And unlike Sony, they aren't sending cease and desist letters to kinect hackers.- -And they could easily be far worse patent trolls than they currently are.
That still doesn't make them ethical though. Just because someone is not being as much of a douchebag as they potentially could be does not mean they're automatically ethical. That'd be like saying that a dictator is ethical because he only executed half of the citizens.
The Egyptions protests have demonstrated the incredible utility of social networking sites in enabling a large pool of people to organize around a common idea.
As nice as that does sound it's not true. The egyptian protests had at the most 300 000 people involed. Now, while that's a lot of people we must remember that Egypt has nearly 80 million inhabitants so compared to thatt the protests were actually pretty small. And more importantly: most of the people arrived to the streets after the social networking sites had been blocked.
The media seems to be painting a picture of some sort of revolution facilitated by social networking sites while completely forgetting the fact that no revolution actually took place: Mubarak is gone but the millitary regime that he hailed from is still in power and in fact stronger than ever (actually, the reason the millitary allowed and even endorsed the protests was that Mubarak wanted his son - who has no ties with the military - to be his successor and that angered most of the people in the armed forces). In addition, as I alreasdy stated the 300 000 protestors is not a major achievement for "social media". There have been protest even in middle-east before the era of the internet where millions of people joined the protests, such as the 1979 revolution of Iran. The crowd in Cairo never swelled to the point that it involved a substantial portion of the city.
Our president does have one important power still, and it's the veto right. Afaik, she can deny any bill she doesn't like, am i right?
No, not anymore. She can still deny signing any law, but that only delays the law from coming into effect. If the senate (eduskunta) passes a law and she doesn't sign it, it will wait three months, after which the senate can the vote on it again and this time it will become a law and come into effect even without her signature.
Our president under the current constitutional law has no concrete power - she only has a role as na official representative of the State. All the actual power resides with the prime minister but she doesn't have a veto right on laws either.
Governments should be afraid of citizens, not vice-versa. and drawing to the comfort that i do happen to live in Finland, a neutral country, and for the most part our government wants to do the right thing. Let alone that our president isn't afraid to be aggressive to voice her and our governments opinion if she sees wrong doing, even if it hasn't anything to do directly with us. Yes, Finland is a weird tiny big country.
For the most part I agree, the goverment is trying its best. But right now, the current ministers, especialy our minister of information, are slowly forgetting or things like ignoring freedom of speech. The fact that some pages are still being censorerd in the make of "preventing the spreading of child pornography" (even though most of the pages censored do not actually contain child pornigraphy, or pornography of any kind) and that they allow things like the "lex nokia" (effectively allowing not only corporations, but also some private organisations such as housing companies to monitor the network usage and emails of ther members) - though it hasn't apparently been used since it passed - proves that many people in the current goverment have seemingly forgotten the importance of these fundamental rights. Also, Finland has been repeatedly fined for breaking the EU articles on freedom of press and speech (note: link in finnish).
And our president hasn't said a thing about these issues - nor for example the fact that Finland is one of the few remaining countries ehere one can still be fined for blasphemy (a law, which has been used a couple times even in the 21st century). And with the current presidential powers being what they are, it wouldn't make a one damn difference. The office of the president under the current constitution is akin to the king of the Swedes: a public figure. All the concrete power rests in the hands of the prime minister, who also has done or said nothing to defend a citizen's right to freedom of speech and expression.
In the upcoming elections next year, none of the major parties have so far informed that they would be focussing on these kind of issues. And why would the? Taxation, budget and immigration are the "hot topics" here like in most western countries so they are what's being used to entice voters. I like being a Finn living here, I think this is a great country and that our educatioon system for exmpale is probably one of the best if not the best in the world. And the political system is beyond repair yet - the major parties just really need a wake up call; a snap on their fingers to remind them that they cannot keep slowly chiselling away our personal freedoms while we're distacted. They need to be shown that this is not the US of A (no offense to any americans) and we won't swallow any "patriot acts" they try to push down our trhoats and that in the spirit of true democracy we will throw them out the door of the senate if they do.
That's why, if you're like me and are truly worried and care about thigns such as freedom of speech, I advice you to consider strongly about not voting any of the major parties in the next elections. Instead, I'd recommedn voting for the Finnish Pirate Party which is not by any means only a party concerned with torrenst and p2p like many unfortunately think - if you check their themes and core values from the site you will notice that personal liberties and freedoms are infact their key points along with de-criminalization of piracy for personal use. They have many candidates focussed primarily on the personal freedoms.
So yes, we're still a great nation. But by no means perfect. So please, for the sake of all of us, stop thinking that we're flawless and vote for somebody who doesn't think that it's a good idea to censor the net abd limit personal freedoms because child pornography is EVIL or because we don't want t
The reason why permanent storage facilities do not exist is only because politicians have never agreed on where those facilities should be located and how they would be constructed. each time some proposal comes up it's immediately shot down by the anti-nuclear lobby.
