I'm not really an expert on religion, especially Christianity, but wasn't the point of the "mark of the beast" that it was basically a tracking number? I agree that it's silly on those grounds, especially since it would be much more likely that the "mark of the beast" would be the social security number that the kid (and probably the parents) undoubtedly have.
Way to try to come off with the objectivity when we're trying to rally and foster our own personal agenda in something loosely related, BTW.
I am not a fan of badges, but badges are a fact of work life so we might as well train the kids to wear badges. After all, if the kids are full human they should be encourages to do the same things as other human. And more and more badges are RFID.
Right, get them accustomed to it early, like respecting authority and always doing what you're told without question. Fact of life.
For instance, presuming these are not self power tags,
From TFS: "The badges are RFIDs powered by built-in batteries..."
Any infringement on right have to balanced. Young children in school are required to stay with a teacher even to go the bathroom. This is acceptable to most people. In high school, there is more freedom but you are required to be in school. Frankly, RFID tags are less invasive method and more accurate to insure the student is where he or she is supposed to be. There are many cases in which a student claims to be somewhere, but the records show they weren't. With an RFID tag teachers mistakes will not put the kid in jeopardy. Sure, kids switch and give badges to others, so the system is not perfect, but it will do more to protect students who operate in good faith.
It's been a long time since I was a minor, and I don't have children, so I suppose my perspective is skewed, but at the risk of sounding like one of those "must reject technology or anything that's not the old ways" people, children have managed to survive to adulthood without RFID tags. Sure, some kids have had terrible things occur to them, but I do not believe you can legitimately solve societal issues with technological mandates.
...and before any pedant gets ahold of my post: Yes, I know it's a chick. Yes, I call women "dudes" sometimes. No, that does not represent any sort of confusion upon my part.
You're under 18, so not a human being in the eyes of the state, and as such subject to being tracked like cattle.
If it's any consolation, the rest of us are only marginally human beings in the eyes of the state, and are still subject to being tracked like cattle if we go out to anywhere public, or use any service or product. On the bright side, you're getting indoctrinated to it early.
Honestly, I have a hard time knowing for sure. I couldn't have downmodded you, as posting prohibits moderation. This is, of course, ruling out sockpuppet accounts or any sort of malarkey like that, but you'll have to take me on my word it wasn't me.
To speculate on your question, I would suggest that it's probably something to do with the fact that you have a bit of a reputation for what I might call an erratic posting style. You're usually very long winded on a topic, and I've seen you post things that are strange tangents that don't really apply to the topic of the thread. Then again, I'm not sure if those are actually you, or perhaps impersonators mimicking your very unique style of writing.
All of these things somewhat make you stand out in a crowd, which makes you a target for anyone who needs one, deserving or otherwise. Tell you what: Try toning down the posting style to something more subtle for a couple posts. Maybe don't sign them apk. Maybe go with Alexander (I believe that is your name) or some other moniker. See if people react the same way. Call it a social experiment.:)
Interesting post. I'm no security buff, but whitelisting doesn't sound like it's inheriently a bad thing, and I don't think anyone would argue so, but if that's the route you go, the default should have to be that the user themselves is gatekeeper, with the option of enabling it such that they can use another party to manage their walled garden for themselves.
Really, building your own walled garden of executables from places you trust actually sounds like a pretty clever idea. It also sounds like Linux repositories with a filemask of 110. Or maybe using a host file instead of DNS.:P
...this is kind of like saying "Since this one agency is finicky about technology, government regulation is ineffective and outdated. As such, the government shouldn't regulate medicine!"
It's basically change control for games. As you point out, it keeps you on the latest patch, automatically. Compare this with "try to play a game with people, find out that half of you are on one patch and the other half are on another, and the patch adds an unexpected hour or so into not being able to play yet". I've never ran into a game that just doesn't work, and the amount of screwing around with games in the last couple years I've had to do was basically zero. I'm not saying that the possibility isn't out there. I'm just saying that I can't accuse Steam of breaking games by keeping them up to date until I actually see it happen.
These are so much better than the original article. I have a two year old computer that I put together new for about $500 that can run just about every game I've played on medium-high to high graphics settings with at least 30 fps minimum. While I don't play a lot of modern games, such as Metalfield 428 or Halo 9 or what have you, Planetside 2 is quite beautiful nearly maxed out.
These are the ways to make PC gaming better. The article has a handful of suggestions for manufacturers to make selecting a PC better, the level of quality being somewhere between obvious and pointless.
