I don't know why people treat things like these utility boxes, utility poles, communications towers, and wind turbines as ugly. I think that they are quite beautiful, mostly because they provide the some of the most visible insights into how our society functions. Particularly so when you're fortunate enough to pass by a box when a technician is working inside of it. They also provide a character to a community that goes beyond the cookie-cutter houses that ravage our neighborhoods from coast to coast, and the immaculately trimmed green of lawns.
Perhaps NIBYism would be less of an issue if people avoided that knee-jerk reaction that anything unfamiliar is ugly. Any form of infrastructure that makes our society works is ugly. After all, NIBYism would then focus on real issues (e.g. health concerns) rather than vanity.
If that were the case, any patent that Microsoft could take out on this concept would be totally irrelevant. After all, how many vendors would want to create a web browser that cannot make HTTP connections?
To an extent, I agree that these cards are for piracy.
I have an M3DS Real, and the launch menu clearly has a slot named NDS for commercial games and MyCard for homebrew stuff. (It also has one called GBA, which can be used for both commercial and homebrew.) It is clear that one of the purposes of these cards is to run commercial software. Depending upon the owners actions and the definition of piracy, this card is made for running pirated software. If it's purpose was to run homebrew, they would not have the option to use copied commercial carts.
That being said, if you want to run or create homebrew you don't have much choice. And there is a lot of excellent homebrew for the DS. Particularly on the applications front. (I'm not really into games, and only regularly play two games on the DS. Even though I bought four. Wimper.)
They are supposed to be offering another round og G1G1 (give 1 get 1) this autumn. But based upon the last round, I don't think that you're going to get many buyers who will end up developing for it. Another indicator is that Sugar has been ported to other Linux distributions. If you want to develop for it, you can do so today. Some people do, but it is by no means a massive outpouring of support.
Don't get me wrong, the XO itself is a nice piece of hardware. Alas, Sugar is buggy and does not perform all that well. Many of the original claims simply have not be met, and it does not appear that they ever will be. Battery life is a classic example here. The XO does reasonably well: roughly 4 hours on a new battery. That is roughly what a new battery in my old PowerBook G4 managed, while the XO battery is half the capacity. Performance sucks, and you can expect the machine to lockup like clockwork. I suspect this is because it is in Python, which not only slows things down, but chews up an incredible amount of RAM. The joyride branch seems to be much faster and has bumped up the battery life to 8 hours or so in some circumstances, but it has a long way to go. For instance, RAM consumption is still beyond the means of this machine. (Remember, it has no swap file. Those who want a swap file are using disposable USB keys.)
I'm one of the people who picked it up thinking that I could program this thing. While I did learn a lot by exploring the internals (which are in the form of accessible Python code), I have a hard time seeing how a well-meaning but inexperienced adult can program the critter. Nevermind a child in the third world. The code itself is not very clear, and the whole thing is (or at least was) pitifully documented.
Will XP solve these problems. Maybe, maybe not. It won't make it easier to program, and it certainly won't allow kids to explore the internals. It will allow kids and schools to access more education software in principle, but who knows how well that would work out in the developing world because software licenses are often expensive.
> Government has no business legislating what is moral. It's everyone's job as individuals to do what they can to keep their kids away from unwanted content.
Exactly. Which is why the government is providing parents with the tools to judge what is moral and to keep their kids away from unwanted content. Technical protections won't always work, but it will allow parents to step back and allow their teenagers to start making decisions for themselves as part of a more gradual process. You can let them have that console in their room when their 14 knowing that hyperviolent and/or hypersexualized games are not likely to be on their game roster. You can give them discretionary money (an allowance) knowing that it is unlikely that they will be able to buy and use those games. Sure they can do an end-run and buy their own console and unlock the console, but that would be a major decision on their part since it would cost 10 times as much.
> My tax dollars shouldn't be used to keep your snowflakes from watching bad things.
My tax dollars are being spent to build roads that I barely use, to support war efforts that I oppose, to give aid to third-world nations when I believe that we should be giving aid to third-world communities within our own nation. I have to live with that though because the government funds things that I personally do agree with. It's give and take. Society always is give and take.