Although you're right that no permanent waste repositories have yet been completed, one is currently being built. The Onkalo waste repository is being consturcted right here in Finland, and its one of those things that I'm especially proud as a Finn. Granted it is relatively small (designed to contain only all of our nuclear waste, and we're a small country by any comparison) but still, it's a project that gives a lot of important information and shows that permanent waste disposal sites are possible. The location should be choosen carefully, but that's a decission in which people should trust geologists and other scienticst more than politicians.
For those fellow/.'ers that are interested about these kinds of thigs: there's an interesting documentary about Onkalo (which is finnish for "a pit/cave") - and the challenges of selecting and building such a repository - called Into eternity directed by the danish director Michael Madsen. While I might not agree with everything that's said in the film, it's a documentary with exceptional cinematography and it perfectly illustrates how much time, effort and planning has to be put into projects this big.
And every time I go out of the door and press the doorhandle, it opens. This must mean that the doorhandle is actually feeling my touch and that it is sentient. No wait...
The fact that an object reacts when it's touched does not mean the object knows it is being touched. Modern computers aren't any more sentient than typewriters and calculators. Sure, they are really fancy typewriters and even fancier calculators, but we are far from creating any sort of sentient machine.
Not to brag or anything, but damn that's expensive. Here in northern europe, the prices are roughly as follows:
4,90 euros = 6,6 dollars for unlimted data with a maxium speed of 321 kbit/s 9,90 euros = 13,2 dollars for unlimited data with a maxium speed of 1 Mbit/s 14,90 euros = 20,1 dollars for unlimited data with a maxium speed of 15 Mbit/s (with HSPA)
Now, I understand that most mobile usres don't really have the need for unlimited data if they only browse the net and read emails, but it boggles my mind how the cheapest packet for merely 200 megs is twice the price of the cheapest unlimited packet here. Wtf?
Already, the majority of laws in Europe come from Brussels
I'm sorry, but that is just flatout wrong.
The majority of trade laws and laws relating to agriculture/production come from Brussels. But even under the Lisbon treaty the EU has no power whatsoever to impose criminal laws on its member nations. Therefore, even if the EU wanted to force police-state like control over its citizens, it has no means of doing so. EU does try to promote international police co-operation through Europol but Europol is just an organazation transfering and managing information, it has no rights to do arrests or search homes etc - all it can do is try and help local police forces to locate wanted high-profile criminals by relaying information from foreign agencies.
Don't get wrong, I'm as worried as the next/. about these kinds of projects but despite all the scaremongering the EU isn't quite as scary as you seem to think it is.
So instead of purchasing a game new for say $50 then the expansion for another $30 they waited till the set was $20 then purchased them all the while getting full use of a game that others paid full price for. That is stealing and is wrong in my book as they took something they liked then continued to play the game(although I know many people that did the same thing).
So what are you implying? That instead of giving any money at all to Blizard they should've just kept playing for free? If you read the guys post you'd have noticed he said that they didn't have the money to pay 50$ or more for the game because they had no jobs. Point is, they wanted to support the company that made the games, because they liked the game. Why did they like it? Because they got to try it and found out it was good. Why did they get to try it? Because of piracy.
Without piracy it's altogether likely (not certain, but likely) that these guys would not have bought the game at all. Moreover, your analogy of "stealing" is inherently flawed, because people wait for prices of products to drop all the time. I for example, would like to get a PS3 at some point, but I am not getting it before the price comes down a bit. If I end up buing it at a lower price in the future do you call that stealing?
My point is, since they guys had little or no money to spend on games they would've waited for the prices to drop anyways. Piracy "cost" Blizzard nothing - if anything it ensured that they bought the game.
Of course there are always going to be people who are just going to play for free and not buy anything, I'm not denying that. But those people are not the target audience of game manufacturers - you can't force people to buy stuff they have no interest in paying for. You can, however, create a product so good that a part of people who wouldn't have bought it otherwise will end up buing it*. Even if they buy it at a lower price that's still money made, not money lost.
*studies have shown that people who pirate music for example, spend, on average, more money on music than people who don't pirate. Source.
Sorry to nitpick here, but I feel this is kind of important, even if it's just a matter of semantics.
No, we all live our lives in different ways. Unless one believes in some kind of supreme metaphysical being against all evidence, then the only purpose our lives have is one that we assign to ourselves.
I couldn't personally give a damn about Bejeleweled, or tv for that matter, and I wouldn't waste my time on them, but if somebody gains fulfilment and happiness from doing so then why should it be called a waste of his time? That's right, it shouldn't.
...You mean like how right by every single post in the news feed there is a button where you can hide posts from certain people, groups, etc?
The problem is that the hide button doesn't allow you to hide certain type of news from the feed (at least not anymore). You can hide entire applications, and entire actions of persons from showing up. I would love to be able to hide notices such as "person X commented on person Y's message" or "Person X likes person Y's status", and so on - because I don't care about them and I think they're just adding crap to my news feed - but if I click "hide" it will hide all the messages of the said person.
