And, I again reiterate as I have a few times already: you put a worth on human life, and that worth is "if I have to pay more, it is infinitely worse than someone being killed, be they civilian, enemy, or one of our own."
Money is as important as you make it to be. If the health care system UTTERLY DESTROYS the economy in a way impossible to fix, then what happens? Do we all fall over and starve? No, the system changes. If war UTTERLY DESTROYS a country in a way that is impossible to fix, guess what? It's gone. You can't regrow the people that lived there, all you can do is inject foreign populations if you truly wish to repopulate it. Money is a currency, a middle man in bartering. When money fails, it's simply bye-bye middle man.
Again, it depends. For example, if a game was set ten years in the future, it may add to it. Say, massive monster apocalypse, and you walk by a billboard that says "McDonald's, I'm lovin' it!". Biting irony, maybe have some blood splattered on it or some splayed corpses. On the other hand, how unrealistic would it be if it was entirely devoid of all advertisements?
But 30 second load screens? Oh yeah, those suck. 100% agreeance. In game product placement advertising? May add to it, but only in the right kind of games.
Ah; then I stand corrected and putting a monetary value on killing is less horrifying.
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Not really. Point still stands. It could be googelpexian numbers of money being thrown at healthcare; it still doesn't change the fact that OP thought killing people was easier to stomach than saving people, even when footing the bill for both. If anything, it accents that fact because OP found war to be less evil because it personally cost him less.
You should be a tad more disgusted that the glorified wasting of money to kill people across the world is considered "less annoying" than having the possibility of a slightly higher bill, or slightly higher taxes, or maybe, just maybe, it being a better choice.
Just remember, you said it. You prefer throwing billions at killing people than throwing billions at giving everyone health care.
The Congressional route is more efficient and fair when it isn't full to the rafters with inefficient corporate puppets that IBM can eagerly stuff full of cash to prevent any sort of trouble coming there way.
As the Anon. coward stated, stealing an account is quite a bit different than a simple snafu. You are suggesting that someone hammered away at logging into your account, and then charged $100 to your account. That seems like a lot of effort just to play your games for free, especially when they could have just used TPB and some tools to get a similar experience.
The more logical option is that you had a weak password, you gave it away, or you were phished. None of these involve someone forcefully stealing your account; they involve poor protecting on your behalf. To put it simply: if you spend more than $100 on something and connect it to every e-peen-seeking fanboi in the world, maybe you should make sure they can't figure out your login info.
It sounds like the people who complain that they were "hacked" on MMORPGs, when in reality they were just "stupid". So many people say "hacker" when they really mean "some guy asked for my password for a 5 billion gold trade and then logged into my account and emptied it out".
It just sounds better to be "hacked" because hacking implies that it was entirely out of your control. There is some poetic justice to the Xbox fanbois being attacked based on how "good" (read: how much time spent) they are at a game. The better you are, the more time you waste, the more likely you are to be attacked. Casual gamers, I suppose, are safer by default. Irony, maybe?
Err...why does the age or gender surprise you? Most kids in elementary school were regularly using computers when I was in elementary school. I'm sure it's even more common nowadays than it was for me 10 years ago. If you're still shocked by females using computers, then I'm afraid you're still stuck in the very early 90's.
It's also insanely common place for older members of society to be confused by newer technology. This leads to the old people who are legally the only people allowed to run government being complete morons about the new technology while the youngest members of society have at least more than passing knowledge of it.
But not at a majority acceptance. Enter any classroom, and you may find one or two students that actively enjoy their class; but the rest of the students may be bored, even going so far as to utterly hate it. You don't inspire interest by jamming something down someone's throat: if they don't like it, you can't make them like it (even under pain of failing).
Because looking at pictures/videos or reading sexual material is exactly the same as reading a plot driven book that doesn't actively motivate your biological drive to mate?
Lol. Yeah, people aren't buying the entertainment console for the games; they're buying it for the free games that they could easily play on the PC?
Shockingly, not everybody likes the same games, and I have a slight hunch that maybe, just maybe, the people who purchased those systems liked the games available to them.
Or we can, uh, go with your theme: they really wanted to buy an Xbox360 to play Halo 3, but they couldn't afford it so they bought a cheaper Wii and then bought the modding tools so they could play different, inferior games.
Actually, the problem inherent in the system is that you, jimicus, believe that there are truths so terrible that we are better off never knowing them. Looking back at history, the holocaust and countless other genocides were not terrible enough to hide from the common man. So, you believe that our government is hiding something far worse than the genocide of millions...and that it's better that we don't know.
