I didn't bother reading all the (600+) replies so far because the first few were typically just a bunch of jokers looking for attention. So apologies if what I post now hasn't already been said.
You haven't said what age your daughter is and presumably she's heterosexual. Also, are you her father or mother? Whatever the case, I think it's important that you remember that you were a kid once too.
I think that the most important 'filter' when it comes to deciding what your kids should see/read/hear/talk about isn't some arbitrary set of rules drawn up by someone else, whether that person is a priest, a politician, a judge or the owner of an ISP. It's yourself. It has been said that we don't own our children (very true), but we are the guardians of them for society. I don't entirely agree with that last part because it implies that once they become 'adults' (as in: whatever legal or socially determined threshold makes them independent of you and suddenly responsible for themselves) they should be handed over to that society's will. Which could be conscription, indentured servitude, arranged marriage, legal requirement, body mutilation, anything.
I think that the most serious parenting problems kids and their parents have are not pornography, violence, or career choices - but FEAR and IGNORANCE.
You Don't Know What To Do and You Are Afraid.
Try this: You are worried about your daughter getting hassled by aggressive porn spammers but (apparently) you don't mind her talking sexually about boys. So explain to her what the porn industry is really all about. That it's a large business that sells sex movies for entertainment. And for example, show her 'The Annabelle Chong Story' and 'Ron Jeremy: Porn Star'. (To my mind, films every kid should see.)
Kids aren't stupid, they're just the noobs of life. So once you teach her that the worst problem with those arsehole porn spammers is that they use you, waste your bandwidth and try to put trojans on your PC, she'll probably lose interest in porn they way that girls usually lose interest in society queens after they've been mocked on Facebook for not being pretty or rich enough.
So given some good advice by someone she can trust, your daughter should be a lot more confident and more inclined to come to you for advice later on.
One more point: one of the earlier posters replied that you should just put the PC in the living room. Stupid stupid move. Teenagers need privacy. It's because they need to explore their sense of self and make decisions about their lives ON THEIR OWN TERMS. As you were a teenager once, you should remember this.
Don't insult your daughter's intelligence and give her reason to believe that anything you say is bogus.
That probably wouldn't work.
Why not? Because fan-made free-to-play Shards (server worlds for the non UO savvy) were huge from about 2001 to 2005 and yes, there were several 'back to basics' shards but for all their custom rulesets and content (which was often better than the crap EA was making) the official game still lurches on and most of those fan-made shards are gone.
Right now UO suffers from assinine rulesets (Age Of Shadows, come on down!) and almost total disinterest from the developers. What keeps it alive for now are the old veteran players and the people who want to play a game with genuine history and unrivalled depth.
But to get back on topic here.....
I bought Unreal Tournament 3 THE DAY my local game shop got it in and I paid 80 for the collector's box too. After realising how badly I needed to upgrade my PC just to get it running I played it for about a month, tolerating the apalling bugs (like having the game reset all your config. options every time you exit) and waiting for the anticipated patch.
By three months later, it was obvious CliffyB and friends were more interested in 'quarter-term profit margins' and 'market sector penetration realisations' (someone make a joke about that) than they were in making great games anymore. Fuck it, they wouldn't even release Gears Of War 2 for PC because of 'piracy concerns'!
Yesterday I reinstalled UT3 for the first time in a year only because I got the v2.0 Patch.
It's a good game, and with the editor, it could be like Unreal Tournament all over again.
But it took the v2.0 patch to get to where we should have been in November 2007.
What about reissuing some old games simply because they won't run on modern PCs? I don't mean console-to-console ports I mean cases where a game ran on Glide or DirectX 3 or whatever and won't even install anymore.
I've got a few games like Machines, Independence War/Independence War 2, Little Big Adventure and Battle Isle 4 and the last time I played these gems was back in the 20th century. I'd KILL to see someone rewrite them so they'll run on my Quad-Core powered twin-linked HD4870 8Gb gamer rig with its 2Tb storage and 40 inch plasma widescreen!
Ireland has had resources to draw on for years (oil and gas fields for example) but in my opinion, the real problem is the Irish themselves.
You say that the last 15 years have seen considerable changes in Ireland but those changes were only on the surface. Irish culture has hardly changed and that is the most serious problem the Irish have. Themselves.
From the days of Laughing Stock Of Europe through the Celtic Tiger/Rip-off Republic era to today's ignominy as the first country in Europe to declare a recession, the Irish have learned very little at all.