I don't use facebook much at all - and the shitty interface is one of the biggest reasons for that.
Although this is slightly off-topic, I'd just like to point out to all/. readers who might be wondering about his name: Ilkka Karttunen is actually a Finnish name. I have no idea if the guy has moved into the UK from Finland or if his parents/relatives have come from here. Well, idiots like him are pretty evenly split between nations anyway, so his nationality doesn't really make a difference. But I know there are people out there who went "What kind kind of name is that for a guy from Essex O.o?".
I personally think abortion is a disgusting cop-out and an affront to humanity in most cases
And forcing a child to be born into a family that didn't want a child in the first place is a much, much worse of an affront to humanity.
If two adults are honest enought to confess that they made a mistake and that they're not ready for them huge responsibility of having and raising a child no humane society should punish them - and the child at the same time - for that mistake by forcing them to keep the child.
Actually, I think there are more people here from outside of the US (mainly Europe) than you think. I think it's closer to a 50-50 ratio. And this is why:
Exhibit A) If you look at this poll you'll see that 43% of all voters chose the option "I Use Celsius, You Insensitive Clod!", which would obviously imply that they are not from the States.
Exhibit B) I'm Finnish (been browsing/. actively for a couple of years now) and I know I'm by far not the only Finn lurking around here. Moreover, if you look at, for example, the stories that have something to do with the US healthcare system there always seems to be an abundance of Swedes, Brits, Canadians and (more rarely though) us Finns trying to explain how "socialist healthcare" really isn't such an infernal thing as some of you Americans think it is.
allows the government to strip you of your freedom without the consent of your fellow citizens.
Erm. Why is the "consent" of your fellow citizens needed? Laws - in any democratic country - are crafted by people who have been democratically selected to represent the people. If someone breaks these laws he/she deserves a punishment. However, wether or not he indeed commited the crime he is acused of is not a matter of oppinion. Why should it be open for a vote? There either is or is not enough evidence to condemn the man, and people who have been given the proper training in lgeal issues (ie. judges and prosecutors) should be able to determine that.
By giving complete laymen control over wether or not the suspect is guilty, an additional factor is added to the process. Trials are not only about reviewing the evidence, they're about convincing people that your view is correct. It's a show where both sides have to try to appeal to the basic human insticts like empathy. Both sides are trying to manipulate the jury's feelings and because emotions affect one's judgement the decissions of the jury could be far from objective (of course a trial can never be 100% objective, but I still don't think that a jury based system is the best alternative).
I say it's not the best alternative because it isn't working that well. In fact I'd go as far as saying that it's a failure, since the USA has the highest murder rate of all the industrialized countries, the highest amount of prisoners in the world. Especially the latter statistic is in my oppinion partially explained by the fact that people seek revenge, they want the "bad guys" off the streets and hence a jury of laymen is more likely to find a man guilty than a system which doesn't use juries.
For example: Germany - and many other European countries - uses a system where the judge is assisted by two lay judges on the lowest level and two other judges on higher levels of the legal system. Germany has nearly six times lower murder rate than the USA and only 1/7 of the prisoner amount of the USA.
So could someone please explain why is this "consent of one's fellow citizens" a good thing for the criminal (who is more likely to get imprisoned) and most importantly for the society itself since it doesn't seem to be very effecting in reducing crimes?
I'm always curious about whether or not these kind of treaties only restrict the number of warheads or the total yield of the arsenal. Of course, less nukes is always good, but if the agreement only says you must have less nukes, it doesn't stop you from making those nukes even more powerful.
I have had two gmail accounts for a couple years now. One of them has my name on it (in the form of: "firstname.lastname@gmail.com") and the other is a nick (not the same as my/. one) that I often use in forums/games. Curiosuly enough, neither of these accounts gets any spam at all. And by this I don't mean that the spam filters are effective because there is no to be filtered. I can understand that my name based account doesn't get spam, after all I rarely give it out to anyone except people I know in person and very important sites (mostly web-stores that require my full name anyways) that I trust. However, I use my nick based email on nearly all forums and sites that require an email address during registration and despite that, I only get mail from those sites. No unwanted viagra adds or anything. Now I know from earlier comments and stories such as this that spam is a huge problem to many people. So am I just incredibly lucky? I honestly don't know.
The only thing I have consciously done to avoid being spammed is that I have never typed my adress directly to any forum post/site. In fact, most forums allow you to hide the email address, and even the sites that option of sending email to other users usually require registration to see the adress and have methods such as CAPTCHAS in place to prevent bots from getting in to harvest the addresses. If somebody asks for my email I'll just send it to them via private message or similar method instead of leaving it "in public view".
Like I said, I have no idea if I'm just lucky or something, but spam has never been a problem for me.
I just don't see how taking the life of an embryo so that the older or sick can keep on living is anything other than vampirisim (in a loose sense of the word, or course).
