I don't know if it's unimaginable, because "genetically engineering greed.. out of our genes" is exactly what Marxism is all about, and exactly what the Soviets and the Chinese actually did to tens of millions of people after their revolutions, with genocidal consequences far outstripping the better-known crimes of Hitler.
It is always useful to remind everyone that the same "evil" intellectual property laws that are used to prosecute pirates also ensure that Linux and GNU software remain free. If you are a free software advocate and you "don't believe in imaginary property", then yuo = rtard.
Stallman didn't say this, but it is also important to point out that piracy actually hurts free software, by making all software effectively free to those willing to steal it. Linux may cost $0, but if Windows also costs $0, then (to some) it's a better deal. If you are a pirate and you regard yourself as a daring Robin Hood-style freedom fighter, then the bad news is that you're actually fighting against freedom, not for it.
Leonard Peikoff is retarded. He misrepresents agnosticism in two important ways.
Error number 1. Both theism and atheism are faith based positions. There is no proof of the non-existence of God, ergo anyone who claims "There is no God" has made a leap of faith. You may argue that the non-existence of God is more likely than his existence, but that's not good enough.
Error number 2. Agnosticism is a recognition that both atheism and theism require faith. It is not chosen for diplomatic reasons, it is chosen because it is the only position that does not require faith. I don't know, for 100% certain, that God does not exist. Hence, I am agnostic. Leonard Retard doesn't have 100% proof either, but he has faith, faith that he knows enough about the world to know, for sure, that God does/does not exist.
Incidentally, it must be said the behaviour of religious people does not tell us anything about God. God might exist, but have nothing to do with any religion. You cannot use flaws in Islam or Christianity or Scientology to disprove God. Equally, the behaviour of those religious people is NOT a reason to be an atheist.
Those are just different videos, though. No impact on actual gameplay. I was deeply disappointed when I discovered this, as I had hoped for a major difference in the later stages of the game. For example:
1. You rescue all the little sisters. The German doctor helps you defeat the bad guy. You are the good guy. Your altruistic actions demonstrate that Ayn Rand^W^W Andrew Ryan's hypothesis was wrong - altruism is not, in fact, the root of all evil, because it saves the city and the lives of the remaining survivors.
2. You harvest all the little sisters. The bad guy helps you defeat the German doctor. You are a puppet of the bad guy. Your self-serving actions demonstrate that Objectivism is a flawed political philosophy, because greed will always lead to tyranny.
3. You harvest some and rescue others. You escape the city, but only by condemning the remaining survivors to certain death. You are the morally ambiguous guy. You embody Objectivism; you have rejected altruism and acted to maximise your own benefit.
That's how you do three endings! That's the sort of conclusion that the game's beginning implied, because Bioshock does start off very well. And yet, nothing. Just a shitty sub comic-book battle with a cyborg gangster, followed by a selection of three different videos depending on decisions that are otherwise irrelevant.
The BBC definitely are biased. The thing about bias is that you only tend to notice it when it jars with your own personal world view. That's when it really stands out, and you think "OMG WTF, how can you say that?"
I often find this on the BBC, but then, I disapprove of their predominant ideology, and that of the government they serve (see my sig). I live in Britain.
CP/M programs were actually highly portable. In a well-written program, all communication with the hardware was via system calls. The OS had a hardware abstraction layer which was modified by each vendor to suit their hardware; then, most CP/M programs would run "out of the box".
Unfortunately, this also means that it was difficult to do graphics. Programs would need to write directly to video memory in order to avoid the system call overhead, and that would not be portable.
Disagree. You can export documents from Microsoft Office, but Office users are still often "locked in" to the software. The cost of moving to other software is too great. It is clear that the same thing will occur with Google Apps. A cost to the end user is a profit for the service provider. I think it is worth pointing this out.
However, I accept the point that this will improve Linux support on netbooks and thus benefit all of us. Google certainly does contribute to free software and that cannot be criticised.
And btw, 1984 is about fascism.
No, it really isn't. This is a common misperception which I hope to correct. It is in my sig after I heard Big Brother described as an extreme right-wing dictator: a surreal suggestion both in the context of the book and when applied to his real-life counterpart Joseph Stalin. It seems that two and two have become five.
From the perspective of the user, what is worse than being dependent on non-free software such as Flash?
