Nor does Google have the ability to shoot people dead and only get fined for a "health and safety violation".
Any examples of the government doing that? Outside of a paranoid's alterno-world that is...
I'm thinking you're probably referring to the police shooting Jean Charles de Menezes (and being found guilty under the under the Health and Safety at Work Act), but that's not really the same thing as you're suggesting - it was an accident, not a premeditated, politically-motivated murder.
Because obviously the easiest way to get pictures of Britain is to fly an American over from the US and have him take them, no chance at all that they'd employ someone from this side of the Atlantic to drive the car...
Also, why curry? "Offer him food" could have meant a perfectly innocuous jellied eel with warm beer.
Heh... and there I was thinking "The hell... crossbow? Why in satan's glorious name would I want a crossbow?"
Well, I'll get around to another go eventually (I'm not kidding about that to-do list, if I put all those films on a playlist and just let them run end-to-end, then played through each game as fast as possible and without any breaks, just tried to burn through it all as fast as can humanly be done, even then I'd still be at it a week from now)
I think I took the sniper rifle... on the basis that taking all the fuckers out from a distance would make things easier. Maybe sniping is best left until after putting some more points into that skill... or until you're on a map with some godforsaken ammo for it.
May well give it another go some time, it's on the to-do list alongside an ever-increasingly large stack of of other games/films (download speed > consumption speed)
Easiest solution is to buy each employee a pocket radio.
That would be true in some cases, although I don't know that you'd find many businesses that care that much about their employees' ability to listen to a radio. In this case however, there is the small problem related to the scarcity of equine earphones.
I got Deus Ex after seeing something describing the amount of choice/freedom in the game, and how much you could change the flow (if not the ending) of the story if you tried hard enough...
Then, after making my way through some strange problems, (hypersensitive controls mainly - most likely caused by the age of the thing... got them fixed eventually) I got the game running and the first level was immensely frustrating.
Maybe I just sucked at it, but to my mind it wasn't made even close to clear enough where exactly I ought to be going, and the bad guys were just annoying... always knew I was behind them when I tried to attack stealthily, and once I'd used my 6 bullets I was essentially reduced to ducking around in the shadows with a crowbar, hoping not to be seen.
That sounds like a complicated solution for a simple problem... all he needed was earplugs or a quiet room; a dramatic restructuring of our educational culture is overengineering the issue.
I think that one's more a case of the "Foot in the Door" technique - start with a small request that they're likely to agree to, and then they're likely to also agree to a bigger request. Asking the small thing first means the second request doesn't sound so big, and agreeing the first time puts them in an agreeing mood.
So it'd go "Hey, want to come out to dinner", then after dinner, ask them back to wherever and, "while you're here, how about a BJ?"
$40-60 would be somewhat excessive for an old game, and so long as Steam continues to exist you wouldn't have to re-buy, so it's not a rental in that sense.
Granted, if they were to go under, you'd have a case... but even then it just removes the backup copy on their server, leaving you to take care of the copy on your computer, just as you'd have to cake care of a copy on disc (and I think I'm actually more likely to lose/damage a disc than a digital copy)
Are randomly determined actions actually free though? To my mind, if what you do is ultimately decided by random, subatomic quantum events then you're no more free than if they're decided by normal deterministic events (the only difference being that you're unpredictable with quantum events in there)
The normal way of defining free will I've seen is "Given the same physical conditions leading up to your decision, it was possible for you to take the other choice", which I suppose quantum randomness allows for, but it's still not really you making the choice.
The other definition would be that you do what you want, which is actually a plausible possibility even in a deterministic universe - everything that makes you "you" is a part of the physical world, all of your thoughts, emotions and desires come from the state of your brain and this directly and strongly influences your decision making. What you want is all a part of the system, so you do in fact do what you want.
I suppose the problem there is that although you might always do what you want to, you're actions aren't really free because you can't make a choice about what to want to do, that being determined physically by (ultimately) events outside of yourself. But really, where do you expect to find something that obeys no deterministic physical laws and reflects your wants? Quantum randomness only meets one of those, and I think the only thing that would meet both is a non-physical soul, which I tend not to consider as a serious possibility.
Of course it only applies if the code in question actually gets looked over by a lot of people. True for high profile things like Apache, but smaller open source projects can't be automatically assumed to be more secure - they may well have no more, or less, people actively reviewing their code than an equivalent program from a normal developer.