Erm, someone correct me if I'm wrong but hasn't this been discussed time and time again. Embryos for stem cell research are not bred just for the purpose of being "killed". The cells, at least acording to what I've heard/read (again, prove me wrong if you know any better, I'm not a professional) are taken from embryos that were fertilized for the purposes of fertility treatment/artificial impregantion. During those treatments multiple embryos are fertilized and some of them are the discared. The stem cells are extracted from discarded embryos. This means that the embryos would "die" anyway and at least this way they're being used for something beneficial.
Moreover, I don't understand the problem at all. Embryos aren't humans. They are clusters of cells. They are by no means sentient or intelligent. So what's the whole deal about "vapirism"? People donate blood and organs all the time - this is not so far from it. Bottom line is: The embryo is alive in the sense all cells are alive but it has no "life" to be taken away. If you seriously think that way I suggest you stop eating any food because by eating vegetables you're basically taking the life of another organism so that you can live and according to you, that's "vampirism".
When the Sun runs out it won't matter how much coal we have, (or any other energy source) unless we've used it to ship out far, far away from this solar system. Nothing is truly indefinite so your argument is mostly pointless.
Current nukes are in the 5-50 megaton range, and do really rather more damage.
Interesting thing I once heard about nuclear bombs and radiation:
Somebody correct me if I'm wrong but isn't it so that the larger the bomb, the less dangerous the fallout is.
With smaller bombs the irradiated matter (soil and other stuff) flies into the air where it is then carried onwards by the wind before raining down as fallout and causing damage.
On the other hand, with large bombs the immidiate damage caused by the blast is huge but the blast is also powerful enough that a fairly large portion of the irradiated materia will be lifter so far up into the atmosphere that the wind will not be able to carry it (there's less/no wind on the upper layers of the atmosphere) and it will not land as fast.
Of course the matter be affected by gravity and come down eventually, but it will be after long enough period so that the resulting fallout is not nearly as bad as with smaller bombs.
This does not mean bigger bombs cause any less deaths because the sheer size of the blast does so much more damage but I found it to be interesting.
Like I said, I am not an expert on the issue so if I got it completely wrong I'd be very pleased if someone corrected me.
We are born selfish and violent, lashing out (stomping feet, hitting, biting, scratch, hitting, etc) when we don't get want.
Yes, and we're also born naked. Nudity is a natural thing and I haven't seen any scientific proof that seeing a naked person is harmful to the development of children.
OTOH, we don't even start to become sexual beings until the early teen years. (Later, in cultures that aren't so sex-saturated as the US.)
While this is true, I still think that restrecting kids that are nearing their teen years (that is, approzimately 9-12 year-olds) all knowledge of sex only helps to make it a mystical thing that, because it's prohibited, they're more likely to try. This is not true in all cases of course, but kids tend to be interested in forbidden things, they're curious by nature.
The fact is that they're going to try it at some point anyway, and if you make it appear like this super secret thing that only adults are allowed to do you're not exactly helping them. Besides, the sex scenes in movies are most often far from those in porn, there is nothing "bad" in them (most often no visible genitals or anything). Sure your child could ask you what was it all about but then you can just tell him/her. There is nothing bad about telling your child what sex is so on - it's a natural thing and telling them about it is a part of being a parent.
If you think you should only start to talk about sex to them at the age of 15-16 you might be sadly late, because by that time many might have tried it already (and there's nothing wrong with that either, however they should be aware of how to use proper protection and so on). So it is best to tell about it to them before they become sexually active.
So no, there is nothing wrong with taking, say an 11 year-old to see Watchmen if you think he/she can handle the violence (it's individual, children develop at different speed).
The reason for that is people like you blocking adverts.
The sites don't get money from just people who visit the site and see the ads, people have to actually click them. I understand your point but your theory presumes that people who block the ads would click them if they didn't block them.
Before I began using Firefox with adblock I considered ads as mainly a nuisance because, like you said, they were often intrusive and made it harder to find the stuff I was looking for from the site. Due to this I simply learned to ignore the ads and I can count on one hand's fingers the occasions on which I actually clicked some ad.
The problem is not with the people. People block the ads because they're annoying and hence not very interesting. The problem is the ads themselves. The advertisement tactic used in the net is too much based on the same tactic companies use on the streets: The bigger the better. On the streets this work because the bigger and more colourful the ad is the more chance there is that people will notice it. However, when you make the ads on the net big, colourful and often moving (sometimes even with sound effects) and then fill a webpage with these ads they stop working and instead of arousing interest you're just making people annoyed.
I can't see why people would click on ads they consider irritating even if they would see them. Now that there are free and easy-to-use tools that efficiently block the ads of course people will use it, but it's not their "fault", it's the advertisers fault for making ads too damn frustraiting. So in short: Ad blocking is not the cause, it's an effect. The core of the problem lies within the business model of web advertising.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe so, but tell me: how is that different from history? Ever since the birth of organized societies, wealth has always equalled power.
