Fallout 1 and 2 are particularly nicely times with the release of FO3. Lots of people will want to play the originals again.
I wonder who the money goes to, though... In the case of Fallout 1 and 2, certainly not the developer, since Black Isle is long gone. So.. whoever hold distribution rights now, is that sill Interplay or did they sell everything to Bethesda? My point being, if your rationale for paying for games is supporting the devs, then buying some of these classics may not do that at all.
Speaking of solutions, wouldn't homes with an ability to store some amount of power locally help this situation? If you had batteries or hydrogen cells or whatever the most reasonable form of power storage might be in homes, then those could be charged during off-peak hours from the grid, or if possible, even from solar panels or other sources the users run themselves. They could then be programmed to cut in at peak hours. Of course there are any number of issues, the bigger ones probably being finding suitable battery tech and making the idea of getting such a system attractive to the home user in the first place.
What about the viewpoint? I have fairly cinematic dreams, by which I mean that the point of view changes a lot, as if watching a movie shot from multiple angles and edited together. I'd say most of the time I'm not looking through my own eyes in my dreams, and I wonder if this could happen to someone who hasn't grown up watching TV and cinema.
Well, FW800 is very speedy, that's one thing. You can daisy-chain devices. And in the end it's just part of what a lot of video pros expect to have in a computer they use for work - but then again, what with the glossy display and this business, I guess the "pro" models are not really that any more, just more expensive consumer models with some extra features/better specs than the standard Macbooks.
I'm not a regular protester at any events or anything like that, but I'd rather be shot for defending my freedom than live to see it gone.
But that's not how it works nowadays, is it? By and large you're not going to be given the chance to martyr yourself for liberty. You just get to watch basic freedoms slowly erode away while most people don't give a damn. Your options are either to try to effect change through the political system (good luck with that, you godless nihilist), to start an outright armed revolt (good luck with that, you godless terrorist) or to simply quietly secede and disregard the authority of "your" government to rule you. The last option will pretty much inevitably lead you into conflict with law enforcement, and ultimately you'll be faced with either giving up or taking up arms (good luck with that, you godless nutcase).
So either you're quiet and no-one notices or you're loud and your actions are used to further justify the need for increasingly draconian law enforcement.
There is such a thing as criminal negligence. In many places, if you own a gun, you need to keep it locked up, and I doubt "oh, I forgot" would really cut it as an excuse if you were seriously prosecuted for neglecting to do so. You might forget to look for pedestrians at a zebra crossing, but that's not going to get you off the hook should you run someone over. In this case, requiring a person to be able to hand over their encryption keys if requested to do so basically means anyone using encryption has to take some care to make sure they don't forget the password.
Whether this is good or bad will depend on your viewpoint, but there's nothing inherently ludicrous about legally requiring people to remember things, or to make sure they have the relevant information stored somewhere should they be asked to produce it.
Which is surely part of the reason they will not be storing the actual messages sent. This seems to be an implementation of the kind of data retention required by the EU.
The only thing it will ever be used for is to tack another charge onto the sentences of repeat offenders if they are found to have not registered. (Which is a good thing, but is a side-effect...)
A good thing? Really? I'd prefer a legal system that doesn't play shenanigans to add years to convicts' sentences, whatever the crime. If you want harder sentences for an offence, make the sentences harder, don't corrupt the legal process with this kind of crap.
It's not a question of whether or not you have the right to free internet. I don't think you have the "right" to free use of public infrastructure in the sense you seem to interpret the word "right". That service is provided for "free", that is, paid for by tax money, either because it's just how it's always been done or because there are thought to be benefits to doing it that way. Probably a bit of both. Same thing with "free" wireless internet, should it be provided. It's not a right, it's simply a service the government provides. I don't see how tax dollars being spent on internet access for everyone means the government should control what kind of content can be transmitted through their wireless service any more than they should control who drives on their roads.
(And I hope no-one is thinking of pulling the "what about traffic police" argument on me. We're not talking about criminal use of the internet, and anyway, filtering is censorship before the fact, not comparable to regular police work where you first have a crime and then an investigation.)
As for the rest of your comments, well, you may wonder whether I was serious or not. I'll say I was surprised about the insightful moderation myself, but I hoped it was just the mods figuring you can be both sarcastic and insightful at the same time. The alternative is frightening.
I completely agree. In fact, tax dollars are used to fund public roads and streets, and all kinds of people use them. There's pornstars, bar employees, raunchy late-night comedians, atheists, bleeding heart liberal activists, you name it! People engaging in totally inappropriate behaviour, all using public infrastructure for free! Not cool. We need to get over this entitlement mentality.