Answer - being dependent on non-free software that only runs on someone else's machine as a remote service. The goal of Chrome is to replace customer lock-in to Windows and Office with lock-in to Google's "software as a service". Since customer data will be held hostage by Google, along with the only applications that can read it, no "Openoffice" or "Linux" will be coming to rescue the user from this lock-in. But hey, it's Google, they won't "be evil", right? (hollow laughter).
I am unsure why other free software advocates are supporting this idea, unless the enemy of Microsoft is automatically our friend.
Exactly. And there is video compression and decompression delay. And, on top of that, current low-latency applications don't send much data. Do you still get low latency if you're receiving at 1MBit/s or higher? In both directions? Reliably? There can be no client-side prediction to smooth out lag: your connection must be perfect all of the time.
I don't believe in this idea at all. I don't think they've done the math correctly. I'm sure it works wonderfully on their LAN, but over the Internet..?
When stating the specifications of future computers, never, ever use real units such as "megabytes", because whatever number you use, it will be hopelessly wrong within a few years.
Some misunderstanding, yes, since I thought I was agreeing with you, but summarising what you said in fewer words.
Your post looked like a point about how government interference begins with the best of intentions, but often leads to entirely unintended consequences, through malice, greed, or simple incompetence.
An example of this incompetence is how social programs cut off when you get above a certain threshold of income, thus encouraging poor people to stay below that threshold, i.e. remain poor. This could be regarded as an implementation error in those social programs, but since it is common to all implementations of socialism, I regard it as a design flaw in the ideology itself.
Similarly, I suspect this carbon credits idea is defective by design, and through malice, greed or simple incompetence, it will not do what it is supposed to.
So, you're saying that socialism actually keeps the poor poor, by making it harder for them to escape poverty?
Applying that to the climate change discussion, perhaps we could expect a system of "carbon credits" to increase CO2 emissions. I suspect that widespread political support is the worst thing to happen to the green movement, because now their ideas are being twisted to attack democracy and serve the interests of big business.
Medicine is one of those fields along with firefighting, law enforcement, and military defense whee capitalism is a very poor fit.
This may be true, but Government control of medicine is actually worse. I live in Britain, where we have socialised healthcare in the form of the NHS. I pay for the NHS with a big chunk of tax money; all Brits are forced to do likewise, no choice, no opt-out. Still, many of us choose to buy private health insurance as well, paying twice simply because the quality of NHS care is so poor. It is poor because it is inefficient, and it is inefficient because it is run by a Government monopoly staffed by more bureaucrats than doctors.
For all its faults, I envy the American system and wish that we had it here. An American may lose his house to pay for an operation, but at least he gets the operation, while the Brits die from MRSA, waiting months for urgent surgery in a dirty ward, paying more (on average) for the privilege.
Your original post strongly implied that support for "British culture" was closely related to support for the BNP, which is incorrect.
The case, "nationalism = racism" has come up before, and in England it is official policy, something which many English people find insulting. The Welsh and Scottish cultural history is celebrated and preserved, as are the cultures of recent immigrants, but the English are mischaracterised as racists if they show any national pride. For example, if you display the traditional St George flag (red cross on white background), people will tend to assume you are a BNP supporter. Display the Scottish flag and you're regarded as a proud Scotsman. It frustrates me that supposed "intellectuals" regard this as right and proper, never questioning the groupthink. Hence I try to challenge that attitude wherever I see it.
"Holocaust", a culturally German game where you play the administrator of the Auschwitz prison camp. Implement the final solution or face the Fuhrer's displeasure!
"Tobacco Tycoon", a culturally American game where you run a series of farms in the South. Save costs by buying cheap labour from Africa! Quell uprisings by dressing in a white sheet!
"Bolsheviks", a culturally Russian game in which you are the Commissar of the NKVD. Can you eliminate the enemies of the revolution. Can you survive Stalin's Terror and replace him as leader of the USSR?
"Labour Camp", a culturally Japanese game where you must use POW slave labour to build railways and bridges. Can you build the infrastructure needed to beat the Americans before they develop the A-bomb?
"Conquistador", a culturally Spanish game in which you are an explorer in South America. How much gold can you take from the native people? Can you wipe out the Incans?
