I know what you were trying to say, but all I heard when I read this section was CHA-CHING BABY! You just hit the JACKPOT of lawsuit land.
I know we're a sue-happy nation, but for such obviously blatent abuse, it really is merited. And the fear of that keeps the dogs at bay.
Well, if you had a magical system where you, being my close neighbor, could only get my milk with no risk to house and hold, with a system to limit your milk-runs if you took so much milk where it actually inconvenienced me, and I was paying for a set amount of milk to be pouring our of my faucet whether I used it or not, and I never had to see your ugly mug, then yeah, sure, come get your glass of milk.
Seriously, do you need to repeat kindergarten? Sharing is good.
Holy shit! That's horrible! If only you weren't a nameless faceless troll offering zero details and spouting the bare minimum of fear-mongering.
Seriously, the astro-turfers are just getting lazy.
Hey, is there anything out there that will automatically add to a whitelist any site I go to, but will restrict others? That would seem like zero headache for me and the neighbors can eat sand if they can't get to facebook or spongebob's magic castle.com
Ah, Georgia State tried to hand out coursework owned by publishers under the guise that they're a non-profit and therefore get by on some loophole. I can see their point, but they went about it the wrong way. You can't simply hand out other people's books. You have professors writing text books for 11% of the price. I'd much rather hand the professor $15 rather then give the publishers $150. The middlemen are antiquated and worthless. Although, some copy editing IS probably needed.
Shit like this has to be clean. Once you muddy the water with copyright and infringement, FUD muddies the waters and everyone stays away.
Yeah, university book stores are rat-fucking-bastards. There's no god-damned reason why professors couldn't hand out or straight-up-sell PDFs of their material.
Someone here said that education is THE long-term solution to EVERY problem we face, and I like that. I would also be for a system that put extra taxes towards college education.
But. One caveat is that some people just aren't cut out for college. Humanity exists as a bell curve, and while a lot of that depends on their upbringing and lower education, the fact of the matter is that if you take a cross section of college-age kids and paid for their college, most of them would never graduate. Well, with anything meaningful anyway. The majority of majors out there are worthless time sinks. Come on, what are you going to do with a bachelors of philosophy? Or anthropology? You can't have a college solely dedicated to educating future professors of said college. Oh, and my brother FINALLY got his anthropology degree and promptly got let go from a janitor position because his boss was worried my brother would take his job. Sadly, he kinda needed that job.
So it should come cheap to those who are smart enough to actually do something with it, but if you're just not bright enough, you'll have to pay for the privileged.
Which is the system we have now with merit-based scholarships. There are also needs-based scholarships, because, well, they need more. The gender and race-based scholarships are supposedly because the discrimination against them would bury talent. I guess what I'm saying is that I'm a fan of Pell grants, FASFA, and all that jazz.
but where else is there to go that has more freedoms? (serious question here, not rhetorical).
The woods. Northern Canada. Anywhere there is a severe lack of people. It's not perfect freedom, but you certainly have a lot more freedom to do whatever the fuck you want. Kind of lacking in broadband though, and I doubt you'll be able to pick up your neighbors open wifi out there.
You cut them off, DUH! Gee, I dunno, maybe EXACTLY like I described with my router policy:
and if it's abused, it's simple to throttle, restrict, or simply cut them off.
So why don't you bother reading the rest of the post before your knee jerks all over your keyboard?
Also, take your labels and shove them. I'm going to be neighborly to my neighbors and that's that. Call it whatever you want, but it doesn't change a damn thing.
Assuming you're not lying, you're smarter, but he's more skilled. At house framing. Duh.
These things that come out of our heads, you know, WORDS, they mean things. Real objective things. If you get into some sort of philosophical funk where all your words start take on questionable meaning, then you need to snap out of it and come back to reality.
But there's a serious question of how do you prove you're an American citizen?
Let's say you're on vacation abroad. Hell, even that stipulation isn't really required anymore. Someone blackbags you, beats you, strips you, and throws you in a cell, naked.
Now how do you prove that you're an American citizen so that what they just did illegal? How do I, sitting here in America and duty-bound to uphold the laws of the land, make sure that the CIA or whoever is only capturing non-citizens? If I were to walk through the jail, and hear your lament, how would I prove that you deserve a trial, and the guy next to you didn't?
If you let the authorities handle group X without any rights, then anyone they want to grab can be labeled as a member of group X. That's an unfathomable amount of power for them to wield and simply put, no-one should be entrusted with such power.
You also track the hell out of them. If they're such horrible terrorists then eventually you'll catch them doing something or making contact with someone you REALLY want to know about.
