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Let me see if I can be bothered to explain why you're wrong... First of all, read this as well as being some good background reading, it covers a fair number of facts and figures about gaming in general, and GTA3 specifically. Second, are you bitching about GTA3 or gaming in general here? Most games have combat and violence in their core concepts. Why not suggest that the Civilisation series encourages people to wage war and enslave opposing civilisations? Quake seems to be far more violence focussed than GTA3. Thirdly, you seem to have missed the important difference between a game allowing you to do something, and a game encouraging you to do something. For example, you are NEVER best off shooting all the police officers in sight. Doing that will just mean that the FBI and the army will show up and you'll get shot down. The fact that the game allows you to do it means that lots of people do, but that's not the point of the game, and won't help you in the game. Most of the time, the game's storyline is best served by running from the cops, not shooting them. The point you miss is that videogames are a form of media, not a life experience. Your argument can be extrapolated to most mobster films and it holds true. I can think of various films in which the hero has done all of the things you mention in your opening sentence. Why are games different from movies in this respect? As a 20 year old, I see games as a form of media with the same value as film or television (ie just under the value of books music). You need to understand that the way you see a game is not the way that gamers see that game. If you agree that your argument applies to all movies which include your list of nasties, that's fine we'll have reached a point where we can agree to disagree. If you don't, please explain why gaming is so very different from other methods of media consumption. Either way please respond, as I consider this to be a rational reply to your objection.

Seems like UWF devices will get in line by the time they're commercial, according to the article, so fine. But expecting the airline industry to train all its underpaid flight attendants to screen laptops would be a big expense in resources, and it sounds like they should really spend that money elsewhere, on some basics.

Next time, before everyone spends a lot of time and energy debating the morality of copyright laws and the hypocrisy of Hollywood and the MPAA, we should probably take a look at the source of the article to determine how seriously we should take it (even though that's not as much fun).

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. -- Gandhi

Author's website
Signed edition available
Article on CNN about marketing the book
buy at Amazon
Buy at B+N
Review on Salon
Excerpt available

Didn`t the dod see this? If so, let hope saddam has a big marker on his head or they will end up bombing france.... I mean

that guy has breasts!

I mean I understand they want to improve todays soldier but I don`t know if that is the right place to start, although, It might ofcourse get the attention of politcal islamic fundamentalist, they are unlikely to have seem much female skin recently... it might lure them! hell perhaps these comics are even more inspiring then the holywood directors who until now where the source of the strategic planning in the early day of the "war on terror".

1. Click on the "print" button.
   
   
2. Go to File menu, select Save As.
   
   
3. Use your favorite method of HTML-to-docfile conversion to stick it in your PDA. I'm not familiar with the Zaurus (I use a Clie) so I don't know what that might be for you, but surely you have one. I used iSilo.

I thought games weren't speech at all!

If games aren't speech, then there is no reason these "interative political cartoons" can't be censored.

And heck, why not censor political cartoons altogether? I mean, it's common sense that all cartoons are meant for children, right? Comic books too, since they're practially the same thing.

From there it's a short step to books, music, video, and anything else these pesky consumers invent.

And no, you can not ride the slippery slope when I'm done with it. :-P

here...

The man is simply a kook. There's nothing else that needs to be said. I don't think Salon really needed to give him even a hint of legitimacy by doing a story about him, and I think Slashdot could have done a lot better than featuring the story.

Frankly, I'm surprised there hasn't been any Slashdot posting of another "article" featured on Salon's tech page: bOing bOing co-editor Cory Doctorow's 0wnz0red short story. It's a wonderful little gem in kind of a Stephensonian vein, sprinkled with the kind of terms and jargon that a Slashdot code-head could appreciate. Seems like it'd be a much better use of time than checking out Mr. Anti-Google.

Well, you could have submitted a link to the freakin' article instead of just a URL for it.

or, even better, http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/08/29/googl e_watch/print.html

The only link that actually does anything in this story is the google.com url... there isn't even a link to the story he was referencing.

http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/08/29/googl e_watch/index.html?x

The only link that actually does anything in this story is the google.com url... there isn't even a link to the story he was referencing.

http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/08/29/googl e_watch/index.html?x

in the story would have been nice...

http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/08/29/googl e_watch/index.html

I'm lazy, but a direct link to the story would have been nice.

Here is the link to the story:

Slon Article

Go to an actual "hog farm" and assess the environmental impact.

