Tell me, what is the harm of some minor plotting and scheming?
Groups and forces have always wanted to overthrow governments, the only point at which they become dangerous and the state should intervene is when they begin hiding barrels of gunpowder under Parliament. Check the basement at night, don't try to police the entire citizenry and restrict their liberties!
I agree, they're a possibility they would name it "your mom", leading to exchanges in the observatories like... "your mom's mass is so great she's going to destroy the earth!"
"The technology is changing! What's with all this new crap putting us out of business?"
I think a failure to recognise the changeable nature of Information Technology and that they need to stay on top of the latest trends (such as Linux) rather than bemoan people's lack of loyalty to Unix, is the cause of the SCO Group's bankruptcy filing. It's a constantly changing environment, and companies need to innovate and improvise.
Because smart, nice people know that right-wing economics is simply selfishness. There are a lot of smart, nice people working on projects like Linux - some of the smartest people in the world. They know what's right and what's unfair.
Also, my personal opinion is that the open-source movement - where thousands of people make an equal contribution for the good of everyone - is the closest thing we have at the moment to anarchism in action.
I'm not sure how this is any different to the BBFC (British Board of Film Classification) or the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America). I'm not opposed to violence in film just because they are violence but I don't like the idea of children growing up with the idea that it's okay to run around a city shooting people where the worst thing that can happen is you are shot by police and wake up outside the hospital without your weapons. It's a fine line between over-the-top-censorship (like Wal-Mart's beeping out of expletives in all their music) and rightful prevention of exposure to the kind of violent ideas that might influence a child (a nine-year-old playing Hitman: Blood Money or Bully).
I remember being around age 13/14 when GTA San Andreas was released, I had some contrasting thoughts. On the one hand I was fed up listening to people at school go on about gratuitous violence and it seemed to me they were becoming de-sensitized to it on some level; on the other, i enjoyed playing the game as much as they did as soon as it came out on PC - and it hasn't made me a violent person. As far as I know no-one at my school has went on to kill people for money or for the sake of it, surely realising the distinction between fantasy and reality, but I wouldn't find it hard to believe that some people were influenced by it. I think what we need is an objective study by some reputably psychologists into the way teens distinguish between reality and what happens in video games, there surely is evidence out there but I'm not aware of it...
Yes, while most Internet technologies have been the work of private companies, Universities and research institutions like CERN the American military had a significant role in developing the early technology. What I was saying is their technologies designed for more effective killing can sometimes lead to a benefit to the general public, and the Internet is a very good example of this. (Although not by any stretch of the imagination can you say that it was entirely their creation.)
In response to lessthan - I was saying I don't want a people-less war. Because it's impossible to be so, it would probably end up (definitely in the near future) with one side being people-less (America) and the the other side (whoever) being a people's army. While I welcome any advance in civil engineering and human understanding I wish weapons of war had never been developed. The world would be a far better and more democratic place if all wars were fought with sticks and stones - the greater number of people wins. The way it is now soldiers can be totally desensitized to killing, destroying houses with "smart bombs" and firing ICBMs and cruise missiles without any contact with the people whose lives they are ending. The development of military technology is a sad side-effect of human technological and infrastructural progression. While I might be speaking a little out of my depth here with my patchy knowledge of history, but I think the way such a small number of Romans held such a dominance over so many people was due to their superior military tactics and technology, and this problem has only become more and more prevalent in the modern world with the development of guns, tanks and nukes.
I'm not necessarily saying "the ends justify the means" but that i find it less morally problematic if there are actually benefits in the end.
I'll take it for granted that it's "immoral" to kill someone (i think so), but is it immoral to kill someone if you're stranded on a mountain as a member of a group of plane-crash victims with no other sustenance? I'm not so sure that it is, if it means more will live.
It's an extreme case; but what I'm saying is not "the ends justify the means" but "because of the good ends, i'm a bit less worried about the means" - by comparison with killing thousands of mice because I feel like it or simply because I don't like the idea of mice it doesn't trouble me as much. Animals are killed all the time, but at least there's some benefit to this.