I wonder, however, the type of strength you'd have to have to actually "do a Spiderman" up the building. Yes it will hold you to the building, but you'll still have to have the upper body strength to advance your way up without handholds to help if it's a flat surface.
Isn't that what handholds are used for? Holding you to the surface you're climbing? If anything, climbing with this stuff should be less of a strain than with handholds - you don't have to wear your arms out gripping things, you are securely held in place without having to reach for holds in difficult positions and you can put some of the stuff on your feet and maybe knees to let you use the much stronger leg muscles to make your way up.
Speaking of tagging, and completely off-topic of course, but this is idle... WTF is up with the "story" tags? I mean, no shit, what else do we have to tag here than stories? Some stories are tagged "story" twice! I get the feeling it's some new form of trolling, or maybe there are just a lot more than I thought of the type of person here, who go around puting sticky notes with words on them on everything: "car" for cars, "cat" for cats, "tree" for trees...
Someone clue me in here. It doesn't matter in any real sense, of course, but I find I'm somehow vaguely annoyed by the whole phenomenon. Maybe that's what the point is?
I really doubt the cause was really EMI from any passenger's gadgets. I mean, airport security confiscates liquids for fear someone might manage to cook up composite explosives by stirring fluids together for a few hours, all while keeping the concoction cooled and not being noticed. They're that paranoid, and I'm supposed to believe they let people on board with gear that can interfere with the steering of the plane? Please.
You agree with the thesis? You didn't even understand the claim made. It's not that our genetic pool is being corrupted by [insert "inferior" group here], it's that the rate of genetic variation has gone down because there are less mutations happening before males breed. Jones is not saying things are changing for the worse, or for the better - he's saying things aren't changing as much as they used to.
What you want is something like the LG LP4100, which reportedly comes with a breathalyzed, and you can program the phone not to let you place calls when the breathalyzed shows you're drunk.
Re:Wrong about Fossett, wrong about Reiser...
on
Fossett's Plane Found
·
· Score: 2, Funny
See, this is exactly the problem with the Internet. Now that anyone can be a paranoid crackpot on-line, the venerable, traditional lunatic fringe is being devalued by all these crowd-sourced, anonymous cyber-nuts. Used to be, you could trust a conspiracy theory to be utterly impervious to disproof by reasoned argument - Who shot Kennedy, Elvis' faked death etc etc. Now these dilettantes are messing it all up.
That assumes you actually tried to look for evidence. You can quite truthfully say you have found no evidence of X if you never even looked for any in the first place.
Well I remember visiting the website for that bunch of logic-freaks, so I think it really was an attempt by them to get some exposure. Basically they seemed to advocate striving to live a life of pure logic, always making only the right choices as dictated by logic and running society along the same lines. Very illogical, of course.
There's this new invention that might be just the thing for you. It's a kind of load-bearing device, deceptively simple really - just a flat surface supported by one or several "legs". I believe in industry lingo such devices are called "tables".
In fact, considering he's going to have to come up with a new source of income now, expect to see him on all kinds of shows and in the papers a lot more now.
Another thing to consider is that ideologies are not there to provide adherents with accurate facts. That is not their function. Belief systems provide a set of base assumptions that let a person make snap judgments without going through a process of rigorous analysis and logical evaluation of known facts. For individuals going about their daily lives, I'd say the ability to feel confident in their choices, having a solid system for making sense of the world around them, and not having to put an inordinate amount of effort into just figuring out what to think about things can be more valuable than the ability to objectively weigh facts and make unbiased conclusions. In reality, a balance is usually struck between these options, but my point is that knowing the facts doesn't necessarily make life easier for most people.
In any case, what would it actually take for a citizen to be adequately informed to form well-grounded opinions on policy in a modern western society? Disregarding all the privileged information not available to the common citizen, just the sheer complexity of the power structures is overwhelming. From local government on the city-level (or even more granular in some cases) to the myriad international bodies with varying mandates, it seems to me that really making sense of it all would be a full-time job. That's one of the big reasons we have politicians in the first place, and it doesn't seem they are really doing such a great job of understanding it all, either. So for practical purposes, just picking a side and sticking to it can make sense.
You know, sometimes, one side really is right, or at least substantially less wrong than the other.
Yes, but not necessarily because their analysis and thinking are more sound... You can be a bloody-minded partisan and still hit on a good idea every now and then, even if it's just because the other side opposes the idea.