Many people are exploiting the works of the greats, like Chaucer and Shakespeare, without offering a nickle to their estates. Some of the worse offenders are theaters and schools, who greedily steal this work to enrich the lives of theatergoers and teenagers. Such self-centred and exploitive behaviours have to stop. Copyrights must be extended eternally, and it must be done retroactively so that the estates of great writers from any member of the EU can seek damages for decades, centuries, and even millenia./sarcasm
> There's a major belief that men should not be allowed around children because they are quite likely to be pedophiles. Sometimes the mere fact that they're seeking such a job is used as proof that they shouldn't be allowed to have it.
Unfortunately, this belief also discourages men from choosing to teach in the lower grades. Even if you know yourself and know that you are not a pedophile, there is always the fear of accusations.
And there are other contributing factors. All teachers are told, in no uncertain terms, never to touch a student. In the higher grades, this isn't much of an issue. Teenages know to respect personal spaces, want their personal space respected, and few would be caught dead associating with a teacher anyway. Teens who have a crush on a teacher usually know that it is improper. Short of malicious accusations or improper behaviour on the part of the teacher, the teacher is usually safe. But all of that is an issue for both male and female teachers.
Children are different though. Children can and will grab onto you. They don't know about personal spaces. A child who does not have friends is not afraid to look to adults for friendship. These are extraordinarily difficult situations to deal with. Not only because of the fear of impropriety, but because the teacher is dealing with 20 or 30 or 40 years worth of socialization that is telling them to defend their own personal space.
Alas, there is not a whole lot you can do short of avoiding the obvious risks. But if you enjoy working with children and know that you wouldn't cause any form of harm to a child, it is a risk that you learn to live with.
While not quotas per se, as a male it is possible to be a subject to affirmative action. The lack of male elementary school teachers is of such grave concern to some people that it is a natural consequence. It is a grave concern because about 1 in 5 elementary school teachers are male, and there are worries that the lack of male role models is disengaging young boys from the education system. That being said, inspite of action through school boards and professional bodies, men often fail to find work at the lower grades. Parents and principals keep them out.
That being said, it is the exception rather than the rule and I have seen feminists argue agressively against it because men have much better opportunities in society and don't deserve a hand up in the parts of society that they have been forced out of due to active discrimination. I wonder if they realise that more qualified men in education means more space for qualified women in other fields.
A new Texas law that requires PC repairmen to hold a PI license has computer users giggling in glee. One user, Guy Pern told PCMag, "finally, I don't have to worry about those blundering fools deleting the thousands of photos of my children when they format my computer to reinstall Windows XP."
FBI agent Brute Farce was disappointed though. After arresting Guy Pern he commented to a PCMag reporter, "I guess it makes our job easier because we can just arrest these pervs when they pick up their computers. But I kinda miss the days of breaking down theirs doors and watching them masturbate in their computer chairs."
> My logical "hacker" choice is to wrap everything around the high priority protocol.
But is that really going to work in the long term? I'm fairly certain that the people behind these companies are fairly intelligent and are going to figure out the bit about wrapping traffic in high priority protocols, or encryption, or what be it. So what's the next step: they look at traffic patterns. HTTPS to access your bank is going to look quite different from someone using a P2P protocol encapsulated in HTTPS to download a GB of data.
> In reality, priority should be set by the user as part of the interface, and not by anybody else.
If you can trust the user, sure. If the user is allocated a certain data transfer rate and prioritizes among their own tasks, sure. The thing is, you can trust person X to say that they are lower priority than person Y. In most of the cases that I've seen, ISPs over-commit their bandwidth, so switching to a pay-for-bandwidth model would be disastrous in the context of their current model.
Besides, North American users love flat-rate models. Which is likely why so many of them rejected the data transfer caps when they were first introduced.
Perhaps I'm slightly biased here, because I usually see P2P being used to transfer large data files (e.g. Linux ISOs), but it strikes me that certain types of traffic should have a priority.
Think about it: downloading something like an ISO or video is somewhat different than downloading the various bits and pieces of a web page or streaming video or making a phone call via VoIP. Network congestion or throttling for the former is not really an issue since it does not diminish service. You will get your data, even if it takes twice as long. Yet most people won't want to wait a couple of minutes for a web page to download, won't want to watch their video screech to a halt as it buffers more data, or deal with horrendous amounts of distortion due to higher compression on their VoIP call.