I dislike Apple too but it's not as if they invented greed.
That still doesn't make them ethical though. Just because someone is not being as much of a douchebag as they potentially could be does not mean they're automatically ethical. That'd be like saying that a dictator is ethical because he only executed half of the citizens.
As nice as that does sound it's not true. The egyptian protests had at the most 300 000 people involed. Now, while that's a lot of people we must remember that Egypt has nearly 80 million inhabitants so compared to thatt the protests were actually pretty small. And more importantly: most of the people arrived to the streets after the social networking sites had been blocked.
The media seems to be painting a picture of some sort of revolution facilitated by social networking sites while completely forgetting the fact that no revolution actually took place: Mubarak is gone but the millitary regime that he hailed from is still in power and in fact stronger than ever (actually, the reason the millitary allowed and even endorsed the protests was that Mubarak wanted his son - who has no ties with the military - to be his successor and that angered most of the people in the armed forces). In addition, as I alreasdy stated the 300 000 protestors is not a major achievement for "social media". There have been protest even in middle-east before the era of the internet where millions of people joined the protests, such as the 1979 revolution of Iran. The crowd in Cairo never swelled to the point that it involved a substantial portion of the city.
Our president does have one important power still, and it's the veto right. Afaik, she can deny any bill she doesn't like, am i right?
No, not anymore. She can still deny signing any law, but that only delays the law from coming into effect. If the senate (eduskunta) passes a law and she doesn't sign it, it will wait three months, after which the senate can the vote on it again and this time it will become a law and come into effect even without her signature.
Our president under the current constitutional law has no concrete power - she only has a role as na official representative of the State. All the actual power resides with the prime minister but she doesn't have a veto right on laws either.
Governments should be afraid of citizens, not vice-versa. and drawing to the comfort that i do happen to live in Finland, a neutral country, and for the most part our government wants to do the right thing. Let alone that our president isn't afraid to be aggressive to voice her and our governments opinion if she sees wrong doing, even if it hasn't anything to do directly with us. Yes, Finland is a weird tiny big country.
For the most part I agree, the goverment is trying its best. But right now, the current ministers, especialy our minister of information, are slowly forgetting or things like ignoring freedom of speech. The fact that some pages are still being censorerd in the make of "preventing the spreading of child pornography" (even though most of the pages censored do not actually contain child pornigraphy, or pornography of any kind) and that they allow things like the "lex nokia" (effectively allowing not only corporations, but also some private organisations such as housing companies to monitor the network usage and emails of ther members) - though it hasn't apparently been used since it passed - proves that many people in the current goverment have seemingly forgotten the importance of these fundamental rights. Also, Finland has been repeatedly fined for breaking the EU articles on freedom of press and speech (note: link in finnish).
And our president hasn't said a thing about these issues - nor for example the fact that Finland is one of the few remaining countries ehere one can still be fined for blasphemy (a law, which has been used a couple times even in the 21st century). And with the current presidential powers being what they are, it wouldn't make a one damn difference. The office of the president under the current constitution is akin to the king of the Swedes: a public figure. All the concrete power rests in the hands of the prime minister, who also has done or said nothing to defend a citizen's right to freedom of speech and expression.
In the upcoming elections next year, none of the major parties have so far informed that they would be focussing on these kind of issues. And why would the? Taxation, budget and immigration are the "hot topics" here like in most western countries so they are what's being used to entice voters. I like being a Finn living here, I think this is a great country and that our educatioon system for exmpale is probably one of the best if not the best in the world. And the political system is beyond repair yet - the major parties just really need a wake up call; a snap on their fingers to remind them that they cannot keep slowly chiselling away our personal freedoms while we're distacted. They need to be shown that this is not the US of A (no offense to any americans) and we won't swallow any "patriot acts" they try to push down our trhoats and that in the spirit of true democracy we will throw them out the door of the senate if they do.
That's why, if you're like me and are truly worried and care about thigns such as freedom of speech, I advice you to consider strongly about not voting any of the major parties in the next elections. Instead, I'd recommedn voting for the Finnish Pirate Party which is not by any means only a party concerned with torrenst and p2p like many unfortunately think - if you check their themes and core values from the site you will notice that personal liberties and freedoms are infact their key points along with de-criminalization of piracy for personal use. They have many candidates focussed primarily on the personal freedoms.
So yes, we're still a great nation. But by no means perfect. So please, for the sake of all of us, stop thinking that we're flawless and vote for somebody who doesn't think that it's a good idea to censor the net abd limit personal freedoms because child pornography is EVIL or because we don't want t
The reason why permanent storage facilities do not exist is only because politicians have never agreed on where those facilities should be located and how they would be constructed. each time some proposal comes up it's immediately shot down by the anti-nuclear lobby.