As a nation, they're famously venal and shortsighted with a strong streak of incompetence and procrastination.
Massive overspending on credit, status anxiety and explosive urban sprawl were the hallmarks of the Irish in the Celtic Tiger and let's not leave out the infamous Irish greed for property.
For the price you'd pay for a castle in England
http://www.propertyshowrooms.com/united%20kingdom/property/news/richard-hammond-buys-haunted-herefordshire-castle_19029.html/,
you'd be lucky to afford a house on the Rathgar road.
Why would anyone want to pay that much to live in a country with low building standards, an incompetent and ineffectual judiciary and a culture of smirking corruption at the highest level? Hell, you could move to Italy or Bulgaria for that and get better weather.
No, the Irish have blown it - again. And they can't whine and blame the English this time.
If anyone truly believes that the Irish are in this bind because they happen to live on an island with little resources, please STFU and go to Iceland.
...FUCKING Telcoms and FUCKING ISPS!
If they could only charge you for the air you breath, you'd be choking. All of you.
In every country that has internet access it's the same old story. ISPs charge whatever the hell they can get away with on a scale based upon the user base/government regulator's comprehension of what 'the internet' means -OR- ISPs bends over backwards (and forwards) to help censor the internet in that particular country.
Why do people even bother complaining about Comcast anymore? Comcast isn't specially bad, it's just as greedy and full of shit as a hundred other ISPs around the world.
Ask an Irishman or an Australian if their internet access is any good and see what kind of answers you'll get.
Now if it were possible for me, I'd start a cooperative and raise enough capital to run my own ISP - without the bullshit.
I intend on buying Spore when it gets to my local shop but
I'm going to download it as well so I can install and play it without crappy DRM on my PC.
I'm also going to wait a month or so before paying cash for it so there'll be plenty of time for the patches to come out, and for the price to drop. I may like this game but not enough pay 60 just so I can be first on my street to yell "FIRST!".
On that last point:
EA are currently advertising Spore:Galactic Edition. Which is Spore packaged in an actual card box with two self-loving documentaries (available on torrent soon anyway, right?) an artbook (ditto),a 100 page manual... and a poster worthy of any 12 year old's bedroom wall.
How special is that? Not a bit.
PC games ALWAYS used to come in individually designed card boxes with printed manuals. Everything else is in this package is promotional kipple typical of EA and their corporate stooge, Will Wright.
That's essentially what I yelled down the 'phone in Berlin to Fujitsu-Siemens tech support after a week with a brand new Vista laptop.
I'd bought it in Dublin on sale and had asked the salesman if there would be any problems installing Windows XP for the software I use. He said no and so I left, feeling happy.
But not so happy two days later in a Kreuzberg café when I discovered that F-S were not making XP drivers - thanks to Microsoft's licencing. An email from them said something along the lines of XP drivers never being available anymore. So my new laptop had no Wi-fi, sound or proper graphics drivers. Thanks to Microsoft.
I had smartly enough, created a partition to install WinXP on instead of simply formatting and wiping Windows Vista, so I hadn't actually activated Vista and was able to return the laptop to the shop in Dublin a month later. I still had to spend another 150 Euro to get a laptop that had XP in it, though.
Why do I get the impression that if high-speed internet access was banned in YOUR homes, you guys would (probably literally) be up in arms about it and not just making remarks on a forum?
We did it with a free society and a decent
respect for life.
(Blocking is mine.)
I know that Americans are fed this story about how wonderful The United States is from an early age but you could do with a little more skepticism.
A free society? Millions of you are prisoners of an economy, nothing more.
Decent respect for life? Which country invented the A-Bomb, used it twice and was dropping Napalm and Agent Orange on the Vietnamese by the time Armstrong landed on the moon?
I'm an atheist and I'm quite sure there are no gods. Gods are invented mythological beings, like dragons and elves.
Buddha does not exist, nor Allah nor God nor the Hindu pantheon nor the Wiccan nature spirits.
People do exist, however. I'm pretty sure of that even in my most hermit-like solipsist moments and this Christmas, I'd like for the stupid fuckers to get along with each other, stop polluting the planet and imprisoning each other with their arbitrary and illogical morality rules. Mostly I'd like them to stop killing each other over squabbles about who's made up mythological being is better.
Does anyone find it odd that an atheist hopes for a nicer Christmas than usual? It isn't that odd. There's never been anything wrong with having a holiday in the middle of Winter and I wish everyone out there - even the religious haters - a nice peaceful one.