Actually in North Carolina, the Hog Farms do end up producing a large problem when any flooding occurs. Check out an article on Salon here about it. .
Asides from that, I think you are right to a large degree. And it's kinda what I am concerned with. The thing is that no matter what we do, the way we live dictates that we spend vast amounts of energy and pollute a ton.
Ok, I realized that the trees aren't cut from the rain forest for paper (but they are cut I guess for farming?), so that's not a direct impact there. However, the paper mills put off some awful pollution. Now they are getting getting better, but still, everything we do, even recycling, oddly enough is harmful to the enviorment.
Well I guess the worst thing that could happen is that we destroy ourselves, and the planet rebuilds (which it would, and in some sick way, that's kinda comforting).
Thanks for the advice though, it's good! :)

The RIAA has asked Rep. Berman (D-CA and entertainment industry monkey) to amend their recently proposed bill to include web media outlets including Salon.com . Asked if this decision was brought about by Salon's recent article dismissing the impact Napster had on the recording industry, RIAA spoksperson, M. Stalin, replied "It has everything to do with it. This kind of libel provokes terrorism in the form of music piracy. We intend to defend our country in the only manner we can: shutting down irresponsible media."

The resounding consensus is that most folks appreciate how, compared to these other OSes, Mac OS X 'just works.'

Resounding consensus, my ass. Macs don't "just work" any more than *anything* "just works".

Don't believe me? Believe this.

...because other (former) Linux users are doing the job for them. Between Tim O'Reilly, plenty of folks here on / and various others, it would be difficult for geeks not to know that OS X is "Unix Inside (tm)".

• Jordan Hubbard (pre-employment): "it was impressive just how much "Unix stuff" did work exactly as I'd expected."
• David Coursey: "if all I wanted was a Unix (or Unix-ish) OS I could actually use, I'd choose Mac OS X"
• Chris Coleman: "I didn't have to dual boot. I could use my Unix applications on the same screen"

According to this Salon article Windows users shouldn't switch unless you want all the old problems of incompatibility.

I read an interesting article on Salon.com yesterday about a minister who had been suckered in the "Switch" campaign. The article can be found here.

• It's up to the copyright holder to decide if they want to use this oh-so-l33t new promotion method.

You're assuming that the current copyright laws are fair and just. Bribery and rigged electoral and legislative processes are largely not recognized as ligitimate government. So, although every other judge in America(tm) may agree with you, that doesn't invalidate the right of the people to rebel against laws that were not passed in their best interest.

Although we've have numerous laws put on the books extending the power of copyright, the burden of these injunctions on society may well by too costly to bear. If the people don't have a valid means of changing the law within the system, they have the inalienable right to choose a new law (or government if necessary)

Indeed, many people think copyright law has gone way too far in the US. The fight has moved into the courts. Whether you believe the law should follow the Framers' intent or the good of today's society, copyright law as it stands now is working far beyond the pale.

(Original author unknown)

Windows error message haiku winners
Antitrust trial haiku winners
Telemarketer haiku winners

darkness grows outdoors,
your dinner cools, I waste a
moment of your time
-- Dave Demko

(Original author unknown)

Windows error message haiku winners
Antitrust trial haiku winners
Telemarketer haiku winners

darkness grows outdoors,
your dinner cools, I waste a
moment of your time
-- Dave Demko

(Original author unknown)

Windows error message haiku winners
Antitrust trial haiku winners
Telemarketer haiku winners

darkness grows outdoors,
your dinner cools, I waste a
moment of your time
-- Dave Demko

the problem with your interpretation is that of theft. before we passed copyright law, there was no theft. we created it. what we now refer to as copyrighted material was not something you could steal if you wanted to -- only copies could be stolen: physical copies. what would now be the CD's, the DVD's ... not the content.

copyright law was created so as to create a new form of 'thing' which could be stolen, and to protect it. why? not because of some higher morals or mandate from god -- but because we, as a nation (we, as a set of politicians) decided it was a fair trade-off, because we wanted the content. because we wanted it badly enough, and we didn't want to just, say, pay all artists a certain amount per year to produce stuff, or tax people for the right to access any and all content, we created this, the copyright system instead. so that there would be a direct monetary relationship between creating content, and getting rewarded for doing so.

remember this: we, by law, -created-, not codified, not wrote down, not remembered some long-lost knowledge ... CREATED this crime. we did it, to ourselves, so we could encourage those who had the ability to create the things we wanted so badly to do so. knowing full-well that they would otherwise revert to some form of production where there would be no copying.

there were many options to get what we wanted ... we chose this one. and now the copyright holders (who, in the case of music, are not the artists themselves anymore) are holding us by the balls on the issue. try reading up on some artists' views on the matter. they're not getting the benefits of this law we passed. writers aren't doing much better, either. publishing companies are, and will continue to fight for their right to rip everyone off -- artists and consumers.


http://dir.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/14/lov e/ index.html?pn=1

maybe it's time for a new system for copyrighteable media, one that would actually reward artists, and truly forward humanity. (note that the original copyright text in US law very much described the goal of copyright as giving a temporary financial benefit to content providers in order to help humanity by providing us with cool, neat, smart stuff to put into our brains ... i'm not sure Nsync qualifies for copyright, given the intent of the law ...)