Now there is a problem with this technology: it could just as easily be used to block as to throttle. And that is what we should really be concerned about. Alas, if we go around freaked out about throttling low priority traffic our larger concern (blocking) will probably lack credibility in the eyes of policymakers when that time comes. And it will come.
Three reasons to upgrade, rather than replacement:
1. It could be cheaper. He was talking about a hard drive and memory here, both of which can offer a slight boost in functionality, which is all that some people need.
2. It may be easier. If you're only talking about upgrading the RAM, then you get to bypass the joys of installing software and reconfiguring your working environment.
3. You may have trouble getting the features you need. Have an old printer that you don't want to replace? Need a serial port on the road, but don't want to carry an adapter?
4. It just may be more environmentally friendly. It takes energy to manufacture goods. It takes time and energy to dispose of hazardous waste.
Upgrading doesn't always makes sense. But sometimes it does make sense. So why criticize people who take that less travelled path?
People underperform for different reasons, very few of which have to do with latent intelligence.
Ever see what happens to a kid who's parents are undergoing a divorce? Some may be able to handle it, but some kids aren't emotionally equipped to handle it. Ever see what happens to a kid who has no parents or poor parents? Without proper adult guidance, they're going to choose paths that may be productive but will probably be counter productive. Have you ever lived with the effects of poverty, may they be reduced nutrition and health or a limited world view that does not incorporate the middle or upper class' perspective on achievement? That's a good way to limit motivation, hence performance.
There is a (perhaps irrational) fear of streaming kids based upon perceived success in academics (or sports or trades) because there are so many ways in which kids can fall through the cracks. There are so many ways by which a child can be pushed down into poverty or be stuck in poverty. When an education system views its role as lifting people out of those situations, a few compromises have to be made. And if that means spending a disproportionate amount on under-achievers, then so be it.
> Removing alt.folklore.computers (...) to avoid kiddie porn just makes no sense.
Maybe they were disgusted by all of those old timers talking about their fantasies about old computers, even though all of those computers were of legal age (and then some).
> As for his flagrant abuse of the legal process in order to advance his political agenda... that can and should be stopped
No argument there.
> It also should be stopped because he's wrong.
That is where we are in conflict. If you want to present an argument contrary to his position, then fine. That is a part of civil discourse. That is a part of the freedom of speech. But let's face the fact here: a lot of people on Slashdot are arguing that JT should be stopped simply because they don't agree with him. Yet IF a hypothetical anti-JT was standing up for the freedom of expression in violent video games, and abusing the system of law in the exact same manner, a lot of people around these parts would be crying bloody murder if the anti-JT was facing disbarment.
And MAYBE a mild version of that has already happened. Remember the days of the SCO lawsuit. Remember how almost everyone was standing behind IBM's and Novell's legal teams almost without question. Remember how almost everyone was vilifying SCO, again without question. Now I'm not going to stand up for SCO because I believe that developers should have reasonable freedom to create and distribute their own work. But the point was that people were standing up for IBM and Novell without questioning their tactics or their motives.
The reason for that, and the reason why a lot of people seem so eager to see JT disbarred, is because we have an intense emotional attachment to the issue. We are letting it cloud our judgement, and because of that we have the online equivalent of a public lynching.
That emotial response is what I'm opposed to. Ever the more so because we are saying that our sense of morality takes priority over his.
Being disbarred is not about his personal opinion, nor your personal opinion, about video games. It is about his ability to practice law.
I also find it ironic that people who are so keen on the freedom of speech are so eager to find a way to gag or demean someone that they don't agree with. That's not civil behaviour. It is childish behaviour. (My apologies to the children of the world.)
I usually avoid any mass-media portrayal of computers and computer crime, because it usally ends up being unadulterated drivel. But when I first saw WarGames last year, I was shocked and (quite frankly) impressed.
