These people would never have invented mathematics never mind space travel saddled with a language based entirely upon metaphor. Can you imagine what their logic classes in philosophy would be like? Or their legal system?
Omahgherd! Like, get real. Their Einstein woulda dun sick numbers, brah. Mebby: I can haz Interwobs? Then BOOM! Iteration sensation placation nation, man!
Although Star Trek TNG was outstanding, the real problem is that there hasn't been much high quality science fiction TV series in the last 25 years.
I agree. There's so much shallow-war tripe and cop drama BS (even one where PRISM is a good thing, ugh), I feel that kids today could use some more ethical conundrums and imaginative exploration on prime time TV.
I've exposed space fascinated kids to Planetes and Space Brothers with scores of success (the later has world's 1st voice acting from space from the ISS). Too bad we don't have any prime-time shows about striving for peaceful coexistence in the hostile universe. It's too bad, they haven't made a reboot of Star Trek yet.
...whereas "life signs detectors" are perfectly fine and plausible?
Bayesian filter plus future-tech sensor package equals life-signs detector.
The energy transfers between cells to operate quickly enough are going to be electrical in nature in this universe. So, you can detect electromagnetic variances, then apply some cybernetics to your future-tech sensor and you can detect emotional states, create biological implementation of the hyper sensitive senor via natural selection instead instead of intelligent design and in a universe that explains away forehead aliens as the product of panspermia it's fully plausible to have an empath.
As somebody who studies language - I agree. You can't make analogies in the first place without a functional language.
Ah, I see you haven't studied Egyptian Hieroglyphs then, eh? As someone who teaches networks of neural networks concepts such as object recognition, relational significance, temporal ordering significance and I don't understand your ignorance of the problem. Imagine a Chinese speaker and an English speaker separated by a wall impervious to everything but sound. They would never come to know each other's languages unless they both experienced some event at the same time, and gave it a name, much like your parents do to teach infants. The same thing happened between us and the ancient Egyptians, the wall was time and it was impervious to everything except the symbolic hieroglyphs.
The universal translator had encountered a problem it did not understand, so it got as far as it could and spit out the result, perhaps thinking it had decoded the language. It would be similar to me asking my AI system which understands some English to decipher hieroglyphs without analyzing the Rosetta stone. It would stop at the OCR pass and spit out a series of words naming each symbol: water yolk bird falcon. It translated the symbols into meanings as best it could, but could never grok, "You belong to the god Horus" without a common body of knowledge, much as humans couldn't make the translation even given extensive samples of the language. Aliens with no concept of gods would have an even harder time understanding the sentence. "They say we're following an imaginary legendary figure"...uh, is that good or bad?
To me you seem like a philosopher studying epistemology without ever studying cybernetics and learning the fundamental principals of classification and cognition. Perhaps in your pursuit to understand languages you should first understand language itself. Learn by doing: Invent an alien language, then write something in it. Then give it to your peers, and see what they make of it without a translation medium.
If you want to bitch about something obvious, then it should be that each space faring alien hadn't invented a new self-describing language based on the concepts of mathematics, physical and temporal dimensions and properties of matter. Then described their common tongues in it, for use as a common medium for conceptual exchange between races.
Oh, but what do I know, I'm just a high school drop out who learned everything he needed to know about you humans from being homeless... To me it seems humans invest too much in your divisionist institutions of learning, and not enough in the process of learning itself.
Ya, maybe the episode would not of sucked so bad if their made up language, that was "completely different to all other languages" was not just a pile of bull.
Oh, you mean we could not decode the language because every word was just an arbitrary sequence of sounds denoting an idea, instead of how normal words work?
Data, his technospeak halted! Vanna White, her job made easy. A function calling itself:
Spock at his station, one brow raised. Free flaming hairdos from a biblical tower. Einstein, his M and squared C: A Pulp Fictional briefcase, it's contents unshown. A babbling brook's fish swims in 42 ears. Buddha his belly grown large.