If you're too weak to handle reality, then someone failed at raising you. Terrible, unspeakable crimes happen every hour, and you honestly believe some crimes to be so horrible that it's better to be lied to about it? Giving them such freedom, meanwhile, means that they can choose to hide commonplace atrocities from us because the common man is afraid of atrocity X
Or, in layman's terms: Terrorism. Give them all the power they want so long as they make the scary bad men go away, right?
Except that in our current public school system, this is how it would work:
Read the exact book I tell you to, at the exact pace I tell you to. Once you finish, typically a month later, write a 3-page essay on why this was written. Use three sources, none of which are internet-based, MLA format.
Repeat that roughly five times, and there you go. It sounds really fun until you realize that it'll be whatever they want it to be, and they'll decide how you react to it. They couldn't possibly let the students choose which book they read, in case the teacher had never heard of it, and they couldn't possibly let the students decide how to write about the book, as it'd take the teacher too long to read them all.
In the small town environment, ass-backwardness still thrives. The school I went through actively squashed anything that didn't agree with religion wholeheartedly; teachers who did anything contrary to that really had to tread carefully or else get fired. Our science classes considered evolution to be an utterly false "theory"...I could go on, but it makes me wince.
If schools did this on their own accord, and did so silently, it'd be fine. If a ton of schools did it and any media network (Fox News *cough*) picked up on it, the uber evangelical Christians would come down on them like Thor's hammer.
All joking aside, I can't see why this class is necessary. Science Fiction and Fantasy are meant to be enjoyed. If you force children who aren't interested, they still won't like it. If it's an elective, then you'll get kids who have probably already read all of the books that might be offered, so they won't fully enjoy it either. Unless it worked around not that well known literature and focused more on discussions and less on bulk reading/essays, it might have some merit.
For that matter, a good 1/3 of my books read in plain ol' Lit were sci-fi/fantasy. Would that class be changed to general lit? Will there be no other specialized lit classes? Will they cut general lit and change it into specialized lit, so that no one has to leave the genre they like? I prefer the generalized approached to reading, otherwise you are in danger of never leaving your comfort zone.
That's some fine internet tough talk, but realistically the best solution open to the common man is to simply vote with your dollars and leave.
I'm sick of this excuse. Voting with your dollar works when your dollar is the only dollar. When millions of other people have dollars and a good chunk of them are ignorant, your dollar won't be missed. I took my dollar away from Verizon years ago, and there's a good chance that many others did the same thing.
There are three methods to dealing with businesses: you can let them do whatever they want to you, you can quietly go elsewhere, or you can speak up loudly and take them to court. The first method makes the business happy, the second makes you feel good about yourself but does very little, and the third lets everyone hear what evils the company did and how they handle it, thus making more people make decisions of their own. Seeing as how all of the duopolies and monopolies and x-opolies are still thriving despite the silent treatment, I would think a more aggressive approach is the only way to fight back.
All of which went into multi-billion dollar corporations...right?
The business world is a world fraught with laws directly restricting any sort of movement forward unless you are already rich. This becomes moreso apparent when you add two things: electronics and the USA. If you trace the history, you can see many branches at the beginning, followed by a few branches reaching out and grabbing the ones around them, growing larger and larger. Then they reach into the government and have concrete built around their little trees to make sure no one else grows. Sure, a few weeds grow here and there, but new trees will struggle and be far sicklier.
And that's avoiding the customers, who already are deeply entrenched in current technology and don't want to change unless they have absolutely no choice.
It is easier to win the hearts of man than it is to win the hearts of business. It's the reason why when someone slams reality in your face, you reach for Ghandi, for Martin Luther King Jr., and so on. You don't reach for them because they succeeded in the situation you put forth; you reach for them because they pull at heart strings. For example, Bill Gates is an example you could have reached for; by all accounts he started with nothing and became richer than our wildest dreams. But he is far from what you would define as a hero, even though he is a successful businessman.
Hey folks, you all have a path open to you if you don't like the way Apple and AT&T manage the IPhone. Simply design, build, market, and sell a competing phone and service that is as popular as the IPhone. What's holding you back?
Yeah, you're right! I'll just use my millions of dollars and my full team of dedicated programmers as well as my factories and create an entirely new phone that doesn't go against any of the hundreds of patents while being competitively priced, then pour hundreds of thousands of dollars into advertising to get as much known about my phone as possible, then either find an existing company that has cell phone towers up that agree with our methods (not gonna happen) or build our own cell phone towers so we don't have to pay for the privilege to be screwed over whilst jumping through dozens of government hoops!