Article demands a spec for hardware. Windows 7 has a rating for hardware. It's called the Experience Index. It sucks, but so does any other spec you'll come up with because specs can't be as simple as "cd-rom drive and SVGA graphics" anymore. Peggle and Crysis won't have the same minimum requirements, ever. Linux does not have something like this because it hasn't been needed, both due to a lack of games and because I can only assume Linux users generally know what the fuck they're doing.
Article demands a spec for rating (benchmarking) processors. Author hates not knowing if another core is better than an extra 500 megahertz. Great. Problem is that the answer is (and always will be): "It depends."
Next suggestions are "stop letting the marketing guys name products cause they do it bad", and "drop the suck when you write your drivers". These are both fantastic ideas. Unfortunately, they've been the issue for about the last 10 years, or at least, when ATI first started building cards that required drivers (on the topic of bad drivers) and Nvidia's "Geforce If I have FX in my name, I suck regardless of my number".
And the crazy thing for me is that I feel like in the last 3-4 years, I've had a lot less fucking around with games/hardware to get them to "just work". For all of it's flaws, Steam is pretty magical. I feel like if this article would have come out years ago, I'd have agreed wholeheartedly. Now I just shake my head at Captain Obvious.
So, you admit that people are going to try to wound each other, sometimes on a grand scale, even when guns aren't available, and then you say “well, they'll do it less if we don't give them guns to do it with”, but only after declaring that it's not a mental illness that causes people to do this, it's guns?Let me try:
The mental illness is not the problem.
There are mentally ill people all over the world. They don't go around stabbing up classrooms and theaters.
The KNIFE is the problem.
Recently a mentally ill woman in Rhode Island went on a car rampage. She drove her car into another car belonging to a woman who claimed to have a romantic relationship with her husband died. No one died. Horrible crime. But no one died (at least from what I read)
If she had had a knife, there would have been 1 dead (or more, gasp!).
The KNIFE is the problem.
Less knives - less knife violence. Pretty simple.
There, I spewed my rhetoric, balanced it atop a strawman for support, suggested a hyperbolic hypothetical situation for which we can never know the result, and then reiterated my base stance in the form of a tautology. I still don't feel any better about you or myself though.:(
Finally, I leave you with the fact that there have been quite a few horrible things pulled off in the last twenty years with little more that trucks full of fertilizer and knowledge of chemistry, or if you'd rather, box cutters and a few lessions as a flight school.
Guns aren't the problem. The problem is that your reality doesn't have enough bubble wrap on it.
I guess you do have a point, in as so far as saying that being outraged here doesn't mean you can't be outraged about other things. This just felt petty with the implication of a sense of being genuinely personally slighted.
With respect to my sig, I always prefer the DRM free option. At the same time, I just don't feel like I can respect a hard philosophy of "DRM or go home" either. A situation where a vendor cannot choose to implement DRM (should they genuinely want to cut their hand off) isn't really "free" either, because the vendor is bound, rather than the consumer.
This is further complicated by the fact that I've not been inconvenienced by Steam (as DRM) enough that I consider it as such. Steam is the perfect example of DRM done in such a way that it's not intrusive or crippling. It's never complained about my DVD drive emulator software. It's never subversively rootkited my Windows box. I can't say I *trust* it, but I can't say that about anything on my Windows box.
Really, subject says it all. I sometimes get cash out of the ATM, just because I like to have some on hand. The great thing about cash is that if you end up in a bad position, anyone anywhere will accept it. I got to thinking about it the other day though, and I'm kind of surprised they don't record they serial number of the bills they dispense to you and track where they end up in order to better track purchases that go under the radar because there's no 'card trail'.
Not that I WANT this, mind you, but from a marketing point of view, the most interesting demographic has got to be the one that is trying it's damned to prevent you from finding out about it.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not really an expert on religion, especially Christianity, but wasn't the point of the "mark of the beast" that it was basically a tracking number? I agree that it's silly on those grounds, especially since it would be much more likely that the "mark of the beast" would be the social security number that the kid (and probably the parents) undoubtedly have.
Way to try to come off with the objectivity when we're trying to rally and foster our own personal agenda in something loosely related, BTW.
I am not a fan of badges, but badges are a fact of work life so we might as well train the kids to wear badges. After all, if the kids are full human they should be encourages to do the same things as other human. And more and more badges are RFID.
Right, get them accustomed to it early, like respecting authority and always doing what you're told without question. Fact of life.
For instance, presuming these are not self power tags,
From TFS: "The badges are RFIDs powered by built-in batteries..."