"Syf" is shorthand for Syphilis in Poland, and "Syfy" is similarly for anything dirty, unpleasant, diseased... not necessarily literally syphilitic, but nasty.
We don't not need no stinking grammars! We's just lern it as we goes along.
Seriously though, I've noticed the same thing - second language speakers tend (once fluent) to have a better grasp of what the rules of the language are in a technical sense, and know what's proper use or not. Native speakers on the other hand still have 'better English' because the language we use and the language as defined formally are somewhat different from one another.
Native speakers tend not to know the actual rules, so much as what "sounds right", and by and large we get by on that just fine and make ourselves understood perfectly well, but then there's the boundary cases where what sounds right isn't what the rules proscribe, and you get a divide between the people who think language needs to be used properly and precisely, and those that just want to get on with it, even if that means the language mutates all over the place.
I think change is inevitable, and will tend towards common usage rather than the old rules, but there are still plenty of common little bugs in the language that are too far removed from the 'real' use for me to stomach. Things like "alot" as a single word, or "definately". So in summary, everyone should bloody well learn to spell, but only to the same degree that I have.
Whether it's someone else's or not, most cams I've seen have audio so terrible it's hard to tell who's speaking, let alone pick up subtle audio watermarks.
And that is why TV lost. The medium does its thing well enough I guess, but it doesn't lend itself to what we really want.
So we're moving to the internet, taking back control, running to our own schedule, not watching adverts... wondering whether anyone will figure out a way to make enough money from our viewership to actually make good TV, given the above.
Or is that last part just me? (I'm not saying it's not possible, just that I'm unsure... time will tell)
You could try making games that people want to hang on to, as opposed to the disposable "play through once, in a few hours, then never want to pick up again" variety.
Or make your money on game-related services rather than the games themselves. Granted that's easier for multiplayer games, but if you were to put out regular updates and improvements to a game (actual improvements, not just patches for bugs) then people would willingly pay for them.
Steam will let you make gift purchases - you pay in the normal way and the game is added to the recipient's account, or if they're not on Steam you can send it in the form of an email inviting them to set up an account and get their game.
It's not ideal if you're buying for people who don't already have a Steam account, but I wouldn't expect a download game to be ideal for someone not already used to the idea of digital distribution.
In any case, not a barrier to adoption... if anything it encourages more people to sign up.
Scores of 3 (Funny) followed 2 (Funny), followed by 1 (Funny)... I appear to be in line for a "Score: 0 (Funny)"
Maybe I ought to post this anonymously to save myself the Karmic retribution (that would even make the starting score zero and make it easier to continue the chain...)
It pains me to have to explain this thing again, but maybe if it's said enough times people will actually take notice...
Copyright infringement is a distinct thing from theft/stealing. They are two separately defined legal terms, plain and simple, not the same thing. They are both illegal. They are not the same crime.
The ethics of whether copyright should be changed/abolished, whether infringement should be made legal (and hence would no longer be "infringing") and the fight between TPB and the industry, these are all entirely separate issues. The only thing I'm saying here is that "Theft" and "Copyright Infringement" are two clear and distinct terms with different meanings under the law. There is no reason whatsoever to conflate them, and pretend they mean exactly the same thing.
Well, not quite true - there is one reason, and as far as I can see it's the only reason, and that's because "Pirates are stealing our music" has more emotional impact then "Our copyright is being infringed". The whole "you wouldn't steal a..." campaign, for example, relies on erasing the difference in people's minds between theft and infringement, to make them feel bad about something they may have been doing without thinking about it. Doesn't change the legal side of things, only peoples' perceptions, but perceptions can be powerful. The industry are using that to their advantage and I for one don't like their way their doing it, so I'll insist on correct use of the terminology.
You could even draw parallels with Orwell (although doing so feels cliched) - the 'Newspeak' idea revolved around removing words with similar meanings so that varied and nuanced ideas would be collapsed into a single concept. So all forms of political dissent, freedom fighting etc would be lumped together with terrorism and the like under the label "thoughtcrime", making the not-so-bad parts sound as bad as the very worst parts. It's the same deal with putting theft and copyright infringement together under "stealing" - suddenly infringement sounds worse than it did before. Whether it's actually as bad as stealing or not is a side issue to be determined separately (and personally) but if we let them convince us that they're the same thing then the debate will be over without it ever having taken place.
