Generally I thought that things people get "for free" from the government are paid for by taxes. The problem is that the act of paying for these services is so divorced from the receipt of these services that people have no idea how much these things cost or what their tax revenue pays for, and how. Plus, if you pay for something it is usual in a consumer society to have some say in the administration of that thing. Many of the disputes of the modern age concern the perceived consumer notion of paying for a good or service and how the vendor wishes them to consume that product. In the case of taxes I have to side with the consumer that the governmental vendor has been allowed to run their shop in a way that would have killed an actual business long ago and hides behind a bureaucratic mask of obfuscation. Basically paying taxes is something like visiting a casino. Except giving your money to the Las Vegas mob isn't mandatory in law.
The whole point of South Park is to be childishly iconoclastic. This pisses people off. But that's a byproduct. As is education or any though stimulated as a result of their efforts.
The people generally in charge of a school system are usually people who are so institutionalised they find it hard to cope anywhere except that or a similar school system. They have no interest in changing things, because that's what provides their wretched existences with the only modicum of comfort they are capable of generating for themselves trapped in their small-minded worldview.
All very well. In fact quite illuminating. But one needs to systematise this to have it accepted by the education system. And even then it faces some horrible opposition from those who don't understand that state education systems for better or worse have little to do with education and everything to do with babysitting the young so mom and pop can go out and work.
The underlying motivation of the system is to free up a greater proportion of the workforce by putting their children somewhere together whilst the workers contribute to society. The idea that children should be idle during this time was abhorrent to those possessed of a strong protestant work ethic but as education was supposed to resolve the issue of child labour some hideous mutant "kill two birds with one stone" attempt to instil high cultural values was put into the system.
Unfortunately society discovered quickly that it was easier to say education than to do it. The current state of affairs is one that should be familiar to anyone who deals with a legacy system. The original system was hacked together by a bunch of arrogant, barely competent monkeys but once it was "done" the client (society under the umbrella of "government") were loath to admit the whole thing was an unscalable mess with little practical value that merely subsitituted one problem space for another. As time has gone on the system has been further hacked and patched in a futile attempt to avoid the inevitable system crash which will occasion a radical rebuilding of the entire system from scratch.
Of course it's no surprise that government should produce such abominations on a regular basis as they are the natural progeny of the mother of all messy, unworkable and ultimately doomed abominations, government itself.
They put the price up around November to £13.50 (still roughly the price of two cinema tickets as they put those prices up too) a month. And they charge you a stipend on top if you want to see 3D performances. I haven't been to a 3D performance since they introduced the stipend.
There are vital differences between your anecdote and the punch bag.
In your situation you were releasing anger in a positive act of helping to rebirth a social centre, that is turning a domestic residence into a spiritual centre. You were helping a group of people to do this positive thing. When you went home at the end of the day the house was a little bit more dead and that meant the spiritual centre was a little bit closer to being alive.
What you did was a physical demonstration of how anger energy can be turned into a positive expression that speeds up the natural cycles of life. You were mentally participating in those cycles and the process itself commented upon the fact that death is a part of life and even when a house is derelict life must go on.
The act of renewal, especially when placed in such a spiritual context, can be viewed from a deep and subtle perspective that easily explains why it released so much aggression and refreshed your psyche.
Punching a bag full of sand repetitively by yourself achieves nothing and shows little. If you are mentally in a state where such exercise is about discipline and physical improvement then this is not a problem. Using it as a valve for pent up emotion is unsatisfying and more likely to lead to frustration.
How does this inform the video game violence question? Simple a video game should not be used as a crutch for emotional release. They can clean the mental screen through simple, repetitive, action-reward cycles that may not be available in the wider world. If you sit down with a video game just to relieve the very particular frustration of feeling stuck in a rut, or not getting any where it could be quite therapeutic, but trying to cope with deeper anger issues this way is not appropriate.
A subtlety I doubt is addressed within any report on violent video games as we tend to view all "anger" as the same "anger" irrespective of its source. Its been documented a couple of hundred times how social and psychological experimenters tend to find whatever it is they're looking for in any given study and yet no major collapse or resolution in their questionable methodology is implemented because it would require an academic perspective too radically different from any remembered in the majority of human culture. So I don't expect it to change any time soon.
I give any sociological report the respect it deserves. None. And less than that if it claims to be conclusive.