Any infringement on right have to balanced. Young children in school are required to stay with a teacher even to go the bathroom. This is acceptable to most people. In high school, there is more freedom but you are required to be in school. Frankly, RFID tags are less invasive method and more accurate to insure the student is where he or she is supposed to be. There are many cases in which a student claims to be somewhere, but the records show they weren't. With an RFID tag teachers mistakes will not put the kid in jeopardy. Sure, kids switch and give badges to others, so the system is not perfect, but it will do more to protect students who operate in good faith.
It's been a long time since I was a minor, and I don't have children, so I suppose my perspective is skewed, but at the risk of sounding like one of those "must reject technology or anything that's not the old ways" people, children have managed to survive to adulthood without RFID tags. Sure, some kids have had terrible things occur to them, but I do not believe you can legitimately solve societal issues with technological mandates.
I think this one is why: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3368557&cid=42531081
...and before any pedant gets ahold of my post: Yes, I know it's a chick. Yes, I call women "dudes" sometimes. No, that does not represent any sort of confusion upon my part.
You're under 18, so not a human being in the eyes of the state, and as such subject to being tracked like cattle.
If it's any consolation, the rest of us are only marginally human beings in the eyes of the state, and are still subject to being tracked like cattle if we go out to anywhere public, or use any service or product. On the bright side, you're getting indoctrinated to it early.
Honestly, I have a hard time knowing for sure. I couldn't have downmodded you, as posting prohibits moderation. This is, of course, ruling out sockpuppet accounts or any sort of malarkey like that, but you'll have to take me on my word it wasn't me.
:)
To speculate on your question, I would suggest that it's probably something to do with the fact that you have a bit of a reputation for what I might call an erratic posting style. You're usually very long winded on a topic, and I've seen you post things that are strange tangents that don't really apply to the topic of the thread. Then again, I'm not sure if those are actually you, or perhaps impersonators mimicking your very unique style of writing.
All of these things somewhat make you stand out in a crowd, which makes you a target for anyone who needs one, deserving or otherwise. Tell you what: Try toning down the posting style to something more subtle for a couple posts. Maybe don't sign them apk. Maybe go with Alexander (I believe that is your name) or some other moniker. See if people react the same way. Call it a social experiment.
Interesting post. I'm no security buff, but whitelisting doesn't sound like it's inheriently a bad thing, and I don't think anyone would argue so, but if that's the route you go, the default should have to be that the user themselves is gatekeeper, with the option of enabling it such that they can use another party to manage their walled garden for themselves.
:P
Really, building your own walled garden of executables from places you trust actually sounds like a pretty clever idea. It also sounds like Linux repositories with a filemask of 110. Or maybe using a host file instead of DNS.
...this is kind of like saying "Since this one agency is finicky about technology, government regulation is ineffective and outdated. As such, the government shouldn't regulate medicine!"
It's basically change control for games. As you point out, it keeps you on the latest patch, automatically. Compare this with "try to play a game with people, find out that half of you are on one patch and the other half are on another, and the patch adds an unexpected hour or so into not being able to play yet". I've never ran into a game that just doesn't work, and the amount of screwing around with games in the last couple years I've had to do was basically zero. I'm not saying that the possibility isn't out there. I'm just saying that I can't accuse Steam of breaking games by keeping them up to date until I actually see it happen.
These are so much better than the original article. I have a two year old computer that I put together new for about $500 that can run just about every game I've played on medium-high to high graphics settings with at least 30 fps minimum. While I don't play a lot of modern games, such as Metalfield 428 or Halo 9 or what have you, Planetside 2 is quite beautiful nearly maxed out.
These are the ways to make PC gaming better. The article has a handful of suggestions for manufacturers to make selecting a PC better, the level of quality being somewhere between obvious and pointless.
Article demands a spec for hardware. Windows 7 has a rating for hardware. It's called the Experience Index. It sucks, but so does any other spec you'll come up with because specs can't be as simple as "cd-rom drive and SVGA graphics" anymore. Peggle and Crysis won't have the same minimum requirements, ever. Linux does not have something like this because it hasn't been needed, both due to a lack of games and because I can only assume Linux users generally know what the fuck they're doing.
Article demands a spec for rating (benchmarking) processors. Author hates not knowing if another core is better than an extra 500 megahertz. Great. Problem is that the answer is (and always will be): "It depends."