Although you're right that no permanent waste repositories have yet been completed, one is currently being built. The Onkalo waste repository is being consturcted right here in Finland, and its one of those things that I'm especially proud as a Finn. Granted it is relatively small (designed to contain only all of our nuclear waste, and we're a small country by any comparison) but still, it's a project that gives a lot of important information and shows that permanent waste disposal sites are possible. The location should be choosen carefully, but that's a decission in which people should trust geologists and other scienticst more than politicians.
For those fellow /.'ers that are interested about these kinds of thigs: there's an interesting documentary about Onkalo (which is finnish for "a pit/cave") - and the challenges of selecting and building such a repository - called Into eternity directed by the danish director Michael Madsen. While I might not agree with everything that's said in the film, it's a documentary with exceptional cinematography and it perfectly illustrates how much time, effort and planning has to be put into projects this big.
They feel my touch, and respond to it.
And every time I go out of the door and press the doorhandle, it opens. This must mean that the doorhandle is actually feeling my touch and that it is sentient. No wait...
The fact that an object reacts when it's touched does not mean the object knows it is being touched. Modern computers aren't any more sentient than typewriters and calculators. Sure, they are really fancy typewriters and even fancier calculators, but we are far from creating any sort of sentient machine.
Not to brag or anything, but damn that's expensive. Here in northern europe, the prices are roughly as follows:
4,90 euros = 6,6 dollars for unlimted data with a maxium speed of 321 kbit/s
9,90 euros = 13,2 dollars for unlimited data with a maxium speed of 1 Mbit/s
14,90 euros = 20,1 dollars for unlimited data with a maxium speed of 15 Mbit/s (with HSPA)
Now, I understand that most mobile usres don't really have the need for unlimited data if they only browse the net and read emails, but it boggles my mind how the cheapest packet for merely 200 megs is twice the price of the cheapest unlimited packet here. Wtf?
You missed something extremely important there.
Already, the majority of laws in Europe come from Brussels
I'm sorry, but that is just flatout wrong.
The majority of trade laws and laws relating to agriculture/production come from Brussels. But even under the Lisbon treaty the EU has no power whatsoever to impose criminal laws on its member nations. Therefore, even if the EU wanted to force police-state like control over its citizens, it has no means of doing so. EU does try to promote international police co-operation through Europol but Europol is just an organazation transfering and managing information, it has no rights to do arrests or search homes etc - all it can do is try and help local police forces to locate wanted high-profile criminals by relaying information from foreign agencies.
Don't get wrong, I'm as worried as the next /. about these kinds of projects but despite all the scaremongering the EU isn't quite as scary as you seem to think it is.
So instead of purchasing a game new for say $50 then the expansion for another $30 they waited till the set was $20 then purchased them all the while getting full use of a game that others paid full price for. That is stealing and is wrong in my book as they took something they liked then continued to play the game(although I know many people that did the same thing).
So what are you implying? That instead of giving any money at all to Blizard they should've just kept playing for free? If you read the guys post you'd have noticed he said that they didn't have the money to pay 50$ or more for the game because they had no jobs. Point is, they wanted to support the company that made the games, because they liked the game. Why did they like it? Because they got to try it and found out it was good. Why did they get to try it? Because of piracy.
Without piracy it's altogether likely (not certain, but likely) that these guys would not have bought the game at all. Moreover, your analogy of "stealing" is inherently flawed, because people wait for prices of products to drop all the time. I for example, would like to get a PS3 at some point, but I am not getting it before the price comes down a bit. If I end up buing it at a lower price in the future do you call that stealing?
My point is, since they guys had little or no money to spend on games they would've waited for the prices to drop anyways. Piracy "cost" Blizzard nothing - if anything it ensured that they bought the game.
Of course there are always going to be people who are just going to play for free and not buy anything, I'm not denying that. But those people are not the target audience of game manufacturers - you can't force people to buy stuff they have no interest in paying for. You can, however, create a product so good that a part of people who wouldn't have bought it otherwise will end up buing it*. Even if they buy it at a lower price that's still money made, not money lost.
*studies have shown that people who pirate music for example, spend, on average, more money on music than people who don't pirate. Source.
But in Soviet Russia, the cyrrillic alphabets understand Slashdot.
We all waste our life in different ways.
Sorry to nitpick here, but I feel this is kind of important, even if it's just a matter of semantics.
No, we all live our lives in different ways. Unless one believes in some kind of supreme metaphysical being against all evidence, then the only purpose our lives have is one that we assign to ourselves.
I couldn't personally give a damn about Bejeleweled, or tv for that matter, and I wouldn't waste my time on them, but if somebody gains fulfilment and happiness from doing so then why should it be called a waste of his time? That's right, it shouldn't.
End of existential rant.
...You mean like how right by every single post in the news feed there is a button where you can hide posts from certain people, groups, etc?
The problem is that the hide button doesn't allow you to hide certain type of news from the feed (at least not anymore). You can hide entire applications, and entire actions of persons from showing up. I would love to be able to hide notices such as "person X commented on person Y's message" or "Person X likes person Y's status", and so on - because I don't care about them and I think they're just adding crap to my news feed - but if I click "hide" it will hide all the messages of the said person.