Slashdot Mirror
Fallout 1 and 2 are particularly nicely times with the release of FO3. Lots of people will want to play the originals again.
I wonder who the money goes to, though... In the case of Fallout 1 and 2, certainly not the developer, since Black Isle is long gone. So.. whoever hold distribution rights now, is that sill Interplay or did they sell everything to Bethesda? My point being, if your rationale for paying for games is supporting the devs, then buying some of these classics may not do that at all.
Speaking of solutions, wouldn't homes with an ability to store some amount of power locally help this situation? If you had batteries or hydrogen cells or whatever the most reasonable form of power storage might be in homes, then those could be charged during off-peak hours from the grid, or if possible, even from solar panels or other sources the users run themselves. They could then be programmed to cut in at peak hours. Of course there are any number of issues, the bigger ones probably being finding suitable battery tech and making the idea of getting such a system attractive to the home user in the first place.
What about the viewpoint? I have fairly cinematic dreams, by which I mean that the point of view changes a lot, as if watching a movie shot from multiple angles and edited together. I'd say most of the time I'm not looking through my own eyes in my dreams, and I wonder if this could happen to someone who hasn't grown up watching TV and cinema.
Nevermind, I was confused, FW is in the pro models. Makes more sense now.
Well, FW800 is very speedy, that's one thing. You can daisy-chain devices. And in the end it's just part of what a lot of video pros expect to have in a computer they use for work - but then again, what with the glossy display and this business, I guess the "pro" models are not really that any more, just more expensive consumer models with some extra features/better specs than the standard Macbooks.
Well, possibly, or you just make sure most people don't use encryption.
I'm not a regular protester at any events or anything like that, but I'd rather be shot for defending my freedom than live to see it gone.
But that's not how it works nowadays, is it? By and large you're not going to be given the chance to martyr yourself for liberty. You just get to watch basic freedoms slowly erode away while most people don't give a damn. Your options are either to try to effect change through the political system (good luck with that, you godless nihilist), to start an outright armed revolt (good luck with that, you godless terrorist) or to simply quietly secede and disregard the authority of "your" government to rule you. The last option will pretty much inevitably lead you into conflict with law enforcement, and ultimately you'll be faced with either giving up or taking up arms (good luck with that, you godless nutcase).
So either you're quiet and no-one notices or you're loud and your actions are used to further justify the need for increasingly draconian law enforcement.
There is such a thing as criminal negligence. In many places, if you own a gun, you need to keep it locked up, and I doubt "oh, I forgot" would really cut it as an excuse if you were seriously prosecuted for neglecting to do so. You might forget to look for pedestrians at a zebra crossing, but that's not going to get you off the hook should you run someone over. In this case, requiring a person to be able to hand over their encryption keys if requested to do so basically means anyone using encryption has to take some care to make sure they don't forget the password.
Whether this is good or bad will depend on your viewpoint, but there's nothing inherently ludicrous about legally requiring people to remember things, or to make sure they have the relevant information stored somewhere should they be asked to produce it.
Which is surely part of the reason they will not be storing the actual messages sent. This seems to be an implementation of the kind of data retention required by the EU.
The only thing it will ever be used for is to tack another charge onto the sentences of repeat offenders if they are found to have not registered. (Which is a good thing, but is a side-effect...)
A good thing? Really? I'd prefer a legal system that doesn't play shenanigans to add years to convicts' sentences, whatever the crime. If you want harder sentences for an offence, make the sentences harder, don't corrupt the legal process with this kind of crap.
It's not a question of whether or not you have the right to free internet. I don't think you have the "right" to free use of public infrastructure in the sense you seem to interpret the word "right". That service is provided for "free", that is, paid for by tax money, either because it's just how it's always been done or because there are thought to be benefits to doing it that way. Probably a bit of both. Same thing with "free" wireless internet, should it be provided. It's not a right, it's simply a service the government provides. I don't see how tax dollars being spent on internet access for everyone means the government should control what kind of content can be transmitted through their wireless service any more than they should control who drives on their roads.
(And I hope no-one is thinking of pulling the "what about traffic police" argument on me. We're not talking about criminal use of the internet, and anyway, filtering is censorship before the fact, not comparable to regular police work where you first have a crime and then an investigation.)
As for the rest of your comments, well, you may wonder whether I was serious or not. I'll say I was surprised about the insightful moderation myself, but I hoped it was just the mods figuring you can be both sarcastic and insightful at the same time. The alternative is frightening.