Ok, that explains why the system works the way it does... thanks for that (non-US, I don't know how your elections work beyond what people tell me)
Only question in my mind is, when people are filling out that ballot, are they really thinking in terms of each separate choice of one elector vs another, or do they just vote along party lines to support their presidential candidate of choice and try and get them elected?
Kinda seem to me that the system you've described is what would develop out of convenience to co-ordinate a nationwide election of the President, i.e. have each state vote for a couple of guys to go off and cast votes on the state's behalf for the President - the point of the system being to elect a President, not to elect a group of electors.
Does the Electoral College have a role beyond selecting the President? I guess I could look that up myself, but if it's important outside of that task then it would make more sense to treat it as a separate election rather than a vote-by-proxy for the Presidential candidates.
People reply to things and don't always say something relevant... what do you expect the commenting system to do about it short of developing a sophisticated AI to arbitrate on relevance from one post to the next?
I would consider the point of democracy to be that the outcome reflects, as accurately as possible, the will of the people. Seems fair to me that if the vote for the electors is split 50/50, or 60/40, or whatever, that the state's electors should be split the same way between the candidates.
Granted there's not that enough electors per state to accurately match each percentage point of the vote, but a rounded approximation would be more representative than 100% of the electors being supported by only 50% of the population. (Or potentially less than a majority if there's more than 2 candidates)
Alternatively, maybe in the modern age you should be voting for the President, rather than the electors - the system would have made more sense before everything got so connected, when it was essentially impossible to co-ordinate a poll of the entire nation and so it was easier to hold a state-sized election then send some electors to report the result.
By contrast, we now have the technology to vote directly for one guy or the other, and that's how people tend to think about it ("I voted for X", not "I voted for some guy to go to the EC and support X"). Don't be too attached to a system just because it's long-standing; if a better alternative presents itself then it makes sense to change.
Slashdot Mirror
Nor does Google have the ability to shoot people dead and only get fined for a "health and safety violation".
Any examples of the government doing that? Outside of a paranoid's alterno-world that is...
I'm thinking you're probably referring to the police shooting Jean Charles de Menezes (and being found guilty under the under the Health and Safety at Work Act), but that's not really the same thing as you're suggesting - it was an accident, not a premeditated, politically-motivated murder.
most Americans can't take our spicy tika masalas
Because obviously the easiest way to get pictures of Britain is to fly an American over from the US and have him take them, no chance at all that they'd employ someone from this side of the Atlantic to drive the car...
Also, why curry? "Offer him food" could have meant a perfectly innocuous jellied eel with warm beer.
Heh... and there I was thinking "The hell... crossbow? Why in satan's glorious name would I want a crossbow?"
Well, I'll get around to another go eventually (I'm not kidding about that to-do list, if I put all those films on a playlist and just let them run end-to-end, then played through each game as fast as possible and without any breaks, just tried to burn through it all as fast as can humanly be done, even then I'd still be at it a week from now)
I think I took the sniper rifle... on the basis that taking all the fuckers out from a distance would make things easier. Maybe sniping is best left until after putting some more points into that skill... or until you're on a map with some godforsaken ammo for it.
May well give it another go some time, it's on the to-do list alongside an ever-increasingly large stack of of other games/films
(download speed > consumption speed)
Easiest solution is to buy each employee a pocket radio.
That would be true in some cases, although I don't know that you'd find many businesses that care that much about their employees' ability to listen to a radio. In this case however, there is the small problem related to the scarcity of equine earphones.
I got Deus Ex after seeing something describing the amount of choice/freedom in the game, and how much you could change the flow (if not the ending) of the story if you tried hard enough...
Then, after making my way through some strange problems, (hypersensitive controls mainly - most likely caused by the age of the thing... got them fixed eventually) I got the game running and the first level was immensely frustrating.
Maybe I just sucked at it, but to my mind it wasn't made even close to clear enough where exactly I ought to be going, and the bad guys were just annoying... always knew I was behind them when I tried to attack stealthily, and once I'd used my 6 bullets I was essentially reduced to ducking around in the shadows with a crowbar, hoping not to be seen.
I was disappointed...
That sounds like a complicated solution for a simple problem... all he needed was earplugs or a quiet room; a dramatic restructuring of our educational culture is overengineering the issue.