Yes, if publicly funded books have open source requirements, it'll be the same as Communism. Or Socialism. Or whatever it is Fox News tells you to be scared of.
It endangers their vital revenue of charging several hundred dollars for the same textbook that has a slightly different colored cover, then offering to buy book that book for 1/16 the price of said book before reselling the same book at 15/16 the price. While we can argue that the job of gathering lots of data is very challenging, I find it difficult to believe that the Algebra text books have changed so drastically ever year that they needed $100 on each new edition to cover research. Unless they are quite literally copyrighting each text in such a way that they can't use the prior text for more than a school year, there is no reason for this constant rehashing of the same book.
I doubt this will pass, though. High chance it'll be shot down, and then a new bill will slip through that strengthens the stranglehold publishers have on education.
Slashdot Mirror
Money is as important as you make it to be. If the health care system UTTERLY DESTROYS the economy in a way impossible to fix, then what happens? Do we all fall over and starve? No, the system changes. If war UTTERLY DESTROYS a country in a way that is impossible to fix, guess what? It's gone. You can't regrow the people that lived there, all you can do is inject foreign populations if you truly wish to repopulate it. Money is a currency, a middle man in bartering. When money fails, it's simply bye-bye middle man.
But 30 second load screens? Oh yeah, those suck. 100% agreeance. In game product placement advertising? May add to it, but only in the right kind of games.
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Not really. Point still stands. It could be googelpexian numbers of money being thrown at healthcare; it still doesn't change the fact that OP thought killing people was easier to stomach than saving people, even when footing the bill for both. If anything, it accents that fact because OP found war to be less evil because it personally cost him less.
Just sayin'.
You should be a tad more disgusted that the glorified wasting of money to kill people across the world is considered "less annoying" than having the possibility of a slightly higher bill, or slightly higher taxes, or maybe, just maybe, it being a better choice.
Just remember, you said it. You prefer throwing billions at killing people than throwing billions at giving everyone health care.
The Congressional route is more efficient and fair when it isn't full to the rafters with inefficient corporate puppets that IBM can eagerly stuff full of cash to prevent any sort of trouble coming there way.
Sorry for the repeat post, but one more thing: your credit card info is tied to your account if you ever used it. Go on, check it. Fascinating, no?
Ssssh! Next you'll be telling me that my Runescape account is compromised when the gold sellers ask for my password to transfer the funds!
As the Anon. coward stated, stealing an account is quite a bit different than a simple snafu. You are suggesting that someone hammered away at logging into your account, and then charged $100 to your account. That seems like a lot of effort just to play your games for free, especially when they could have just used TPB and some tools to get a similar experience.
The more logical option is that you had a weak password, you gave it away, or you were phished. None of these involve someone forcefully stealing your account; they involve poor protecting on your behalf. To put it simply: if you spend more than $100 on something and connect it to every e-peen-seeking fanboi in the world, maybe you should make sure they can't figure out your login info.
It just sounds better to be "hacked" because hacking implies that it was entirely out of your control. There is some poetic justice to the Xbox fanbois being attacked based on how "good" (read: how much time spent) they are at a game. The better you are, the more time you waste, the more likely you are to be attacked. Casual gamers, I suppose, are safer by default. Irony, maybe?
A six year old (!!) girl (!)
Err...why does the age or gender surprise you? Most kids in elementary school were regularly using computers when I was in elementary school. I'm sure it's even more common nowadays than it was for me 10 years ago. If you're still shocked by females using computers, then I'm afraid you're still stuck in the very early 90's.
It's also insanely common place for older members of society to be confused by newer technology. This leads to the old people who are legally the only people allowed to run government being complete morons about the new technology while the youngest members of society have at least more than passing knowledge of it.
But not at a majority acceptance. Enter any classroom, and you may find one or two students that actively enjoy their class; but the rest of the students may be bored, even going so far as to utterly hate it. You don't inspire interest by jamming something down someone's throat: if they don't like it, you can't make them like it (even under pain of failing).
Because looking at pictures/videos or reading sexual material is exactly the same as reading a plot driven book that doesn't actively motivate your biological drive to mate?
Shockingly, not everybody likes the same games, and I have a slight hunch that maybe, just maybe, the people who purchased those systems liked the games available to them.
Or we can, uh, go with your theme: they really wanted to buy an Xbox360 to play Halo 3, but they couldn't afford it so they bought a cheaper Wii and then bought the modding tools so they could play different, inferior games.