Or would that very obviously be offensive to all concerned? The summary isn't racist, having a national identity isn't racist. Racism is where you take one imagined aspect of a people and imply that they're all like that as if we Brits are all Victorian-era imperialists, drinking port in our London clubs while guys in India break their backs to make us even richer. "They're not really people, old chap. Jeeves, fetch me the cigar box would you?"
Having your own national identity is racist? Around the world, many people would find that comment insulting. Only in Britain could you expect such a comment to go unchallenged. Many people are proud of their cultural background.
One gram of this gold is actually worth less than the market price for one gram. When you take your gold bars out of a professional gold vault, they cease to be "Good Delivery", which means they lose value to other traders since their purity is not guaranteed to the same standard.
Real gold traders always keep their gold in a vault, or move it between vaults. This is extremely expensive - but gold bars are expensive - $400k each! So it's not just a 30% markup - it's even worse than that. Confidence trick.
Establishment versus the people? A corrupt judge, happy to protect the privacy rights of perverts, but not willing to protect those who attack his cronies in the police and judiciary? That's my understanding at any rate, but I only linked to that post as an example of Nightjack's writing.
I read his blog, all of it, and I can assure you that he didn't reveal any confidential details, no matter what Sunday Times hacks might claim. His exposure was not in the public interest. It was in the Government's interest.
In any case, politics was a very minor aspect of Nightjack's blog. He started off writing just about his work; both positive and negative aspects of being a detective. Some of the best stories on the blog (e.g. his "24 hours to crack the case" series) dealt with successful work that he had been involved with. Some were not about policing at all.
However, the UK Government is always interfering with the police. Their social policies cause a lot of problems which the police are required to solve. The UK is not a socialist paradise, it is a complete mess, and this is because of the malice and incompetence of our "elected" rulers. In a minority of posts, Nightjack told the public exactly what he had to deal with, and after the Orwell Prize raised his profile, he became an embarrassment to the police and to the Government. That was his "crime" and that's why he was shut down. It doesn't help the public, it helps the Government, because that's one fewer dissenting voice.
I am very sad that I did not take the opportunity to copy Nightjack's blog while it was still available, I assumed it would always stay online; silly of me, considering what has happened to other police bloggers after they are "outed".
If you say so. This is The Internet, so you can believe whatever you want.
However. Link 1: By 1985, concern as to Healy's financial, political and intelligence links with the Libyan and Iraqi governments had risen within the WRP to the point at which the group imploded
Link 2: As printed by Solidarity, the report claimed over £1,000,000 had been received by the group from Libya and several Middle Eastern governments, between 1977 and 1983. While only a small proportion of this is alleged to have come from Saddam Hussein's Iraqi government, it draws particular attention to photographs which it claims WRP members were instructed to take of demonstrations of opponents of Saddam Hussein, and it states were later handed to the Iraqi embassy.
TL;DR: The Worker's Revolutionary Party supported Saddam, was funded by him, and helped the Iraqi intelligence services to eliminate dissenters.
The most famous instances of tyranny advocated by the Left are the mass murders committed by Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Castro in the name of forced collectivisation, and (subsequently) purging dissenters from their parties. The second two links were on this subject, as classic and undeniable examples of the tyranny of the Left. This is the best I can do; but feel free to believe that socialism is good. Many do.
Specific: Saddam Hussein was supported by Gerry Healy'sWorker's Revolutionary Party. He helped to fund them, and in turn, they published favourable articles about him.
General: The Left advocates international socialism, a political ideology based on totalitarian oppression of dissent, whether practised by hardline tyrants such as Stalin or by supposed "moderates" like Leon Trotsky. When did the Left advocate tyranny? Constantly.
I think your reply only serves to illustrate just what a corrupt and anti-democratic mess the EU government really is, and what's more, has been for decades. That's a big part of why we don't like it! We could argue at great length about which parts of the EU government are most like Soviet Russia, and in what way, but why bother? It's not something that we would choose to be involved with, and of course, that's why "we the people" have never been given an opportunity to leave.
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I don't know if it's unimaginable, because "genetically engineering greed.. out of our genes" is exactly what Marxism is all about, and exactly what the Soviets and the Chinese actually did to tens of millions of people after their revolutions, with genocidal consequences far outstripping the better-known crimes of Hitler.
