you're at a rebellious stage. But then, there are young fools with no idea what's what who profess Capitalism, or one or other party within a Representative Democracy, despite having no idea what those things do or how they actually work. It doesn't sound as stupid because you know those things actually do exist and operate, but they'd seem pretty dim if all you had to go on was the way some teenagers ranted about them. Imagine you're in a feudal system and someone is ranting about how there should be something like the modern system only nobody explained it to them very well.
"So wait, you're saying everything should be run by merchants? Commoner merchants?! Who'd follow them into battle? How would they get castles built if nobody owes them any labour? Hire people with money they made from usury?! I think the Church would have something to say about that, don't you?"

But the longer Anarchist tradition, like with Anarcho-Syndicalism and stuff, is a bit more practical in my opinion. It's connected to the socialist tradition but where all-out non-market socialism generally is about taking capitalist owners' stuff and having the state run it on the people's behalf (that last bit being a bit of a problem in my view), Anarchism is more into taking both capitalist owners' stuff and for that matter State stuff and having the people own and run it directly. So unlike Libertarianism it is an egalitarian and even somewhat communalist approach; the idea is that people run stuff together, not as individuals in a war of each against all. It is in my opinion a very desirable vision, the real stumbling block being how workable is it in practice (and also, can it defend itself)?

Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: tuubiTake another look at the internal politics of these software projects. Far from anarchistic I'd say. More like highly organized and bureaucratic in Debian's case. And none of these projects have prospered without leaders.

Returning to my simple and basic point, it is perfectly possible--indeed, almost mandatory at any size--for anarchy to be highly organized and bureaucratic.
As to leaders . . . well, to some extent, but define "leader". Someone designated to do a task isn't a leader. Do policies get decided unilaterally by these leaders?
Heck, even in those Free Software projects, like Linux, with a benevolent dictator, the whole thing is kind of weird--these benevolent dictators have no power to coerce because not only is membership voluntary but the whole deal can be forked.

What would you call a democratically elected president? Or cabinet ministers? Surely they are leaders even if their power is not absolute? How about a hired CEO of a company?

To get back to the point, Anarchy with any sort of hierarchy or laws is surely bending the concept to a breaking point. I'd say this alone invalidates Anarchism as a political system (which was the original point of this discussion). I'll accept it as a philosophy, but the fact that the rejection of state and of hierarchy is central, I fail to see how you could even imagine an actual, functioning political system based on it.

Hierarchy yes, laws no. It's a matter of where you get the laws from. Anarchism to me is basically direct democracy all the way down--both on the political side and the work side. Everyone with an equal opportunity not only to have a vote and voice in decisions, but to propose them in the first place as well. Of course in practice not everyone can be involved in every decision or you get complete paralysis--I think in a broader scale anarchy you'd have to settle for splitting things up some, but leaving it possible for anyone to be involved in any decision they choose. This isn't probably the place to get really detailed . . . but as to laws.
If you elect representatives and they decide on laws for you, that is clearly not an anarchistic thing. But if someone suggests a law, and it's debated and modified and finally voted on by the people in general (or some self-selected subset of them if it's a relatively specialized law), that would be an anarchistic thing--if it wasn't decided by some leader/boss but directly by those the law will affect, that's leaderless governance and Anarchism in action.

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Quoting: wvstolzingYou guys are so naive... It's not an ordinary trademark; it's a stylized version of the emblem of the KNIGHTS TEMPLAR. These poor developers found themselves in the middle of a TEMPLAR conspiracy. Fortunately, they don't seem to have alerted the Illuminati yet.

... or have they? :S:

Pendantry: Isn't the red cross actually a stylized version of the emblem of the Knights Hospitaller, the Templars' foes/rivals?

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Quoting: Segata Sanshiro

Quoting: ArehandoroNo anarchism?

There wouldn't be ANY gameplay if there was anarchism. Just sit back and watch your lack of state progress on its own and, I'd argue, eventually re-develop itself into a state, but that's another topic :P.

Heh. Point. Although we already ignore similar problems with, as players, being individual despots running "Democracies", "Oligarchies", "Republics" and so on for centuries on end. I think the fiction that over the generations, the individuals voted for by the people, or the cabal of oligarchs running the place, always happen to have your exact preferences on how to run the empire, isn't really so different from the fiction that the anarchist self-organizing realm you're playing would always come to mass and/or tacit decisions that happen to be exactly yours.

Anyway. Fond of anarchism though I am, I would have to claim that if a game like this, set as it is in modern times, allowed it as an option, to be realistic it should be made a really super-hard one. It'd be like having a socialist option only even harder. Any attempt to establish an anarchist "government" in the modern setting would have to deal with a host of problems: The simple difficulty of setting up something that has basically never been tried in a big way, the internal problems coming from the wealthy having their stuff taken away and the various old hierarchies trying to stick, the financial, informational and simple old-fashioned violent warfare from all the normal countries who really don't want something like that to succeed . . . there are reasons why nobody's even really tried since Spain in the 30s. After all look what happened to them: Franco's Fascists, with help from the Germans (overt) and the British et al. (more covert), massacred the hell out of them.