If you're too weak to handle reality, then someone failed at raising you. Terrible, unspeakable crimes happen every hour, and you honestly believe some crimes to be so horrible that it's better to be lied to about it? Giving them such freedom, meanwhile, means that they can choose to hide commonplace atrocities from us because the common man is afraid of atrocity X
Or, in layman's terms: Terrorism. Give them all the power they want so long as they make the scary bad men go away, right?
Grow up.
Read the exact book I tell you to, at the exact pace I tell you to. Once you finish, typically a month later, write a 3-page essay on why this was written. Use three sources, none of which are internet-based, MLA format.
Repeat that roughly five times, and there you go. It sounds really fun until you realize that it'll be whatever they want it to be, and they'll decide how you react to it. They couldn't possibly let the students choose which book they read, in case the teacher had never heard of it, and they couldn't possibly let the students decide how to write about the book, as it'd take the teacher too long to read them all.
If schools did this on their own accord, and did so silently, it'd be fine. If a ton of schools did it and any media network (Fox News *cough*) picked up on it, the uber evangelical Christians would come down on them like Thor's hammer.
The reason being that if anyone took the ballsy move of associating religion with fiction, they would immediately get shot down and destroyed.
All joking aside, I can't see why this class is necessary. Science Fiction and Fantasy are meant to be enjoyed. If you force children who aren't interested, they still won't like it. If it's an elective, then you'll get kids who have probably already read all of the books that might be offered, so they won't fully enjoy it either. Unless it worked around not that well known literature and focused more on discussions and less on bulk reading/essays, it might have some merit.
For that matter, a good 1/3 of my books read in plain ol' Lit were sci-fi/fantasy. Would that class be changed to general lit? Will there be no other specialized lit classes? Will they cut general lit and change it into specialized lit, so that no one has to leave the genre they like? I prefer the generalized approached to reading, otherwise you are in danger of never leaving your comfort zone.
That's some fine internet tough talk, but realistically the best solution open to the common man is to simply vote with your dollars and leave.
I'm sick of this excuse. Voting with your dollar works when your dollar is the only dollar. When millions of other people have dollars and a good chunk of them are ignorant, your dollar won't be missed. I took my dollar away from Verizon years ago, and there's a good chance that many others did the same thing.
There are three methods to dealing with businesses: you can let them do whatever they want to you, you can quietly go elsewhere, or you can speak up loudly and take them to court. The first method makes the business happy, the second makes you feel good about yourself but does very little, and the third lets everyone hear what evils the company did and how they handle it, thus making more people make decisions of their own. Seeing as how all of the duopolies and monopolies and x-opolies are still thriving despite the silent treatment, I would think a more aggressive approach is the only way to fight back.
I re-read my comment right after submitting and immediately cringed upon seeing that. At least it doesn't normally. ;)
Because then companies like Sony couldn't screw with us.
The business world is a world fraught with laws directly restricting any sort of movement forward unless you are already rich. This becomes moreso apparent when you add two things: electronics and the USA. If you trace the history, you can see many branches at the beginning, followed by a few branches reaching out and grabbing the ones around them, growing larger and larger. Then they reach into the government and have concrete built around their little trees to make sure no one else grows. Sure, a few weeds grow here and there, but new trees will struggle and be far sicklier.
And that's avoiding the customers, who already are deeply entrenched in current technology and don't want to change unless they have absolutely no choice.
It is easier to win the hearts of man than it is to win the hearts of business. It's the reason why when someone slams reality in your face, you reach for Ghandi, for Martin Luther King Jr., and so on. You don't reach for them because they succeeded in the situation you put forth; you reach for them because they pull at heart strings. For example, Bill Gates is an example you could have reached for; by all accounts he started with nothing and became richer than our wildest dreams. But he is far from what you would define as a hero, even though he is a successful businessman.
Hey folks, you all have a path open to you if you don't like the way Apple and AT&T manage the IPhone. Simply design, build, market, and sell a competing phone and service that is as popular as the IPhone. What's holding you back?
Yeah, you're right! I'll just use my millions of dollars and my full team of dedicated programmers as well as my factories and create an entirely new phone that doesn't go against any of the hundreds of patents while being competitively priced, then pour hundreds of thousands of dollars into advertising to get as much known about my phone as possible, then either find an existing company that has cell phone towers up that agree with our methods (not gonna happen) or build our own cell phone towers so we don't have to pay for the privilege to be screwed over whilst jumping through dozens of government hoops!
Wow, it'll be so easy!
Yes, if publicly funded books have open source requirements, it'll be the same as Communism. Or Socialism. Or whatever it is Fox News tells you to be scared of.
I doubt this will pass, though. High chance it'll be shot down, and then a new bill will slip through that strengthens the stranglehold publishers have on education.