It is always useful to remind everyone that the same "evil" intellectual property laws that are used to prosecute pirates also ensure that Linux and GNU software remain free. If you are a free software advocate and you "don't believe in imaginary property", then yuo = rtard.
Stallman didn't say this, but it is also important to point out that piracy actually hurts free software, by making all software effectively free to those willing to steal it. Linux may cost $0, but if Windows also costs $0, then (to some) it's a better deal. If you are a pirate and you regard yourself as a daring Robin Hood-style freedom fighter, then the bad news is that you're actually fighting against freedom, not for it.
Leonard Peikoff is retarded. He misrepresents agnosticism in two important ways.
Error number 1. Both theism and atheism are faith based positions. There is no proof of the non-existence of God, ergo anyone who claims "There is no God" has made a leap of faith. You may argue that the non-existence of God is more likely than his existence, but that's not good enough.
Error number 2. Agnosticism is a recognition that both atheism and theism require faith. It is not chosen for diplomatic reasons, it is chosen because it is the only position that does not require faith. I don't know, for 100% certain, that God does not exist. Hence, I am agnostic. Leonard Retard doesn't have 100% proof either, but he has faith, faith that he knows enough about the world to know, for sure, that God does/does not exist.
Incidentally, it must be said the behaviour of religious people does not tell us anything about God. God might exist, but have nothing to do with any religion. You cannot use flaws in Islam or Christianity or Scientology to disprove God. Equally, the behaviour of those religious people is NOT a reason to be an atheist.
Those are just different videos, though. No impact on actual gameplay. I was deeply disappointed when I discovered this, as I had hoped for a major difference in the later stages of the game. For example:
1. You rescue all the little sisters. The German doctor helps you defeat the bad guy. You are the good guy. Your altruistic actions demonstrate that Ayn Rand^W^W Andrew Ryan's hypothesis was wrong - altruism is not, in fact, the root of all evil, because it saves the city and the lives of the remaining survivors.
2. You harvest all the little sisters. The bad guy helps you defeat the German doctor. You are a puppet of the bad guy. Your self-serving actions demonstrate that Objectivism is a flawed political philosophy, because greed will always lead to tyranny.
3. You harvest some and rescue others. You escape the city, but only by condemning the remaining survivors to certain death. You are the morally ambiguous guy. You embody Objectivism; you have rejected altruism and acted to maximise your own benefit.
That's how you do three endings! That's the sort of conclusion that the game's beginning implied, because Bioshock does start off very well. And yet, nothing. Just a shitty sub comic-book battle with a cyborg gangster, followed by a selection of three different videos depending on decisions that are otherwise irrelevant.
The BBC definitely are biased. The thing about bias is that you only tend to notice it when it jars with your own personal world view. That's when it really stands out, and you think "OMG WTF, how can you say that?"
I often find this on the BBC, but then, I disapprove of their predominant ideology, and that of the government they serve (see my sig). I live in Britain.
CP/M programs were actually highly portable. In a well-written program, all communication with the hardware was via system calls. The OS had a hardware abstraction layer which was modified by each vendor to suit their hardware; then, most CP/M programs would run "out of the box".
Unfortunately, this also means that it was difficult to do graphics. Programs would need to write directly to video memory in order to avoid the system call overhead, and that would not be portable.
Disagree. You can export documents from Microsoft Office, but Office users are still often "locked in" to the software. The cost of moving to other software is too great. It is clear that the same thing will occur with Google Apps. A cost to the end user is a profit for the service provider. I think it is worth pointing this out.
However, I accept the point that this will improve Linux support on netbooks and thus benefit all of us. Google certainly does contribute to free software and that cannot be criticised.
And btw, 1984 is about fascism.
No, it really isn't. This is a common misperception which I hope to correct. It is in my sig after I heard Big Brother described as an extreme right-wing dictator: a surreal suggestion both in the context of the book and when applied to his real-life counterpart Joseph Stalin. It seems that two and two have become five.
From the perspective of the user, what is worse than being dependent on non-free software such as Flash?
Answer - being dependent on non-free software that only runs on someone else's machine as a remote service. The goal of Chrome is to replace customer lock-in to Windows and Office with lock-in to Google's "software as a service". Since customer data will be held hostage by Google, along with the only applications that can read it, no "Openoffice" or "Linux" will be coming to rescue the user from this lock-in. But hey, it's Google, they won't "be evil", right? (hollow laughter).