I'm sure PETA, RSPCA etc will all have something to say about this. But i see it less immoral that we're using mice (at their expense) to end human suffering rather than to test cosmetics or kill simply because they're in our home. At least this kind of animal cruelty (as it could be construed) has a negating good karma benefit.
I also agree with the premise. The US government is the biggest offender in this perpetual arms race with the world and themselves - but like many military inventions this has a civil purpose. It's not a new bio-bomb that can kill people more effectively, but a car that can rescue people and supply troops. It should lead to some useful inventions that we could be seeing in the commercial market soon enough.
My only worry with new military technology is that it will progress to the point where troops (American troops) will have no contact with the people they are liberating, killing or whatever - it could totally dehumanise war, making it all the easier for governments to fight senseless wars.
A form of proportional representation is much more democratic than First Past the Post. The trouble is people see the democratic system as traditional and infallible, even though there are many obvious flaws. There is scope for proportional representation to be used in the UK soon though, as it was used (i think) for the Scottish Parliament elections a few months ago. Doubt it will be in place before the next general election unfortunately.
The other problem is that some forms of proportional representation such as the most basic Party List system can enable extremist parties a seat in parliament, the form of elections that the Weimar Republic (1918-1933) held in Germany were a factor in Hitler's rise to power. That's just one argument opponents to PR use.
Fortunately in the UK we already have a multi-party system, but it's plagued with imbalances and so on... First Past the Post is perfect if there is a two-party system (such as in the USA) but with the current system there is no chance whatsoever of there being a third party elected to government, it just will not happen; and it's one of the things that is making the USA such a failed democracy at the moment.
Well, as humans, the natural next step of course is to kill it. What are the chances that it's some sort of mutant space-alien? I'm thinking along the lines of the premise for a series of Stargate SG1 here...
As an anarchist at heart I can't help but hope everything will one day be free, libre, open-source... but unfortunately I live in the real world and we have to be a bit more pragmatic
I doubt the open-source community could really support the centralised infrastructure that would be required for a resource hungry high-traffic social networking site like Facebook or MySpace; for the same reason free open-source Google probably wouldn't work:( Then again i think Launchpad probably falls under the 'social networking site' category... but then that doesn't have all the gadgets and traffic that sites like Facebook have.
Perhaps we should be seeking more openness in the good social networking sites we already have like Facbook?:)
Well I guess we'll find out if they make any attempts to make amends for their error or not. If they don't and just ignore the GPL well... I'm sure they'll get a big Internet-media headache:)
Maybe life on other planets is still governed by the laws of natural selection and resulted in the evolution (as it has on Earth) of petty-minded geniuses that teeters on the brink of nuclear destruction. They could've finished each other off aeons ago, perhaps we were just late to the party?
Will iD be upholding their tradition of being native OpenGL? That means there shouldn't be a problem getting it working equally well (even better, in fact) on Linux or a Mac than Vista. Doom 3 worked much faster on Ubuntu for me... In XP with full settings the game was borderline unplayable but on Ubuntu - as smooth as could be!
iD is still the only really major developer i can think of that makes their games openGL native and Linux friendly... Hopefully this collaboration with Valve is another sign that other developers will collaborate and follow their lead.
PS Steam available as a.deb on the valve website, anyone?:)
Why, yet again, is the responsibility for something this important (like the rebuilding of Iraq for example) being entrusted to a private company? Corporations by their very nature don't give a damn about anything that doesn't affect their ability to make money.
I can see lots of people complaining about "dumbing down" maths as if there's something wrong with that... I can see why there could be complaints about, say, simplifying an English language course by changing things - because that would remove some of the content. Arty subjects are inherently hard, but I see no reason why mathematics can't change some of its language and methods to make it easy for students, because although I'm not prone to saying "when are we ever going to use any of this nonsense in real life" in my math classes, the fact is that the vast majority of people won't do mathematics past high-school level (algebra and arithmetic etc, the essentials). You don't need to know all the complexities of mathematics unless you're doing it (or a related subject like physics) at college.
EXACTLY! They're not charging any money for it, so why ARE they doing it? That's what worries me. There's no subversion if you're buying outright a product...