Uh... you know that Ben Franklin was a dirty dirty old man right? And Jefferson probably had sex with his slaves. George was pretty flawless as a president, but he wasn't a great general and had his personality quirks. They were all great men who did great things, but don't think of them as gods. Politics then was similar to politics now. But I'd have to agree that the focus has changed quiet a bit.
I don't see any merit to the "very soon" comment. This has been a struggle since strong encryption became trivial. So, for a decade or two at least. The "nothing to hide" line of reasoning is as flawed now as it was then and, theoretically, cooler calmer more rational minds will win out.
Their advice: Password-protect your wireless router.
In my most sincere heart of hearts, let me be one of the few to say: "Fuck that noise!"
I don't know about you out there, but I'm a big fan of this whole "society" thing, and if random JoeBlow walks up to my house and asks for a drink of water, I'll gladly give him some. I've got plenty and the cost to me is negligible. I do this because I might want a drink from someone at some point. Same for my router and connection. The effort and cost to me is negligible, and if it's abused, it's simple to throttle, restrict, or simply cut them off.
I like people, and I want to be a good neighbor. So fuck your tyrannical fear-mongering police-state.
Well actually, the others ARE OK with dying, or at least don't put up much of a struggle. The masters sent out warriors against each other in mock wars just to kill them off. Masters can order their underlings to kill off their children. Apparently there are loyalty repercussions, but they're main job is to be crafty, I'm sure they could come up with something. And there was that one guy who tried to exterminate all the doctors. The problem wasn't their revolution, or fellow moties defending them, it was masters hoarding them away because they were too useful. The wanton slaughter of most of them didn't meet too much resistance, at least, the story didn't mention it. Of course, the existence of the masters is a little funky to begin with, but some things you just have to roll with.
The people with kids are not passing a population control gene/meme on so that trait dies out.
And there you go. You pointed out another problem with Niven. He often portrays his aliens (and by extrapolation, human nature) as being completely powered by instinct. Their personality, actions, and character is defined by DNA. And while instinct certainly does have an influence, it’s not the overriding force. I mean, we want sex, but we can control it so we’re not constantly humping each other. It’s a little harder at 16, but we’re not always 16. Niven, on the other hand, ignores cultural and personal motivation and hand-waves away OBVIOUS SOLUTIONS to the moties problems.
It's a little religion heavy. I mean, I know god is in the title, but it kinda permeates throughout the entire novel. I got the feeling that "We've tried hundreds of religions" was supposed to be shocking, but it just fell flat with me.
Then there's the whole premise of the Motie's cycle is that they MUST have children to survive. And the resulting overpopulation stresses their resources to a breaking point. Except that Masters and Browns can mate to make sterile breed who is short lived. Since Masters are the only breed that seems to have any sort of willpower, and they can easily circumvent the pregnancy->overpopulation issue, what's the problem?
Well there's question about the nature of games. Are they a form of escapism or are they simulators that give you experience outside of the norm?
You could make an escapist game that is unhinged from reality. It let's players power trip, face no real challenge, make no real decisions, perform obvious responses to stimulus, and receive copious amount of meaningless rewards for their ability to breath. This game is cheap.
You could also make a realistic game that emulates the true experience of a trooper in Iraq. So after 3 hours of staring at sand, there's a bang, some smoke, and you duck for cover, immobilized with a leg wound. After twenty minutes backup arrives and you get airlifted to Germany for surgery. This game is a grind.
I think the trick to making an entertaining game is to slip in selective bits of realism. Here and there you throw in some dose of perspective, or ambiguous morality, or honest to god boring grind. It's certainly easy to over do it, but if you completely sterilize a game it becomes the cheap crap that Hollywood mass produces each summer. Which is fine for some people. Soulless people.
I dunno, I think it could serve as an interesting artsy piece.
You have two sides out in front of your base that are murderizing each other. You have a sniper rifle and a clear view of the entire battlefield.
The game lasts anywhere between one and ten minutes, and if you ever shoot the gun, you lose neutrality and both sides send overwhelming units against you.
wtf is this guy going on about? Whatever. The piano thing is from Buckminster Fuller, btw.
My point is that emulating lifeforms is a naive way of making something. I believe most lifeforms have multiple eyes for redundancy. You know that whole thing with the two lungs, two kidney, two balls. There are a lot of lessons to learn from studying biology, but until our drones need to worry about bears trying to eat it, one camera will probably do. Especially when it's just looking at an office hallway.
Well I do make an honest effort to stay sane. You seem pretty level headed yourself. If you're ever going through the Midwest, give me a ping and we can argue over beers.
heckruler83 over on yahoo
Ah yes, elected officials that represent our interests. I had forgotten they can do that. One problem that seems to come up is that if you get someone who is adamant on a subject against bargaining, political bullying, and lobbying money tend to be the ones foaming at the mouth.