That's funny, I am a content producer who uses a Print On Demand service to publish books. I use OOo for all our formatting and then merely save out to PDF. I am painfully aware that the one time the publisher had a problem with one of the resultant PDFs it took a month to clear it up. When I finally did manage to get some sort of dialogue out of them it turned out it was a PNG artifact introduced by my image editing software in one of the pictures that was causing the problem, not the PDF or OOo (in fact, if anything, they were guilty of doing their job too well). So I know for a fact that even given the most trivial of problems the POD service are utter rubbish and will just down tools. This leads me to the inevitable conclusion that all my other publications formatted in OOo and then converted to PDF via OOo with a trivial two click operation were just fine and dandy. I can't help but think that this is a case of people making unnecessarily heavy weather out of things.
Both these principles were from a time when the single purpose of the law was to enforce stability... the current attitude is that the law should provide justice and protection to the citizenry
Someone needs to renew their cynicsm prescription. I've never regarded the former state of law to have expired nor the latter attitude to have stretched as far as the actual legal system.
As a creator of largely neglected works that I believe may, in time, prove to be of some wider value I would like to agree with the following caveat.
The author of a given right should have conferred upon them the right to a token of copyright fiat. That is upon creation a work enters the public domain by default. Then, at such a time as the author chooses, the right of copyright fiat is invoked and runs its term. After it is over the work is once again in the public domain.
This circumvents the inherent unfairness of something neglected during a "from creation" copyright term suddenly becoming popular years after creation. It also means that copyright can be restricted to as few years as necessary for a creator (or their descendants) to benefit from a first flush of popularity. I think five years in such a case might even be a little overlong.
Better yet ignore them. Talking to them at all can be seen as suspicious... sad but until large amounts of people decide to make it plain that this is unacceptable it remains true.
To summarise the other replies. And add a side of bluntness because people still don't seem to be getting the message:
Yes, absolutely. I'd rather get my hands bloody in a revolution than help a child in peril while the revolution never comes and will continue to not come while my life is forfeit for the reasons already discussed.
Your attitude correlates almost exactly with my views on the probable intelligence of people who make such evangelistic statements about the validity of IQ.
In case you missed it that's "correlates"... also, it's "pursuits", and what you mistyped as spcial brilliantly preserved the confusion between the notions of "special" and "spatial".
And no, I don't have an alternative metric for intelligence in mind because I am not arrogant enough to believe that my definition of intelligence is sufficiently developed to adequately reflect what the concept is capable of implying. This is not something that bothers many "experts" in the field of intelligence theory.
Or a system of voluntary moderation of accounts by trusted users like everything else on the internet. A Dungeon Master client for those interested in quest design might be handy too.
Microsoft Active Live Artificially Intelligent Search Engine
Except 1) It's not artificially intelligent and 2) that would mean it was called Microsoft Malaise...
Re:still very friendly toward free information
on
Lulu Introduces DRM
·
· Score: 1
I think from a self-publishers point of view this comment communicates a lot of what should be at the forefront of a self-publishers mind.
Personally myself, my wife and our artist publish a leisure product and our main problem is not with people pirating the work (we give the PDF away free anyway) but with people just not caring that it exists.
I think people being allowed to pin the colours of a greedy, self-deluding idiot to their respective masts can only be a good thing. Maybe a few more people will be encouraged to look at the work of those who are keen to share it.
Or maybe... as usual... unless it's available on Amazon at a hefty mark up or in a retail store people won't give a flying one.
Except, of course, that the PRS would require some kind of proof that the music you were playing was nothing to do with them to stop hounding you. The kind of proof that involves lawyers and legal fees. Even if you wrote your own original compositions, recorded them to CD and played them the PRS would still demand money on the offchance that you would back down rather than go to court to defend your right to play music you wrote that has nothing to do with them.
Most cheaper DVD players have a chipset that allows them to be sent to multiple global regions, e.g. programmable by using a "cheat code" similar to the ones employed by console games. On these players the code unlocks a factory options menu. On some models region zero (e.g. all regions) can then be set as the player's region. I'm not sure whether this ever held true for more well known brands who can produce large batches of players for a single country market. The factory menu access codes used to be fairly easily found through Google.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that all depends on what you classify as "good people skills"... I wouldn't count "being a manipulative liar" as a good people skill to have.