I think that one's more a case of the "Foot in the Door" technique - start with a small request that they're likely to agree to, and then they're likely to also agree to a bigger request. Asking the small thing first means the second request doesn't sound so big, and agreeing the first time puts them in an agreeing mood.
So it'd go "Hey, want to come out to dinner", then after dinner, ask them back to wherever and, "while you're here, how about a BJ?"
And doing nothing while these people deny evolution is going to help?
Keeping quiet isn't going to prevent the idiocy passing to another generation, only the opposite.
$40-60 would be somewhat excessive for an old game, and so long as Steam continues to exist you wouldn't have to re-buy, so it's not a rental in that sense.
Granted, if they were to go under, you'd have a case... but even then it just removes the backup copy on their server, leaving you to take care of the copy on your computer, just as you'd have to cake care of a copy on disc (and I think I'm actually more likely to lose/damage a disc than a digital copy)
Are randomly determined actions actually free though? To my mind, if what you do is ultimately decided by random, subatomic quantum events then you're no more free than if they're decided by normal deterministic events (the only difference being that you're unpredictable with quantum events in there)
The normal way of defining free will I've seen is "Given the same physical conditions leading up to your decision, it was possible for you to take the other choice", which I suppose quantum randomness allows for, but it's still not really you making the choice.
The other definition would be that you do what you want, which is actually a plausible possibility even in a deterministic universe - everything that makes you "you" is a part of the physical world, all of your thoughts, emotions and desires come from the state of your brain and this directly and strongly influences your decision making. What you want is all a part of the system, so you do in fact do what you want.
I suppose the problem there is that although you might always do what you want to, you're actions aren't really free because you can't make a choice about what to want to do, that being determined physically by (ultimately) events outside of yourself. But really, where do you expect to find something that obeys no deterministic physical laws and reflects your wants? Quantum randomness only meets one of those, and I think the only thing that would meet both is a non-physical soul, which I tend not to consider as a serious possibility.
Of course it only applies if the code in question actually gets looked over by a lot of people. True for high profile things like Apache, but smaller open source projects can't be automatically assumed to be more secure - they may well have no more, or less, people actively reviewing their code than an equivalent program from a normal developer.
"Syf" is shorthand for Syphilis in Poland, and "Syfy" is similarly for anything dirty, unpleasant, diseased... not necessarily literally syphilitic, but nasty.
We don't not need no stinking grammars! We's just lern it as we goes along.
Seriously though, I've noticed the same thing - second language speakers tend (once fluent) to have a better grasp of what the rules of the language are in a technical sense, and know what's proper use or not. Native speakers on the other hand still have 'better English' because the language we use and the language as defined formally are somewhat different from one another.
Native speakers tend not to know the actual rules, so much as what "sounds right", and by and large we get by on that just fine and make ourselves understood perfectly well, but then there's the boundary cases where what sounds right isn't what the rules proscribe, and you get a divide between the people who think language needs to be used properly and precisely, and those that just want to get on with it, even if that means the language mutates all over the place.
I think change is inevitable, and will tend towards common usage rather than the old rules, but there are still plenty of common little bugs in the language that are too far removed from the 'real' use for me to stomach. Things like "alot" as a single word, or "definately". So in summary, everyone should bloody well learn to spell, but only to the same degree that I have.
Whether it's someone else's or not, most cams I've seen have audio so terrible it's hard to tell who's speaking, let alone pick up subtle audio watermarks.
And that is why TV lost. The medium does its thing well enough I guess, but it doesn't lend itself to what we really want.
So we're moving to the internet, taking back control, running to our own schedule, not watching adverts... wondering whether anyone will figure out a way to make enough money from our viewership to actually make good TV, given the above.
Or is that last part just me? (I'm not saying it's not possible, just that I'm unsure... time will tell)
You could try making games that people want to hang on to, as opposed to the disposable "play through once, in a few hours, then never want to pick up again" variety.
Or make your money on game-related services rather than the games themselves. Granted that's easier for multiplayer games, but if you were to put out regular updates and improvements to a game (actual improvements, not just patches for bugs) then people would willingly pay for them.
Steam will let you make gift purchases - you pay in the normal way and the game is added to the recipient's account, or if they're not on Steam you can send it in the form of an email inviting them to set up an account and get their game.