Next suggestions are "stop letting the marketing guys name products cause they do it bad", and "drop the suck when you write your drivers". These are both fantastic ideas. Unfortunately, they've been the issue for about the last 10 years, or at least, when ATI first started building cards that required drivers (on the topic of bad drivers) and Nvidia's "Geforce If I have FX in my name, I suck regardless of my number".
And the crazy thing for me is that I feel like in the last 3-4 years, I've had a lot less fucking around with games/hardware to get them to "just work". For all of it's flaws, Steam is pretty magical. I feel like if this article would have come out years ago, I'd have agreed wholeheartedly. Now I just shake my head at Captain Obvious.
Masochists, probably.
Hey, Mark Cuban doesn't do what Mark Cuban does for Mark Cuban. Mark Cuban does what Mark Cuban does because he IS Mark Cuban.
Lagrange points?
I hear they got a lotta nice girls there. A HAR HAR HAR HAR.
So, you admit that people are going to try to wound each other, sometimes on a grand scale, even when guns aren't available, and then you say “well, they'll do it less if we don't give them guns to do it with”, but only after declaring that it's not a mental illness that causes people to do this, it's guns?Let me try:
:(
The mental illness is not the problem.
There are mentally ill people all over the world. They don't go around stabbing up classrooms and theaters.
The KNIFE is the problem.
Recently a mentally ill woman in Rhode Island went on a car rampage. She drove her car into another car belonging to a woman who claimed to have a romantic relationship with her husband died. No one died. Horrible crime. But no one died (at least from what I read)
If she had had a knife, there would have been 1 dead (or more, gasp!).
The KNIFE is the problem.
Less knives - less knife violence. Pretty simple.
There, I spewed my rhetoric, balanced it atop a strawman for support, suggested a hyperbolic hypothetical situation for which we can never know the result, and then reiterated my base stance in the form of a tautology. I still don't feel any better about you or myself though.
This article is interesting and states that the high point for mass killings is actually 1929: http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/335739/facts-about-mass-shootings-john-fund
This one points out that fire was a quite effective method of killing large amounts of people prior to automatic weapons: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2012/07/aurora_shooting_how_did_people_commit_mass_murder_before_automatic_weapons_.html
Finally, I leave you with the fact that there have been quite a few horrible things pulled off in the last twenty years with little more that trucks full of fertilizer and knowledge of chemistry, or if you'd rather, box cutters and a few lessions as a flight school.
Guns aren't the problem. The problem is that your reality doesn't have enough bubble wrap on it.
Someone didn't get my Spaceballs reference. :(
On one hand, this is awesome. On the other hand, the probability of having a grandfather still alive who served in WW2 is quickly dropping to zero.
fredrated, marylinfelton45 is your brother in-law's co-worker's half-sister's neighbour who did this for 4 months.
What does that make you? Absolutely nothing!
"Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops." - Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
I used to have one of those. Loved that thing.
The greatest Food Network show we will never see: "Cooking with McAfee".
Which stories would you rather see more of? Obama hosting Twitter townhalls, Facebook privacy schemes, or Crysis system requirments?
Ooooh, how about a slashvertisement for a commercial version of an X tunnel over ssh?
I picture the ghosts of Phillip K. Dick and Hunter S. Thompson co-writing it.
McAfee, is that you? They're looking for you dude, you should probably get out of here.
I guess you do have a point, in as so far as saying that being outraged here doesn't mean you can't be outraged about other things. This just felt petty with the implication of a sense of being genuinely personally slighted.
With respect to my sig, I always prefer the DRM free option. At the same time, I just don't feel like I can respect a hard philosophy of "DRM or go home" either. A situation where a vendor cannot choose to implement DRM (should they genuinely want to cut their hand off) isn't really "free" either, because the vendor is bound, rather than the consumer.
This is further complicated by the fact that I've not been inconvenienced by Steam (as DRM) enough that I consider it as such. Steam is the perfect example of DRM done in such a way that it's not intrusive or crippling. It's never complained about my DVD drive emulator software. It's never subversively rootkited my Windows box. I can't say I *trust* it, but I can't say that about anything on my Windows box.
Really, subject says it all. I sometimes get cash out of the ATM, just because I like to have some on hand. The great thing about cash is that if you end up in a bad position, anyone anywhere will accept it. I got to thinking about it the other day though, and I'm kind of surprised they don't record they serial number of the bills they dispense to you and track where they end up in order to better track purchases that go under the radar because there's no 'card trail'.
Not that I WANT this, mind you, but from a marketing point of view, the most interesting demographic has got to be the one that is trying it's damned to prevent you from finding out about it.