Sure there was a lot of drivel in there, but a lot of it could be considered as artistic license. The teen had to turn on a voice synthesis unit the first time the computer talked, so the talking computer wasn't magic. At least not in Lightman's room. They were quite clear that Lightman's computer sequentially tried numbers to find an access point and they found other interesting systems before getting into military systems. Again, magic was not involved. Breaking into systems usually involved some sort of research, may it be swiping passwords from the school office or doing some hard research on the people involved. He didn't magically guess the password after two failed attempts. Sure the computer had a personality, just like HAL in 2001 had a personality, but it's not as though he was dumped into some flakey virtual world.
Movies are a balance between what will entertain, and what will suspend the viewers disbelief. WarGames is no exception, and I think that WarGames struck a decent balance between both. After all, how many people would want to watch a Soviet computer expert being fed information from a few spies. Who would want to watch a movie where that spy, once caught, would have a near-zero chance of escaping. Boring. Right. At least for most people.
Time for a writing competition. Let's see who's out of the running first: you on a fancy laptop because your battery died, or me on a 100 because I ran out of memory.:)
I patented "Slashdotter making positive comments about patents" since I figured that there was no prior art and that it was specific enough. You know, the sort of thing that some of you guys think a good patent should do. Alas, I haven't found anyone to sue for violating my patent yet...
When the military performed a psychiatric review of Feynman, and labelled him as a nut bar for answering innocient questions in an honest way. (For example: "Are people staring at you?" "Yes, since the chap lined up behind me has little else to do." Or something to that effect.)
There is a term for that: graphic violence. In a lot of movies, the violent acts will take place off screen simply because the act of violence is part of the plot (an investigation of a rape, a child dealing with their mothers death) but the visual presentation of that act is not necessary to the story. Now the acts of violence did take place on-screen in Space Invaders, but they were so abstractly presented that they were essentially non-graphic.
It could be argued that graphic and non-graphic violence is fundamentally different because someone who feels that it is necessary to present or watch acts that are not socially acceptable (like rape or murder) are fantasizing about those acts, rather than being interested in the consequences of those acts. And that is where the problem may lay.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know why people treat things like these utility boxes, utility poles, communications towers, and wind turbines as ugly. I think that they are quite beautiful, mostly because they provide the some of the most visible insights into how our society functions. Particularly so when you're fortunate enough to pass by a box when a technician is working inside of it. They also provide a character to a community that goes beyond the cookie-cutter houses that ravage our neighborhoods from coast to coast, and the immaculately trimmed green of lawns.
Perhaps NIBYism would be less of an issue if people avoided that knee-jerk reaction that anything unfamiliar is ugly. Any form of infrastructure that makes our society works is ugly. After all, NIBYism would then focus on real issues (e.g. health concerns) rather than vanity.
If that were the case, any patent that Microsoft could take out on this concept would be totally irrelevant. After all, how many vendors would want to create a web browser that cannot make HTTP connections?
(Yes, I read the trademark bit).
No, the ideal cadidate is still a 22 year old college graduate.
All you need is 25 years of Java and .Net experience to back those credentials.
To an extent, I agree that these cards are for piracy.
I have an M3DS Real, and the launch menu clearly has a slot named NDS for commercial games and MyCard for homebrew stuff. (It also has one called GBA, which can be used for both commercial and homebrew.) It is clear that one of the purposes of these cards is to run commercial software. Depending upon the owners actions and the definition of piracy, this card is made for running pirated software. If it's purpose was to run homebrew, they would not have the option to use copied commercial carts.
That being said, if you want to run or create homebrew you don't have much choice. And there is a lot of excellent homebrew for the DS. Particularly on the applications front. (I'm not really into games, and only regularly play two games on the DS. Even though I bought four. Wimper.)
They are supposed to be offering another round og G1G1 (give 1 get 1) this autumn. But based upon the last round, I don't think that you're going to get many buyers who will end up developing for it. Another indicator is that Sugar has been ported to other Linux distributions. If you want to develop for it, you can do so today. Some people do, but it is by no means a massive outpouring of support.