Well I'm a bit of a stickler for playing good games when I have to pay £40-50 for them, I've grown used to finding games on isohunt.com for the PC when i feel like it;)
My anger at the PS3 is mostly annoyance at myself for buying this console when I would have been better getting a GeForce 8800 and having some cash left over. And to top it off i just found GTA IV (one of the main reasons i bought the ps3, buying a console for a killer app that isn't even out yet, stupid, i know) has been delayed till spring '08:(
I'm a bit of an anti-capitalist... totally cynical, and rightly so, about corporations. Especially ones that have proven manipulative tendencies like Microsoft. You know, it might work out in practice for most people, but there will be some sort of drawback - paying MS money, requiring their permission, it not working on Macs and Linux or whatever. There's always a drawback with these kinds of things or Microsoft would have just left things as they are with image file formats. I'm saying it's highly unlikely Microsoft is doing this out of the good of their heart. I'm not one for the whole "M$ is 3V1L!!" banners and shouting lark but corporations such as Microsoft exist for the sole purpose of creating profit, they have an angle on this, whatever it might be.
I think you might be mistaking irony for despair. Whatever Microsoft does Microsoft does for Microsoft; and that means what will make them money. Why would they have gone to the bother of making a (very good, i hear) new image file format... for our benefit? I don't think so....
I don't care what the DMCA says, I reserve the right to tinker with, break, alter or pirate my games consoles.
People need to remember that morality is not defined by the law (far from it) and that the laws are controlled by government, which is in turn mostly influenced by large corporations (i.e. movie studios and the RIAA). This is just another example of why American politics needs to steer itself away from the money-race politicians have for funding, the candidate with the most money to spend on smear campaigns and advertising is most likely to win - and who supplies the candidates with this money? Do you think they might expect something in return, or at least give their support to this candidate (making them more likely to win) because their proposed policies will be beneficial to the financial backer?
The whole service has been banned in Canada? That can't be right, it's used for lots of things - Linux distros, software updates... Microsoft are even thinking about implementing their own flavour of it in the next version of Windows (or a service pack for Vista).
Slashdot Mirror
Tell me, what is the harm of some minor plotting and scheming? Groups and forces have always wanted to overthrow governments, the only point at which they become dangerous and the state should intervene is when they begin hiding barrels of gunpowder under Parliament. Check the basement at night, don't try to police the entire citizenry and restrict their liberties!
I agree, they're a possibility they would name it "your mom", leading to exchanges in the observatories like... "your mom's mass is so great she's going to destroy the earth!"
"The technology is changing! What's with all this new crap putting us out of business?"
I think a failure to recognise the changeable nature of Information Technology and that they need to stay on top of the latest trends (such as Linux) rather than bemoan people's lack of loyalty to Unix, is the cause of the SCO Group's bankruptcy filing. It's a constantly changing environment, and companies need to innovate and improvise.
Because smart, nice people know that right-wing economics is simply selfishness. There are a lot of smart, nice people working on projects like Linux - some of the smartest people in the world. They know what's right and what's unfair.
Also, my personal opinion is that the open-source movement - where thousands of people make an equal contribution for the good of everyone - is the closest thing we have at the moment to anarchism in action.
Home confinement? For piracy?!
I thought the worst that could happen was being sued for a bunch of money by the MPAA/RIAA?
I'm not sure how this is any different to the BBFC (British Board of Film Classification) or the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America). I'm not opposed to violence in film just because they are violence but I don't like the idea of children growing up with the idea that it's okay to run around a city shooting people where the worst thing that can happen is you are shot by police and wake up outside the hospital without your weapons. It's a fine line between over-the-top-censorship (like Wal-Mart's beeping out of expletives in all their music) and rightful prevention of exposure to the kind of violent ideas that might influence a child (a nine-year-old playing Hitman: Blood Money or Bully).
I remember being around age 13/14 when GTA San Andreas was released, I had some contrasting thoughts. On the one hand I was fed up listening to people at school go on about gratuitous violence and it seemed to me they were becoming de-sensitized to it on some level; on the other, i enjoyed playing the game as much as they did as soon as it came out on PC - and it hasn't made me a violent person. As far as I know no-one at my school has went on to kill people for money or for the sake of it, surely realising the distinction between fantasy and reality, but I wouldn't find it hard to believe that some people were influenced by it. I think what we need is an objective study by some reputably psychologists into the way teens distinguish between reality and what happens in video games, there surely is evidence out there but I'm not aware of it...