A pig eats pearls at the library of Alexandria. Riker and Picard, both faces palmed. A geek and his card divided.
Wait, didn't we fight against these dumb fucks in WWII?
1: They had done more for biometric recognition and genealogical research and helped individually identify virtually entire races of people.
2: They had a very well made system for hunting down people who are actual people versus dummy/sock puppet newsletters that get squashed.
3: They were excellent at geolocation.
4: They created the "normalization of production, just ignore its backend application of redundancy and stagnation." where the fault intolerance is in the top of the stack, and blame flows downhill until a few heads roll, just programmers of IBM mainframes. This cost-shifting allows for the absolute cheapest workers possible, and if they die, things continue on. Even entire races can drop off the face of the earth!
5: They had the best behavioral reporting and profiling tech out there. Want to check if people 18-25 are opposed to your new propaganda? Easily done by a trial balloon and witch hunt.
6: They had one of the few propaganda channels that worked too well. People threw away their fliers, but the hateful FUD messages will still come to them no matter what. They used it to propagate info for gathering youths... and attendance soared.
7: They were one of the few enterprises that had a chance of getting filing systems from an early beta to a finished distributed product that can handle distributed datasets. Without their on demand "Papers Please" model, BTRFS's record keeping journal might never have been invented.
8: They were one of the few types of governments, who, years after being defeated, were still operational and not criticized by their citizens openly.
9: They had very tight security. They never let their citizens see a note about them being hacked, and in security, no news is good news.
10: Their economic and religious model is platform agnostic.
So, even though people bag Nazis and the Stasi, they are some of the most efficient oppressive forces on the face of the planet.
and let them know that this is a bit of a black eye against Linux.
Or, you could recognize TFA as the hit-piece it is: Points to the Bug, knows what a bug tracker is, doesn't use the bug tracker to fix the issue: Open a new duplicate bug to get it re-triaged and noticed by more than just the bug assignee. Escalate the issue to other devs. It's not like the devs are saying: NO WE DO NOT GIVE A FLYING FUCK ABOUT DISABLED PEOPLE GO USE MICROSOFT OR APPLE, ANYTHING BUT A FREE AND OPEN SOURCE OPERATING SYSTEM.
This is a tempest in a teapot with sizable negative PR spin. I do not negotiate with terrorists. I do not speak for everyone, but to the users who jump to shaming tactics instead of resolution options: Fuck you, I don't give a flying fuck about your persecution complex. I would rather not deal with such disgusting shit-stirrers.
For future reference, Submitter, if you're reading this: How to ask a question the smart way. -- Everything here also pertains to bugs or questions like "Why isn't this fixed yet?". The answer? You reap what you sew.
Did you know it took 10+ years for Mozilla to fix the alert() denial loop [mozilla.org]? That bug is older than Mozilla itself, and the most obvious fix of "checkbox to stop further dialogs" was dismissed as a hack (compared to the destructive hack of force-killing Mozilla.)
Yeah, and it should be reverted to the prior behavior because it doesn't fix the issue. If you're giving someone an infinite alert loop, then your code is bad or malicious.
Whether it is bad or malicious this "fix" doesn't fix the issue at all. The very same "denial of service" is easily produced by wrapping an infinite loop in a short window.setInterval(...);. Then instead of an alert() popup you get a never-ending stream of "would you like to stop the script?" dialogs. So, if it's a pop-up dialog denial of service attack you're fixing, then that fucking moronic patch, didn't do jack shit, dingus.
Protip: Application Level Modal Dialogs are the problem -- That they prohibit you from using your browser functions, like the refresh button or address bar, and not just the page itself is the issue.
A "modal dialog" is a DENIAL OF SERVICE to all other application features. The fix should really happen at the OS UI level. Just fire all the UI designers who think modality is grand.
Well, sometimes even if you get the patch accepted it STILL doesn't fix the issue.