I am unsure why other free software advocates are supporting this idea, unless the enemy of Microsoft is automatically our friend.
Exactly. And there is video compression and decompression delay. And, on top of that, current low-latency applications don't send much data. Do you still get low latency if you're receiving at 1MBit/s or higher? In both directions? Reliably? There can be no client-side prediction to smooth out lag: your connection must be perfect all of the time.
I don't believe in this idea at all. I don't think they've done the math correctly. I'm sure it works wonderfully on their LAN, but over the Internet..?
When stating the specifications of future computers, never, ever use real units such as "megabytes", because whatever number you use, it will be hopelessly wrong within a few years.
Some misunderstanding, yes, since I thought I was agreeing with you, but summarising what you said in fewer words.
Your post looked like a point about how government interference begins with the best of intentions, but often leads to entirely unintended consequences, through malice, greed, or simple incompetence.
An example of this incompetence is how social programs cut off when you get above a certain threshold of income, thus encouraging poor people to stay below that threshold, i.e. remain poor. This could be regarded as an implementation error in those social programs, but since it is common to all implementations of socialism, I regard it as a design flaw in the ideology itself.
Similarly, I suspect this carbon credits idea is defective by design, and through malice, greed or simple incompetence, it will not do what it is supposed to.
So, you're saying that socialism actually keeps the poor poor, by making it harder for them to escape poverty?
Applying that to the climate change discussion, perhaps we could expect a system of "carbon credits" to increase CO2 emissions. I suspect that widespread political support is the worst thing to happen to the green movement, because now their ideas are being twisted to attack democracy and serve the interests of big business.
The UK Government believes in climate change. They broadcast frequent propaganda about it in the form of TV commercials ("Act on CO2").
Watch these taxpayer-funded climate change commercials and tell me you're not 100% totally convinced that the Government is right:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pV9MzzcCPf8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCJotacAmo4
INDEPENDENT THOUGHT IS KILLING THE EARTH. DO NOT QUESTION THE GOVERNMENT.
Medicine is one of those fields along with firefighting, law enforcement, and military defense whee capitalism is a very poor fit.
This may be true, but Government control of medicine is actually worse. I live in Britain, where we have socialised healthcare in the form of the NHS. I pay for the NHS with a big chunk of tax money; all Brits are forced to do likewise, no choice, no opt-out. Still, many of us choose to buy private health insurance as well, paying twice simply because the quality of NHS care is so poor. It is poor because it is inefficient, and it is inefficient because it is run by a Government monopoly staffed by more bureaucrats than doctors.
For all its faults, I envy the American system and wish that we had it here. An American may lose his house to pay for an operation, but at least he gets the operation, while the Brits die from MRSA, waiting months for urgent surgery in a dirty ward, paying more (on average) for the privilege.
Your original post strongly implied that support for "British culture" was closely related to support for the BNP, which is incorrect.
The case, "nationalism = racism" has come up before, and in England it is official policy, something which many English people find insulting. The Welsh and Scottish cultural history is celebrated and preserved, as are the cultures of recent immigrants, but the English are mischaracterised as racists if they show any national pride. For example, if you display the traditional St George flag (red cross on white background), people will tend to assume you are a BNP supporter. Display the Scottish flag and you're regarded as a proud Scotsman. It frustrates me that supposed "intellectuals" regard this as right and proper, never questioning the groupthink. Hence I try to challenge that attitude wherever I see it.
Great idea, here are some more:
"Holocaust", a culturally German game where you play the administrator of the Auschwitz prison camp. Implement the final solution or face the Fuhrer's displeasure!
"Tobacco Tycoon", a culturally American game where you run a series of farms in the South. Save costs by buying cheap labour from Africa! Quell uprisings by dressing in a white sheet!
"Bolsheviks", a culturally Russian game in which you are the Commissar of the NKVD. Can you eliminate the enemies of the revolution. Can you survive Stalin's Terror and replace him as leader of the USSR?
"Labour Camp", a culturally Japanese game where you must use POW slave labour to build railways and bridges. Can you build the infrastructure needed to beat the Americans before they develop the A-bomb?
"Conquistador", a culturally Spanish game in which you are an explorer in South America. How much gold can you take from the native people? Can you wipe out the Incans?