Slashdot Mirror
...your body beaten, ...
I know what you were trying to say, but all I heard when I read this section was CHA-CHING BABY! You just hit the JACKPOT of lawsuit land.
I know we're a sue-happy nation, but for such obviously blatent abuse, it really is merited. And the fear of that keeps the dogs at bay.
Well, if you had a magical system where you, being my close neighbor, could only get my milk with no risk to house and hold, with a system to limit your milk-runs if you took so much milk where it actually inconvenienced me, and I was paying for a set amount of milk to be pouring our of my faucet whether I used it or not, and I never had to see your ugly mug, then yeah, sure, come get your glass of milk.
Seriously, do you need to repeat kindergarten? Sharing is good.
Holy shit! That's horrible! If only you weren't a nameless faceless troll offering zero details and spouting the bare minimum of fear-mongering.
Seriously, the astro-turfers are just getting lazy.
Hey, is there anything out there that will automatically add to a whitelist any site I go to, but will restrict others? That would seem like zero headache for me and the neighbors can eat sand if they can't get to facebook or spongebob's magic castle.com
Ah, Georgia State tried to hand out coursework owned by publishers under the guise that they're a non-profit and therefore get by on some loophole. I can see their point, but they went about it the wrong way. You can't simply hand out other people's books. You have professors writing text books for 11% of the price. I'd much rather hand the professor $15 rather then give the publishers $150. The middlemen are antiquated and worthless. Although, some copy editing IS probably needed.
Shit like this has to be clean. Once you muddy the water with copyright and infringement, FUD muddies the waters and everyone stays away.
You'll still need a STEM major to help you close your tags.
Yeah, university book stores are rat-fucking-bastards. There's no god-damned reason why professors couldn't hand out or straight-up-sell PDFs of their material.
Someone here said that education is THE long-term solution to EVERY problem we face, and I like that. I would also be for a system that put extra taxes towards college education.
But. One caveat is that some people just aren't cut out for college. Humanity exists as a bell curve, and while a lot of that depends on their upbringing and lower education, the fact of the matter is that if you take a cross section of college-age kids and paid for their college, most of them would never graduate. Well, with anything meaningful anyway. The majority of majors out there are worthless time sinks. Come on, what are you going to do with a bachelors of philosophy? Or anthropology? You can't have a college solely dedicated to educating future professors of said college. Oh, and my brother FINALLY got his anthropology degree and promptly got let go from a janitor position because his boss was worried my brother would take his job. Sadly, he kinda needed that job.
So it should come cheap to those who are smart enough to actually do something with it, but if you're just not bright enough, you'll have to pay for the privileged.
Which is the system we have now with merit-based scholarships. There are also needs-based scholarships, because, well, they need more. The gender and race-based scholarships are supposedly because the discrimination against them would bury talent. I guess what I'm saying is that I'm a fan of Pell grants, FASFA, and all that jazz.
but where else is there to go that has more freedoms? (serious question here, not rhetorical).
The woods. Northern Canada. Anywhere there is a severe lack of people. It's not perfect freedom, but you certainly have a lot more freedom to do whatever the fuck you want. Kind of lacking in broadband though, and I doubt you'll be able to pick up your neighbors open wifi out there.
What happens when [abuse]
You cut them off, DUH! Gee, I dunno, maybe EXACTLY like I described with my router policy:
and if it's abused, it's simple to throttle, restrict, or simply cut them off.
So why don't you bother reading the rest of the post before your knee jerks all over your keyboard?
Also, take your labels and shove them. I'm going to be neighborly to my neighbors and that's that. Call it whatever you want, but it doesn't change a damn thing.
Assuming you're not lying, you're smarter, but he's more skilled. At house framing. Duh.
These things that come out of our heads, you know, WORDS, they mean things. Real objective things. If you get into some sort of philosophical funk where all your words start take on questionable meaning, then you need to snap out of it and come back to reality.
But there's a serious question of how do you prove you're an American citizen?
Let's say you're on vacation abroad. Hell, even that stipulation isn't really required anymore. Someone blackbags you, beats you, strips you, and throws you in a cell, naked.
Now how do you prove that you're an American citizen so that what they just did illegal?
How do I, sitting here in America and duty-bound to uphold the laws of the land, make sure that the CIA or whoever is only capturing non-citizens?
If I were to walk through the jail, and hear your lament, how would I prove that you deserve a trial, and the guy next to you didn't?
If you let the authorities handle group X without any rights, then anyone they want to grab can be labeled as a member of group X. That's an unfathomable amount of power for them to wield and simply put, no-one should be entrusted with such power.