For example, I once submitted a patch and had it accepted to a project, but the maintainer had died before releasing a new build. This was severely inconsiderate because I really needed this bug to be fixed. What other extreme "+1 Interesting" edge cases can you think of for why all of the normal options just couldn't work? What possible hope can we have of a fix when a cosmic ray could change a bit of the release binary and actually re-introduce the very same bug while the code remains perfectly patched?
Here's how it gets fixed. When everyone migrates to the buggy version, thousands of affected users suddenly cry out, and then are quickly silenced by a working patch and update.
Protip: The graph speaks of its trends, not its outliers.
It seems likely that there are enough people affected by this that if they all threw in a dollar it would have been done by the next day. What we might have here is a community coordination problem, not just a software bug.
Or, you know, just giving a head's up to the dev who was already bisecting the bug and what not. That the bug was left for months without follow-up from "affects me too on $OS $VERSION" is the problem. Instead of being so hyperbolic and moronic as to resorting to paying people and bitiching about it on a tech news site and saying, OH, SHOULD I JUST SWITCH TO $PROPRIETARY SOFTWARE like some kind of moron or shill, the affected party could have opened a new (duplicate) bug, but seeing as they already knew about the bug, it makes one wonder why the anti-FLOSS sentiment when they rejected the FLOSS model of fixing shit even having known about said model's existence as demonstrated by TFS.
I think the answer is more approachable issue trackers, so that laymen can more easily find bugs. They're a bit too unruly for joke six-pack to interact with directly, and may cause him to bitch loudly to his peers in frustration. Why, I'm no conspiracy theorist, but were I aware of what appears to be a glaring disregard for a disabled community and harbored any degree of malice towards FLOSS operating systems, I think that submitting vitriolic bullshit on popular tech-news sites and promoting proprietary software while doing so would be exactly the MO for my political propaganda.
One of my customers has a Win98 box, because it controls a $50,000 device. Another one runs NT Server, because porting 100,000+ part numbers to a new database isn't worth the upgrade.
I have had similar experiences in the past with customers. I recommended them not allow the systems Internet connections. In the cases where this wasn't possible, GNU/Linux + WINE and Linux + VirtualBox have proven effective solutions. Even for some crazy low level COM port gizmo made by a now defunct company with Win Server 2003 only driver...
You talk a big talk, but I suspect you haven't tried walking the walk. The contraptions are simple tools, which can bring down the entire company with a single crypto locker exploit.
The problem with Movie streaming is that there's nothing good to watch.
My memory isn't so bad that I need to re-experience my favorite works more than once in a five year period. Even when money and availability is no obstacle it's not worth my the investment of my valuable entertainment time to waste on some non-interactive butchering and re-butchering of books, comic books, and even movies that I've already experienced. The new crap is all re-hashes of the old, and even the "original" stories have tired old plot-lines taken damn near directly form the books I read a decade or more ago. I can't invest 2 hours of my evening and take the high risk being bored out of my gourd when I have damn near guaranteed entertainment options elsewhere.
Sorry, I used to watch more but TV and movies are essentially dead to me now. I've got Games, a few web-series, podcasts, books, and esp. the new audio book explosion vying for my time with better, more immersive, potentially interactive, and more entertaining content. I especially enjoy audio books as I can consume even fairly recent sci-fi releases while I do other things (like exercise outdoors).
It's fucking ridiculous when I think about it: Even old radio programs have adapted to the digital age as podcasts and dramatized audio books, and yet the multi-billion dollar industry of video is stuck in the 50's in terms of distribution (broadcast/streaming) and monetization models. Die a sad stale death already. The sooner the better, let the new web media take their place.
Do you remember the shit you said as a kid? Kids are now interacting with adults. Their physical bodies which face threat in the real world if such things are said have been removed and replaced by the appearance of grizzled soldiers. Thus removing the instinctive tolerance we have towards the biting, pulling, poking and verbal abuse of our young, and enabling their already vitriolic comments to become more so. This, combined with the illusion of maturity in swearing like "adults" this, adds multiplier coefficients to the GIFT equation.