Yes, while most Internet technologies have been the work of private companies, Universities and research institutions like CERN the American military had a significant role in developing the early technology. What I was saying is their technologies designed for more effective killing can sometimes lead to a benefit to the general public, and the Internet is a very good example of this. (Although not by any stretch of the imagination can you say that it was entirely their creation.)
In response to lessthan - I was saying I don't want a people-less war. Because it's impossible to be so, it would probably end up (definitely in the near future) with one side being people-less (America) and the the other side (whoever) being a people's army. While I welcome any advance in civil engineering and human understanding I wish weapons of war had never been developed. The world would be a far better and more democratic place if all wars were fought with sticks and stones - the greater number of people wins. The way it is now soldiers can be totally desensitized to killing, destroying houses with "smart bombs" and firing ICBMs and cruise missiles without any contact with the people whose lives they are ending. The development of military technology is a sad side-effect of human technological and infrastructural progression. While I might be speaking a little out of my depth here with my patchy knowledge of history, but I think the way such a small number of Romans held such a dominance over so many people was due to their superior military tactics and technology, and this problem has only become more and more prevalent in the modern world with the development of guns, tanks and nukes.
I'm not necessarily saying "the ends justify the means" but that i find it less morally problematic if there are actually benefits in the end.
I'll take it for granted that it's "immoral" to kill someone (i think so), but is it immoral to kill someone if you're stranded on a mountain as a member of a group of plane-crash victims with no other sustenance? I'm not so sure that it is, if it means more will live.
It's an extreme case; but what I'm saying is not "the ends justify the means" but "because of the good ends, i'm a bit less worried about the means" - by comparison with killing thousands of mice because I feel like it or simply because I don't like the idea of mice it doesn't trouble me as much. Animals are killed all the time, but at least there's some benefit to this.
I'm sure PETA, RSPCA etc will all have something to say about this. But i see it less immoral that we're using mice (at their expense) to end human suffering rather than to test cosmetics or kill simply because they're in our home. At least this kind of animal cruelty (as it could be construed) has a negating good karma benefit.
I also agree with the premise. The US government is the biggest offender in this perpetual arms race with the world and themselves - but like many military inventions this has a civil purpose. It's not a new bio-bomb that can kill people more effectively, but a car that can rescue people and supply troops. It should lead to some useful inventions that we could be seeing in the commercial market soon enough.
My only worry with new military technology is that it will progress to the point where troops (American troops) will have no contact with the people they are liberating, killing or whatever - it could totally dehumanise war, making it all the easier for governments to fight senseless wars.
USENIX Workshop On Offensive Technology spells umm... woot?
;)
*checks the date*
well, it's not April 1st
A form of proportional representation is much more democratic than First Past the Post. The trouble is people see the democratic system as traditional and infallible, even though there are many obvious flaws. There is scope for proportional representation to be used in the UK soon though, as it was used (i think) for the Scottish Parliament elections a few months ago. Doubt it will be in place before the next general election unfortunately.
The other problem is that some forms of proportional representation such as the most basic Party List system can enable extremist parties a seat in parliament, the form of elections that the Weimar Republic (1918-1933) held in Germany were a factor in Hitler's rise to power. That's just one argument opponents to PR use.
Fortunately in the UK we already have a multi-party system, but it's plagued with imbalances and so on... First Past the Post is perfect if there is a two-party system (such as in the USA) but with the current system there is no chance whatsoever of there being a third party elected to government, it just will not happen; and it's one of the things that is making the USA such a failed democracy at the moment.
Well, as humans, the natural next step of course is to kill it. What are the chances that it's some sort of mutant space-alien? I'm thinking along the lines of the premise for a series of Stargate SG1 here...
As an anarchist at heart I can't help but hope everything will one day be free, libre, open-source... but unfortunately I live in the real world and we have to be a bit more pragmatic
:(
:)
I doubt the open-source community could really support the centralised infrastructure that would be required for a resource hungry high-traffic social networking site like Facebook or MySpace; for the same reason free open-source Google probably wouldn't work
Then again i think Launchpad probably falls under the 'social networking site' category... but then that doesn't have all the gadgets and traffic that sites like Facebook have.