And digital prohibition is a good term for it.

Stallman wrote a wonderful piece of science fiction on the subject. If you want to think about where this is going, it's worth reading.

When you think about how it's possible for such a small industry (content is infinitessimal compared to, for instance, consumer electronics) to have such incredible influence, remember that politicians have a unique respect for those who control the media.

It's a remarkably cynical viewpoint, but the television in some ways restored an old social order called the monarchy. Content actually is King. More specifically, those who control the TV rule the world. I mean, think about it; that joke doesn't quite get the laugh it used to. Anyone who'se ever worked for a cause and felt the crushing, inevitable apathy of the world around them knows what I mean. Five minutes on Oprah could mobilize tens of millions of people to vote or to read or to free Tibet, but at the moment its highest calling is to sell beer and diet drugs.

And the days when the media owners were innocent and principled are ancient history. They know what they're doing. The federal government's ONDCP editing scripts of prime time TV shows? Disney making anti-file-sharing propaganda cartoons? Oh, they know exactly how it works.

They may be doomed anyway, but the content trust will fight brutally to the end. They'll take whatever we wont fight to the death over. They'll leave a wake of ruined lives and an ocean of lost opportunity in their wake. If we're lucky, our children and their children will get to clean up the mess we make today.

Remember. Sales were slow - why? because the discs weren't portable. You registered it to YOUR player and YOUR player only. Your player broke? You had to call them and beg them to unlock the disc for another player.

There was an article in Salon bout 2 months ago with Courtney Love. this article where she talks aobut Record Labels and Piracy. A VERY good read. Even if you (like I do) think her music sucks.

I think, as she states, that we're going to see a big upheaval in the Recording Industry as a whole. Not by the consumers, but by the artists. Artists are out there to create something, and to have that something viewed or listened to by the public masses. Not to be censored down so far as to only PAYING customers by record companies that only have themselves to think about..

Wish I had the venture capital to start what she's talking about.

The arguments about lower quality music selling CDs is one of the two core factors of the RIAA business model. If you like a song played on FM or via any MP3 provider, you'll buy the CD, it's a lot less hassle than a 50 meg CD audio and you get full quality and all the nuances you paid for when you got your big bucks stereo or Dolby Pro Logic system.

The difference? If I'm an independent artist, I can upload to any P2P or any Internet Radio provider that's left. If listeners like what they here on P2P, they'll tell their friends. If the owner/DJ of a Internet Radio station likes it, they'll play it on the "air". No money changed hands.

As an independent artist, (which I'm not) I can NOT get access to a FM radio station playlist without paying a shitload of money to an "independent promoter" who pays the radio station in an under or over the counter transaction. Even given the money, the good timeslots go to the regular customers, all of which are RIAA labels.

So RIAA labels have a monopoly on FM radio content. That's where the sheeple go to hear "new music". Anything you hear on commercial radio is a commercial for an RIAA label band or musician. (A series of Salon articles lays out the whole deal) That's the OTHER core factor in the RIAA label business model, exclusive access to FM radio.

If an artist goes platinum without record company backing, he'll have made $5M-$10M. If one goes platinum for the first time with a label behind him, he might break even against his record label advances, partially due to legit advances but mainly due to Enron-style economics.

The day one goes platinum without a record label, the business model used by all the RIAA labels just went into the dumper.

Metallica will hear "this guy went platinum and made 5 MILLION DOLLARS OFF HIS FIRST RECORD?"... and I predict they will be among the very first to tell their lawyers "GET US OUT OF THIS RECORD LABEL CONTENT NOW!!!". However, this will probably be page 10 of Billboard, that issue of the magazine will be the first "all lawsuit" issue.

With Internet Radio and P2P unplugged, the record industry can say to an artist "You make a living with us or not at all, without us, the only people you can sell CDs to are the ones who show up at your gigs."