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Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: ArehandoroNo anarchism? Not real nor politics...

Surely it isn't a political system. Or are you one of those people who don't see the irony in organized anarchism? :)

There is actually no irony in organized anarchism. An + archy = no ruler. Not, no rules. It's perfectly possible to be organized without a boss.

You won't find your definition in a dictionary.

You will find it in the traditions of Anarchism as a movement and in the basic derivation of the word. Please don't talk down to me on this issue, I have paid a good deal of attention to it over a large number of years; I may be wrong about it, but not in ways that can be got at with facile one-liners. The notion of Anarchism as a sort of every-man-for-himself crazy chaos thing is a largely North American one, while Anarchism's roots are mostly European. This false picture comes from a combination of propaganda, conflation with the distinctively American "Libertarian" ideology which actually is a bit like that, and idiot teenagers in coffee shops wearing black and blabbering about smashing the (whatever).

Quoting: Purple Library GuyWhether anarchism is feasible on a sizable scale, like say national, is a different question. But technology is making it more feasible on broader scales of late years. Once upon a time it might have been claimed that complex self-organized leaderless projects collaborating across the globe would be an impossibility. Heck, not so long ago you just wouldn't have strung those words together because it was way past the horizon of what people would think about. But now? Take a bow, various large open source software projects from Debian to Apache.

Quoting: tuubiTake another look at the internal politics of these software projects. Far from anarchistic I'd say. More like highly organized and bureaucratic in Debian's case. And none of these projects have prospered without leaders.

Returning to my simple and basic point, it is perfectly possible--indeed, almost mandatory at any size--for anarchy to be highly organized and bureaucratic.
As to leaders . . . well, to some extent, but define "leader". Someone designated to do a task isn't a leader. Do policies get decided unilaterally by these leaders?
Heck, even in those Free Software projects, like Linux, with a benevolent dictator, the whole thing is kind of weird--these benevolent dictators have no power to coerce because not only is membership voluntary but the whole deal can be forked.

Quoting: Purple Library GuyThere was a time when technology didn't support national-scale representative democracy; for that you need a certain level of communication and transportation across the country, and probably the printing press.

Quoting: tuubiRight. A level of technology an anarchistic society would have had a hard time achieving. :)

Yes, yes, how cute.
It's not so much that anarchistic societies couldn't work in the old days, or would have had less capacity for technological improvement. It's more a Celts-vs-Romans problem: Anarchistic societies could only get so big, and that maximum workable size was much much smaller than a despotic empire. With low tech, centralized is the only way to be big. So if you have dozens of decentralized tribes without much authority and one despotic god-king looking to expand, the math is pretty easy.
But with modern communications things potentially become different. It's clear that there are changes happening to just what kinds of social/political organization are possible. We have yet to really explore all the possibilities that new technologies unlock. I think it's quite plausible that larger-scale anarchism is one of them.

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Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: ArehandoroNo anarchism? Not real nor politics...

Surely it isn't a political system. Or are you one of those people who don't see the irony in organized anarchism? :)

There is actually no irony in organized anarchism. An + archy = no ruler. Not, no rules. It's perfectly possible to be organized without a boss.
Whether anarchism is feasible on a sizable scale, like say national, is a different question. But technology is making it more feasible on broader scales of late years. Once upon a time it might have been claimed that complex self-organized leaderless projects collaborating across the globe would be an impossibility. Heck, not so long ago you just wouldn't have strung those words together because it was way past the horizon of what people would think about. But now? Take a bow, various large open source software projects from Debian to Apache.

There was a time when technology didn't support national-scale representative democracy; for that you need a certain level of communication and transportation across the country, and probably the printing press.

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Quoting: Segata SanshiroOne thing I'm curious about is whether they will have the fallacy of democracy and capitalism being one and the same, or whether they will allow for more interesting systems like authoritarian capitalism (ie. Singapore) or democratic socialism (Scandinavian model). That would probably be a dealbreaker for me.

Yes. In general, I'm kind of caught--on one hand, this is just the kind of game I'd be really interested in. On the other hand, my beliefs in terms of both political ideology and in terms of how economies work are quite different from the mainstream so the chance of such a game functioning in a way that makes sense to me and doesn't annoy me is small. So in practice, I doubt I'm going to see a game of this sort that I like. Ideal I guess would be a game like this where a lot of the parameters are quite moddable.

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Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: Purple Library Guy...one would expect Steam's expansion into Windows PCs and Linux PCs to happen at the same rate, and so if the Windows Steam population doubled, so would the Linux population.