Generally I thought that things people get "for free" from the government are paid for by taxes. The problem is that the act of paying for these services is so divorced from the receipt of these services that people have no idea how much these things cost or what their tax revenue pays for, and how. Plus, if you pay for something it is usual in a consumer society to have some say in the administration of that thing. Many of the disputes of the modern age concern the perceived consumer notion of paying for a good or service and how the vendor wishes them to consume that product. In the case of taxes I have to side with the consumer that the governmental vendor has been allowed to run their shop in a way that would have killed an actual business long ago and hides behind a bureaucratic mask of obfuscation. Basically paying taxes is something like visiting a casino. Except giving your money to the Las Vegas mob isn't mandatory in law.
Hadn't you heard? It was my understanding that everyone had heard?
But once we have a precise metric of how corrupt, self-serving and unethical they are... what does anyone propose we do about it?
Or... as Rollins put it: "If life gives you lemons say: LEMONS!? Great! I LOOOOOOVE lemons! What else ya got!?"
The whole point of South Park is to be childishly iconoclastic. This pisses people off. But that's a byproduct. As is education or any though stimulated as a result of their efforts.
Wow, this only got modded up to two? Well... just goes to show... (This space left blank for your own conclusions about what it goes to show.)
The people generally in charge of a school system are usually people who are so institutionalised they find it hard to cope anywhere except that or a similar school system. They have no interest in changing things, because that's what provides their wretched existences with the only modicum of comfort they are capable of generating for themselves trapped in their small-minded worldview.
FTFY
All very well. In fact quite illuminating. But one needs to systematise this to have it accepted by the education system. And even then it faces some horrible opposition from those who don't understand that state education systems for better or worse have little to do with education and everything to do with babysitting the young so mom and pop can go out and work.
The underlying motivation of the system is to free up a greater proportion of the workforce by putting their children somewhere together whilst the workers contribute to society. The idea that children should be idle during this time was abhorrent to those possessed of a strong protestant work ethic but as education was supposed to resolve the issue of child labour some hideous mutant "kill two birds with one stone" attempt to instil high cultural values was put into the system.
Unfortunately society discovered quickly that it was easier to say education than to do it. The current state of affairs is one that should be familiar to anyone who deals with a legacy system. The original system was hacked together by a bunch of arrogant, barely competent monkeys but once it was "done" the client (society under the umbrella of "government") were loath to admit the whole thing was an unscalable mess with little practical value that merely subsitituted one problem space for another. As time has gone on the system has been further hacked and patched in a futile attempt to avoid the inevitable system crash which will occasion a radical rebuilding of the entire system from scratch.
Of course it's no surprise that government should produce such abominations on a regular basis as they are the natural progeny of the mother of all messy, unworkable and ultimately doomed abominations, government itself.
They put the price up around November to £13.50 (still roughly the price of two cinema tickets as they put those prices up too) a month. And they charge you a stipend on top if you want to see 3D performances. I haven't been to a 3D performance since they introduced the stipend.
There are vital differences between your anecdote and the punch bag.
In your situation you were releasing anger in a positive act of helping to rebirth a social centre, that is turning a domestic residence into a spiritual centre. You were helping a group of people to do this positive thing. When you went home at the end of the day the house was a little bit more dead and that meant the spiritual centre was a little bit closer to being alive.
What you did was a physical demonstration of how anger energy can be turned into a positive expression that speeds up the natural cycles of life. You were mentally participating in those cycles and the process itself commented upon the fact that death is a part of life and even when a house is derelict life must go on.
The act of renewal, especially when placed in such a spiritual context, can be viewed from a deep and subtle perspective that easily explains why it released so much aggression and refreshed your psyche.
Punching a bag full of sand repetitively by yourself achieves nothing and shows little. If you are mentally in a state where such exercise is about discipline and physical improvement then this is not a problem. Using it as a valve for pent up emotion is unsatisfying and more likely to lead to frustration.
How does this inform the video game violence question? Simple a video game should not be used as a crutch for emotional release. They can clean the mental screen through simple, repetitive, action-reward cycles that may not be available in the wider world. If you sit down with a video game just to relieve the very particular frustration of feeling stuck in a rut, or not getting any where it could be quite therapeutic, but trying to cope with deeper anger issues this way is not appropriate.
A subtlety I doubt is addressed within any report on violent video games as we tend to view all "anger" as the same "anger" irrespective of its source. Its been documented a couple of hundred times how social and psychological experimenters tend to find whatever it is they're looking for in any given study and yet no major collapse or resolution in their questionable methodology is implemented because it would require an academic perspective too radically different from any remembered in the majority of human culture. So I don't expect it to change any time soon.