Perhaps we should be seeking more openness in the good social networking sites we already have like Facbook?
Well I guess we'll find out if they make any attempts to make amends for their error or not. If they don't and just ignore the GPL well... I'm sure they'll get a big Internet-media headache :)
Maybe life on other planets is still governed by the laws of natural selection and resulted in the evolution (as it has on Earth) of petty-minded geniuses that teeters on the brink of nuclear destruction. They could've finished each other off aeons ago, perhaps we were just late to the party?
Will iD be upholding their tradition of being native OpenGL? That means there shouldn't be a problem getting it working equally well (even better, in fact) on Linux or a Mac than Vista.
.deb on the valve website, anyone? :)
Doom 3 worked much faster on Ubuntu for me... In XP with full settings the game was borderline unplayable but on Ubuntu - as smooth as could be!
iD is still the only really major developer i can think of that makes their games openGL native and Linux friendly... Hopefully this collaboration with Valve is another sign that other developers will collaborate and follow their lead.
PS Steam available as a
Why, yet again, is the responsibility for something this important (like the rebuilding of Iraq for example) being entrusted to a private company? Corporations by their very nature don't give a damn about anything that doesn't affect their ability to make money.
I can see lots of people complaining about "dumbing down" maths as if there's something wrong with that... I can see why there could be complaints about, say, simplifying an English language course by changing things - because that would remove some of the content. Arty subjects are inherently hard, but I see no reason why mathematics can't change some of its language and methods to make it easy for students, because although I'm not prone to saying "when are we ever going to use any of this nonsense in real life" in my math classes, the fact is that the vast majority of people won't do mathematics past high-school level (algebra and arithmetic etc, the essentials). You don't need to know all the complexities of mathematics unless you're doing it (or a related subject like physics) at college.
EXACTLY! They're not charging any money for it, so why ARE they doing it? That's what worries me. There's no subversion if you're buying outright a product...
Well I'm a bit of a stickler for playing good games when I have to pay £40-50 for them, I've grown used to finding games on isohunt.com for the PC when i feel like it ;)
:(
My anger at the PS3 is mostly annoyance at myself for buying this console when I would have been better getting a GeForce 8800 and having some cash left over.
And to top it off i just found GTA IV (one of the main reasons i bought the ps3, buying a console for a killer app that isn't even out yet, stupid, i know) has been delayed till spring '08
I'm a bit of an anti-capitalist... totally cynical, and rightly so, about corporations. Especially ones that have proven manipulative tendencies like Microsoft. You know, it might work out in practice for most people, but there will be some sort of drawback - paying MS money, requiring their permission, it not working on Macs and Linux or whatever.
There's always a drawback with these kinds of things or Microsoft would have just left things as they are with image file formats.
I'm saying it's highly unlikely Microsoft is doing this out of the good of their heart. I'm not one for the whole "M$ is 3V1L!!" banners and shouting lark but corporations such as Microsoft exist for the sole purpose of creating profit, they have an angle on this, whatever it might be.
I think you might be mistaking irony for despair. Whatever Microsoft does Microsoft does for Microsoft; and that means what will make them money. Why would they have gone to the bother of making a (very good, i hear) new image file format... for our benefit? I don't think so....
This can only end badly.
I don't care what the DMCA says, I reserve the right to tinker with, break, alter or pirate my games consoles.
People need to remember that morality is not defined by the law (far from it) and that the laws are controlled by government, which is in turn mostly influenced by large corporations (i.e. movie studios and the RIAA).
This is just another example of why American politics needs to steer itself away from the money-race politicians have for funding, the candidate with the most money to spend on smear campaigns and advertising is most likely to win - and who supplies the candidates with this money? Do you think they might expect something in return, or at least give their support to this candidate (making them more likely to win) because their proposed policies will be beneficial to the financial backer?
The whole service has been banned in Canada? That can't be right, it's used for lots of things - Linux distros, software updates... Microsoft are even thinking about implementing their own flavour of it in the next version of Windows (or a service pack for Vista).