Without exclusive control by labels over any method a musician can use to get to the public, all a RIAA label is, is a ruinously expensive source of venture capital, both in terms of money and personal integrity, and if they change their mind about promoting a record, the musician can;t legally work.

Anyone who talks about piracy is either a conscious shill for the industry or parroting industry propaganda. Check out what Courtney Love and Janis Ian have to say about this. (presumably you know how to use Google)

MP3s and songs played back on analog FM are promotional tools, NOT products.

Paul is taking an interesting approach here, but he's not correct in saying that SpamAssassin doesn't use a statitstical approach. He has a bit of a point in noting that his system will generate a prediction probability which is more intuitive than SpamAssassin's scoring system in terms of determining how likely a message is to be spam, but there is also an attractive element to the simplified, non-math way that SA uses scores, which allows them to be more understandable to non-math people.
Seems like a number of the points which Paul makes in the article about spammers being defeatable, about the basic premise that they must get their message through in order to be successful, and that the war on spam is winnable are extensions from my interview with Salon a few months back, but his statistical approach fails to make use of one factor which I believe is critical (and which SpamAssassin attempts to exploit), which is that those commercial messages must convey a commercial message, in other words, they have to be a message, and have some sort of linguistic component which encourages the reader to do something. A purely statistical approach to spam filtering will lose the power of doing analysis of higher-order linguistic concepts.
SpamAssassin's approach is to use the universe's best known natural language processors (humans) to build rules which they believe can differentiate linguistic elements of spam vs nonspam messages, and then use the best optimization and statistical tools we have (currently only using decent tools, not the best tools) to determine how to score those rules against individual messages. The scoring system is very simplistic today, just being a simple sum of the scores of the various rules (though it's slightly nonlinear because of the properties of some of the rules, like the auto-whitelist). Future SpamAssassin development directions include extending the scoring system to be much more non-linear, including examining statistically the frequency of occurrence of combinations of rule triggers.
Automated rule-creation certainly has its place (for example, SpamAssassin's spam-phrase rule, or the auto-whitelist), but I truly believe that the ideal spam filtering system will always have to make the best use it can of human language processing skills. Using this combination of human/computer power, I believe that SpamAssassin can (and often does for many existing users) achieve better ROC performance than anything else.

Gambler's Inc. In California, gamblers bet against each other, not the house. The casino makes its money by charging a betting fee of 1%. Because the professional gamblers place many bets and attract other players, they are welcomed by the (California) casinos.

Although they were a monopoly, even the U.S. Department of Justice couldn't stop them from showing those clever shadow-people commercials. But, even the mighty have trouble.

Actually, no one is using volunteer help at this point. There was a lawsuit not long ago where several player "volunteers" demanded back pay for their time and were able to win in court. As a result no one is willing to risk having volunteer assistance any longer. Dark Age of Camelot has a very limited, unofficial helper program, but it's rarely used, in my experience.

Bottom line: Server support/newbie help will cost extra money for the developers, but probably not significant amounts. I know the response time in Asheron's Call was *much* faster when the volunteers were in place. (On the order of a few minutes compared to a few hours or even days with "professional" help.)

He's talking about the TIPS program where US Citizens spy and report suspicious activities.

..To "America's Most Wanted."

The DOJ was hoping the USPS would be involved. They declined.

..Did they really?

Here's a flash version of your rant.

Worldcom, Imclone, Global Crossing, Enron, Adelphia, Anderson -- "a few bad apples" or a systemic problem? I think Bush saying that the American people don't care about this "stock market stuff" just shows how out of touch he is. Either that, or he simply doesn't care and he's just filling time until the next topic of the day comes along.

Here's what we know:
- George W. Bush wanted to run the government like a business
- George W. Bush has never come within 50 feet of a successful business himself. Not Harkin, not the sweetheart deal with the Texas Rangers, not even that stupid airline catering company
- Neither has Dick Cheney
- Both Cheney and Bush are so close to the oil industry that they're willing to allow companies steal money from taxpayers and business in fradulent energy schemes.

Any talk of this being a Clinton-caused recession is just willfully ignoring that the Bush's tax cut caused nearly half of the budget shortfall.

What can you do?

- Demand that the Bush Administration release information on the secret energy task force. We want to know how Enron, Haliburton, Harkin, and Unocal were involved in this
- Demand that the Bush Adminstration support an independent investigation of the goverment's actions before and after September 11. If the attacks were due to the U.S.'s quest for oil, the American people deserve to know.
- Demand that the SEC open the files on Bush's dealings with Harkin
- Demand the Justice Department come down hard on Enron
- Demand to know why Bush is so interested in attacking Iraq
- Ask yourself if you're better off now or 4 years ago. Good, now vote Democrat in November.