I give any sociological report the respect it deserves. None. And less than that if it claims to be conclusive.
That's funny, I am a content producer who uses a Print On Demand service to publish books. I use OOo for all our formatting and then merely save out to PDF. I am painfully aware that the one time the publisher had a problem with one of the resultant PDFs it took a month to clear it up. When I finally did manage to get some sort of dialogue out of them it turned out it was a PNG artifact introduced by my image editing software in one of the pictures that was causing the problem, not the PDF or OOo (in fact, if anything, they were guilty of doing their job too well). So I know for a fact that even given the most trivial of problems the POD service are utter rubbish and will just down tools. This leads me to the inevitable conclusion that all my other publications formatted in OOo and then converted to PDF via OOo with a trivial two click operation were just fine and dandy. I can't help but think that this is a case of people making unnecessarily heavy weather out of things.
Both these principles were from a time when the single purpose of the law was to enforce stability... the current attitude is that the law should provide justice and protection to the citizenry
Someone needs to renew their cynicsm prescription. I've never regarded the former state of law to have expired nor the latter attitude to have stretched as far as the actual legal system.
As a creator of largely neglected works that I believe may, in time, prove to be of some wider value I would like to agree with the following caveat.
The author of a given right should have conferred upon them the right to a token of copyright fiat. That is upon creation a work enters the public domain by default. Then, at such a time as the author chooses, the right of copyright fiat is invoked and runs its term. After it is over the work is once again in the public domain.
This circumvents the inherent unfairness of something neglected during a "from creation" copyright term suddenly becoming popular years after creation. It also means that copyright can be restricted to as few years as necessary for a creator (or their descendants) to benefit from a first flush of popularity. I think five years in such a case might even be a little overlong.
Meet the Peter principle.
Better yet ignore them. Talking to them at all can be seen as suspicious... sad but until large amounts of people decide to make it plain that this is unacceptable it remains true.
To summarise the other replies. And add a side of bluntness because people still don't seem to be getting the message:
Yes, absolutely. I'd rather get my hands bloody in a revolution than help a child in peril while the revolution never comes and will continue to not come while my life is forfeit for the reasons already discussed.
Your attitude correlates almost exactly with my views on the probable intelligence of people who make such evangelistic statements about the validity of IQ.
In case you missed it that's "correlates"... also, it's "pursuits", and what you mistyped as spcial brilliantly preserved the confusion between the notions of "special" and "spatial".
And no, I don't have an alternative metric for intelligence in mind because I am not arrogant enough to believe that my definition of intelligence is sufficiently developed to adequately reflect what the concept is capable of implying. This is not something that bothers many "experts" in the field of intelligence theory.
I dunno. Maybe it's just my Roman heritage but if you chuck handheld weapons and wild beasts in I think it would make the sport just about watchable.
I bet the meeting lasted a heck of a lot less time than it would have taken all the attendees to read the book... writers need to get over themselves.
Or a system of voluntary moderation of accounts by trusted users like everything else on the internet. A Dungeon Master client for those interested in quest design might be handy too.
They were going to call it:
Microsoft Active Live Artificially Intelligent Search Engine
Except 1) It's not artificially intelligent and 2) that would mean it was called Microsoft Malaise...
I think from a self-publishers point of view this comment communicates a lot of what should be at the forefront of a self-publishers mind.
Personally myself, my wife and our artist publish a leisure product and our main problem is not with people pirating the work (we give the PDF away free anyway) but with people just not caring that it exists.
I think people being allowed to pin the colours of a greedy, self-deluding idiot to their respective masts can only be a good thing. Maybe a few more people will be encouraged to look at the work of those who are keen to share it.
Or maybe... as usual... unless it's available on Amazon at a hefty mark up or in a retail store people won't give a flying one.
Except, of course, that the PRS would require some kind of proof that the music you were playing was nothing to do with them to stop hounding you. The kind of proof that involves lawyers and legal fees. Even if you wrote your own original compositions, recorded them to CD and played them the PRS would still demand money on the offchance that you would back down rather than go to court to defend your right to play music you wrote that has nothing to do with them.
Most cheaper DVD players have a chipset that allows them to be sent to multiple global regions, e.g. programmable by using a "cheat code" similar to the ones employed by console games. On these players the code unlocks a factory options menu. On some models region zero (e.g. all regions) can then be set as the player's region. I'm not sure whether this ever held true for more well known brands who can produce large batches of players for a single country market. The factory menu access codes used to be fairly easily found through Google.