I completely agree. In fact, tax dollars are used to fund public roads and streets, and all kinds of people use them. There's pornstars, bar employees, raunchy late-night comedians, atheists, bleeding heart liberal activists, you name it! People engaging in totally inappropriate behaviour, all using public infrastructure for free! Not cool. We need to get over this entitlement mentality.
I wonder, however, the type of strength you'd have to have to actually "do a Spiderman" up the building. Yes it will hold you to the building, but you'll still have to have the upper body strength to advance your way up without handholds to help if it's a flat surface.
Isn't that what handholds are used for? Holding you to the surface you're climbing? If anything, climbing with this stuff should be less of a strain than with handholds - you don't have to wear your arms out gripping things, you are securely held in place without having to reach for holds in difficult positions and you can put some of the stuff on your feet and maybe knees to let you use the much stronger leg muscles to make your way up.
Speaking of tagging, and completely off-topic of course, but this is idle... WTF is up with the "story" tags? I mean, no shit, what else do we have to tag here than stories? Some stories are tagged "story" twice! I get the feeling it's some new form of trolling, or maybe there are just a lot more than I thought of the type of person here, who go around puting sticky notes with words on them on everything: "car" for cars, "cat" for cats, "tree" for trees...
Someone clue me in here. It doesn't matter in any real sense, of course, but I find I'm somehow vaguely annoyed by the whole phenomenon. Maybe that's what the point is?
I really doubt the cause was really EMI from any passenger's gadgets. I mean, airport security confiscates liquids for fear someone might manage to cook up composite explosives by stirring fluids together for a few hours, all while keeping the concoction cooled and not being noticed. They're that paranoid, and I'm supposed to believe they let people on board with gear that can interfere with the steering of the plane? Please.
You agree with the thesis? You didn't even understand the claim made. It's not that our genetic pool is being corrupted by [insert "inferior" group here], it's that the rate of genetic variation has gone down because there are less mutations happening before males breed. Jones is not saying things are changing for the worse, or for the better - he's saying things aren't changing as much as they used to.
What you want is something like the LG LP4100, which reportedly comes with a breathalyzed, and you can program the phone not to let you place calls when the breathalyzed shows you're drunk.
See, this is exactly the problem with the Internet. Now that anyone can be a paranoid crackpot on-line, the venerable, traditional lunatic fringe is being devalued by all these crowd-sourced, anonymous cyber-nuts. Used to be, you could trust a conspiracy theory to be utterly impervious to disproof by reasoned argument - Who shot Kennedy, Elvis' faked death etc etc. Now these dilettantes are messing it all up.
The world ain't what it used to be.
That assumes you actually tried to look for evidence. You can quite truthfully say you have found no evidence of X if you never even looked for any in the first place.
Well I remember visiting the website for that bunch of logic-freaks, so I think it really was an attempt by them to get some exposure. Basically they seemed to advocate striving to live a life of pure logic, always making only the right choices as dictated by logic and running society along the same lines. Very illogical, of course.
There's this new invention that might be just the thing for you. It's a kind of load-bearing device, deceptively simple really - just a flat surface supported by one or several "legs". I believe in industry lingo such devices are called "tables".
In fact, considering he's going to have to come up with a new source of income now, expect to see him on all kinds of shows and in the papers a lot more now.
Another thing to consider is that ideologies are not there to provide adherents with accurate facts. That is not their function. Belief systems provide a set of base assumptions that let a person make snap judgments without going through a process of rigorous analysis and logical evaluation of known facts. For individuals going about their daily lives, I'd say the ability to feel confident in their choices, having a solid system for making sense of the world around them, and not having to put an inordinate amount of effort into just figuring out what to think about things can be more valuable than the ability to objectively weigh facts and make unbiased conclusions. In reality, a balance is usually struck between these options, but my point is that knowing the facts doesn't necessarily make life easier for most people.
In any case, what would it actually take for a citizen to be adequately informed to form well-grounded opinions on policy in a modern western society? Disregarding all the privileged information not available to the common citizen, just the sheer complexity of the power structures is overwhelming. From local government on the city-level (or even more granular in some cases) to the myriad international bodies with varying mandates, it seems to me that really making sense of it all would be a full-time job. That's one of the big reasons we have politicians in the first place, and it doesn't seem they are really doing such a great job of understanding it all, either. So for practical purposes, just picking a side and sticking to it can make sense.
Flip-flop!
You know, sometimes, one side really is right, or at least substantially less wrong than the other.
Yes, but not necessarily because their analysis and thinking are more sound... You can be a bloody-minded partisan and still hit on a good idea every now and then, even if it's just because the other side opposes the idea.