Don't get me wrong, the XO itself is a nice piece of hardware. Alas, Sugar is buggy and does not perform all that well. Many of the original claims simply have not be met, and it does not appear that they ever will be. Battery life is a classic example here. The XO does reasonably well: roughly 4 hours on a new battery. That is roughly what a new battery in my old PowerBook G4 managed, while the XO battery is half the capacity. Performance sucks, and you can expect the machine to lockup like clockwork. I suspect this is because it is in Python, which not only slows things down, but chews up an incredible amount of RAM. The joyride branch seems to be much faster and has bumped up the battery life to 8 hours or so in some circumstances, but it has a long way to go. For instance, RAM consumption is still beyond the means of this machine. (Remember, it has no swap file. Those who want a swap file are using disposable USB keys.)
I'm one of the people who picked it up thinking that I could program this thing. While I did learn a lot by exploring the internals (which are in the form of accessible Python code), I have a hard time seeing how a well-meaning but inexperienced adult can program the critter. Nevermind a child in the third world. The code itself is not very clear, and the whole thing is (or at least was) pitifully documented.
Will XP solve these problems. Maybe, maybe not. It won't make it easier to program, and it certainly won't allow kids to explore the internals. It will allow kids and schools to access more education software in principle, but who knows how well that would work out in the developing world because software licenses are often expensive.
Well, I think it would be rather obvious if someone made a 50 km wide telescope in order to read that Earth-bound CD from the Moon.
> Government has no business legislating what is moral. It's everyone's job as individuals to do what they can to keep their kids away from unwanted content. Exactly. Which is why the government is providing parents with the tools to judge what is moral and to keep their kids away from unwanted content. Technical protections won't always work, but it will allow parents to step back and allow their teenagers to start making decisions for themselves as part of a more gradual process. You can let them have that console in their room when their 14 knowing that hyperviolent and/or hypersexualized games are not likely to be on their game roster. You can give them discretionary money (an allowance) knowing that it is unlikely that they will be able to buy and use those games. Sure they can do an end-run and buy their own console and unlock the console, but that would be a major decision on their part since it would cost 10 times as much. > My tax dollars shouldn't be used to keep your snowflakes from watching bad things. My tax dollars are being spent to build roads that I barely use, to support war efforts that I oppose, to give aid to third-world nations when I believe that we should be giving aid to third-world communities within our own nation. I have to live with that though because the government funds things that I personally do agree with. It's give and take. Society always is give and take.
Why not have indefinite copyright?
Many people are exploiting the works of the greats, like Chaucer and Shakespeare, without offering a nickle to their estates. Some of the worse offenders are theaters and schools, who greedily steal this work to enrich the lives of theatergoers and teenagers. Such self-centred and exploitive behaviours have to stop. Copyrights must be extended eternally, and it must be done retroactively so that the estates of great writers from any member of the EU can seek damages for decades, centuries, and even millenia. /sarcasm
> There's a major belief that men should not be allowed around children because they are quite likely to be pedophiles. Sometimes the mere fact that they're seeking such a job is used as proof that they shouldn't be allowed to have it.
Unfortunately, this belief also discourages men from choosing to teach in the lower grades. Even if you know yourself and know that you are not a pedophile, there is always the fear of accusations.
And there are other contributing factors. All teachers are told, in no uncertain terms, never to touch a student. In the higher grades, this isn't much of an issue. Teenages know to respect personal spaces, want their personal space respected, and few would be caught dead associating with a teacher anyway. Teens who have a crush on a teacher usually know that it is improper. Short of malicious accusations or improper behaviour on the part of the teacher, the teacher is usually safe. But all of that is an issue for both male and female teachers.
Children are different though. Children can and will grab onto you. They don't know about personal spaces. A child who does not have friends is not afraid to look to adults for friendship. These are extraordinarily difficult situations to deal with. Not only because of the fear of impropriety, but because the teacher is dealing with 20 or 30 or 40 years worth of socialization that is telling them to defend their own personal space.
Alas, there is not a whole lot you can do short of avoiding the obvious risks. But if you enjoy working with children and know that you wouldn't cause any form of harm to a child, it is a risk that you learn to live with.
While not quotas per se, as a male it is possible to be a subject to affirmative action. The lack of male elementary school teachers is of such grave concern to some people that it is a natural consequence. It is a grave concern because about 1 in 5 elementary school teachers are male, and there are worries that the lack of male role models is disengaging young boys from the education system. That being said, inspite of action through school boards and professional bodies, men often fail to find work at the lower grades. Parents and principals keep them out.