Oh, and ... uh ... run Linux too.

"In late April, when as a result of an SEC investigation Nvidia had to restate several years of earnings, the company ended up reporting that it had earned more profits than previously indicated."

The record industry is already doing this in order to pollute P2P networks.

All is does is piss off dial up users, it doesn't stop them, they just keep searching.

Salon's article on the practice

I think having an enforced standard for the Gnutella protocol is the the sensible way to go. If you're going to design a protocol, do it properly and completely, which includes specifying exactly and clearly what a supernode is and how it should behave. If you don't clearly define every aspect of the protocol then it is going to break down as people interpret it in different ways.

A protocol has to be a set of rules or it isn't a protocol by definition.

I have only one thing to say to you: Why do you hate America so much?

Give a pair to every special forces unit on the ground and they have quick intelligance in a pinch.

Hey, good idea. We should also give this idea to Operation TIPS. Imagine how much more efficient their snitches could be.

And I understand x10 is coming out with a model airplane version of their wireless camera... (if they're not, they should!).

Apple Switches Processors and Steve Jobs Gets Vindication!

I can't help but speculate...

Two pundits have predicted recently that Apple will go to Intel within two years. Steve Jobs, when asked if Apple would go to another processor, said that once the transition to OSX is complete we'll have options, and we like options.

Most OSX apps are written in Carbon right now. Jobs has been in love with Object Oriented Programming since he started NeXTand now that the OOP benefits of NextStep are part of OSX he should be thrilled, right? Wrong. Most current OSX apps are written in Carbon, not the slick Object Oriented OSX Native Cocoa environment.

If Apple "switched" to another processor, (pun intended) they could use that transition to force app developers to rewrite in Cocoa since Carbon is (correct me if I'm wrong, and you know you want to) OS9/PowerPC dependent.

Jobs' beloved Cocoa, the current incarnation of the NextStep development environment he's been preaching about for lo these many years, would become the Mac standard. Objective C would be the rage and Steve would be vindicated.

Watch it happen!

----------------
http://blogs.salon.com/0001159/

Oops - try it here

Salon.com (206.14.209.40) is still Salon magazine, or was as of 9:46 EST Aug 5th.

here

Looks like all that is required is the ?x at the end...

http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/08/03/delet eddomains/index.html?x

Stupid dumbarses. Phil

Sorry, I'm not interested in searching for a date.

The blog stuff does get news out that the mainstream media does not print. So a reference in a blog on MSNBC to an article in a small paper that reveals that Harken oil was using an offshore tax haven in the caymans to cheat the IRS while Bush was a director gets picked up by the Bush Impeachment Coundown, and I am now posting it here - all in less time than it takes Chris Mathews to give a fawning interview to Ann Coulter.

Bad kaws get wriiten all the time, but they do frequently get over turned eventually. One of the best means of arguing against a law is to develop a 'literature' of archtypical examples of that law being abused.

One of the reason thye anti-DMCA and Bono Act forces aren't getting traction with the public is they are doing a poor job of building that 'literature of abuse'. We need to get away from the examples involving hacker groups, cryptologists discussing obscure algorythms and p2p piracy (never allow them to couple p2p with copyright -- two different issues). Instead we need to concentrate on examples that resonate with the mythical Joe Sixpack.

A week or so ago I had dinner with a couple of journalists... neither of them particularily Tech savy. Some how the conversation turned to these copyright issues. I've reak a lot of the stuff on Chilling Effects quite carefully. I started out with the stories of the Underwater Gardening mailgroup problems and the poor lady and her Dragon Art that got stomped on by Anne McCaffrey. Both of those stories resonatedwith my listeners because they were "little guy getting squashed" stories. We then moved onto the Bona Act and some of the DMCA issues Both of these journalists requested the URL to Chilling Effects so they could read further.

In short, don't present a non-technical person with technical examples they'll have difficulting sympathizing with. Use some simple marketting and engage them with human interest stories... stories they can relate to. The little guy getting screwed never sits well with the public, we need to build up a literature of those types of stories to redefine the 'spin' of the debate.

This is Scott Rosenberg's weblog. He is the editor of the very liberal Salon.com, which is slated to be delisted from NASDAQ on August 13.

Start trolling the trendy liberals while you still can!

For a completely unbiased, bipartisan view of US politics I always go to the Bush Impeachment Countdown.

However I do protest at the posters transparent attempt to increase their position in the rankings page by using the sladshdot effect.