I don't use facebook much at all - and the shitty interface is one of the biggest reasons for that.
Although this is slightly off-topic, I'd just like to point out to all /. readers who might be wondering about his name: Ilkka Karttunen is actually a Finnish name. I have no idea if the guy has moved into the UK from Finland or if his parents/relatives have come from here. Well, idiots like him are pretty evenly split between nations anyway, so his nationality doesn't really make a difference. But I know there are people out there who went "What kind kind of name is that for a guy from Essex O.o?".
I personally think abortion is a disgusting cop-out and an affront to humanity in most cases
And forcing a child to be born into a family that didn't want a child in the first place is a much, much worse of an affront to humanity.
If two adults are honest enought to confess that they made a mistake and that they're not ready for them huge responsibility of having and raising a child no humane society should punish them - and the child at the same time - for that mistake by forcing them to keep the child.
Actually, I think there are more people here from outside of the US (mainly Europe) than you think. I think it's closer to a 50-50 ratio. And this is why:
Exhibit A) If you look at this poll you'll see that 43% of all voters chose the option "I Use Celsius, You Insensitive Clod!", which would obviously imply that they are not from the States.
Exhibit B) I'm Finnish (been browsing /. actively for a couple of years now) and I know I'm by far not the only Finn lurking around here. Moreover, if you look at, for example, the stories that have something to do with the US healthcare system there always seems to be an abundance of Swedes, Brits, Canadians and (more rarely though) us Finns trying to explain how "socialist healthcare" really isn't such an infernal thing as some of you Americans think it is.
allows the government to strip you of your freedom without the consent of your fellow citizens.
Erm. Why is the "consent" of your fellow citizens needed? Laws - in any democratic country - are crafted by people who have been democratically selected to represent the people. If someone breaks these laws he/she deserves a punishment. However, wether or not he indeed commited the crime he is acused of is not a matter of oppinion. Why should it be open for a vote? There either is or is not enough evidence to condemn the man, and people who have been given the proper training in lgeal issues (ie. judges and prosecutors) should be able to determine that.
By giving complete laymen control over wether or not the suspect is guilty, an additional factor is added to the process. Trials are not only about reviewing the evidence, they're about convincing people that your view is correct. It's a show where both sides have to try to appeal to the basic human insticts like empathy. Both sides are trying to manipulate the jury's feelings and because emotions affect one's judgement the decissions of the jury could be far from objective (of course a trial can never be 100% objective, but I still don't think that a jury based system is the best alternative).
I say it's not the best alternative because it isn't working that well. In fact I'd go as far as saying that it's a failure, since the USA has the highest murder rate of all the industrialized countries, the highest amount of prisoners in the world. Especially the latter statistic is in my oppinion partially explained by the fact that people seek revenge, they want the "bad guys" off the streets and hence a jury of laymen is more likely to find a man guilty than a system which doesn't use juries.
For example: Germany - and many other European countries - uses a system where the judge is assisted by two lay judges on the lowest level and two other judges on higher levels of the legal system. Germany has nearly six times lower murder rate than the USA and only 1/7 of the prisoner amount of the USA.
So could someone please explain why is this "consent of one's fellow citizens" a good thing for the criminal (who is more likely to get imprisoned) and most importantly for the society itself since it doesn't seem to be very effecting in reducing crimes?
I'm always curious about whether or not these kind of treaties only restrict the number of warheads or the total yield of the arsenal. Of course, less nukes is always good, but if the agreement only says you must have less nukes, it doesn't stop you from making those nukes even more powerful.
I have had two gmail accounts for a couple years now. One of them has my name on it (in the form of: "firstname.lastname@gmail.com") and the other is a nick (not the same as my /. one) that I often use in forums/games. Curiosuly enough, neither of these accounts gets any spam at all. And by this I don't mean that the spam filters are effective because there is no to be filtered. I can understand that my name based account doesn't get spam, after all I rarely give it out to anyone except people I know in person and very important sites (mostly web-stores that require my full name anyways) that I trust. However, I use my nick based email on nearly all forums and sites that require an email address during registration and despite that, I only get mail from those sites. No unwanted viagra adds or anything. Now I know from earlier comments and stories such as this that spam is a huge problem to many people. So am I just incredibly lucky? I honestly don't know.
The only thing I have consciously done to avoid being spammed is that I have never typed my adress directly to any forum post/site. In fact, most forums allow you to hide the email address, and even the sites that option of sending email to other users usually require registration to see the adress and have methods such as CAPTCHAS in place to prevent bots from getting in to harvest the addresses. If somebody asks for my email I'll just send it to them via private message or similar method instead of leaving it "in public view".
Like I said, I have no idea if I'm just lucky or something, but spam has never been a problem for me.
Nuke the site from orbit.
Seriously. Mod this guy insightful. After all, it's the only way to be sure. ;-)
I just don't see how taking the life of an embryo so that the older or sick can keep on living is anything other than vampirisim (in a loose sense of the word, or course).