However, no one can offend you. You have to take offense yourself. You are the only one responsible for the shit in your head. You have the power to mute voice chat. Party chat is a far superior cross-game feature anyway, which even prevents those in close proximity in game from hearing you.
We now have the ability for children to potentially interact on adult levels without many of the instinctual impulses which help us infantalize them. We should encourage this development, not censor it. As with the Internet: Do not enact restrictions on content; Practice self censorship if you must -- You can disable voice chat for your kids' accounts if you desire.
This being the first generation of the Information Age growing up with an instantaneous world wide communication medium, of course there will be an adjustment period; The same has followed every major technological advancement. However note that suppression of technology has never worked: If you tried to penalize others for over use of fire or stone tools in the stone age they would rightly stone you and burn the remains. Good luck with that in the Information Age, flamers. Humans are a stubborn race, they only learn things the hard way.
I have invented a homeopathic work-around for the concerned.
I have just discovered a way to dilute the diluted water itself! Placing the homeopathic pure water solution into a crystal goblet near a west facing window during the week prior to and/or following the summer solstice will dilute the water with pure sunlight!
Soon one will notice that the water itself has been completely diluted and is filled with the radioactive echo of the quantum entangled liquid. Be warned: You must drink the entire cup of sunlight energy & air diluted liquid; Resist the urge to take a small sip or else the dosage dilution in your body will be so powerful you may overdose on the potent hot air.
DISCLAIMER: Consult a local fire station immediately at the first sign of smoke as it may blow up your ass!
Slashdot Mirror
Sharks with friggin' lasers!
Because it would be trivial to wrest control from the bridge...
These people would never have invented mathematics never mind space travel saddled with a language based entirely upon metaphor. Can you imagine what their logic classes in philosophy would be like? Or their legal system?
Omahgherd! Like, get real. Their Einstein woulda dun sick numbers, brah. Mebby: I can haz Interwobs? Then BOOM! Iteration sensation placation nation, man!
Although Star Trek TNG was outstanding, the real problem is that there hasn't been much high quality science fiction TV series in the last 25 years.
I agree. There's so much shallow-war tripe and cop drama BS (even one where PRISM is a good thing, ugh), I feel that kids today could use some more ethical conundrums and imaginative exploration on prime time TV.
I've exposed space fascinated kids to Planetes and Space Brothers with scores of success (the later has world's 1st voice acting from space from the ISS). Too bad we don't have any prime-time shows about striving for peaceful coexistence in the hostile universe. It's too bad, they haven't made a reboot of Star Trek yet.
...whereas "life signs detectors" are perfectly fine and plausible?
Bayesian filter plus future-tech sensor package equals life-signs detector.
The energy transfers between cells to operate quickly enough are going to be electrical in nature in this universe. So, you can detect electromagnetic variances, then apply some cybernetics to your future-tech sensor and you can detect emotional states, create biological implementation of the hyper sensitive senor via natural selection instead instead of intelligent design and in a universe that explains away forehead aliens as the product of panspermia it's fully plausible to have an empath.
I will fight to keep POTS as long as you prevent all unlicensed use of select short-wave radio bands.
As somebody who studies language - I agree. You can't make analogies in the first place without a functional language.
Ah, I see you haven't studied Egyptian Hieroglyphs then, eh? As someone who teaches networks of neural networks concepts such as object recognition, relational significance, temporal ordering significance and I don't understand your ignorance of the problem. Imagine a Chinese speaker and an English speaker separated by a wall impervious to everything but sound. They would never come to know each other's languages unless they both experienced some event at the same time, and gave it a name, much like your parents do to teach infants. The same thing happened between us and the ancient Egyptians, the wall was time and it was impervious to everything except the symbolic hieroglyphs.