This expectation is what I think is unfounded. There's just no basis for it. It's entirely possible that the vastly larger Windows population is currently taking up Steam more rapidly than Linux users. Or maybe the disproportionate change only happened during the Winter Sale.

I'm not saying it's impossible for the Windows population to be taking up Steam more rapidly than Linux users (although the size of their population is completely irrelevant and a red herring).
But there is a simple, direct basis for the expectation of those rates of growth being similar: A desktop is a desktop and the population of users is the population of users. They are all part of the same market, they see the same ads or whatever--why should they be behaving differently?
Even if there is some systematic difference between the gaming tendencies of Linux users and Windows users, why should that difference itself be changing? Imagine Linux desktop users have a lower tendency to game, such that half as many Linux users per 10,000 desktops play games. Then, if Linux had 2% of the desktop market, it would not be unreasonable for Linux to be at 1% on Steam. But then, if Linux increased to 3% of the desktop market, one would expect Linux to rise to 1.5% on Steam.
Instead, we have apparently a long-term trend of in the neighbourhood of from 2% to 3% on the desktop (ish, vaguely--whatever the specifics, like maybe 1 and a half times as much as a couple years ago) and a simultaneous long-term trend of from 1% on the Steam survey some time back, down to about 0.8% now. Monthly shifts have generally been insignificant, but the long term trend has been downwards. For these two things to both be true, Linux users would have to be gaming at lower and lower rates compared to Windows users over this time period, or at least adopting Steam at lower and lower rates. Or all of Steam's growth would have to be coming from some particular population which includes a much lower percentage of Linux users.

But we're talking about a big shift here if we accept Steam's figures, of Linux users gaming on Steam a lot less, like half as much per capita, from Linux desktops being used for gaming maybe half as much as Windows ones (1% Steam/2% desktop), to Linux desktops being used for gaming about 1/4 as much as Windows ones (0.8% Steam/3.?% desktop), over the course of a couple of years. Would you not expect such a trend to be visible in some way? Is it not reasonable to expect some explanation for the shift to exist, especially at a time when all our information suggests Linux becoming far more viable for gaming, rather than less?

Or alternatively, one could conclude the Steam figures are bogus in some way. I've reserved judgement for a long time, but I am gradually coming to the conclusion that that is the simpler and less unlikely explanation.

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Quoting: hardpenguin

Quoting: liamdaweIntel HD/Iris graphics aren't exactly the best for gaming, but it's good to know that people stuck with the integrated graphics at least get the chance to try more out.

This man would disagree: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQkd05iAYed2-LOmhjzDG6g

And don't say that! I am going to buy a laptop with Intel graphics and play a lot of DOTA2 on it!

Dota2?! I have a laptop with Intel graphics and I play games on it fine . . . specifically, turn-based games, where frame rate doesn't matter a whole ton. But high end real-time games, particularly ones pitting you against other people and their machines, seem to be exactly the most masochistic choice for Intel gaming.
Or was that a joke that just swished over my head?

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Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: Purple Library GuyOne might say we shouldn't be sure of such a surge, but there's no reason to have no expectations of one. But stipulating no such surge, why should we expect a decline?

What decline? We're going in circles, but I still don't see why you'd expect every metric to grow linearly and in proportion to each other. There's just no good reason for this expectation.

I am sure, or rather I know Linux gaming is growing. Steam user base is also growing, and fast. These two might grow at different rates and those rates are not likely to be constant. Even in relation to each other.

We are indeed going in circles.
Why would they grow at different rates? Let's start from the simplest case: The PC population stays constant, the percentage of that population running Linux stays constant, but the percentage of that population using Steam grows. If the general role filled by those PCs for Linux and Windows is either the same, or different but in a way that does not itself shift as Steam use grows, one would expect Steam's expansion into Windows PCs and Linux PCs to happen at the same rate, and so if the Windows Steam population doubled, so would the Linux population.

Factors could exist that would make that not be the case. They would have to involve some change in the roles of either Windows PCs, Linux PCs or both during the period of Steam expansion.

Quoting: ShmerlFirst of all, I don't see the survey as even representing Steam picture correctly (why do you need the survey, if Steam has complete data no doubt?). But one factor can potentially be higher number of games that don't have Linux versions still. If we assume gaming market is growing, and only a minority of games have Linux releases, then may be non Linux segment has larger growth?

What? No. That doesn't make sense at all. Linux already had that problem at the beginning of the market growth, so it was baked into Linux's earlier numbers--in fact the problem was worse before. So that should either have zero impact or work in the other direction. Honestly, I'm tearing my hair out here; everyone's giving me explanations for why Linux might have small numbers at a snapshot in time, and telling me they're explanations for change over time. Those things are different!

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