Erm, someone correct me if I'm wrong but hasn't this been discussed time and time again. Embryos for stem cell research are not bred just for the purpose of being "killed". The cells, at least acording to what I've heard/read (again, prove me wrong if you know any better, I'm not a professional) are taken from embryos that were fertilized for the purposes of fertility treatment/artificial impregantion. During those treatments multiple embryos are fertilized and some of them are the discared. The stem cells are extracted from discarded embryos. This means that the embryos would "die" anyway and at least this way they're being used for something beneficial.
Moreover, I don't understand the problem at all. Embryos aren't humans. They are clusters of cells. They are by no means sentient or intelligent. So what's the whole deal about "vapirism"? People donate blood and organs all the time - this is not so far from it. Bottom line is: The embryo is alive in the sense all cells are alive but it has no "life" to be taken away. If you seriously think that way I suggest you stop eating any food because by eating vegetables you're basically taking the life of another organism so that you can live and according to you, that's "vampirism".
When the Sun runs out it won't matter how much coal we have, (or any other energy source) unless we've used it to ship out far, far away from this solar system. Nothing is truly indefinite so your argument is mostly pointless.
WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSH!
Current nukes are in the 5-50 megaton range, and do really rather more damage.
Interesting thing I once heard about nuclear bombs and radiation:
Somebody correct me if I'm wrong but isn't it so that the larger the bomb, the less dangerous the fallout is.
With smaller bombs the irradiated matter (soil and other stuff) flies into the air where it is then carried onwards by the wind before raining down as fallout and causing damage.
On the other hand, with large bombs the immidiate damage caused by the blast is huge but the blast is also powerful enough that a fairly large portion of the irradiated materia will be lifter so far up into the atmosphere that the wind will not be able to carry it (there's less/no wind on the upper layers of the atmosphere) and it will not land as fast.
Of course the matter be affected by gravity and come down eventually, but it will be after long enough period so that the resulting fallout is not nearly as bad as with smaller bombs.
This does not mean bigger bombs cause any less deaths because the sheer size of the blast does so much more damage but I found it to be interesting.
Like I said, I am not an expert on the issue so if I got it completely wrong I'd be very pleased if someone corrected me.
We are born selfish and violent, lashing out (stomping feet, hitting, biting, scratch, hitting, etc) when we don't get want.
Yes, and we're also born naked. Nudity is a natural thing and I haven't seen any scientific proof that seeing a naked person is harmful to the development of children.
OTOH, we don't even start to become sexual beings until the early teen years. (Later, in cultures that aren't so sex-saturated as the US.)
While this is true, I still think that restrecting kids that are nearing their teen years (that is, approzimately 9-12 year-olds) all knowledge of sex only helps to make it a mystical thing that, because it's prohibited, they're more likely to try. This is not true in all cases of course, but kids tend to be interested in forbidden things, they're curious by nature.
The fact is that they're going to try it at some point anyway, and if you make it appear like this super secret thing that only adults are allowed to do you're not exactly helping them. Besides, the sex scenes in movies are most often far from those in porn, there is nothing "bad" in them (most often no visible genitals or anything). Sure your child could ask you what was it all about but then you can just tell him/her. There is nothing bad about telling your child what sex is so on - it's a natural thing and telling them about it is a part of being a parent.
If you think you should only start to talk about sex to them at the age of 15-16 you might be sadly late, because by that time many might have tried it already (and there's nothing wrong with that either, however they should be aware of how to use proper protection and so on). So it is best to tell about it to them before they become sexually active.
So no, there is nothing wrong with taking, say an 11 year-old to see Watchmen if you think he/she can handle the violence (it's individual, children develop at different speed).
The reason for that is people like you blocking adverts.
The sites don't get money from just people who visit the site and see the ads, people have to actually click them. I understand your point but your theory presumes that people who block the ads would click them if they didn't block them.
Before I began using Firefox with adblock I considered ads as mainly a nuisance because, like you said, they were often intrusive and made it harder to find the stuff I was looking for from the site. Due to this I simply learned to ignore the ads and I can count on one hand's fingers the occasions on which I actually clicked some ad.
The problem is not with the people. People block the ads because they're annoying and hence not very interesting. The problem is the ads themselves. The advertisement tactic used in the net is too much based on the same tactic companies use on the streets: The bigger the better. On the streets this work because the bigger and more colourful the ad is the more chance there is that people will notice it. However, when you make the ads on the net big, colourful and often moving (sometimes even with sound effects) and then fill a webpage with these ads they stop working and instead of arousing interest you're just making people annoyed.
I can't see why people would click on ads they consider irritating even if they would see them. Now that there are free and easy-to-use tools that efficiently block the ads of course people will use it, but it's not their "fault", it's the advertisers fault for making ads too damn frustraiting. So in short: Ad blocking is not the cause, it's an effect. The core of the problem lies within the business model of web advertising.