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I didn't bother reading all the (600+) replies so far because the first few were typically just a bunch of jokers looking for attention. So apologies if what I post now hasn't already been said.
You haven't said what age your daughter is and presumably she's heterosexual. Also, are you her father or mother? Whatever the case, I think it's important that you remember that you were a kid once too.
I think that the most important 'filter' when it comes to deciding what your kids should see/read/hear/talk about isn't some arbitrary set of rules drawn up by someone else, whether that person is a priest, a politician, a judge or the owner of an ISP. It's yourself.
It has been said that we don't own our children (very true), but we are the guardians of them for society. I don't entirely agree with that last part because it implies that once they become 'adults' (as in: whatever legal or socially determined threshold makes them independent of you and suddenly responsible for themselves) they should be handed over to that society's will. Which could be conscription, indentured servitude, arranged marriage, legal requirement, body mutilation, anything.
I think that the most serious parenting problems kids and their parents have are not pornography, violence, or career choices - but FEAR and IGNORANCE.
You Don't Know What To Do and You Are Afraid.
Try this: You are worried about your daughter getting hassled by aggressive porn spammers but (apparently) you don't mind her talking sexually about boys. So explain to her what the porn industry is really all about. That it's a large business that sells sex movies for entertainment. And for example, show her 'The Annabelle Chong Story' and 'Ron Jeremy: Porn Star'. (To my mind, films every kid should see.)
Kids aren't stupid, they're just the noobs of life. So once you teach her that the worst problem with those arsehole porn spammers is that they use you, waste your bandwidth and try to put trojans on your PC, she'll probably lose interest in porn they way that girls usually lose interest in society queens after they've been mocked on Facebook for not being pretty or rich enough.
So given some good advice by someone she can trust, your daughter should be a lot more confident and more inclined to come to you for advice later on.
One more point: one of the earlier posters replied that you should just put the PC in the living room. Stupid stupid move. Teenagers need privacy. It's because they need to explore their sense of self and make decisions about their lives ON THEIR OWN TERMS. As you were a teenager once, you should remember this.
Don't insult your daughter's intelligence and give her reason to believe that anything you say is bogus.
Hope I've helped.
That probably wouldn't work. Why not? Because fan-made free-to-play Shards (server worlds for the non UO savvy) were huge from about 2001 to 2005 and yes, there were several 'back to basics' shards but for all their custom rulesets and content (which was often better than the crap EA was making) the official game still lurches on and most of those fan-made shards are gone. Right now UO suffers from assinine rulesets (Age Of Shadows, come on down!) and almost total disinterest from the developers. What keeps it alive for now are the old veteran players and the people who want to play a game with genuine history and unrivalled depth. But to get back on topic here..... I bought Unreal Tournament 3 THE DAY my local game shop got it in and I paid 80 for the collector's box too. After realising how badly I needed to upgrade my PC just to get it running I played it for about a month, tolerating the apalling bugs (like having the game reset all your config. options every time you exit) and waiting for the anticipated patch. By three months later, it was obvious CliffyB and friends were more interested in 'quarter-term profit margins' and 'market sector penetration realisations' (someone make a joke about that) than they were in making great games anymore. Fuck it, they wouldn't even release Gears Of War 2 for PC because of 'piracy concerns'! Yesterday I reinstalled UT3 for the first time in a year only because I got the v2.0 Patch. It's a good game, and with the editor, it could be like Unreal Tournament all over again. But it took the v2.0 patch to get to where we should have been in November 2007.
What about reissuing some old games simply because they won't run on modern PCs? I don't mean console-to-console ports I mean cases where a game ran on Glide or DirectX 3 or whatever and won't even install anymore.
I've got a few games like Machines, Independence War/Independence War 2, Little Big Adventure and Battle Isle 4 and the last time I played these gems was back in the 20th century. I'd KILL to see someone rewrite them so they'll run on my Quad-Core powered twin-linked HD4870 8Gb gamer rig with its 2Tb storage and 40 inch plasma widescreen!
Ireland has had resources to draw on for years (oil and gas fields for example) but in my opinion, the real problem is the Irish themselves.
You say that the last 15 years have seen considerable changes in Ireland but those changes were only on the surface. Irish culture has hardly changed and that is the most serious problem the Irish have. Themselves.
From the days of Laughing Stock Of Europe through the Celtic Tiger/Rip-off Republic era to today's ignominy as the first country in Europe to declare a recession, the Irish have learned very little at all.
As a nation, they're famously venal and shortsighted with a strong streak of incompetence and procrastination.