Or would that very obviously be offensive to all concerned? The summary isn't racist, having a national identity isn't racist. Racism is where you take one imagined aspect of a people and imply that they're all like that as if we Brits are all Victorian-era imperialists, drinking port in our London clubs while guys in India break their backs to make us even richer. "They're not really people, old chap. Jeeves, fetch me the cigar box would you?"
Having your own national identity is racist? Around the world, many people would find that comment insulting. Only in Britain could you expect such a comment to go unchallenged. Many people are proud of their cultural background.
One gram of this gold is actually worth less than the market price for one gram. When you take your gold bars out of a professional gold vault, they cease to be "Good Delivery", which means they lose value to other traders since their purity is not guaranteed to the same standard.
Real gold traders always keep their gold in a vault, or move it between vaults. This is extremely expensive - but gold bars are expensive - $400k each! So it's not just a 30% markup - it's even worse than that. Confidence trick.
Establishment versus the people? A corrupt judge, happy to protect the privacy rights of perverts, but not willing to protect those who attack his cronies in the police and judiciary? That's my understanding at any rate, but I only linked to that post as an example of Nightjack's writing.
He's the judge who ruled that Nightjack had no right to anonymity.
This has caused some anger, because Eady has ruled that various other people (paedophiles, for example) do have a right to privacy.
I read his blog, all of it, and I can assure you that he didn't reveal any confidential details, no matter what Sunday Times hacks might claim. His exposure was not in the public interest. It was in the Government's interest.
In any case, politics was a very minor aspect of Nightjack's blog. He started off writing just about his work; both positive and negative aspects of being a detective. Some of the best stories on the blog (e.g. his "24 hours to crack the case" series) dealt with successful work that he had been involved with. Some were not about policing at all.
However, the UK Government is always interfering with the police. Their social policies cause a lot of problems which the police are required to solve. The UK is not a socialist paradise, it is a complete mess, and this is because of the malice and incompetence of our "elected" rulers. In a minority of posts, Nightjack told the public exactly what he had to deal with, and after the Orwell Prize raised his profile, he became an embarrassment to the police and to the Government. That was his "crime" and that's why he was shut down. It doesn't help the public, it helps the Government, because that's one fewer dissenting voice.
I am very sad that I did not take the opportunity to copy Nightjack's blog while it was still available, I assumed it would always stay online; silly of me, considering what has happened to other police bloggers after they are "outed".
However, you can still read the post that won him the prize (it's the yellow text).
If you say so. This is The Internet, so you can believe whatever you want.
However. Link 1: By 1985, concern as to Healy's financial, political and intelligence links with the Libyan and Iraqi governments had risen within the WRP to the point at which the group imploded
Link 2: As printed by Solidarity, the report claimed over £1,000,000 had been received by the group from Libya and several Middle Eastern governments, between 1977 and 1983. While only a small proportion of this is alleged to have come from Saddam Hussein's Iraqi government, it draws particular attention to photographs which it claims WRP members were instructed to take of demonstrations of opponents of Saddam Hussein, and it states were later handed to the Iraqi embassy.
TL;DR: The Worker's Revolutionary Party supported Saddam, was funded by him, and helped the Iraqi intelligence services to eliminate dissenters.
The most famous instances of tyranny advocated by the Left are the mass murders committed by Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Castro in the name of forced collectivisation, and (subsequently) purging dissenters from their parties. The second two links were on this subject, as classic and undeniable examples of the tyranny of the Left. This is the best I can do; but feel free to believe that socialism is good. Many do.
Specific: Saddam Hussein was supported by Gerry Healy's Worker's Revolutionary Party. He helped to fund them, and in turn, they published favourable articles about him.
General: The Left advocates international socialism, a political ideology based on totalitarian oppression of dissent, whether practised by hardline tyrants such as Stalin or by supposed "moderates" like Leon Trotsky. When did the Left advocate tyranny? Constantly.
I think your reply only serves to illustrate just what a corrupt and anti-democratic mess the EU government really is, and what's more, has been for decades. That's a big part of why we don't like it! We could argue at great length about which parts of the EU government are most like Soviet Russia, and in what way, but why bother? It's not something that we would choose to be involved with, and of course, that's why "we the people" have never been given an opportunity to leave.