The universal translator had encountered a problem it did not understand, so it got as far as it could and spit out the result, perhaps thinking it had decoded the language. It would be similar to me asking my AI system which understands some English to decipher hieroglyphs without analyzing the Rosetta stone. It would stop at the OCR pass and spit out a series of words naming each symbol: water yolk bird falcon. It translated the symbols into meanings as best it could, but could never grok, "You belong to the god Horus" without a common body of knowledge, much as humans couldn't make the translation even given extensive samples of the language. Aliens with no concept of gods would have an even harder time understanding the sentence. "They say we're following an imaginary legendary figure" ...uh, is that good or bad?
To me you seem like a philosopher studying epistemology without ever studying cybernetics and learning the fundamental principals of classification and cognition. Perhaps in your pursuit to understand languages you should first understand language itself. Learn by doing: Invent an alien language, then write something in it. Then give it to your peers, and see what they make of it without a translation medium.
If you want to bitch about something obvious, then it should be that each space faring alien hadn't invented a new self-describing language based on the concepts of mathematics, physical and temporal dimensions and properties of matter. Then described their common tongues in it, for use as a common medium for conceptual exchange between races.
Oh, but what do I know, I'm just a high school drop out who learned everything he needed to know about you humans from being homeless... To me it seems humans invest too much in your divisionist institutions of learning, and not enough in the process of learning itself.
Ya, maybe the episode would not of sucked so bad if their made up language, that was "completely different to all other languages" was not just a pile of bull.
Oh, you mean we could not decode the language because every word was just an arbitrary sequence of sounds denoting an idea, instead of how normal words work?
Data, his technospeak halted! Vanna White, her job made easy. A function calling itself:
Spock at his station, one brow raised. Free flaming hairdos from a biblical tower. Einstein, his M and squared C: A Pulp Fictional briefcase, it's contents unshown. A babbling brook's fish swims in 42 ears. Buddha his belly grown large.
A pig eats pearls at the library of Alexandria. Riker and Picard, both faces palmed. A geek and his card divided.
Indeed, causation requires correlation. Clearly they were the ones pulling the strings.
Plausible deniability does not eliminate undeniable plausibility.
"I think ravens are supposed to be even more intelligent?"
What a dinosaur.
the MPAA and the RIAA are all about fare use
Specifically, they think fare use is for the birds: Three fowl plays and you're bunted out!
Amazing! I can navigate a menu system IN 3D!
All Aboard!
Wait, didn't we fight against these dumb fucks in WWII?
1: They had done more for biometric recognition and genealogical research and helped individually identify virtually entire races of people.
2: They had a very well made system for hunting down people who are actual people versus dummy/sock puppet newsletters that get squashed.
3: They were excellent at geolocation.
4: They created the "normalization of production, just ignore its backend application of redundancy and stagnation." where the fault intolerance is in the top of the stack, and blame flows downhill until a few heads roll, just programmers of IBM mainframes. This cost-shifting allows for the absolute cheapest workers possible, and if they die, things continue on. Even entire races can drop off the face of the earth!
5: They had the best behavioral reporting and profiling tech out there. Want to check if people 18-25 are opposed to your new propaganda? Easily done by a trial balloon and witch hunt.
6: They had one of the few propaganda channels that worked too well. People threw away their fliers, but the hateful FUD messages will still come to them no matter what. They used it to propagate info for gathering youths... and attendance soared.
7: They were one of the few enterprises that had a chance of getting filing systems from an early beta to a finished distributed product that can handle distributed datasets. Without their on demand "Papers Please" model, BTRFS's record keeping journal might never have been invented.
8: They were one of the few types of governments, who, years after being defeated, were still operational and not criticized by their citizens openly.
9: They had very tight security. They never let their citizens see a note about them being hacked, and in security, no news is good news.
10: Their economic and religious model is platform agnostic.
So, even though people bag Nazis and the Stasi, they are some of the most efficient oppressive forces on the face of the planet.
and let them know that this is a bit of a black eye against Linux.