Massive overspending on credit, status anxiety and explosive urban sprawl were the hallmarks of the Irish in the Celtic Tiger and let's not leave out the infamous Irish greed for property. For the price you'd pay for a castle in England http://www.propertyshowrooms.com/united%20kingdom/property/news/richard-hammond-buys-haunted-herefordshire-castle_19029.html/, you'd be lucky to afford a house on the Rathgar road.
Why would anyone want to pay that much to live in a country with low building standards, an incompetent and ineffectual judiciary and a culture of smirking corruption at the highest level? Hell, you could move to Italy or Bulgaria for that and get better weather.
No, the Irish have blown it - again. And they can't whine and blame the English this time. If anyone truly believes that the Irish are in this bind because they happen to live on an island with little resources, please STFU and go to Iceland.
And for the record, I'm Irish.
...FUCKING Telcoms and FUCKING ISPS! If they could only charge you for the air you breath, you'd be choking. All of you. In every country that has internet access it's the same old story. ISPs charge whatever the hell they can get away with on a scale based upon the user base/government regulator's comprehension of what 'the internet' means -OR- ISPs bends over backwards (and forwards) to help censor the internet in that particular country. Why do people even bother complaining about Comcast anymore? Comcast isn't specially bad, it's just as greedy and full of shit as a hundred other ISPs around the world. Ask an Irishman or an Australian if their internet access is any good and see what kind of answers you'll get. Now if it were possible for me, I'd start a cooperative and raise enough capital to run my own ISP - without the bullshit.
I intend on buying Spore when it gets to my local shop but I'm going to download it as well so I can install and play it without crappy DRM on my PC. I'm also going to wait a month or so before paying cash for it so there'll be plenty of time for the patches to come out, and for the price to drop. I may like this game but not enough pay 60 just so I can be first on my street to yell "FIRST!". On that last point: EA are currently advertising Spore:Galactic Edition. Which is Spore packaged in an actual card box with two self-loving documentaries (available on torrent soon anyway, right?) an artbook (ditto),a 100 page manual... and a poster worthy of any 12 year old's bedroom wall. How special is that? Not a bit. PC games ALWAYS used to come in individually designed card boxes with printed manuals. Everything else is in this package is promotional kipple typical of EA and their corporate stooge, Will Wright.
That's essentially what I yelled down the 'phone in Berlin to Fujitsu-Siemens tech support after a week with a brand new Vista laptop.
I'd bought it in Dublin on sale and had asked the salesman if there would be any problems installing Windows XP for the software I use. He said no and so I left, feeling happy. But not so happy two days later in a Kreuzberg café when I discovered that F-S were not making XP drivers - thanks to Microsoft's licencing. An email from them said something along the lines of XP drivers never being available anymore. So my new laptop had no Wi-fi, sound or proper graphics drivers. Thanks to Microsoft.
I had smartly enough, created a partition to install WinXP on instead of simply formatting and wiping Windows Vista, so I hadn't actually activated Vista and was able to return the laptop to the shop in Dublin a month later. I still had to spend another 150 Euro to get a laptop that had XP in it, though.
And now? I mostly use SUSE Linux.
The Matrix has you.
---> . Always nice to know where you are, right?
Why do I get the impression that if high-speed internet access was banned in YOUR homes, you guys would (probably literally) be up in arms about it and not just making remarks on a forum?
We did it with a free society and a decent respect for life. (Blocking is mine.) I know that Americans are fed this story about how wonderful The United States is from an early age but you could do with a little more skepticism. A free society? Millions of you are prisoners of an economy, nothing more. Decent respect for life? Which country invented the A-Bomb, used it twice and was dropping Napalm and Agent Orange on the Vietnamese by the time Armstrong landed on the moon?
I'm an atheist and I'm quite sure there are no gods. Gods are invented mythological beings, like dragons and elves. Buddha does not exist, nor Allah nor God nor the Hindu pantheon nor the Wiccan nature spirits. People do exist, however. I'm pretty sure of that even in my most hermit-like solipsist moments and this Christmas, I'd like for the stupid fuckers to get along with each other, stop polluting the planet and imprisoning each other with their arbitrary and illogical morality rules. Mostly I'd like them to stop killing each other over squabbles about who's made up mythological being is better. Does anyone find it odd that an atheist hopes for a nicer Christmas than usual? It isn't that odd. There's never been anything wrong with having a holiday in the middle of Winter and I wish everyone out there - even the religious haters - a nice peaceful one.