You also track the hell out of them. If they're such horrible terrorists then eventually you'll catch them doing something or making contact with someone you REALLY want to know about.
Totally agree. And this little RSA animate thing is a really good explaination about why you're right.
Uh... you know that Ben Franklin was a dirty dirty old man right? And Jefferson probably had sex with his slaves. George was pretty flawless as a president, but he wasn't a great general and had his personality quirks. They were all great men who did great things, but don't think of them as gods. Politics then was similar to politics now. But I'd have to agree that the focus has changed quiet a bit.
I don't see any merit to the "very soon" comment. This has been a struggle since strong encryption became trivial. So, for a decade or two at least. The "nothing to hide" line of reasoning is as flawed now as it was then and, theoretically, cooler calmer more rational minds will win out.
Their advice: Password-protect your wireless router.
In my most sincere heart of hearts, let me be one of the few to say: "Fuck that noise!"
I don't know about you out there, but I'm a big fan of this whole "society" thing, and if random JoeBlow walks up to my house and asks for a drink of water, I'll gladly give him some. I've got plenty and the cost to me is negligible. I do this because I might want a drink from someone at some point. Same for my router and connection. The effort and cost to me is negligible, and if it's abused, it's simple to throttle, restrict, or simply cut them off.
I like people, and I want to be a good neighbor. So fuck your tyrannical fear-mongering police-state.
The people with kids are not passing a population control gene/meme on so that trait dies out.
And there you go. You pointed out another problem with Niven. He often portrays his aliens (and by extrapolation, human nature) as being completely powered by instinct. Their personality, actions, and character is defined by DNA. And while instinct certainly does have an influence, it’s not the overriding force. I mean, we want sex, but we can control it so we’re not constantly humping each other. It’s a little harder at 16, but we’re not always 16. Niven, on the other hand, ignores cultural and personal motivation and hand-waves away OBVIOUS SOLUTIONS to the moties problems.
Still though, good book.
It was entertaining, but it had it's flaws.
It's a little religion heavy. I mean, I know god is in the title, but it kinda permeates throughout the entire novel. I got the feeling that "We've tried hundreds of religions" was supposed to be shocking, but it just fell flat with me.
Then there's the whole premise of the Motie's cycle is that they MUST have children to survive. And the resulting overpopulation stresses their resources to a breaking point. Except that Masters and Browns can mate to make sterile breed who is short lived. Since Masters are the only breed that seems to have any sort of willpower, and they can easily circumvent the pregnancy->overpopulation issue, what's the problem?
Well there's question about the nature of games. Are they a form of escapism or are they simulators that give you experience outside of the norm?
You could make an escapist game that is unhinged from reality. It let's players power trip, face no real challenge, make no real decisions, perform obvious responses to stimulus, and receive copious amount of meaningless rewards for their ability to breath. This game is cheap.
You could also make a realistic game that emulates the true experience of a trooper in Iraq. So after 3 hours of staring at sand, there's a bang, some smoke, and you duck for cover, immobilized with a leg wound. After twenty minutes backup arrives and you get airlifted to Germany for surgery. This game is a grind.
I think the trick to making an entertaining game is to slip in selective bits of realism. Here and there you throw in some dose of perspective, or ambiguous morality, or honest to god boring grind. It's certainly easy to over do it, but if you completely sterilize a game it becomes the cheap crap that Hollywood mass produces each summer. Which is fine for some people. Soulless people.
I dunno, I think it could serve as an interesting artsy piece.
You have two sides out in front of your base that are murderizing each other. You have a sniper rifle and a clear view of the entire battlefield.
The game lasts anywhere between one and ten minutes, and if you ever shoot the gun, you lose neutrality and both sides send overwhelming units against you.
Yeah, I wonder why nobody ever mentions all the good things Hitler did.
new first-person shooter Homefront, which has you play as a freedom fighter in an America occupied by a North Korean superpower.
A north Korean superpower... really? So it's a comedy then?
wtf is this guy going on about? Whatever. The piano thing is from Buckminster Fuller, btw.
My point is that emulating lifeforms is a naive way of making something. I believe most lifeforms have multiple eyes for redundancy. You know that whole thing with the two lungs, two kidney, two balls. There are a lot of lessons to learn from studying biology, but until our drones need to worry about bears trying to eat it, one camera will probably do. Especially when it's just looking at an office hallway.
Well I do make an honest effort to stay sane. You seem pretty level headed yourself. If you're ever going through the Midwest, give me a ping and we can argue over beers.
heckruler83 over on yahoo
Ah yes, elected officials that represent our interests. I had forgotten they can do that. One problem that seems to come up is that if you get someone who is adamant on a subject against bargaining, political bullying, and lobbying money tend to be the ones foaming at the mouth.