That being said, it is the exception rather than the rule and I have seen feminists argue agressively against it because men have much better opportunities in society and don't deserve a hand up in the parts of society that they have been forced out of due to active discrimination. I wonder if they realise that more qualified men in education means more space for qualified women in other fields.
Texas computer users thrilled by new law
A new Texas law that requires PC repairmen to hold a PI license has computer users giggling in glee. One user, Guy Pern told PCMag, "finally, I don't have to worry about those blundering fools deleting the thousands of photos of my children when they format my computer to reinstall Windows XP."
FBI agent Brute Farce was disappointed though. After arresting Guy Pern he commented to a PCMag reporter, "I guess it makes our job easier because we can just arrest these pervs when they pick up their computers. But I kinda miss the days of breaking down theirs doors and watching them masturbate in their computer chairs."
> My logical "hacker" choice is to wrap everything around the high priority protocol.
But is that really going to work in the long term? I'm fairly certain that the people behind these companies are fairly intelligent and are going to figure out the bit about wrapping traffic in high priority protocols, or encryption, or what be it. So what's the next step: they look at traffic patterns. HTTPS to access your bank is going to look quite different from someone using a P2P protocol encapsulated in HTTPS to download a GB of data.
> In reality, priority should be set by the user as part of the interface, and not by anybody else.
If you can trust the user, sure. If the user is allocated a certain data transfer rate and prioritizes among their own tasks, sure. The thing is, you can trust person X to say that they are lower priority than person Y. In most of the cases that I've seen, ISPs over-commit their bandwidth, so switching to a pay-for-bandwidth model would be disastrous in the context of their current model.
Besides, North American users love flat-rate models. Which is likely why so many of them rejected the data transfer caps when they were first introduced.
Perhaps I'm slightly biased here, because I usually see P2P being used to transfer large data files (e.g. Linux ISOs), but it strikes me that certain types of traffic should have a priority.
Think about it: downloading something like an ISO or video is somewhat different than downloading the various bits and pieces of a web page or streaming video or making a phone call via VoIP. Network congestion or throttling for the former is not really an issue since it does not diminish service. You will get your data, even if it takes twice as long. Yet most people won't want to wait a couple of minutes for a web page to download, won't want to watch their video screech to a halt as it buffers more data, or deal with horrendous amounts of distortion due to higher compression on their VoIP call.
Now there is a problem with this technology: it could just as easily be used to block as to throttle. And that is what we should really be concerned about. Alas, if we go around freaked out about throttling low priority traffic our larger concern (blocking) will probably lack credibility in the eyes of policymakers when that time comes. And it will come.
Be smart about the battles you pick.
Have make sure my 9 year old son making dinner for the wife and I. Back in a minute.
Guess I can't blame it on an integer overflow since I've never heard of a two-bit ALU.
Three reasons to upgrade, rather than replacement:
1. It could be cheaper. He was talking about a hard drive and memory here, both of which can offer a slight boost in functionality, which is all that some people need.
2. It may be easier. If you're only talking about upgrading the RAM, then you get to bypass the joys of installing software and reconfiguring your working environment.
3. You may have trouble getting the features you need. Have an old printer that you don't want to replace? Need a serial port on the road, but don't want to carry an adapter?
4. It just may be more environmentally friendly. It takes energy to manufacture goods. It takes time and energy to dispose of hazardous waste.
Upgrading doesn't always makes sense. But sometimes it does make sense. So why criticize people who take that less travelled path?
People underperform for different reasons, very few of which have to do with latent intelligence.
Ever see what happens to a kid who's parents are undergoing a divorce? Some may be able to handle it, but some kids aren't emotionally equipped to handle it. Ever see what happens to a kid who has no parents or poor parents? Without proper adult guidance, they're going to choose paths that may be productive but will probably be counter productive. Have you ever lived with the effects of poverty, may they be reduced nutrition and health or a limited world view that does not incorporate the middle or upper class' perspective on achievement? That's a good way to limit motivation, hence performance.