It's not ideal if you're buying for people who don't already have a Steam account, but I wouldn't expect a download game to be ideal for someone not already used to the idea of digital distribution.
In any case, not a barrier to adoption... if anything it encourages more people to sign up.
Scores of 3 (Funny) followed 2 (Funny), followed by 1 (Funny)... I appear to be in line for a "Score: 0 (Funny)"
Maybe I ought to post this anonymously to save myself the Karmic retribution (that would even make the starting score zero and make it easier to continue the chain...)
On the other hand, NoScript and FlashBlock are among the most popular Firefox extensions.
Could be a fairly hefty number have one or both installed... that could skew the numbers, depending on how they test for a Flash install.
It pains me to have to explain this thing again, but maybe if it's said enough times people will actually take notice...
Copyright infringement is a distinct thing from theft/stealing. They are two separately defined legal terms, plain and simple, not the same thing. They are both illegal. They are not the same crime.
The ethics of whether copyright should be changed/abolished, whether infringement should be made legal (and hence would no longer be "infringing") and the fight between TPB and the industry, these are all entirely separate issues. The only thing I'm saying here is that "Theft" and "Copyright Infringement" are two clear and distinct terms with different meanings under the law. There is no reason whatsoever to conflate them, and pretend they mean exactly the same thing.
Well, not quite true - there is one reason, and as far as I can see it's the only reason, and that's because "Pirates are stealing our music" has more emotional impact then "Our copyright is being infringed". The whole "you wouldn't steal a..." campaign, for example, relies on erasing the difference in people's minds between theft and infringement, to make them feel bad about something they may have been doing without thinking about it. Doesn't change the legal side of things, only peoples' perceptions, but perceptions can be powerful. The industry are using that to their advantage and I for one don't like their way their doing it, so I'll insist on correct use of the terminology.
You could even draw parallels with Orwell (although doing so feels cliched) - the 'Newspeak' idea revolved around removing words with similar meanings so that varied and nuanced ideas would be collapsed into a single concept. So all forms of political dissent, freedom fighting etc would be lumped together with terrorism and the like under the label "thoughtcrime", making the not-so-bad parts sound as bad as the very worst parts. It's the same deal with putting theft and copyright infringement together under "stealing" - suddenly infringement sounds worse than it did before. Whether it's actually as bad as stealing or not is a side issue to be determined separately (and personally) but if we let them convince us that they're the same thing then the debate will be over without it ever having taken place.
Ok, that explains why the system works the way it does... thanks for that (non-US, I don't know how your elections work beyond what people tell me)
Only question in my mind is, when people are filling out that ballot, are they really thinking in terms of each separate choice of one elector vs another, or do they just vote along party lines to support their presidential candidate of choice and try and get them elected?
Kinda seem to me that the system you've described is what would develop out of convenience to co-ordinate a nationwide election of the President, i.e. have each state vote for a couple of guys to go off and cast votes on the state's behalf for the President - the point of the system being to elect a President, not to elect a group of electors.
Does the Electoral College have a role beyond selecting the President? I guess I could look that up myself, but if it's important outside of that task then it would make more sense to treat it as a separate election rather than a vote-by-proxy for the Presidential candidates.
Anyone feel like finding a foreign law that the RIAA are breaching, and sending them hundreds of letters threatening legal action?
People reply to things and don't always say something relevant... what do you expect the commenting system to do about it short of developing a sophisticated AI to arbitrate on relevance from one post to the next?
I would consider the point of democracy to be that the outcome reflects, as accurately as possible, the will of the people. Seems fair to me that if the vote for the electors is split 50/50, or 60/40, or whatever, that the state's electors should be split the same way between the candidates.
Granted there's not that enough electors per state to accurately match each percentage point of the vote, but a rounded approximation would be more representative than 100% of the electors being supported by only 50% of the population. (Or potentially less than a majority if there's more than 2 candidates)
Alternatively, maybe in the modern age you should be voting for the President, rather than the electors - the system would have made more sense before everything got so connected, when it was essentially impossible to co-ordinate a poll of the entire nation and so it was easier to hold a state-sized election then send some electors to report the result.
By contrast, we now have the technology to vote directly for one guy or the other, and that's how people tend to think about it ("I voted for X", not "I voted for some guy to go to the EC and support X"). Don't be too attached to a system just because it's long-standing; if a better alternative presents itself then it makes sense to change.