Or, you could recognize TFA as the hit-piece it is: Points to the Bug, knows what a bug tracker is, doesn't use the bug tracker to fix the issue: Open a new duplicate bug to get it re-triaged and noticed by more than just the bug assignee. Escalate the issue to other devs. It's not like the devs are saying: NO WE DO NOT GIVE A FLYING FUCK ABOUT DISABLED PEOPLE GO USE MICROSOFT OR APPLE, ANYTHING BUT A FREE AND OPEN SOURCE OPERATING SYSTEM.
This is a tempest in a teapot with sizable negative PR spin. I do not negotiate with terrorists. I do not speak for everyone, but to the users who jump to shaming tactics instead of resolution options: Fuck you, I don't give a flying fuck about your persecution complex. I would rather not deal with such disgusting shit-stirrers.
For future reference, Submitter, if you're reading this: How to ask a question the smart way. -- Everything here also pertains to bugs or questions like "Why isn't this fixed yet?". The answer? You reap what you sew.
Did you know it took 10+ years for Mozilla to fix the alert() denial loop [mozilla.org]? That bug is older than Mozilla itself, and the most obvious fix of "checkbox to stop further dialogs" was dismissed as a hack (compared to the destructive hack of force-killing Mozilla.)
Yeah, and it should be reverted to the prior behavior because it doesn't fix the issue. If you're giving someone an infinite alert loop, then your code is bad or malicious.
Whether it is bad or malicious this "fix" doesn't fix the issue at all. The very same "denial of service" is easily produced by wrapping an infinite loop in a short window.setInterval(...);. Then instead of an alert() popup you get a never-ending stream of "would you like to stop the script?" dialogs. So, if it's a pop-up dialog denial of service attack you're fixing, then that fucking moronic patch, didn't do jack shit, dingus.
Protip: Application Level Modal Dialogs are the problem -- That they prohibit you from using your browser functions, like the refresh button or address bar, and not just the page itself is the issue.
A "modal dialog" is a DENIAL OF SERVICE to all other application features. The fix should really happen at the OS UI level. Just fire all the UI designers who think modality is grand.
Well, sometimes even if you get the patch accepted it STILL doesn't fix the issue.
For example, I once submitted a patch and had it accepted to a project, but the maintainer had died before releasing a new build. This was severely inconsiderate because I really needed this bug to be fixed. What other extreme "+1 Interesting" edge cases can you think of for why all of the normal options just couldn't work? What possible hope can we have of a fix when a cosmic ray could change a bit of the release binary and actually re-introduce the very same bug while the code remains perfectly patched?
Here's how it gets fixed. When everyone migrates to the buggy version, thousands of affected users suddenly cry out, and then are quickly silenced by a working patch and update.
Protip: The graph speaks of its trends, not its outliers.
It seems likely that there are enough people affected by this that if they all threw in a dollar it would have been done by the next day. What we might have here is a community coordination problem, not just a software bug.
Or, you know, just giving a head's up to the dev who was already bisecting the bug and what not. That the bug was left for months without follow-up from "affects me too on $OS $VERSION" is the problem. Instead of being so hyperbolic and moronic as to resorting to paying people and bitiching about it on a tech news site and saying, OH, SHOULD I JUST SWITCH TO $PROPRIETARY SOFTWARE like some kind of moron or shill, the affected party could have opened a new (duplicate) bug, but seeing as they already knew about the bug, it makes one wonder why the anti-FLOSS sentiment when they rejected the FLOSS model of fixing shit even having known about said model's existence as demonstrated by TFS.
I think the answer is more approachable issue trackers, so that laymen can more easily find bugs. They're a bit too unruly for joke six-pack to interact with directly, and may cause him to bitch loudly to his peers in frustration. Why, I'm no conspiracy theorist, but were I aware of what appears to be a glaring disregard for a disabled community and harbored any degree of malice towards FLOSS operating systems, I think that submitting vitriolic bullshit on popular tech-news sites and promoting proprietary software while doing so would be exactly the MO for my political propaganda.
It's like charities don't exist. It's like kickstarter never happened. I feel sorry for the dystopian timeline you left when you joined ours.