There is a (perhaps irrational) fear of streaming kids based upon perceived success in academics (or sports or trades) because there are so many ways in which kids can fall through the cracks. There are so many ways by which a child can be pushed down into poverty or be stuck in poverty. When an education system views its role as lifting people out of those situations, a few compromises have to be made. And if that means spending a disproportionate amount on under-achievers, then so be it.
> Removing alt.folklore.computers (...) to avoid kiddie porn just makes no sense.
Maybe they were disgusted by all of those old timers talking about their fantasies about old computers, even though all of those computers were of legal age (and then some).
> As for his flagrant abuse of the legal process in order to advance his political agenda ... that can and should be stopped
No argument there.
> It also should be stopped because he's wrong.
That is where we are in conflict. If you want to present an argument contrary to his position, then fine. That is a part of civil discourse. That is a part of the freedom of speech. But let's face the fact here: a lot of people on Slashdot are arguing that JT should be stopped simply because they don't agree with him. Yet IF a hypothetical anti-JT was standing up for the freedom of expression in violent video games, and abusing the system of law in the exact same manner, a lot of people around these parts would be crying bloody murder if the anti-JT was facing disbarment.
And MAYBE a mild version of that has already happened. Remember the days of the SCO lawsuit. Remember how almost everyone was standing behind IBM's and Novell's legal teams almost without question. Remember how almost everyone was vilifying SCO, again without question. Now I'm not going to stand up for SCO because I believe that developers should have reasonable freedom to create and distribute their own work. But the point was that people were standing up for IBM and Novell without questioning their tactics or their motives.
The reason for that, and the reason why a lot of people seem so eager to see JT disbarred, is because we have an intense emotional attachment to the issue. We are letting it cloud our judgement, and because of that we have the online equivalent of a public lynching.
That emotial response is what I'm opposed to. Ever the more so because we are saying that our sense of morality takes priority over his.
Being disbarred is not about his personal opinion, nor your personal opinion, about video games. It is about his ability to practice law. I also find it ironic that people who are so keen on the freedom of speech are so eager to find a way to gag or demean someone that they don't agree with. That's not civil behaviour. It is childish behaviour. (My apologies to the children of the world.)
I usually avoid any mass-media portrayal of computers and computer crime, because it usally ends up being unadulterated drivel. But when I first saw WarGames last year, I was shocked and (quite frankly) impressed. Sure there was a lot of drivel in there, but a lot of it could be considered as artistic license. The teen had to turn on a voice synthesis unit the first time the computer talked, so the talking computer wasn't magic. At least not in Lightman's room. They were quite clear that Lightman's computer sequentially tried numbers to find an access point and they found other interesting systems before getting into military systems. Again, magic was not involved. Breaking into systems usually involved some sort of research, may it be swiping passwords from the school office or doing some hard research on the people involved. He didn't magically guess the password after two failed attempts. Sure the computer had a personality, just like HAL in 2001 had a personality, but it's not as though he was dumped into some flakey virtual world. Movies are a balance between what will entertain, and what will suspend the viewers disbelief. WarGames is no exception, and I think that WarGames struck a decent balance between both. After all, how many people would want to watch a Soviet computer expert being fed information from a few spies. Who would want to watch a movie where that spy, once caught, would have a near-zero chance of escaping. Boring. Right. At least for most people.
Time for a writing competition. Let's see who's out of the running first: you on a fancy laptop because your battery died, or me on a 100 because I ran out of memory. :)
I patented "Slashdotter making positive comments about patents" since I figured that there was no prior art and that it was specific enough. You know, the sort of thing that some of you guys think a good patent should do. Alas, I haven't found anyone to sue for violating my patent yet ...
When the military performed a psychiatric review of Feynman, and labelled him as a nut bar for answering innocient questions in an honest way. (For example: "Are people staring at you?" "Yes, since the chap lined up behind me has little else to do." Or something to that effect.)
It could be argued that graphic and non-graphic violence is fundamentally different because someone who feels that it is necessary to present or watch acts that are not socially acceptable (like rape or murder) are fantasizing about those acts, rather than being interested in the consequences of those acts. And that is where the problem may lay.