One of my customers has a Win98 box, because it controls a $50,000 device. Another one runs NT Server, because porting 100,000+ part numbers to a new database isn't worth the upgrade.
I have had similar experiences in the past with customers. I recommended them not allow the systems Internet connections. In the cases where this wasn't possible, GNU/Linux + WINE and Linux + VirtualBox have proven effective solutions. Even for some crazy low level COM port gizmo made by a now defunct company with Win Server 2003 only driver...
You talk a big talk, but I suspect you haven't tried walking the walk. The contraptions are simple tools, which can bring down the entire company with a single crypto locker exploit.
At my company, if you start making comments like that, pack your shit.
L-Lude!
Forgive the self reply, but I just remembered that this is why everything sucks on TV / cable / streaming.
The problem with Movie streaming is that there's nothing good to watch.
My memory isn't so bad that I need to re-experience my favorite works more than once in a five year period. Even when money and availability is no obstacle it's not worth my the investment of my valuable entertainment time to waste on some non-interactive butchering and re-butchering of books, comic books, and even movies that I've already experienced. The new crap is all re-hashes of the old, and even the "original" stories have tired old plot-lines taken damn near directly form the books I read a decade or more ago. I can't invest 2 hours of my evening and take the high risk being bored out of my gourd when I have damn near guaranteed entertainment options elsewhere.
Sorry, I used to watch more but TV and movies are essentially dead to me now. I've got Games, a few web-series, podcasts, books, and esp. the new audio book explosion vying for my time with better, more immersive, potentially interactive, and more entertaining content. I especially enjoy audio books as I can consume even fairly recent sci-fi releases while I do other things (like exercise outdoors).
It's fucking ridiculous when I think about it: Even old radio programs have adapted to the digital age as podcasts and dramatized audio books, and yet the multi-billion dollar industry of video is stuck in the 50's in terms of distribution (broadcast/streaming) and monetization models. Die a sad stale death already. The sooner the better, let the new web media take their place.
Do you remember the shit you said as a kid? Kids are now interacting with adults. Their physical bodies which face threat in the real world if such things are said have been removed and replaced by the appearance of grizzled soldiers. Thus removing the instinctive tolerance we have towards the biting, pulling, poking and verbal abuse of our young, and enabling their already vitriolic comments to become more so. This, combined with the illusion of maturity in swearing like "adults" this, adds multiplier coefficients to the GIFT equation.
However, no one can offend you. You have to take offense yourself. You are the only one responsible for the shit in your head. You have the power to mute voice chat. Party chat is a far superior cross-game feature anyway, which even prevents those in close proximity in game from hearing you.
We now have the ability for children to potentially interact on adult levels without many of the instinctual impulses which help us infantalize them. We should encourage this development, not censor it. As with the Internet: Do not enact restrictions on content; Practice self censorship if you must -- You can disable voice chat for your kids' accounts if you desire.
This being the first generation of the Information Age growing up with an instantaneous world wide communication medium, of course there will be an adjustment period; The same has followed every major technological advancement. However note that suppression of technology has never worked: If you tried to penalize others for over use of fire or stone tools in the stone age they would rightly stone you and burn the remains. Good luck with that in the Information Age, flamers. Humans are a stubborn race, they only learn things the hard way.
I have invented a homeopathic work-around for the concerned.
I have just discovered a way to dilute the diluted water itself! Placing the homeopathic pure water solution into a crystal goblet near a west facing window during the week prior to and/or following the summer solstice will dilute the water with pure sunlight!
Soon one will notice that the water itself has been completely diluted and is filled with the radioactive echo of the quantum entangled liquid. Be warned: You must drink the entire cup of sunlight energy & air diluted liquid; Resist the urge to take a small sip or else the dosage dilution in your body will be so powerful you may overdose on the potent hot air.
DISCLAIMER: Consult a local fire station immediately at the first sign of smoke as it may blow up your ass!